The Moors Last Sigh

or Dalits, call them what you please, who had in their vanity thought to escape the caste system by converting to Islam? Shall I describe the steps by which we returned them to their place beyond the social pale? – Or shall I speak of the time Hazaré’s XI was called upon to enforce the ancient custom of sati, and elaborate on how, in a certain village, we persuaded a young widow to mount her husband’s funeral pyre?
    No, no. You’ve heard enough. After six years’ hard work in the field we had reaped a rich harvest. The MA had taken political control of the city; it was Mayor Mainduck now. Even in the most remote rural areas, where ideas such as Fielding’s had never before taken root, people had begun to speak of the coming kingdom of Lord Ram, and to say that the country’s ‘Mughals’ must be taught the same lesson that the millworkers had so painfully learned. And events on a greater stage also played their part in the bloody game of consequences that our history has a way of becoming. A golden temple harboured armed men, and was attacked, and the armed men were slain; and the consequence was, armed men murdered the Prime Minister; and the consequence was, mobs, armed and unarmed, roamed the capital and murdered innocent persons who had nothing in common with any of the armed men except a turban; and the consequence was, that men like Fielding who spoke of the need to tame the country’s minorities, to subject one and all to the tough-loving rule of Ram, gained a certain momentum, a certain extra strength.
     … And I am told that on the day of Mrs Gandhi’s death – the same Mrs Gandhi whom she had loathed and who had enthusiastically returned the compliment – my mother Aurora Zogoiby burst into torrential tears …
    Victory is victory: in the election that brought Fielding to power, the millworkers’ organisations backed the MA candidates. Nothing like showing people who is boss …
     … And if at times I found myself vomiting without apparent cause, if all my dreams were infernos, what of it? If I had a constant and growing sense of being followed, yes, perhaps by vengeance, then I set such thoughts aside. They belonged to my old life, that amputated limb; I wanted nothing to do with such qualms, such foibles now. I awoke sweating with terror from a nightmare, mopped my brow, and went back to sleep.
    It was Uma who pursued me through my dreams, dead Uma, made frightful by death, Uma wild-haired, white-eyed, fork-tongued, Uma metamorphosed into an angel of revenge, playing a hellbat Dis-demona to my Moor. Fleeing from her, I would run into a mighty fortress, slam its doors shut, turn – and find myself outside once again, and she floating in air, above me and behind, Uma with vampire’s fangs the size of elephant’s tusks. And again in front of me was a fortress, its doors standing open, offering me sanctuary; and again I ran, and slammed the door, and found myself still in the open air, defenceless, at her mercy. ‘You know how the Moors built,’ she whispered to me. ‘Theirs was a mosaic architecture of interlinked insides and outsides–gardens framed by palaces framed by gardens and so on. But you – I condemn you to exteriors from now on. For you there are no safe palaces any more; and in these gardens I will wait for you. Across these infinite outsides I will hunt you down.’ Then she came down to me, and opened her awful mouth.
    To the devil with such fear-of-the-dark childishness! – Or so, waking from these horrors, I reproved myself. I was a man; would act as a man acts, making my way and bearing any consequential burdens. – And if, at times in those years, both Aurora Zogoiby and I had a feeling of being pursued, then it was because – O most prosaic of explanations! – it was true. As I would learn after my mother’s death, Abraham Zogoiby had had us both followed for years. He was a man who liked to be in possession of information. And while he had been prepared to tell Aurora most of what he knew about my activities – thus becoming the source from which she created the ‘exile’ paintings; so much for crystal balls! – he did not feel it necessary to mention that he had also been checking up on her. In their old age they had drifted so far apart as to be almost out of each other’s earshot, and exchanged few unnecessary words. At any rate, Dom Minto, almost ninety years old now but once again the head of the city’s leading private investigation