The Moors Last Sigh

charge, had demanded new terms of business that placed further burdens on the company’s already tottering finances. There were many offers to buy her out for a tenth or at best an eighth of the business’s real value.
    She didn’t sell. She started dressing in men’s trousers, white cotton shirts and Camoens’s cream fedora. She went to every field, every orchard, every plantation under her control and won back the confidence of the terrified employees, many of whom had bolted for their lives. She found managers whom she could trust and whom the work-force would follow with respect but without fear. She charmed banks into lending her money, bullied departed clients into returning, and became a mistress of small print. And for the rescue of her fifty per cent of the Gama Trading Company she earned a respectful nickname: from Fort Cochin’s salons to the Ernakulam dockside, from the British Residency in old Bolgatty Palace to the Spice Mountains, there was only one Queen Isabella of Cochin. She did not like the nickname, though the admiration behind it made her hot with pride. ‘Call me Belle,’ she would insist. ‘Plain Belle is fine for me.’ But she was never plain; and, more than any local princess, had earned her royalty.
    After three years Aires and Carmen surrendered, because their fifty per cent had by this time come to the point of collapse. Belle could have bought them out for next to nothing, but because Camoens would not do such a thing to his brother, she paid out twice as much. And in the years that followed she worked as feverishly on saving the Aires Fifty as she had on rescuing her own. The company name was changed, however; the Gama Trading Company was gone for good. In its place stood the restored edifice of the so-called C-50, the Camoens Fifty Per Cent Corp. (Private) Limited. ‘Just goes to show,’ she liked to say, ‘how, in this life, fifty plus fifty equals fifty.’ Meaning that the business might be reunited by Queen Isabella’s reconquista but the rift in the family remained unbridged; the sack-barricades remained in place. And would remain for many long years.

    She wasn’t perfect; perhaps it’s time that was said. She was tall, beautiful, brilliant, brave, hard-working, powerful, victorious, but, ladies and gents, Queen Isabella was no angel, no wings or halo in her wardrobe, no sir. In those years of Camoens’s jail sentence she smoked like a volcano, grew increasingly foul-mouthed and failed to restrain her language in front of her growing child, went in for occasional drinking sprees that would leave her unconscious, sprawled like a tart on a mat in some backwoods shebeen; she became the toughest of nuts, and there were hints that her business methods extended at times to a little intimidation, a little strong-arming of suppliers, contractors, rivals; and she was frequently, casually, shamelessly unfaithful, unfaithful without discrimination or restraint. She would step out of her working attire into a beaded flapper dress and cloche hat, practise the Charleston, wide-eyed and pout-lipped, in front of her dressing-room mirror, and then, leaving Aurora with her ayah, head off for the Malabar Club. ‘See you later, chickadee,’ she’d say in her deep, smoke-shattered voice. ‘Mummy’s hunting tigers tonight.’ Or, again, kicking up her heels and coughing profoundly: ‘Sweet dreams, honeybunch; Mummy needs lion meat to munch.’
    In later years my mother Aurora da Gama told this story to her circle of bohemian chums. ‘You know, I was five-six-seven-eight years old, a proper little madam. If the phone rang, I would pick it up and say, “I’m so sorry, but Daddy and Aires-uncle are both in prison, Carmen-aunty and Granny are on the other side of the smelly sacks and aren’t allowed to come over, and Mummy will be out tiger-shooting all night; may I take a message?”
    While Belle was on the razzle, little Aurora, this solitary child, left to her own devices in her surreally cloven home, turned upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude; and, according to legend, found her gift. When she had grown up and was enclosed within the cult of herself, her admirers liked to linger upon the image of the little girl alone in the big house, throwing open the windows and allowing the torrential reality of India to awaken her soul. (You will notice that two episodes from Aurora’s early life have been conflated to form this image.) It was said of her, in awe, that