The Moors Last Sigh

policeman flat on his back. At this point, mercifully, the Buick stalled.
    What puzzled me most when I heard the story as a boy, what continues to perplex, is how, having more or less cut a man in two, she managed to get out of there in one piece. Aurora herself varied her explanations with each telling, attributing her escape, variously, to the disorientation of those unhappy sailors; or to some residue of naval discipline, which prevented them from becoming a lynch mob; or to the innate chivalry and sense of hierarchy of Indian men, which kept them from harming a lady, especially a grand one. Or, again, it might have been on account of her deep and evident concern – no grand manner there! – for the injured man, whose leg had taken on an upsetting resemblance to her dangling wing-mirror; or the result of the speed and habit of command with which she had him scooped up and placed on the Buick’s back seat, where he was shielded from angry eyes by green-and-gold cloth while she pointed out to the assembled gathering that the injured man needed transport, and hers was the most readily available vehicle. The truth was that she had no idea why she was spared by that increasingly ugly crowd, but in her dark moments she perhaps came closest to the truth, admitting that she had been saved by fame; for her image was everywhere still, and with her beautiful young face and long white hair she wasn’t hard to recognise. ‘Tell your Congress friends they let us down,’ someone shouted, and she shouted back, ‘I will’; and then they let her go. (Some months later, pirouetting on the ramparts of her home, she kept her word, and let Jawaharlal Nehru have it straight. Soon after that, the Mountbattens arrived in India, and Nehru and Edwina fell in love. Is it too much to suppose that Aurora’s plain speaking in the matter of the great naval strike turned Panditji away from her and towards the Last Viceroy’s possibly less disputatious mame?)
    Abraham’s version – Abraham, who had promised to look after her always – was different. Long after she died he confided in me. ‘Back then I kept a top team secretly on her tail, and she led us a merry dance. I don’t say it was so hard keeping your fool mummy safe when she went off on her madcap ventures, but I had to stay on my toes. Wherever that Buick turned up, my boys were also there. How could I inform her? If she knew she would have chewed me out.’
    It is difficult for me, after all these years, to know what to believe. How could Abraham have known that Aurora was going to dash off as she did? – But maybe it is her version that is suspect – perhaps her departure was not so precipitate, after all. The old biographer’s problem: even when people are telling their own life stories, they are invariably improving on the facts, rewriting their tales, or just plain making them up. Aurora needed to seem independent; her version followed from that desire, just as Abraham’s derived from his need to make the world think – to make me think – her safety depended on his care. The truth of such stories lies in what they reveal about the protagonists’ hearts, rather than their deeds. In the case of the amputated sailor, however, the truth is simpler to establish: the poor fellow lost his leg.

    She brought him home and changed his life. She had diminished him, subtracting a leg and therefore his future in the navy; and now she sought fiercely to enlarge him again, providing him with a new uniform, a new job, a new leg, a new identity and a grumpy parrot to go with it all. She had ruined his life, but she saved him from the worst, gutter-dwelling, begging-bowl consequences of that ruination. As a result, he fell in love with her, what else; he became Lambajan Chandiwala as she desired, and the fabulous elephant-tales he told were his way of expressing his love, which was the impossible dog-devoted love of a slave for his queen, and which disgusted our sour and bony ayah and housekeeper Miss Jaya Hé, who became his bride and the bane of his life. ‘Baap-ré!’ she berated him. ‘Why not go on a salt march and don’t stop when you reach the sea?’
    Lambajan at Aurora’s gates – at the gates, as Vasco Miranda called them, of dawn – guarded his mistress from the coarse world outside, but he was also, in a way, protecting others against her. Nobody entered until he knew their business; but Lamba also made it his own business to give visitors the benefit of his