The Moors Last Sigh

words ‘Breach Candy Hospital’ conjure up, for me, the memory of a sort of house of correction, a benevolent torture chamber, a zone of infernal torments run by well-meaning demons who mortified me – who roasted me – who tikka-kababed and Bombay-ducked me – for my own good.) And in the end, after every effort, the slow inevitable shaking of the eminent stethoscoped head of some boss-devil, the upturned-palm gestures of helplessness, the murmurs about karma, kismet, Fate. As well as medical practitioners, I was taken to see Ayurvedic specialists, Tibia College professors, faith-healers, saints. Aurora was a thorough and determined woman, and was accordingly prepared – again, in my best interests! – to expose me to all manner of guru-fakery which she herself both despised and abhorred. ‘Just in case,’ I heard her say to Abraham more than once. ‘I swear, if one of these ju-ju guys can fix the poor boy’s clock, then I will convertofy in one tick flat.’
    Nothing worked. That was the time of the emergence of the boy-mahaguru Lord Khusro Khusrovani Bhagwan, who acquired a following of millions in spite of the persistent rumours that he was the wholly spurious creation of his mother, a certain Mrs Dubash. One day, when I was about five (and looked ten), Aurora Zogoiby swallowed her scruples – for my sake , naturally – and (for a high price) arranged a private audience with the magic child. We visited him aboard a luxury yacht anchored in Bombay harbour, and in his chooridar pajamas, gold skirt and turban he struck my parents as a frightened child obliged to live his whole life trapped in wedding-party fancy-dress; in spite of this, my mother gritted her teeth, explained my problems and asked for his help. The boy Khusro looked at me with grave, sad, intelligent eyes.
    ‘Embrace your fate,’ he said. ‘Rejoice in what gives you grief. That which you would flee, turn and run towards it with all your heart. Only by becoming your misfortune will you transcend it.’
    ‘Too much wisdom,’ exclaimed Mrs Dubash, who lay munching mangoes messily on a divan. ‘Wah-wah! Rubies, diamonds, pearls! Now, please,’ she added, concluding our audience, ‘account may kindly be settled. Cash rupees only, unless foreign currency is available, in which event fifteen per cent discount may be given for cash dollars or pounds sterling.’
    For a long time I remembered those days with bitterness, the useless doctors, the even more useless quacks. I resented my mother for the hoops she put me through, for being the hypocrite these genuflections to the guru industry seemed to reveal her to be. I don’t resent her any more; I have learned to see the love in what she did, learned to see that her humiliation at the hands of all the mango-sticky Mrs Dubashes we encountered was at least as great as mine. Also, I must admit, Lord Khusro taught me a lesson that I have often, in my life, been obliged to learn again. And on each of these occasions, the cost has been high, and no foreign-currency discount has been offered.

    By embracing the inescapable, I lost my fear of it. I’ll tell you a secret about fear: it’s an absolutist. With fear, it’s all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot’s fall, has more or less nothing to do with ‘courage’. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life. I stopped being afraid because, if my time on earth was limited, I didn’t have seconds to spare for funk. Lord Khusro’s injunction echoed Vasco Miranda’s motto, another version of which I found, years later, in a story by J. Conrad. I must live until I die .
    I inherited the family’s gift for sleep. All of us slept like babies when sadness or trouble loomed. (Not always, it’s true: the thirteen-year-old Aurora da Gama’s window-opening, ornament-tossing insomnia was an old, but important, exception to this rule.) So on days when I felt badly I would lie down and switch myself off, ‘close’ myself, as Vasco would put it, like a light; and hope to ‘open’ in a better frame of mind. This didn’t always work. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would awake and weep, I would cry out pitifully for love. The shakes, the sobs came from a place too deep