The Moors Last Sigh

which came as a welcome relief to those honest, and actually-existing citizens who paid taxes for the upkeep of the messy, dynamic burg. However, it cannot be denied that for the million or more ghosts who had just been created by law, life got harder. This was where Abraham Zogoiby and all those who had jumped on the great Reclamation bandwagon came in, generously hiring as many phantoms as they could to work on the huge construction sites springing up on every inch of the new land, and even going so fer – O philanthropists! – as to pay them small amounts of cash for their work. ‘Nobody ever heard of paying spooks until we began the practice,’ said ancient Abraham, cackling wheezily. ‘But naturally we accepted no responsibility in case of ill-health or injury. It would have been, if you follow my line, illogical. After all, these persons were not just invisible, but actually, according to official pronouncements, simply not at all there.’
    We had been sitting in thickening gloom on the thirty-first floor of the jewel of the New Bombay, I. M. Pei’s masterpiece, Cashondeliveri Tower. Through the window I could see the shining spear of K. K. Chambers lancing the night. Now Abraham rose and opened a door. Light poured in, and high arpeggios of music. He led me into a giant atrium stocked with trees and plants from more temperate climes than our own – there were orchards of apple-trees and poiriers , and heavy grapevines, too – all under glass, maintained at ideal conditions of temperature and humidity by a climate-control system whose cost would have been unimaginable if it had not been invisible; for, by some happy chance, no electricity bill had ever been presented to Abraham for payment. From this atrium comes my last memory of him – of my old, old father, whom I, with my thirty-six-going-on-seventy-two appearance, was beginning more and more to resemble; my unrepentant, serpentine father, who had taken over Eden in the absence of Aurora and God.
    ‘Now, but, I’m done for,’ he sighed. ‘It’s all coming apart in my hand. The magic stops working when people start seeing the strings. To hell! I had a damn fine run. Have a bloody apple.’

12
    I GREW IN ALL directions, willy-nilly. My father was a big man but by the age of ten my shoulders had grown wider than his coats. I was a skyscraper freed of all legal restraints, a one-man population explosion, a megalopolis, a shirt-ripping, button-popping Hulk. ‘Look at you,’ my big sister Ina marvelled when I reached my full heft and height. ‘You have become Mr Gulliver-Travel and we are your Lilliputs.’ Which was true at least in this respect: that if our Bombay was my personal not-Raj-but-Lilli-putana, then my great size was indeed succeeding in tying me down.
    The wider my physical bounds were set, the more limited my horizons seemed to become. Education was a problem. Many boys from ‘good homes’ on Malabar Hill, Scandal Point and Breach Candy began their education at Miss Gunnery’s Walsingham House School, which was co-educational at kindergarten and junior level, before they went on to Campion or Cathedral or one of the city’s other in-those-days-boys-only élite establishments. But the legendary ‘Gunner’ in her horn-rims with their Batmobile fins refused to accept the truth about my condition. ‘Too old for KG,’ she snorted, at the end of an interview in which she treated my three-and-a-half-year-old self at all times as if I were the seven-year-old she could not help seeing seated in my chair, ‘and for the junior school, I am deploring to be informing, sub-normal.’ My mother was incensed. ‘Who-all have you got in class?’ she demanded. ‘Einsteins, is it? Little Alberts and Albertinas, must be? A whole schoolful of emcee-squares?’
    But La Gunnery was not to be moved, and so it was home tuition for me. A string of male tutors followed, few of them lasting more than a few months. I bear them no grudge. Faced with, for example, an eight-year-old who had decided, in honour of his friendship with the painter V. Miranda, to sport a fully waxed pointy-tipped moustache, they understandably fled. In spite of all my efforts to create a neat, tidy, obedient, moderate, unexceptional persona, I was simply too weird for them; until that is, my first female tutor was hired. O Dilly Hormuz of sweet memory! Like Miss Gunnery, her thick glasses wore fins, or wings; but these were the wings of angels. Arriving in a white frock