The Moors Last Sigh

cemetery. Abraham remained by her graveside for a long time after the funeral, and when Sara Cohen took his hand, he did not draw it away.
    A few days later a giant mushroom cloud ate the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and on hearing the news Moshe Cohen the chandler burst into hot, bitter tears.

    They have almost all gone now, the Jews of Cochin. Less than fifty of them remaining, and the young departed to Israel. It is the last generation; arrangements have been made for the synagogue to be taken over by the government of the State of Kerala, which will run it as a museum. The last bachelors and spinsters sun themselves toothlessly in the childless Mattancherri lanes. This, too, is an extinction to be mourned; not an extermination, such as occurred elsewhere, but the end, nevertheless, of a story that took two thousand years to tell.
    By the end of 1945, Aurora and Abraham had left Cochin and bought a sprawling bungalow set amid tamarind, plane and jack-fruit trees on the slopes of Malabar Hill, Bombay, with a steeply terraced garden looking down on Chowpatty Beach, the Back Bay and Marine Drive. ‘Cochin is finished, anyway,’ Abraham reasoned. ‘From a strictly business point of view the move makes complete sense.’ He left hand-picked men in charge of the operation down South, and would continue to make regular inspection trips over the years … but Aurora needed no reasoned arguments. On the day they moved in she went to the look-out point where the garden’s terracing ended in a vertiginous drop towards black rocks and foaming sea; and at the top of her voice she out-screamed the wheeling chils for joy.
    Abraham shyly waited some yards back, hands clasped before him, looking for all the world like the duty manager he once was. ‘I hope so that the new locale will prove beneficial to your creative process,’ he said with painful formality. Aurora came running towards him and leapt into his arms.
    ‘Creative process you’re after, is it?’ she demanded, looking at him as she had not looked for years. ‘Then come on, mister, let’s go indoors and create.’

II
MALABAR MASALA

9
    O NCE A YEAR, MY mother Aurora Zogoiby liked to dance higher than the gods. Once a year, the gods came to Chowpatty Beach to bathe in the filthy sea: fat-bellied idols by the thousand, papier-mâché effigies of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha or Ganpati Bappa, swarming towards the water astride papier-mâché rats – for Indian rats, as we know, carry gods as well as plagues. Some of these tusk’n’tail duos were small enough to be borne on human shoulders, or cradled in human arms; others were the size of small mansions, and were pulled along on great-wheeled wooden carts by hundreds of disciples. There were, in addition, many Dancing Ganeshas, and it was these wiggle-hipped Ganpatis, love-handled and plump of gut, against whom Aurora competed, setting her profane gyrations against the jolly jiving of the much-replicated god. Once a year, the skies were full of Color-by-DeLuxe clouds: pink and purple, magenta and vermilion, saffron and green, these powder-clouds, squirted from re-used insecticide guns, or floating down from some bursting balloon-cluster wafting across the sky, hung in the air above the deities ‘like aurora-not-borealis-but-bombayalis’, as the painter Vasco Miranda used to say. Also sky-high above crowds and gods, year after year – for forty-one years in all – fearless upon the precipitous ramparts of our Malabar Hill bungalow, which in a spirit of ironic mischief or perversity she had insisted on naming Elephanta , there twirled the almost-divine figure of our very own Aurora Bombayalis, plumed in a series of dazzle-hued mirrorwork outfits, outdoing in finery even the festival sky with its hanging gardens of powdered colour. Her white hair flying out around her in long loose exclamations (O prophetically premature white hair of my ancestors!), her exposed belly not old-bat-fat but fit-cat-flat, her bare feet stamping, her ankles a-jingle with silver jhunjhunna bell-bracelets, snapping her neck from side to side, speaking incomprehensible volumes with her hands, the great painter danced her defiance, she danced her contempt for the perversity of humankind, which led these huge crowds to risk death-by-trampling ‘just to dumpofy their dollies in the drink,’ as she liked incredulously, and with much raising of eyes to skies and wry twisting of the mouth, to jeer.
    ‘Human perversity is