The Moors Last Sigh

a belly has no appetite for life.’

    On 23rd June 1980 Sanjay Gandhi tried to loop the loop over New Delhi and nose-dived to his death. At once, in the period of instability that followed, I, too, was plunged towards catastrophe. Within days of Sanjay’s death I heard that Jamshed Cashondeliveri had died in a car accident on the road to Powai Lake. His passenger, who had miraculously been thrown clear and escaped with minor cuts and concussion, was the brilliant young sculptor Uma Sarasvati to whom, it was said, the dead man had been intending to propose at the well-known beauty spot. Forty-eight hours later it was reported that Miss Sarasvati had been discharged from hospital and had been driven to her residence by friends. She continued, understandably, to suffer greatly from grief and shock.
    The news of Uma’s injury unleashed all the feelings for her which I had spent so long trying to tie down. I spent two days fighting against myself, but once I heard she was back at Cuffe Parade, I left the house, telling Lambajan I was off to the Hanging Gardens for a stroll, and grabbed a cab the moment I was out of his sight. Uma answered the door in black tights and a loosely tied kimono-style Japanese shirt. She looked panicky, hunted. It was as if her internal gravitational force had diminished; she seemed like a shaky assemblage of particles that might fly apart at any moment.
    ‘Are you badly hurt?’ I asked her.
    ‘Shut the door,’ she replied. When I turned back towards her she had untied her shirt and let it fall. ‘See for yourself,’ she said.
    After that there was no keeping us apart. The thing between us seemed to have grown more potent during our separation. ‘Oh boy,’ she murmured as I caressed her with my twisted right hand. ‘Oh yes, this. Oh boyoboy.’ And, later: ‘I knew you didn’t stop loving me. I didn’t stop. I told myself, confusion to our enemies. Whoever stands in our way will fall.’
    Her husband, she confessed, had died. ‘If I’m such a mean woman,’ she said, ‘then answer me why he left me everything? After his illness he didn’t know who anybody was, he thought I was the servant girl. So I arranged for his care and left. If that is a bad thing then I am bad.’ I absolved her easily. No, not bad, my darling, my life, not you.
    There was not a scratch on her body. ‘Bloody newspapers,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t even in the bloody car. I took my own vehicle because I had plans for later. So he was in his stupid Mercedes’ – how charmingly she mispronounced the name: Murs’deez! – ‘and I in my new Suzuki. And on that second-rate road the crazy playboy wants to race. On that road where trucks come and buses with doped-up drivers and donkey-carts and camel-carts and god knows what-all.’ She wept; I dried her tears. ‘What could I do? I just drove like a sensible woman and shouted at him, no, get back, no. But Jimmy always had something missing up top. What to tell you? He didn’t look, he stayed on the wrong side of the road to overtake, a corner came, a cow was sitting, he tried to avoid, he could not pull across because my car was there, he went off the road on the right side, and there was a poplar tree. Khalaas.’
    I tried to feel sorry for Jimmy and failed. ‘The papers said you were going to be married.’ She gave me a furious look. ‘You never understood me,’ she said. ‘Jimmy was nothing. For me it was always you.’
    We met as often as we could. I kept our assignations secret from my family, and apparently Aurora had dispensed with Dom Minto’s services, because she found out nothing. A year passed; more than a year. The happiest fifteen months of my life. ‘Confusion to our enemies!’ Uma’s defiant phrase became our greeting and farewell.
    Then Mynah died.
    My sister perished of – what else? – a shortage of breath. She had been visiting a chemical factory in the north of town to investigate its maltreatment of its large female workforce – mostly women from the slums of Dharavi and Parel – when there was a small explosion in her near vicinity. The ‘integrity’ of a sealed vat of dangerous chemicals was, to use the official report’s anaesthetised language, ‘compromised’. The practical consequence of this loss of chemical integrity was the release into the atmosphere of a substantial quantity of the gas methyl isocyanate. Mynah, who had been knocked unconscious by the explosion, inhaled a lethal dose of the gas. The