The Moors Last Sigh

behind. How can this little pocket mousey be anything but Ina-minus?’ Within a week, she had decided that Baby Inamorata, the five-pound mouse, bore a close resemblance to a famous cartoon rodent – ‘all big ears, wide eyes and polka dots’ – and my middle sister was always Minnie after that. When Aurora announced, eighteen months later, that her newborn third daughter would be Philomina, Abraham tore his hair. ‘Now comes this Minnie-’meena mix-up,’ he groaned. ‘And another -ina , too.’ Philomina, listening in on this dispute, began to cry, a fat tuneless roar of a noise that convinced everyone except her mother of the comical inappropriateness of naming her after the nightingale. When the child was three months old, however, Miss Jay a Hé the ayah heard a series of alarming caws and piercing trills emanating from the nursery and rushed in to find the baby lying contentedly in her cot with bird-song pouring from her lips. Ina and Minnie stared at their sister through the bars of the cot with expressions of terror and awe. Aurora was summoned and, with an unfazed casualness that instantly normalised the miracle, nodded brusquely and gave judgment: ‘So if she can mimic like this she is not a bulbul but a mynah,’ and from then on it was Ina, Minnie, Mynah, except that at Walsingham House School on Nepean Sea Road they became Eeny Meeny Miney, three quarters of an unfinished line followed by a hollow beat, a silent space where a fourth word should be. Three sisters waiting – and they had a long wait of it, because between Mynah and me there was an eight-year gap – to catch a brother by his toe.
    The male child for which old, cursing Flory Zogoiby had intrigued in vain continued to prove elusive, and it must be recorded to the honour of my father’s memory that he always professed himself satisfied with his daughters. As the girls grew, he proved himself the most doting of fathers; until one day – it was in 1956, during the long school holidays after the rains – when the family had gone for an outing to see the two-thousand-year-old Buddhist cave-temples at Lonavla, he clutched gasping at his heart half-way up the steep stairway cut into the hillside that led to the dark mouth of the biggest cave, and as the breath rattled in his throat and his eyes blurred he reached uselessly out towards the three girls, then aged nine, eight and almost-seven, who failed to notice his distress and scampered, giggling, up and away from him with all the insouciant speed and immortality of the young.
    Aurora caught him before he fell. An old mushroom-selling crone had appeared beside them and helped Aurora sit Abraham down with his back against the rock, his straw hat falling forward over his brow and cold sweat pouring down his neck.
    ‘Don’t croak-o, damn it,’ Aurora shouted, cupping his face in her hands. ‘Breathe! You are not allowed to die.’ And Abraham, obeying her as always, survived. The breathing eased, the eyes cleared, and he rested for long minutes with bowed head. The girls came running goggle-eyed down the stairs with their fingers jammed into their mouths.
    ‘You see the problems of being an old father,’ fifty-three-year-old Abraham muttered to Aurora before their daughters came into earshot. ‘See how fast they are growing, and how fast I am cracking up, too. If I had my wish all this growing – up and old, both – would stop for ever right now.’
    Aurora made herself speak lightly as the worried children arrived. ‘You-tho will be around for ever,’ she told Abraham. ‘I’ve got no worries about you . And as for these savage creatures, they can’t growofy fast enough for me. God! How long this childhood business draggoes on! Why couldn’t I have kids–why not even one child – who grew up really fast.’
    A voice behind her said a few words, almost inaudibly. Obeah, jadoo, fo, fum . Aurora whirled around. ‘Who said that?’
    There were only the children. Other visitors, some of them carried in sedan chairs (Abraham had spurned this soft option), were making their way to and from the caves, but they were all too far away, above and below.
    ‘Where’s that woman?’ Aurora asked her children. ‘The mushroom woman who helped me. Where has she disappeared?’
    ‘We didn’t see anybody,’ Ina answered. ‘It was just the two of you.’

    Mahabaleshwar, Lonavla, Khandala, Matheran … O cool beloved hill-stations I will never see again, whose names echo for Bombay