The Moors Last Sigh

cliché of a sobriquet by which he was known throughout the city’s underworld, and finally – as we shall see – beyond it. For the moment I will content myself with recording that as a result of an alliance with this gentleman Abraham gained the ‘protection’ which was from the beginning such a feature of his preferred mode of operation; and in return for this protection my father became, and covertly remained throughout his long and wicked life, the prime supplier of new young girls to the houses which Scar’s people so efficiently maintained, the Grant Road-Falkland Road-Foras Road-Kamathipura fleshpots of Bombay.
    – What’s that? – ‘Where did he get them from?’ – Why, from the temples of South India, I regret to say, especially from those shrines dedicated to the worship of a certain Karnataka goddess, Kellamma, who seemed incapable of protecting her poor young ‘disciples’ … it is a matter of record that in our sorry age with its prejudice in favour of male children many poor families donated to their favoured cult-temple the daughters they could not afford to marry off or feed, in the hope that they might live in holiness as servants or, if they were fortunate, as dancers; vain hopes, alas, for in many cases the priests in charge of these temples were men in whom the highest standards of probity were mysteriously absent, a failing which laid them open to offers of cash on the nail for the young virgins and not-quite-virgins and once-again-virgins in their charge. Thus Abraham the spice merchant was able to use his widespread Southern connections to harvest a new crop, entered in his most secret ledgers as ‘Garam Masala Super Quality’, and also, I note with some embarrassment, ‘Extra Hot Chilli Peppers: Green.’
    And it was in secret partnership with ‘Scar’, too, that Abraham Zogoiby went into the talcum-powder industry.

    Crystallised hydrated magnesium silicate, Mg 3 Si 4 O 10 (OH) 2 : talc. When Aurora asked him over breakfast why he was going into the baby-bottom business, he cited the twin advantages of a protectionist economy, which imposed prohibitive tariffs on imported talcum brands, and a population explosion, which guaranteed a ‘bum boom’. He spoke enthusiastically of the product’s global potential, characterising India as the one Third World economy capable of rivalling the First World in its sophistication and growth without necessarily becoming enslaved by the almighty US dollar, and suggested that many other Third World countries would leap at the chance to buy a high-quality talcum powder for which no greenback payments were required. By the time he had begun to speculate on the very real short-term possibility of his ‘Baby Softo’ brand taking on Johnson & Johnson in their home markets, Aurora had stopped listening. When he began to sing the advertising jingle with which he proposed to launch his new wheeze, with lyrics personally composed by himself and set to the maddening tune of Bobby Shafto , my mother covered her ears.
    ‘Baby Softo, sing it louder,/Softo-pofto talcum powder,’ carolled Abraham.
    ‘Talcum you can make or don’t make,’ cried Aurora, ‘but this racket must stoppo pronto. It is crackofying the shell of my egg.’
    As I write this I wonder again at Aurora’s unwillingness to see how often and how casually Abraham deceived her, I marvel at the things she accepted without questioning, because of course he was lying, and the white powder he was interested in did not come from quarries in the Western Ghats, but found its way into selected Baby Softo canisters by a highly unusual route involving nocturnal lorry convoys from unknown places of origin, and extensive and systematic bribery of policemen and other officials manning octroi posts along the sub-continent’s trunk roads; and these relatively few canisters produced, for several years, an export-based income which far outstripped the rest of the company’s profits, and made possible a broad-based corporate diversification – an income which was never declared, however, which appeared in no ledger save the secret encoded book of books which Abraham kept profoundly hidden, perhaps in some dark recess of his corrupted soul.
    The city itself, perhaps the whole country, was a palimpsest, Under World beneath Over World, black market beneath white; when the whole of life was like this, when an invisible reality moved phantomwise beneath a visible fiction, subverting all its