The Moor's Last Sigh Read online

  The Menezes family lawyers failed to find a loophole, much to the widow’s dismay. She wept, tore her hair, pounded her tiny bosom, and ground her teeth, which produced an alarmingly piercing noise; but the lawyers continued doggedly to explain that the matrilinear principle, for which Cochin, Travancore and Quilon were famous, and according to which the disposition of family property would have been a matter for Mme Epifania to decide rather than the late Dr da Gama, could by no stretch of the law be held to apply to the Christian community, being part of Hindu tradition alone.

  ‘Then bring me a Shiva lingam and a watering-can,’ Epifania, according to legend, was heard to say, though she afterwards denied it. ‘Bring me to River Ganges and I will jump in double-quick. Hai Ram!’

  (I should comment that in my view Epifania’s willingness to perform puja and pilgrimage sounds unconvincing, apocryphal; but wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of hair and beating of bosom there most certainly was.)

  The sons of the late magnate neglected business affairs, it must be admitted, being too often distracted by worldly matters. Aires da Gama, more distressed than he cared to reveal by his father’s suicide, sought solace in promiscuity, provoking a deluge of correspondence – letters on cheap paper, written in a barely legible, semi-literate script. Love-letters, messages of desire and anger, threats of violence if the beloved persisted in his too-hurtful ways. The author of this anguished correspondence was none other than the boy in the wedding-night rowing-boat: Prince Henry the Navigator himself. Do not think I do not hear what all you do. Give me heart or I will cut it from your body. If love is not whole world and sky above then it is nothing, worse than dirt.

  If love is not all, then it is nothing: this principle, and its opposite (I mean, infidelity), collide down all the years of my breathless tale.

  Aires, out tom-catting all night, as often as not spent the daylight hours sleeping off the effects of hashish or opium, recovering from his exertions, and, not infrequently, needing attention for various minor wounds; Carmen, without a word, applied medication and drew hot baths to soothe his bruises; and, when he fell into snoring sleep in that bathwater drawn from the deep well of her grief, if she ever thought about pushing his head below the surface, then she did not give in to temptation. Soon there would be another outlet for her rage.

  As for Camoens, in his timid, soft-spoken way he was his father’s son. Through Belle, he fell in with a group of young nationalist radicals who, impatient with talk of non-violence and passive resistance, were intoxicated by the great events in Russia. He began to attend, and later to deliver, talks with titles like Forward! and Terrorism: Does End Justify This Means?

  ‘Camoens, who wouldn’t say booski to a mouseski,’ Belle laughed. ‘What a big bad redski you will make.’

  It was Grandfather Camoens who found out about the fake Ulyanovs. In late 1923 he informed Belle and their friends that an élite group of Soviet actors had been given exclusive rights to the rôle of V. I. Lenin: not only in specially prepared touring productions which told the Soviet people about their glorious revolution, but also at the thousands upon thousands of public functions at which the leader was unable to be present owing to the pressures on his time. The Lenin-thesps memorised, and then delivered, the speeches of the great man, and when they appeared in full make-up and costume people shouted, cheered, bowed and quaked as if they were in the presence of the real thing. ‘And now,’ Camoens excitedly concluded, ‘applications from foreign-language actors are being solicited. We can have our personal Lenins right here, properly accredited, speaking Malayalam or Tulu or Kannada or any damn thing we please.’

  ‘So they are reproducing the big boss in the See See See Pee,’ Belle told him, placing his hand on her belly, ‘but, husband, see see see please, you have already begun a little reproduction of your own.’

  It is a demonstration of the ludicrous – yes! I dare to use that word – the ridiculous and ludicrous perversity of my family that – in a period when the country and indeed the planet was engaged in such momentous affairs – and when the family business needed the most scrupulous attention, because in the aftermath of Francisco’s death the lack of leadership was becoming alarming, there was discontent in the plantations and slackness at the two Ernakulam godowns, and even the Gama Company’s long-term customers had begun to listen to the siren voices of its competitors – and when, to crown it all, his own wife had announced her pregnancy, and was bearing what turned out to be not only their firstborn but also their only child, the only child, what is more, of her generation, my mother Aurora, the last of the da Gamas – my grandfather became increasingly obsessed with this question of counterfeit Lenins. With what zeal he scoured the locality to discover men with the necessary acting skill, memory capacity and interest in his plan! With what dedication he worked, getting copies of the latest statements of the illustrious leader, finding translators, acquiring the services of make-up artists and costumiers, and rehearsing his little troupe of seven whom Belle, with her customary brutality, had dubbed the Too-Tall Lenin, the Too-Short Lenin, the Too-Fat Lenin, the Too-Skinny Lenin, the Too-Lame Lenin, the Too-Bald Lenin, and (this was a misfortunate fellow with gravely defective orthodonture) Lenin the Too-Thless … Camoens corresponded feverishly with contacts in Moscow, cajoling and persuading; certain Cochinian authorities, both pale- and dark-skinned, were likewise persuaded and cajoled; and finally, in the hot season of 1924, he had his reward. When Belle was bursting with child, there arrived in Cochin a genuine, card-carrying member of the Special Lenin Troupe, a Lenin First Class, with the power to approve and further instruct the members of the Troupe’s new Cochin Branch.

  He came by ship from Bombay and when he walked down the gangway in character there were little gasps and shrieks from the dockside, to which he responded with a series of magnanimous bows and waves. Camoens noticed that he was perspiring freely in the heat; little rivulets of dark hair-dye ran down his forehead and neck and had constantly to be mopped.

  ‘How may I address you?’ asked Camoens, blushing politely as he met his guest, who was travelling with an interpreter.

  ‘No formality, Comrade,’ said the interpreter. ‘No honorifics! A simple Vladimir Ilyich will suffice.’

  A crowd had gathered at the dockside to watch the arrival of the World Leader and now Camoens, in a little theatrical gesture of his own, clapped his hands, and out of the arrivals shed came the seven local Lenins in their beards. They stood shuffling their feet on the dockside, grinning sweetly at their Soviet colleague; who burst, however, into long fusillades of Russian.

  ‘Vladimir Ilyich asks what is the meaning of this outrage,’ the interpreter told Camoens as the crowd around them enlarged. ‘These persons have blackness of skin and their features are not his. Too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, too lame, too bald, and that one has no teeth.’

  ‘I was informed’, said Camoens, unhappily, ‘that we were permitted to adapt the Leader’s image to local needs.’

  More barrages of Russian. ‘Vladimir Ilyich opines that this is not adaptation but satirical caricature,’ the interpreter said. ‘It is insult and offence. See, two beards at least are improperly affixed in spite of the admonishing presence of the proletariat. A report will be made at the highest level. Under no circumstances do you have authority to proceed.’

  Camoens’s face fell; and seeing him on the point of tears, his dreams in ruins, his actors – his cadres – leapt forward; eager to demonstrate the care with which they had learned their rôles, they began to strike attitudes and declaim. In Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Tamil, Telugu and English they proclaimed the revolution, they demanded the immediate departure of the revanchist poodles of colonialism, the blood-sucking cockroaches of imperialism, to be followed by the common ownership of assets and annual over-fulfilment of rice quotas; their right-hand index fingers stabbing towards the future while their left fists rested magisterially against their hips. Babeling Lenins, their beards coming loose in the heat,
addressed the now-enormous crowd; which began, little by little at first, and then in a great swelling title, to guffaw.

  Vladimir Ilyich turned purple. Leninist vituperations issued from his mouth and hung in the air above his head in Cyrillic script. Then, spinning on his heel, he stalked back up the gangway and disappeared below decks.

  ‘What did he say?’ Camoens disconsolately asked the Russian interpreter.

  ‘This country of yours,’ the interpreter replied, ‘Vladimir Ilyich tells frankly that it gives to him the shits.’

  A small woman pushed her way through the triumphant hilarity of the People, and through the moist curtain of his misery Grandfather Camoens recognised his wife’s maid Maria. ‘Better you come, sir,’ she shouted over the People’s mirth. ‘Your good madam has given you a girl.’

  After his dockside humiliation, Camoens turned away from Communism, and became fond of saying that he had learned the hard way that it was not ‘the Indian style’. He became a Congresswallah, a Nehru man, and followed from a distance all the great events of the ensuing years: from a distance, because although he spent hours each day absorbed in the subject, to the exclusion of most other things, reading and talking and writing voluminously on the subject, he never again took an active part in the movement, never published a word of his passionate scribblings … let us contemplate, for a moment, the case of my maternal grandfather. How easy to dismiss him as a butterfly, a lightweight, a dilettante! A millionaire flirting with Marxism, a timid soul who could only be a revolutionary firebrand in the company of a few friends, or in the privacy of his study, in the writing of secret papers which – perhaps fearing a repeat of the jeers that had finished off Francisco – he could not bring himself to print; a nationalist whose favourite poets were all English, a professed atheist and rationalist who could bring himself to believe in ghosts, and who could recite from memory, and with deep sentiment, the whole of Marvell’s ‘On a Drop of Dew’:

  So the Soul, that Drop, that Ray

  Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day

  Could it within the humane flow’r be seen,

  Remembering still its former height,

  Shuns the sweet leaves and blossoms green;

  And, recollecting its own Light,

  Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express

  The greater Heaven in an Heaven less.

  Epifania, most severe and least forgiving of mothers, dismissed him as a confused fool of a boy; but, influenced by the more loving views of him that have come down to me through Belle and Aurora, I make a different estimation. To me, the doublenesses in Grandfather Camoens reveal his beauty; his willingness to permit the coexistence within himself of conflicting impulses is the source of his full, gentle humaneness. If you pointed out the contradictions between, for example, his egalitarian ideas and the olympian reality of his social position, he would answer with no more than an owning-up smile and a disarming shrug. ‘Everyone should live well, isn’t it,’ he was fond of saying. ‘Cabral Island for all, that is my motto.’ And in his fierce love of English literature, his deep friendships with many Cochin English families, and his equally fierce determination that the British imperium must end and the rule of princes along with it, I see that hate-the-sin-and-love-the-sinner sweetness, that historical generosity of spirit, which is one of the true wonders of India. When empire’s sun set, we didn’t slaughter our erstwhile masters, saving that privilege for one another … but the notion is too cruel to have occurred to Camoens, who was baffled by evil, calling it ‘inhuman’, an absurd notion, as even his loving Belle pointed out; and, luckily-unluckily for him, he didn’t live to see the Partition massacres in the Punjab. (Sadly, he also died long before the election, after independence, in the new state of Kerala forged from old Cochin-Travancore-Quilon, of the first Marxist government in the sub-continent, the vindication of all his broken hopes.)

  He lived to see trouble enough, for the family was already plunging towards that catastrophic conflict, the so-called ‘battle of the in-laws’, which would have wiped out many a lesser house, and from which our family fortunes took a decade to recover.

  The women are now moving to the centre of my little stage. Epifania, Carmen, Belle, and the newly arrived Aurora – they, not the men, were the true protagonists in the struggle; and inevitably, it was Great-Grandmother Epifania who was the troublemaker-in-chief.

  She declared war the day she heard Francisco’s will, summoning Carmen to her boudoir for a pow-wow. ‘My sons are useless playboys,’ she announced with a wave of her fan. ‘From now on, better us ladies should call-o the tune.’ She would be the commander-in-chief and Carmen, her niece as well as her daughter-in-law, was to be her lieutenant, general factotum and dogsbody. ‘It is your duty not only to this house but to Menezes family also. Never forget that till I saved your skin you were sittoed on a shelf and would have rottofied till Kingdom Come.’

  Epifania’s first order was the most ancient wish of dynasts: that Carmen must conceive a male child, a king-in-waiting through whom his loving mother and grandmother would rule. Carmen, realising in her bitter consternation that this very first instruction would have to be disobeyed, lowered her eyes, muttered, ‘Okay, Epifania Aunty, wish is my command,’ and fled the room.

  (When Aurora was born the doctors said that owing to an unfortunate occurrence Belle would be unable to conceive again. That night Epifania read the riot act to Carmen and Aires. ‘See that Belle, what she popped out with! But a girl child and no more kiddies is some luck from God for you. Buck up! Make a boy, or maybe the whole kit-cat-caboodle will be hers: the whole bang shoot.’)

  On Aurora da Gama’s tenth birthday a barge came across the harbour to Cabral Island, bearing a Northern fellow, a U.P. type with a great pile of wooden planks which he assembled into a simplified giant wheel, fixing wooden seats to each end of the arms of a wooden X. From a green velvet box he produced an accordion and launched into a jolly medley of fairground tunes. When Aurora and her friends had had their fill of whirling through the sky on what the accordionist called a charrakh-choo, he put on a scarlet cape and made fish swim out of the young girls’ mouths and drew live snakes from beneath their skirts, to the horror of Epifania, much tut-tutting from the still-childless Carmen and Aires, and the giggling delight of Belle and Camoens. After Aurora saw the Northerner she understood that a personal magician was what she needed most in life, someone who could make her wishes come true, who could magic her grandmother away for ever and make cobras bite Aires-uncle and Carmen-aunty to death and enable Camoens to live happily-ever-after; for this was in the time of the divided house, which had chalk lines drawn across its floors, like frontiers, and spice-sacks piled up across courtyards, forming little walls, as though they were defences against the risk of floods, or sniper fire.

  It had all started when Epifania, using her sons’ wandering attention as an excuse, invited her relatives to Cochin. She chose the moment for her coup expertly; this was at the time of Aires’s post-Francisco promiscuity, and Camoens’s hunt for Lenins, and Belle’s pregnancy, so there were few protests. In fact, the most vociferous objections came from Carmen, who had never been kindly treated by her ‘mother’s side’ and found her Lobo hackles rising at the advent of so many Menezeses. When she made her feelings known to Epifania, haltingly, and with much circumlocution, that lady replied with a calculated use of coarseness, ‘Missy, your future prospects are right there between your legs, so kindly concentrate on making your husband interested, and buttofy out of your elders’ business.’

  Bees-to-honey Menezes men arrived from Mangalore by the boatload, nor were their womenfolk and children far behind. Further Menezeses poured out of the bus depot, and yet more members of the clan were believed to be trying to get down by train, but had been delayed on account of the eccentricities of the railway service. By the time Belle had recovered from Aurora’s birth, and Camoens from his Lenin fiasco, Epifania’s people had got in everywhere, they were twining themselves around th
e Gama Trading Company like pepper-creepers around coco-palms, bullying the plantation overseers, nosing into the accounts, meddling with procedures at the godowns; it was an invasion all right, but it is never easy for conquerors to be loved, and no sooner was Epifania certain of her power than she started making mistakes. Her first error was to be too Machiavellian, for even though Aires was her favourite son she could not deny that Camoens had produced the only heir, and therefore could not be entirely excluded from her calculations. She began to flirt clumsily with Belle, who did not respond because of her growing anger at the behaviour of the numberless Menezeses; however, Epifania’s too-obvious efforts to seduce her alienated Carmen to a considerable degree. Then Epifania made an even bigger error: on account of her worsening allergy to the spices that were the mainstay of the family’s wealth – yes, even to pepper, to pepper most of all! – she let it be known that in future the Gama Trading Company would be developing a fragrance business, ‘so that, in quick time, good perfume can take the place of these stuffs that maddofy my nose’.

  Carmen lost patience. ‘Menezeses were always small fry,’ she railed at Aires. ‘Will you let your mother turn big business into bottled smells?’ But in those days Aires da Gama’s over-indulgences had instilled a torpor that all Carmen’s cajolings could not dispel. ‘Then if you will not take up your rightful place in this house,’ she cried, ‘at least have the goodness to permit that Lobo family members may help us instead of these Menezes fellows crawling everywhere like white ants and eating up our cash.’ Great-Uncle Aires readily agreed. Belle, who was equally agitated, had less success (and no relatives); Camoens was not a warrior by nature, and argued that since he had no head for business he should not stand in the way of his mother. But then the Lobos arrived.

  What started with perfume ended with a very big stink indeed … there is a thing that bursts out of us at times, a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon one another, thing-darkness in our eyes and real weapons in our hands, neighbour against thing-ridden neighbour, thing-driven cousin against cousin, brother-thing against brother-thing, thing-child against thing-child. Carmen’s Lobos headed for the da Gama estates in the Spice Mountains, and things began to stir.