The Moors Last Sigh

calling Moors.’
    Elderly men with rolled trouser-legs and women with greying buns emerged into the shady Jewish alley outside the Mattancherri synagogue and gave solemn witness to the quarrel. Above angry mother and retaliating son blue shutters flew open and there were heads at windows. In the adjoining cemetery Hebrew inscriptions waved on tombstones like half-mast flags at twilight. Fish and spices on the evening air. And Flory Zogoiby, at the mention of secrets of which she had never spoken, dissolved abruptly into stutters and jerks.
    ‘A curse on all Moors,’ she rallied. ‘Who destroyed the Cranganore synagogue? Moors, who else. Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello-fellows. A plague on their houses and spouses.’ In 1524, ten years after Zogoibys arrived from Spain, there had been a Muslim-Jewish war in these parts. It was an old quarrel to revive, and Flory did so in the hope of turning her son’s thoughts away from hidden matters. But oaths should not be lightly uttered, especially before witnesses. Flory’s curse flew into the air like a startled chicken and hovered there a long while, as if uncertain of its intended destination. Her grandson Moraes Zogoiby would not be born for eighteen years; at which time the chicken came home to roost.
    (And what did Muslims and Jews fight over in the cinquecento? – What else? The pepper trade.)
    ‘Jews and Moors were the ones who went to war,’ old Flory grunted, goaded by misery into speaking a sentence too many, ‘and now your Christian Fitz-Vascos have gone and pinched the market from us both.’
    ‘You’re a fine one to talk about bastards,’ cried Abraham Zogoiby who bore his mother’s name. ‘Fitz she says,’ he addressed the gathering crowd. ‘I’ll show her Fitz.’ Whereupon with furious intent he strode into the synagogue with his mother scrambling after him, bursting into dry and shrieky tears.

    About my grandmother Flory Zogoiby, Epifania da Gama’s opposite number, her equal in years although closer to me by a generation: a decade before the century’s turn Fearless Flory would haunt the boys’ school playground, teasing adolescent males with swishings of skirts and sing-song sneers, and with a twig would scratch challenges into the earth – step across this line . (Line-drawing comes down to me from both sides of the family.) She would taunt them with nonsensical, terrifying incantations, ‘making like a witch’:
Obeah, jadoo, fo, fum ,
chicken entrails, kingdom come .
Ju-ju, voodoo, fee, fi ,
piddle cocktails, time to die .
    When the boys came at her she attacked them with a ferocity that easily overcame their theoretical advantages of strength and size. Her gifts of war came down to her from some unknown ancestor; and though her adversaries grabbed her hair and called her jewess they never vanquished her. Sometimes she literally rubbed their noses in the dirt. On other occasions she stood back, scrawny arms folded in triumph across her chest, and allowed her stunned victims to back unsteadily away. ‘Next time, pick on someone your own size,’ Flory added insult to injury by inverting the meaning of the phrase: ‘Us pint-size jewinas are too hot for you to handle.’ Yes, she was rubbing it in, but even this attempt to make metaphors of her victories, to represent herself as the champion of the small, of the Minority, of girls , failed to make her popular. Fast Flory, Flory-the-Roary: she acquired a Reputation.
    The time came when nobody would cross the lines she went on drawing, with fearsome precision, across the gullies and open spaces of her childhood years. She grew moody and inward and sat on behind her dust-lines, besieged within her own fortifications. By her eighteenth birthday she had stopped fighting, having learned something about winning battles and losing wars.
    The point I’m leading up to is that Christians had in Flory’s view stolen more from her than ancestral spice fields. What they took was even then getting to be in short supply, and for a girl with a Reputation the supply was even shorter … in her twenty-fourth year Solomon Castile the synagogue caretaker had stepped across Miss Flory’s lines to ask for her hand in marriage. The act was generally thought to be one of great charity, or stupidity, or both. Even in those days the numbers of the community were decreasing. Maybe four thousand persons living in the Mattancherri Jewtown, and by the time you excluded family members and the very