The Moors Last Sigh

further monsoon rains. Many workers had been trapped in the tower by the blast. Lifts were inoperative, stairwells had collapsed, there were fires and clouds of ravenous black smoke. There were those who despaired, who exploded from the windows and tumbled to their deaths.
    Finally, Abraham’s garden rained down like a benediction. Imported soil, English lawn-grass and foreign flowers – crocuses, daffodils, roses, hollyhocks, forget-me-nots – fell towards the Backbay Reclamation; also alien fruits. Whole trees rose gracefully into the heavens before floating down to earth, like giant spores. The feathers of un-Indian birds went on drifting through the air for days.
    Peppercorns, whole cumin, cinnamon sticks, cardamoms mingled with the imported flora and birdlife, dancing rat-a-tat on the roads and sidewalks like perfumed hail. Abraham had always kept sacks of Cochin spices close at hand. Sometimes, when he was alone, he would open their necks, and plunge his nostalgic arms into their odorous depths. Fenugreek and nigella, coriander seeds and asafoetida fell upon Bombay; but black pepper most of all, the Black Gold of Malabar, upon which, an eternity and a day ago, a young duty manager and a fifteen-year-old girl had fallen in pepper love.

    To form a class , Macaulay wrote in the 1835 Minute on Education,  … of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in opinions, in morals, and in intellect . And why, pray? O, to be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern . How grateful such a class of persons should, and must, be! For in India the dialects were poor and rude , and a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature . History, science, medicine, astronomy, geography, religion were likewise derided. Would disgrace an English farrier … would move laughter in girls at an English boarding-school .
    Thus, a class of ‘Macaulay’s Minutemen’ would hate the best of India. Vasco was wrong. We were not, had never been, that class. The best, and worst, were in us, and fought in us, as they fought in the land at large. In some of us, the worst triumphed; but still we could say – and say truthfully – that we had loved the best.
    As my aeroplane banked over the city I could see columns of smoke rising. There was nothing holding me to Bombay any more. It was no longer my Bombay, no longer special, no longer the city of mixed-up, mongrel joy. Something had ended (the world?) and what remained, I didn’t know. I found myself looking forward to Spain – to Elsewhere. I was going to the place whence we had been cast out, centuries ago. Might it not turn out to be my lost home, my resting-place, my promised land? Might it not be my Jerusalem?
    ‘Eh, Jawaharlal?’ But the stuffed mutt on my lap had nothing to say.
    I was wrong about one thing, however: the end of a world is not the end of the world. My ex-fiancée, Nadia Wadia, appeared on television a few days after the attacks, when the scars across her face were still livid, the permanence of the disfiguration all too evident. And yet her beauty was so touching, her courage so evident, that in a way she looked even lovelier than before. A news interviewer was trying to ask her about her ordeal; but, in an extraordinary moment, she turned away from him, and spoke directly into the camera, and every viewer’s heart. ‘So I asked myself, Nadia Wadia, is it the end for you? Is it curtains? And for some time I thought, achha, yes, it’s all over, khalaas. But then I was asking myself, Nadia Wadia, what you talking, men? At twenty-three to say that whole of life is funtoosh? What pagalpan, what nonsense, Nadia Wadia! Girl, get a grip, OK? The city will survive. New towers will rise. Better days will come. Now I am saying it every day. Nadia Wadia, the future beckons. Hearken to its call.’

IV
‘THE MOOR’S LAST SIGH’

19
    I WENT TO BENENGELI because I had been told by my father that Vasco Miranda, a man I had not seen for fourteen years – or twenty-eight, according to my personal, quick-time calendar – was holding my dead mother prisoner there; or if not my mother, then the best part of what remained of her. I suppose I was hoping to reclaim these stolen goods, and, by so doing, to heal something in myself before I reached my own conclusion.
    I had never been up in a plane before, and the experience of passing through clouds – I had left Bombay on a rare cloudy day – was so spookily like the