One day in my eighteenth year – it was in the early days of the Emergency, as I recall – I went with her to Zaveri Bazaar, where jewellers sat like wise monkeys in tiny shops that were all mirrors and glass, buying and selling antique silver by weight. When Miss Jaya produced a pair of heavy bracelets and handed them to the valuer, I recognised them at once as my mother’s. Miss Jaya’s stare pierced me like a spear; I felt my tongue dry and could not speak. The transaction was soon completed and we moved away from the jeweller’s into the bustle of the street, avoiding the pushcarts laden with cotton bales wrapped in jute sacking and bound with metal bands, the street stalls selling plantains, mangoes, bush-shirts, filmi magazines and belts, the coolies with huge baskets on their heads, the scooters, the bikes, the truth. We made our way home to Elephanta, and it was not until we had descended from the bus that the ayah spoke. ‘Too much,’ she said. ‘In the house. So-much too-much things.’
I didn’t answer. ‘People also,’ Miss Jaya said. ‘Coming. Going. Waking. Sleeping. Eating. Drinking. In drawing-rooms. In bedrooms. In all rooms. Too much people.’ Meaning, I understood, that because Aurora would find it hard to place her circle of friends under suspicion, nobody would ever be able to identify the thief; unless I spoke up.
‘You will not speak,’ Miss Jaya said, playing her trump. ‘For Lambajan. Because of him.’
She was right. I could not have betrayed Lambajan; he taught me how to box. He made my father’s despairing prophecy come true. You’re going to knock the whole world flat with a fist on you like that.
In the days when Lambajan had two legs and no parrot, in the days before he had become Long John Silverfellow, he had used his fists to supplement his meagre sailor’s pay. In the city’s gambling alleys, where fighting-cocks and baited bears provided the warm-up entertainment, he had earned something of a reputation and fair sums of money as a bare-knuckle boxer. He had originally wanted to be a wrestler, because in Bombay a wrestler could become a great star like the famous Dara Singh, but after a series of defeats he turned to the rawer, rougher world of the street fighters, and became known as a man who could take a punch. His win-loss record was creditable; he lost all his teeth, but he had never been knocked out.
Once a week, throughout my early life, he came into the gardens at Elephanta carrying long strips of rag, with which he would bandage my hands, before pointing to his hairy chin. ‘Right there, baba,’ he commanded. ‘Land your super bomb.’ This was how we discovered that my crippled right was a hand to be reckoned with, a torpedo, a fist of fists. Once a week I slugged Lamba as hard as I could, and at first his toothless smile never faltered. ‘Bas?’ he taunted me. ‘That feather-tickle only? That I can get from my parrot buddy here.’ After a time, however, he stopped grinning. He still presented his chin, but now I could see him bracing himself for the blow, calling up his old professional reserves … on my ninth birthday I took my swing and Totah rose noisily into the air as the chowkidar fell to earth.
‘Mashed White Elephants!’ screeched the parrot. I ran for the garden hose. I had knocked poor Lamba cold.
When he revived he turned down the corners of his mouth in impressed respect, then sat up and prodded at his bleeding gums. ‘Shot, baba,’ he praised me. ‘Now it is time to start learning.’
We hung a rice-filled bolster from the branch of a plane-tree and after Dilly Hormuz had finished her unforgettable lessons, Lambajan gave me his. For the next eight years, we sparred. He taught me strategy, what would have been called ringcraft if there had been a ring. He sharpened my positional sense and above all my defence. ‘Don’t expect you’ll never get hit, baba, and even with that fist you can’t punch if you’re hearing tweet-tweets.’ Lambajan was a coach of all-too-plainly reduced mobility; but with what herculean determination he strove to shrug off his handicap! When we worked out he would cast aside his crutch and bounce around like a human pogo-stick.
As I grew older, so my weapon increased in might. I found myself having to hold back, to pull my punches. I did not want to knock Lambajan out too often, or too violently. In my mind’s eye I saw an image of a chowkidar grown punchy, slurring his words and forgetting my name, and it made me reduce the force of my blows.
By the time Miss Jaya and I went to Zaveri Bazaar I had become expert enough for Lambajan to whisper, ‘Baba, if you want some action for real, just say one little word.’ This was thrilling, terrifying. Was I up to this? My punchbag did not hit back, after all, and Lambajan was a sparring partner of long familiarity. What if a biped opponent, made of flesh-and-blood rather than rice-and-sackcloth, danced two-legged circles round me and beat me black-and-blue? ‘Your fist is ready,’ said Lambajan, shrugging. ‘But about your heart, I cannot say.’
And so, out of bloody-mindedness, I had said the word, and we went for the first time, into those Bombay Central alleys that have no name. Lamba introduced me simply as ‘The Moor’, and because I came with him there was less contempt than I had expected. But when he told them I was a new fighter of seventeen-plus the guffaws began, because it was obvious to all the onlookers that I was a man in his thirties who was beginning to go grey, I must be guy on his last legs that one-legged Lamba was training as a favour. But as well as taunts there were raised voices in misplaced admiration. ‘Maybe he is good,’ these voices said, ‘because he is still pretty after so many years.’ Then they brought out my opponent, a loose-haired Sikh salah at least as big as me, and mentioned casually that even though this bucko had just turned twenty he had murdered two men in such bouts already and was on the run from the law. I felt my nerve going then, and looked towards Lambajan, but he just nodded quietly and spat on his right wrist. So I spat on mine and walked towards the murderer. He came straight at me, brimming with confidence, because he thought he held a fourteen-year advantage and would be able to put away this old-timer pronto. I thought about the rice bolster and let fly. The first time I touched him he went down and stayed there for a lot longer than the count of ten. As for me, even after that single blow I was visited by an asthmatic attack of gasps and tears so severe that in spite of my victory I began to doubt whether I had a future in this line of work. Lambajan pooh-poohed such uncertainties, ‘Just a little virgin nerves,’ he assured me on the way home. ‘I have seen many boys have fits and fall down frothing after their first time, win or lose. You don’t know what goods you got there, baba,’ he added delightedly. ‘Not only a pile driver but too much speed as well. Also, balls.’ There wasn’t a mark on my body, he pointed out, and what was more we had a goodly wad of pocket-money to divide.
So of course I could not accuse Lamba’s wife of thievery, and see them both dismissed. I could not lose my manager, the man who had shown me my gift … once Miss Jaya was certain of her power over me, she began to flaunt it, stealing our possessions while I watched, making sure she didn’t do it too often or steal too much – now a small jade box, now a tiny gold brooch. There were days when I saw Aurora and Abraham shaking their heads as they stared at an empty space, but Miss Jaya’s calculations proved correct: they grilled the servants, but they never called the cops, not wanting to subject their household staff to the gentle ministrations of the Bombay police, nor to embarrass their friends. (And I wonder, too, if Aurora remembered her own purloinings and disposals of little Ganesha-ornaments on Cabral Island long ago. From too-many-elephants to Elephanta had been a long journey; did her younger self rebuke her then, and even make her feel some sympathy, some solidarity with the thief?)
It was during this period of thievery that Miss Jaya told me the dreadful secret of my earliest days. We were walking at Scandal Point, across the way from the big Chamchawala house, and I think I had made some remark – the Emergency remember, was still quite new – about the unhealthy relationship between Mrs Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay. ‘The whole nation is paying for that mother-son problem,’ I said. Miss Jaya, who had been clucking her disapproval of the young lovers holding hands as they walked along the sea wall, snorted disgustedly. ‘Y
ou can talk,’ she said. ‘Your family. Perverts. Your sisters and mother also. In your baby time. How they played with you. Too sick.’
I did not know, have never known, if she was telling the truth. Miss Jaya Hé was a mystery to me, a woman so deeply angry at her lot in life that she had become capable of the most bizarre revenges. So it was a lie, then; yes, it was probably a foul lie; but what is true – let me reveal this while I am in the mood for revelations – is that I have grown up with an unusually laissez-faire attitude towards my primary sexual organ. Permit me to inform you that people have grasped at it from time to time–yes! – or have in other ways, both gentle and peremptory, demanded its services, or instructed me how and where and with whom and for how much to use it, and on the whole I have been perfectly willing to comply. Is this quite usual? I think not, begums ’n’ sahibs … More conventionally, on other occasions this same organ has issued instructions of its own, and these, too, I have tried–as men will–to follow if possible; with disastrous results. If Miss Jaya was not lying, the origins of this behaviour may lie in those early fondlings to which she so viciously alluded. And if I am honest I can picture such scenes, they seem completely credible to me: my mother fooling with my soo-soo while suckling me at her breast, or my three sisters crowding round my cot, pulling my little brown chain. Perverts. Too sick. Aurora, dancing above the Ganpati crowds, spoke of the limitlessness of human perversity. So it may have been true. It may. It may.
My god, what kind of family were we, diving together down Destruction Falls? I have said that I think of the Elephanta of those days as a Paradise, and so I do – but you may imagine to an outsider it could have looked a great deal more like Hell.
I am not sure whether my great-uncle Aires da Gama can really be called an outsider, but when he showed up in Bombay for the first time in his life at the age of seventy-two he was so sadly reduced a human being that Aurora Zogoiby only recognised him by the bulldog Jawaharlal at his side. The only remaining trace of the preening Anglophile dandy he had once been was a certain eloquent indolence of speech and gesture which, in my continuing effort to fight my too-many-r.p.m. fate by cultivating the pleasures of slowness, I tried hard to emulate. He looked ill – hollow-eyed, unshaven, underfed – and it would not have been a surprise to learn that his old disease had returned. But he wasn’t sick.
‘Carmen is dead,’ he said. (The dog was dead too, of course, had been for decades. Aires had had Jaw-jaw stuffed, and there were little furniture-wheels screwed into the undersides of his paws, so that his master could continue to pull him along on a lead.) Aurora took pity on him and set aside all the old family resentments, installing him in the most lavish of the guest rooms, the one with the softest mattress and quilt and the best view of the sea, and forbidding us all to titter at Aires’s habit of talking to Jawaharlal as if he were still alive. For the first week Great-Uncle Aires was very quiet at table, as if he were reluctant to draw attention to himself in case it resulted in the resumption of ancient hostilities. He ate little, although he did show a great liking for the new Braganza Brand lime and mango pickles which had lately taken the city by storm; we tried not to stare, but out of the corners of our eyes we saw the old gentleman slowly turning his head from side to side, as if looking for something he had lost.
On his trips to Cochin, Abraham Zogoiby had occasionally paid brief, awkward courtesy calls at the house on Cabral Island, so we knew something of the astonishing developments in that almost-severed branch of our quarrelsome clan, and as time went by Great-Uncle Aires told us the whole sad, beautiful tale. The day Travancore-Cochin became the state of Kerala, Aires da Gama had given up his secret fantasy that the Europeans might one day return to the Malabar Coast, and entered a reclusive retirement during which he set aside his lifelong philistinism to begin a complete reading of the canon of English literature, consoling himself with the best of the old world for the distasteful mutabilities of history. The other members of that unusual domestic triangle, Great-Aunt Carmen and Prince Henry the Navigator, were increasingly thrown together, and became fast friends, playing cards late into the night for high, if notional, stakes. After some years Prince Henry picked up the notebook in which they kept their betting records and informed Carmen with only half a smile that she now owed him her entire fortune. At that moment the Communists came to power, fulfilling Camoens da Gama’s dream, and Prince Henry’s fortunes rose with those of the new government. With his good connections in the Cochin docks he had run for office and had been elected by a landslide to membership of the state legislature, without having needed to campaign. On the night he told her of his new career, Carmen, inspired by the news, won back every last rupee of her lost fortune in a marathon poker-game which culminated in a single gigantic pot. Prince Henry had always hinted to Carmen that she lost so heavily because of her reluctance to fold, but on this occasion it was he who was drawn into her web, seduced by the four queens in his hand into raising the bet to vertiginous heights. When she finally had a chance to show him her four kings, he understood that in all the years of her long losing streak she had been quietly learning how to deal a crooked hand; that he had been the victim of the longest hustle in the history of card-games. Impoverished once more, he applauded her underhand skills.
‘The poor will never be as sneaky as the rich, so they will always lose in the end,’ she told him, fondly. Prince Henry got up from the card-table, kissed the top of her head, and dedicated the rest of his working life, in and out of power, to the Party’s educational policies, because only education would give the poor the means to disprove Carmen da Gama’s dictum. And indeed the literacy rate in the new State of Kerala rose to become the best in India – Prince Henry himself proved a quick learner – and then Carmen da Gama launched a daily newspaper aimed at the masses of readers in the seaside fishing-villages and also the rice-villages on the hyacinth-infested backwaters. She discovered that she had a real talent as a hands-on proprietor, and her journal became a great hit with the poor, much to Prince Henry’s rage, because even though it pretended to be taking a good leftist line it somehow managed to turn the people’s heads away from the Party, and when the anti-Communist coalition took power in the State it was card-sharp Carmen’s sneaky, fork-tongued newspaper that Prince Henry blamed as much as the interference of the central government in Delhi.
In 1974 Aires da Gama’s former lover (for their affair was long past) went on a trip into the Spice Mountains to visit the thriving elephant sanctuary of which he had been made patron, and disappeared. Carmen heard the news on her seventieth birthday, and became hysterical. Her newspaper’s headlines grew inches high, making accusations of foul play. But nothing was ever proved; Prince Henry’s body was never found, and after a decent interval the case was closed. The loss of the man who had become her closest friend and friendliest rival knocked the stuffing out of Carmen, and one night she dreamed that she was standing by a lake surrounded by forested hills, and Prince Henry was beckoning to her from the back of a wild elephant. ‘Nobody killed me,’ he told her. ‘It was just time to fold my hand.’ The next morning Aires and Carmen sat for the last time in their island garden and Carmen told her husband about the dream. Aires bowed his head, having perceived the meaning of the vision, and did not look up until he heard his wife’s china teacup fall from her lifeless hands.
I try to imagine how Elephanta must have seemed to Great-Uncle Aires when he arrived with a stuffed dog and a broken heart, what bewilderment it must have created in his diluted spirit. What, after the near-isolation of Cabral Island, would he have made of the daily mayhem of chez nous, of Aurora’s towering ego and the great working jags which would conceal her from us for days at a time, until she staggered out of her studio cross-eyed with starvation and fatigue; of my three crazy sisters and Vasco Miranda, of thieving Miss Jaya and one-legged Lambajan and Totah and Dilly Hormuz’s myopic lust? What about me?
And then there was the constant come-and-go of painters and collectors and gallery-folk an
d gawpers and models and assistants and mistresses and nudes and photographers and packers and stone-merchants and brush-salesmen and Americans and layabouts and dope-fiends and professors and journalists and celebrities and critics and the endless talk about the West as problematic and the myth of authenticity and the logic of dream and the languid contours of Sher-Gil’s figuration and the presence in the work of B. B. Mukherjee of both exaltation and dissent and the derivative progressivism of Souza and the centrality of the magical image and the proverb and the relationship between gesture and revealed motifs, to say nothing of rivalrous discussions of how-much and to-whom and group-hang and one-man-show and New York and London, and the arriving and departing processions of paintings, paintings, paintings. For it seemed that every painter in the country had developed the urge to make pilgrimages to Aurora’s door to ask for her blessing on their work – which she gave to the ex-banker with his luminous Indianised Last Supper, and withheld with a harrumph from the talentless New Delhi self-publicist with the beautiful dancer wife, with whom Aurora went off to practise her Ganpati routine, leaving the painter alone with his awful canvases … was this glorious too-muchness simply too much for poor old Aires? – In which case, our earlier supposition, that one boy’s Paradise could be another fellow’s Hell, would be, perhaps, well proven.
The Moor's Last Sigh Page 22
