The Moors Last Sigh

of the loose morals of the citizens of Bombay, whom it compared to Sodomites and Gomorrahis, and threatened with floods, droughts, explosions and fires, these punishments to be spread over a period of approximately sixteen years; and by a talking black rat who prophesied that the Plague itself would return as the last plague of all. The vision of Ina was something much more personal, and whereas the earlier manifestations had mostly made Aurora fear for her daughter’s balance of mind this new apparition made her see red, perhaps not least beause of the recent appearance of Ina’s ghost in her own work; but also because of a general feeling she had developed since her daughter’s death – a feeling shared by many people in those paranoid, unstable times – that she was being followed. Wraiths were entering our family life, they were crossing the frontier between the metaphors of art and the observable facts of everyday life, and Aurora, unnerved, took refuge in her rage. But today had been designated as a day for family unity, and so, uncharacteristically, my mother bit her lip.
    ‘She says the food is also good,’ Minnie added, informatively. ‘All the ambrosia, nectar and manna you can eat, and you never put on weight.’ Fortunately the Mahalaxmi racecourse was only a few minutes’ drive from Altamount Road.
    And now Abraham and Aurora were arm-in-arm as they had not been for many long years, and Minnie, our very own cherub, was tripping along at their heels, while I lagged behind a little, lowering my head to avoid people’s eyes, jamming my right hand deep into my trousers, and kicking at the turf for shame; because of course I could hear the whispers and giggles of the matriarchs and the young beauties of Bombay, I knew that if I walked too close to Aurora – who, for all her white hair, looked no more than forty-five at the age of fifty-three – then to the casual bystander, yours truly, at twenty-looking-forty, looked too old to be her child. O catch him … misshapen … freaky … some peculiar disorder … I hear they keep him locked up … such a shame on the house … almost like an idiot, they say … and his poor father’s only son . Thus did the oily tongue of gossip lubricate the wheel of scandal. Our people do not react with grace to misfortunes of the body. Or, indeed, the mind.
    Perhaps in a way they were right, those racecourse whisperers. In a way I was a sort of social idiot, severed by my nature from the everyday, made strange by fate. Certainly I have never considered myself to be a scholar of any sort. Thanks to my unusual, and (by conventional standards) hopelessly inadequate education I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered, and caught the light. Fool’s gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood’s rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.
    It is true that I had managed to cling to Dilly, for extra-curricular reasons, much longer than I should. Nor was there any question of my going to college. I did some modelling for my mother, while my father accused me of wasting my life, and began to insist on introducing me to the family business. It was a long time since anyone – except Aurora – had dared to stand up to Abraham Zogoiby. In his middle seventies he was strong as a bullock, fit as a wrestler, and apart from his worsening asthma as healthy as any of the track-suited joggers at the racecourse. His relatively humble origins had been forgotten, and the old C-50 enterprise of Camoens da Gama had been assimilated into the huge corporate entity known acronymically in business parlance as ‘Siodi Corp’. ‘Siodi’ was C.O.D. which was Cashondeliveri, and the use of this nickname was energetically encouraged by Abraham. It drove out the old – the memory of the decayed and assimilated empire of the Cashondeliveri grandees – and drove in the new. A financial-pages profile referred to him as ‘ Mr Siodi’ – the brilliant new entrepreneur behind the House of Cashondeliveri , and after that some of his business partners had mistakenly begun to call him ‘Siodi Sahib’. Abraham did not always trouble to correct them. So he was beginning to paint a new layer over his own past … and as a