The Moors Last Sigh

mistakes. I recalled, with a shudder, my old fantasy of the trouble-eating alien who could take human form. Last time a lady, this time a man. The Thing had returned.
    ‘I used to know a woman like you,’ I told Adam. ‘And, brother, you’ve still got a lot to learn.’
    ‘Well, humph,’ flounced Adam. ‘When one of us is making such an effort , I don’t see why one of us is being so darn offensive . That’s some attitude problem you’ve got there, Moor bhai. Bad show. Bad career move, also. I hear you came over all hoity with darling Daddyji as well. At his age! Luckily for him one of his sons at least is willing to do the needfuls without giving backchat or lip.’

    Sammy Hazaré lived in the suburb of Andheri, surrounded by a random tangle of light industries – Nazareth Leathercloths, Vajjo’s Ayurvedic Laboratory (specialising in vajradanti gel for the gums), Thums Up Cola Bottle Caps, Clenola Brand Cooking Oil, and even a small film studio, mostly used for advertising commercials, which boasted – on a board beside its gate – an ‘On-Site Stunter and Stuntess’ and ‘Manuel Function (6-Man Team) Crane Faslity’. His house, a rutputty single-storey wooden bungalow, long threatened with demolition but still standing, after the happenstance fashion of Bombay life, skulked between the stinking factory backs and a squat yellow group of lower-income housing units, as though it were doing its best to escape the demolition teams’ attention. Limes and green chillies hung over the screen-door, to ward off evil spirits. Outdated calendars featuring brightly coloured representations of Lord Ram and elephant-headed Ganesh had for many years been the only other decorations; now, however, pictures of Nadia Wadia, torn from magazines, were Scotch-taped all over the blue-green walls. And there were also society-page photographs of the betrothal of Miss Wadia and Mr M. Zogoiby at the Taj Hotel, and in these pictures my face had been violently crossed out with a pen, or scratched off with the tip of a knife. In one or two I had been completely beheaded. Obscene words had been scrawled across my chest.
    Sammy had never married. He shared these quarters with a bald, big-nosed dwarf named Dhirendra, a bit-part movie actor who claimed to have featured in over three hundred feature films and whose life’s ambition it was to become the Guinness record-holder for most movie appearances. Dhiren the dwarf cooked and cleaned for fierce Sammy, and even oiled his tin hand when required. And at night, by the light of a paraffin lantern, he helped the Tin-man with his little hobby. Fire-bombs, time-bombs, rocker-triggers and tilt-bombs: the whole house – its cupboards, its nooks and crannies, and even several special holes which the two men had dug beneath the floor of their residence’s single room and then boarded over for secrecy – had become a private arsenal. ‘If they come to knock us down,’ Sammy would tell his little sidekick with a ferocious, fatalistic satisfaction, ‘boy, sir, we sure will go out with a bang.’
    Once upon a time Sammy and I had been pals; with our non-matching hands we had thought of each other as blood brothers, and for a few years back then we were the terrors of the town, and pint-sized Dhirendra, like a jealous wife, would stay home, cooking meals which Sammy, returning exhausted from our labours, would wolf down without a word of thanks before falling asleep to fill the room with mighty eructations and farts. But now there was Nadia Wadia, and stupid Sammy, in the grip of his pathetic infatuation with that unattainable lady, my fiancée, was ready – or so his wadlls suggested – to blow off my hated head.
    Once upon a time the Tin-man had been Raman Fielding’s Cadre Number One, his super-skipper, his man of men. But then Mainduck, himself obsessed with Nadia, had ordered Sammy to rough the bint up a bit, and Hazaré had led a revolution. For a few months Mainduck had kept Sammy where he could see him, watching him with those cold dead eyes, like the eyes with which frogs target their buzzing prey. Then he summoned the Tin-man into his frog-phoned inner sanctum, and gave him the sack.
    ‘Got to let you go, sport,’ he said. ‘No man is bigger than the game, isn’t it, and you started to write your own rules.’
    ‘Sir no skipper sir. Sir ladies and bachcha-log are not combatants sir.’
    ‘Cricket has changed, Tin-man,’ said Mainduck softly. ‘I see you are of the