The Moors Last Sigh

painful and twisted, because they were living out a lie, and so sometimes their behaviour came out twisted, too. Like Jaw-jaw-Jawaharlal, they made plenty of noise but didn’t draw much blood. Above all, I want to emphasise that they very quickly regretted their brief alliance with the Angel Allover-Death, and when the scandal was at its height, when mobs came within feet of destroying their warehouses, when there was talk of lynching the Jew and his child-whore, when the dwindling population of the Mattancherri Jewtown had for a few days to fear for their lives and the news from Germany didn’t sound as if it came from very far away, Aires and Carmen stood by the lovers: they closed ranks, defended family interests. And if Aires had not stood before the godown-threatening throng and shouted down its leaders – an act of immense personal courage – and if he and Carmen had not personally visited all the city’s religious and secular authorities and insisted that what had happened between Abraham and Aurora was a love-match, and that as her legal guardians they made no objection to it, then perhaps things would have spiralled out of control. As it was, however, the scandal fizzled out in a few short days. At the Masonic Lodge (Aires had recently become a Freemason), local worthies congratulated Mr da Gama on his sensitive handling of the affair. The sisters Aspinwall, returning too late from ‘Snooty Ooty’, missed all the fun.
    No victory is ever complete. The Bishop of Cochin refused to countenance the idea of Abraham’s conversion, and Moshe Cohen the leader of the Cochin Jews declared that under no circumstances could any Jewish marriage be performed. This is why – I now reveal for the first time – my parents were so keen to speak of the event in the Corbusier chalet as their wedding night. When they went to Bombay, they would call themselves Mr and Mrs, and Aurora took the name Zogoiby and made it famous; but, ladies and gents, there were no wedding bells.
    I salute their unmarried defiance; and note that Fate so arranged matters that neither of them – irreligious as they were – needed to break confessional links with the past, after all. I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was – what’s the word these days? – atomised . Yessir: a real Bombay mix.
    Bastard: I like the sound of the word. Baas , a smell, a stinky-poo. Turd , no translation required. Ergo, Bastard, a smelly shit; like, for example, me.

    Two weeks after the end of the scandal he had unleashed against my future parents, Oliver D’Aeth was visited by a particularly nasty anopheles mosquito, which crawled, while he slept, through a hole in his mosquito-net. Soon after this visit by the mosquito of poetic justice, he contracted the malaria of just desserts, and in spite of being nursed night and day by the Widow Elphinstone, who mopped his brow with the cold compresses of dashed hopes, he sweated mightily, and died.
    Man, but I’m in a compassionate sort of mood today. What do you know? I feel sorry for that poor bugger, too.

8
    T HE THIRD, AND MOST shocking, of our family scandals never became public knowledge, but now that my father Abraham Zogoiby has given up the ghost at ninety years of age I no longer feel any compunction about letting his skeletons out of the cupboard …  it’s better to win was his unchanging motto, and from the moment he entered Aurora’s life she understood that he meant what he said; because no sooner had the hullabaloo about their love affair died down than, with a chug of smoke from its funnels and a loud whom whom whom from its horn, the cargo ship Marco Polo set off for the London Docks.
    That evening Abraham returned to Cabral Island after a whole day’s absence, and when he went so far as to pat the bulldog Jawaharlal on the head it was plain that he was bursting with delight. Aurora, at her most imperious, demanded to know where he’d been. In reply he pointed at the departing boat and made, for the first of many times in their life together, the sign that meant don’t ask: he drew an imaginary needle and thread through his lips, as if to sew them shut. ‘I told you’, he said, ‘that I would take care of the unimportant things: but to do it, sometimes I must go quietly to Thread-Needle Street.’
    At that time the newspapers, the radio, the gossip in the streets spoke of