The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  The city itself, perhaps the whole country, was a palimpsest, Under World beneath Over World, black market beneath white; when the whole of life was like this, when an invisible reality moved phantomwise beneath a visible fiction, subverting all its meanings, how then could Abraham’s career have been any different? How could any of us have escaped that deadly layering? How, trapped as we were in the hundred per cent fakery of the real, in the fancy-dress, weeping-Arab kitsch of the superficial, could we have penetrated to the full, sensual truth of the lost mother below? How could we have lived authentic lives? How could we have failed to be grotesque?

  It is clear to me now, as I look back, that the only thing wrong with Vasco Miranda’s Independence Night gag about the power of corruption being equal to that of the gods was the excessive mildness of its formulation. And of course Abraham Zogoiby must have known very well that the painter’s boozy attempt at flamboyant cynicism was in fact an understatement of the case.

  ‘Your mother and her art crowd were always complaining what tough times they had making something out of nothing,’ Abraham confessing his crimes in his great old age remembered, with more than a little amusement. ‘What did they make? Pictures! But I, I, I-tho brought a whole new city out of nowhere! Now you judge: which is the harder magic trick? From your dear mother’s conjuring hat came many fine creatures; but from mine, mister – King Kong!’

  During the first twenty or so years of my life, new tracts of land– ‘something out of nothing’ – were reclaimed from the Arabian Sea at the southern end of the Bombay peninsula’s Back Bay, and Abraham invested heavily in this reverse-Atlantis rising from the waves. In those days there was much talk of relieving the pressure on the overcrowded city by limiting the extent and height of new buildings in the Reclamation area, and then constructing a second city centre on the mainland across the water. It was important for Abraham that this scheme should fail – ‘how could I maintain the value of the property in which I had sunk so many assets, if not?’ he asked me, spreading his skeletal arms wide and baring his teeth in what would once have been a disarming smile, but now, in the semi-darkness of his office high above the city streets, gave my nonagenarian father the appearance of a voracious skull.

  He found an ally when Kiran (‘K.K.’ or ‘Kéké’) Kolatkar, a little pop-eyed black cannonball of a politico from Aurangabad, and the toughest of all the hard men who have bossed Bombay over the years, rose to dominate the Municipal Corporation. Kolatkar was a man to whom Abraham Zogoiby could explain the principles of invisibility, those hidden laws of nature that could not be overturned by the visible laws of men. Abraham explained how invisible funds could find their way through a series of invisible bank accounts and end up, visible and clean as a whistle, in the account of a friend. He demonstrated how the continued invisibility of the dream-city across the water would benefit those friends who might have, or by chance acquire, a stake in what had until recently been invisible but had now risen up like a Bombay Venus from the sea. He showed how easy it would be to persuade those worthy officers whose job it was to monitor and control the number and height of new buildings in the Reclamation that they would be much advantaged were they to lose the gift of sight – ‘metaphorically, of course, boy – it was only a figure of speech; don’t think we wanted to put out anybody’s eyes, not like Shah Jehan with that peeping Tom who wanted a sneak preview of the Taj’ – so that great crowds of new edifices could actually remain invisible to public scrutiny, and soar into the sky, as high as anyone could wish. And, once again, hey presto, the invisible buildings would generate mountains of cash, they would become some of the most valuable real-estate on earth; something out of nothing, a miracle, and all the friends who had helped make it so would be well rewarded for their pains.

  Kolatkar was a quick learner, and even came up with an inspiration of his own. Suppose these invisible buildings could be built by an invisible work-force? Would that not be the most elegant and economic of results? ‘Naturally, I agreed,’ old Abraham confessed. ‘That little bullet-head Kéké was getting into the swing.’ Soon after that the city authorities decreed that any persons who had settled in Bombay subsequent to the last census were to be deemed not to exist. Because they had been cancelled, it followed that the city bore no responsibility for their housing or welfare, which came as a welcome relief to those honest, and actually-existing citizens who paid taxes for the upkeep of the messy, dynamic burg. However, it cannot be denied that for the million or more ghosts who had just been created by law, life got harder. This was where Abraham Zogoiby and all those who had jumped on the great Reclamation bandwagon came in, generously hiring as many phantoms as they could to work on the huge construction sites springing up on every inch of the new land, and even going so fer – O philanthropists! – as to pay them small amounts of cash for their work. ‘Nobody ever heard of paying spooks until we began the practice,’ said ancient Abraham, cackling wheezily. ‘But naturally we accepted no responsibility in case of ill-health or injury. It would have been, if you follow my line, illogical. After all, these persons were not just invisible, but actually, according to official pronouncements, simply not at all there.’

  We had been sitting in thickening gloom on the thirty-first floor of the jewel of the New Bombay, I. M. Pei’s masterpiece, Cashondeliveri Tower. Through the window I could see the shining spear of K. K. Chambers lancing the night. Now Abraham rose and opened a door. Light poured in, and high arpeggios of music. He led me into a giant atrium stocked with trees and plants from more temperate climes than our own – there were orchards of apple-trees and poiriers, and heavy grapevines, too – all under glass, maintained at ideal conditions of temperature and humidity by a climate-control system whose cost would have been unimaginable if it had not been invisible; for, by some happy chance, no electricity bill had ever been presented to Abraham for payment. From this atrium comes my last memory of him – of my old, old father, whom I, with my thirty-six-going-on-seventy-two appearance, was beginning more and more to resemble; my unrepentant, serpentine father, who had taken over Eden in the absence of Aurora and God.

  ‘Now, but, I’m done for,’ he sighed. ‘It’s all coming apart in my hand. The magic stops working when people start seeing the strings. To hell! I had a damn fine run. Have a bloody apple.’

  12

  I GREW IN ALL directions, willy-nilly. My father was a big man but by the age of ten my shoulders had grown wider than his coats. I was a skyscraper freed of all legal restraints, a one-man population explosion, a megalopolis, a shirt-ripping, button-popping Hulk. ‘Look at you,’ my big sister Ina marvelled when I reached my full heft and height. ‘You have become Mr Gulliver-Travel and we are your Lilliputs.’ Which was true at least in this respect: that if our Bombay was my personal not-Raj-but-Lilli-putana, then my great size was indeed succeeding in tying me down.

  The wider my physical bounds were set, the more limited my horizons seemed to become. Education was a problem. Many boys from ‘good homes’ on Malabar Hill, Scandal Point and Breach Candy began their education at Miss Gunnery’s Walsingham House School, which was co-educational at kindergarten and junior level, before they went on to Campion or Cathedral or one of the city’s other in-those-days-boys-only élite establishments. But the legendary ‘Gunner’ in her horn-rims with their Batmobile fins refused to accept the truth about my condition. ‘Too old for KG,’ she snorted, at the end of an interview in which she treated my three-and-a-half-year-old self at all times as if I were the seven-year-old she could not help seeing seated in my chair, ‘and for the junior school, I am deploring to be informing, sub-normal.’ My mother was incensed. ‘Who-all have you got in class?’ she demanded. ‘Einsteins, is it? Little Alberts and Albertinas, must be? A whole schoolful of emcee-squares?’

  But La Gunnery was not to be moved, and so it was home tuition for me. A string of male tutors followed, few of them lasting more than a few months. I bear them no grudge. Faced with, for example, an eight-year-old who had decide
d, in honour of his friendship with the painter V. Miranda, to sport a fully waxed pointy-tipped moustache, they understandably fled. In spite of all my efforts to create a neat, tidy, obedient, moderate, unexceptional persona, I was simply too weird for them; until that is, my first female tutor was hired. O Dilly Hormuz of sweet memory! Like Miss Gunnery, her thick glasses wore fins, or wings; but these were the wings of angels. Arriving in a white frock and ankle-socks early in 1967, her hair bunched in thin tails, books gathered to her bosom, myopically blinking and nervously chatterboxy, she looked at first glance more like a kid than yours truly. But Dilly was worth a second look, for she, too, was in disguise. She wore flat shoes and the practised stoop with which tall girls learn to hide their height; but she soon began, when we were alone, to uncoil – ah, the pale magnificent length of her, from her smallish head to her shapely but enormous feet! Also – and even after all these years the memory of it creates in me a blushy heat of nostalgic longing – she commenced to stretch. Stretching Dilly – pretending to reach for a book, a ruler, a pen – revealed to me, and me alone, the fullness of the body beneath the frock, and soon began to return, with her level unblinking gaze, my own crude bug-eyed gawps. Pretty Dilly – for when we were alone and she let down her hair, when she took off her glasses to blink at me blindly through those haunting, deep-set, absent eyes, then her true looks were unveiled – looked long and hard upon her new pupil, and sighed.

  ‘Ten years old, men,’ she said softly the first time we were alone. ‘Man cub, you are the eighth wonder and no mistake.’ And after that, remembering her didactic rôle, began her first lesson by making me learn by heart – to ‘ruttofy’, as we said – the world’s seven ancient and seven modern wonders, mentioning, as she did so, the interesting proximity on Malabar Hill of myself (‘young Master Colossus’) and the Hanging Gardens – as if the Wonders were gathering here, and taking Indian form.

  It seems to me now that in my younger self, in that appalling monster in whom a child’s mind peered out in confusion through the portals of a young man’s beautiful body (for, in spite of my hand, of all my sense of self-disgust and need for comfort, Dilly would have seen beauty in me; beauty, our family curse!), my teacher Miss Hormuz found a kind of personal liberation, understanding that I was hers to command as a child, and also – and here I venture into dangerous water – hers to touch, and be touched by, as a man.

  I do not remember now how old I was (though I had certainly shaved off my Vascoid moustache) when Dilly ceased to simply marvel at my physique and began, timidly at first, and then with increasing freedom, to caress it. I was at an internal age at which such caresses were innocent gestures of the love for which I was so wolfishly hungry; externally, my body had become capable of wholly adult responses. Do not condemn her, for I cannot; I was a wonder of her world, and she was simply entranced.

  For almost three years my lessons took place at Elephanta, and during these thousand days and a day, there were limits imposed by the location, and the fear of being caught in the act. Refrain, if you will, from asking me to say how far our caresses went; from obliging me, in my remembering, to stop, once again, at the frontiers for which we possessed no passport! The memory of that time remains a breathless ache, it makes my heart pound, it is a wound that does not heal; for my body knew what I did not, and though the child sat half-bewildered in the prison of his flesh, still my lips, my tongue, my limbs began to act, under her expert tutelage, quite independently of my mind; and on some blessed days, when we felt safe, or when what drove us on grew too maddening to care about the risk, her hands, her lips, her breasts moving at my groin brought me a measure of hot and desperate relief.

  She took my ruined hand, some days, and placed it thus and so. She was the first human being to make me feel, for those stolen moments, whole … and most of the time, no matter what her body might be up to with mine, she kept up a constant stream of information. We had no lovers’ chit-chat; the battle of Srirangapatnam and the principal exports of Japan were all our bill and coo. While her fluttering fingers raised my body temperature to unbearable heights, she kept things under control by obliging me to recite my thirteen times table or enumerate the valencies of each element in the periodic table. Dilly was a girl with a lot to say, and infected me with gabbiness, which to this day retains, for me, a powerful erotic charge. When I chatter on, or am assailed by the garrulity of others, I find it–how-to-say? – arousing. Often, in the heat of bavardage, I must place my hands upon my lap to conceal the movements there from the eyes of my companions, who would be puzzled by such arousal; or, more probably, amused. I have had, until now, no wish to become the source of such amusement. But now all must, and will, be told; now, my life’s story, that tissue of erectile volubility, is drawing to a close.

  Dilly Hormuz was a spinster of perhaps twenty-five when we met, and in her mid-thirties when I last saw her. She lived with her tiny, elderly and stone-blind mother, who sat on a balcony all day long, sewing quilts, her needlewoman’s fingers having long ago ceased to need the assistance of her eyes. How could such a small, frail woman have produced so tall and voluptuous a daughter, I wondered, when at the age of thirteen it was agreed that I was old enough to be sent to Dilly’s place for my lessons, because it would do me good to get out of the house. Some days I would forgo the car, waving away the driver, and walk – I would actually skip – down the hill to see her, passing the gracious old pharmacy at Kemp’s Corner – this was long before it turned into the flyover-and-boutique spiritual wasteland it is today – and the Royal Barber Shop (where a master barber with a cleft palate offered a circumcision service as a sideline). Dilly lived in the dark, peeling depths of an old grey Parsi house, all balconies and curlicues, on Gowalia Tank Road, a few doors up from Vijay Stores, that numinous mixed business where you could buy both Time, with which you could polish your wooden furniture, and Hope, with which you could wipe your bum. We Zogoibys used to call it Jaya Stores, pretending it was named after our sourpuss ayah, Miss Jaya Hé, who went there to buy herself little packets of Life, inside which were eucalyptus cleaning-sticks for the teeth, and Love, with which she henna’ed her hair … With my heart singing, and with a feeling something very like ecstasy I would enter Dilly’s home, that small apartment of impoverished, but still tasteful, gentility. The presence of a baby grand piano in the front room and of silver-framed photographs upon it, portraits of patriarchs in tasselled flowerpot hats and of a saucy young society belle who turned out to be old Mrs Hormuz herself, indicated that her family had once known better times; as did Dilly’s skill in Latin and French. I have forgotten most of my Latin, but what I remember of French – language, literature, kisses, letters; the sweat-soaked afternoon pleasures of the cinq à sept – Dilly, I learned it all from you … Now, however, the two women were doomed to a life of private tuition and quilts. This may explain why Dilly was so hungry for a man that she settled for an overgrown boy; why she would leap on to my lap, her legs straddling me, and whisper as she bit my lower lip: ‘I took my specs off, men; now I see my lover only, nothing but.’

  She was indeed my first lover, but I think I did not love her. I know this because she made me glad of my condition, glad that my outward form was older than my years should have allowed. I was still a child; so I wanted for her sake to hurtle towards adulthood with all possible speed. I wanted to be a man for her, a real man and not manhood’s simulacrum, and if that meant sacrificing even more of my already abbreviated span, then I would happily have made that devil-deal for her blessed sake. But when real love, the great grand thing itself, came along after Dilly had gone, how bitterly, then, I resented my lot! With what hunger and rage I yearned to slow down the too-fast ticking of my unheeding internal clock! Dilly Hormuz never shook in me the child’s conviction of his own immortality, which was why I could wish so lightly to throw away my childhood years. But Uma, my Uma, when I loved her, made me hear Death’s lightning footsteps as they ran towards me; then, O then, I heard each lethal scything
of his blade.

  I grew towards manhood under Dilly Hormuz’s soft, knowing hand. But – and here is a hard confession indeed, perhaps my hardest yet – she was not the first woman to touch me. Or so I have been told, though it should be said that the witness – our ayah, Miss Jaya Hé, peg-leg Lambajan’s domineering wife – was a liar and a thief.

  The children of the rich are raised by the poor, and since both my parents were dedicated to their work I was frequently left with only the chowkidar and the ayah for company. And even though Miss Jaya was as snappy as a claw, with lips as sharp as scratches and eyes as narrow as squeaks, even though she was as thin as ice and as bossy as boots, I was and am grateful to her, for in her time off she was a peripatetic sort of bird, she liked to wander the city in order to disapprove of it, clucking her tongue and pursing her lips and shaking her head at its various infelicities. So it was with Miss Jaya that I rode the B.E.S.T. trams and buses, and while she disapproved of their overcrowding I was secretly rejoicing in all that compacted humanity, in being pushed so tightly together that privacy ceased to exist and the boundaries of your self began to dissolve, that feeling which we only get when we are in crowds, or in love. And it was with Miss Jaya that I ventured into the fabulous turbulence of Crawford Market with its frieze by Kipling’s dad, with its vendors of chickens both live and plastic, and it was with Miss Jaya that I penetrated the rum dens of Dhobi Talao and ventured into the chawls, the tenements, of Byculla (where she took me to visit her poor – I should say her poorer – relations, who with yet-more-impoverishing offers of cold drinks and cakes treated her arrival like the visit of a queen), and it was with her that I ate watermelon at Apollo Bunder and chaat on the seafront at Worli, and with all these places and their loud inhabitants, with all these commodities and comestibles and their insistent vendors, with my inexhaustible Bombay of excess, I fell deeply and for ever in love, even while Miss Jaya was enjoying herself by giving full vent to her outsized capacity for derision, even while she was firing out judgments from which she would permit no appeal: ‘Too costly!’ (Chickens.) ‘Too disgusting!’ (Dark rum.) ‘Too slummy!’ (Chawl.) ‘Too dry!’ (Watermelon.) ‘Too hot!’ (Chaat.) And always, on our return home, she turned to me with a glittering, resentful look and spat out, ‘You, baba: too lucky! Thank your lucky stars.’