The Moors Last Sigh

short, and self-confessedly speculative passage. However, the derision it inspired was on the grand scale. A newspaper editorial in the Madras-based paper The Hindu , headed Thunderbolts of Good and Evil , lampooned him cruelly: ‘Dr da Gama’s fears for our ethical future are like those of a crackpot weatherman who believes our deeds control the weather, so that unless we act “clemently”, so to speak, there will be nothing overhead but storms.’ The satirical columnist ‘Waspyjee’ in the Bombay Chronicle – whose editor Horniman, a friend of Mrs Besant and the nationalist movement, had earnestly implored Francisco not to publish – inquired maliciously whether the famous Fields of Conscience were for human use alone, or if other living creatures – cockroaches, for example, or poisonous snakes – might learn to benefit from them; or whether, alternatively, each species had its own such vortices swirling around the planet. ‘Should we fear contamination of our values – call it Gama Radiation – by accidental field collisions? Might not praying-mantis sexual mores, baboon or gorilla aesthetics, scorpion politics fatally infect our own poor psyches? Or, Heaven forfend – perhaps they already have!!’
    It was these ‘Gama rays’ that finished Francisco off; he became a joke, light relief from the murderous war, economic hardship and the struggle for independence. At first he kept his nerve, and bloody-mindedly concentrated on thinking up experiments that could prove the first, lesser hypothesis. He wrote a second paper proposing that ‘bols’, the long strings of nonsense words used by Kathak dance instructors to indicate movements of feet arms neck, might be suitable bases for tests. One such sequence (tat-tat-taa dreegay-thun-thun jee-jee-kathay to, talang, taka-thun-thun, tai! Tat tai! &c.) could be used alongside four other strings of purposeless nonsense devised to be spoken in the same rhythmic pattern as the ‘control’. Students in a country other than India, having no knowledge of Indian dance instructions, would be asked to learn all five; and, if Francisco’s field theory held, the dance-class gobbledygook should prove much the easiest to memorise.
    The test was never performed. And soon his resignation from the banned Home Rule League was requested and its leaders, who now included Motilal Nehru himself, stopped answering the increasingly plaintive letters with which my great-grandfather bombarded them. Arty types no longer arrived by the boatload to carouse in either of Cabral Island’s follies, to smoke opium in papery East or drink whisky in pointy West, though from time to time, as the Frenchy’s reputation grew, Francisco was asked if he had indeed been the first Indian patron of the young man who was now calling himself ‘Le Corbusier’. When he received such an inquiry, the shattered hero would fire off a terse note in reply: ‘Never heard of the fellow.’ After a time these inquiries also stopped.
    Epifania was exultant. As Francisco sank into introversion and despondency, his face acquiring the puckered look common in men convinced that the world has inexplicably done them a great and unjustified wrong, she moved in swiftly for the kill. (Literally, as it turned out.) I have come to the conclusion that the years of her suppressed discontents had bred in her a vindictive rage – rage, my true inheritance! – that was often indistinguishable from true, murderous hatred; although if you had ever asked her if she loved her husband, the very question would have shocked her. ‘Ours was a love-match,’ she told her dejected spouse during an interminable island evening with only the radio for company. ‘For love or what else I gave in to your fancies? But see where they have brought you. Now for love you must give in to mine.’
    The detested follies in the garden were locked up. Nor was politics to be mentioned in her presence again: when the Russian Revolution shook the world, when the Great War ended, when news of the Amritsar Massacre filtered down from the north and destroyed the Anglophilia of almost every Indian (the Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, returned his knighthood to the King), Epifania da Gama on Cabral Island stopped up her ears and continued to believe, to a degree that was almost blasphemous, in the omnipotent beneficence of the British; and her elder son Aires believed it along with her.
    At Christmas, 1921, Camoens, eighteen, shyly brought the