The Moors Last Sigh

occurred to Camoens, who was baffled by evil, calling it ‘inhuman’, an absurd notion, as even his loving Belle pointed out; and, luckily-unluckily for him, he didn’t live to see the Partition massacres in the Punjab. (Sadly, he also died long before the election, after independence, in the new state of Kerala forged from old Cochin-Travancore-Quilon, of the first Marxist government in the sub-continent, the vindication of all his broken hopes.)
    He lived to see trouble enough, for the family was already plunging towards that catastrophic conflict, the so-called ‘battle of the in-laws’, which would have wiped out many a lesser house, and from which our family fortunes took a decade to recover.
    The women are now moving to the centre of my little stage. Epifania, Carmen, Belle, and the newly arrived Aurora – they, not the men, were the true protagonists in the struggle; and inevitably, it was Great-Grandmother Epifania who was the troublemaker-in-chief.
    She declared war the day she heard Francisco’s will, summoning Carmen to her boudoir for a pow-wow. ‘My sons are useless playboys,’ she announced with a wave of her fan. ‘From now on, better us ladies should call-o the tune.’ She would be the commander-in-chief and Carmen, her niece as well as her daughter-in-law, was to be her lieutenant, general factotum and dogsbody. ‘It is your duty not only to this house but to Menezes family also. Never forget that till I saved your skin you were sittoed on a shelf and would have rottofied till Kingdom Come.’
    Epifania’s first order was the most ancient wish of dynasts: that Carmen must conceive a male child, a king-in-waiting through whom his loving mother and grandmother would rule. Carmen, realising in her bitter consternation that this very first instruction would have to be disobeyed, lowered her eyes, muttered, ‘Okay, Epifania Aunty, wish is my command,’ and fled the room.
    (When Aurora was born the doctors said that owing to an unfortunate occurrence Belle would be unable to conceive again. That night Epifania read the riot act to Carmen and Aires. ‘See that Belle, what she popped out with! But a girl child and no more kiddies is some luck from God for you. Buck up! Make a boy, or maybe the whole kit-cat-caboodle will be hers: the whole bang shoot.’)

    On Aurora da Gama’s tenth birthday a barge came across the harbour to Cabral Island, bearing a Northern fellow, a U.P. type with a great pile of wooden planks which he assembled into a simplified giant wheel, fixing wooden seats to each end of the arms of a wooden X. From a green velvet box he produced an accordion and launched into a jolly medley of fairground tunes. When Aurora and her friends had had their fill of whirling through the sky on what the accordionist called a charrakh-choo , he put on a scarlet cape and made fish swim out of the young girls’ mouths and drew live snakes from beneath their skirts, to the horror of Epifania, much tut-tutting from the still-childless Carmen and Aires, and the giggling delight of Belle and Camoens. After Aurora saw the Northerner she understood that a personal magician was what she needed most in life, someone who could make her wishes come true, who could magic her grandmother away for ever and make cobras bite Aires-uncle and Carmen-aunty to death and enable Camoens to live happily-ever-after; for this was in the time of the divided house, which had chalk lines drawn across its floors, like frontiers, and spice-sacks piled up across courtyards, forming little walls, as though they were defences against the risk of floods, or sniper fire.
    It had all started when Epifania, using her sons’ wandering attention as an excuse, invited her relatives to Cochin. She chose the moment for her coup expertly; this was at the time of Aires’s post-Francisco promiscuity, and Camoens’s hunt for Lenins, and Belle’s pregnancy, so there were few protests. In fact, the most vociferous objections came from Carmen, who had never been kindly treated by her ‘mother’s side’ and found her Lobo hackles rising at the advent of so many Menezeses. When she made her feelings known to Epifania, haltingly, and with much circumlocution, that lady replied with a calculated use of coarseness, ‘Missy, your future prospects are right there between your legs, so kindly concentrate on making your husband interested, and buttofy out of your elders’ business.’
    Bees-to-honey Menezes men arrived from Mangalore by