The Moors Last Sigh

‘The Moor’s Last Sigh is to be hailed as a triumph of imaginative indomitability. With it, Rushdie triumphantly unfurls his pent-up creativity and lets it gorgeously ripple out’
Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
‘A spicy Indian family saga about the loss of love …
Believe me, it’s a great read’
Victoria Glendinning, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph
‘An amazing, rambunctious epic which has the reader in fits of side-splitting laughter even as it chills to the bone’
India Today
‘The Moor’s Last Sigh is story-telling at its best.’
The Calgary Herald
‘The seven-league boots of Rushdie’s imaginative power carry him far ahead of any other novel this year. All that is joyous and terrible in human life is encompassed in grand ebullience in this book’
Nadine Gordimer, Books of the Year, Observer
‘A rich, wonderfully readable novel’
The Toronto Star
‘My novel of the year’
Martin Amis, Books of the Year, Sunday Times
‘Brilliant.’
The Montreal Gazette
‘The Moor’s Last Sigh towers over this year’s home-grown novel. It is a colossus of a book, to me, heartbreaking, a tale of the unloved son, the outsider, the rejected. Its scope and exuberant wit obscures its sadness’
Doris Lessing, Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph
‘A wonderful book’
Malcolm Bradbury, The Times
‘Every page bubbles with Rushdie’s trademark linguistic virtuosity and explodes with jokes, confirming the author’s position as the most inventive novelist writing in English’
Elle
‘The Moor’s Last Sigh is possessed by a demonic narrative energy and has colossal imaginative reach’
Ian McEwan, Books of the Year, Financial Times
‘This book is so funny and wonderful that I have marked 25 passages to come back to which I will do again and again’
Rosie Boycott, Books of the Year, The Times
‘Irresistible … Rushdie is on the form that makes him one of the world’s leading novelists’
Melvyn Bragg, Books of the Year, Sunday Times
‘The Moor’s Last Sigh held me captured with its prose, richness, brilliant colour and fun’
Ruth Rendell, Books of the Year, Daily Mail



FIRST VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 1996
    Copyright © 1995 by Salman Rushdie
    All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. First published in Canada in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, and simultaneously in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., in 1995. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
    Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
    Rushdie, Salman
    The Moor’s last sigh
    eISBN: 978-0-307-36774-7
    I. Title
    PR9499.3.R8M6 1996 832’.914 C96-930457-9
    v3.1

For E.J.W.



I
A HOUSE DIVIDED

1
    I HAVE LOST COUNT of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda’s mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door. And since then along my hungry, heat-hazed way there have been further bunches of scribbled sheets, swings of the hammer, sharp exclamations of two-inch nails. Long ago when I was green my beloved said to me in fondness, ‘Oh, you Moor, you strange black man, always so full of theses, never a church door to nail them to.’ (She, a self-professedly godly un-Christian Indian, joked about Luther’s protest at Wittenberg to tease her determinedly ungodly Indian Christian lover: how stories travel, what mouths they end up in!) Unfortunately, my mother overheard; and darted, quick as snakebite: ‘So full, you mean, of faeces.’ Yes, mother, you had the last word on that subject, too: as about everything.
    ‘Amrika’ and ‘Moskva’, somebody once called them, Aurora my mother and Uma my love, nicknaming them for the two great super-powers; and people said they looked alike but I never saw it, couldn’t see it at all. Both of them dead, of unnatural causes, and I in a far-off country with death at my heels and their story in my hand, a story I’ve been crucifying upon a gate, a fence, an olive-tree, spreading it across this landscape of my last journey, the story which points to me. On the run, I have turned the world into my pirate map, complete with clues, leading X-marks-the-spottily to the treasure of myself. When my pursuers have followed the trail they’ll find me waiting, uncomplaining, out of breath, ready. Here I stand. Couldn’t’ve done