The Moors Last Sigh

you will be catching those crunchy cockies for food,’ the Warder laughed. ‘Even vegetarian jailbirds go for them in the end; and you-tho, I am thinking, are definitely non-veg from before.’
    The illusion of an elephant’s head, I now saw, had been created by the hood of a cloak (the flapping ears) and a hookah (for a nose). This fellow was no mythological Ganesha, but a coarse, sadistic brute. ‘What is this place?’ I asked him. ‘I never came across it in my life.’
    ‘You laad-sahibs,’ he said, contemptuously sending a long jet of bright vermilion sputum towards my bare feet. ‘You live in the city and know nothing of its secret, of its heart. To you it is invisible, but now you have been made to see. You are in Bombay Central lock-up. It is the stomach, the intestine of the city. So naturally there is much of shit.’
    ‘I know the Bombay Central area,’ I protested. ‘Railway stations, dhabas, bazaars. I found no place resembling this.’
    ‘A city does not show itself to every bastard, sister-fucker, mother-fucker,’ the elephant man shouted before slamming the window shut. ‘You were blind, but now wait and see.’
    Shit-bucket, gruel-bucket, the rapid slide towards utter degradation: I will spare you the details. My forebears Aires and Camoens da Gama, and my mother too, had spent time in British-Indian jails; but this post-Independence made-in-India institution was far beyond their worst imaginings. This was not just a jail; it was an education. Hunger, exhaustion, cruelty and despair are good teachers. I learned their lessons quickly – my guilt, my worthlessness, my abandonment by everyone I might have called mine. I deserved no better than I had received. We all get what we deserve. I huddled against a wall with my forehead upon my knees and my arms clasped around my shins, and let the cockies come and go. ‘This is nothing,’ the Warder comforted me. ‘Wait on till diseases start.’
    How true, I thought. Soon there would be trachoma, inner-ear infection, rickets, dysentery, infection of the urinary tract. Malaria, cholera, TB, typhoid. And I had heard about a new killer, a thing without a name. Whores were dying of it – turning into living skeletons and then giving up the ghost, the rumour was – and the Kamathipura pimps were hushing it up. Not that there was much chance of my coming into contact with a whore.
    As roaches crawled and mosquitoes stung, so I felt that my skin was indeed coming away from my body, as I had dreamed so long ago that it would. But in this version of the dream, my peeling skin took with it all elements of my personality. I was becoming nobody, nothing; or, rather, I was becoming what had been made of me. I was what the Warder saw, what my nose smelled on my body, what the rats were beginning, with growing enthusiasm, to approach. I was scum.
    I tried to cling to the past. In my bitter turmoil I sought to apportion blame; and mostly I blamed my mother, to whom my father never could say no. – For what kind of mother would set out on such flimsy provocation to destroy her child, her only son? – Why, a monster! – O, an age of monsters is come upon us. Kalyug, when cross-eyed red-tongued Kali, our mad dam, moves among us wreaking havoc. – And remember, O Beowulf, that Grendel’s mother was more fearsome than Grendel himself … Ah, Aurora, how easily you turned to infanticide – with what cold zeal you determined to choke the last breath from your own flesh and blood, to eject him from the atmosphere of your love into the airless deeps of space, there to gasp and perish horribly, with protruding eyes and swollen tongue! – I wish you had pulverised me as a baby, mother, before I grew so old-young with my club. You had the stomach for it – for punch and kick, for pinch and smack. See, beneath your blows the child’s dark skin acquires the iridescence characteristic of bruises and oil-slicks. O, how he howls! The very moon is darkened by his cries. But you are relentless, inexhaustible. And when he is flayed, when he is a shape without frontiers, a self without walls, then your hands close about his neck, and squash, and squish; air rushes out from his body through all available orifices, he is farting out his life, just as once you, his mother, farted him into it … and now he has just one breath left in him, one last shuddering bubble of hope …
    ‘Wah, wah!’ the Warder cried, startling me out of my self-pitying reverie and into