To the devil with such fear-of-the-dark childishness! – Or so, waking from these horrors, I reproved myself. I was a man; would act as a man acts, making my way and bearing any consequential burdens. – And if, at times in those years, both Aurora Zogoiby and I had a feeling of being pursued, then it was because – O most prosaic of explanations! – it was true. As I would learn after my mother’s death, Abraham Zogoiby had had us both followed for years. He was a man who liked to be in possession of information. And while he had been prepared to tell Aurora most of what he knew about my activities – thus becoming the source from which she created the ‘exile’ paintings; so much for crystal balls! – he did not feel it necessary to mention that he had also been checking up on her. In their old age they had drifted so far apart as to be almost out of each other’s earshot, and exchanged few unnecessary words. At any rate, Dom Minto, almost ninety years old now but once again the head of the city’s leading private investigation agency, had kept us under surveillance at Abraham’s behest. But Minto must take a back seat for a while. Miss Nadia Wadia is waiting in the wings.
Yes, there were women, I won’t attempt to deny it. Crumbs from Fielding’s table. I recall a Smita, a Shobha, a Rekha, an Urvashi, an Anju and a Manju, among others. Also a striking number of non-Hindu ladies: slightly soiled Dollies, Marias and Gurinders, none of whom lasted long. Sometimes, too, at the Skipper’s request I ‘undertook commissions’: that is, I was sent out like a party girl to pleasure some rich bored matron in her tower, offering personal favours in return for gifts to party coffers. I also accepted payment if it was offered. It made no difference to me. I was congratulated by Fielding on ‘showing a genuine aptitude’ for such work.
But I never touched Nadia Wadia. Nadia Wadia was different. She was a beauty queen – Miss Bombay and Miss India 1987, and, later the same year, Miss World. In more than one magazine, comparisons were made between this newly arrived just-seventeen-year-old and the lost, lamented Ina Zogoiby, my sister, to whom she was alleged to bear a strong resemblance. (I couldn’t see it; but then, in the matter of resemblances, I was always a little slow. When Abraham Zogoiby suggested that Uma Sarasvati had something in her of the young Aurora, that imposing fifteen-year-old with whom he had fallen so fatefully in love, it came as news to me.) Fielding wanted Nadia – tall, Valkyrean Nadia, who had a walk like a warrior and a voice like a dirty phone call, serious Nadia who donated a percentage of her prize-money to hospitals for children and who wanted to be a doctor when she had grown tired of making the planet’s males ill with desire – wanted her more than anyone on earth. She had what he lacked, and what, in Bombay, he knew he needed before his package was complete. She had glamour. And she called him a toad to his face at a civic reception; so she had guts, and needed to be tamed.
Mainduck wanted to possess Nadia, to hang her like a trophy on his arm; but Sammy Hazaré, his most loyal lieutenant – hideous Sammy, half-man, half-can – made a bad mistake, and fell in love.
Me, I had grown uninterested in the love of women. Truthfully. After Uma, something had been switched off in me, some fuse had been blown. My employer’s not infrequent magisterial leavings, and the ‘commissions’, were enough to satisfy me, easy-come-easy-go as they were. There was also the question of my age. When I turned thirty, my body turned sixty, and not a particularly youthful sixty, at that. Age flooded over my crumbling vellards and took possession of the lowlands of my being. My breathing difficulties had now increased to the point at which I had to retire from flying-wedge activities. No more chases down slum alleys and up the staircases of tawdry tenements for me. Long sensual nights were likewise no longer an option; these days, at best, I was strictly a one-trick pony. Fielding, lovingly, offered me work in his personal secretariat, and the least athletically inclined of his courtesans … But Sammy, a decade older than me in years but twenty years younger in body, Sammy the Tin-man still dreamed. No breathing problems there; in Mainduck’s nocturnal Olympics, either he or Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite won the impromptu lung-power contests (holding of breath, blowing of a tiny dart through a long metal blowpipe, extinguishing of candles) every time.
Hazaré was a Christian Maharashtrian, and had joined up with Fielding’s crew for regionalist, rather than religious reasons. O, we all had reasons, personal or ideological. There are always reasons. You can get reasons in any chor bazaar, any thieves’ market, reasons by the bunch, ten chips the dozen. Reasons are cheap, cheap as politicians’ answers, they come tripping off the tongue: I did it for the money, the uniform, the togetherness, the family, the race, the nation, the god. But what truly drives us – what makes us hit, and kick, and kill, what makes us conquer our enemies and our fears – is not to be found in any such bazaar-bought words. Our engines are stranger, and use darker fuel. Sammy Hazaré, for instance, was driven by bombs. Explosives, which had already claimed a hand and half his jaw, were his first love, and the speeches in which he sought – unsuccessfully, thus far – to persuade Fielding of the political value of an Irish-style bombing campaign were delivered with all the passion of Cyrano wooing his Roxane. But if bombs were the Tin-man’s first love, Nadia Wadia was his second.
Fielding’s Bombay Municipal Corporation had arranged to give their girl a big send-off to the beauty finals in Granada, Spain. At the party, Nadia, free-spirited Parsi lovely that she was, spurned the reactionary, hard-line Mainduck in full view of the cameras (‘Shri Raman, in my personal opinion you are not so much frog as toad, and I do not think so that if I kissed you you would turn into a prince,’ she replied loudly to his clumsily murmured invitation to a private tête-à-tête) and – to underline her point – deliberately turned her charms upon his rather metallic personal bodyguard. (I was the other one; but was spared.) ‘Tell me,’ she purred at paralysed, sweating Sammy, ‘do you think so I can win?’
Sammy couldn’t speak. He turned puce, and made a distant gargling noise. Nadia Wadia nodded gravely, as if she had been the beneficiary of true wisdom.
‘When I entered Miss Bombay competition,’ she growled, as Sammy quaked, ‘my boyfriend said to me, O, Nadia Wadia, look at those so-so beautiful ladies, I don’t think so you can win. But anyway, you see, I won!’ Sammy reeled beneath the violence of her smile.
‘Then when I entered Miss India competition,’ breathed Nadia, ‘my boyfriend said to me, O, Nadia Wadia, look at those so-so beautiful ladies, I don’t think so you can win. But again, you see, I won!’ Most of us in that room were wondering at the lèse-majesté of this unseen boyfriend, and finding it unsurprising that he had not been asked to accompany Nadia Wadia to this reception. Mainduck was trying to look graceful about having recently been called a toad; and Sammy – well, Sammy was just trying not to faint.
‘But now it is Miss World competition,’ pouted Nadia. ‘And I look in the magazine at the colour photos of all those so-so beautiful ladies, and I say to myself, Nadia Wadia, I don’t think so you can win.’ She looked yearningly at Sammy, craving the Tinman’s reassurance, while Raman Fielding stood ignored and desperate at her elbow.
Sammy burst into speech. ‘But, Madam, never mind!’ he blurted. ‘You will get club-class round trip to Europe, and see such great things, and meet the great persons of the world. You will acquit yourself excellently and carry our national flag with honour. Yes! I am certain-sure. So, Madam, forget this winning. Who are those judges-shudges? For us – for people of India – you are already and always the winner.’ It was the most eloquent speech of his life.
Nadia Wadia feigned dismay. ‘Oh,’ she moaned, breaking his inexpert heart as she moved away. ‘Then you also don’t think so I can win.’
There was a song about Nadia Wadia after she conquered the world:
Nadia Wadia you’ve gone fardia
Whole of India has admiredia
Whole of world you put in whirlia
Beat their girls for you were girlia
I will buy you a brand new cardia
Let me be your bodyguardia
; I love Nadia Wadia hardia
Hardia, Nadia Wadia, hardia.
Nobody could stop singing it, certainly not the Tin-man. Let me be your bodyguardia … the line seemed to him like a message from the gods, an intimation of destiny. I also heard a tuneless version of the song being hummed behind Mainduck’s office doors; for Nadia Wadia after her victory became an emblem of the nation, like Lady Liberty or the Marianne, she became the repository of our pride and self-belief. I could see how this affected Fielding, whose aspirations were beginning to burst the bounds of the city of Bombay and the state of Maharashtra; he gave up the mayor’s office to a fellow-MA politico and began to dream of bestriding the national stage, preferably with Nadia Wadia standing at his side. Hardia, Nadia Wadia … Raman Fielding, that hideously driven man, had set himself a new goal.
The Ganpati festival came round. It was the fortieth anniversary of Independence, and the MA-controlled Municipal Corporation tried to make this the most impressive Ganesha Chaturthi on record. Worshippers and their effigies were trucked in from outlying areas in their thousands. MA slogans on their saffron banners were all over the town. A special VIP stand was built just off Chowpatty, next to the footbridge; and Raman Fielding invited the new Miss World as guest of honour, and, out of respect for the festive day, she accepted. So the first part of his fantasy had come true, and he was standing beside her as the hooligan cadres came past in their MA trucks, waving clenched fists and hurling colour and flower petals into the air. Fielding made a stiff-armed, open-palmed reply; and Nadia Wadia, seeing the Nazi salute, turned away her face. But Fielding was in a kind of ecstasy that day; and as the noise of Ganpati mounted to almost unbearable heights, he turned to me – I was standing right behind him with Sammy the Tin-man, jammed against the back of the crowded little stand – and bellowed with all his might: ‘Now it is time to take on your father. Now we are strong enough for Zogoiby, for Scar, for anyone. Ganpati Bappa morya! Who will stand against us now?’ And in his voluptuous pleasure he seized the horrified Nadia Wadia’s long, slender hand, and kissed it on the palm. ‘Lo, I kiss Mumbai, I kiss India!’ he screamed. ‘Behold, I kiss the world!’
Nadia Wadia’s reply was inaudible, drowned by the cheering of the crowds.
That night, on the news, I heard that my mother had fallen to her death while dancing her annual dance against the gods. It was like a validation of Fielding’s confidence; for her death made Abraham weaker, and Mainduck had grown strong. In the radio and TV reports I thought I could detect a rueful apologetic note, as though the reporters and obituarists and critics were conscious of how grievously that great, proud woman had been wronged – of their responsibility for the grim retreat of her last years. And indeed in the days and months that followed her death her star rose higher than it had ever been, people rushed to re-evaluate and praise her work with an ambulance-chasing haste that made me very angry. If she merited these words now, then she had merited them before. I never knew a stronger woman, nor one with a clearer sense of who and what she was, but she had been wounded, and these words – which might have healed her if spoken while she could still hear– came too late. Aurora da Gama Zogoiby, 1924–87. The numbers had closed over her like the sea.
And the painting they found on her easel was about me. In that last work, The Moor’s Last Sigh, she gave the Moor back his humanity. This was no abstract harlequin, no junkyard collage. It was a portrait of her son, lost in limbo like a wandering shade: a portrait of a soul in Hell. And behind him, his mother, no longer in a separate panel, but re-united with the tormented Sultan. Not berating him – well may you weep like a woman – but looking frightened and stretching out her hand. This, too, was an apology that came too late, an act of forgiveness from which I could no longer profit. I had lost her, and the picture only intensified the pain of the loss.
O mother, mother. I know why you banished me now. O my great dead mother, my duped progenitrix, my fool.
17
RECALCITRANT, 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 with feeling, 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 of fish, 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 crowd
s 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.
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