The Moors Last Sigh

Aurora and Minto were to be believed, she did not love me, was simply a great actress, a predator of the passions, a fraud. All at once I realised that many of the judgments I had recently made about my family were based on things Uma had said. I felt my head spin. The floor fell away beneath my feet. Was it true about Aurora and Kekoo, about Aurora and Vasco, about Aurora and Raman Fielding? Was it true that my sisters spoke ill of me behind my back? And if not, then it must be true that Uma – O my best beloved! – had sought deliberately to damage my opinion of those to whom I was closest, so that she could insert herself between me and mine. To give up one’s own picture of the world and become wholly dependent on someone else’s – was not that as good a description as any of the process of, literally, going out of one’s mind? In which case – to use Aurora’s contrast – I was the mad one. And lovely Uma: the bad.
    Faced with the possibility that evil existed, that pure malevolence had walked into my life and convinced me it was love, faced with the loss of everything I wanted from my life, I fainted. And dreamed dark dreams of blood.

    The next morning I sat on the terrace at Elephanta staring out at the glittering bay. Mynah came to see me. At Aurora’s request she, too, had assisted Dom Minto in his inquiries. It turned out that nobody in the Baroda branch of the UWAPRF had ever met Uma Sarasvati or knew of her involvement in any kind of activist campaigning. ‘So even her introduction was a phoney,’ she said. ‘I tell you, little bro, this time Mummyji is spot on.’
    ‘But I love her,’ I said helplessly. ‘I can’t stop. I just can’t.’
    Mynah sat beside me and took my left hand. She spoke in a voice so gentle, so un-Mynah-like, that it caught my attention. ‘I also liked her too much,’ she said. ‘But then it went wrong. I didn’t want to tell you. Not my place. Anyhow, you wouldn’t have listened.’
    ‘Listened to what?’
    ‘One time she came to me after being with you,’ Mynah said, squinting into the distance. ‘She told me some things about how it was. About what you. Anyway. Doesn’t matter. She said she didn’t like it. She said more but to hell. It doesn’t matter now. Then she said something to me about me. That is to say: wanting. I sent her packing. Since then we don’t speak.’
    ‘She said it was you,’ I told her dully. ‘I mean. Who was after her.’
    ‘And you believed her,’ Mynah snapped, then swiftly kissed my forehead. ‘Of course you believed her. What do you know about me? Who I like, what I need? And you were crazy for love. Poor sap. Now, but, you better wise up quick.’
    ‘I should dump her? Just like that?’
    Mynah stood up, lit a cigarette, coughed: a deep, unhealthy, choking sound. Her hard, front-line voice was back, her anti-civic-corruption lawyer’s cross-examination voice, her fighting-against-murder-of-girl-babies, no-more-sati no-more-rapes loud-hailer instrument. She was right. I knew nothing about what it might be like to be her, about the choices she had had to make, about whose arms she might turn to for comfort, or why men’s arms might be places not of pleasure but of fear. She might be my sister, but so what? I didn’t even call her by her proper name. ‘What’s the big prob?’ she shrugged, waving an ashy cigarette as she left. ‘Giving up this stuff is harder. Trust me on this. Just cold-turkey the bitch and be thankful you don’t also smoke.’

    ‘I knew they would try and break us up. From the beginning I knew.’
    Uma had moved into an eighteenth-floor apartment with sea view on Cuffe Parade, in a high-rise next door to the President Hotel and not far from the Mody Gallery. She was standing, theatrically ravaged by grief, on a little balcony against a suitably operatic backdrop of wind-agitated coco-palms and sudden, voluminous rain; and now, sure enough, here came the quiver of the sensuously full lower lip, here came her very own waterworks. ‘For your own mother to tell you – that with your father! – well, excuse me but I am disgusted. Chhi! And Jimmy Cashondeliveri! That dumbo guitar-wallah with a missing string! You know perfectly well that from the first day at the racecourse he thought I was some avatar of your sister. Since then he follows me like a dog with his tongue hanging. And I’m supposed to be sleeping with him? God, who else? V. Miranda, maybe? The one-legged chowkidar? Have I no