The Moors Last Sigh

will be made at the highest level. Under no circumstances do you have authority to proceed.’
    Camoens’s face fell; and seeing him on the point of tears, his dreams in ruins, his actors – his cadres – leapt forward; eager to demonstrate the care with which they had learned their rôles, they began to strike attitudes and declaim. In Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Tamil, Telugu and English they proclaimed the revolution, they demanded the immediate departure of the revanchist poodles of colonialism, the blood-sucking cockroaches of imperialism, to be followed by the common ownership of assets and annual over-fulfilment of rice quotas; their right-hand index fingers stabbing towards the future while their left fists rested magisterially against their hips. Babeling Lenins, their beards coming loose in the heat, addressed the now-enormous crowd; which began, little by little at first, and then in a great swelling title, to guffaw.
    Vladimir Ilyich turned purple. Leninist vituperations issued from his mouth and hung in the air above his head in Cyrillic script. Then, spinning on his heel, he stalked back up the gangway and disappeared below decks.
    ‘What did he say?’ Camoens disconsolately asked the Russian interpreter.
    ‘This country of yours,’ the interpreter replied, ‘Vladimir Ilyich tells frankly that it gives to him the shits.’
    A small woman pushed her way through the triumphant hilarity of the People, and through the moist curtain of his misery Grandfather Camoens recognised his wife’s maid Maria. ‘Better you come, sir,’ she shouted over the People’s mirth. ‘Your good madam has given you a girl.’

    After his dockside humiliation, Camoens turned away from Communism, and became fond of saying that he had learned the hard way that it was not ‘the Indian style’. He became a Congresswallah, a Nehru man, and followed from a distance all the great events of the ensuing years: from a distance, because although he spent hours each day absorbed in the subject, to the exclusion of most other things, reading and talking and writing voluminously on the subject, he never again took an active part in the movement, never published a word of his passionate scribblings … let us contemplate, for a moment, the case of my maternal grandfather. How easy to dismiss him as a butterfly, a lightweight, a dilettante! A millionaire flirting with Marxism, a timid soul who could only be a revolutionary firebrand in the company of a few friends, or in the privacy of his study, in the writing of secret papers which – perhaps fearing a repeat of the jeers that had finished off Francisco – he could not bring himself to print; a nationalist whose favourite poets were all English, a professed atheist and rationalist who could bring himself to believe in ghosts, and who could recite from memory, and with deep sentiment, the whole of Marvell’s ‘On a Drop of Dew’:
So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray
Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day
Could it within the humane flow’r be seen ,
Remembering still its former height ,
Shuns the sweet leaves and blossoms green;
And, recollecting its own Light ,
Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express
The greater Heaven in an Heaven less .
    Epifania, most severe and least forgiving of mothers, dismissed him as a confused fool of a boy; but, influenced by the more loving views of him that have come down to me through Belle and Aurora, I make a different estimation. To me, the doublenesses in Grandfather Camoens reveal his beauty; his willingness to permit the coexistence within himself of conflicting impulses is the source of his full, gentle humaneness. If you pointed out the contradictions between, for example, his egalitarian ideas and the olympian reality of his social position, he would answer with no more than an owning-up smile and a disarming shrug. ‘Everyone should live well, isn’t it,’ he was fond of saying. ‘Cabral Island for all, that is my motto.’ And in his fierce love of English literature, his deep friendships with many Cochin English families, and his equally fierce determination that the British i mperium must end and the rule of princes along with it, I see that hate-the-sin-and-love-the-sinner sweetness, that historical generosity of spirit, which is one of the true wonders of India. When empire’s sun set, we didn’t slaughter our erstwhile masters, saving that privilege for one another … but the notion is too cruel to have