The Moors Last Sigh

folk with the memory of childhood laughter, sweet love-songs, and days and nights in cool green forests, spent in walking and repose! In the dry season before the rains these blessed hilltops seem to float lightly on a shimmering magic haze; after the monsoon, when the air is clear, you can stand, for example, on Matheran’s Heart Point or One Tree Hill, and sometimes in that supernatural clarity you can see, if not for ever, then at least a little way into the future, maybe one or two days ahead.
    On the day of Abraham’s collapse, however, the hill-stations’ quaint slow ways were not what the doctor ordered. The family was booked in for the season at the Lord’s Central House in Matheran, which meant that after Abraham’s collapse they had to drive over twenty miles on a slow untended road, and then, at the road’s end, leave Hanuman in charge of the Buick and take the toy train up the hill from Neral through the One Kiss Tunnel and beyond, a crawling two-hour journey during which Aurora relaxed her usual ironclad rules and stuffed the girls with pieces of sugar-and-nut chikki-toffee to keep them quiet, while Miss Jaya wet handkerchiefs from a water surahi so that Aurora could spread them on Abraham’s weakened brow. ‘Takes longer to gettofy to this Lord’s House’, Aurora complained, ‘than to Paradise itself.’
    But at least the Lord’s Central House was real, it had an empirically provable basis in fact, whereas heavenly Paradise has never been something by which my family set much store … the narrow-gauge train puffed up the hill, pink curtains flapping at the first-class windows, and finally it stopped, and monkeys swung down from its roof and tried to steal the chikki from the Zogoiby girls’ startled hands. It was the end of the line; and that night, in a room in the Lord’s House newly heavy with odours of spice, and while lizards watched from the walls, Aurora Zogoiby on a noisy spring bed under a slow-moving ceiling fan caressed her husband’s body until his return to life was complete; and four and a half months later , on New Year’s Day, 1957, she gave birth to their fourth and final child.
    Ina, Minnie, Mynah, and at last Moor. That’s me: the end of the line. And something else. I’m something else as well: call it a wish come true. Call it a dead woman’s curse. I am the child the lack of whom Aurora Zogoiby lamented on the steps to the Lonavla caves. This is my secret, and after all these years all I can do is say it, straight out, and to hell with how it sounds.
    I am going through time faster than I should . Do you understand me? Somebody somewhere has been holding down the button marked ‘FF’, or, to be more exact, ‘x2’. Reader, listen carefully, take in every word, for what I write now is the simple and literal truth. I, Moraes Zogoiby, known as Moor, am – for my sins, for my many and many sins, for my fault, for my most grievous fault – a man living double-quick.
    And the mushroom seller? Aurora, inquiring into the matter the next morning, was informed by the hotel desk clerk that mushrooms had never to his knowledge been grown or sold in the region of the Lonavla caves. And the old woman – chicken entrails, kingdom come – was never seen again.
    ( I see the morning appearing; and fall silent, discreetly. )

10
    I ’ LL SAY IT AGAIN : from the moment of my conception, like a visitor from another dimension, another time-line, I have aged twice as rapidly as the old earth and everything and everyone thereupon. Four and a half months from conception to birth: how could my two-timing evolution have given my mother anything but the most difficult of pregnancies? As I see, in fancy’s vision, the accelerated swelling of her womb, it resembles nothing so much as a movie special effect, as if under the influence of some twice-pushed genetic button her biochemical pixels had gone loco and begun to morph her protesting body so violently that the speeded-up outward effects of my gestation actually became visible to the naked eye. Engendered on one hill, born on another, I attained mountainous proportions when I should still have been at the minor molehill stage … the point I am making is that, while there can be no disputing that I was conceived in the Lord’s Central House, Matheran, it is also unarguably the case that when Baby Gargantua Zogoiby drew his first, surprising breath at the élite private nursing home-cum-nunnery of the Sisters of Maria