The Moors Last Sigh

1 at Ernakulam dock, and stormed into that cavernous storehouse; where she momentarily stalled, unnerved by the cool serenity of its light-shafted darkness, and by its blasphemous atmosphere of a gunny-sack cathedral, in which the scents of patchouli oil and cloves, of turmeric and fenugreek, of cumin and cardamom hung like the memory of music, while the narrow passages vanishing into the gloom between the high stacks of export-ready produce could have been roads to hell and back, or even to salvation.
    (Great family trees from little ’corns: it is appropriate, is it not, that my personal story, the story of the creation of Moraes Zogoiby, should have its origins in a delayed pepper shipment?)
    There were clergy in this temple too: shipping clerks bent over clipboards who went worrying and scurrying between the coolies loading their carts and the fearsomely emaciated trinity of comptrollers – Mr Elaichipillai Kalonjee, Mr V. S. Mirchandalchini and Mr Karipattam Tejpattam – perching like an inquisition on high stools in pools of ominous lamplight and scratching with feathered nibs in gigantic ledgers which tilted towards them on desks with long, stork-stilty legs. Below these grand personages, at an everyday sort of desk with its own little lamp, sat the godown’s duty manager, and it was upon him that Aurora descended, upon recovering her composure, to demand an explanation of the pepper shipment’s delay.
    ‘But what is Uncle thinking?’ she cried, unreasonably, for how could so lowly a worm know the mind of the great Mr Aires himself? ‘He wants family fortunes to drownofy or what?’
    The sight at close quarters of the most beautiful of the da Gamas and the sole inheritrix of the family crores – it was common knowledge that while Mr Aires and Mrs Carmen were the incharges for the time being, the late Mr Camoens had left them no more than an allowance, albeit a generous one – struck the duty manager like a spear in the heart, rendering him temporarily dumb. The young heiress leaned closer towards him, grabbed his chin between her thumb and forefinger, transfixed him with her fiercest glare, and fell head over heels in love. By the time the man had conquered his lightning-struck shyness and stammered out the news of the declaration of war between England and Germany, and of the skipper of the Marco Polo’s refusal to sail for England – ‘Possibility of attacks on merchant fleet, see’ – Aurora had realised, with some anger at the treachery of her emotions, that on account of the ridiculous and inappropriate advent of passion she would have to defy class and convention by marrying this inarticulately handsome family employee at once. ‘It’s like marrying the dratted driver,’ she scolded herself in blissful misery, and for a moment was so preoccupied by the sweet horror of her condition that she did not take in the name painted on the little block of wood on his desk.
    ‘My God,’ she burst out when at last the white capitals insisted on being seen, ‘it isn’t disgraceful enough that you haven’t got a bean in your pocket or a tongue in your head, you had to be a Jew as well.’ And then, aside: ‘Face facts, Aurora. Thinkofy. You’ve fallen for a bloody godown Moses.’
    Pedantic white capitals corrected her (the object of her affections, thunderstruck, moon-struck, dry of mouth, thumping of heart, incipiently fiery of loin, was unable to do so, having been deprived anew of the power of speech by the burgeoning of feelings not usually encouraged in members of staff): Duty Manager Zogoiby’s given name was not Moses but Abraham. If it is true that our names contain our fates, then seven capital letters confirmed that he was not to be a vanquisher of pharaohs, receiver of commandments or divider of waters; he would lead no people towards a promised land. Rather, he would offer up his son as a living sacrifice on the altar of a terrible love.
    And ‘Zogoiby’?

    ‘Unlucky.’ In Arabic, at least according to Cohen the chandler and Abraham’s maternal family’s lore. Not that anyone had even the most rudimentary knowledge of that faraway language. The very idea was alarming. ‘Just look at their writing,’ Abraham’s mother Flory once remarked. ‘Even that is so violent, like knife-slashes and stab-wounds. Still and all: we also have come down from martial Jews. Maybe that’s why we kept on this wrong-tongue Andalusian name.’
    (You ask: But if the name was his mother’s,