The Moors Last Sigh

Gratiaplena on Altamount Road, Bombay, his physical development was already so advanced – a generous erection serving somewhat to impede his passage down the birth canal – that nobody in their right mind would have thought of calling him half-formed.
    Premature? Post-mature is much more like it. Four and a half months in the wet and slimy felt much too long to me. From the beginning – from before the beginning – I knew I had no time to waste. Passing from lost waters towards necessary air, jammed solid in Aurora’s lower passages by my soo-soo’s rather military decision to salute the moment by standing at attention, I decided to let people know about the urgent nature of my problem, and unleashed a mighty bovine groan. Aurora, hearing my first sound emerging from inside her body (and getting a sense, too, of the immense size of what was waiting to be born), was at once appalled and impressed; but not, naturally, lost for words. ‘After our Eeny-Meeny-Miney,’ she gasped at the frightened ecclesiastical midwife, who was looking as if she’d heard a hound from Hell, ‘I think, Sister, here comes Moo.’ From Moo to Moor, from first groan to last sigh: on such hooks hang my tales.
    How many of us feel, these days, that something that has passed too quickly is ending: a moment of life, a period of history, an idea of civilisation, a twist in the turning of the unconcerned world. A thousand ages in Thy sight , they sing in St Thomas’s Cathedral to their no-doubt-nonexistent god, are like an evening gone; so might I just point out, O my omnipotent reader, that I have been passing too quickly, too. A double-speed existence permits only half a life. Short as the watch that ends the night, Before the morning sun .
    No need for supernatural explanations; some cock-up in the DNA will do. Some premature-ageing disorder in the core programme, leading to the production of too many short-life cells. In Bombay, my old hovel’n’highrise home town, we think we’re on top of the modern age, we boast that we’re natural techno fast-trackers, but that’s only true in the high-rises of our minds. Down in the slums of our bodies, we’re still vulnerable to the most disorderly disorders, the scurviest of scurvies, the plaguiest of plagues. There may be pet pussies prowling around our squeaky-clean, sky-high penthouses, but they don’t cancel out the rat-infested corruption in the sewers of the blood.
    If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect. From Bombay nunnery to Benengeli folly, my life’s journey has taken just thirty-six calendar years. But what remains of the tender young giant of my youth? The mirrors of Benengeli reflect an exhausted gent with hair as white, as thin, as serpentine as his great-grandmother Epifania’s long-gone chevelure. His gaunt face, and in his elongated body no more than a memory of an old, slow grace of movement. The aquiline profile is now merely beaky, and the womanly full lips have thinned, like the dwindling corona of hair. An old brown leather greatcoat, worn over paint-spattered check shirt and shapeless corduroy trousers, flaps behind him like a broken wing. Chicken-necked and pigeon-chested, this bony, dusty old-timer still manages an admirable erectness of bearing (I could always walk with a pitcher of milk balanced comfortably on my head); but if you could see him, and had to guess his age, you’d say he was fit for rocking-chairs, soft food and rolled trousers, you’d put him out to pasture like an old horse, or – if by chance you were not in India – you might pack him off to a retirement home. Seventy-two years old, you’d say, with a deformed right hand like a club.

    ‘Nothing that grew-o’ed so fast could have grown right,’ Aurora thought (and later, when our troubles came, said aloud, right into my face). Filled with revulsion at the sight of my deformity, she tried in vain to console herself: ‘Lucky it’s only a hand.’ The midwife, Sister John, was bemoaning the tragedy on my mother’s behalf, because to her way of thinking (which was not so very different from my mother’s own) a physical abnormality was only one notch lower than mental illness on the scale of family shame. She swaddled the baby in white, concealing the good hand as well as the bad; and when my father came in, she offered him the astonishingly outsized bundle with a muffled – and