The Moors Last Sigh

whore. When questions about the legitimacy of the Zogoiby children began to be hinted at, however, it seems that on a certain day the editors of all the major newspapers received quiet visits from emissaries of Abraham Zogoiby, who had a word-to-the-wise in their ears; and after that the press campaign stopped instantly, as if it had had a heart attack and died of fright.
    Aurora retreated somewhat from public life. Her salon continued to glitter, but the more conservative elements in high society and in the country’s artistic and intellectual life dropped her for good. She herself remained, more and more, inside the walls of her personal Paradise, and turned, once and for all, in the direction Vasco Miranda had been urging upon her, the true direction of her heart: that is to say, inwards, to the reality of dreams.
    (It was at this time, when language riots prefigured the division of the state, that she announced that neither Marathi nor Gujarati would be spoken within her walls; the language of her kingdom was English and nothing but. ‘All these different lingos cuttofy us off from one another,’ she explained. ‘Only English brings us together.’ And to prove her point she would recite, with a doleful expression that could not fail to provoke wicked thoughts in her audience, the popular rhyme of those days: ‘A-B-C-D-E-F-G, out of this came Panditji.’ To which only her trusted ally V. Miranda had the nerve to reply, ‘H-I-J-K-L-M-N, and now he’s buggered off again.’)
    I, too, was obliged to lead a relatively sheltered life; and it must be stressed that the two of us were thrown together more than most mothers and sons, because soon after I was born, she began the series of major canvases with which she is most strongly associated; those works whose name (‘the Moor paintings’) is the same as mine, in which my growing-up is more meaningfully documented than in any photograph album, and which will keep us joined to each other for ever and a day, no matter how far, and how violently, our lives drove us apart.

    The truth about Abraham Zogoiby was that he had put on a disguise; had created a mild-mannered secret identity to mask his covert super-nature. He had deliberately painted the dullest possible picture of himself – not for him the kitsch excess of Vasco Miranda’s lachrymose self-portrait en arabe ! – over the thrilling but unacceptable reality. The deferential, complaisant surface was what Vasco would have called his ‘overneath’; underneath it, he ruled a Mogambo-ish underworld more lurid than any masala-movie fantasy.
    Soon after he settled in Bombay he had made a pilgrimage of respect to old man Sassoon, head of the great Baghdadi-Jewish family which had hobnobbed with English kings, intermarried with the Rothschilds, and dominated the city for a hundred years. The patriarch agreed to receive him, but only in the Sassoon & Co offices in the Fort; not at home, not as an equal, but as a johnny-come-lately supplicant from the provinces did Abraham come into the Presence. ‘The country may be about to become free,’ the old gentleman told him, smiling benignly, ‘but you must appreciate, Zogoiby, that Bombay is a closed town.’
    Sassoon, Tata, Birla, Readymoney, Jeejeebhoy, Cama, Wadia, Bhabha, Goculdas, Wacha, Cashondeliveri – these great houses had their grip on the city, on its precious and industrial metals, on its chemicals, textiles and spices, and they weren’t about to let go. The da Gama-Zogoiby enterprise had a solid foothold in the last of these areas; and everywhere he went, Abraham received tea or ‘cold-drink’, sweetmeats, warm welcomes, and, lastly, a series of unfailingly courteous but icily serious warnings to keep off any other patches over which he might have been running an entrepreneurial eye. A mere fifteen years later, however, when official sources revealed that just one and a half per cent of the country’s companies owned over half of all private capital, and that even within this élite one and a half per cent, just twenty companies dominated the rest, and that within these twenty companies there were four super-groups who controlled, between them, one quarter of all the share capital in India, the da Gama-Zogoiby C-50 Corporation had already risen to number five.
    He had begun by studying history. There is a certain endemic vagueness in Bombay on the subject of time past; ask a man how long he’s been in business and he’ll answer, ‘Long.’