The Moor's Last Sigh (33 page)

ECALCITRANT, UNREGENERATE, PARAMOUNT: THE Over World's cackling overlord in his hanging garden in the sky, rich beyond rich men's richest dreams, Abraham Zogoiby at eighty-four reached for immortality, long-fingered as the dawn. Though he always feared an early death, he had made old bones; Aurora died instead. His own health had improved with age. He still limped, there were still breathing difficulties, but his heart was stronger than at any time since Lonavla, his sight sharper, his hearing more acute. He tasted food as if eating it for the first time, and in his business dealings could always smell a rat. Fit, mentally agile, sexually active, he already contained elements of the divine--had already risen far above the herd, and of course above the Law as well. Not for him those sinuous wordshackles, those due processes, those paper bounds. Now, after Aurora's fall, he decided to refuse death altogether. Sometimes, sitting astride the highest needle in the giant bright pincushion at the city's southern tip, he marvelled at his destiny, he filled withfeeling, he looked down on moon-glistened nightwater and seemed to see, beneath its mask, his wife lying broken amid the crabs' dogged scuttles, the clinging of shells, and the bright knives offish, whole regimented canteens of them, filleting her fatal sea. Not for me, he demurred. I have just begun to live. Once by a southern shore he had seen himself as a part of Beauty, as one half of a magic ring, completed by that wilful brilliant girl. He had feared the defeat of loveliness by what was ugly in the earth, sea and ourselves. How long ago that was! Two daughters and a wife dead, a third girl gone to Jesus and the young-old boy to Hell. How long since he was beautiful, since beauty made him a conspirator in love! How long since unsanctified vows acquired legitimacy through the force of their desire, like coal crushed by heavy aeons into a faceted jewel. But she turned away from him, his beloved, she did not keep her part of the bargain, and he lost himself in his. In what was worldly, what was of the earth and in the nature of things, he found comfort for the loss of what he had touched, through her love, of the transcendent, the transformational, the immense. Now that she had gone, leaving him with the world in his hand, he would wrap himself in his might, like a golden cloak. Wars were brewing; he would win them. New shores were visible; he would take them by storm. He would not emulate her fall. She received a state funeral. He stood by her open casket in the cathedral and let his thoughts run on new strategies of gain. Of the three pillars of life, God, family and money, he had only one, and needed a minimum of two. Minnie came to say her farewells to her mother but seemed somehow too glad. The devout rejoice in death, Abraham thought, they think it's the door to God's chamber of glory. But that's an empty room. Eternity is here on earth and money won't buy it. Immortality is dynasty. I need my outcast son. When I found a message from Abraham Zogoiby tucked neatly under the pillow of my bed in Raman Fielding's house, I understood for the first time how great his power had grown. 'Do you know who your Daddyji is, high in his tower?' Mainduck had asked me, before unleashing a mad tirade about anti-Hindu robots and what-not. The note under my pillow made me wonder what else might or might not be true, for there in the sanctums of the Under World I had been shown, by this casual demonstration of the length of my father's arm, that Abraham would be a formidable antagonist in the coming war of the worlds, Under versus Over, sacred versus profane, god versus mammon, past versus future, gutter versus sky: that struggle between two layers of power in which I, and Nadia Wadia, and Bombay, and even India itself would find ourselves trapped, like dust between coats of paint. Racecourse, read the note, written in his own hand. Paddock. Before the third race. Forty days had passed since my mother was laid to rest in my absence, with cannons firing a salute. Forty days and now this magically delivered but utterly banal communication, this withered olive branch. Of course I would not go, I first thought in predictable, wounded pride. But just as predictably, and without informing Mainduck, off I went. Children at Mahalaxmi played ankh micholi, hide-and-go-seek, in and out of the crowds of adult legs. This is how we are to one another, I thought, divided by generations. Do jungle animals understand the true nature of the trees among which they have their daily being? In the parent-forest, amid those mighty trunks, we shelter and play; but whether the trees are healthy or corroded, whether they harbour demons or good sprites, we cannot say. Nor do we know the greatest secret of all: that one day we, too, will become as arboreal as they. And the trees, whose leaves we eat, whose bark we gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once, they climbed like squirrels and bounded like deer, until one day they paused, and their legs grew down into the earth and stuck there, spreading, and vegetation sprouted from their swaying heads. They remember this as a fact; but the lived reality of their fauna-years, the how-it-felt of that chaotic freedom, is beyond recapture. They remember it as a rustle in their leaves. I don't know my father, I thought at the paddock before the third race. We are strangers. He will not know me when he sees me, and will pass blindly by. Something--a small parcel--was being pushed into my hand. Somebody whispered, quickly: 'I need an answer before we can proceed.' A man in a white suit, wearing a white panama, pushed into the human forest, and was gone. Children screamed and fought at my feet. Here I come ready or not. I tore open the packet in my hand. I had seen this thing before, clipped to Uma's belt. These headphones once adorned her lovely head. Always mangling my tapes. I chucked it in a bin. Another lie; another game of hide-and-seek. I saw her running away from me, dodging into the human thickets with an unnerving rabbit-like scream. What would I find when I found her? I put the headphones on, lengthening them until the earpieces fitted. There was the play button. I don't want to play, I thought. I don't like this game. I pushed the button. My own voice, dripping poison, filled my ears. You know those people who claim to have been captured by aliens and subjected to unspeakable experiments and tortures--sleep deprivation, dissection without anaesthesia, prolonged tickling of the armpits, hot chillis inserted into the rectum, over-exposure to marathon performances of Chinese opera? I must tell you that after I stopped listening to the tape in Uma's Walkman I felt I had been in the clutches of just such an unearthly fiend. I imagined a chameleon-like creature, a cold-blooded lizard from across the cosmos, who could take human form, male or female as required, for the express purpose of making as much trouble as possible, because trouble was its staple diet--its rice, its lentils, its bread. Turbulence, disruption, misery, catastrophe, grief: all these were on the menu of its preferred foods. It came among us--she (on this occasion) came among us--as a farmer of discontents, a fomentor of war, seeing in me (O fool! O thrice-assed dolt!) a fertile field for her pestilential seeds. Peace, serenity, joy were deserts to her--for if her noisome crops failed, she would starve. She ate our divisions, and grew strong upon our rows. Even Aurora--Aurora, who saw the truth of her from the start--had succumbed in the end. No doubt it had been a point of pride for Uma; like the great predator she was, she had been most eager to devour the most elusive prey. Nothing she could have said would have taken my mother in. Knowing this, she used my words--my angry, awful, lust-provoked obscenities--instead. Yes, she had recorded it all, had gone that far; and with what seduction she led me down that road, eliciting the fatal phrases by making me think they were what she needed to hear! I do not excuse myself. The words were mine, I said them. A lesser fool would have said less. But loving her and knowing my mother's opposition I spoke at first in rage, then in confirmation of the primacy of romantic love over the mother-son variety; coming from a house where easy obscenities had always peppered and spiced our conversational dishes, I did not flinch from fuck and cunt and screw. And then continued these dark murmurs, because in our lovemaking she, my lover, asked--how often she asked!--that I tell her those things, to heal--O most false! O foully false and falsely foul!--her wounded confidence and pride. Your lover asks, in loving's midst, for your endorsement of her need; she needs you, so she says, to need it too: do you refuse? Well, if so, so. I do not know your secrets, nor desire to know more. But perhaps you do not refuse. Yes, you say, O my love, yes, I also need, I do. I spoke in the privacy and complicity of the act of love. Which, too, was a part of Uma's deception, a necessary means to her end. Forty-five minutes a side of our lovemaking's edited highlights were on that sad cassette, and running through the bump and grind, the loathsome leitmotif. Fuck her. Yes I want to. God I do. Fuck my mother. Screw her. Screw the fucking bitch. And each coarse syllable drove a skewer into my mother's broken heart. When Aurora was already deep in shock, with Mynah newly dead, the creature seized its moment, disguising her errand of hate as a pilgrimage of love. She gave my parents the tape that night, she went there for that purpose and no other, and I can only guess at their terror and hurt, can only create my own image of the scene--Aurora slumped all night on the piano-stool in her orange and gold saloon, old Abraham hand-wringing helplessly against a wall, and through a shadowed doorway a glimpse of frightened servants, fluttering like trembling hands at the edges of the frame. And the next morning, when I left her bed, Uma must have known what awaited me at home--the grimly ashen faces in the garden, the hand pointing at the gates: go, get theefrom hence and never return any more. And when in my bewilderment I came back to her flat, how she surpassed herself! What a performance she gave that day!--But now I knew everything. No more benefits of doubts. Uma, my beloved traitor, you were ready to play the game to the end; to murder me and watch my death while hallucinogens blew your mind. Later, no doubt, you would have announced my tragic suicide: 'Such a sad family quarrel, poor tender-hearted man, he could not bear. And the death of a sister too.' But farce intervened, a lunge, a slapstick clash of heads, and then, like the great actress and gambler you were, you played the scene out to the end; and came out on the wrong side of a fifty-fifty bet. Even absolute evil has its impressive side. Lady, I doff my hat; and so goodnight. That rabbity scream again; it hangs on the air, and fades. As if some ancient malignity, unable to bear truth's light, were dissolving into dust... but no, I will permit myself no such fancies. She was a woman, of woman born. Let her be seen as such... Mad or bad? I no longer have a problem with that question. Just as I have rejected all supernatural theories (alien invaders, rabbit-screechy vampires), so also I will not allow her to be mad. Space-lizards, undead bloodsuckers and insane persons are excused from moral judgment, and Uma deserves to be judged. Insaan, a human being. I insist on Uma's insaanity. This, too, is what we are like. We, too, are planters of winds, and harvesters of hurricanes. There are those among us--not alien but insaan--who eat devastation; who, without a regular supply of mayhem, cannot thrive. My Uma was one of those. Six years! Six years of Aurora, twelve of Moor, lost. My mother was sixty-three when she died; I looked sixty myself. We might have been brother and sister. We might have been friends. 'I need an answer,' my father had said at the races. Yes, he must have one. It must be the plain truth; everything about Uma and Aurora, Aurora and me, me and Uma Sarasvati, my witch. I would set it all down, and surrender myself to his sentence. As Yul Brynner, in Pharaonic mode (that is, a rather fetching short skirt), was so fond of saying in The Ten Commandments: 'So let it be written. So let it be done.' There had been a second note, placed beneath my pillow by an unseen hand. There had been instructions, and a master key, which had unlocked a certain unguarded service entrance at the rear of Cashondeliveri Tower, and also the door to a private elevator leading direcdy to the thirty-first floor penthouse. There had been a reconciliation, an explanation accepted, a son gathered to his father's bosom, a broken bond renewed. 'O my boy your age, your age.' 'O my father and also yours.' There was a clear night, a high garden, a talk such as we had not had before. 'My boy, hide nothing from me. I know everything already. I have eyes that see and ears that hear and I know your deeds and misdeeds.' And before I could make any attempt at justification, there was a raised hand, a grin, a cackle. 'I am pleased,' he said. 'You left me as a boy and you have come back as a man. Now we can talk as men of manly things. Once you loved your mother more. I do not blame you. I was the same. But now it is your father's turn; a turn, I should more righdy say, for us. Now I can ask if you will join your force to mine, and hope to speak freely of many hidden things. There is at my age a question of trust. There is a need to speak my heart, to unlock my locks, to unveil my mysteries. Great things are afoot. That Fielding, who is he? A bug. At best a Pluto of the Under World and we know from Miranda's nursery what is Pluto. A stupid collared dog. Or now, one can maybe say, a frog.' There was a dog. In a special corner of the soaring atrium, a stuffed bull terrier on wheels. 'You kept him,' I wondered. 'Aires's oldjawaharlal.' 'For old times' sake. Sometimes on this leash, in this little garden, I take Jaw-jaw for a walk.' Now came danger. Having agreed with my father to be his man, to know what he knew and assist him in his enterprises, I agreed, also, to remain for a time in Fielding's employ. So to betray my master to my father I returned into my master's house. And told Mainduck--for he was no fool--something of the truth. 'It is good to heal a family quarrel but it does not affect my choices.' Which Fielding, being kindly disposed towards me by reason of my six years of service, accepted; and suspected. He would watch me always from now on, I knew. My first mistake would be my last. I am a part of the battlefield, I thought, and they are the bloody war. When my team-mates--my old comrades in battle--heard my happy news: Chhaggan shrugged. As though to say: 'You never were one of us, rich boy. Neither Hindu nor Mahratta. Just a cook