The Moors Last Sigh

everything we have done.’
    Minnie coloured, and you could see her wanting to tell her mother not to take the name of the Lord in vain, but she bit her lip until it bled, and went on hunger strike. ‘Let her die,’ said Aurora obdurately. ‘Better a corpse than a nun.’ But for six days little Minnie neither ate nor drank, until she started fainting and becoming more and more resistant to being revived. Under pressure from Abraham, Aurora relented. I did not often see my mother weep, but on that seventh day she wept, the tears being wrenched from her and emerging in harsh, hacking sobs. Sister John from the Gratiaplena nunnery was summoned – Sister John who had assisted at all our births – and she arrived with the serene authority of a conquering queen, as if she were Queen Isabella of Spain entering Granada’s Alhambra to accept the surrender of Boabdil the Moor. She was a large old boat of a woman with white sails around her head and soft billows of flesh under her chin. Everything about her took on symbolic resonances that day; she seemed to be the vessel in which our sister would sail away. There was a knotty tree-stump of a mole – signifying the recalcitrance of true faith – on her upper lip, and from it there protruded like arrows – hinting at the sufferings of a true believer – half a dozen needles of hair. ‘Blessed is this house,’ she said, ‘for it gives a bride to Christ.’ It took Aurora Zogoiby all her self-control not to kill her on the spot.
    So Minnie had become a novice and when she visited us in her Audrey Hepburn Nun’s Story outfit the servants called her – of all things – Minnie mausi . Little mother, they meant, but I couldn’t help finding the sound of it a bit creepy, as if Vasco Miranda’s Disney figures on our nursery wall were somehow responsible for my sister’s metamorphosis. Also, this new Minnie, this composed, remote, certain Minnie with the Mona Lisa smile and the devotional sparkle in her eternity-fixated eye, this Minnie felt as alien to me as if she had become a member of a different species: an angel, or a Martian, or a two-dimensional mouse. Her elder sister, however, acted as if nothing had changed in their relationship, as if Minnie – in spite of having been drafted into a different army – were still obliged to obey her Big Sis’s commands.
    ‘Talk to your nuns,’ Ina ordered her. ‘Get me a bed in their nursing home.’ (The Gratiaplena nuns of Altamount Road specialised in the two ends of life, in helping people in and out of this sinful world.) ‘I must be in such a place when my Jimmy Cash returns.’
    Why did we do it? – For we all collaborated in Ina’s plot, you know; Aurora sent the cancergram and Minnie persuaded the Altamount sisters to make a bed available on compassionate grounds, arguing that anything that might save a marriage, that might protect that high sacrament, was pure in the eyes of God. And when the cable worked and Jamshed Cashondeliveri flew into town, the fiction was maintained. Even Mynah, third and toughest of my sisters, who had recently been admitted to the Bombay Bar, and of whom we saw less and less in those days, rallied round.
    We have been a cussed lot, we da Gama-Zogoibys, each of us needing to strike out in a direction unlike the others, to lay claim to a territory we could call our own. After Abraham’s business and Aurora’s art came Ina’s professionalisation of her sexuality and Minnie’s surrender to God. As for Philomina Zogoiby – she dropped the ‘Mynah’ as soon as she could, and the magic child who imitated bird-calls had vanished long ago, though with the obstinacy of family we continued to annoy her by using the loathed nickname whenever she visited us at home – she had chosen to make a career out of what every youngest-daughter must do to get attention; that is, protest. No sooner had she qualified as an advocate than she told Abraham that she had joined a radical all-woman group of activists, film-makers and lawyers whose purpose was to expose the double scandals of invisible people and invisible skyscrapers out of which he had done so well. She took Kéké Kolatkar and his cronies at the Municipal Corporation to court, in a landmark case that lasted many years and shook the old F. W. Stevens Corporation building – ‘How old?’ – ‘Old. From Old Time’ – to its foundations. Years later she would succeed in putting crooked old Kéké in jail; Abraham Zogoiby, however,