The Moors Last Sigh

– Very well, Sir, and how old is your house? – ‘Old. From Old Time.’ – I see; and your great-grandfather, when was he born? – ‘Some time back. What are you asking? Such dead letters are lost in the ancient mists.’ Records are kept tied up with ribbon in dusty box-rooms and nobody ever looks at them. Bombay, a relatively new city in an immensely ancient land, is not interested in yesterdays. ‘So if today and tomorrow are competitive areas,’ Abraham reasoned, ‘let me make my first investment in what nobody values: i.e., what is gone.’ He devoted much time and many resources to a close study of the great families, unearthing their secrets. From the history of the Cotton Mania, or Bubble, of the 1860s he learned that many grandees had been badly damaged, almost ruined, by that time of wild speculation, and that after it their dealings were marked by a profound caution and conservatism. ‘Therefore a gap may exist’, Abraham hypothesised, ‘in the area of risk. None but the brave deserves the prize.’ He traced the great houses’ networks of connections and understood how they pulled the strings; and he discovered, too, which empires were built on sand. So when, in the mid-Fifties, he made his spectacular reverse takeover of the House of Cashondeliveri, which had begun as a firm of moneylenders and grown over the course of a century into a giant enterprise with extensive holdings in banking, land, ships, chemicals and fish, it was because he had discovered that the old Parsi family at its heart was in a state of terminal decline, ‘and when decay is so advanced,’ he noted in his private journal, ‘then the rotten teeth must be yanked out double-quick, or the whole body may suffer infection and die.’ With each Cashondeliveri generation the level of business acumen had declined sharply and the present generation of playboy brothers had incurred colossal gambling losses in the casinos of Europe, and, in addition, had been foolish enough to become involved in a hushed-up bribery scandal resulting from their efforts to export Indian business methods somewhat too crudely into Western financial markets that required rather more subtle treatment. All these skeletons Abraham’s staff assiduously extracted from their cupboards; and then one fine morning Abraham simply walked into the inner sanctum of the House of Cashondeliveri and quite straightforwardly and in broad daylight blackmailed the two pale not-quite-youths he found there into submitting instantly to his many and precise demands. The once-great clan’s weakling scions, Lowjee Lowerjee Cashondeliveri and Jamibhoy Lifebhoy Cashondeliveri, seemed, as they sold their birthright, almost happy to be free of the responsibilities they were so ill-equipped to shoulder, ‘the way the decadent Persian Emperors must have felt when the armies of Islam thundered in,’ as Abraham liked to say.
    But Abraham was no holy warrior, no sir. That man who in his domestic life exuded an air of ineffectuality, even weakness, made of himself, in reality, a veritable czar, a mughal of human frailty. Would it shock you to know that within months of his arrival in Bombay he had begun to trade in human flesh? Reader: it shocked me. My father, Abraham Zogoiby? – Abraham, whose love-story had been a thing of such high passion, such romance? – I fear so; the same. My unforgivable father, whom I forgave … I have said many times already that as well as the loving husband, the uncomplaining protector of our greatest modern artist, there had from the beginning been a darker Abraham; a man who had made his way by threats and coercion, of reluctant ship’s-captains and press barons, too. This Abraham invariably sought out, and came to mutually satisfactory arrangements with, those personages – call them black merchants – who purveyed menace, and bootleg whisky, and also sex, as devotedly as the Tatas and Sassoons plied their more respectable, ‘white market’ trades. Bombay in those days was, Abraham discovered, quite unlike the ‘closed town’ that old man Sassoon had described. For a man prepared to take risks, to give up scruple – for, in short, a black merchant – it was wide, wide open, and the only limit to the money that could be made was the boundary of your imagination.
    More will be said later of the feared Muslim gang-boss, ‘Scar’, whose real name I will not make so bold as to set down here, contenting myself with that terrifying