The Moors Last Sigh

By that time, however, although she was still my mother, I was no longer her son.

    At the gate to Elephanta stood a man with a wooden leg, propped against a crutch. If I close my eyes it is still easy to conjure him up: that simple Peter at the doors of an earthly Paradise, who became my personal cut-price Virgil, leading me down to Hell – to the great city of Hell, Pandaemonium, that dark-side, through-the-looking-glass evil twin of my own and golden city: not Proper, but Improper Bombay. Beloved monopod guardian! The parents in their lingo-garbling way called him Lambajan Chandiwala. (It seems they had become infected by Aires da Gama’s habit of nicknaming the world.) In those days many more people would have understood the inter-lingual joke: lamba, long; jan, sounds like John, chandi, silver. Long John Silverfellow, terrifyingly hairy-faced but literally and metaphorically as toothless as the day he was born, grinding paans between his betel- or blood-red gums. ‘Our private pirate,’ Aurora called him, and yes, you guessed it, there was normally a green clipped-winged Totah squawking obscenities on his shoulder. My mother, a perfectionist in all things, arranged for the bird; would settle for nothing less.
    ‘So what point in a pirate if no parrot?’ she’d inquire, arching her eyebrows and twisting her right hand as if it held an invisible doorknob; adding, lightly, and scandalously (for it was not done to make lewd jokes about the Mahatma): ‘Might as well have had the little man without the loincloth.’ She tried hard to teach the parrot pirate-speak, but it was a stubborn old Bombay bird. ‘Pieces of eight! Me hearties!’ my mother shrieked, but her pupil maintained a mutinous silence. However, after years of such persecution Totah gave in and snapped, bad-temperedly: ‘Peesay – saféd – hathi!’ This remarkable utterance, translating approximately as mashed white elephants , became the family’s oath of choice. I was not present at the occasion of Aurora Zogoiby’s last dance, but many who were later testified that the parrot’s magnificent curse trailed after her, diminuendo , as she plummeted to her doom: ‘Ohhh …  Mashed White Elephants,’ my mother howled before hitting the rocks. Next to her body, borne towards her on the title, was a broken effigy of Dancing Ganesha. But that was not what she had meant at all.
    Totah’s utterance had a profound effect upon Lambajan Chandiwala also, for he – like so many of us – was a man with elephants on the brain; after the parrot spoke up, Lamba recognised the presence upon his shoulder of a kindred spirit, and opened up his heart thereafter to that intermittently oracular, but more often taciturn and (if the truth be told) irascible and fucking awful bird.
    Of what isles of treasure did our parroted pirate dream? Chiefly and most often he spoke of the real Elephanta. To the Zogoiby children, who were being educated beyond the point at which it was possible to see visions, Elephanta Island was nothing, a hilly lump in the Harbour. Before Independence – before Ina, Minnie and Mynah – people could go out there if they got hold of a boat and were willing to brave the possibility of snakes &c.; by the time I arrived, however, the island had long been tamed and there were regular motor-launch excursions from the Gateway of India. My three big sisters were bored by the place. So for my child-self as it squatted beside Lambajan in the afternoon heat Elephanta was anything but a fantasy island; but for Lambajan, to hear him tell it, it was the land of milk and honey itself.
    ‘Once in that place there were elephant kings, baba,’ he confided. ‘Why do you think-so god Ganesha is so popular in Bombay City? It is because in the days before men there were elephants sitting on thrones and arguing philosophy, and it was the monkeys who were their servants. It is said that when men first came to Elephanta Island in the days after the elephants’ fall they found statues of mammoths higher than the Qutb Minar in Delhi, and they were so afraid that they smashed up the whole lot. Yes, men wiped away the memory of the great elephants but still not all of us have forgotten. Up there in Elephanta in the hills is the place where they buried their dead. No? Head is shaking? See, he does not believe us, Totah. Okay, baba. Forehead is frowning? Then look at this!’
    And here to much parroty noising he produced – what else, what else, O my