The Moors Last Sigh

Cochin or other destinations whose identity remained secret for many years, he would either bring me absurdly tiny clothes that were appropriate for a child my age, but much too small for me; or else he would offer me books that a young man my size might enjoy, books that utterly baffled the child who dwelt within all my outsized flesh. And he was bewildered, too, by his wife, by the change in her feelings towards him, by the darkening violence within her, and by her self-destructive gifts, which had never been more fully demonstrated than on her last meeting with the Prime Minister of India, nine months before I was born …

     … Nine months before I was born, Aurora Zogoiby travelled to Delhi to receive, from the President’s hands and in the presence of her good friend the Prime Minister, a State Award – the so-called ‘Esteemed Lotus’ – for her services to the arts. By an unfortunate coincidence, however, Mr Nehru had only just returned from a trip to England, during the course of which he had spent most of his private time in the company of Edwina Mountbatten. Now it was a much-observed (though little-commented-on) fact of our family life that the mere mention of the name of that distinguished lady was enough to send Aurora into vituperative apoplexies. The intimate details of the friendship between Pandit Nehru and the last Viceroy’s wife have long been a matter for speculation; my own speculations linger, more and more, on the similar rumours about the PM and my mother. Certain chronological verities cannot be denied. Turn back the clock four and a half months from my birth, and you return to the events at the Lord’s Central House, Matheran, and what may have been the last occasion on which my parents made love. But let the clock travel a further four and a half months in reverse and there is Aurora Zogoiby in Delhi, entering a ceremonial hall in Rashtrapati Bhavan, and being received by Panditji himself; there is Aurora Zogoiby creating a scandal, by giving in to what the newspapers would call ‘an unseemly display of artistic temperament’, and saying loudly into Nehru’s appalled face: ‘That chicken-breasted mame! Edweenie Mount-teenie! If Dickie was the -roy then my dear she was certainly the Vice-. God knows why you go keep on going sucking back like a beggar at her gate. If it’s white meat you want, ji, you won’t find-o much on her.’
    After which, leaving the assembled company open-mouthed and the President waiting with the Esteemed Lotus in his hand, she spurned the award, turned on her heel, and went back to Bombay. That, at least, was the version published in the nation’s horrified press the following day; but two de tails nag at me, the first of which is the interesting point that when Aurora went north, Abraham went south. Mysteriously failing to accompany his beloved wife at this moment of her high recognition, he went instead to check on business interests back home. On some days I can’t help but see this – hard as it is to believe! – as the behaviour of a complaisant husband … and the second detail has to do with the copybooks of Ezekiel, our cook.
    Ezekiel, my Ezekiel: eternally ancient, egg-bald, his three canary-yellow teeth bared in a permanent cackling grin, he squatted beside a traditional open stove, waving the charcoal fumes away with a shell-shaped fan of straw. He was an artist in his own right, and recognised as such by all who ate the food whose secret recipes he recorded, in a slow, shaky hand, in the green-jacketed copybooks which he kept in a padlocked box: like emeralds. Quite an archivist, our Ezekiel; for in his hoard of copybooks were not only recipes but records of meals – a full account, made over all the long years of his service, of what was served to whom on which occasion. During my sequestered childhood years (of which more anon) I spent long hours of apprenticeship at his side, learning how to do with one hand what he did with two; and learning, too, our family’s history of food, divining moments of stress by the margin-notes which told me that very little had been eaten, guessing at the angry scenes behind the laconic entry ‘spilled’. Happy moments were evoked also; by the frill-less references to wine, or cake, or other special requests – favourite dishes for a child who had done well at school, celebratory banquets marking some triumph in business or in painting. It is true, of course, that in food as in other matters