The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  Her son failed to grasp her meaning. Certainly, he radiantly vowed, she would receive full recompense for her loan, once their ship came in; and if she preferred to receive her share in the form of emeralds, then he would undertake to select the finest stones. Thus he babbled; but he had entered darker waters than he knew, and beyond them lay a black forest in which, in a clearing, a little mannikin danced, singing Rumpelstiltskin is my name … ‘This is by-the-by,’ Flory interrupted. ‘Return of loan I do not doubt. But for so risky an investment only the greatest jewel can be my prize. You must give me your firstborn son.’

  (Two origins have been suggested for Flory’s box of emeralds, family heirloom and smugglers’ hoard. Setting sentiment aside, reason and logic recommend the latter; and if they are right, if Flory was speculating with the gangsters’ stockpile, then her own survival was in doubt. Does it make her demand less shocking that she risked herself to gain the human life for which she asked? Was it, in fact, heroic?)

  Bring me your firstborn … A line from legends hung between this mother and this son. Abraham, aghast, told her it was out of the question, it was evil, unthinkable. ‘Wiped that stupid smile off your mouth, Abie, didn’t I?’ Flory grimly asked. ‘And don’t think you can grab the box and run. It is in another cache. You need my stones? Give me your eldest boy; his flesh’n’skin’n’bones.’

  O mother you are mad, mother. O my ancestor I am much afeared that thou art stark raving nuts. ‘Aurora is not expecting as yet,’ Abraham muttered weakly.

  ‘Oho-ho Abie,’ giggled Flory. ‘You think I’m crazy, boy? I’ll kill and eat him up, or drink his blood, or what? I am not a rich woman, child, but there is enough food on my table without consuming family members.’ She grew serious. ‘Listen: you can see him when-when you want. Even the mother can come. Outings, holidays, these also are OK. Only send him to live with me so I can do my level best to bring him up as the thing you have ceased to be, that is, a male Jew of Cochin. I lost a son; I’ll save a grandson at least.’ She did not add her secret prayer: And maybe, in saving him, rediscover a God of my own.

  As the world fell back into place, Abraham, in the dizziness of his relief, the great hunger of his need, and the absence of an actual pregnancy, acquiesced. But Flory was implacable, wanted it in writing. ‘To my mother, Flory Zogoiby, I hereby promise my firstborn male child, to be raised in the Jewish ways.’ Signed, sealed, delivered. Flory, snatching the paper, waved it above her head, picked up her skirt and capered in a circle by the synagogue door. An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven … I stay here on my bond. And for these promised pounds of unborn flesh she delivered Abraham her wealth; and, paid and bribed by jewels, his last-chance argosy set sail.

  Of these privy matters, however, Aurora was not informed.

  And it came to pass that the ship was brought safely to port, and after it another, and another, and another. While the world’s fortunes worsened, the da Gama-Zogoiby axis prospered. (How did my father ensure his cargo’s protection by the British Navy? Surely it is not being suggested that emeralds, contraband or heirloom, found their way into Imperial pockets? What a bold stroke that would have been, what an all-or-nothing throw! And how implausible to suggest that such an offer might have been accepted! No, no, one must just put what happened down to naval diligence – for the marauding Medea was finally sunk – or to the Nazis’ preoccupations in other theatres of the war; or call it a miracle; or blind, dumb luck.) At the earliest opportunity, Abraham had paid off the jewel-money borrowed from his mother, and offered her a generous additional sum by way of profit. However, he left brusquely, without answering, when she refused the bonus with a plaintive call: ‘And the jewel, my contracted reward? And when will that be paid?’ I crave the law, the penalty and the forfeit of my bond.

  Aurora continued to be without child: but knew nothing of a signed paper. The months lengthened towards a year. Still Abraham held his tongue. By now he was the sole in-charge of the family business; Aires never really had the heart for it, and after his new nephew-in-law had performed his triumphant rescue act the surviving da Gama brother retired gracefully – as they say – into private life … on the first of every month Flory sent her son the great merchant a message. ‘I hope you are not slacking off; I want my precious stone.’ (How strange, how fated, that in those blazing days of their hot-pepper love Aurora conceived no child! Because had there been a boy, and here I speak as my parents’ sole male issue, then the bone of contention – the flesh’n’skin’n’bones–could have been me.)

  Again he offered her money; again, she refused. At one point he pleaded; how could he ask his young wife to send a newborn son away, to be cared for by one who hated her? Flory was implacable. ‘Should’ve thought before.’ Finally his anger took control, and he defied her. ‘Your piece of paper buys nothing,’ he shouted down the telephone. ‘Wait on and see who can pay more for a judge.’ Flory’s green stones could not match the family’s renewed affluence; and if indeed they were hot rocks, she’d think twice before showing them to court officers, even those willing to feather their nests. What were her options? She had lost her belief in divine retribution. Vengeance was for this world.

  Another avenger! Another ginger dog, or murderous mosquito! What an epidemic of getting-even runs through my tale, what a malaria cholera typhoid of eye-for-tooth and tit-for-tat! No wonder I have ended up … But my ending up must not be told before my starting out. Here’s Aurora on her seventeenth birthday in the spring of 1941, visiting Vasco’s tomb alone; and here, waiting in the shadows, is an old crone …

  When she saw Flory dart towards her out of the shadows of the church, Aurora thought for a startled moment that her grandmother Epifania had risen from the grave. Then she collected herself with a little smile, remembering how she had once ridiculed her father’s ghostly notions; no, no, this was just some hag, and what was that paper she was thrusting out? Sometimes beggar-women gave you such papers, Have mercy in the name of God, cannot speak, and 12 kiddies to support. ‘Forgive me, sorry,’ Aurora said perfunctorily, and began to turn away. Then the woman spoke her name. ‘Madam Aurora!’ (Loudly.) ‘My Abie’s Roman whore! This paper you must read.’

  She turned back; took the document Abraham’s mother proffered; and read.

  Portia, a rich girl, supposedly intelligent, who acquiesces in her late father’s will – that she must marry any man who solves the riddle of the three caskets, gold silver lead – is presented to us by Shakespeare as the very archetype of justice. But listen closely; when her suitor the Prince of Morocco fails the test, she sighs:

  A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains: go.

  Let all of his complexion choose me so.

  No lover then, of Moors! No, no; she loves Bassanio, who by a happy chance picks the right box, the one containing Portia’s picture (‘thou, thou meagre lead’). Lend an ear, therefore, to this paragon’s explanation of his choice.

  … ornament is but the guilèd shore,

  To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf

  Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,

  The seeming truth which cunning times put on …

  Ah, yes: for Bassanio, Indian beauty is like a ‘dangerous sea’; or, analogous to ‘cunning times’! Thus Moors, Indians, and of course ‘the Jew’ (Portia can only bring herself to use Shylock’s name on two occasions; the rest of the time she identifies him purely by his race) are waved away. A fair-minded couple, indeed; a pair of Daniels, come to judgment … I adduce all this evidence to show why, when I say that our tale’s Aurora was no Portia, I do not mean it wholly as a criticism. She was rich (like Portia in this), but chose her own husband (unlike in this); she was certainly intelligent (like), and, at seventeen, near the height of her very Indian beauty (most unlike). Her husband was – as Portia’s could never have been – a Jew. But, as the maid of Belmont denied Shylock his bloody pound, so my mother found a way, with justice, of denying Flory the child.

  ‘Tell your mother’, Aurora comman
ded Abraham that night, ‘that there will be no children born in this house while she remains alive.’ She moved him out of her bedroom. ‘You do your work and I’ll do mine,’ she said. ‘But the work Flory is waiting for, that she never will see.’

  She, too, had drawn a line. That night she scrubbed her body until the skin was raw and not a trace of love’s peppery perfume remained. (‘I scrubbofy and tubbofy …’) Then she locked and bolted her bedroom door, and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. In the following months, however, her work – drawings, paintings, and terrible little skewered dolls moulded in red clay – grew full of witches, fire, apocalypse. Later she would destroy most of this ‘Red’ material, with the consequence that the surviving pieces have gained greatly in value; they have rarely been seen in the saleroom and when they were, a fevered excitement prevailed.

  For several nights Abraham mewled piteously at her locked door, but was not admitted. At length, Cyrano-fashion, he hired a local accordionist and ballad-singer who serenaded her in the courtyard below her window, while he, Abraham, stood idiotically beside the music-man and mouthed the words of the old love-songs. Aurora opened her shutters, and threw flowers; then the water from the flower-vase; and finally the vase itself. All three scored direct hits. The vase, a heavy piece of stoneware, struck Abraham on his left ankle, breaking it. He was taken, wet and yowling, to hospital, and thereafter did not try to change her mind. Their lives moved along diverging paths.

  After the episode of the stone vase, Abraham always walked with a slight limp. Misery was etched in every line of his face, misery dragged down the corners of his mouth and damaged his good looks. Aurora continued, contrastingly, to blossom. Genius was being born in her, filling the empty spaces in her bed, her heart, her womb. She needed no-one but herself.

  She was absent from Cochin from most of the war years, at first on long visits to Bombay, where she met, and was taken up by, a young Parsee, Kekoo Mody, who had begun dealing in contemporary Indian artists – not, at the time, a very lucrative field – from his home on Cuffe Parade. Limping Abraham did not accompany her on these trips; and when she left, her invariable parting words were, ‘Okay, fine, Abie! Mindofy the store.’ So it was in his absence, away from his lamed, hangdog expression of unbearable longing, that Aurora Zogoiby grew into the giant public figure we all know, the great beauty at the heart of the nationalist movement, the loose-haired bohemian marching boldly alongside Vallabhbhai Patel and Abul Kalam Azad when they took out processions, the confidante – and, according to persistent rumours, mistress – of Pandit Nehru, his ‘friend of friends’, who would later vie with Edwina Mountbatten for his heart. Distrusted by Gandhiji, loathed by Indira Gandhi, her arrest after the Quit India resolution of 1942 made her a national heroine. Jawaharlal Nehru was jailed, too, in Ahmadnagar Fort, where in the cinquecento the warrior-princess Chand Bibi had resisted the armies of the Mughal Empire – of the Grand Mughal Akbar himself. People began saying that Aurora Zogoiby was the new Chand Bibi, standing up against a different and even more powerful Empire, and her face began to appear everywhere. Painted on walls, caricatured in the papers, the maker of images became an image herself. She spent two years in Dehra Dun District Jail. When she emerged she was twenty years old, and her hair was white. She returned to Cochin, translated into myth. Abraham’s first words to her were: ‘Store is in good shape.’ She nodded briefly, and went back to work.

  Some things had changed on Cabral Island. During Aurora’s jail term, Aires da Gama’s long-time lover, the man known to us as Prince Henry the Navigator, had fallen seriously ill. He was found to be suffering from a particularly pernicious strain of syphilis, and it soon became clear that Aires, too, had been infected. Syphilitic eruptions on his face and body made it impossible for him to leave home; he became gaunt of body and hollow of eye and looked two decades older than his forty-odd years. His wife Carmen, who had long ago threatened to kill him for his infidelities, came instead to sit beside his bedside. ‘Look what happened to you, my Irish-man,’ she said. ‘You’re going to die on me or what?’ He turned his head on the pillow and saw nothing but compassion in her eyes. ‘We better get you well,’ she said, ‘or who am I going to dance with the rest of my life? You,’ and here she made the briefest of pauses, and her colour heightened dramatically, ‘and your Prince Henry, too.’

  Prince Henry the Navigator was given a room in the house on Cabral Island, and in the months that followed Carmen, with an inexhaustible determination, supervised the two men’s treatment by the finest and most discreet – because most highly paid – specialists in town. Both patients slowly recovered; and the day came when Aires, sitting out in the garden in a silk dressing-gown with Jawaharlal the bulldog and drinking a fresh lime-water, was visited by his wife, who suggested, quietly, that there was no need for Prince Henry to move out. ‘Too many wars in this house and outside it,’ she told him. ‘Let us make at least this one three-cornered peace.’

  In the middle of 1945, Aurora Zogoiby reached adulthood. She spent her twenty-first birthday in Bombay, without Abraham, at a party given for her by Kekoo Mody and attended by most of the city’s artistic and political luminaries. At that time the British had released the Congress prisoners, because new negotiations were in the air; Nehru himself had been freed, and sent Aurora a long letter from a house called Armsdell in Simla, apologising for his absence from her celebrations. ‘My voice is very hoarse,’ he wrote. ‘I can’t make out why I attract these crowds. Very gratifying, no doubt, but also very trying and often irritating. Here in Simla I have had to go out to the balcony and verandah frequently to give darshan. I doubt if I shall ever be able to go out for a walk because of crowds following, except at dead of night … You should be grateful that I have spared you this experience by staying away.’ As a birthday present, he sent her Hogben’s Science for the Citizen and Mathematics for the Million, ‘to leaven your artistic spirit with a little of the other side of the mind’.

  She immediately gave the books to Kekoo Mody, with a little grimace. ‘Jawahar is keen on all this boffin-shoffin. But I am a single-minded girl.’

  As for Flory Zogoiby: she was still alive, but had grown a little strange of late. Then, one day near the end of July, she was found crawling around the Mattancherri synagogue floor on her hands and knees, claiming that she could see the future in the blue Chinese tiles, and prophesying that very soon a country not far from China would be eaten up by giant, cannibal mushrooms. Old Moshe Cohen had the sad duty of relieving her of her duties. His daughter Sara–still a spinster–had heard of a church near the sea in Travancore where mentally troubled people of all religions had started going, because it was thought to have the power of curing madness; she told Moshe she wanted to take Flory there, and the chandler agreed to pay all the expenses of the trip.

  Flory spent her first day sitting in the dust of the compound outside the magic church, drawing lines in the dirt with a twig, and talking volubly to the invisible, because non-existent, grandson by her side. On the second day of their stay, Sara left Flory alone for an hour while she walked along the beach and watched the fishermen in their longboats come and go. When she returned there was pandemonium in the church compound. One of the madmen assembled there had committed fiery suicide by pouring petrol over himself at the foot of the life-sized figure of Christ crucified. When he struck the fatal match the whoosh of flame had licked murderously at the hem of an old lady’s floral-printed skirt, and she, too, had been engulfed. It was my grandmother. Sara brought the body home, and it was laid to rest in the Jewtown cemetery. Abraham remained by her graveside for a long time after the funeral, and when Sara Cohen took his hand, he did not draw it away.

  A few days later a giant mushroom cloud ate the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and on hearing the news Moshe Cohen the chandler burst into hot, bitter tears.

  They have almost all gone now, the Jews of Cochin. Less than fifty of them remaining, and the young departed to Israel. It is the last generation; arrangements have
been made for the synagogue to be taken over by the government of the State of Kerala, which will run it as a museum. The last bachelors and spinsters sun themselves toothlessly in the childless Mattancherri lanes. This, too, is an extinction to be mourned; not an extermination, such as occurred elsewhere, but the end, nevertheless, of a story that took two thousand years to tell.

  By the end of 1945, Aurora and Abraham had left Cochin and bought a sprawling bungalow set amid tamarind, plane and jack-fruit trees on the slopes of Malabar Hill, Bombay, with a steeply terraced garden looking down on Chowpatty Beach, the Back Bay and Marine Drive. ‘Cochin is finished, anyway,’ Abraham reasoned. ‘From a strictly business point of view the move makes complete sense.’ He left hand-picked men in charge of the operation down South, and would continue to make regular inspection trips over the years … but Aurora needed no reasoned arguments. On the day they moved in she went to the look-out point where the garden’s terracing ended in a vertiginous drop towards black rocks and foaming sea; and at the top of her voice she out-screamed the wheeling chils for joy.

  Abraham shyly waited some yards back, hands clasped before him, looking for all the world like the duty manager he once was. ‘I hope so that the new locale will prove beneficial to your creative process,’ he said with painful formality. Aurora came running towards him and leapt into his arms.

  ‘Creative process you’re after, is it?’ she demanded, looking at him as she had not looked for years. ‘Then come on, mister, let’s go indoors and create.’