The Moors Last Sigh

a teeming Bombay street-scene – Muhammad Ali Road, perhaps – is surveyed from a first-floor balcony by the full-length nude figure of Aires da Gama, trim-and-slim as a young god, but with the unfulfilled, unfulfillable, unexpressed, inexpressible longings of old age in every brush-stroke of his painted form. There is an old bulldog sitting at his feet; and it may just be my imagination, but down below him in the crowd – yes, just there! – those two tiny figures on the back of the elephant with the Vimto advertisements painted on its flanks! – could they be – surely they are! – Prince Henry the Navigator and Carmen da Gama, beckoning Great-Uncle to join them on their trip?
    (Once upon a time, there were two figures in a boat, one in a wedding-dress, one not, and a third figure left alone in her nuptial bed. Aurora immortalised that painful scene; and here in the Accountant’s work, surely, were the same three figures. Only their disposition was different. The dance had moved on; had become a dance of death.)
    Soon after the completion of You Can’t Always Get Your Wish , Aires da Gama passed away. Aurora, as well as Abraham, made a trip south to bury him. Disregarding the custom of the tropics, where men go hastily to their sleep, lest by their tarrying they leave the world in bad odour, my mother called the undertakers, Mahalaxmi Deadbody Disposicians Pvt Ltd (motto: ‘Corpse is here? Want it there? Okay, dear! It’s your affair!’), and had Aires put on ice for the journey, so that he could be laid beside Carmen in the consecrated family plot on Cabral Island, where Prince Henry the Navigator could find him if he ever chose to ride down from the Spice Hills on his elephant. When Aires arrived at his last destination and they opened up his aluminium Dispotainer to transfer him to his coffin he looked – Aurora told us – like a ‘big blue Popsicle’. There was a hoar-frost on his eyebrows and he was colder than the grave. ‘Never mind, Uncle,’ Aurora murmured during the funeral service at which she and Abraham were the only mourners. ‘Where you’re off to they’ll soon warmofy you up.’
    But her heart wasn’t in it. The quarrels of the past were long forgotten. The house on Cabral Island felt like a leftover, an irrelevance. Even the room which Aurora, as a young prodigy, had covered with painting during the period of her ‘house arrest’ no longer concerned her, for she had returned to its themes many times, had gone back obsessively to the mythic-romantic mode in which history, family, politics and fantasy jostled each other like the great crowds at V.T. or Churchgate Stations; and had returned, too, to that exploration of an alternative vision of India-as-mother, not Nargis’s sentimental village-mother but a mother of cities, as heartless and lovable, brilliant and dark, multiple and lonely, mesmeric and repugnant, pregnant and empty, truthful and deceitful as the beautiful, cruel, irresistible metropolis itself. ‘My father thought I had made a masterpiece here,’ she said to Abraham as they stood in the painted room. ‘But as you see they are only a child’s first steps.’
    Aurora had the old house dust-sheeted and locked up. She never returned to Cochin, and even after she died Abraham spared her the humiliation of being flown south like a frozen fish. He sold the old place and it became a decaying, modestly priced hotel for young back-packers and old India hands returning, on inadequate pensions, for a last look at their lost world. Eventually, or so I heard, it fell down. I am sorry that it did; but then, I was, I think, the only member of our family to give a fig for the past.
    When Great-Uncle Aires died, every one of us had the sense of arriving at a turning-point. Iced, blue, he marked the end of a generation. It was our turn now.

    I decided I would no longer accompany Miss Jaya on her sorties around town. Even that act of distancing proved insufficient; the events in Zaveri Bazaar continued to rankle. So, finally, I went to see Lambajan at the gates, and, blushing hotly with the knowledge that I was humiliating him, told him what I knew. When I had finished I watched him in trepidation. Never before, after all, had I told a man that his wife was a thief. Would he want to fight me for his family’s honour, to kill me where I stood? Lambajan said nothing, and his silence spread outwards from him, muffling the hooting of taxis, the cigarette-vendor’s cries, the