The Moors Last Sigh

horn-of-plenty lines converged, Mother India with Belle’s face. Queen Isabella was the only mother-goddess here, and she was dead; at the heart of this first immense outpouring of Aurora’s art was the simple tragedy of her loss, the unassuaged pain of becoming a motherless child. The room was her act of mourning.
    Camoens, understanding, held her, and they wept.

    Yes, mother; once you were a daughter, too. You were given life, and you took it away … Mine is a tale of much mayhem, many sudden deaths, felos of other fellows as well as de se . Fire, water and disease must play their part alongside – no, around and within – the human beings.
    On Christmas Eve, 1938, seventeen Christmases after the young Camoens had brought seventeen-year-old Isabella Souza home to meet the family, their daughter, my mother Aurora da Gama, was woken by period pains and couldn’t get back to sleep. She went to the bathroom and attended to herself as old Josy had taught her to, with cotton-wool and gauze and a long pyjama-cord to hold everything in place … thus trussed, she coiled up on the white-tiled floor and fought against the pain. After a time it subsided. She decided to go out into the gardens and bathe her aching body in the shining, the insouciant miracle of the Milky Way. Star light, star bright  … we look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading us to our destiny, but it’s only our vanity. We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It’s true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you’ll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That’s not a star worth following; it’s just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars.
    More than a year had passed since the incident of the open windows, and the house on Cabral Island slumbered that night under a kind of truce. Aurora, too old for Father Christmas, put a light shawl around her night-dress, stepped around the sleeping figure of Josy-ayah on her mat by the door, and went barefoot down the hall.
    (Christmas, that Northern invention, that tale of snow and stockings, of merry fires and reindeer, Latin carols and O Tannenbaum , of evergreen trees and Sante Klaas with his little piccaninny ‘helpers’, is restored by tropical heat to something like its origins, for whatever else the Infant Jesus may or may not have been, he was a hot-weather babe; however poor his manger, it wasn’t cold; and if Wise Men came, following (unwisely, as I’ve indicated) yonder star, they came, let’s not forget it, from the East. Over in Fort Cochin, English families have put up Christmas trees with cotton wool on the branches; in St Francis’s Church – Anglican in those days, though no longer–the young Rev. Oliver D’Aeth has already held the annual carol service; and there are mince pies and glasses of milk waiting for Santa, and somehow there will be turkey on the table tomorrow, yes, and two kinds of stuffing, and even brussels sprouts. But there are many Christianities here in Cochin, Catholic and Syriac Orthodox and Nestorian, there are midnight masses where incense chokes the lungs, there are priests with thirteen crosses on their caps to symbolise Jesus and the Apostles, there are wars between the denominations, R.C. v. Syriac, and everyone agrees the Nestorians are no sort of Christians, and all these warring Christmases, too, are being prepared. In the house on Cabral Island it is the Pope who rules. There are no trees here; instead there is a crib. Joseph could be a carpenter from Ernakulam, and Mary a woman from the tea-fields, and the cattle are water-buffalo, and the skin of the Holy Family (gasp!) is rather dark. There are no presents. For Epifania da Gama, Christmas is a day for Jesus. Presents – and even this somewhat unloving family makes an exchange of gifts – are for Twelfth Night, the night of gold frankincense myrrh. Nobody is shinning down a chimney in this house …)
    Aurora reached the top of the great staircase and saw that the chapel doors were open; the chapel itself was illuminated, and the light emanating from the doorway made a little golden sun in the stairwell dark. Aurora crept forward, peered in. A small figure, head covered by a black lace mantilla, knelt at the altar.