The Moors Last Sigh

agency, had kept us under surveillance at Abraham’s behest. But Minto must take a back seat for a while. Miss Nadia Wadia is waiting in the wings.

    Yes, there were women, I won’t attempt to deny it. Crumbs from Fielding’s table. I recall a Smita, a Shobha, a Rekha, an Urvashi, an Anju and a Manju, among others. Also a striking number of non-Hindu ladies: slightly soiled Dollies, Marias and Gurinders, none of whom lasted long. Sometimes, too, at the Skipper’s request I ‘undertook commissions’: that is, I was sent out like a party girl to pleasure some rich bored matron in her tower, offering personal favours in return for gifts to party coffers. I also accepted payment if it was offered. It made no difference to me. I was congratulated by Fielding on ‘showing a genuine aptitude’ for such work.
    But I never touched Nadia Wadia. Nadia Wadia was different. She was a beauty queen – Miss Bombay and Miss India 1987, and, later the same year, Miss World. In more than one magazine, comparisons were made between this newly arrived just-seventeen-year-old and the lost, lamented Ina Zogoiby, my sister, to whom she was alleged to bear a strong resemblance. (I couldn’t see it; but then, in the matter of resemblances, I was always a little slow. When Abraham Zogoiby suggested that Uma Sarasvati had something in her of the young Aurora, that imposing fifteen-year-old with whom he had fallen so fatefully in love, it came as news to me.) Fielding wanted Nadia – tall, Valkyrean Nadia, who had a walk like a warrior and a voice like a dirty phone call, serious Nadia who donated a percentage of her prize-money to hospitals for children and who wanted to be a doctor when she had grown tired of making the planet’s males ill with desire – wanted her more than anyone on earth. She had what he lacked, and what, in Bombay, he knew he needed before his package was complete. She had glamour. And she called him a toad to his face at a civic reception; so she had guts, and needed to be tamed.
    Mainduck wanted to possess Nadia, to hang her like a trophy on his arm; but Sammy Hazaré, his most loyal lieutenant – hideous Sammy, half-man, half-can – made a bad mistake, and fell in love.
    Me, I had grown uninterested in the love of women. Truthfully. After Uma, something had been switched off in me, some fuse had been blown. My employer’s not infrequent magisterial leavings, and the ‘commissions’, were enough to satisfy me, easy-come-easy-go as they were. There was also the question of my age. When I turned thirty, my body turned sixty, and not a particularly youthful sixty, at that. Age flooded over my crumbling vellards and took possession of the lowlands of my being. My breathing difficulties had now increased to the point at which I had to retire from flying-wedge activities. No more chases down slum alleys and up the staircases of tawdry tenements for me. Long sensual nights were likewise no longer an option; these days, at best, I was strictly a one-trick pony. Fielding, lovingly, offered me work in his personal secretariat, and the least athletically inclined of his courtesans … But Sammy, a decade older than me in years but twenty years younger in body, Sammy the Tin-man still dreamed. No breathing problems there; in Mainduck’s nocturnal Olympics, either he or Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite won the impromptu lung-power contests (holding of breath, blowing of a tiny dart through a long metal blowpipe, extinguishing of candles) every time.
    Hazaré was a Christian Maharashtrian, and had joined up with Fielding’s crew for regionalist, rather than religious reasons. O, we all had reasons, personal or ideological. There are always reasons. You can get reasons in any chor bazaar, any thieves’ market, reasons by the bunch, ten chips the dozen. Reasons are cheap, cheap as politicians’ answers, they come tripping off the tongue: I did it for the money, the uniform, the togetherness, the family, the race, the nation, the god . But what truly drives us – what makes us hit, and kick, and kill, what makes us conquer our enemies and our fears – is not to be found in any such bazaar-bought words. Our engines are stranger, and use darker fuel. Sammy Hazaré, for instance, was driven by bombs. Explosives, which had already claimed a hand and half his jaw, were his first love, and the speeches in which he sought – unsuccessfully, thus far – to persuade Fielding of the political value of an Irish-style bombing