The Moors Last Sigh

scolding and petting the country into good living goes forward. If an advance be made all credit is given to the native, while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a failure occurs the Englishmen step forward and take the blame. Overmuch tenderness of this kind has bred a strong belief among many natives that the native is capable of administering the country, and many devout Englishmen believe this also, because the theory is stated in beautiful English with all the latest political colours.’
    ‘Sir, you can have no doubt of my personal gratitude,’ Aires began, but a sepoy, a common Malayali, slapped him across the face, and he fell silent.
    ‘We shall administer the country, whatever you say now,’ shouted Camoens, defiantly. He, too, was slapped: once, twice, thrice. Blood trickled from his mouth.
    ‘There are other men who hope to administer the country in their own way,’ said the man at the window, still addressing his remarks to the harbour. ‘That is to say, with a garnish of Red Sauce. Such men must exist among three hundred million people, and, if they are not attended to, may cause trouble and even break the great idol called Pax Britannica , which, as the newspapers say, lives between Peshawur and Cape Comorin.’
    The man turned to face them, and of course he was a man well known to them: a well-read man with whom Camoens had enjoyed discussing Wordsworth’s views on the French Revolution, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, and Kipling’s almost schizophrenic early stories of the Indiannesses and Englishnesses that struggled within him; with whose daughters Aires had danced atthe Malabar Club on Willingdon Island; whom Epifania had entertained at her table; but who wore, now, an oddly absent look.
    He said, ‘This Resident, this Englishman, at least, is disinclined on this occasion to take the blame. Your clans are guilty of arson, riot, murder and bloody affray and therefore, in my view, though you took no direct part, so are you. We – by which pronoun you will naturally understand me to be referring to your own local authorities – are going to make sure that you suffer for it. You will be spending very little time with your families for the next many years.’

    In June 1925 the da Gama brothers were sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment. The unusual severity of the judgment led to some speculation that the family was being paid back for Francisco’s involvement with the Home Rule Movement, or even Camoens’s comic-opera efforts at importing the Soviet Revolution; but for most people such speculations had been rendered superfluous, even offensive, by the hideous discoveries at the Gama Trading Company estates in the Spice Mountains, the unarguable evidence that the Menezes and Lobo gangs had lost their heads completely. In a torched cashew orchard the bodies of the (Lobo) overseer, his wife and daughters were found, tied to trees with barbed wire: burned, like heretics, at the stake. And in the smouldering ruins of a fertile cardamom grove, the charred corpses of three Menezes brothers were also found on fire-eaten trees. Their arms were outstretched, and through the centre of each of their six palms an iron nail had been driven.
    I say these things baldly because they make me shake with shame.
    My family has been under many clouds. What sort of family is this? Is this normal? Is this what we are all like?
    We are like this; not always, but potentially. This, too, is what we are.
    Fifteen years: Epifania fainted in the courtroom, Carmen wept, but Belle was dry-eyed and hard-faced, with Aurora similarly silent and grave upon her lap. Many Menezes and Lobo men, and some women, were jailed or condemned; the survivors melted away, returning ash-stained to Mangalore. When they had gone the house on Cabral Island became very quiet, but the walls, the furniture, the rugs were still a-crackle with the electricity generated by the recently departed; there were parts of the house so highly charged that just to enter them made your hair stand on end. The old place released the memory of the mob slowly, slowly, as if it half-expected the bad times to return. But in the end it relaxed, and peace and silence began to think about moving back in.
    Belle had her own ideas about how civilisation should be restored, and she wasted no time. Ten days after the jailings of Aires and Camoens, as an afterthought, the authorities ordered the arrest of Epifania and Carmen as well; but a