The Moors Last Sigh

conventional size; the wall in which it was set was just a wall. No magical machine awaited us outside – no, not even our old driver Hanuman and his winged Buick! – but an ordinary yellow-and-black taxi-cab with, painted in small white letters on its black dashboard, the legend Hypothecated to Khazana Bank International Limited . We entered familiar streets above which loomed familiar messages from the manufacturers of Metro shoes and Stayfree sanitary panties; on hoardings and in neon, Rothmans and Charminar cigarettes, Breeze and Rexona soaps, Time polish and Hope toilet tissue and Life neem-sticks and Love henna all welcomed me home. For there was no doubt in my mind that I was en route to Malabar Hill, and if there was a shadow on my otherwise sunny horizon it was because I felt obliged to rehearse the old arguments about repentance and forgiveness. My parents’ forgiveness, plainly, was now mine; should my repentance be my homecoming gift to them? But the Prodigal Son got the fatted calf – was loved – without ever having to say he was sorry. And repentance’s bitter pills stuck in my throat; as with all my kin, there was overmuch mulishness in my blood. Damn it, I frowned, what was there for me to repent? – It was at about this point in my cogitations that I registered the fact that we were driving north – not towards the parental bosom, but away from; so that this was not a return to Paradise, but a further stage in my fall.
    I began, panickily, to jabber. Lamba, Lamba, tell this fellow . Lambajan was soothing. Just take out some time to rest baba. After your experience your nervous condition is natural. But to balance Lambajan there was psittacoid scorn. Totah the parrot on the ledge by the rear window screeched its painful contempt. I slid down in my seat and closed my eyes, remembering. The Inspector was examining Uma’s body and I was being body-searched too. From my pocket emerged a white rectangle. ‘Is what?’ demanded the Inspector, coming up close (he was almost a head shorter than I), pushing his moustache up against my chin. ‘Fresh-breath peppermint?’ And at once I was blubbering helplessly about suicide pacts. ‘Shut off your tap!’ the Inspector commanded, snapping the tablet in half. ‘Just suck this and we’ll see.’
    That sobered me up. I scarcely dared to part my lips; the Inspector was jabbing the half-tablet towards my mouth. But it will kill me, good sir, it will lay me cold beside my departed love . ‘In which case we found two persons dead,’ said the Inspector, as if stating the obvious. ‘Sad story of love gone wrong.’
    Reader: I resisted his request. Hands grasped me by the arms the legs the hair. In a moment I was lying on the floor not far from dead Uma, whose corpse was being buffeted somewhat by the over-eager short-trousered crowd. I had heard about people dying in what were euphemistically called ‘police encounters’. The Inspector’s hand grasped my nose and squeezed … Airlessness demanded my full attention. And when I yielded to the inevitable, pop! In went the fatal pill.
    But – as you will have divined – I did not die. The half-tablet was not almond-bitter, but sugar-sweet. I heard the Inspector say, ‘The fiend gave the female the lethal dose while indulging self with a sweetie. So it is murder, then! The open-and-shutfulness is terrific.’ And as the Inspector metamorphosed into Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, Bunter’s dusky nabob of Bhanipur, so the men in shorts became a rabble of schoolboys, the terrors of the Remove. They removed me all right, by frog-march into the lift. And as the contents of that potent tablet took effect – at high speed, given my accelerated systems – everything began to change. ‘Yarooh, you fellows,’ I shouted, twitching convulsively in the hallucinogen’s tightening grip. ‘Ooh, I say – leave off. ’
    Chasing a white rabbit, tumbling towards Wonderland past rocking-horse flies, a young girl had to make eat-me drink-me choices; go ask Alice, as the old song goes. But my Alice, my Uma, had made her selection, which was not simply a question of size; and was dead, and could not answer. Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies . Put that on her tombstone. What was I to make of these two tablets, deadly and dreamy? Had it been my beloved’s intention to die, and allow me, after a time of visions, to survive; or to watch my death through the drug’s transcendent eyes? Was she a tragic heroine; or