The Moors Last Sigh

ourselves. How long ago that was! Two daughters and a wife dead, a third girl gone to Jesus and the young-old boy to Hell. How long since he was beautiful, since beauty made him a conspirator in love! How long since unsanctified vows acquired legitimacy through the force of their desire, like coal crushed by heavy aeons into a faceted jewel. But she turned away from him, his beloved, she did not keep her part of the bargain, and he lost himself in his . In what was worldly, what was of the earth and in the nature of things, he found comfort for the loss of what he had touched, through her love, of the transcendent, the transformational, the immense. Now that she had gone, leaving him with the world in his hand, he would wrap himself in his might, like a golden cloak. Wars were brewing; he would win them. New shores were visible; he would take them by storm. He would not emulate her fall .
    She received a state funeral. He stood by her open casket in the cathedral and let his thoughts run on new strategies of gain. Of the three pillars of life, God, family and money, he had only one, and needed a minimum of two. Minnie came to say her farewells to her mother but seemed somehow too glad . The devout rejoice in death, Abraham thought , they think it’s the door to God’s chamber of glory. But that’s an empty room. Eternity is here on earth and money won’t buy it. Immortality is dynasty. I need my outcast son.

    When I found a message from Abraham Zogoiby tucked neatly under the pillow of my bed in Raman Fielding’s house, I understood for the first time how great his power had grown. ‘Do you know who your Daddyji is, high in his tower?’ Mainduck had asked me, before unleashing a mad tirade about anti-Hindu robots and what-not. The note under my pillow made me wonder what else might or might not be true, for there in the sanctums of the Under World I had been shown, by this casual demonstration of the length of my father’s arm, that Abraham would be a formidable antagonist in the coming war of the worlds, Under versus Over, sacred versus profane, god versus mammon, past versus future, gutter versus sky: that struggle between two layers of power in which I, and Nadia Wadia, and Bombay, and even India itself would find ourselves trapped, like dust between coats of paint.
    Racecourse , read the note, written in his own hand. Paddock. Before the third race . Forty days had passed since my mother was laid to rest in my absence, with cannons firing a salute. Forty days and now this magically delivered but utterly banal communication, this withered olive branch. Of course I would not go, I first thought in predictable, wounded pride. But just as predictably, and without informing Mainduck, off I went.
    Children at Mahalaxmi played ankh micholi, hide-and-go-seek, in and out of the crowds of adult legs. This is how we are to one another, I thought, divided by generations. Do jungle animals understand the true nature of the trees among which they have their daily being? In the parent-forest, amid those mighty trunks, we shelter and play; but whether the trees are healthy or corroded, whether they harbour demons or good sprites, we cannot say. Nor do we know the greatest secret of all: that one day we, too, will become as arboreal as they. And the trees, whose leaves we eat, whose bark we gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once, they climbed like squirrels and bounded like deer, until one day they paused, and their legs grew down into the earth and stuck there, spreading, and vegetation sprouted from their swaying heads. They remember this as a fact; but the lived reality of their fauna-years, the how-it-felt of that chaotic freedom, is beyond recapture. They remember it as a rustle in their leaves. I don’t know my father , I thought at the paddock before the third race. We are strangers. He will not know me when he sees me, and will pass blindly by .
    Something – a small parcel – was being pushed into my hand. Somebody whispered, quickly: ‘I need an answer before we can proceed.’ A man in a white suit, wearing a white panama, pushed into the human forest, and was gone. Children screamed and fought at my feet. Here I come ready or not .
    I tore open the packet in my hand. I had seen this thing before, clipped to Uma’s belt. These headphones once adorned her lovely head. Always mangling my tapes. I chucked it in a bin . Another lie; another game of hide-and-seek. I saw her running away from me,