The Moors Last Sigh

Your handsome fiancé is come a-calling and we have not even offered him one little piece of cake.’

    Why did I do it? Because I knew what I said to be true; Abraham would have taken refusal as a personal insult, and hurled them into the street. Because I admired Nadia Wadia’s stand against Fielding, and also the way in which she had dealt with my notoriously lecherous father. Oh, because she was so beautiful and young, and I was such a ruin. Perhaps because, after my years of violence and corruption, I was looking for redemption, I wanted to be shriven of my sins.
    Redemption from what? Shriven by whom? Don’t ask me difficult questions. I did it, that’s all. The engagement of Moraes Zogoiby, only son of Mr Abraham Zogoiby and the late Aurora Zogoiby (née da Gama), and Miss Nadia Wadia, only daughter of Mr Kapadia Wadia, deceased, and Mrs Fadia Wadia, all of Bombay, was announced. And somewhere in the city, a Tin-man heard the news, and evil festered in his broken, heartless heart.
    The engagement party was at the Taj, of course, and a lavish Bombay affair it surely was. In the spiteful presence of more than a thousand beautiful, razor-tongued and sceptically amused strangers, including my last sister, Sister Floreas, who was becoming more of a stranger by the day, I slipped a ‘fabulous diamond’, as the papers described it, on to that lovely girl’s lovely finger, and so completed what ‘Waspyjee’ would call ‘an amazing, almost sacrificial betrothal of the Sunset to the Dawn’. But Abraham Zogoiby – most malicious, coldest-hearted of old men – had, with his customary black humour, prepared a little sting in the evening’s tail. After the ritual of the public engagement was complete, and the photographers had feasted on Nadia’s never-more-radiant beauty, and were at last replete, Abraham stepped up on to the dais and asked for silence, because he had an announcement to make.
    ‘Moraes, only son of my body, and Nadia, loveliest of daughters-in-law to be,’ he cawed. ‘Let me venture the hope that you will soon give this sadly depleted family some new members’ – O empty-hearted father! – ‘for an old man to enjoy. In the meantime, however, I myself have a new member to introduce.’
    Much puzzlement, much anticipation. Abraham cackled and nodded. ‘Yes, my Moor. At last, my boy, you will have a younger brother to call your own.’
    Red curtains parted, theatrically on cue, behind the little dais. Adam Braganza – Little Big Ears himself! – stepped forward. Among the many loud gasps were Fadia Wadia’s, Nadia Wadia’s, and mine.
    Abraham kissed him on both cheeks, and on the lips. ‘From this time forward,’ he told the boy before the city’s assembled élite, ‘call yourself Adam Zogoiby – my beloved son.’

18
    B OMBAY WAS CENTRAL, HAD been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India’s East and to the west, the world’s West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once.
    What magic was stirred into that insaan-soup, what harmony emerged from that cacophony! In Punjab, Assam, Kashmir, Meerut – in Delhi, in Calcutta – from time to time they slit their neighbours’ throats and took warm showers, or red bubble-baths, in all that spuming blood. They killed you for being circumcised and they killed you because your foreskins had been left on. Long hair got you murdered and haircuts too; light skin flayed dark skin and if you spoke the wrong language you could lose your twisted tongue. In Bombay, such things never happened. – Never, you say? – OK: never is too absolute a word. Bombay was not inoculated against the rest of the country, and what happened elsewhere, the language business for example, also spread into its streets. But on the way to Bombay the rivers of blood were usually diluted, other rivers poured into them, so that by the time they reached the city’s streets the disfigurations were relatively slight. – Am I sentimentalising? Now that I have left it all behind, have I, among my many losses, also lost clear sight? – It may