The Moors Last Sigh

part of his fantasy had come true, and he was standing beside her as the hooligan cadres came past in their MA trucks, waving clenched fists and hurling colour and flower petals into the air. Fielding made a stiff-armed, open-palmed reply; and Nadia Wadia, seeing the Nazi salute, turned away her face. But Fielding was in a kind of ecstasy that day; and as the noise of Ganpati mounted to almost unbearable heights, he turned to me – I was standing right behind him with Sammy the Tin-man, jammed against the back of the crowded little stand – and bellowed with all his might: ‘Now it is time to take on your father. Now we are strong enough for Zogoiby, for Scar, for anyone. Ganpati Bappa morya! Who will stand against us now?’ And in his voluptuous pleasure he seized the horrified Nadia Wadia’s long, slender hand, and kissed it on the palm. ‘Lo, I kiss Mumbai, I kiss India!’ he screamed. ‘Behold, I kiss the world!’
    Nadia Wadia’s reply was inaudible, drowned by the cheering of the crowds.

    That night, on the news, I heard that my mother had fallen to her death while dancing her annual dance against the gods. It was like a validation of Fielding’s confidence; for her death made Abraham weaker, and Mainduck had grown strong. In the radio and TV reports I thought I could detect a rueful apologetic note, as though the reporters and obituarists and critics were conscious of how grievously that great, proud woman had been wronged – of their responsibility for the grim retreat of her last years. And indeed in the days and months that followed her death her star rose higher than it had ever been, people rushed to re-evaluate and praise her work with an ambulance-chasing haste that made me very angry. If she merited these words now, then she had merited them before. I never knew a stronger woman, nor one with a clearer sense of who and what she was, but she had been wounded, and these words – which might have healed her if spoken while she could still hear– came too late. Aurora da Gama Zogoiby, 1924–87. The numbers had closed over her like the sea.
    And the painting they found on her easel was about me. In that last work, The Moor’s Last Sigh , she gave the Moor back his humanity. This was no abstract harlequin, no junkyard collage. It was a portrait of her son, lost in limbo like a wandering shade: a portrait of a soul in Hell. And behind him, his mother, no longer in a separate panel, but re-united with the tormented Sultan. Not berating him – well may you weep like a woman – but looking frightened and stretching out her hand. This, too, was an apology that came too late, an act of forgiveness from which I could no longer profit. I had lost her, and the picture only intensified the pain of the loss.
    O mother, mother. I know why you banished me now. O my great dead mother, my duped progenitrix, my fool.

17
    R ECALCITRANT, UNREGENERATE, PARAMOUNT : THE Over World’s cackling overlord in his hanging garden in the sky, rich beyond rich men’s richest dreams, Abraham Zogoiby at eighty-four reached for immortality, long-fingered as the dawn. Though he always feared an early death, he had made old bones; Aurora died instead. His own health had improved with age. He still limped, there were still breathing difficulties, but his heart was stronger than at any time since Lonavla, his sight sharper, his hearing more acute. He tasted food as if eating it for the first time, and in his business dealings could always smell a rat. Fit, mentally agile, sexually active, he already contained elements of the divine – had already risen far above the herd, and of course above the Law as well. Not for him those sinuous wordshackles, those due processes, those paper bounds. Now, after Aurora’s fall, he decided to refuse death altogether. Sometimes, sitting astride the highest needle in the giant bright pincushion at the city’s southern tip, he marvelled at his destiny, he filled with feeling, he looked down on moon-glistened nightwater and seemed to see, beneath its mask, his wife lying broken amid the crabs’ dogged scuttles, the clinging of shells, and the bright knives of fish, whole regimented canteens of them, filleting her fatal sea . Not for me, he demurred . I have just begun to live.
    Once by a southern shore he had seen himself as a part of Beauty, as one half of a magic ring, completed by that wilful brilliant girl. He had feared the defeat of loveliness by what was ugly in the earth, sea and