The Moors Last Sigh

and ankle-socks early in 1967, her hair bunched in thin tails, books gathered to her bosom, myopically blinking and nervously chatterboxy, she looked at first glance more like a kid than yours truly. But Dilly was worth a second look, for she, too, was in disguise. She wore flat shoes and the practised stoop with which tall girls learn to hide their height; but she soon began, when we were alone, to uncoil – ah, the pale magnificent length of her, from her smallish head to her shapely but enormous feet! Also – and even after all these years the memory of it creates in me a blushy heat of nostalgic longing – she commenced to stretch. Stretching Dilly – pretending to reach for a book, a ruler, a pen – revealed to me, and me alone, the fullness of the body beneath the frock, and soon began to return, with her level unblinking gaze, my own crude bug-eyed gawps. Pretty Dilly – for when we were alone and she let down her hair, when she took off her glasses to blink at me blindly through those haunting, deep-set, absent eyes, then her true looks were unveiled – looked long and hard upon her new pupil, and sighed.
    ‘Ten years old, men,’ she said softly the first time we were alone. ‘Man cub, you are the eighth wonder and no mistake.’ And after that, remembering her didactic rôle, began her first lesson by making me learn by heart – to ‘ruttofy’, as we said – the world’s seven ancient and seven modern wonders, mentioning, as she did so, the interesting proximity on Malabar Hill of myself (‘young Master Colossus’) and the Hanging Gardens – as if the Wonders were gathering here, and taking Indian form.
    It seems to me now that in my younger self, in that appalling monster in whom a child’s mind peered out in confusion through the portals of a young man’s beautiful body (for, in spite of my hand, of all my sense of self-disgust and need for comfort, Dilly would have seen beauty in me; beauty, our family curse!), my teacher Miss Hormuz found a kind of personal liberation, understanding that I was hers to command as a child, and also – and here I venture into dangerous water – hers to touch, and be touched by, as a man.
    I do not remember now how old I was (though I had certainly shaved off my Vascoid moustache) when Dilly ceased to simply marvel at my physique and began, timidly at first, and then with increasing freedom, to caress it. I was at an internal age at which such caresses were innocent gestures of the love for which I was so wolfishly hungry; externally, my body had become capable of wholly adult responses. Do not condemn her, for I cannot; I was a wonder of her world, and she was simply entranced.
    For almost three years my lessons took place at Elephanta , and during these thousand days and a day, there were limits imposed by the location, and the fear of being caught in the act. Refrain, if you will, from asking me to say how far our caresses went; from obliging me, in my remembering, to stop, once again, at the frontiers for which we possessed no passport! The memory of that time remains a breathless ache, it makes my heart pound, it is a wound that does not heal; for my body knew what I did not, and though the child sat half-bewildered in the prison of his flesh, still my lips, my tongue, my limbs began to act, under her expert tutelage, quite independently of my mind; and on some blessed days, when we felt safe, or when what drove us on grew too maddening to care about the risk, her hands, her lips, her breasts moving at my groin brought me a measure of hot and desperate relief.
    She took my ruined hand, some days, and placed it thus and so. She was the first human being to make me feel, for those stolen moments, whole … and most of the time, no matter what her body might be up to with mine, she kept up a constant stream of information. We had no lovers’ chit-chat; the battle of Srirangapatnam and the principal exports of Japan were all our bill and coo. While her fluttering fingers raised my body temperature to unbearable heights, she kept things under control by obliging me to recite my thirteen times table or enumerate the valencies of each element in the periodic table. Dilly was a girl with a lot to say, and infected me with gabbiness, which to this day retains, for me, a powerful erotic charge. When I chatter on, or am assailed by the garrulity of others, I find it–how-to-say? – arousing. Often, in the heat of bavardage , I must place my hands upon my