The Moors Last Sigh

Abraham. The document was not found among his papers. Inspector Singh did not suspect foul play; but that was a matter for him. Me, I had work to do. Ancient, irrefutable imperatives had claimed me. Against all expectation, my mother’s perturbed shade was hovering at my shoulder, crying havoc. Blood will have blood. Wash my body in my murderers’ red fountains and let me R.I.P .
    Mother, I will.

    The mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed. Alphabet-soupists, ‘fanatics’, or, alternatively, ‘devout liberators of the sacred site’ (delete according to taste) swarmed over the seventeenth-century Babri Masjid and tore it apart with their bare hands, with their teeth, with the elemental power of what Sir V. Naipaul has approvingly called their ‘awakening to history’. The police, as the press photographs showed, stood by and watched the forces of history do their history-obliterating work. Saffron flags were raised. There was much chanting of dhuns: ‘Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram’ &c. It was one of those moments best described as irreconcilable: both joyful and tragic, both authentic and spurious, both natural and manipulated. It opened doors and shut them. It was an end and a beginning. It was what Camoens da Gama had prophesied long ago: the coming of the Battering Ram.
    Nobody could even be sure, some commentators dared to point out, that the present-day town of Ayodhya in U.P. stood on the same site as the mythical Ayodhya, home of Lord Ram in the Ramayan. Nor was the notion of the existence there of Ram’s birthplace, the Ramjanmabhoomi, an ancient tradition – it wasn’t a hundred years old. It had actually been a Muslim worshipper at the old Babri mosque who had first claimed to see a vision of Lord Ram there, and so started the ball rolling; what could be a finer image of religious tolerance and plurality than that? After the vision, Muslims and Hindus had, for a time, shared the contested site without fuss … but to the devil with such old news! Who cared about those unhealthy, split hairs? The building had fallen. It was a time for consequences, not backward glances: for what-happened-next, not what might or might not have gone before.
    What happened next: in Bombay, there was a nocturnal burglary at the Zogoiby Bequest. The thieves were swift and professional; the gallery’s alarm system was revealed as hopelessly inadequate, and, in more than one zone, totally dysfunctional. Four paintings were taken, all belonging to the Moor cycle, and plainly pre-selected – one from each of the three major periods, and also the last, unfinished, but nevertheless supreme canvas, The Moor’s Last Sigh . The curator, Dr Zeenat Vakil, tried in vain to persuade radio and TV stations to carry the story. Events at Ayodhya, and their bloody after-effects, swamped the airwaves. Had it not been for Raman Fielding, the loss of these national treasures would not have made the news at all. The MA boss, commenting on Doordarshan, linked the mosque’s fall and the pictures’ disappearance. ‘When such alien artefacts disappear from India’s holy soil, let no man mourn,’ he said. ‘If the new nation is to be born, there is much invader-history that may have to be erased.’
    So we were invaders now, were we? After two thousand years, we still did not belong, and indeed, were soon to be ‘erased’ – which ‘cancellation’ need not be followed by any expressions of regret, or grief. Mainduck’s insult to Aurora’s memory made it easier for me to carry out the deed upon which I was resolved.
    My assassin mood cannot properly be ascribed to atavism; though inspired by my mother’s death, this was scarcely a recurrence of characteristics that had skipped a few generations! It might more accurately be termed a sort of in-law inheritance; for had not match after match imported violence into the da Gama household? Epifania brought her murderous Menezes clan, and Carmen her lethal Lobos. And Abraham had had the killer instinct from the start, though he preferred to employ others to carry out his commands. Only my true-loving maternal grandparents, Camoens and Belle, were innocent of such a charge.
    My own amorous liaisons had scarcely been an improvement. I cast no slur upon sweet Dilly; but what of Uma, who deprived me of my mother’s love by persuading her that I harboured indecent passions? What of Uma the would-be murderess, who only failed to kill me because of the head-banging intervention of slapstick comedy