The Moors Last Sigh

metaphysics, its chlorophyllosophy. My family tree says all I need to hear.

    I have been living in a folly: Vasco Miranda’s towered fortress in Benengeli village, which looks down from a brown hill to a plain dreaming, in glistening mirages, of being a medi-terranean sea. I, too, have been dreaming, and through a narrow slit-window of my habitation I have seen not Spain’s, but India’s South; seeking, in spite of distances in space and time, to re-enter that Dark Age between Belle’s death and my father’s arrival on the scene. Here, filtering through this slender portal, this narrow crack in time, was Epifania Menezes da Gama, kneeling, at prayer, her chapel like a golden pool in the dark of the great stairwell. I blinked, and there came a memory of Belle. One day soon after his release from jail Camoens arrived at breakfast in simple khaddar clothes; Aires, a dandy once again, laughed into his kedgeree. After breakfast Belle took Camoens aside. ‘Darling, get out of fancy-dress,’ she said. ‘Our national effort is to run a good business and look after our workers, not to dress like errand boys.’ But this time Camoens was unshakable. Like her, he was for Nehru, not Gandhi – for business and technology and progress and modernity, for the city, and against all that sentimental clap-trap of spinning your own cotton and travelling third-class on the train. But wearing homespun pleased him. To change your masters, change your clothes. ‘Okay,Bapuji,’ she teased him. ‘But don’t think you’ll get me out of trousers, unless into a sexy dancing dress.’
    I watched Epifania praying and gave thanks that somehow, by some great fluke that seemed at the time the most ordinary thing in the world, my parents had been cured of religion. (Where’s their medicine, their priest-poison-beating anti-venene? Bottle it, for pity’s sake, and send it round the world!) I looked at Camoens in his khaddar jibba and remembered that he once went, without Belle, all the way across the mountains to the small town of Malgudi on the river Sarayu, just because Mahatma Gandhi was to speak there: this, in spite of being a Nehru man. He wrote about it in his journal:
    In that huge gathering sitting on the sands of Sarayu I was a tiny speck. There were a lot of volunteers clad in white khaddar moving around the dais. The chromium stand of the microphone gleamed in the sun. Police stood about here and there. Busybodies were going round asking people to remain calm and silent. People obeyed them … the river flowed, the leaves of the huge banyan and peepul trees on the banks rustled; the waiting crowd kept up a steady babble, constantly punctuated by the pop of soda-water bottles; longitudinal cucumber slices, crescent-shaped, and brushed up with the peel of a lime dipped in salt, were disappearing from the wooden tray of a vendor who was announcing in a subdued tone (as a concession to the coming of a great man), ‘Cucumber for thirst, the best for thirst.’ He had wound a green Turkish towel around his head as a protection from the sun .
    Then Gandhi came and made everyone clap hands in rhythm over their heads and chant his favourite dhun:
Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram
Patitha pavana Sita Ram
Ishwara Allah tera nam
Sabko Sanmati dé Bhagwan .
    And there was Jai Krishna, Hare Krishna, Jai Govind, Hare Govind , there was Samb Sadashiv Samb Sadashiv Samb Sadashiv Samb Shiva Har Har Har Har . ‘After all that,’ Camoens told Belle on his return, ‘I heard nothing. I had seen India’s beauty in that crowd with its soda-water and cucumber but with that God stuff I got scared. In the city we are for secular India but the village is for Ram. And they say Ishwar and Allah is your name but they don’t mean it, they mean only Ram himself, king of Raghu clan, purifier of sinners along with Sita. In the end I am afraid the villagers will march on the cities and people like us will have to lock our doors and there will come a Battering Ram.’

5
    A FEW WEEKS AFTER his wife’s death, mysterious scratches began to appear on Camoens da Gama’s body during his sleep. First there was one on his neck, round at the back where it had to be pointed out to him by his daughter of all people, then three long raking lines on his right buttock and after that one on his cheek right down the edge of his goatee. At the same time Belle started coming to him in his dreams, naked and demanding, so that he would wake up weeping, because even as he