The Moors Last Sigh

undersides of his paws, so that his master could continue to pull him along on a lead.) Aurora took pity on him and set aside all the old family resentments, installing him in the most lavish of the guest rooms, the one with the softest mattress and quilt and the best view of the sea, and forbidding us all to titter at Aires’s habit of talking to Jawaharlal as if he were still alive. For the first week Great-Uncle Aires was very quiet at table, as if he were reluctant to draw attention to himself in case it resulted in the resumption of ancient hostilities. He ate little, although he did show a great liking for the new Braganza Brand lime and mango pickles which had lately taken the city by storm; we tried not to stare, but out of the corners of our eyes we saw the old gentleman slowly turning his head from side to side, as if looking for something he had lost.
    On his trips to Cochin, Abraham Zogoiby had occasionally paid brief, awkward courtesy calls at the house on Cabral Island, so we knew something of the astonishing developments in that almost-severed branch of our quarrelsome clan, and as time went by Great-Uncle Aires told us the whole sad, beautiful tale. The day Travancore-Cochin became the state of Kerala, Aires da Gama had given up his secret fantasy that the Europeans might one day return to the Malabar Coast, and entered a reclusive retirement during which he set aside his lifelong philistinism to begin a complete reading of the canon of English literature, consoling himself with the best of the old world for the distasteful mutabilities of history. The other members of that unusual domestic triangle, Great-Aunt Carmen and Prince Henry the Navigator, were increasingly thrown together, and became fast friends, playing cards late into the night for high, if notional, stakes. After some years Prince Henry picked up the notebook in which they kept their betting records and informed Carmen with only half a smile that she now owed him her entire fortune. At that moment the Communists came to power, fulfilling Camoens da Gama’s dream, and Prince Henry’s fortunes rose with those of the new government. With his good connections in the Cochin docks he had run for office and had been elected by a landslide to membership of the state legislature, without having needed to campaign. On the night he told her of his new career, Carmen, inspired by the news, won back every last rupee of her lost fortune in a marathon poker-game which culminated in a single gigantic pot. Prince Henry had always hinted to Carmen that she lost so heavily because of her reluctance to fold, but on this occasion it was he who was drawn into her web, seduced by the four queens in his hand into raising the bet to vertiginous heights. When she finally had a chance to show him her four kings, he understood that in all the years of her long losing streak she had been quietly learning how to deal a crooked hand; that he had been the victim of the longest hustle in the history of card-games. Impoverished once more, he applauded her underhand skills.
    ‘The poor will never be as sneaky as the rich, so they will always lose in the end,’ she told him, fondly. Prince Henry got up from the card-table, kissed the top of her head, and dedicated the rest of his working life, in and out of power, to the Party’s educational policies, because only education would give the poor the means to disprove Carmen da Gama’s dictum. And indeed the literacy rate in the new State of Kerala rose to become the best in India – Prince Henry himself proved a quick learner – and then Carmen da Gama launched a daily newspaper aimed at the masses of readers in the seaside fishing-villages and also the rice-villages on the hyacinth-infested backwaters. She discovered that she had a real talent as a hands-on proprietor, and her journal became a great hit with the poor, much to Prince Henry’s rage, because even though it pretended to be taking a good leftist line it somehow managed to turn the people’s heads away from the Party, and when the anti-Communist coalition took power in the State it was card-sharp Carmen’s sneaky, fork-tongued newspaper that Prince Henry blamed as much as the interference of the central government in Delhi.
    In 1974 Aires da Gama’s former lover (for their affair was long past) went on a trip into the Spice Mountains to visit the thriving elephant sanctuary of which he had been made patron, and disappeared. Carmen heard the news on