The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  ‘She walks around here. I’ve seen her.’ Abraham in sky-orchard with stuffed dog confessed to a vision – driven, for the first time in his life, and after a lifetime of utter scepticism on the subject, to allow the possibility of life after death to stumble off his irreligious tongue. ‘She won’t wait for me; eludes me in the trees.’ Ghosts like children like to play hide-and-seek. ‘She is not at rest. I know she is not at rest. What can I do to give her peace?’ To my eye it was Abraham who seemed agitated, unable to accustom himself to her loss. ‘Maybe if her work finds its resting-place,’ he hypothesised, and there followed the huge Zogoiby Bequest, under the terms of which all of Aurora’s own collection of her work – many hundreds of pieces! – was donated to the nation on condition that a gallery was built in Bombay to store and display it properly. But in the aftermath of the Meerut massacres, the Hindu-Muslim riots in Old Delhi and elsewhere, art was not a government priority, and the collection – apart from a few masterpieces which were put on show at the National Gallery in Delhi – languished. Bombay’s civic authorities, being Mainduck-controlled, were not prepared to make good the funding which the central government’s exchequer had denied. ‘Then damn and blast all politicos,’ cried Abraham. ‘Self-help is best policy of all.’ He found other backers to join him in the project; there was money from the rapidly expanding Khazana Bank and also from the super-stockbroker V. V. Nandy, whose George Soros-sized raids on the world’s currency markets were acquiring legendary status, the more so because they came from a Third World source. ‘The Crocodile is becoming a post-colonial hero to our young,’ Abraham told me, hee-hee’ing at the vagaries of fate. ‘He fits their empire-strikes-back plus get-rich-quick double bill.’ A prime site was found – one of the few surviving old-time Parsi mansions on Cumballa Hill (‘How old?’ – ‘Old, men. From old time’) – and a brilliant young art theorist and devotee of Aurora’s oeuvre, Zeenat Vakil, already the author of an influential study of the Mughal Hamza-nama cloths, was appointed curator. Dr Vakil at once set about compiling an exhaustive catalogue, and began work, too, on an accompanying critical appreciation, Imperso-Nation and Dis/Semi/Nation: Dialogics of Eclecticism and Interrogations of Authenticity in A.Z., which gave the Moor sequence – including the previously unseen late pictures – its rightful, central place in the corpus, and would do much to fix Aurora’s place in the ranks of the immortals. The Zogoiby Bequest opened to the public just three years after Aurora’s sad demise; there followed a certain amount of inevitable if short-lived controversy, for example over the early, and to some eyes incestuous, Moor pictures – those ‘panto-paintings’ that she had made so lightly long ago. But high in Cashondeliveri Tower her ghost still walked.

  Now Abraham began to express the conviction that her death had not been the straightforward accident that everyone had supposed. Dabbing at a rheumy eye he said in an unsteady voice that those who perish by foul play require a settlement before they find repose. He seemed to be falling further and further into the traps of superstition, apparently unable to accept the fact of Aurora’s death. In ordinary circumstances this slippage into what he had always called mumbo-jumbo would have shocked me deeply; but I, too, was caught in obsession’s strengthening grip. My mother was dead and yet I needed to repair a rift. If she was dead beyond recall then there could never be a reconciliation, only this gnawing, imperative need, this wound-that-could-not-heal. So I did not contradict Abraham when he spoke of phantoms in his hanging gardens. I may even have hoped – yes! – for a sudden tinkle of jhunjhunna ankle-bracelets, a flurry of fabric behind a bush. Or, better still, for the return of the mother of my favourite times, paint-spattered, and with brushes sticking out of her high-piled, chaotic hair.

  Even when Abraham announced that he had asked Dom Minto to re-open, on a private basis, the inquiry into her fall–Minto of all people, blind, toothless, wheelchair-ridden, deaf, and kept alive, as he approached his century, by dialysis machines, regular blood transfusions, and that insatiable and undiminished inquisitiveness which had taken him to the top of his professional tree! – I made no demurral. Let the old man have what he needed to soothe his troubled spirit, I thought. Also, I must say, it was not easy to contradict Abraham Zogoiby, that ruthless skeleton. The more he took me into his confidence, opening his bank-books, his secret ledgers and his heart, the more profoundly I began to feel afraid.

  ‘Fielding, must be,’ he shouted his suspicion at Minto in the Pei orchard. ‘As to Mody, fellow doesn’t have what it takes. Investigate Fielding. Moor here will lend any assistance you may require.’

  My fear increased. If Raman Fielding – guilty or innocent – ever suspected I was spying on him with a view to incriminating him in a putative murder, it would not go well with me. Yet I could not refuse Abraham, my newly reacquired father. Nervously, however, I did at last bring myself to ask indelicate questions: why would Mainduck – what motive, what provocation did he have …?

  ‘Boy wants to know why I suspect that froggy bastard,’ Abraham Zogoiby yelled between terrifying cackles, and ruined old Minto likewise slapped a mirthful thigh. ‘Maybe he thinks his Mummy was a saint, and only his bad Daddy strayed from the fold. But she tried out most things in trousers, isn’t it? Short attention span, only. Hell hath no fury like a froggy spurned. QE bleddy D.’

  Two macabrely laughing old men, accusations of marital infidelities and murder, a walking ghost, and me. I was out of my depth. But there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. There was only what had to be done.

  ‘Big Daddy, worry not,’ whispered Minto, peering through blue glass, as softly spoken as Abraham had been stentorian. ‘This Fielding, consider him quartered, drawn and hung.’

  Children make fictions of their fathers, re-inventing them according to their childish needs. The reality of a father is a weight few sons can bear.

  It was the conventional wisdom of the period that the (mainly Muslim) gangs controlling the city’s organised crime, each with their ruling boss or dada, had been weakened by their traditional difficulties in forming any kind of lasting syndicate or united front. My own experience with the MA, working in the poorest quarters of the city to win friends and build support, suggested something different. I had begun to see hints and glimpses of something shadowy, so frightening that nobody would talk about it – some hidden layer under the surface of what-seemed-to-be. I had suggested to Mainduck that the gangs might have finally achieved unity, that there might even be a single Mafia-style capo di tutti capi in place, running all the rackets in town, but he laughed me to scorn. ‘Stick to punching heads, Hammer,’ he sneered. ‘Leave the deep stuff to deeper minds. Unity takes discipline, and we have the monopoly of that commodity. Those sister-fuckers will be squabbling until the heavens fall.’

  But now, with my own ears, I had heard Dom Minto name my father as the biggest dada of them all. Mogambo! The moment I heard it, I knew it was true. Abraham was a natural commander, a born negotiator, the deal-maker of deal-makers. He gambled for the highest stakes; had even been willing, as a young man, to wager his unborn son. Yes, the High Command did exist, and the Muslim gangs had been united by a Cochin Jew. The truth is almost always exceptional, freakish, improbable, and almost never normative, almost never what cold calculations would suggest. In the end, people make the alliances they need. They follow the men who can lead them in the directions they prefer. It occurred to me that my father’s pre-eminence over Scar and his colleagues was a dark, ironic victory for India’s deep-rooted secularism. The very nature of this inter-community league of cynical self-interest gave the lie to Mainduck’s vision of a theocracy in which one particular variant of Hinduism would rule, while all India’s other peoples bowed their beaten heads.

  Vasco had said it years ago: corruption was the only force we had that could defeat fanaticism. What had been, on his lips, no more than a drunkard’s gibe, had been turned by Abraham Zogoiby into living reality, into a union of hovel and high-rise, a godless crooked army that could take on and va
nquish anything that the god-squad sent its way.

  Maybe.

  Raman Fielding had already made the grave error of underestimating his opponent. Would Abraham Zogoiby be any wiser? Early indications were not good. ‘A bug,’ he’d called Mainduck. ‘A stupid collared dog.’

  And if both sides went to war because they believed the enemy was easy to vanquish? And if both sides were wrong? What then?

  Armageddon?

  In the matter of the Baby Softo narcotics scandal, Abraham Zogoiby – as he confirmed during our ‘briefing sessions’, with a wide, shameless grin – had received a complete exoneration by the investigating authorities. ‘Clean bill of health,’ he crowed. ‘Pair of hands, likewise clean. Enemies may try to drag me down, but they must try harder than that.’ There was no question that the Softo company’s talcum powder exports had been used as cover for the dispatch overseas of rather more lucrative white powders, but in spite of herculean efforts by narcotics squad officers it had been impossible to prove that Abraham had been aware of any illegal activity. Certain minor functionaries of the company – in the canning and dispatch departments – had indeed been shown to be in the pay of a drugs syndicate, but thereafter all investigations simply hit a wall. Abraham was generous in caring for the families of the jailed men – ‘Why should women-children suffer for activities of fathers?’ he liked to say – and in the end the case was closed without any of the charges against high personages that had originally been trumpeted, not least by Raman Fielding’s MA-controlled city corporation. It remained a matter of embarrassment that the drug overlord known as ‘Scar’ remained at liberty. The supposition was that he had taken refuge somewhere in the Persian Gulf. But Abraham Zogoiby had different news for me. ‘How foolish we would be if immigration-emigration matters were not also capable of being arranged,’ he cried. ‘Of course our people can slip out and in whenever they may so choose. And drugs squad officers also are only human. On their low pay it is hard to make ends meet. What to tell you? It is the duty of the well-off to be generous. Philanthropy is our necessary rôle. Noblesse oblige.’

  Abraham’s victory in the Baby Softo affair had been a blow for Fielding, who urged me constantly to pump my father for information about drug-related activities. But I did not need to pump. Abraham was intent on opening his heart to me, and told me plainly that the Softo win had not been without long-term costs. With the talcum powder route closed, a more perilous operation had had to be constructed at some speed and in the teeth of the intensive police investigation. ‘Start-up costs were ridiculous,’ he confided. ‘But what to do? In business a man’s word is his bond, and there were contracts to fulfil.’ Scar and his men had been working full-time to set up the new route, which culminated in the dusty wastes of the Rann of Kutch (thus necessitating the bribery of officials in Gujarat as well as Maharashtra). Small boats would ferry the ‘talcum’ out to waiting cargo ships. The new route was slower, riskier. ‘Only a stop-gap,’ said Abraham. ‘In time we will find new friends at the air cargo terminal.’

  I would go to his high-rise glass Eden at night and he would tell me his serpentine tales. And they were like fairy tales, in a way: goblin-sagas of the present day, tales of the utterly abnormal recounted in a matter-of-fact, banal, duty manager’s normalising tones. (So this was what my feral father meant by burying himself in his work to help him bear his loss! This was what he did to assuage his pain!) … Armaments featured strongly, though the publicly listed activities of his great corporation included no such trade. A famous Nordic armaments house was negotiating to supply India with a range of essentially decent, elegantly designed and naturally lethal products. The sums of money involved were too large to have meaning, and as is the way with such Karakorams of capital, certain peripheral boulders of money came loose from the main bulk and began to roll down the mountain. What was needed was a discreet means of tidying away these tumbling boulders in a manner properly beneficial to those involved in the negotiations. The participants in the negotiations were of a great refinement, possessed of a delicacy that would have made it quite impossible for them to tidy away this rubble of lucre, even into their own bank accounts. Not a whisper of impropriety could ever attach itself to their high names! ‘So,’ said Abraham with a happy shrug, ‘we do the dirty work, and plenty of pebbles end up in our pockets, too.’

  It turned out that Abraham’s ‘Siodicorp’ – as it was now universally known – was a major player in the Khazana Bank International, which by the end of the 1980s had become the first financial institution from the Third World to rival the great Western banks in terms of assets and transactions. The more or less moribund banking operation he had taken over from the Cashondeliveri brothers had been brilliantly refurbished, and its links with the KBI enterprise had made it the wonder of the city. ‘The old days of setting up a dollar-bypass system for basket-case economies are gone,’ declaimed my father. ‘No more of that namby-pamby South-South co-operation bakvaas. Bring on the big boys! Dollar, DM, Swiss franc, yen – let them come! Now we will beat them at their own game.’ In spite of his new frankness with me, however, it was several years before Abraham Zogoiby admitted that beneath this glittering monetarist vision there lurked a hidden layer of activity: the inevitable secret world that has existed, awaiting revelation, beneath everything I have ever known. – And if the reality of our being is that so many covert truths exist behind Maya-veils of unknowing and illusion, then why not Heaven and Hell, too? Why not God and the Devil and the whole blest-damned thing? If so much revelation, why not Revelation? – Please. This is no time to discuss theology. The subject on the table is terrorism, and a secret nuclear device.

  Among KBI’s largest clients were a number of gentlemen and organisations whose names featured on the most-wanted and most-dangerous lists of every country in the free world – but who, mysteriously, themselves seemed free to come and go, to board commercial airplanes and visit bank branches and receive medical treatment in the countries of their choice, without fear of arrest or harassment. These shadow-accounts were maintained in special files, shielded by an impressive battery of passwords, software ‘bombs’ and other defence mechanisms, and in theory at least could not be accessed through the main computer. But these precautions were as nothing, and this unsavoury clientèle looked positively angelic, when set beside the precautions taken to protect, and the personnel involved in, KBI’s greatest enterprise: namely, the financing and secret manufacture ‘for certain oil-rich countries and their ideological allies’ of large-scale nuclear weaponry. Abraham’s arm had grown long indeed. If there was a stockpile of suitably enriched uranium or plutonium to be had, the Khazana Bank would have a finger in that hot pie; if by some chance a long-range delivery system unexpectedly came on to the market in the fringe states of the recently collapsed Soviet Union, KBI money would move sinuously, invisibly, beneath carpets, through walls, towards that vendor’s stall. So at last Abraham’s invisible city, built by invisible people to do invisible deeds, was nearing its apotheosis. It was building an invisible bomb.

  In May 1991 an all-too-visible explosion in Tamil Nadu added Mr Rajiv Gandhi to the list of his family’s murdered dead, and Abraham Zogoiby – whose decisions could at times be so incomprehensibly dark as to suggest that he actually believed he was being funny – chose that awful day to ‘brief’ me on the existence of the secret H-bomb project. At that moment something changed within me. It was an involuntary alteration, born not of will or choice but of some deeper, unconscious function of my self. I listened carefully as he went into the specifics (the overarching problem the project faced at present, he noted, was the need for an ultra-fast supercomputer capable of running the complex weapons delivery programmes without which the missiles would never hit anything they were supposed to; in the whole world there existed less than two dozen such FPS or ‘Floating Point System’ computers with VAX accessing equipment that enabled them to make around seventy-six million calculations per second, and twenty of these were in the U
nited States, which meant one of the remaining three or four – and such a machine had been located in Japan – must either be acquired by a front organisation so impenetrable as to deceive the enormously sophisticated security systems surrounding such a sale, or else it would have to be stolen, and then made invisible, smuggled to the end-user by means of an improbably complex chain of corrupt excise officials, falsified bills of lading and duped inspectorates) but, as I listened, I heard a voice within me making an absolute, non-negotiable refusal. Just as I had refused the death which Uma Sarasvati had planned for me, so I now believed I had passed the bounds of what was required of me by family loyalty. To my surprise, another loyalty had taken precedence. Surprise, because after all I had been raised in Elephanta, where all communal ties had been deliberately disrupted; in a country where all citizens owe an instinctive dual allegiance to a place and a faith, I had been made into a nowhere-and-no-community man – and proud of it, may I say. So it was with a keen sense of the unexpected that I found myself standing up to my formidable, deadly father.

  ‘… And if we are found to be smuggling it,’ he was saying, ‘all aid agreements, favoured-nation privileges and other government-to-government economic protocols would be terminated on the spot.’

  I took a breath, and plunged: ‘I guess you must know who-all this bomb is meant to blow into more bits than poor Rajiv, and where?’

  Abraham became stone. He was ice, and flame. He was God in Paradise and I, his greatest creation, had just put on the forbidden fig-leaf of shame. ‘I am a business person,’ he said. ‘What there is to do, I do.’ YHWH. I am that I am.

  ‘To my astonishment,’ I told this shadow-Jehovah, this anti-Almighty, this black hole in the sky, my Daddyji, ‘excuse me, but I find that I’m a Jew.’

  By this time I was no longer working for Mainduck; so Chhaggan had been right, I suppose – the blood in my veins had proved thicker than the blood we had spilled together. It was not I, but Fielding who had suggested, not without a modicum of grace, that we had reached the parting of the ways. He probably knew that I was not prepared to spy on my father for him, and he may very well have intuited that information about his activities might be flowing in the opposite direction. It must be added that my appetite for office work was not great; for while my youthful habit of neatness, my urge-to-unexceptionality was well suited to the humble, mechanical tasks I was given to perform, my ‘secret identity’ – that is, my true, untamed, amoral self – rebelled violently against the tedium of the days. Nothing to be done with an old hoodlum, a superannuated goonda, except retire him. ‘Go and rest,’ Fielding told me, putting his hand on my head. ‘You have earned it.’ I wondered if I was being told he had decided not to have me killed. Or the opposite: that in the near future the Tin-man’s knife, or Five-in-a-Bite’s teeth, might be caressing my throat. I made my farewells and left. No assassins came after me. Not then. But the feeling of being pursued, that did persist.