The Moors Last Sigh

gentleman era. But, Sammy boy, now it is total war.’
    Andhera is darkness, and in Andheri, Sammy ‘Tin-man’ Hazaré sat silently for long hours, wrapped in gloom. In the early days of his Nadia Wadia intoxication, he would sometimes dance around the house, holding up, like a mask, a full-page colour photo of Nadia Wadia into which he had cut peep-holes, so that he could see the world through her eyes; and he would sing the latest movie hits in a girly falsetto voice. ‘ What is under my choli?’ he sang, jerking his torso suggestively. ‘What is under my blouse?’ One day, Dhirendra, driven mad by the interminability of his companion’s fixation and also by the appalling quality of his voice, had yelled back, ‘Tits! She’s got tits under her fucking choli, what do you think? Bleddy party balloons!’ But Sammy, unshaken, had gone on singing. ‘ Love ,’ he warbled. ‘Love is what’s under my blouse.’
    Now, however, his singing days seemed to be over. Little Dhiren ricocheted around the room, cooking and joking, doing his party tricks – handstands, backflips, contortions – trying to cheer Sammy up, even going so far as to sing the naughty blouse-song, setting aside his own resentments of Nadia Wadia, this pin-up fiction who had materialised from nowhere and, in short order, ruined their lives. Little Dhiren was careful not to share the thought with Sammy, but Nadia Wadia was a female to whom he personally would willingly cause harm.
    Finally, Dhirendra found the word of power, the open-sesame, that restored animation to morose Sammy Hazaré. He leapt up on to a table, posed like a little garden statue and spoke the occult syllables. ‘RDX,’ he announced.
    Divided loyalties had never been a problem for Sammy; had he not taken my father’s money and spied on Mainduck for years? A poor man must make his way, and backing both sides is never a bad idea. No, divided loyalties were OK: but no loyalties at all? That was confusing. And this Nadia Wadia business had somehow broken all the Tin-man’s bonds – to Fielding, to ‘Hazaré’s XI’ and the MA as a whole, to Abraham, and to me. Now he was playing for himself. And if he could not have her, why should anyone? And if his house was not to be permitted to stand, why should not other mansions and towers also crumble and fall? Yes, that was it. He knew secrets, and he could make bombs. These were his aptitudes, his remaining possibilities. ‘I will do it,’ he said aloud. Those who had hurt him would feel the weight of the Tin-man’s hand.
    ‘Stunter-Stuntess can guarantee,’ Dhiren was saying. ‘Grade A, and to old customers, discount price.’ The husband-and-wife team of action-sequence specialists at the nearby film studio – purveyors of harmless flashes and bangs – were also, more privately, involved in enabling the real thing. Small fry they undoubtedly were, but for many years they had been the Tin-man’s most reliable suppliers of gelignite, TNT, timers, detonators, fuses. But RDX explosive! Stunter-Stuntess must be going up in the world. For RDX, a person’s pockets had to be deep, a person’s contacts had to reach pretty high. The action-sequence couple must have been recruited by a bunch of heavy hitters. If RDX was being brought into Bombay, in sufficient quantities for the stuntists to be able to sell off a little on the side, there was serious trouble in the air.
    ‘How much?’ Sammy asked.
    ‘Who knows?’ cried Dhiren, capering. ‘Enough horses for our hobby, that is certain.’
    ‘I have gold saved,’ said Sammy Hazaré. ‘Also, there is cash. You also are having a nest-egg.’
    ‘An actor’s life is short,’ protested the dwarf. ‘Will you let me starve in twilight years?’
    ‘No twilight for us,’ the Tin-man replied. ‘Soon we will be fire, like the sun.’

    My ‘brother’ and I enjoyed no more lunches together. And for ‘our’ father, too, the years of feeding off the lifeblood of the country were almost over. My mother had already come a cropper. It was time for the paternal plunge.
    The story of the headlong fall of Abraham Zogoiby from the very pinnacle of Bombay life has become all too well-known; the speed and size of the crash ensured its notoriety. And from this sorry tale one name is entirely absent, while another name recurs in its chapters, time and time again.
    Absent: my name. The name of my father’s only biological male child.
    Recurring: ‘Adam Zogoiby’. Known before that