The Moors Last Sigh

driver but too much speed as well. Also, balls.’ There wasn’t a mark on my body, he pointed out, and what was more we had a goodly wad of pocket-money to divide.
    So of course I could not accuse Lamba’s wife of thievery, and see them both dismissed. I could not lose my manager, the man who had shown me my gift … once Miss Jaya was certain of her power over me, she began to flaunt it, stealing our possessions while I watched, making sure she didn’t do it too often or steal too much – now a small jade box, now a tiny gold brooch. There were days when I saw Aurora and Abraham shaking their heads as they stared at an empty space, but Miss Jaya’s calculations proved correct: they grilled the servants, but they never called the cops, not wanting to subject their household staff to the gentle ministrations of the Bombay police, nor to embarrass their friends. (And I wonder, too, if Aurora remembered her own purloinings and disposals of little Ganesha-ornaments on Cabral Island long ago. From too-many-elephants to Elephanta had been a long journey; did her younger self rebuke her then, and even make her feel some sympathy, some solidarity with the thief?)
    It was during this period of thievery that Miss Jaya told me the dreadful secret of my earliest days. We were walking at Scandal Point, across the way from the big Chamchawala house, and I think I had made some remark – the Emergency remember, was still quite new – about the unhealthy relationship between Mrs Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay. ‘The whole nation is paying for that mother-son problem,’ I said. Miss Jaya, who had been clucking her disapproval of the young lovers holding hands as they walked along the sea wall, snorted disgustedly. ‘You can talk,’ she said. ‘Your family. Perverts. Your sisters and mother also. In your baby time. How they played with you. Too sick.’
    I did not know, have never known, if she was telling the truth. Miss Jaya Hé was a mystery to me, a woman so deeply angry at her lot in life that she had become capable of the most bizarre revenges. So it was a lie, then; yes, it was probably a foul lie; but what is true – let me reveal this while I am in the mood for revelations – is that I have grown up with an unusually laissez-faire attitude towards my primary sexual organ. Permit me to inform you that people have grasped at it from time to time–yes! – or have in other ways, both gentle and peremptory, demanded its services, or instructed me how and where and with whom and for how much to use it, and on the whole I have been perfectly willing to comply. Is this quite usual? I think not, begums ’n’ sahibs … More conventionally, on other occasions this same organ has issued instructions of its own, and these, too, I have tried–as men will–to follow if possible; with disastrous results. If Miss Jaya was not lying, the origins of this behaviour may lie in those early fondlings to which she so viciously alluded. And if I am honest I can picture such scenes, they seem completely credible to me: my mother fooling with my soo-soo while suckling me at her breast, or my three sisters crowding round my cot, pulling my little brown chain. Perverts. Too sick . Aurora, dancing above the Ganpati crowds, spoke of the limitlessness of human perversity. So it may have been true. It may. It may.
    My god, what kind of family were we, diving together down Destruction Falls? I have said that I think of the Elephanta of those days as a Paradise, and so I do – but you may imagine to an outsider it could have looked a great deal more like Hell.

    I am not sure whether my great-uncle Aires da Gama can really be called an outsider, but when he showed up in Bombay for the first time in his life at the age of seventy-two he was so sadly reduced a human being that Aurora Zogoiby only recognised him by the bulldog Jawaharlal at his side. The only remaining trace of the preening Anglophile dandy he had once been was a certain eloquent indolence of speech and gesture which, in my continuing effort to fight my too-many-r.p.m. fate by cultivating the pleasures of slowness, I tried hard to emulate. He looked ill – hollow-eyed, unshaven, underfed – and it would not have been a surprise to learn that his old disease had returned. But he wasn’t sick.
    ‘Carmen is dead,’ he said. (The dog was dead too, of course, had been for decades. Aires had had Jaw-jaw stuffed, and there were little furniture-wheels screwed into the