The Moors Last Sigh

bloodsucker lizard who loves your blood, not you. She will suck you like a mango and throw away the stone.’
    I was horrified. ‘You are sick,’ I shouted at her. ‘Sick, sick in the head.’
    ‘Not I, my son,’ she replied, yet more softly. ‘A sick woman, however, there is – sick, or evil. Mad, or bad, or both. I can’t decide. As to being a nosey parker, I plead guilty as charged. Since some time I have employoed Dom Minto to find out the truth about your mystery lady friend. May I tell you what he dug up?’
    ‘Dom Minto?’ The name stopped me in my tracks. She might as well have said ‘Hercule Poirot’ or ‘Maigret’ or ‘Sam Spade’. She might as well have said ‘Inspector Ghote’ or ‘Inspector Dhar’. Everyone knew the name, everyone had seen Minto’s Mysteries , the railway-station penny-dreadfuls chronicling the career of the great Bombay private eye. There had been a series of movies about him in the 1950s, the last one following his involvement in the celebrated murder case (for, yes, there had once been a ‘real’ Minto who had ‘really’ been a private detective) in which the Indian Navy’s high-flying hero, Commander Sabarmati, had shot his wife and her lover, killing the man and seriously wounding the lady. It was Minto who had tracked the cheating couple to their love-nest and given the irate Commander the address. Profoundly distressed by the shootings, and by the unsympathetic portrayal of him in the film based upon the case, the old man – for he had been ancient and lame even then – had retired from his profession, and the fantasists had taken over, creating the heroic super-sleuth of the cheap paperbacks and radio serials (and lately the motion picture remakes, as big-budget superstar vehicles, of the old 50s B-features), transforming him from an old has-been into a myth. What was this masala-fiction of a fellow doing in the story of my life?
    ‘Yes, the real guy,’ said Aurora, not unkindly. ‘Now he is eighty-plus. Kekoo found him.’ O, Kekoo. Another one of your fancy-boys. O, darling Kekoo found him, and he’s just too darling, the darling oldster, I set him straight to work .
    ‘He was in Canada,’ Aurora said. ‘Retired, living with grandkids, bored, making the youngsters’ life miserable as hell. Then it turns out that Commander Sabarmati has come out of jail, and patchofied things up with his wife. What do you know? Right there in Toronto they were live-o’ing happily ever after. After that, according to Kekoo, Minto felt free of his old misdeed, came back to Bombay, and in spite of advanced years went right back to work, fut-a-fut. Kekoo is a big fan; me too. Dom Minto! Back then, you know, he really was the best.’
    ‘Wonderful!’ I said, as sarcastically as I could. But my heart, I must confess, my penny-dreadful heart was pounding. ‘And what has this Bollywood Sherlock Holmes to tell me about the woman I love?’
    ‘She’s married,’ said Aurora, flatly. ‘And currently fooling around with not one, not two, but three lovers. You want photos? Your poor sister Ina’s stupid Jimmy Cash; your stupid father; and, my stupid peacock, you.’

    ‘Listen on, because I’ll tell you once only,’ she had said in response to my persistent inquisitiveness about her background. She came from a respectable – though not by any means wealthy – Gujarati Brahmin family, but had been orphaned young. Her mother, a depressive, had hanged herself when Uma was twelve and her schoolteacher father, driven mad by the tragedy, had set himself on fire. Uma had been rescued from penury by a kindly ‘uncle’ – actually, not an uncle, but a teaching colleague of her father’s – who paid for her education in return for sexual favours (so not ‘kindly’, either). ‘From the age of twelve,’ she said. ‘Until just now. If I followed my heart I would put a knife in his eye. Instead I have asked the god to curse him and simply turned my back. So maybe you understand why I do not choose to talk about my past. Never speak of it again.’
    Dom Minto’s version, as reported by my mother, was rather different. According to him Uma was not from Gujarat but Maharashtra – the other half of the divided self of the former Bombay State – and had been raised in Poona, where her father was a high-ranking officer in the police force. At a young age she had shown prodigious artistic gifts and been encouraged by her parents, without whose support it was