Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear; not fear of Aires or Carmen or the Photophobic priest, but a sudden terrible apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world’s beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate’s victory would not make it other than it was. ‘Better, however, to win.’ He had promised Aurora looking-after, and he would be as good as his word.
My mother painted The Scandal, I don’t need to tell any art-lovers, since the huge canvas is right there in the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, filling up a whole wall. Go past Raja Ravi Verma’s Woman Holding a Fruit, that young bejewelled temptress whose sidelong gaze of open sensuality reminds me of pictures of the young Aurora herself; turn the corner at Gaganendranath Tagore’s spooky water-colour Jadoogar (Magician), in which a monochrome Indian version of the distorted world of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari stands upon a shocking orange carpet (and, I confess, I am reminded of the house on Cabral Island by the harsh shadows, skulking figures and shifting perspectives of this picture, to say nothing of the strange, half-screened figure, at its heart, of a gowned’n’crowned giantess); and- turn away quickly now! This is not the moment to get into the arch-cosmopolitan Aurora Zogoiby’s contemptuous opinion of the work of her older, and determinedly village-oriented rival for the title of Greatest Woman Painter! – facing Amrita Sher-Gil’s masterpiece The Ancient Story-Teller, there it is: Aurora at her best, in my humble or maybe not-so-humble opinion the equal for colour and movement of any Matisse dance-circle, only in this densely crowded picture with its deliberately garish magentas, its scandalous neon greens, the dance is not of bodies but of tongues, and all the tongues of the highly coloured figures whispering lick-lick-lick into one another’s ears are black, black, black.
I will not speak here of the picture’s painterly qualities, but simply point out some of its thousand-and-one anecdotes, for as we know Aurora had learned much from the narrative-painting traditions of the South: see, here is the repeated and cryptic figure of a ginger-coloured, sweating priest with the head of a dog, and we can agree, I hope, that this is, in many ways, the figure which orchestrates the action of the painting. Look! There he is, a splash of ginger lurking in the blue tiles of the synagogue; and again, at the Santa Cruz Cathedral, painted from top to bottom with fake balconies, fake garlands and of course the Stations of the Cross, there! You can see the dog-vicar whispering in the ear of a shocked Catholic Bishop, represented as a Fish, in full regalia.
The scandal – I should say The Scandal–is a great spiral of a scene, into which Aurora has woven both the scandals that enveloped the da Gamas of Cochin, both the burning spice-fields and the lovers whose smell of spices gave their game away. Warring Lobo and Menezes clans can be spotted on the mountains that form the backdrop for the spiralling throng: the Menezes people all have serpents’ heads and tails and the Lobos, of course, are wolves. But in the foreground are the streets and waterways of Cochin, and they teem with scandalised congregations: fish-Catholics, dog-Anglicans, and the Jews all painted Delft blue, like figures in Chinese tiles. The Maharaja, the Resident, various officers of law are shown receiving petitions; action of various sorts is being demanded. Lick-lick-lick! Placards are carried, burning torches raised. There are armed men defending godowns against the righteous arsonists of the town. Yes, tempers are running high in this painting: as in life. Aurora always said that the picture had its origins in her family history, irritating those critics who objected to such historicising, which reduced art to mere ‘gossip’ … but she never denied that the figures at the heart of the angrily swirling spiral were based upon Abraham and herself. They are the still heart of the whirlwind, asleep on a peaceful island at the centre of the storm; they lie with their bodies entwined in an open pavilion set in a formal garden of waterfalls and willow-trees and flowers, and if you look closely at them, for they are small, you will see that they have feathers instead of skin: and their heads are the heads of eagles, and their eagerly licking tongues are not black, but juicy, plump, and red. ‘The storm died down,’ my father told me when he took me to see this picture as a boy. ‘But we soared above it, we defied the lot of them, and we endured.’
I want – finally! – to say something good at this point about Great-Uncle Aires and his wife, Carmen/Sahara. I want to offer arguments in extenuation of their behaviour: that in fact they had been genuinely worried on Aurora’s behalf when they burst in on her little love-nest, that after all it is no simple matter for a penniless thirty-six-year-old man to deflower a fifteen-year-old millionairess. I want to say that Aires and Carmen’s lives were painful and twisted, because they were living out a lie, and so sometimes their behaviour came out twisted, too. Like Jaw-jaw-Jawaharlal, they made plenty of noise but didn’t draw much blood. Above all, I want to emphasise that they very quickly regretted their brief alliance with the Angel Allover-Death, and when the scandal was at its height, when mobs came within feet of destroying their warehouses, when there was talk of lynching the Jew and his child-whore, when the dwindling population of the Mattancherri Jewtown had for a few days to fear for their lives and the news from Germany didn’t sound as if it came from very far away, Aires and Carmen stood by the lovers: they closed ranks, defended family interests. And if Aires had not stood before the godown-threatening throng and shouted down its leaders – an act of immense personal courage – and if he and Carmen had not personally visited all the city’s religious and secular authorities and insisted that what had happened between Abraham and Aurora was a love-match, and that as her legal guardians they made no objection to it, then perhaps things would have spiralled out of control. As it was, however, the scandal fizzled out in a few short days. At the Masonic Lodge (Aires had recently become a Freemason), local worthies congratulated Mr da Gama on his sensitive handling of the affair. The sisters Aspinwall, returning too late from ‘Snooty Ooty’, missed all the fun.
No victory is ever complete. The Bishop of Cochin refused to countenance the idea of Abraham’s conversion, and Moshe Cohen the leader of the Cochin Jews declared that under no circumstances could any Jewish marriage be performed. This is why – I now reveal for the first time – my parents were so keen to speak of the event in the Corbusier chalet as their wedding night. When they went to Bombay, they would call themselves Mr and Mrs, and Aurora took the name Zogoiby and made it famous; but, ladies and gents, there were no wedding bells.
I salute their unmarried defiance; and note that Fate so arranged matters that neither of them – irreligious as they were – needed to break confessional links with the past, after all. I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was – what’s the word these days? – atomised. Yessir: a real Bombay mix.
Bastard: I like the sound of the word. Baas, a smell, a stinky-poo. Turd, no translation required. Ergo, Bastard, a smelly shit; like, for example, me.
Two weeks after the end of the scandal he had unleashed against my future parents, Oliver D’Aeth was visited by a particularly nasty anopheles mosquito, which crawled, while he slept, through a hole in his mosquito-net. Soon after this visit by the mosquito of poetic justice, he contracted the malaria of just desserts, and in spite of being nursed night and day by the Widow Elphinstone, who mopped his brow with the cold compresses of dashed hopes, he sweated mightily, and died.
Man, but I’m in a compassionate sort of mood today. What do you know? I feel sorry for that poor bugger, too.
8
THE THIRD, AND MOST shocking, of our family scandals never became public knowledge, but now that my father Abraham Zogoiby has given up the ghost at ninety years of age I no longer feel any compunction about letting his skeletons out of the cupboard … it’s better to win was his unchanging motto, an
d from the moment he entered Aurora’s life she understood that he meant what he said; because no sooner had the hullabaloo about their love affair died down than, with a chug of smoke from its funnels and a loud whom whom whom from its horn, the cargo ship Marco Polo set off for the London Docks.
That evening Abraham returned to Cabral Island after a whole day’s absence, and when he went so far as to pat the bulldog Jawaharlal on the head it was plain that he was bursting with delight. Aurora, at her most imperious, demanded to know where he’d been. In reply he pointed at the departing boat and made, for the first of many times in their life together, the sign that meant don’t ask: he drew an imaginary needle and thread through his lips, as if to sew them shut. ‘I told you’, he said, ‘that I would take care of the unimportant things: but to do it, sometimes I must go quietly to Thread-Needle Street.’
At that time the newspapers, the radio, the gossip in the streets spoke of nothing but war – to be frank, Hitler and Churchill did as much as anyone to prevent my scandalous parents’ goose from being cooked; the outbreak of World War II was a pretty effective diversionary tactic – and the prices of pepper and spices had grown unstable on account of the loss of the German market, and the growing number of stories about the risks to cargo vessels. Particularly persistent were the rumours about German plans to paralyse the British Empire by sending warships and submarines – people were starting to learn the term U-boats – into the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean as well as the Atlantic, and trading vessels (so everybody believed) would be as high-priority a target as the British Navy; on top of which there would be mines. In spite of all this, Abraham had worked his magic trick, and the Marco Polo was even now disappearing out of Cochin harbour and heading West. Don’t ask, his lip-stitching fingers warned; and Aurora, my empress of a mother, put up her hands, brought them together for a little round of applause, and asked no more. ‘I always wanted a magician,’ was all she said. ‘Looks like I found one after all.’
I marvel at my mother when I think of it. How did she stifle her curiosity? Abraham had done the impossible, and she was content not to know how: she was prepared to live in ignorance, as the Young Lady of Thread-Needle Street. And in the years that followed, as the family business diversified triumphantly in a hundred and one directions, as the treasure-mountains grew from mere Gama-Ghats into Zogoiby-Himalayas, did she never imagine – did she never think for one moment – but of course, she must have; hers was a chosen blindness, her complicity the complicity of silence, of don’t-tell-me-things-I-don’t-want-to-know, of quiet-I-am-busy-with-my-Great-Work. And such was the force of her not-seeing that none of us looked either. What a cover she was for Abraham Zogoiby’s operations! What a brilliant, legitimising façade … but I must not run ahead of my story. For the present, it is necessary only to reveal – no, it is high time that somebody revealed it! – that my father, Abraham Zogoiby, turned out to have a genuine talent for changing reluctant minds.
I have it from the horse’s mouth: he spent most of his missing hours among the dock-workers, drawing aside the largest and strongest of those known to him, and pointing out that if the Nazis’ attempt at a blockade succeeded, if businesses like the da Gamas’ Camoens Fifty Per Cent Corp. (Private) Limited were to go under, then they, the stevedores, and their families, too, would quickly sink into destitution. ‘That Marco Polo captain,’ he murmured contemptuously, ‘by his cowardice in refusing to sail, is snatching food from your kiddies’ plates.’
Once he had succeeded in building an army strong enough to overpower the ship’s crew, should the need arise, Abraham went by himself to see the chief clerks. Messrs Tejpattam, Kalonjee and Mirchandalchini met him with ill-concealed distaste, for had he not been their humble minion until very recently, theirs to command as they pleased? Whereas – thanks to his seduction of that cheap hussy, the Proprietor – he now had the effrontery to come laying down the law like a boss of bosses … however, having no option, they followed his instructions. Urgent and insistent telegraphic messages were sent to the owners and the master of the Marco Polo, and a short while after that Abraham Zogoiby, still unaccompanied, was taken out to the cargo-boat by the harbour pilot himself.
The meeting with the ship’s captain didn’t take long. ‘I laid out the total situation frankly,’ my father told me in his great old age. ‘Necessity of prompt action to corner the British market as compensation for loss of German income, so on so forth. I was generous, that is always wise in negotiation. Because of his courage, I said, we would make him a rich man just when he reached East India Dock. This he liked. This made him well disposed.’ He paused, gasping, trying to fill the tattered remnant of his lungs. ‘Naturally, there was not only this bowl of carrot-halva but a big bumboo-stick as well. I informed Skipper that if there was no compliance by sunset then to my great regret, speaking as a colleague, his ship would go to the bottom of the harbour and he personally would, alas, be required to accompany the same.’
Would he have carried out his threat? I asked him. For a moment I thought he was going to reach for his invisible needle and thread; but then a coughing fit seized him, he hacked and hawked, his milky old eyes streamed. Only when the convulsions subsided a little did I understand that my father had been laughing. ‘Boy, boy,’ croaked Abraham Zogoiby, ‘never try an ultimatum unless’n’until you are ready and willing to have the ultimatee call your bluff.’
The master of the Marco Polo did not dare call the bluff; but someone else did. The cargo ship journeyed across the ocean, travelling beyond rumour, beyond calculation, until the German cruiser Medea holed her when she was no more than a few hours away from the island of Socotra off the tip of the Horn of Africa. She sank quickly; all hands, and the full cargo, were lost.
‘I played my ace,’ my antique father reminisced. ‘But, damme, it got trumped.’
Who could blame Flory Zogoiby for going a little loco after her only child walked out on her? Who could begrudge her the hours upon hours she had begun to spend straw-hatted, sucking her gums on a bench in the synagogue entrance-hall, slapping down patience cards or clicking away with mah-jong tiles, and delivering herself of a non-stop tirade against ‘Moors’, a concept which had by now expanded to include just about everyone? And who would not have forgiven her for thinking she was seeing things, when prodigal Abraham marched up to her, bold as brass, one fine day in the spring of 1940, grinning sweetly all over his face as if he’d just located some rainbow-end pot of gold?
‘So, Abie,’ she said slowly, not looking directly at him in case she found she could see through him, which would prove that she had finally cracked into little pieces. ‘You want to play a game?’
His smile widened. He was so handsome that it made her angry. What business did he have coming here, pouring his good looks all over her without any warning? ‘I know you, Abie boy,’ she said, still staring at her cards. ‘When you got that smile on, you’re in trouble, and the wider the smile, the deeper the mud. Looks to me like you can’t handle what you got, so you came running to mother. I never in all my days saw you smile so big. Sit! Play one-two hands.’
‘No games, mother,’ Abraham said, his smile almost touching his ear-lobes. ‘Can we go inside or does the whole of Jewtown have to know our business?’
Now she looked him in the eye. ‘Sit,’ she said. He sat; she dealt for nine-card rummy. ‘You think you can beat me? Not me, son. You never had a chance.’
A ship sank. Abraham’s new trader family’s fortunes were placed once more in crisis. I am pleased to say that this led to no unseemly squabbling on Cabral Island – the truce between old and new clan members held firm. But the crisis was real enough; after much cajoling, and other, less, mentionable tactics from the depths of Thread-Needle Street, a second and then a third da Gama shipment had been sent on their way, going the long way round via Good Hope to avoid North African dangers. In spite of this precaution and the British Navy’s efforts to police all vital sea-routes – though it must be said, and Pandit N
ehru said it from jail, that the British attitude to Indian shipping was, to understate matters, more than a little lax – these two ships also ended up adding spice to the ocean-bed; and the C-50 condiment empire (and, who knows, perhaps also the heart of Empire itself, deprived of peppery inspiration) began to totter and sway. Overheads – wage-bills, maintenance costs, interest on loans – mounted. But this is not a company report, and so you must simply take it from me: things had reached a sorry pass when beaming Abraham, latterly a powerful merchant of Cochin, returned to Jewtown. Hath all his ventures failed? What, not one hit? – Not one. Okay-fine? Then let’s get on. I want to tell you a fairy-tale.
In the end, stories are what’s left of us, we are no more than the few tales that persist. And in the best of the old yarns, the ones we ask for over’n’over, there are lovers, it’s true, but the parts we go for are the bits where shadows fall across the lovers’ path. Poisoned apple, bewitched spindle, Black Queen, wicked witch, baby-stealing goblins, that’s the stuff. So: once upon a time, my father Abraham Zogoiby gambled heavily, and lost. But he had made a vow: I’ll take care of things. And accordingly, when all other devices failed, his desperation was so great that he was obliged to come, grinning mightily, to plead with his maddened mother. – For what? – What else? Her treasure chest.
Abraham swallowed his pride and came a-begging, which in itself told Flory all she needed to know about the strength of her hand. He had made a boast he could not make good; spinning-straw-into-gold, that kind of old-time stuff; and was too proud to admit his failure to his in-laws, to tell them they must mortgage or sell off their great estate. They gave you your head, Abie, and see, here it is on a plate. She made him wait a little, but not too long; then agreed. Capital needed? Jewels from an old box? Then OK, he could take. All speeches of gratitude, explanations of temporary cash-flow problems, disquisitions upon the especially persuasive properties of jewels when sailors are being requested to risk their lives, all offers of interest and pecuniary profit were waved away. ‘Jewels I am giving,’ Flory Zogoiby said. ‘A greater jewel must be my reward.’
The Moor's Last Sigh Page 12
