The Moors Last Sigh

there were things she could not imagine, things which even her piercing eye could not see.
    What she missed in herself was the snobbery that her contemptuous rage revealed, her fear of the invisible city, the Malabar-ness of her. How radical Aurora, the nationalists’ queen, would have hated that! To have it pointed out that in her later years she was just another grande dame on the Hill, sipping tea and looking with distaste upon the poor man at her gate … And what she missed in me was that in that surreal stratum, with a tin man, a toothsome scarecrow and a cowardly frog for company (for Mainduck was certainly a coward – he did none of his own rough stuff), I found, for the first time in my short-long life, the feeling of normality, of being nothing special , the sense of being among kindred spirits, among people-like-me, that is the defining quality of home.
    There was a thing that Raman Fielding knew, which was his power’s secret source: that it is not the civil social norm for which men yearn, but the outrageous, the outsize, the out-of-bounds – for that by which our wild potency may be unleashed. We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.
    So, mother: in that dreadful company, doing those dreadful deeds, without need of magic slippers, I found my own way home.

    I admit it: I am a man who has delivered many beatings. I have brought violence to many doorsteps, the way a postman brings the mail. I have done the dirty as and when required – done it, and taken pleasure in the doing. Did I not tell you with what difficulty I had learned left-handedness, how unnaturally it came to me? Very well: but now I could be right-handed at last, in my new life of action I could remove my doughty hammer from my pocket and set it free to write the story of my life. It served me well, my club. In quick time I became one of the MA’s élite enforcers, alongside Tin-man Hazaré and Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite (who, it will come as no surprise to learn, was something of an all-rounder, too, with talents that no kitchen could contain). Hazaré’s XI – whose eight other component hoodlums were every whit as deadly as we three – reigned unchallenged for a decade as the MA’s Team of Teams. So as well as the pure magnificence of our unleashed force there were the rewards of high achievement, and the virile pleasures of comradeship and all-for-one.
    Can you understand with what delight I wrapped myself in the simplicity of my new life? For I did; I revelled in it. At last, I told myself, a little straightforwardness; at last you are what you were born to be. With what relief I abandoned my lifelong quest for an unattainable normality, with what joy I revealed my super-nature to the world! Can you imagine how much anger had been banked in me by the circumscriptions and emotional complexities of my previous existence – how much resentment at the world’s rejections, at the overheard giggles of women, at teachers’ sneers, how much unexpressed wrath at the exigencies of my sheltered, necessarily withdrawn, friendless, and finally mother-murdered life? It was that lifetime of fury that had begun to explode from my fist. Dhhaamm! Dhhoomm! O, sure thing, misters ’n’ begums: I knew how to give what-for, and I also had a good idea of why. Keep your disapproval! Put it where the sun don’t shine! Go sit in a movie theatre and take note that the guy getting the biggest cheers is no longer the loverboy or heero – it’s the guy in the black hat, stabbing shooting kickboxing and generally pulverising his way through the film! O, baby . Violence today is hot . It is what people want .
    My early years were spent breaking the great textile mill strike. My allotted task was to form part of Sammy Hazaré’s unofficial flying wedge of masked avengers. After the authorities moved in to break up a demonstration with sticks and gas – and in those years there were agitations in every part of the city, organized by Dr Datta Samant, his Kamgar Aghadi political party and his Maharashtra Girni Kamgar union of textile workers – the MA’s crack teams would select and pursue individual, randomly selected demonstrators, not giving up until we had cornered them and given them the beating of their lives. We had given much deep thought to the matter of our masks, finally rejecting the idea of using the faces of the Bollywood stars of the time in favour of the more historic Indian folk-tradition of bahurupi travelling