The Moors Last Sigh

it differently .
    (Here I sit, is more like it. In this dark wood – that is, upon this mount of olives, within this clump of trees, observed by the quizzically tilting stone crosses of a small, overgrown graveyard, and a little down the track from the Ultimo Suspiro gas station – without benefit or need of Virgils, in what ought to be the middle pathway of my life, but has become, for complicated reasons, the end of the road, I bloody well collapse with exhaustion.)
    And yes, ladies, much is being nailed down. Colours, for example, to the mast. But after a not-so-long (though gaudily colourful) life I am fresh out of theses. Life itself being crucifixion enough.

    When you’re running out of steam, when the puff that blows you onward is almost gone, it’s time to make confession. Call it testament or (what you) will; life’s Last Gasp Saloon. Hence this here-I-stand-or-sit with my life’s sentences nailed to the landscape and the keys to a red fort in my pocket, these moments of waiting before a final surrender.
    Now, therefore, it is meet to sing of endings; of what was, and may be no longer; of what was right in it, and wrong. A last sigh for a lost world, a tear for its passing. Also, however, a last hurrah, a final, scandalous skein of shaggy-dog yarns (words must suffice, video facility being unavailable) and a set of rowdy tunes for the wake. A Moor’s tale, complete with sound and fury. You want? Well, even if you don’t. And to begin with, pass the pepper.
    – What’s that you say? –
    The trees themselves are surpriséd into speech. (And have you never, in solitude and despair, talked to the walls, to your idiot pooch, to empty air?)
    I repeat: the pepper, if you please; for if it had not been for peppercorns, then what is ending now in East and West might never have begun. Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama’s tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon’s Tower of Belém to the Malabar Coast: first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in the period called Discovery-of-India – but how could we be discovered when we were not covered before? – we were ‘not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment’, as my distinguished mother had it. ‘From the beginning, what the world wanted from bloody mother India was daylight-clear,’ she’d say. ‘They came for the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.’

    Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high-born cross-breed: me, Moraes Zogoiby, called ‘Moor’, for most of my life the only male heir to the spice-trade-’n’-big-business crores of the da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin, and of my banishment from what I had every right to think of as my natural life by my mother Aurora, née da Gama, most illustrious of our modern artists, a great beauty who was also the most sharp-tongued woman of her generation, handing out the hot stuff to anybody who came within range. Her children were shown no mercy. ‘Us rosary-crucifixion beatnik chicks, we have red chillies in our veins,’ she would say. ‘No special privileges for flesh-and-blood relations! Darlings, we munch on flesh, and blood is our tipple of choice.’
    ‘To be the offspring of our daemonic Aurora,’ I was told when young by the Goan painter V. (for Vasco) Miranda, ‘is to be, truly, a modern Lucifer. You know: son of the blooming morning.’ By then my family had moved to Bombay, and this was the kind of thing that passed, in the Paradise of Aurora Zogoiby’s legendary salon, for a compliment; but I remember it as a prophecy, because the day came when I was indeed hurled from that fabulous garden, and plunged towards Pandaemonium. (Banished from the natural, what choice did I have but to embrace its opposite? Which is to say, unnaturalism , the only real ism of these back-to-front and jabberwocky days. Placed beyond the Pale, would you not seek to make light of the Dark? Just so. Moraes Zogoiby, expelled from his story, tumbled towards history.)
    – And all this from a pepperpot! –
    Not only pepper, but also cardamoms, cashews, cinnamon, ginger, pistachios, cloves; and as well as spice’n’nuts there were coffee beans, and the mighty tea leaf itself. But the fact remains that, in Aurora’s words, ‘it was pepper first and onemost – yes, yes, onemost, because why say foremost? Why come forth if you can come first?’ What was true of history in general was