The Moors Last Sigh

lap to conceal the movements there from the eyes of my companions, who would be puzzled by such arousal; or, more probably, amused. I have had, until now, no wish to become the source of such amusement. But now all must, and will, be told; now, my life’s story, that tissue of erectile volubility, is drawing to a close.
    Dilly Hormuz was a spinster of perhaps twenty-five when we met, and in her mid-thirties when I last saw her. She lived with her tiny, elderly and stone-blind mother, who sat on a balcony all day long, sewing quilts, her needlewoman’s fingers having long ago ceased to need the assistance of her eyes. How could such a small, frail woman have produced so tall and voluptuous a daughter, I wondered, when at the age of thirteen it was agreed that I was old enough to be sent to Dilly’s place for my lessons, because it would do me good to get out of the house. Some days I would forgo the car, waving away the driver, and walk – I would actually skip – down the hill to see her, passing the gracious old pharmacy at Kemp’s Corner – this was long before it turned into the flyover-and-boutique spiritual wasteland it is today – and the Royal Barber Shop (where a master barber with a cleft palate offered a circumcision service as a sideline). Dilly lived in the dark, peeling depths of an old grey Parsi house, all balconies and curlicues, on Gowalia Tank Road, a few doors up from Vijay Stores, that numinous mixed business where you could buy both Time, with which you could polish your wooden furniture, and Hope, with which you could wipe your bum. We Zogoibys used to call it Jaya Stores, pretending it was named after our sourpuss ayah, Miss Jaya Hé, who went there to buy herself little packets of Life, inside which were eucalyptus cleaning-sticks for the teeth, and Love, with which she henna’ed her hair … With my heart singing, and with a feeling something very like ecstasy I would enter Dilly’s home, that small apartment of impoverished, but still tasteful, gentility. The presence of a baby grand piano in the front room and of silver-framed photographs upon it, portraits of patriarchs in tasselled flowerpot hats and of a saucy young society belle who turned out to be old Mrs Hormuz herself, indicated that her family had once known better times; as did Dilly’s skill in Latin and French. I have forgotten most of my Latin, but what I remember of French – language, literature, kisses, letters; the sweat-soaked afternoon pleasures of the ci nq à sept – Dilly, I learned it all from you … Now, however, the two women were doomed to a life of private tuition and quilts. This may explain why Dilly was so hungry for a man that she settled for an overgrown boy; why she would leap on to my lap, her legs straddling me, and whisper as she bit my lower lip: ‘I took my specs off, men; now I see my lover only, nothing but.’

    She was indeed my first lover, but I think I did not love her. I know this because she made me glad of my condition, glad that my outward form was older than my years should have allowed. I was still a child; so I wanted for her sake to hurtle towards adulthood with all possible speed. I wanted to be a man for her, a real man and not manhood’s simulacrum, and if that meant sacrificing even more of my already abbreviated span, then I would happily have made that devil-deal for her blessed sake. But when real love, the great grand thing itself, came along after Dilly had gone, how bitterly, then, I resented my lot! With what hunger and rage I yearned to slow down the too-fast ticking of my unheeding internal clock! Dilly Hormuz never shook in me the child’s conviction of his own immortality, which was why I could wish so lightly to throw away my childhood years. But Uma, my Uma, when I loved her, made me hear Death’s lightning footsteps as they ran towards me; then, O then, I heard each lethal scything of his blade.

    I grew towards manhood under Dilly Hormuz’s soft, knowing hand. But – and here is a hard confession indeed, perhaps my hardest yet – she was not the first woman to touch me. Or so I have been told, though it should be said that the witness – our ayah, Miss Jaya Hé, peg-leg Lambajan’s domineering wife – was a liar and a thief.
    The children of the rich are raised by the poor, and since both my parents were dedicated to their work I was frequently left with only the chowkidar and the ayah for company. And even though Miss Jaya was as snappy as a