The Moors Last Sigh

term, Aires da Gama’s long-time lover, the man known to us as Prince Henry the Navigator, had fallen seriously ill. He was found to be suffering from a particularly pernicious strain of syphilis, and it soon became clear that Aires, too, had been infected. Syphilitic eruptions on his face and body made it impossible for him to leave home; he became gaunt of body and hollow of eye and looked two decades older than his forty-odd years. His wife Carmen, who had long ago threatened to kill him for his infidelities, came instead to sit beside his bedside. ‘Look what happened to you, my Irish-man,’ she said. ‘You’re going to die on me or what?’ He turned his head on the pillow and saw nothing but compassion in her eyes. ‘We better get you well,’ she said, ‘or who am I going to dance with the rest of my life? You,’ and here she made the briefest of pauses, and her colour heightened dramatically, ‘and your Prince Henry, too.’
    Prince Henry the Navigator was given a room in the house on Cabral Island, and in the months that followed Carmen, with an inexhaustible determination, supervised the two men’s treatment by the finest and most discreet – because most highly paid – specialists in town. Both patients slowly recovered; and the day came when Aires, sitting out in the garden in a silk dressing-gown with Jawaharlal the bulldog and drinking a fresh lime-water, was visited by his wife, who suggested, quietly, that there was no need for Prince Henry to move out. ‘Too many wars in this house and outside it,’ she told him. ‘Let us make at least this one three-cornered peace.’
    In the middle of 1945, Aurora Zogoiby reached adulthood. She spent her twenty-first birthday in Bombay, without Abraham, at a party given for her by Kekoo Mody and attended by most of the city’s artistic and political luminaries. At that time the British had released the Congress prisoners, because new negotiations were in the air; Nehru himself had been freed, and sent Aurora a long letter from a house called Armsdell in Simla, apologising for his absence from her celebrations. ‘My voice is very hoarse,’ he wrote. ‘I can’t make out why I attract these crowds. Very gratifying, no doubt,but also very trying and often irritating. Here in Simla I have had to go out to the balcony and verandah frequently to give darshan . I doubt if I shall ever be able to go out for a walk because of crowds following, except at dead of night … You should be grateful that I have spared you this experience by staying away.’ As a birthday present, he sent her Hogben’s Science for the Citizen and Mathematics for the Million , ‘to leaven your artistic spirit with a little of the other side of the mind’.
    She immediately gave the books to Kekoo Mody, with a little grimace. ‘Jawahar is keen on all this boffin-shoffin. But I am a single-minded girl.’

    As for Flory Zogoiby: she was still alive, but had grown a little strange of late. Then, one day near the end of July, she was found crawling around the Mattancherri synagogue floor on her hands and knees, claiming that she could see the future in the blue Chinese tiles, and prophesying that very soon a country not far from China would be eaten up by giant, cannibal mushrooms. Old Moshe Cohen had the sad duty of relieving her of her duties. His daughter Sara–still a spinster–had heard of a church near the sea in Travancore where mentally troubled people of all religions had started going, because it was thought to have the power of curing madness; she told Moshe she wanted to take Flory there, and the chandler agreed to pay all the expenses of the trip.
    Flory spent her first day sitting in the dust of the compound outside the magic church, drawing lines in the dirt with a twig, and talking volubly to the invisible, because non-existent, grandson by her side. On the second day of their stay, Sara left Flory alone for an hour while she walked along the beach and watched the fishermen in their longboats come and go. When she returned there was pandemonium in the church compound. One of the madmen assembled there had committed fiery suicide by pouring petrol over himself at the foot of the life-sized figure of Christ crucified. When he struck the fatal match the whoosh of flame had licked murderously at the hem of an old lady’s floral-printed skirt, and she, too, had been engulfed. It was my grandmother. Sara brought the body home, and it was laid to rest in the Jewtown