The Moors Last Sigh

the knowledge that I had spoken aloud. ‘Keep your big ears to yourself, elephant man,’ I yelled. ‘Call me what you want,’ he replied, affably. ‘Your fate is already written.’ I subsided, squatting, and buried my head in my hands.
    ‘Case for the prosecution you have given,’ said the Warder. ‘Very powerful, bhai. Damn strong. But for the defence? A mother must be defended, isn’t it? Then who will speak for her?’
    ‘This is not a court of law,’ I answered, in the grip of the sick emptiness that remains when anger drains away. ‘If she has another version, then let her tell it where she pleases.’
    ‘Okay, okay,’ said the Warder, in mock-appeasement. ‘Keep up the good work. For me, your entertainment value is presently number one. Top-notch. Kudos, mister. Kudos to you.’
    And I thought about mad love, about all the amours fous down the da Gama-Zogoiby generations. I remembered Camoens and Belle, and Aurora and Abraham, and poor Ina eloping with her Country and Eastern Cashondeliveri beau. I even included Minnie-Inamorata-Floreas finding ecstasy in Jesus Christ. And of course I thought – endlessly, like a child scratching at a wound – about Uma and myself. I tried to cling to our love, to the fact of it, even though there were voices within deriding me for the size of the mistake I had made with her. Let her go , the voices advised. At least now, after all this, cut your losses . But I still wanted to believe what lovers believe: that the thing itself is better than any alternative, be it unrequited, or defeated, or insane. I wanted to cling to the image of love as the blending of spirits, as mélange, as the triumph of the impure, mongrel, conjoining best of us over what there is in us of the solitary, the isolated, the austere, the dogmatic, the pure; of love as democracy, as the victory of the no-man-is-an-island, two’s-company Many over the clean, mean, apartheiding Ones. I tried to see lovelessness as arrogance, for who but the loveless could believe themselves complete, all-seeing, all-wise? To love is to lose omnipotence and omniscience. Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliffin hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, I told myself, still, without that leap nobody comes to life. The leap itself is a birth, even when it ends in death, in a scramble for white tablets, and the scent of bitter almonds on your beloved’s breathless mouth.
    No , said my voices. Love, as well as your mother, has done you down .
    My own breath came with difficulty; the asthma tore and rasped. When I did manage to doze off I dreamed strangely of the sea. Never until now had I slept out of earshot of the waves, of the collision of the spheres of air and water, and my dreams yearned for that plashy sound. Sometimes in the dreams the sea was dry, or made of gold. Sometimes it was a canvas ocean, sewn tightly to the land along the edge of the beach. Sometimes the land was like a torn page and the sea a glimpse of the hidden page below. These dreams showed me what I was not pleased to be shown: that I was my mother’s son. And one day I awoke from such a sea-dream in which, while attempting to escape from unknown pursuers, I came upon a lightless subterranean flow, and was instructed by a shrouded woman to swim beyond the limit of my breath , for only then would I discover the one and only shore upon which I might be safe for ever, the shore of Fancy itself , and I obeyed her with a will, I swam with all my might towards my lungs’ collapse; and as they gave way at last, and the ocean rushed into me, I awoke with a gasp to find before me the impossible figure of a one-legged man with a parrot on his shoulder and a treasure-map in his hand. ‘Come, baba,’ said Lambajan Chandiwala. ‘Time to seek your fortune, wheresoever it may be.’

    It was not a treasure-map, but golden treasure itself: viz ., a document authorising my immediate release. Not a fortune-hunter’s passport, but a stroke of unlooked-for fortune. It brought me clean water and clean clothing. The turning of keys in locks was heard, and the envious delirium of my fellow prisoners. The Warder, elephantine master of this rathouse, this overcrowded roach motel, was not to be seen; cowering, deferential flunkeys tended to my needs. On my way out no animal-headed demons poked their pitchforks at me, or ululated with snaky tongues. The door was open, and of