The Moors Last Sigh

the cook had restored to me in his kitchen stood revealed as a chimera. What was I to do? Was it to be the gutter for me, or a final, supreme moment of dignity? Did I have the courage to die for love, and by doing so to make our love immortal? Could I do that for Uma? Could I do it for myself?
    ‘I’ll do it,’ I said aloud. She set down her lamp and turned to me.
    ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘The god told me you would. He said you were a brave man, and you loved me, and so of course you would accompany me on the journey. You would not be a coward who let me go alone.’

    She had always known that her attachment to life was not firm, that the time might come when she would be ready to give it up. So, since her childhood, like a warrior going into battle, she had brought her death with her. In case of capture. Death before dishonour. She came out of her boudoir with clenched fists. In each fist was a white tablet. ‘Don’t ask,’ she said. ‘Policemen’s houses contain many secrets.’ She requested me to kneel beside her in front of the portrait of the god. ‘I know you don’t believe,’ she said. ‘But for me, you will not refuse.’ We knelt. ‘To show you how truly I have always loved you,’ she said, ‘to prove to you at last that I have never lied, I will swallow first. If you too are true, then follow me at once, at once, for I will be waiting, O my only love.’
    At that moment something in me changed. There was a refusal. ‘No,’ I cried, and snatched at the tablet in her hand. It fell to the floor. With a cry she dived down towards it, as did I. Our heads clashed. ‘Ow,’ we said together. ‘Ohoho, ai-aiee. Ow’
    When my head cleared a little both our tablets were lying on the floor. I snatched at them; but in my dizzy pain succeeded in capturing only one. Uma seized the remaining tablet and stared at it with a new wideness of eye, in the grip of some new, private horror, as if she had unexpectedly been asked an appalling question, and did not know how to reply.
    I said: ‘Don’t. Uma, don’t. It’s wrong. It’s mad.’
    The word stung her again. ‘Don’t say mad,’ she shrieked. ‘If you want to live, live. But it will prove you never loved me. It proves you have been the liar, the charlatan, the quick-change artist, the manipulator, the conspirator, the fake. Not me: you. You are the rotten egg, the evil one, the devil. See! My egg is good.’
    She swallowed the pill.
    There was a moment when an expression of immense and genuine surprise crossed her face, followed at once by resignation. Then she fell to the ground. I knelt beside her in terror and the bitter-almond smell filled my nostrils. Her face in death seemed to pass through a thousand changes, as if the pages of a book were turning, as if she were giving up, one by one, all her numberless selves. And then a blank page, and she was no longer anyone at all.
    No, I would not die, I had already decided that. I put the remaining tablet in my trouser pocket. Whoever and whatever she had been, good or evil or neither or both, it is undeniable that I had loved her. To die would not immortalise that love, but devalue it. So I would live, to be the standard-bearer of our passion; would demonstrate, by my life, that love was worth more than blood, than shame – more, even, than death. I will not die for you, my Uma, but I will live for you. However harsh that life may be .
    The doorbell rang. I sat with Uma’s dead body in the dark. There was a hammering. Still I made no reply. A loud voice shouted out. Open up. Polis .
    I rose and opened the door. The landing was thick with short-trousered blue uniforms, dark skinny legs wth knobbly knees, and hands clenched around waving lathis. A flat-hatted inspector was pointing a gun right at my face.
    ‘You are Zogoiby, isn’t it?’ he asked at the top of his voice.
    I said I was.
    ‘ I.e. Shri Moraes Zogoiby, marketing manager of Baby Softo Talcum Powder Private Limited?’
    The same.
    ‘Then on basis of information laid before me I arrest you on a charge of narcotics smuggling and in the name of Law I command you to accompany me peaceably to the vehicle below.’
    ‘Narcotics?’ I repeated helplessly.
    ‘Bandying of words is forbidden,’ blared the Inspector, pushing his pistol closer to my face. ‘Detenu must unquestioning obey instructions of the in-charge. Forward march.’
    I stepped meekly into the knobbly throng. At that moment the Inspector caught his first sight of