The Moors Last Sigh

improbable that she would have achieved the required standard for a scholarship at the M.S. University, where she was universally praised as a young woman of exceptional promise. Soon, however, she had started giving signs of an exceptionally disordered spirit. Now that she was becoming a celebrated figure, people were reluctant or afraid to speak against her, but after patient inquiries Dom Minto had discovered that she had on three occasions agreed to take heavy medication intended to control her repeated mental aberrations, but on all three she had abandoned the treatment almost as soon as it had begun. Her ability to take on radically different personae in the company of different people – to become what she guessed a given man or woman (but usually man) would find most appealing – was exceptional; but this was a talent for acting that had been pushed to the point of insanity, and beyond. In addition she would invent long, elaborate personal histories of great vividness, and would cling to them obstinately, even when confronted with internal contradictions in her rigmaroles, or with the truth. It was possible that she no longer had a clear sense of an ‘authentic’ identity that was independent of these performances, and this existential confusion had begun to spread beyond the borden of her own self and to infect, like a disease, all those with whom she came into contact. She was known in Baroda for telling malicious and manipulative lies, for instance about certain faculty members with whom she fantasised absurdly steamy love affairs, and eventually wrote to their wives with explicit details of sexual encounters that had, in more than one case, led to separations and divorces. ‘The reason she did not let you go to her college’, my mother said, ‘is that up there everybody hateofies her guts.’
    Her parents had reacted to the news of her mental illness by abandoning her to her fate; not an uncommon response, as I was well aware. They had neither hanged nor immolated themselves – these violent fictions were born out of their spurned daughter’s (pretty legitimate) rage. As for the lecherous ‘uncle’: according to Aurora and Minto, Uma after her rejection by her family – not at the age of twelve, as she had said! – had quickly latched on to an old Baroda acquaintance of her father’s, an elderly, retired deputy commissioner of police by the name of Suresh Sarasvati, a melancholy old widower whom the young beauty effortlessly seduced into a quick marriage at a time when, as a disowned woman, she had a desperate need for the respectability of marital status. Soon after their marriage the old fellow had been rendered helpless by a stroke (‘And what brought that on?’ demanded Aurora. ‘Do I have to spellofy it out? Must I draw-o you a picture?’), and now lived a dreadful half-life, mute and paralysed, cared for only by a solicitous neighbour. His young wife had taken off with everything he owned and had never given him a second thought. And now, in Bombay, she had started playing the field. Her powers of attraction, and the persuasiveness of her performances, were at their peak. ‘You must break her magic spell,’ my mother said. ‘Or you are done for. She is like a rakshasa from the Ramayana, and for sure she will cookofy your poor goose.’
    Minto had been thorough; Aurora showed me documentation – birth and wedding certificates, confidential medical reports acquired by the usual greasing of already-slippery palms, and so on – which left little doubt that his account was accurate in all important particulars. Still my heart refused to believe. ‘You don’t understand her,’ I protested to my mother. ‘O?, she lied about her parents. I would also lie about parents of that type. And maybe this ex-cop Sarasvati is not such an angel as you make out. But evil? Mad? A demon in human form? Mummyji, I think some personal factors have intervened.’
    That night I sat alone in my room, unable to eat. It was plain that I had a choice to make. If I chose Uma, I would have to break away from my mother, probably for good. But if I accepted Aurora’s evidence – and in the privacy of my own four walls I had to concede its overwhelming force – then I was condemning myself, in all probability, to a life without a partner. How much longer did I have? Ten years? Fifteen? Twenty? Could I face my strange, dark fate alone, without a lover by my side? What mattered more: love or truth?
    But if