The Moors Last Sigh

be said I have; but still I stand by my words. O Beautifiers of the City, did you not see that what was beautiful in Bombay was that it belonged to nobody, and to all? Did you not see the everyday live-and-let-live miracles thronging its overcrowded streets?
    Bombay was central. In Bombay, as the old, founding myth of the nation faded, the new god-and-mammon India was being born. The wealth of the country flowed through its exchanges, its ports. Those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay: that was one explanation for what happened. Well, well, that may have been so. And it may have been that what was unleashed in the north (in, to name it, because I must name it, Ayodhya) – that corrosive acid of the spirit, that adversarial intensity which poured into the nation’s bloodstream when the Babri Masjid fell and plans for a mighty Ram temple on the god’s alleged birthplace were, as they used to say in the Bombay cinema-houses, filling up fast – was on this occasion too concentrated, and even the great city’s powers of dilution could not weaken it enough. So, so; those who argue thus have a point, too, it cannot be denied. At the Zogoiby Bequest, Zeenat Vakil offered me her usual sardonic take on the troubles. ‘I blame fiction,’ she said. ‘The followers of one fiction knock down another popular piece of make-believe, and bingo! It’s war. Next they will find Vyasa’s cradle under Iqbal’s house, and Valmiki’s baby-rattle under Mirza Ghalib’s hang-out. So, OK. I’d rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.’
    I had been dreaming about Uma – O disloyal subconscious! – Uma sculpting her early work, the large Nandi bull. Like the bull, I thought when I awoke, and like blue Krishna of flute-and-milkmaid fame, Lord Ram was an avatar of Vishnu; Vishnu, most metamorphic of the gods. The true ‘rule of Ram’ should therefore, surely, be premised on the mutating, inconstant, shape-shifting realities of human nature – and not only human nature, but divine as well. This thing being advocated in the great god’s name flew in the face of his essence as well as ours. – But when the boulder of history begins to roll, nobody is interested in discussing such fragile points. The juggernaut is loose.
     … And if Bombay was central, it may have been that what transpired was rooted in Bombay quarrels. Mogambo versus Mainduck: the long-awaited duel, the heavyweight unification bout to establish, once and for all, which gang (criminal-entrepreneurial or political-criminal) would run the town. I saw something like this happen, and can only set down what I saw. Hidden factors? The meddling of secret/foreign hands? These I leave for wiser analysts to reveal.
    I’ll tell you what I think – what, in spite of a life time’s conditioning against the supernatural, I cannot stop believing: something started when Aurora Zogoiby fell – not just a feud, but a lengthening, widening tear in the fabric of all our lives. She would not rest, she haunted us tirelessly. Abraham Zogoiby saw her more and more, floating in his Pei garden, demanding to be avenged. That’s what I really think. What followed was her revenge. Disembodied, she hung above us in the sky, Aurora Bombayalis in her glory, and what rained down upon us was her wrath. Find the femme, say I. See: Aurora’s phantom flying through the fiery air. And behold Nadia, too – Nadia Wadia, like the city whose true creature she was – Nadia Wadia, my fiancée, was also central to the tale.
    So was this a Mahabharat-style conflict, then, a Trojan war, in which the gods took sides and played their part? No, sir. No, sirree. No old-time deities here, but johnny-come-latelies, the lot of us, Abraham-Mogambo and his Scars, Mainduck and his Five-in-a-Bites; all of us. Aurora, Minto, Sammy, Nadia, me. We were not, did not deserve to be thought of as being, of tragic status. If Carmen Lobo da Gama, my unhappy Great-Aunt Sahara, once gambled for her fortune with Prince Henry the Navigator, there’s no need to hear echoes of Yudhisthira’s loss of his kingdom on a fatal throw of the dice. And though men fought over Nadia Wadia, she was neither Helen nor Sita. Just a pretty girl in a hot spot, is all. Tragedy was not in our natures. A tragedy was taking place all right, a national tragedy on a grand scale, but those of us who played our parts were – let me put it bluntly – clowns. Clowns! Burlesque buffoons, drafted