The Moors Last Sigh

claw, with lips as sharp as scratches and eyes as narrow as squeaks, even though she was as thin as ice and as bossy as boots, I was and am grateful to her, for in her time off she was a peripatetic sort of bird, she liked to wander the city in order to disapprove of it, clucking her tongue and pursing her lips and shaking her head at its various infelicities. So it was with Miss Jaya that I rode the B.E.S.T. trams and buses, and while she disapproved of their overcrowding I was secretly rejoicing in all that compacted humanity, in being pushed so tightly together that privacy ceased to exist and the boundaries of your self began to dissolve, that feeling which we only get when we are in crowds, or in love. And it was with Miss Jaya that I ventured into the fabulous turbulence of Crawford Market with its frieze by Kipling’s dad, with its vendors of chickens both live and plastic, and it was with Miss Jaya that I penetrated the rum dens of Dhobi Talao and ventured into the chawls, the tenements, of Byculla (where she took me to visit her poor – I should say her poorer – relations, who with yet-more-impoverishing offers of cold drinks and cakes treated her arrival like the visit of a queen), and it was with her that I ate watermelon at Apollo Bunder and chaat on the seafront at Worli, and with all these places and their loud inhabitants, with all these commodities and comestibles and their insistent vendors, with my inexhaustible Bombay of excess, I fell deeply and for ever in love, even while Miss Jaya was enjoying herself by giving full vent to her outsized capacity for derision, even while she was firing out judgments from which she would permit no appeal: ‘Too costly!’ (Chickens.) ‘Too disgusting!’ (Dark rum.) ‘Too slummy!’ (Chawl.) ‘Too dry!’ (Watermelon.) ‘Too hot!’ (Chaat.) And always, on our return home, she turned to me with a glittering, resentful look and spat out, ‘You, baba: too lucky! Thank your lucky stars.’
    One day in my eighteenth year – it was in the early days of the Emergency, as I recall – I went with her to Zaveri Bazaar, where jewellers sat like wise monkeys in tiny shops that were all mirrors and glass, buying and selling antique silver by weight. When Miss Jaya produced a pair of heavy bracelets and handed them to the valuer, I recognised them at once as my mother’s. Miss Jaya’s stare pierced me like a spear; I felt my tongue dry and could not speak. The transaction was soon completed and we moved away from the jeweller’s into the bustle of the street, avoiding the pushcarts laden with cotton bales wrapped in jute sacking and bound with metal bands, the street stalls selling plantains, mangoes, bush-shirts, filmi magazines and belts, the coolies with huge baskets on their heads, the scooters, the bikes, the truth. We made our way home to Elephanta , and it was not until we had descended from the bus that the ayah spoke. ‘Too much,’ she said. ‘In the house. So-much too-much things.’
    I didn’t answer. ‘People also,’ Miss Jaya said. ‘Coming. Going. Waking. Sleeping. Eating. Drinking. In drawing-rooms. In bedrooms. In all rooms. Too much people.’ Meaning, I understood, that because Aurora would find it hard to place her circle of friends under suspicion, nobody would ever be able to identify the thief; unless I spoke up.
    ‘You will not speak,’ Miss Jaya said, playing her trump. ‘For Lambajan. Because of him.’

    She was right. I could not have betrayed Lambajan; he taught me how to box. He made my father’s despairing prophecy come true. You’re going to knock the whole world flat with a fist on you like that .
    In the days when Lambajan had two legs and no parrot, in the days before he had become Long John Silverfellow, he had used his fists to supplement his meagre sailor’s pay. In the city’s gambling alleys, where fighting-cocks and baited bears provided the warm-up entertainment, he had earned something of a reputation and fair sums of money as a bare-knuckle boxer. He had originally wanted to be a wrestler, because in Bombay a wrestler could become a great star like the famous Dara Singh, but after a series of defeats he turned to the rawer, rougher world of the street fighters, and became known as a man who could take a punch. His win-loss record was creditable; he lost all his teeth, but he had never been knocked out.
    Once a week, throughout my early life, he came into the gardens at Elephanta carrying long strips of