The Moors Last Sigh

father, too, age had painted a palimpsest-image over the memory of the man who had hugged my newborn form and wept comforting words. Now he had grown formidable, distant, dangerous, cold, and impossible to disobey. I bowed my head, and accepted his offer of an entry-level position in the marketing, sales and publicity department of the Baby Softo Talcum Powder Company (Private) Limited. After that I had to schedule my work with Aurora around my office commitments. But of modelling and babies, more anon.
    As for the question of a bride, my ruined limb – a handicap in the zone of the handicap-free – was indeed a sort of spectre at the matrimonial feast, it made young ladies shudder fastidiously, reminding them of life’s ugliness when in their high-born way they sought to concentrate on its beauty. Ugh! It was a fearsome fist. (As regards its long-term future: I’ll say only that while Lambajan had shown me a little of my club-hard right mitt’s true potential, I had not yet discovered my vocation. My sword still slept in my hand.)
    No, I did not belong amongst these thoroughbreds. In spite of my discontinued peregrinations with our larcenous housekeeper Jaya Hé, I was an alien in their town – a Kaspar Hauser, a Mowgli. I knew little about their lives, and (what was worse) I did not care to know more. For while I might be a perpetual outsider among that racecourse breed, still in my twenty years I had gathered experience at such a rate that I had come to feel that time, in my vicinity, had begun to move at my own, doubled speed. I no longer felt like a young man trapped inside an old – or rather, to borrow the lingo of the city’s textile industry, ‘antiqued’, even ‘distressed’ – covering of skin. My outer, apparent age had simply become my age.
    Or so I thought: until Uma showed me the truth.
    Jamshed Cashondeliveri, who had unexpectedly been plunged into a deep depression by his ex-wife’s death and dropped out of law school soon after it, joined us at Mahalaxmi, as Aurora had arranged. Not far from the racecourse is the Great Breach, or Breach Candy, through which at certain seasons the ocean used to pour, flooding the low-lying Flats behind; just as Hornby Vellard was built to seal Breach Candy (completed, according to reliable sources, c. 1805), so the breach between Jimmy and Ina was to be posthumously healed, or so Aurora had decided, by the vellard of her indomitable will. ‘Hi, Uncle, Auntie,’ said Jimmy Cash, waiting awkwardly at the finishing-post, and essaying a crooked smile. Then his face changed. His eyes widened, the colour drained from his anyway-pretty-pale cheeks, his mouth dropped open. ‘What’s gottofied your goat?’ asked Aurora, surprised. ‘You look like you took a gander at a ghost.’ But mesmerised Jimmy did not reply; and continued, wordlessly, to gape.
    ‘Greetings, family members,’ said Mynah’s sardonic voice from behind our backs. ‘I hope you guys don’t mind, but I brought along a friend.’

    All of us who walked with Uma Sarasvati around Mahalaxmi racecourse that morning came away with a different view of her. A few facts were established: that she was twenty years old, and a star art student at the M.S. University in Baroda, where she had already won high praise from the so-called ‘Baroda group’ of artists, and where the noted critic Geeta Kapur had been moved to write a glowing appreciation of her gigantic stone-carving of Nandi, the great bull of Hindu mythology, which had been commissioned from her by the homonymous stockbroker and billionaire financier V. V. Nandy – ‘Crocodile’ Nandy himself. Kapur had compared the work to that of the anonymous masters of the eighth-century Parthenon-sized monolithic wonder, the Kailash Temple, greatest of all the Ellora caves; but Abraham Zogoiby, hearing about the statue as we strolled, unleashed a remarkably bull-like bellow of laughter. ‘That young muggermutch V.V. never had any shame,’ he roared. ‘A Nandi bull, is it? Should have been one of those blind crocs from the rivers up north.’
    Uma had presented herself, with an introduction from a friend in the Gujarati branch of the United Women’s Anti-Price Rise Front, at the tiny, crowded office in a run-down three-storey block near Bombay Central station from which Mynah’s group of women activists against corruption and for civil and women’s rights – known as the WWSTP Committee after its best-known slogan, We Will Smash This