The Moors Last Sigh

Biblical span, all the more so in a country where life-expectancy is markedly lower than the Old Testament allows; and in the case of yrs. truly, to whom six months consistently did a full year’s damage, the moment had a special, extra piquancy. How easily the human mind ‘normalises’ the abnormal, with what rapidity the unthinkable becomes not only thinkable but humdrum, not worth thinking about! – Thus my ‘condition’, once it had been diagnosed as ‘incurable’, ‘inevitable’, and many other ‘in’s’ that I can no longer call to mind, speedily became so dull a thing that not even I could bring myself to give it very much thought. The nightmare of my halved life was simply a Fact, and there is nothing to be said of a Fact except that it is so. – For may one negotiate with a Fact, sir? – In no wise! – May one stretch it, shrink it, condemn it, beg its pardon? No; or, it would be folly indeed to seek to do so. – How then are we to approach so intransigent, so absolute an Entity? – Sir, it cares not if you approach it or leave it alone; best, then, to accept it and go your ways. – And do Facts never change? Are old Facts never to be replaced by new ones, like lamps; like shoes and ships and every other blessed thing? – So: if they are, then it shows us only this – that they never were Facts to begin with, but mere Poses, Attitudes, and Shams. The true Fact is not your burning Candle, to subside limply in a stiff pool of wax; nor yet your Electric Bulb, so tender of filament, and short-lived as the Moth that seeks it out. Neither is it made of your common shoe-leather, nor should it spring any leaks. It shines! It walks! It floats! – Yes! – For ever and a day .
    After my thirty-fifth or seventieth birthday, however, the truth of my life’s great Fact became impossible for me to shrug off with a few nostrums about kismet, karma, or fate. It was borne in upon me by a series of indispositions and hospitalisations with which I will not trouble the squeamish, impatient reader; except to say that they impressed upon me the reality from which I had averted my gaze for so long. I did not have very long to live . That plain truth hung behind my eyelids in letters of fire whenever I went to sleep; it was the first thing I thought of when I awoke. So you made it to today. Will you still be here tomorrow? It’s true, my squeamish, impatient friend: ignominious and unheroic as it may be to say so, I had commenced living with the minute-by-minute fear of death. It was a toothache for which no soothing oil of cloves could be prescribed.
    One of the effects of my adventures in medicine was to render me physically incapable of that which I had long given up hope of doing; that is, to become a father myself, and so alleviate – if not escape – the burdens of being a son. This latest failure so angered Abraham Zogoiby, who was in his ninetieth year and healthier than ever, that he was unable to conceal his irritation beneath the flimsiest show of sympathy or concern. ‘The one thing I wanted from you,’ he spat at my bedside at the Breach Candy Hospital. ‘Even that you can’t give me now.’ A degree of coolness had reentered our relationship ever since I refused to be involved with the covert operations of the Khazana Bank, in particular the manufacture of the so-called Islamic bomb. ‘You’ll be wanting a yarmulke now,’ my father sneered. ‘And phylacteries. Lessons in Hebrew, a one-way trip to Jerusalem? Just, please, to let me know. Many of our Cochin Jews, by the way, complain of the racism with which they are treated in your precious homeland across the sea.’ Abraham, the race traitor, who was repeating on an appalling, gigantic scale the crime of turning his back on mother and tribe, and walking out of Jewtown towards Aurora’s Roman arms. Abraham, the black hole of Bombay. I saw him wrapped in darkness, a collapsing star sucking darkness around itself as its mass increased. No light escaped from the event-horizon of his presence. He had begun to scare me long ago; now he engendered in me a terror, and at the same time a pity, that my words are too impoverished to describe.
    I say again: I’m no angel. I kept away from the KBI’s business, but Abraham’s empire was large, and nine-tenths of it was submerged below the surface of things. There was plenty for me to do. I, too, became an inhabitant of the upper reaches of Cashondeliveri Tower, and took no little satisfaction