The Moors Last Sigh

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    Dr Zeenat Vakil was killed in the fireball that ripped through the Zogoiby Bequest gallery on Cumballa Hill. Nor was a single picture spared; thus consigning my mother Aurora to a region close to the realm of irretrievable antiquity – to the outskirts of that hellish garden filled with the helpless shades of those – now as headless and armless as their statues – whose life-work vanished away. (I think of Cimabue, known to us by a mere handful of pieces.) The Scandal was spared. It had been on permanent loan from the Bequest to the National Museum in Delhi, and it’s still there, facing Amrita Sher-Gil with confidence. A few other canvases remain. Four early Chipkali drawings; Uper the gur gut  …; and the sharp, painful Mother-Naked Moor : which had all, by chance, been on loan, in India or abroad. Also, ironically, the troublesome cricket fantasy hanging on the Wadia ladies’ sitting-room wall, The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig . Eight. Plus the Stedelijk picture, the Tate picture, the Gobler collection. A few ‘Red Period’ pictures in private ownership. (How ironic that she had destroyed most of these herself!)
    More surviving work than Cimabue, then; but a mere shred of the total output of that prolific woman.
    And the four stolen Auroras now represented a crucial segment of her surviving body of work.

    On the morning of the explosions, Miss Nadia Wadia personally answered her doorbell, because the servant had gone out at dawn to do the marketing and had failed to return. Standing before her were a couple of cartoons: a dwarf in khaki and a man with a metal face and hand. A scream and a giggle collided in her throat; but before she could make any kind of sound Sammy Hazaré had raised a cutlass and slashed her twice across the face, in parallel lines running from top right to bottom left, expertly missing her eyes. She passed out on the doormat, and when she regained consciousness, her head was in her distraught mother’s lap, her own blood was on her lips, and her unknown assailants had vanished, never to return.

    The mahaguru Khusro perished in the bombings; the pink skyscraper at Breach Candy, where ‘Adam Zogoiby’ had been raised, was also destroyed. The body of Chhaggan ‘Five-in-a-Bite’ was found in a Bandra gutter; huge cutlass gouges had opened up its neck. Dhabas in Dhobi Talao, cinemas showing the wide-screen remake of the old classic Gai-Wallah , the Sorryno and Pioneer cafés: all these were no more. And Sister Floreas, my one true remaining sibling, turned out to have been wrong about the future; bombs claimed the Gratiaplena nursing home and nunnery, and Minnie was among the dead.
    Dhhaaiiiyn! Dhhaaiiiyn! Not only sister, friends, paintings, and favourite haunts, but also feeling itself was blown apart. When life became so cheap, when heads were bouncing across the maidans and headless bodies were dancing in the street, how to care about any single early exit? How to care about the imminent probability of one’s own? After each monstrosity came a greater; like true addicts, we seemed to need each increased dose. Catastrophe had become the city’s habit, and we were all its users, its zombies, its undead. Disaffected and – to use the over-used word properly for once – shocked, I entered a remote and godlike state. The city I knew was dying. The body I inhabited, ditto. So what? Que sera sera …
    And lo, what was to be, came to pass. Sammy ‘the Tin-man’ Hazaré, with little Dhirendra trotting determinedly by his side, marched into the lobby of Cashondeliveri Tower. Explosives were tied to their torsos, legs and backs. Dhirendra carried two detonators; Sammy was brandishing his sword. The building’s guards saw that the heroin the bombers had taken to give them courage was weighing heavily on their eyes and making their bodies itch, and they backed away in terror. Sammy and Dhiren took the non-stop elevator to the thirty-first floor. The Chief of Security rang Abraham Zogoiby to screech warnings and make self-exculpatory remarks. Abraham interrupted curtly. ‘Evacuate the building.’ These are his last known words.
    Tower workers started spilling madly into the street. Sixty seconds later, however, the great atrium at the top of Cashondeliveri Tower burst like a firework in the sky and a rain of glass knives began to fall, stabbing the running workers through the neck the back the thigh, spearing their dreams, their loves, their hope. And after the glass knives,