The Moors Last Sigh

first came to know, sixtyish, with his stone-vase limp accentuated by age, seemed a weak, diminished figure, whose breaths came raspingly and whose right hand rested lightly against his chest, in a gesture at once self-protective and obeisant. Not much left there (except duty-managerish deference) of the fellow with whom the heiress Aurora had fallen so swiftly and deeply into pepper love! In my childhood memory of him he is a rather colourless phantom hanging around the edges of tumultuous Aurora’s court, hesitant, slightly stooped, frowning the vague frown with which servitors indicate their anxiety to please. In the forward tilt of his body there appeared to be something unpleasantly over-eager, something ingratiating. ‘Here’s a tautology,’ sharp-tongued Aurora was fond of saying to raise a laugh. ‘ “ Weak man.” ’ And I, as Abraham’s son, could not help despising Abraham for being the butt of the joke, and feeling that his weakness demeaned us all – by which I meant, of course, all men.
    In accordance with some strange logic of the heart, Aurora’s great passion for ‘her Jew’ had cooled rapidly after my birth. Characteristically, she announced the cooling of her ardour to anyone within earshot. ‘When I see him coming at me, on heat and smellofying of curry,’ she’d laugh, ‘baap-ré! Then I hide-o behind my kids and hold my nose.’ These humiliations, too, he suffered without protest. ‘Men in our part of the world!’ Aurora would hold forth in the famous orange and gold drawing-rooms. ‘All are either peacocks or shabbies. But even a peacock like my mór is as nothing compared to us ladies, who live-o in a blaze of glory. Look out for the shabbies, I say! They-tho are our jailers. They are the ones holding the cash-books and the keys to the gilded cage.’
    This was the closest she came to thanking Abraham for the uncomplaining inexhaustibility of his cheques, for the city of gold he had so quickly built from her family’s wealth, which for all its old-money graciousness had been no more than, as it were, a village, a country estate, or a small provincial town, compared to the great metropolis of their present fortune. Aurora was not unaware that her lavishness required maintenance, so that she was bound to Abie by her own needs. Sometimes she came close to admitting this, even to worrying that the scale of her spending, or the looseness of her tongue, might bring the house down. Always fond of macabre bedtime stories, she would tell me the parable of the scorpion and the frog, in which the scorpion, having hitched a ride across a stretch of water in return for a promise not to attack his mount, breaks his vow and administers a potent and fatal sting. As the frog and scorpion are both drowning, the murderer apologises to his victim. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ says the scorpion. ‘It’s in my nature.’
    Abraham, it took me a long time to see, was tougher than any frog; she stung him, for it was in her nature to do so, but he did not drown. How easy was my scorn for him, how long it took me to understand his pain! For he had never ceased to love her as fiercely as on the day of their first meeting; and everything he did, he did for her. The greater, the more public her betrayals, the more overarching, and secret, grew his love.
    (And when I learned the things he had done, things for which it might be said that despising was an inadequate response, I found it hard to summon back that youthful disgust; for by then I had fallen under the power of a frog of a different water, and my own deeds had taken from me the right to be my father’s judge.)
    When she abused him in public, she did so with a diamond smile that suggested she was only teasing, that her constant belittlements were no more than a way of concealing an adoration too enormous to express; it was an ironising smile that sought to put her behaviour into quotes. This act was never completely convincing. Often, she drank – the anti-alcohol regulations came and went, paralleling Morarji Desai’s political fortunes, and after the partition of the State of Bombay into Maharashtra and Gujarat, they disappeared from the city for good – and when she drank, she cursed. Confident of her genius, armed with a tongue as merciless as her beauty and as violent as her work, she excluded nobody from her colaratura damnations, from the hawk-swoops and rococo riffs and great set-piece ghazals of her cursing, all delivered with