The Moors Last Sigh

activity I had no place. Zeenat Vakil at the Zogoiby Bequest – where I had started spending a large proportion of my time, wandering in my mother’s dream-worlds, following Aurora’s re-dreaming of myself through the adventures she had designed for me – clever leftish Zeeny, whom I didn’t tell about my Mainduck affiliations, had nothing but contempt for Ram-Rajya rhetoric. ‘What bunkum, I swear,’ she expostulated. ‘Point one: in a religion with a thousand and one gods they suddenly decide only one chap matters. Then what about Calcutta, for example, where they don’t go for Ram? And Shiva-temples are no longer suitable places of worship? Too stupid. Point two: Hinduism has many holy books, not one, but suddenly it is all Ramayan, Ramayan. Then where is the Gita? Where are all the Puranas? How dare they twist everything in this way? Bloody joke. And point three: for Hindus there is no requirement for a collective act of worship, but without that how are these types going to collect their beloved mobs? So suddenly there is this invention of mass puja, and that is declared the only way to show true, class-? devotion. A single, martial deity, a single book, and mob rule: that is what they have made of Hindu culture, its many-headed beauty, its peace.’
    ‘Zeeny, you’re a Marxist,’ I pointed out. ‘This speech about a True Faith ruined by Actually Existing bastardisations used to be you guys’ standard song. You think Hindus Sikhs Muslims never killed each other before?’
    ‘Post-Marxian,’ she corrected me. ‘And whatever was true or not true in the question of socialism, this fundo stuff is really something new.’
    Raman Fielding found many unexpected allies. As well as the alphabet-soupists there were the Malabar Hill fast-laners, joking at their dinner-parties about ‘teaching minority groups a lesson’ and ‘putting people in their place’. But these were people he had wooed, after all; what must have come as something of a bonus was that, on the single issue of contraception, at least, he managed to acquire support from the Muslims, and even more surprisingly, the Maria Gratiaplena nuns as well. Hindus, Muslims and Catholics, on the verge of violent communal conflict, were momentarily united by their common hatred of sheath, diaphragm and pill. My sister Minnie – Sister Floreas – was, needless to say, energetic in the fray.
    Ever since the failure of the attempt to introduce a birth-control campaign by force in the mid-1970s, family planning had been a difficult topic in India. Lately, however, a new drive for smaller families had been initiated, under the slogan Hum do hamaré do (‘we two and our two’). Fielding used this to launch a scare campaign of his own. MA workers went into the tenements and slums to tell Hindus that Muslims were refusing to co-operate with the new policy. ‘If we are two and we have two, but they are two and they have twenty-two, then soon they will outnumber us and drive us into the sea!’ The idea that three-quarters-of-a-billion Hindus could be swamped by the children of one hundred million Muslims was curiously legitimised by many Muslim imams and political leaders, who deliberately exaggerated the numbers of Indian Muslims in an attempt to increase their own importance and the community’s sense of self-confidence; and who were also fond of pointing out that Muslims were much better fighters than Hindus. ‘Give us six Hindus to one of us!’ they screamed at their rallies. ‘Then we will be level pegging, at least. Then there may be a little bit of a fair fight before the cowards run.’ Now, this surrealist numbers game was given a new twist. Catholic nuns began tramping up and down the Bombay Central chawls and the filthy lanes of the Dharavi slum, protesting vociferously against birth control. None worked longer hours, or argued more passionately, than our own Sister Floreas; but after a time she was withdrawn from the front line, because another nun overheard her explaining to terrified slum-dwellers that God had his own ways of controlling His people’s numbers, and her visions had confirmed that in the very near future many of them would die anyway, because of the coming violence and plagues. ‘I myself will be carried away to Heaven,’ she was explaining sweetly. ‘O, how dearly I look forward to the day.’

    I turned seventy on New Year’s Day 1992, at the age of thirty-five. Always an ominous landmark, the passing of the