The Moor's Last Sigh (32 page)

I admit it: I am a man who has delivered many beatings. I have brought violence to many doorsteps, the way a postman brings the mail. I have done the dirty as and when required--done it, and taken pleasure in the doing. Did I not tell you with what difficulty I had learned left-handedness, how unnaturally it came to me? Very well: but now I could be right-handed at last, in my new life of action I could remove my doughty hammer from my pocket and set it free to write the story of my life. It served me well, my club. In quick time I became one of the MA's elite enforcers, alongside Tin-man Hazare and Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite (who, it will come as no surprise to learn, was something of an all-rounder, too, with talents that no kitchen could contain). Hazare's XI--whose eight other component hoodlums were every whit as deadly as we three--reigned unchallenged for a decade as the MA's Team of Teams. So as well as the pure magnificence of our unleashed force there were the rewards of high achievement, and the virile pleasures of comradeship and all-for-one. Can you understand with what delight I wrapped myself in the simplicity of my new life? For I did; I revelled in it. At last, I told myself, a little straightforwardness; at last you are what you were >orn to be. With what relief I abandoned my lifelong quest for an nattamable normality, with what joy I revealed my super-nature to the world! Can you imagine how much anger had been banked in me by the circumscriptions and emotional complexities of my previous existence--how much resentment at the world's rejections, at the overheard giggles of women, at teachers' sneers, how much unexpressed wrath at the exigencies of my sheltered, necessarily withdrawn, friendless, and finally mother-murdered life? It was that lifetime of fury that had begun to explode from my fist. Dhhaamm! Dhhoomm! O, sure thing, misters 'n' begums: I knew how to give what-for, and I also had a good idea of why. Keep your disapproval! Put it where the sun don't shine! Go sit in a movie theatre and take note that the guy getting the biggest cheers is no longer the loverboy or heero--it's the guy in the black hat, stabbing shooting kickboxing and generally pulverising his way through the film! O, baby. Violence today is hot. It is what people want. My early years were spent breaking the great textile mill strike. My allotted task was to form part of Sammy Hazare's unofficial flying wedge of masked avengers. After the authorities moved in to break up a demonstration with sticks and gas--and in those years there were agitations in every part of the city, organised by Dr Datta Samant, his Kamgar Aghadi political party and his Maharashtra Girni Kamgar union of textile workers--the MA's crack teams would select and pursue individual, randomly selected demonstrators, not giving up until we had cornered them and given them the beating of their lives. We had given much deep thought to the matter of our masks, finally rejecting the idea of using the faces of the Bollywood stars of the time in favour of the more historic Indian folk-tradition of bahurupi travelling players, in mimicry of whom we gave ourselves the heads of lions and tigers and bears. It proved a good decision, enabling us to enter the strikers' consciousness as mythological avengers. We had only to appear on the scene for the workers to flee screaming into the dark gullies where we ran them to ground to face the consequences of their deeds. As an interesting side-effect of this work I got to know large new sections of the city: in '82 and '83 I must have gone down every back-alley in Worli, Parel and Bhiwandi in pursuit of union-wallah dross, activist scruff and Communist scum. I use these terms not pejoratively but, if I may so put it, technically. For all industrial processes produce waste matter that must be scraped away, discarded, purged, so that excellence may emerge. The strikers were instances of such waste matter. We removed them. At the end of the strike there were sixty thousand fewer jobs in the mills than there had been at the beginning, and industrialists were at last able to modernise their plant. We skimmed off the filth, and left a sparkling, up-to-date powerloom industry behind. This was how Mainduck explained it, personally, to me. I punched, while others preferred to kick. With my bare hand I clubbed my victims viciously, metronomically--like carpets, like mules. Like time. I did not speak. The beating was its own language and would make its own meaning plain. I beat people by night and by day, sometimes briefly, rendering them unconscious with a single hammer-blow, and on other occasions more lingeringly, applying my right hand to their softer zones and grimacing inwardly at their screams. It was a point of pride to keep one's outward expression neutral, impassive, void. Those whom we beat did not look us in the eye. After we had worked them over for a while their noises stopped; they seemed at peace with our fists boots clubs. They, too, became impassive, empty-eyed. A man who is beaten seriously (as dreaming Oliver D'Aeth had intuited long ago) will be irreversibly changed. His relationship to his own body, to his mind, to the world beyond himself alters in ways both subtle and overt. A certain confidence, a certain idea of liberty is beaten out for good; always provided the beater knows his job. Often, what is beaten in is detachment. The victim--how often I saw this!--detaches himself from the event, and sends his consciousness to float in the air above. He seems to look down upon himself, on his own body as it convulses and perhaps breaks. Afterwards he will never fully re-enter himself, and invitations to join any larger, collective entity--a union, for example--are instantly rebuffed. Beatings in different zones of the body affect different parts of the soul. To be beaten for a long time upon the soles of the feet, for example, affects laughter. Those who are so beaten never laugh again. Only those who embrace their fate, who accept their thrashing, taking it like men--only those who put their hands up, acknowledge their guilt, say their mea culpas--can find something of value in the experience, something positive. Only they can say: 'At least we learned our lesson.' As for the beater: he, too, is changed. To beat; a man is a kind of exaltation, a revelatory act, opening strange gates in the universe. Time and space come away from their moorings, their hinges. Chasms yawn. There are glimpses of amazing things. I saw, at times, the past and the future too. It was hard to cling to these memories. At the end of the work, they faded. But I remembered that something had happened. That there were visions. This was enriching news. We broke the strike in the end. I will allow that I was surprised at how long it took, at the workers' loyalty to scum and dross and scruff. But--as Raman Fielding told us--the mill strike was the MA's proving ground, it honed us, it made us ready. In the next municipal elections Dr Samant's party got a handful of seats and the MA won more than seventy. The bandwagon had begun to roll. And shall I tell you how--at the local feudal landowner's invitation--we visited a village near the Gujarat border, where the freshly gathered red chillies stood around the houses in low hills of colour and spice, and put down a revolt of female workers? But no, perhaps not; your fastidious stomach would be upset by such hot stuff. Shall I speak of our campaign against those out-caste unfortunates, untouchables or Harijans or Dalits, call them what you please, who had in their vanity thought to escape the caste system by converting to Islam? Shall I describe the steps by which we returned them to their place beyond the social pale?--Or shall I speak of the time Hazare's XI was called upon to enforce the ancient custom of sati, and elaborate on how, in a certain village, we persuaded a young widow to mount her husband's funeral pyre? No, no. You've heard enough. After six years' hard work in the field we had reaped a rich harvest. The MA had taken political control of the city; it was Mayor Mainduck now. Even in the most remote rural areas, where ideas such as Fielding's had never before taken root, people had begun to speak of the coming kingdom of Lord Ram, and to say that the country's 'Mughals' must be taught the same lesson that the millworkers had so painfully learned. And events on a greater stage also played their part in the bloody game of consequences that our history has a way of becoming. A golden temple harboured armed men, and was attacked, and the armed men were slain; and the consequence was, armed men murdered the Prime Minister; and the consequence was, mobs, armed and unarmed, roamed the capital and murdered innocent persons who had nothing in common with any of the armed men except a turban; and the consequence was, that men like Fielding who spoke of the need to tame the country's minorities, to subject one and all to the tough-loving rule of Ram, gained a certain momentum, a certain extra strength. ... And I am told that on the day of Mrs Gandhi's death--the same Mrs Gandhi whom she had loathed and who had enthusiastically returned the compliment--my mother Aurora Zogoiby burst into torrential tears... Victory is victory: in the election that brought Fielding to power, the millworkers' organisations backed the MA candidates. Nothing like showing people who is boss... ... And if at times I found myself vomiting without apparent cause, if all my dreams were infernos, what ofit? If I had a constant and growing sense of being followed, yes, perhaps by vengeance, then I set such thoughts aside. They belonged to my old life, that amputated limb; I wanted nothing to do with such qualms, such foibles now. I awoke sweating with terror from a nightmare, mopped my brow, and went back to sleep. It was Uma who pursued me through my dreams, dead Uma, made frightful by death, Uma wild-haired, white-eyed, fork-tongued, Uma metamorphosed into an angel of revenge, playing a hellbat Dis-demona to my Moor. Fleeing from her, I would run into a mighty fortress, slam its doors shut, turn--and find myself outside once again, and she floating in air, above me and behind, Uma with vampire's fangs the size of elephant's tusks. And again in front of me was a fortress, its doors standing open, offering me sanctuary; and again I ran, and slammed the door, and found myself still in the open air, defenceless, at her mercy. 'You know how the Moors built,' she whispered to me. 'Theirs was a mosaic architecture of interlinked insides and outsides--gardens framed by palaces framed by gardens and so on. But you--I concjemn you to exteriors from now on. For you there are no safe palaces any more; and in these gardens I will wait for you. Across these infinite outsides I will hunt you down.' Then she came down to me, and opened her awful mouth. To the devil with such fear-of-the-dark childishness!--Or so, waking from these horrors, I reproved myself. I was a man; would act as a man acts, making my way and bearing any consequential burdens.--And if, at times in those years, both Aurora Zogoiby and I had a feeling of being pursued, then it was because--O most prosaic of explanations!--it was true. As I would learn after my mother's death, Abraham Zogoiby had had us both followed for years. He was a man who liked to be in possession of information. And while he had been prepared to tell Aurora most of what he knew about my activities--thus becoming the source from which she created the 'exile' paintings; so much for crystal balls!--he did not feel it necessary to mention that he had also been checking up on her. In their old age they had drifted so far apart as to be almost out of each other's earshot, and exchanged few unnecessary words. At any rate, Dom Minto, almost ninety years old now but once again the head of the city's leading private investigation agency, had kept us under surveillance at Abraham's behest. But Minto must take a back seat for a while. Miss Nadia Wadia is waiting in the wings. Yes, there were women, I won't attempt to deny it. Crumbs from Fielding's table. I recall a Smita, a Shobha, a Rekha, an Urvashi, an Anju and a Manju, among others. Also a striking number of non-Hindu ladies: slightly soiled Dollies, Marias and Gurinders, none of whom lasted long. Sometimes, too, at the Skipper's request I 'undertook commissions': that is, I was sent out like a party girl to pleasure some rich bored matron in her tower, offering personal favours in return for gifts to party coffers. I also accepted payment if it was offered. It made no difference to me. I was congratulated by Fielding on 'showing a genuine aptitude' for such work. But I never touched Nadia Wadia. Naclia Wadia was different. She was a beauty queen--Miss Bombay and Miss India 1987, and, later the same year, Miss World. In more than one magazine, comparisons were made between this newly arrived just-seven-teen-year-old and the lost, lamented Ina Zogoiby, my sister, to whom she was alleged to bear a strong resemblance. (I couldn't see it; but then, in the matter of resemblances, I was always a little slow. When Abraham Zogoiby suggested that Uma Sarasvati had something in her of the young Aurora, that imposing fifteen-year-old with whom he had fallen so fatefully in love, it came as news to me.) Fielding wanted Nadia--tall, Valkyrean Nadia, who had a walk like a warrior and a voice like a dirty phone call, serious Nadia who donated a percentage of her prize-money to hospitals for children and who wanted to be a doctor when she had grown tired of making the planet's males ill with desire--wanted her more than anyone on earth. She had what he lacked, and what, in Bombay, he knew he needed before his package was complete. She had glamour. And she called him a toad to his face at a civic reception; so she had guts, and needed to be tamed. Mainduck wanted to possess Nadia, to hang her like a trophy on his arm; but Sammy Hazare, his most loyal lieutenant--hideous Sammy, half-man, half-can--made a bad mistake, and fell in love. Me, I had grown uninterested in the love of women. Truthfully. After Uma, something had been switched off in me, some fuse had been blown. My employer's not infrequent magisterial leavings, and the 'commissions', were enough to satisfy me, easy-come-easy-go as they were. There was also the question of my age. When I turned thirty, my body turned sixty, and not a particularly youthful sixty, at that. Age flooded over my crumbling vellards and took possession of the lowlands of my being. My breathing difficulties had now increased to the point at which I had to retire from flying-wedge activities. No more chases down slum alleys and up the staircases of tawdry tenements for me. Long sensual nights were likewise no longer an option; these days, at best, I was strictly a one-trick pony. Fielding, lovingly, offered me work in his personal
secretariat, and the least athletically inclined of his courtesans... But Sammy, a decade older than me in years but twenty years younger in body, Sammy the Tin-man still dreamed. No breathing problems there; in Mainduck's nocturnal Olympics, either he or Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite won the impromptu lung-power contests (holding of breath, blowing of a tiny dart through a long metal blowpipe, extinguishing of candles) every time. Hazare was a Christian Maharashtrian, and had joined up with Fielding's crew for regionalist, rather than religious reasons. O, we all had reasons, personal or ideological. There are always reasons. You can get reasons in any chor bazaar, any thieves' market, reasons by the bunch, ten chips the dozen. Reasons are cheap, cheap as politicians' answers, they come tripping off the tongue: I did it for the money, the uniform, the togetherness, the family, the race, the nation, the god. But what truly drives us--what makes us hit, and kick, and kill, what makes us conquer our enemies and our fears--is not to be found in any such bazaar-bought words. Our engines are stranger, and use darker fuel. Sammy Hazare, for instance, was driven by bombs. Explosives, which had already claimed a hand and half his jaw, were his first love, and the speeches in which he sought--unsuccessfully, thus far--to persuade Fielding of the political value of an Irish-style bombing campaign were delivered with all the passion of Cyrano wooing his Roxane. But if bombs were the Tin-man's first love, Nadia Wadia was his second. Fielding's Bombay Municipal Corporation had arranged to give their girl a big send-off to the beauty finals in Granada, Spain. At the party, Nadia, free-spirited Parsi lovely that she was, spurned the reactionary, hard-line Mainduck in full view of the cameras ('Shri Raman, in my personal opinion you are not so much frog as toad, and I do not think so that if I kissed you you would turn into a prince,' she replied loudly to his clumsily murmured invitation to a private tete-a-tete) and--to underline her point--deliberately turned her charms upon his rather metallic personal bodyguard. (I was the other one; but was spared.) 'Tell me,' she purred at paralysed, sweating Sammy, 'do you think so I can win?' Sammy couldn't speak. He turned puce, and made a distant gargling noise. Nadia Wadia nodded gravely, as if she had been the beneficiary of true wisdom. 'When I entered Miss Bombay competition,' she growled, as Sammy quaked, 'my boyfriend said to me, O, Nadia Wadia, look at those so-so beautiful ladies, I don't think so you can win. But anyway, you see, I won!' Sammy reeled beneath the violence of her smile. 'Then when I entered Miss India competition,' breathed Nadia, 'my boyfriend said to me, O, Nadia Wadia, look at those so-so beautiful ladies, I don't think so you can win. But again, you see, I won!' Most of us in that room were wondering at the lese-majeste of this unseen boyfriend, and finding it unsurprising that he had not been asked to accompany Nadia Wadia to this reception. Mainduck was trying to look graceful about having recently been called a toad; and Sammy--well, Sammy was just trying not to faint. 'But now it is Miss World competition,' pouted Nadia. 'And I look in the magazine at the colour photos of all those so-so beautiful ladies, and I say to myself, Nadia Wadia, I don't think so you can win.' She looked yearningly at Sammy, craving the Tinman's reassurance, while Raman Fielding stood ignored and desperate at her elbow. Sammy burst into speech. 'But, Madam, never mind!' he blurted. 'You will get club-class round trip to Europe, and see such great things, and meet the great persons of the world. You will acquit yourself excellently and carry our national flag with honour. Yes! I am certain-sure. So, Madam, forget this winning. Who are those judges-shudges? For us--for people of India--you are already and always the winner.' It was the most eloquent speech of his life. Nadia Wadia feigned dismay. 'Oh,' she moaned, breaking his inexpert heart as she moved away. 'Then you also don't think so I can win.' There was a song about Nadia Wadia after she conquered the world: Nadia Wadia you 've gonefardia Whole of India has admiredia Whole of world you put in whirlia Beat their girls for you weregirlia I will buy you a brand new cardia Let me be your bodyguardia I love Nadia Wadia hardia. Hardia, Nadia Wadia, hardia. Nobody could stop singing it, certainly not the Tin-man. Let me be your bodyguardia... the line seemed to him like a message from the gods, an intimation of destiny. I also heard a tuneless version of the song being hummed behind Mainduck's office doors; for Nadia Wadia after her victory became an emblem of the nation, like Lady Liberty or the Marianne, she became the repository of our pride and self-belief. I could see how this affected Fielding, whose aspirations were beginning to burst the bounds of the city of Bombay and the state of Maharashtra; he gave up the mayor's office to a fellow-MA politico and began to dream of bestriding the national stage, preferably with Nadia Wadia standing at his side. Hardia, Nadia Wadia... Raman Fielding, that hideously driven man, had set himself a new goal. The Ganpati festival came round. It was the fortieth anniversary of Independence, and the MA-controlled Municipal Corporation tried to make this the most impressive Ganesha Chaturthi on record. Worshippers and their effigies were trucked in from outlying areas in their thousands. MA slogans on their saffron banners were all over the town. A special VIP stand was built just off Chowpatty, next to the footbridge; and Raman Fielding invited the new Miss World as guest of honour, and, out of respect for the festive day, she accepted. So the first part of his fantasy had come true, and he was standing beside her as the hooligan cadres came past in their MA trucks, waving clenched fists and hurling colour and flower petals into the air. Fielding made a stiff-armed, open-palmed reply; and Nadia Wadia, seeing the Nazi salute, turned away her face. But Fielding was in a kind of ecstasy that day; and as the noise of Ganpati mounted to almost unbearable heights, he turned to me--I was standing right behind him with Sammy the Tin-man, jammed against the back of the crowded little stand -and bellowed with all his might: 'Now it is time to take on your father. Now we are strong enough for Zogoiby, for Scar, for anyone. Ganpati Bappa morya! Who will stand against us now?' And in his voluptuous pleasure he seized the horrified Nadia Wadia's long, slender hand, and kissed it on the palm. 'Lo, I kiss Mumbai, I kiss India!' he screamed. 'Behold, I kiss the world!' Nadia Wadia's reply was inaudible, drowned by the cheering of the crowds. That night, on the news, I heard that my mother had fallen to her death while dancing her annual dance against the gods. It was like a validation of Fielding's confidence; for her death made Abraham weaker, and Mainduck had grown strong. In the radio and TV reports I thought I could detect a rueful apologetic note, as though the reporters and obituarists and critics were conscious of how grievously that great, proud woman had been wronged--of their responsibility for the grim retreat of her last years. And indeed in the days and months that followed her death her star rose higher than it had ever been, people rushed to re-evaluate and praise her work with an ambulance-chasing haste that made me very angry. If she merited these words now, then she had merited them before. I never knew a stronger woman, nor one with a clearer sense of who and what she was, but she had been wounded, and these words--which might have healed her if spoken while she could still hear--came too late. Aurora da Gama Zogoiby, 1924--87. The numbers had closed over her like the sea. And the painting they found on her easel was about me. In that last work, The Moor's Last Sigh, she gave the Moor back his humanity. This was no abstract harlequin, no junkyard collage. It was a portrait of her son, lost in limbo like a wandering shade: a portrait of a soul in Hell. And behind him, his mother, no longer in a separate panel, but re-united with the tormented Sultan. Not berating him--well may you weep like a woman--but looking frightened and stretching out her hand. This, too, was an apology that came too late, an act of forgiveness from which I could no longer profit. I had lost her, and the picture only intensified the pain of the loss. O mother, mother. I know why you banished me now. O my great dead mother, my duped progenitrix, my fool.