The Moors Last Sigh

nostalgic heart? – a crumple of cheap paper, which even the boy Moor could see was not in the least bit ancient. It was, of course, a map.
    ‘One great elephant, maybe the Great Elephant, hides up there still, baba. I have seen what I have seen! Who else do you think bit away my leg? And then in his grandness and his scorn he let me crawl bleeding down the jungly hill and into my little boat. What-what I saw! Jewels he guards, baba, a hoard greater than the khazana of the Nizam of Hyderabad himself.’
    Lambajan accommodated our piratical fantasy of him – for naturally my mother the great explainer had made sure he understood his nickname – and in doing so constructed a dream of his own, an Elephanta for Elephanta , in which, as the years passed, he appeared more and more deeply to believe. Without knowing it, he connected himself to the legends of the da. Gama-Zogoibys, in which hidden jewel-boxes were a prominent feature. And thus Malabar Coast masala found its yet-more-fabulous counterpart on Malabar Hill, as was perhaps inevitable, because no matter what pepper’n’spices goings-on there might be or have been in Cochin, this great cosmopolis of ours was and is the Central Junction of all such tamashas, and the hottest tales, the juiciest-bitchiest yarns, the most garish and lurid not-penny-but-paisa-dreadfuls, are the ones walking our streets. In Bombay you live crushed in this crazy crowd, you are deafened by its blaring horns of plenty, and – like the figures of family members in Aurora’s Cabral Island mural – your own story has to shove its way through the throngs. Which was fine by Aurora Zogoiby; never one for a quiet life, she sucked in the city’s hot stenches, lapped up its burning sauces, she gobbled its dishes up whole. Aurora came to think of herself as a corsair, as the city’s outlaw queen. ‘In this residence it’s the Jolly Roger we flyofy,’ she declared repeatedly, to her children’s embarrassment and ennui. She actually had one made up by her tailor and handed it to the chowkidar. ‘Come on quick, Mister Lambajan! Run-o it up the flagstaff and let’s see who-who salutes.’
    As for me, I did not salute Aurora’s skull-and-crossbones; was not, in those days, at all the piratical type. Besides, I knew how Lambajan had really lost his leg.

    The first point to note is that people’s limbs got detached more easily in those days. The banners of British domination hung over the country like strips of flypaper, and, in trying to unstick ourselves from those fatal flags, we flies – if I may use the term ‘we’ to refer to a time before my birth – would often leave legs or wings behind, preferring freedom to wholeness. Of course, now that the sticky paper is ancient history, we find ways of losing our limbs in the struggle against other equally lethal, equally antiquated, equally adhesive standards of our own devising. – Enough, enough; away with this soap-box! Unplug this loud-hailer, and be still, my wagging finger! – To continue: the second essential piece of info in the matter of Lambajan’s leg concerns my mother’s window-curtains; the fact, I mean to say, that there were gold-and-green curtains, kept permanently closed, on the rear windscreen and back windows of her American motor car …
    In February 1946, when Bombay, that super-epic motion picture of a city, was transformed overnight into a motionless tableau by the great naval and landlubber strikes, when ships did not sail, steel was not milled, textile looms neither warped nor woofed, and in the movie studios there was neither turnover nor cut – the twenty-one-year-old Aurora began to zoom around the paralysed town in her famous curtained Buick, directing her driver Hanuman to the heart of the action, or, rather, of all that grand inaction, being set down outside factory gates and dockyards, venturing alone into the slum-city of Dharavi, the rum-dens of Dhobi Talao and the neon fleshpots of Falkland Road, armed only with a folding wooden stool and a sketchbook. Opening them both up, she set about capturing history in charcoal. ‘Ignore-o me,’ she commanded the open-mouthed strikers whom she sketched at high speed as they picketed, whored and drank. ‘I-tho am here just-like-that; like a lizard on the wall; or call me a doodling bug.’
    ‘Crazy woman,’ Abraham Zogoiby marvelled many years later. ‘Your mother, my boy. Crazy as a monkey in a monkey-puzzle tree. God only knows what she thought.