The Moors Last Sigh

coughing, and coughed frighteningly before going to sleep. Coughs would wake her up in the night and she would wander the old house, throwing open the windows … but two months after his return it was Camoens who awoke to find her coughing in a feverish sleep and dribbling blood from her mouth. Tuberculosis was diagnosed, it had settled on both lungs, it was much more dangerous then than it is now, and she was told by the doctors that the battle would be hard and she must cut back drastically on her professional activities. ‘Damn it, Camoens,’ she growled. ‘If you fuck up what I unfucked for you once, you better hope on I’m around to unfuck it for you twice.’ At which that gentle soul, beside himself with anxiety, burst into tears boiling with his love.
    And Aires, returning, had also encountered an altered wife. She came into his bedroom on the night of his release and said, ‘If you do not give up your shame and scandal then, Aires, I will kill you while you sleep.’ He bowed to her deeply in acknowledgment, the bow of a Restoration dandy, the right hand spiralling foppishly outwards, the right foot extended, its toe deliciously cocked, and she left. He did not give up his adventures; but became more circumspect, snatching afternoon hours in a rented Ernakulam apartment with a slow ceiling fan, powder-blue walls, unadorned and peeling, an attached bathroom with a pump-handle shower and a squatting toilet, and a large low charpoy bed whose puttees he had renewed, for hygiene, and for strength. Through the chick-blinds thin blades of daylight fell across his body and another’s, and the cries of the market rose up to him and mingled with his lover’s moans.
    In the evenings he played bridge at the Malabar Club, where his presence could be vouched for, or else stayed modestly at home. He bought padlocks for the bolts on his door and acquired a British bulldog which, to provoke Camoens, he named Jawaharlal. He had emerged from prison as opposed as ever to the Congress and its demands for independence, and now he became an ardent letter-writer, filling newspaper columns with his advocacy of the so-called Liberal alternative. ‘This misguided policy of ejection of our rulers,’ he thundered. ‘Suppose it succeeds; then what will become? Where in this India are the democratic institutions to replace the British Hand, which is, I can personally avow, benevolent even when it chastises us for our infantile misdeeds.’ When the Liberal editor of the Leader paper, Mr Chintamani, suggested that India had ‘better submit to the present unconstitutional government rather than to the more reactionary and furthermore unconstitutional government of the future’, Great-Uncle Aires wrote to say ‘Bravo!’ and when another Liberal, Sir P. S. Sivaswamy Iyer, argued that ‘in advocating the convention of a constituent assembly, Congress places too much faith in the wisdom of the multitude, and does too little justice to the sincerity and ability of men who have taken part in various Round Table Conferences. I very much doubt whether the constituent assembly would have done better,’ then Aires da Gama penned his congratulations: ‘I heartily concur! Common man in India has always bowed his knee to the counsels of his betters – of persons of education and breeding!’
    Belle confronted him on the jetty the next morning. Pale of face and red of eye, she was wrapped in shawls, but insisted on seeing Camoens off to work. As the brothers stepped into the family launch she waved the morning paper in Aires’s face. ‘In this house there is education and breeding,’ Belle said loudly, ‘and we have behaved like dogs.’
    ‘Not we,’ said Aires da Gama. ‘Our pig-ignorant poor relations, for whom I have suffered enough, dash it, and on whose behalf I accept no further blame. Oh, do stop barking now, Jawaharlal; down, boy, down.’
    Camoens reddened, but held his tongue, thinking of Mr Nehru in Alipore prison, of so many good men and women in far-off lock-ups. At night he sat with Belle and her cough, wiping her eyes and lips, putting cold compresses on her brow, and he would whisper to her about the dawning of a new world, Belle, a free country, Belle, above religion because secular, above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened, above hatred because loving, above vengeance because forgiving, above tribe because unifying, above language because many-tongued, above colour because