The Moors Last Sigh

there is much about our personalities that remains opaque. What is one to make of my sisters’ united hatred for aubergines, or of my passion for the selfsame brinjal? What is revealed by my father’s preference for mutton or chicken on the bone, and my mother’s insistence on nothing but bone-free flesh? I set such mysteries aside to record that when I consulted the copybook relating to the period under discussion, it revealed that Aurora did not return to Bombay for three nights after the uproar in Delhi. I am too familiar with the Delhi-Bombay Frontier Mail down-train to need to check: the journey took two nights and a day, leaving one night unaccounted for. ‘Madam probably stopped on in Delhi to eat some other khansama’s dish,’ was Ezekiel’s mournful comment on her absence. He sounded like a betrayed man trying to forgive his errant, unfaithful lover.
    Some other khansama  … what spicy dish kept Aurora Zogoiby away from home? What, to put it bluntly, was cooking? It was one of my mother’s weaknesses that her grief and pain so often came out as anger; it was, in my view, a further weakness that once she had permitted herself the luxury of letting rip, she felt a huge rush of apologetic affection for the people she hurt. As if good feelings could only swell up in her in the aftermath of a ruinous flood of bile.
    Nine months to the day before I arrived, there was a missing night. But innocent-till-proven-otherwise is an excellent rule, and neither Aurora nor that late great leader have any proof of impropriety to answer. Probably there are perfectly good explanations for all these matters. Children never understand why parents act as they do.
    How vain it would be of me baselessly to claim descent – even illegitimate descent – from so great a line! Reader: I have sought only to express a certain head-shaking puzzlement, but rest assured, I make no allegations. I stick to my story, namely, that I was conceived at the hill-station that I have previously specified; and that certain biological norms were diverged from thereafter. Permit me to insist: this is not some sort of cover-up.
    Jawaharlal Nehru was sixty-seven years old in 1957; my mother was thirty-two. They never met again; nor did the great man ever again travel to England, to meet another great man’s wife.
    Public opinion – not for the last time – swung against Aurora. Between Delhi-folk and Bombay types there has always been a measure of mutual contempt (I am speaking, of course, of the bourgeoisie); Bombay-wallahs have tended to dismiss Delhiites as the fawning lackeys of power, as greasy-pole-climbers and placemen, while the capital’s citizens have sneered at the superficiality, the bitchiness, the cosmopolitan ‘Westoxication’ of my home-town’s business babus and lacquered, high-gloss femmes. But in the furore over Aurora’s refusal of the Lotus, Bombay was as scandalized as Delhi. Now, the many enemies her high-handed style had made saw their opportunity and struck. Scoundrelly patriots called her a traitress, the godly called her godless, self-styled spokesmen for the poor berated her for being rich. Many artists failed to defend her: the Chipkalists remembered her attack on them, and were silent; those artists who were truly in thrall to the West, and spent their careers imitating, to dreadful effect, the styles of the great figures of the United States and France, now abused her for ‘parochialism’, while those other artists – and there were many of these – who floundered about in the dead sea of the country’s ancient heritage, producing twentieth-century versions of the old miniature art (and often, secretly, making pornographic fakes of Mughal or Kashmiri art on the side), reviled her just as loudly for ‘losing touch with her roots’. All the old family scandals were raked up, except for the Rumpelstiltskin firstborn-son business between Abraham and his mother Flory, which had never become public property; the newspapers printed with relish every available detail of the disgrace of old Francisco with his ‘Gama rays’, and the absurd efforts of Camoens da Gama to train a troupe of South Indian Lenins, and the murderous war between the Lobos and Menezeses as a result of which the da Gama brothers were sent to jail, and the suicide-by-drowning of poor heartbroken Camoens, and, of course, the great scandal of the coming together, out of wedlock, of the poor, no-account Jew and his filthy-rich Christian