The Moors Last Sigh

within to be identifiable. In time I accepted these nocturnal tears, too, as the penalty I had to pay for being exceptional; though, as I have said, I had no desire for exceptionality – I wanted to be Clark Kent, not any kind of Superman. In our fine mansion I would happily have lived out my days as a wealthy socialite like Bruce Wayne, with or without benefit of a ‘ward’. But no matter how hard I wished, my secret, essential bat-nature could not be denied.

    Permit me to clarify a point about Vasco Miranda: from the very start, there were frightening signs that not all the bats in his belfry were harmless. We who loved him would gloss over the times when an aggressive fury would pour out of him, when he seemed to crackle with such a current of dark, negative electricity that we feared to touch him lest we stuck to him and burned up. He went on dreadful benders and, like Aires (and Belle) da Gama in another time and place, would turn up unconscious in some Kamathipura gutter or wandering dazed around the Sassoon fish dock, drunk, drugged, bruised, bleeding, robbed, and giving off a terrible fishy stench, which could not be washed off him for days. When he became successful, the darling of the international moneyed establishment, it took a lot of hush-money to keep these episodes out of the newspapers, especially because there were indications that many of the partners he found on these bisexual orphic sprees were afterwards less than happy about their experiences. There was a Hell in Vasco, born of whatever devil-deal he had done to shed his past and be born again through us, and at times he seemed capable of bursting into flames. ‘I am the Grand Old Duke of York,’ he would say when he was better. ‘When I am up I am up, and when I am down I am down. Also, by the way, I have had ten thousand men; and ten thousand women, too.’
    On the night of India’s independence, the red mist came over him in a rush. The contradictions of that high moment tore him apart. That celebration of freedom whose engulfing emotions he could not avoid even though, as a Goan, he was technically not involved, and which, to his horror, was taking place while great blood-rivers were still flowing in the Punjab, destroyed the fragile equilibrium at the heart of his invented self, and set the madman free. That was the way my mother told it, anyhow, and no doubt that version contained some of the truth, but I know that there was also the matter of his love for her, the love he could not openly declare, which filled him up and boiled over, turning to rage. He sat at the foot of Aurora and Abraham’s long and glittering table, glaring at the many distinguished and excited guests, and drank vinho verde in quantity and at speed, sunk in darkness. As midnight burst in showers of light across the sky, his mood grew ever blacker; until, deeply drunk, he rose unsteadily to his feet and showered the guests with blurry, spittle-flecked abuse.
    ‘What are you all so pleased about?’ he shouted, swaying. ‘This isn’t your night. Bleddy Macaulay’s minutemen! Don’t you get it? Bunch of English-medium misfits, the lot of you. Minority group members. Square-peg freaks. You don’t belong here . Country’s as alien to you as if you were what’s-the-word lunatics. Moon-men . You read the wrong books, get on the wrong side in every argument, think the wrong thoughts. Even your bleddy dreams grow from foreign roots.’
    ‘Stop making a fool of yourself, Vasco,’ said Aurora. ‘Everybody here is shocked by the Hindu-Muslim killings. You have no monopoly on that pain; only on vinho verde and on being a righteous bum.’
    Which would have stopped most people: but it didn’t stop poor, driven Vasco, crazed by history, love and the torment of keeping up the great pretence of himself. ‘Useless fucking art-johnny clever-dicks,’ he jeered, leaning sideways at a dangerous angle. ‘Circular sexualist India my foot . No. Bleddy tongue twister came out wrong. Secular-socialist. That’s it. Bleddy bunk . Panditji sold you that stuff like a cheap watch salesman and you all bought one and now you wonder why it doesn’t work. Bleddy Congress party full of bleddy fake Rolex salesmen. You think India’ll just roll over, all those bloodthirsty bloodsoaked gods’ll just roll over and die . Our great hostess, Aurora, great lady, great artist, thinks she can dance the gods away. Dance! Tat-tat-taa-dreegay-thun-thun! Tai! Tat-tai! Tat-tai! Jesus