The Moors Last Sigh

greater than human heroism’ – jingle- jangle! – ‘or cowardice’ – th-th- thump ! – ‘or art,’ my dancing mother declaimed. ‘For there are limits to these things, there are points beyond which we will not go in their name; but to perversity there is no limit set, no frontier that anyone has found. Whatever today’s excess, tomorrow’s will exceed-o it.’
    As if to prove her belief in the polymorphous power of the perverse, dancing Aurora became, over the years, a star attraction of the event she despised, a part of what she had been dancing against. The crowds of the devout – wrongly but incorrigibly – saw their own devotion mirrored in her swirling (and faithless) skirts; they assumed she, too, was paying homage to the god. Ganpati Bappa morya , they chanted, jigging, amid the blaring of cheap trumpets and giant conches and the hammer-blows of drug-speedy drummers with egg-white eyes and mouths stuffed with the appreciative banknotes of the faithful, and the more scornfully the legendary lady danced on her high parapet, the further above it all she seemed to herself to be, the more eagerly the crowds sucked her down towards them, seeing her not as a rebel but as a temple dancer: not the scourge, but rather the groupie, of the gods.
    (Abraham Zogoiby, as we shall see, had other uses for temple dancers.)
    Once, in a family quarrel, I reminded her angrily of the many newspaper reports of her assimilation by the festival. By that time Ganesha Chaturthi had become the occasion for fist-clenched, saffron-headbanded young thugs to put on a show of Hindu-fundamentalist triumphalism, egged on by bellowing ‘Mumbai’s Axis’ party politicos and demagogues such as Raman Fielding, a.k.a. Mainduck (‘Frog’). ‘You’re not just a tourist sight now,’ I gibed. ‘You’re an advert for the Beautification Programme.’ This attractively-named MA policy involved, to put it simply, the elimination of the poor from the city’s streets; but Aurora Zogoiby’s armour-plating was too strong to be pierced by so crude a thrust.
    ‘You think I can be squashed by gutter pressure?’ she howled, dismissively. ‘You think I can be dirtified by your black tongue? What is this Mumbo’s Jumbos fundo foolery to me? I-tho am up against a greater opponent: Shiva Nataraja himself, yes, and his big-nosed holy-poly disco-baby too – for years I have been dancing them off the stage. Watch on, blackfellow. Maybe even you will learn how to whirl-up a whirlwind, how to hurry-up a hurricane – yes! How to dance up a storm.’ Thunder, right on cue, rolled overhead. Fat rain would soon start tumbling from the sky.
    Forty-one years of dancing on the day of Ganpati: she danced without a care for the danger of it, without a downward glance towards the barnacled, patient boulders gnashing below her like black teeth. The very first time she emerged from Elephanta in full regalia and began her cliff-edged pirouettes, Jawaharlal Nehru himself begged her to desist. This was not long after the anti-British strike by the navy in Bombay harbour, and the supporting shutdown in the city, the hartal , had ended at Gandhiji and Vallabhbhai Patel’s joint request, and Aurora did not fail to get in her little dig. ‘Panditji, Congress-tho is always chickening out in the face of radical acts. No soft options will be takeofied round here.’ When he continued to plead with her she set him a forfeit, saying she would only descend if he recited from memory the whole of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’; which, to general admiration, he did. As he helped her down from her dizzy balustrade, he said, ‘The strike was a complex matter.’
    ‘I know what I think about the strike,’ she retorted. ‘Tell me about the poem.’ At which Mr Nehru flushed heavily and swallowed hard.
    ‘It is a sad poem,’ he said after a moment, ‘because the oysters are so young; a poem, one could say, about the eating of children.’
    ‘We all eat children,’ my mother rejoined. This was about ten years before I was born. ‘If not other people’s, then our own.’
    She had four of us. Ina, Minnie, Mynah, Moor; a four-course meal with magic properties, because no matter how often and how heartily she tucked in, the food never seemed to run out.
    For four decades, she ate her fill. Then, dancing her Ganpati dance for the forty-second time at the age of sixty-three, she fell. A thin, salivating title washed over her body, as the black jaws went to work.