The Moors Last Sigh

was exceptional all right, and had no desire to be. Learning from the Phantom and the Flash, from Green Arrow and Batman and Robin, I set about devising a secret identity of my very own. (As had my sisters before me; my poor, damaged sisters.)
    By the age of seven-and-a-half I had entered adolescence, developing face-fuzz, an adam’s apple, a deep bass voice and fully-fledged male sexual organs and appetites; at ten, I was a child trapped in the six-foot-six body of a twenty-year-old giant, and possessed, from these early moments of self-consciousness, by a terror of running out of time. Cursed with speed, I put on slowness the way the Lone Ranger wore a mask. Determined to decelerate my evolution by sheer force of personality, I became ever more languid of body, and my words learned how to stretch themselves out in long sensual yawns. For a time I affected the drawling-aristo speech-mannerisms of Billy Bunter’s Indian chum, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Dusky Nabob of Bhanipur: I was never merely thirsty in that period, but ‘the thirstfulness was terrific’. My sister Mynah the mimic cured me of what she called ‘being in a hurree’ by becoming my ridiculing echo, but even after I left the Dusky Nabob behind she continued to convulse the family with slow-motion, moon-walking impersonations of my half-paced mannerisms; but this ‘Slomo’ – her name for me – was only one of my secret identities, only the most visible of my layers of disguise.
    Southpaw, sinister, cuddy-wiftie, keggy-fistie, corrie-paw: what a vocabulary of denigration clusters around left-handedness! What an infinity of small humiliations await the non-dextrous round every corner! Where, pray, is one to find a left-handed trouser-fly, chequebook, corkscrew, or flatiron (yes, an iron; imagine how awkward for a lefty that the flex always emerges from the right)? A left-handed cricketer, being a valued member of any middle order, will have no trouble finding a bat to suit him; but in all the hockey-mad land of India there’s no such creature as a wrong-way hockey-stick. Of potato peelers and cameras I will not deign to speak … and if life is hard for ‘natural’ left-handers, how much harder it was for me – for it turned out that I was a right-handed entity, a dexter whose right hand just happened to be a wreck. It was as hard for me to learn to write with my left as it would be for any righty in the world. When I was ten, and looked twenty, my handwriting was no better than a toddler’s early scrawls. This, too, I overcame.
    What was hard to overcome was the feeling of being in that house of art, surrounded by makers of beauty, both resident and visiting, and knowing that in my life such making must remain a closed book; that where my mother (and Vasco too) went for their greatest joy, there I could not follow. What was harder still was the feeling of being ugly; malformed, wrong, the knowledge that life had dealt me a bad hand, and a freak of nature was obliging me to play it out too fast. What was hardest of all was the sense of being an embarrassment, a shame.
    All this, too, I concealed. The first lessons of my Paradise were educations in metamorphosis and disguise.
    When I was very young (though not so small), Vasco Miranda would creep into my bedroom while I slept and change the pictures on the walls. Certain windows would shut, others would open; mouse or duck or cat or rabbit would change position, would move from one wall, and one adventure, to the next. For a long time I believed that I did indeed inhabit a magic room, that the fantasy-creatures on the walls came to life after I fell asleep. Then Vasco gave me a different explanation.
    ‘You are changing the room,’ he whispered to me one night. ‘It is you. You do it in your sleep, with this third hand.’ He pointed in the general direction of my heart.
    ‘Whis third hand?’
    ‘Why, this one here, this invisible hand, with these invisible fingers on which are those rough-rough, those badly bitten nails … ’
    ‘Whese? Whoase?’
    ‘ … the hand you can only see clearly in your dreams.’
    No wonder I loved him. I would have loved him for the gift of the dream-hand alone; but as soon as I was old enough to understand he whispered an even greater secret into my nocturnal ear. He told me that as a result of a botched appendix operation many years ago there was a needle lost inside him. It gave him no trouble but one day it would reach his heart and he would