The Moors Last Sigh

derived, according to legend, from a cricket-mad father, a street-wise Bombay ragamuffin who hung around the Bombay Gymkhana pleading to be given a chance: ‘Please, babujis, you give this poor chokra one batting? One bowling only? Okay, okay – then just one fielding ?’ He turned out to be a lousy cricketer but when the Brabourne Stadium was opened in 1937 he gained employment as a security guard, and over the years his skill at nabbing and expelling gatecrashers came to the notice of the immortal C. K. Nayudu, who recognised him from the old days at the Gymkhana and joked, ‘So, my little just-one-fielding-you sure grew up to take some expert catches.’ After that the fellow was always known as J. O. Fielding, and proudly accepted the name as his own.
    His son learned a different lesson from cricket (to the distress, it was said, of his father). Not for him the humble democratic pleasure of simply being a part, however menial, however marginal, of that cherished world. No: as a young man in the Bombay Central rum-dens he would harangue his friends about the Indian game’s origins in inter-community rivalry. ‘From the start the Parsis and Muslims tried to steal the game from us,’ he would declaim. ‘But when we Hindus got our teams together, naturally we proved too strong. By-the-same-token we must make changes beyond the boundary. For too long we have been lying back and allowing un-Indian types to steal a march. Let us only marshal our forces, and what can stand against us?’ In his bizarre conception of cricket as a fundamentally communalist game, essentially Hindu but with its Hindu-ness constantly under threat from the country’s other, treacherous communities, lay the origins of his political philosophy, and of ‘Mumbai’s Axis’ itself. There was even a moment when Raman Fielding considered naming his new political movement after a great Hindu cricketer – Ranji’s Army, Mankad’s Martinets – but in the end he went for the goddess – a.k.a Mumba-Ai, Mumbadevi, Mumbabai – thus uniting regional and religious nationalism in his potent, explosive new group.
    Cricket, most individualistic of all team sports, ironically enough became the basis of the rigidly hierarchic, neo-Stalinist inner structures of ‘Mumbai’s Axis’, or the MA, as it quickly came to be known: for – as I afterwards discovered at first hand – Raman Fielding insisted on grouping his dedicated cadres into ‘elevens’, and each of these little platoons had a ‘team captain’ to whom absolute allegiance had to be sworn. The ruling council of the MA is known as the First XI to this day. And Fielding insisted on being addressed as ‘Skipper’ from the start.
    His old nickname from the cartoonist days was never used in his presence, but throughout the city his famous frog-symbol – Vote for Mainduck – could be seen painted on walls and stuck on the sides of cars. Oddly for so successful a populist leader, he was a man who detested familiarity. So it was always Captain to his face and Mainduck behind his back. And in the fifteen years between his two attacks on The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig, like a man who comes to resemble his pet, he had truly grown into a giant version of that long-abandoned cartoon frog. He held court beneath a gulmohr tree in the garden of his two-storey villa in the Lalgaum suburb of Bandra East, surrounded by aides and supplicants, beside a lilypadded pond, and amid literally dozens of statues of Mumbadevi, large and small; golden blossoms floated down to anoint the statues’ heads as well as Fielding’s. Mostly he was a brooding stillness; but every so often, goaded by some visitor’s injudicious remark, speech would burst from him, foul-tongued, terrifying, lethal. And in his low cane chair with his great belly slung across his knees like a burglar’s sack, with his frog’s croak of a voice bursting through his fat frog’s lips and his little dart of a tongue licking at the edges of his mouth, with his hooded froggy eyes gazing greedily down upon the little beedi-rolls of money with which his quaking petitioners sought to pacify him, and which he rolled lusciously between his plump little fingers until at length he broke slowly into a huge, red-gummed smile, he was indeed a Frog King, a Mainduck Raja whose commands could not be gainsaid.
    By this time he had decided to rewrite his father’s life-story, erasing the tale of just-one-fielding from his repertoire. He had started