The Moors Last Sigh

shrieks of street-urchins as they played fighting-kite and hoop and dodge-the-traffic, and the loud playback music emerging from the ‘Sorryno’ Irani restaurant up the hill (so called because of the huge blackboard at the entrance reading Sorry, No Liquor, No Answer Given Regarding Addresses in Locality, No Combing of Hair, No Beef, No Haggle, No Water Unless Food Taken, No News or Movie Magazine, No Sharing of Liquid Sustenances, No Taking Smoke, No Match, No Feletone Calls, No Incoming with Own Comestible, No Speaking of Horses, No Sigret, No Taking of Long Time on Premises, No Raising of Voice, No Change, and a crucial last pair, No Turning Down of Volume – It Is How We Like, and No Musical Request – All Melodies Selected Are To Taste of Prop) . Even the blasted parrot seemed interested in the chowkidar’s response.
    ‘In my job, baba,’ Lambajan said at length, ‘one sees many things to guard against. A man comes with cheap gemstones, the ladies of the house must be protected. Another person comes with bad watches up his wrist, I must pack him off. Beggars, badmashes, lafangas, all. Better they go from here and so I do my job. I stand and face the street and what it asks I answer. But now I learn that I must have eyes also in the back of my head.’
    ‘Okay, forget it,’ I said clumsily. ‘You’re angry. Let’s forget the whole thing.’
    ‘You don’t know, baba, but I am a god-fearing man,’ Lamba went on, as if I had not spoken. ‘I stand outside this godless house on guard and I do not say. But at Walkeshwar Tank and Mahalaxmi Temple they know my poor face. Now I must go and make offering to Lord Ram and ask for extra back-side eyes. Also for deaf ears, so that I cannot hear such so-bad too-bad things.’
    After I accused Miss Jaya the thieving stopped. Nothing was said between us, but Lamba had done the needful and her pilfering days were over. And there was another ending, too: Lambajan no longer acted as my boxing coach, no longer pogo’ed around the garden shouting ‘Come on, mister parrot; you want to feather-tickle me? Come with your best hit!’, no longer wished to take me into the alley of the street fighters to try my hand against the biggest ruffians in town. The question of whether my breathing problems would cancel out my natural pugilistic talent would have to wait many years to be resolved. Our relations were badly strained, and did not really recover until my own great fall. And in the interim Miss Jaya Hé plotted, and successfully achieved, her revenge.
    Such was my time in Paradise: a full life but a friendless one. Kept out of school, I was starved for contemporaries; and in this world in which appearance becomes reality and we must be what we seem, I quickly became an honorary grown-up, spoken to and treated as such by one and all, excluded from the world of what I was. How I have dreamed of innocence! – of childhood days playing cricket on the Cross Maidan, of excursions to Juhu or Marvé beaches or the Aarey Milk Colony, of making fish-lips at the angel-fish in the Taraporevala Aquarium and musing sweetly with one’s chums on how they might be to eat; of short trousers and snake-buckled belts and the ecstasy of pistachio kulfi and outings for Chinese food and the first incompetent kisses of the young; of being taught to swim on Sunday mornings at the Willingdon Club by that instructor who liked to terrify his pupils by lying flat on the floor of the pool and letting all the air out of his lungs. The larger-than-lifeness of a child’s life, its roller-coaster highs and lows, its alliances and treacheries, its boy-stuff rollick ‘n’ scrape, were denied me by my size and appearance. Mine was a knowing Eden. Still I was happy there.
    – Why?– Why?– Why? –
    – That’s easy: because it was home. –
    So, yes, I was happy amid the wildnesses of its adult lives, amid the travails of my siblings and the parental bizarreries which came to feel like everyday occurrences, and in a way still do, they still persuade me that it is the idea of the norm that is bizarre, the notion that human beings have normal, everyday lives … go behind the door of any household, I want to argue, and you’ll find a macabre wonderland as untamed as our own. And maybe I’m right; or maybe this attitude, too, is a part of my complaint, maybe this – what? – this fucked-up dissident mind-set, too, is all my mother’s fault.
    My sisters would probably say it was. O my Ina,