The Moors Last Sigh

triumphs were rendered meaningless by Aurora’s failure to rise to the bait, to condemn her licentiousness and exhibitionism; until at last Ina was able to send her great mother epistolary proof of a liaison – a stolen weekend, as it turned out, at the Lord’s Central House at Matheran – with Vasco Miranda. That did it all right. Aurora summoned her eldest daughter, cursed her for a nymphomaniac whore and threatened to throw her into the street. ‘You don’t have to push,’ Ina answered, proudly. ‘Don’t worry on; I-tho will jump.’
    Within twenty-four hours she had eloped to Nashville, Tennessee with the young playboy who was the sole heir of what was left of the Cashondeliveri family fortune after Abraham’s buy-out of his father and uncle. Jamshedjee Jamibhoy Cashondeliveri had become well known in Bombay’s nightclubs as the purveyor, under the stage name of ‘Jimmy Cash’, of what he liked to call ‘Country and Eastern’ music, a set of twangy songs about ranches and trains and love and cows with an idiosyncratic Indian twist. Now he and Ina had lit out for the territory, they were taking their love to town. She took the stage name of Gooddy (that is, ‘Dolly’) Gama – the use of a shortened version of her mother’s family name suggested Aurora’s continued influence over her daughter’s thoughts and deeds – and there was a further development. She, who had become a legend by remaining silent, now opened her mouth and sang. She led a group of three back-up singers, and the name of their act, to which she agreed in spite of its regrettable equine connotations, was Jimmy Cash and the G.G.s.
    Ina came home in disgrace a year later. We were all shocked. She was greasy-haired and dishevelled and had put on over seventy pounds: not-so-Gooddy Gama now! Immigration officers had trouble believing she was the young woman in her passport photograph. Her marriage was over, and though she said Jimmy had turned out to be a monster and ‘we didn’t know’ the things he had done, it also emerged, as time passed, that her omnivorous sexual appetite for yodelling rhinestone cowboys and her ever-increasing exhibitionism had not gone down well with the moralistic arbiters of singers’ fates in Tennessee, or, indeed, with her husband Jamshed; and to top it off she sang with the untrainable terminal squawk of a strangled goose. She had spent money as freely as she had partaken of the joys of American cooking, and her tantrums had grown larger along with the rest of her. In the end Jimmy had run away from her, and had given up Country and Eastern music to become a law student in California. ‘I have to get him back,’ she begged us. ‘You must help me with my plan.’
    Home is the place to which you can always return, no matter how painful the circumstances of your leaving. Aurora made no mention of their year-old rift, and took the prodigal child into her arms. ‘We will fix-o that rotter,’ she comforted weeping Ina. ‘Just tell us what you want.’
    ‘I have to bring him here,’ she wept. ‘If he thinks I am dying then he will surely return. Send a cable saying there is suspicion of I don’t know what. Something not infectious. Heart attack.’
    Aurora fought back a grin. ‘How about’, she suggested, hugging her newly girthsome child, ‘some type of wasting sickness ?’
    Ina missed the sardonic note. ‘No, stupid,’ she said into Aurora’s shoulder. ‘How to lose so much weight in time? Don’t have any more bad ideas. Tell him,’ and here she brightened hugely, ‘ cancer .’

    And Minnie: in the year Ina was away she found her own escape route. I am sorry to inform you that our sweet Inamorata, most mild-natured of young women, became, that year, enamoured of no less a personage than Jesus of Nazareth himself; of the Son of Man, and his holy mother, too. Mousey Minnie, always the easily shocked one, always the sister for whom our household’s beatnik licence had been a matter for tuttings and hand-over-mouth shocks, our wide-eyed, innocent mini-Minnie who had been studying nursing with the nuns of Altamount Road, announced her desire to swap Aurora, the mother of her flesh, for Maria Gratiaplena, the Mother of God, to give up her sisterhood in favour of Sisterhood, and to spend the rest of her days away from Elephanta , in the house of, and wrapped in the love of …
    ‘Christ!’ Aurora swore, angrier than I had ever seen her. ‘This is how you payofy us back for