The Moors Last Sigh

then how come the son …? I answer: Control, please, your horses.)
    ‘You are old enough to be her father.’ Abraham Zogoiby, born in the same year as deceased Mr Camoens, stood stiffly outside the blue-tiled Cochin synagogue – Tiles from Canton & No Two Are Identical , said the little sampler on the ante-room wall – and, smelling strongly of spices and something else, faced his mother’s wrath. Old Flory Zogoiby in a faded green calico frock sucked her gums and heard her son’s stumbling confession of forbidden love. With her walking-stick she drew a line in the dust. On one side, the synagogue, Flory and history; on the other, Abraham, his rich girl, the universe, the future – all things unclean. Closing her eyes, shutting out Abrahamic odour and stammerings, she summoned up the past, using memories to forestall the moment at which she would have to disown her only child, because it was unheard-of for a Cochin Jew to marry outside the community; yes, her memory and behind and beneath it the longer memory of the tribe … the White Jews of India, Sephardim from Palestine, arrived in numbers (ten thousand approx.) in Year 72 of the Christian Era, fleeing from Roman persecution. Settling in Cranganore, they hired themselves out as soldiers to local princes. Once upon a time a battle between Cochin’s ruler and his enemy the Zamorin of Calicut, the Lord of the Sea, had to be postponed because the Jewish soldiers would not fight on the Sabbath day.
    O prosperous community! Verily, it flourishéd. And, in the year 379 CE, King Bhaskara Ravi Varman I granted to Joseph Rabban the little kingdom of the village of Anjuvannam near Cranganore. The copper plates upon which the gift was inscribed ended up at the tiled synagogue, in Flory’s charge; because for many years, and in defiance of gender prejudices, she had held the honoured position of caretaker. They lay concealed in a chest under the altar, and she polished them from time to time with much enthusiasm and elbow-grease.
    ‘A Christy wasn’t bad enough, you had to pick the very worst of the bunch,’ Flory was muttering. But her gaze was still far away in the past, fixed upon Jewish cashews and areca-nuts and jack-fruit trees, upon the ancient waving fields of Jewish oilseed rape, the gathering of Jewish cardamoms, for had these not been the basis of the community’s prosperity? ‘Now these come-latelies steal our business,’ she mumbled. ‘And proud of being bastards and all. Fitz-Vasco-da-Gamas! No better than a bunch of Moors.’
    If Abraham had not been knocked sideways by love, if the thunderbolt had been less recent, he would in all probability have held his tongue out of filial affection and the knowledge that Flory’s prejudices could not be argued away. ‘I gave you a too-modern brought-up,’ she went on. ‘Christies and Moors, boy. Just hope on they never come for you.’
    But Abraham was in love, and hearing his beloved under attack he burst out with the observation that ‘in the first place if you look at things without cock-eyes you’d see that you also are a comelately Johnny’, meaning that Black Jews had arrived in India long before the White, fleeing Jerusalem from Nebuchadnezzar’s armies five hundred and eighty-seven years before the Christian era, and even if you didn’t care about them because they had intermarried with the locals and vanished long ago, there were, for example, the Jews who came from Babylon and Persia in 490–518 CE; and many centuries had passed since Jews started setting up shop in Cranganore and then in Cochin Town (a certain Joseph Azaar and his family moved there in 1344 as everybody knew), and even from Spain the Jews started arriving after their expulsion in 1492, including, in the first batch, the family of Solomon Castile …
    Flory Zogoiby screamed at the mention of the name; screamed and shook her head from side to side.
    ‘Solomon Solomon Castile Castile,’ thirty-six-year-old Abraham taunted his mother with childish vengefulness. ‘From whom descends at least this one infant of Castile. You want I should begat? All the way from Señor Leon Castile the swordsmith of Toledo who lost his head over some Spaini Princess Elephant-and-Castle, to my Daddyji who also must have been crazy, but the point is the Castiles got to Cochin twenty-two years before any Zogoiby, so quod erat demonstrandum  … And in the second place Jews with Arab names and hidden secrets ought to watch who they’re