The Moors Last Sigh

of questions, and there are new ways to be beautiful.’
    Francisco was hero material from the day he was born, destined for questions and quests, as ill-at-ease with domesticity as Quixote. He was handsome as sin but twice as virtuous, and on the coir-matting cricket-pitches of the time he proved, when young, a devilish slow left arm tweaker and elegant number four bat. At college he was the most brilliant student physicist of his year, but was orphaned early and chose, after much reflection, to forgo the academic life, do his duty, and enter the family business. He grew up, becoming an adept of the age-old da Gama art of turning spice and nuts into gold. He could smell money on the wind, could sniff the weather and tell you if it was bringing in profit or loss; but he was also a philanthropist, funding orphanages, opening free health clinics, building schools for the villages lining the back-waterways, setting up institutes researching coco-palm blight, initiating elephant conservation schemes in the mountains beyond his spice-fields, and sponsoring annual contests at the time of the Onam flower festival to find and crown the finest oral storytellers in the region: so free with his philanthropy, in fact, that Epifania was driven to wailing (uselessly): ‘And then, when funds are frittered, and children are cap-in-hand? Then can we eatofy your thisthing, your anthropology?’
    She fought him every inch of the way, and lost every battle except the last. Francisco the modernist, his eyes fixed on the future, became a disciple first of Bertrand Russell – Religion and Science and A Free Man’s Worship were his ungodly Bibles – and then of the increasingly fervent nationalist politics of the Theosophical Society of Mrs Annie Besant. Remember: Cochin, Travancore, Mysore, Hyderabad were technically not part of British India; they were Indian States, with their own princes. Some of them – like Cochin – could boast, for example, of educational and literacy standards far in excess of those prevailing under British direct rule, while in others (Hyderabad) there existed what Mr Nehru called a condition of ‘perfect feudalism’, and in Travancore even the Congress was declared illegal; but let us not confuse (Francisco did not confuse) appearance with reality; the fig-leaf is not the fig. When Nehru raised the national flag in Mysore, the local (Indian) authorities destroyed not only the flag but even the flagpole the moment he had left town, lest the event annoy the true rulers … Soon after the Great War broke out on his thirty-eighth birthday, something snapped inside Francisco.
    ‘The British must go,’ he announced solemnly at dinner beneath the oil-paintings of his suited-and-booted ancestors.
    ‘O God, where are they going?’ asked Epifania, missing the point. ‘In such a bad moment they will abandon us to our fate and that boogyman, Kaiser Bill?’
    Francisco exploded, and twelve-year-old Aires and eleven-year-old Camoens froze in their seats. ‘The Kaiser is one bill we are already paying,’ he thundered. ‘Taxes doubled! Our youngsters dying in British uniform! The nation’s wealth is being shipped off, madam: at home our people starve, but British Tommy is utilising our wheat, rice, jute and coconut products. I personally am required to send out goods below cost-price. Our mines are being emptied: saltpetre, manganese, mica. I swear! Bombay-wallahs getting rich and nation going to pot.’
    ‘Too many crooks and books have filled your ears,’ Epifania protested. ‘What are we but Empire’s children? British have given us everything, isn’t it? – Civilisation, law, order, too much. Even your spices that stink up the house they buy out of their generosity, putting clothes on backs and food on children’s plates. Then why speakofy such treason and filthy up my children’s ears with what-all Godless bunk?’
    After that day they had little to say to each other. Aires, defying his father, took his mother’s side; Epifania and he were for England, God, philistinism, the old ways, a quiet life. Francisco was all bustle and energy, so Aires affected indolence, learned how to infuriate his father by the luxuriant ease of his lounging. (In my youth, for different reasons, I also was apt to lounge. But I was not seeking to annoy; my vain intent was to set my slowness against the accelerated rush of Time itself. This tale, too, will be revisited at its proper location.) It was in the younger boy,