The Moors Last Sigh

divide-and-rule, is this not the most eccentric of slices to extract from all that life – a freak blond hair plucked from a jet-black (and horribly unravelling) plait?
    No, sahibzadas. Madams-O: no way. Majority, that mighty elephant, and her sidekick, Major-Minority, will not crush my tale beneath her feet. Are not my personages Indian, every one? Well, then: this too is an Indian yam. That’s one answer; but here’s another: everything in its place . Elephants are promised for later. Majority and Major-Minority will have their day, and much that has been beautiful will be tusked & trampled by their flap-eared, trumpeting herds. Until then, I continue to guzzle this last supper; to exhale, albeit wheezily, this aforementioned dernier soupir . To hell with high affairs of state! I have a love story to tell.

    In the perfumed half-light of C-50 Godown No. 1, Aurora da Gama grabbed Abraham Zogoiby by the chin and looked deep into his eyes … no, men, I can’t do this stuff. This is my mother and father I’m talking about, and even though Aurora the Great was the least bashful of women I guess on this matter I am in possession of her share of bash as well as my own. Did you ever see your father’s cock, your mother’s cunt? Yes or no, doesn’t matter, the point is these are mythical locations, surrounded by taboo, put off thy shoes for it is holy ground, as the Voice said on Mount Sinai, and if Abraham Zogoiby was playing the part of Moses then Aurora my mother sure as eggs was the Burning Bush. Handing down commandments, pillar of fire, I am that I am  … yes, indeed, she had made a study of the Old Testament god. Sometimes I think she practised partings of waters in the bath.
    ‘I couldn’t wait-o,’ that is how Aurora herself used to tell it. In her gold-and-orange drawing-room full of cigarette-smoke, with young beauties stretched out on sofas while men sat on Isfahani rugs and pressed their ankle-braceleted, mauve-nailed feet, and while her ageing husband leaned in a corner in a business suit, mouth twitching in an embarrassed smile, hands flapping helplessly until at last they settled around my young ears, Aurora drank champagne from an opalescent glass like an opening flower and was casually explicit about her own deflowering, laughing lightly at her youthful audacity. ‘By the chin, I swear. I just pulled at him and he followed, popped right up out of his chair like a cork from a bottle, and I led him on. My very own yahoody . My in-those-days beloved Jew.’
    In-those-days  … there will be more to say about the cruelty of that phrase, so easily tossed out with a little wave of the hand, a dismissive little bangle-jingle. But right now we are indeed in those days, we are on that very day , and so: by the chin she led him, and he followed; abandoning his post, and disapprovingly watched, I have no doubt, by the ledger-inscribing high trinity of clerks, Kalonjee, Mirchandalchini and Tejpattam, he pursued his chin, surrendering himself to his fate. Beauty is destiny of a sort, beauty speaks to beauty, it recognises and assents, it believes it can excuse everything, so that even though they knew no more about each other than the words Christian heiress and Jewish employee , they had already made the most important decisions of all. Throughout her life Aurora Zogoiby was quite clear about the reason why she led her duty manager into the murky depths of the godown, and why, motioning him to follow, she climbed a long and bouncy ladder to the highest level of the most remote stacks. Resisting all efforts at psychological analysis, she angrily rejected the theory that in the aftermath of too-many-deaths-in-the-family she had been vulnerable to the charms of an older man, that she had been first held, then captured, by Abraham’s look of wounded kindness: that it had been a simple case of innocence being drawn towards experience. ‘In the first place,’ she would argue, to cheers and applause, while Daddy Abraham earned my contempt by skulking shamefacedly away, ‘excuse me, but who drewofied whom towards where? Seems to me I was the puller, not the pulled. Seems to me that Abie was the know-nothing and I was one smart fifteen-year-old cookie. And in the second place, I always was a sucker for a heero, a loverboy , a hunk.’
    Way up there near the roof of Godown No. 1, Aurora da Gama at the age of fifteen lay back on pepper sacks, breathed in the hot spice-laden air, and waited for Abraham. He