The Moors Last Sigh

told you that this was no country for us. At that time he said to you what you are now saying to me. “Macaulay’s Minutemen, get out.” So, then: was he right? Vamoose, go West? That’s it?’
    ‘Your documents are in order?’ Abraham, his power ended, seemed to be ageing before my eyes, like an immortal forced, at last, to step outside the magic portals of Shangri-La. But yes, I nodded, my documents were in order. That much-renewed passage to Spain which was my mother’s legacy to me. That window to another world.
    ‘Then go ask him yourself,’ said Abraham, smiling his despairing smile as he walked away from me into the trees. I let the apple fall and turned to go.
    ‘Ohé, Moraes,’ he called after me. Shameless, grinning, defeated. ‘Bleddy stupid fool. Who do you think had those pictures stolen if not your loony Miranda? Go find them, boy. Go find your precious Palimpstine. Go see Mooristan.’ And his last command, the closest he came to a declaration of affection: ‘Take the bleddy pooch.’ I left that celestial garden with Jawaharlal under my arm. It was almost dawn. There was a red rim edging the planet, dividing us from the sky. It looked as if someone, or something, had been crying.

    Bombay blew apart. Here’s what I’ve been told: three hundred kilograms of RDX explosive were used. Two and a half thousand kilos more were captured later, some in Bombay, others in a lorry near Bhopal. Also timers, detonators, the works. There had been nothing like it in the history of the city. Nothing so cold-blooded, so calculated, so cruel. Dhhaaiiiyn! A busload of schoolkids. Dhhaaiiiyn! The Air-India building. Dhhaaiiiyn! Trains, residences, chawls, docks, movie-studios, mills, restaurants. Dhhaaiiiyn! Dhhaaiiiyn! Dhhaaiiiyn! Commodity exchanges, office buildings, hospitals, the busiest shopping streets in the heart of town. Bits of bodies were lying everywhere; human and animal blood, guts, and bones. Vultures so drunk on flesh that they sat lop-sidedly on rooftops, waiting for appetite to return.
    Who did it? Many of Abraham’s enemies were hit – policemen, MA cadres, criminal rivals. Dhhaaiiiyn! My father in the hour of his annihilation made a phone call, and the metropolis began to explode. But could even Abraham, with his immense resources, have stockpiled such an arsenal? How could gang warfare explain the legion of innocent dead? Hindu and Muslim areas were both attacked; men, women, children perished, and there was nobody to give the dignity of meaning to their deaths. What avenging demon bestrode the horizon, raining fire upon our heads? Was the city simply murdering itself?
    Abraham went to war, and let his curse fall wheresoever it could. That was some of it. It wasn’t enough; it wasn’t everything. I don’t know everything. I’m telling you what I know.
    Here’s what I want to know: who killed Elephanta , who murdered my home? Who blew it to bits, and ‘Lambajan Chandiwala’ Borkar, Miss Jaya Hé and Ezekiel of the magic copybooks along with the bricks and mortar? Was it dead Fielding’s revenge, or freelance Hazaré’s, or was there some more profound movement in history, deeper down, where not even those of us who had spent so long in the Under World could see it?
    Bombay was central; had always been. Just as the fanatical ‘Catholic Kings’ had besieged Granada and awaited the Alhambra’s fall, so now barbarism was standing at our gates. O Bombay! Prima in Indis! Gateway to India! Star of the East with her face to the West! Like Granada – al-Gharnatah of the Arabs – you were the glory of your time. But a darker time came upon you, and just as Boabdil, the last Nasrid Sultan, was too weak to defend his great treasure, so we, too, were proved wanting. For the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. We were our own wooden horses, each one of us full of our doom. Maybe Abraham Zogoiby lit the fuse, or Scar: these fanatics or those, our crazies or yours; but the explosions burst out of our very own bodies. We were both the bombers and the bombs. The explosions were our own evil – no need to look for foreign explanations, though there was and is evil beyond our frontiers as well as within. We have chopped away our own legs, we engineered our own fall. And now can only weep, at the last, for what we were too enfeebled, too corrupt, too little, too contemptible to defend.
    – Excuse, please, the outburst. Got carried away. Old Moor will sigh no more.