The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  That Sunday six weeks after Ina died we were making an effort to close the family’s sadly depleted ranks. Aurora in elegant slacks and open-necked white linen shirt made a point of displaying the family’s solidarity by walking arm-in-arm with Abraham, who was white of mane and magnificently straight of back, at seventy-four every inch the suited-and-booted patriarch, no longer a country cousin among the grandees, but the very grandest of them all. The morning had not begun auspiciously, however. On our way to Mahalaxmi we had picked up Minnie – Sister Floreas – who had been excused, on compassionate grounds, from morning worship at the Maria Gratiaplena convent. She sat beside me on the back seat in her coiffed nun’s get-up, fidgeting with her rosary and mumbling hailmarys under her breath, looking – I thought – like a version of the Duchess in Alice; much prettier, of course, but just as absolutist; or like a gamine court card – Funny Face meets the Queen of Spades. ‘I saw Ina last night,’ she pronounced without preamble. ‘She says to tell you she is happy in Heaven and the music is very nice.’ Aurora flushed purple, jammed her lips shut and set her jaw. Minnie had started seeing visions lately, although Aurora was not convinced. The Duchess’s view of her baby boy could, if paraphrased, apply to my holy duchess of a sister, too: She only does it to annoy, because she knows it teases.

  Abraham said, ‘Don’t upset your mother, Inamorata,’ and now it was Minnie’s turn to frown, because that name belonged to her past, it had no connection with the person she was becoming, the wonder of the Gratiaplena nuns, the most ascetic of all the faithful, the most uncomplaining of workers, the hardest-scrubbing of floor-scrubbers, the gentlest and most dedicated of nurses, and – as if seeking to atone for a lifetime of privilege – the wearer of the roughest and itchiest undergarments in the Order, which she had sewn for herself out of old jute sacks stinking of cardamoms and tea, and which brought her tender skin up in great weals, until the Mother Superior warned her that excessive mortification was itself a form of vanity. After that rebuke Sister Floreas stopped wearing sackcloth next to the skin, and the visions began.

  Alone in her cell on her plank of wood (she had quickly dispensed with a bed) she was visited by a genderless elephant-headed angel who issued a strongly worded critique of the loose morals of the citizens of Bombay, whom it compared to Sodomites and Gomorrahis, and threatened with floods, droughts, explosions and fires, these punishments to be spread over a period of approximately sixteen years; and by a talking black rat who prophesied that the Plague itself would return as the last plague of all. The vision of Ina was something much more personal, and whereas the earlier manifestations had mostly made Aurora fear for her daughter’s balance of mind this new apparition made her see red, perhaps not least beause of the recent appearance of Ina’s ghost in her own work; but also because of a general feeling she had developed since her daughter’s death – a feeling shared by many people in those paranoid, unstable times – that she was being followed. Wraiths were entering our family life, they were crossing the frontier between the metaphors of art and the observable facts of everyday life, and Aurora, unnerved, took refuge in her rage. But today had been designated as a day for family unity, and so, uncharacteristically, my mother bit her lip.

  ‘She says the food is also good,’ Minnie added, informatively. ‘All the ambrosia, nectar and manna you can eat, and you never put on weight.’ Fortunately the Mahalaxmi racecourse was only a few minutes’ drive from Altamount Road.

  And now Abraham and Aurora were arm-in-arm as they had not been for many long years, and Minnie, our very own cherub, was tripping along at their heels, while I lagged behind a little, lowering my head to avoid people’s eyes, jamming my right hand deep into my trousers, and kicking at the turf for shame; because of course I could hear the whispers and giggles of the matriarchs and the young beauties of Bombay, I knew that if I walked too close to Aurora – who, for all her white hair, looked no more than forty-five at the age of fifty-three – then to the casual bystander, yours truly, at twenty-looking-forty, looked too old to be her child. O catch him … misshapen … freaky … some peculiar disorder … I hear they keep him locked up … such a shame on the house … almost like an idiot, they say … and his poor father’s only son. Thus did the oily tongue of gossip lubricate the wheel of scandal. Our people do not react with grace to misfortunes of the body. Or, indeed, the mind.

  Perhaps in a way they were right, those racecourse whisperers. In a way I was a sort of social idiot, severed by my nature from the everyday, made strange by fate. Certainly I have never considered myself to be a scholar of any sort. Thanks to my unusual, and (by conventional standards) hopelessly inadequate education I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered, and caught the light. Fool’s gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood’s rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.

  It is true that I had managed to cling to Dilly, for extra-curricular reasons, much longer than I should. Nor was there any question of my going to college. I did some modelling for my mother, while my father accused me of wasting my life, and began to insist on introducing me to the family business. It was a long time since anyone – except Aurora – had dared to stand up to Abraham Zogoiby. In his middle seventies he was strong as a bullock, fit as a wrestler, and apart from his worsening asthma as healthy as any of the track-suited joggers at the racecourse. His relatively humble origins had been forgotten, and the old C-50 enterprise of Camoens da Gama had been assimilated into the huge corporate entity known acronymically in business parlance as ‘Siodi Corp’. ‘Siodi’ was C.O.D. which was Cashondeliveri, and the use of this nickname was energetically encouraged by Abraham. It drove out the old – the memory of the decayed and assimilated empire of the Cashondeliveri grandees – and drove in the new. A financial-pages profile referred to him as ‘Mr Siodi’ – the brilliant new entrepreneur behind the House of Cashondeliveri, and after that some of his business partners had mistakenly begun to call him ‘Siodi Sahib’. Abraham did not always trouble to correct them. So he was beginning to paint a new layer over his own past … and as a father, too, age had painted a palimpsest-image over the memory of the man who had hugged my newborn form and wept comforting words. Now he had grown formidable, distant, dangerous, cold, and impossible to disobey. I bowed my head, and accepted his offer of an entry-level position in the marketing, sales and publicity department of the Baby Softo Talcum Powder Company (Private) Limited. After that I had to schedule my work with Aurora around my office commitments. But of modelling and babies, more anon.

  As for the question of a bride, my ruined limb – a handicap in the zone of the handicap-free – was indeed a sort of spectre at the matrimonial feast, it made young ladies shudder fastidiously, reminding them of life’s ugliness when in their high-born way they sought to concentrate on its beauty. Ugh! It was a fearsome fist. (As regards its long-term future: I’ll say only that while Lambajan had shown me a little of my club-hard right mitt’s true potential, I had not yet discovered my vocation. My sword still slept in my hand.)

  No, I did not belong amongst these thoroughbreds. In spite of my discontinued peregrinations with our larcenous housekeeper Jaya Hé, I was an alien in their town – a Kaspar Hauser, a Mowgli. I knew little about their lives, and (what was worse) I did not care to know more. For while I might be a perpetual outsider among that racecourse breed, still in my twenty years I had gathered experience at such a rate that I had come to feel that time, in my vicinity, had begun to move at my own, doubled speed. I no longer felt like a young man trapped inside an old – or rather, to borrow the lingo of the city’s textile industry, ‘antiqued’, even ‘distressed’ – covering of skin. My outer, apparent age had simply become my age.

  Or so I thought: until Uma showed me the truth.

  Jamshed Cashondeli
veri, who had unexpectedly been plunged into a deep depression by his ex-wife’s death and dropped out of law school soon after it, joined us at Mahalaxmi, as Aurora had arranged. Not far from the racecourse is the Great Breach, or Breach Candy, through which at certain seasons the ocean used to pour, flooding the low-lying Flats behind; just as Hornby Vellard was built to seal Breach Candy (completed, according to reliable sources, c. 1805), so the breach between Jimmy and Ina was to be posthumously healed, or so Aurora had decided, by the vellard of her indomitable will. ‘Hi, Uncle, Auntie,’ said Jimmy Cash, waiting awkwardly at the finishing-post, and essaying a crooked smile. Then his face changed. His eyes widened, the colour drained from his anyway-pretty-pale cheeks, his mouth dropped open. ‘What’s gottofied your goat?’ asked Aurora, surprised. ‘You look like you took a gander at a ghost.’ But mesmerised Jimmy did not reply; and continued, wordlessly, to gape.

  ‘Greetings, family members,’ said Mynah’s sardonic voice from behind our backs. ‘I hope you guys don’t mind, but I brought along a friend.’

  All of us who walked with Uma Sarasvati around Mahalaxmi racecourse that morning came away with a different view of her. A few facts were established: that she was twenty years old, and a star art student at the M.S. University in Baroda, where she had already won high praise from the so-called ‘Baroda group’ of artists, and where the noted critic Geeta Kapur had been moved to write a glowing appreciation of her gigantic stone-carving of Nandi, the great bull of Hindu mythology, which had been commissioned from her by the homonymous stockbroker and billionaire financier V. V. Nandy – ‘Crocodile’ Nandy himself. Kapur had compared the work to that of the anonymous masters of the eighth-century Parthenon-sized monolithic wonder, the Kailash Temple, greatest of all the Ellora caves; but Abraham Zogoiby, hearing about the statue as we strolled, unleashed a remarkably bull-like bellow of laughter. ‘That young muggermutch V.V. never had any shame,’ he roared. ‘A Nandi bull, is it? Should have been one of those blind crocs from the rivers up north.’

  Uma had presented herself, with an introduction from a friend in the Gujarati branch of the United Women’s Anti-Price Rise Front, at the tiny, crowded office in a run-down three-storey block near Bombay Central station from which Mynah’s group of women activists against corruption and for civil and women’s rights – known as the WWSTP Committee after its best-known slogan, We Will Smash This Prison (Is Jailko Todkar Rehengé), but also called, mockingly, by its detractors, ‘Women Who Sleep Together Probably’ – was doing battle against half-a-dozen Goliaths. She had spoken of her high regard for Aurora’s painting, but also of the importance of the work being done by highly motivated groups such as Mynah’s in exposing the evils of bride-burning, in setting up women’s patrols against rape, and in a dozen other areas. Her passion and knowledge charmed my notably hard-nosed sister; hence her presence at our little family reunion on Mahalaxmi turf.

  So much for what was beyond dispute. What was truly remarkable was that during that morning amble at Mahalaxmi the newcomer found a way to spend a few private minutes with each of us in turn, and after she departed, saying modestly that she had already intruded for too long on our family gathering, every one of us had a fiercely held opinion about her, and many of these opinions contradicted each other utterly and were incapable of being reconciled. To Sister Floreas, Uma was a woman from whom spirituality seemed to flow like a river; she was abstinent and disciplined, a great soul who saw through to the final unity of all religion, whose differences she was convinced would dissolve under the blessed brilliance of divine light; whereas in Mynah’s opinion she was hard as nails – this, from our Philomina, was a high compliment – and a dedicated secularist marxian feminist whose inexhaustible commitment to the struggle had renewed Mynah’s own appetite for the fray. Abraham Zogoiby dismissed both these views as ‘so much foolishness’ and praised Uma’s razor-sharp financial brain, and her mastery of the very latest in modern deal-making and takeover theory. And Jamshed Cashondeliveri, he of the bulging eye and dropping jaw, confessed in hushed tones that she was the living reincarnation of gorgeous departed Ina, Ina as she had been before the burgers of Nashville ruined her, ‘only she’, he blurted out, like the fool he had always been, ‘is like an Ina with a singing voice, and also brains.’ He had just begun to explain that Uma and he had slipped away behind the grandstand for a few moments, and there the young girl had sung to him in the sweetest country voice he had ever heard; but Aurora Zogoiby had had enough. ‘Everybody here has gone to pot today,’ she thundered. ‘But Jimmy boy, you just passofied the point of no return. Be off with you! Get going ek-dum and never darken our door.’

  We left Jimmy standing in the paddock with a stunned-fish glaze in his eye.

  Aurora resisted Uma from the start; she alone left the racecourse with a sceptical twist to her lip. Permit me to emphasise this point: she never gave the younger woman a chance, though Uma was unfailingly modest about her own artistic abilities, volubly worshipful of my mother’s genius, and asked no favours. Indeed, after her triumph at the 1978 Documenta show in Kassel, when the most illustrious of London and New York dealers snapped her up, she telephoned Aurora long-distance from Germany and shouted through the international crackle, ‘I made Kasmin and Mary Boone promise to show your work as well. Otherwise, I said, I could not permit them to show mine.’

  Like a goddess from the machine she came among us, speaking to our inmost selves. Only godless Aurora failed to hear. Uma came diffidently to Elephanta two days later and Aurora locked her studio door. Which was – to put it mildly – neither adult nor polite. To make up for my mother’s rudeness, I offered to show Uma around the old place, and said hotly, ‘You are welcome in our home as often as you like.’

  What Uma said to me at Mahalaxmi I repeated to no-one. For public consumption she had said laughingly, ‘So if this is a racecourse then I want to race,’ kicked off her chappals, picked them up in her left hand, and gone flying down the track, her long hair zooming out behind her like speed-lines in strip cartoons, marking the air through which she had passed as jet trails mark the sky. I had run after her, of course; it had not occurred to her that I would not. She was a speedy runner, faster than me, and finally I had to give up, because my chest commenced to heave and wheeze. I leaned gasping against the white rails, with both hands pressing against my lungs, trying to calm the spasm. She came back to me and placed her hands over mine. As my breathing settled down she caressed my mangled right hand lightly and said in a voice almost too quiet to be audible, ‘This hand could smash down whatever stood in its way. I would feel very safe near a hand like this.’ Then she looked into my eyes and added, ‘There is a young guy in there. I can see him looking out at me. What a combination, yaar. Youthful-spirit, plus this older-man look that I must tell you I have gone for all my life. Too hot, men, I swear.’

  So this is it, I told myself in wonderment. This prickle of tears, his throat-lump, this heat risen in the blood. My perspiration had acquired a peppery smell. I felt my self, my true self, the secret identity I had hidden so long that I feared it might no longer exist, come rising out of the corners of my being and filling my centre. Now I was nobody’s man, and also wholly, immutably and for ever, hers.

  She took away her hands; leaving behind a Moor in love.

  On the morning of Uma’s first visit my mother had decided she wanted to paint me in the nude. Nudity was nothing special in our circle; over the years many of the painters and their friends had posed for one another in the buff. Not so long ago, the guest toilet at Elephanta had been decorated by Vasco Miranda’s mural of himself and Kekoo Mody in bowler hats and nothing else. Kekoo was as thin and elongated as ever, but success and years of debauchery and carousing had plumped out Vasco, who was also much the shorter man. The interest of the painting lay in the obvious fact that the two men seemed to have exchanged penises. The cock on Vasco was astoundingly long and thin, like a pale pepperoni sausage, whereas tall Kekoo sported a squat dark organ of impressive dia
meter and circumference. However, both men swore that there had been no switch. ‘I have the paintbrush and he has the bankroll,’ Vasco explained. ‘What could be more appropriate?’ It was Uma Sarasvati who gave the painting the name by which it was always subsequently known. ‘Looks like Laurel and Hardon,’ she giggled, and it stuck.