The Moors Last Sigh

perhaps only half-hypocritical – sob. ‘Such a beautiful baby from a so-fine household,’ she snuffled. ‘Rejoice humbly, Mr Abraham, that Lord God Almighty hath inflicted upon your son His tough-tough wound of love.’
    That was too much for Aurora, of course; my right hand, however revolting, was not a matter to be intruded upon by non-family members or gods. ‘Get that woman out of here, Abie,’ my mother roared from her bed, ‘before I inflictofy some tough-tough wounds myself.’
    My right hand: the fingers welded into an undifferentiated chunk, the thumb a stunted wart. (To this day, when I shake hands, I offer my unexceptional left, inverted, the thumb pointing towards the floor.) ‘Hello, boxer,’ Abraham greeted me miserably as he examined the ruined limb. ‘Hiya, champion. Take my word for it: you’re going to knock the whole world flat with a fist on you like that.’ Which fatherly effort to make the best of a bad business, spoken through a misery-twisted mouth, turned out to be nothing less than a prophecy, nothing more than the simple truth.
    Not to be outdone in bright-side-lookery, Aurora – who did not intend to allow her first-ever difficult pregnancy to end in anything less than triumph – put away her horror and disgust, locking it away in a dank basement of her soul until the day of our final quarrel, when she set it free, grown monstrous and slavering, and allowed the beast-within to have its way at last … for the moment, however, she chose to stress the miracle of my life, of my extraordinary more-than-full-grown size, of the astounding gestational speed which had given her such ‘gyp’ but which also proved that I must be a child in a million. ‘That damn fool Sister John was right about one thing,’ she said, taking me in her arms. ‘He is the most beautiful of our kids. And this, what is it? Nothing, na? Even a masterpiece can have a little smudge.’
    With these words she took an artist’s responsibility for her handiwork; my messed-up mitt, this lump as misshapen as modern art itself, became no more than a slip of the genius’s brush. Then, in a further act of generosity – or was it a mortification of the flesh, a self-inflicted punishment for her instinctual revulsion? – Aurora gave me an even greater gift. ‘Miss Jaya’s bottle was okay for the girls,’ she announced. ‘But as for my son, I will feed-o him myself.’ I wasn’t arguing; and clamped myself firmly to her breast.
    ‘See, how beautiful,’ Aurora determinedly purred. ‘Yes, drink your fill, my little peacock, my mór.’

    One day in early 1947 an etiolated young fellow, a certain Vasco Miranda of Loutulim in Goa, had arrived penniless at Aurora’s gates, identified himself as a painter, and demanded to be admitted to the presence of ‘the only Artist in this artless Dumpistan whose greatness approaches my own’. Lambajan Chandiwala took one look at the thin, weak line of the moustache above the small-time confidence man’s smile, the backwoods quiff-and-sideburns hairdo dripping with coconut oil, the cheap bush-shirt, trousers and sandals, and began to laugh. Vasco laughed right back, and soon it was getting pretty hilarious out there at the gates of dawn, the two men were a-wiping of their eyes and a-slapping of their thighs – only the parrot, Totah, remained unamused, and concentrated on clutching anxiously at the chowkidar’s heaving shoulders – until at length Lambajan spluttered, ‘Do you know whose house this is?’ and at once, to Totah’s discomfiture, unleashed a new shoulder-quake of giggles. ‘Yes,’ sobbed Vasco through tears of laughter, whereupon Lambajan’s mirth grew so great that the parrot flew off and settled morosely atop the gates themselves. ‘No,’ wept Lambajan, and began to beat Vasco violently with a long wooden crutch, ‘no, mister badmash, you don’t know whose house this is. Understand me? You have never known, you don’t know now, and tomorrow you won’t know even better.’
    So Vasco ran away down Malabar Hill to whatever hole he was living in at that time – some rickety Mazagaon chawl, I think – where, bruised but undaunted, he sat right down and wrote Aurora a letter, which achieved what he had failed to do in person: it sneaked past the chowkidar into the great lady’s hands. This letter was an early expression of the New Cheekiness – Nayi Badmashi – with which Vasco would afterwards make his name, though it was little more