The Moors Last Sigh

could at times be so incomprehensibly dark as to suggest that he actually believed he was being funny – chose that awful day to ‘brief’ me on the existence of the secret H-bomb project. At that moment something changed within me. It was an involuntary alteration, born not of will or choice but of some deeper, unconscious function of my self. I listened carefully as he went into the specifics (the overarching problem the project faced at present, he noted, was the need for an ultra-fast supercomputer capable of running the complex weapons delivery programmes without which the missiles would never hit anything they were supposed to; in the whole world there existed less than two dozen such FPS or ‘Floating Point System’ computers with VAX accessing equipment that enabled them to make around seventy-six million calculations per second, and twenty of these were in the United States, which meant one of the remaining three or four – and such a machine had been located in Japan – must either be acquired by a front organisation so impenetrable as to deceive the enormously sophisticated security systems surrounding such a sale, or else it would have to be stolen, and then made invisible , smuggled to the end-user by means of an improbably complex chain of corrupt excise officials, falsified bills of lading and duped inspectorates) but, as I listened, I heard a voice within me making an absolute, non-negotiable refusal. Just as I had refused the death which Uma Sarasvati had planned for me, so I now believed I had passed the bounds of what was required of me by family loyalty. To my surprise, another loyalty had taken precedence. Surprise, because after all I had been raised in Elephanta , where all communal ties had been deliberately disrupted; in a country where all citizens owe an instinctive dual allegiance to a place and a faith, I had been made into a nowhere-and-no-community man – and proud of it, may I say. So it was with a keen sense of the unexpected that I found myself standing up to my formidable, deadly father.
    ‘… And if we are found to be smuggling it,’ he was saying, ‘all aid agreements, favoured-nation privileges and other government-to-government economic protocols would be terminated on the spot.’
    I took a breath, and plunged: ‘I guess you must know who-all this bomb is meant to blow into more bits than poor Rajiv, and where?’
    Abraham became stone. He was ice, and flame. He was God in Paradise and I, his greatest creation, had just put on the forbidden fig-leaf of shame. ‘I am a business person,’ he said. ‘What there is to do, I do.’ YHWH. I am that I am .
    ‘To my astonishment,’ I told this shadow-Jehovah, this anti-Almighty, this black hole in the sky, my Daddyji, ‘excuse me, but I find that I’m a Jew.’

    By this time I was no longer working for Mainduck; so Chhaggan had been right, I suppose – the blood in my veins had proved thicker than the blood we had spilled together. It was not I, but Fielding who had suggested, not without a modicum of grace, that we had reached the parting of the ways. He probably knew that I was not prepared to spy on my father for him, and he may very well have intuited that information about his activities might be flowing in the opposite direction. It must be added that my appetite for office work was not great; for while my youthful habit of neatness, my urge-to-unexceptionality was well suited to the humble, mechanical tasks I was given to perform, my ‘secret identity’ – that is, my true, untamed, amoral self – rebelled violently against the tedium of the days. Nothing to be done with an old hoodlum, a superannuated goonda, except retire him. ‘Go and rest,’ Fielding told me, putting his hand on my head. ‘You have earned it.’ I wondered if I was being told he had decided not to have me killed. Or the opposite: that in the near future the Tin-man’s knife, or Five-in-a-Bite’s teeth, might be caressing my throat. I made my farewells and left. No assassins came after me. Not then. But the feeling of being pursued, that did persist.
    The truth is that by 1991 Mainduck’s stratagems had far more to do with the religious-nationalist agenda than the original, localised Bombay-for-the-Mahrattas platform on which he had come to power. Fielding, too, was making allies, with like-minded national parties and paramilitary organisations, that alphabet soup of authoritarians, BJP, RSS, VHP. In this new phase of MA