The Moor's Last Sigh (21 page)

the trio and also, I'm afraid, what her sisters liked to call 'the Family Stupe'. Aurora, ever the kind and generous mama, would wave airily in Ina's direction at the most exalted of gatherings and tell her guests, 'She-tho is just to lookofy at, not to talk-o to. Poor girl is limitoed in brain.' At the age of eighteen Ina screwed up the courage to have her ears pierced atjhaveri Bros, the jewellery store on Warden Road, and was unfortunately rewarded for her courage by an infection; the backs of her ears came up in suppurating lumps which were made worse by her decision, taken for reasons of vanity, to keep pricking them and mopping up the pus. In the end she had to be treated as a hospital out-patient and the whole sorry three-month episode gave her mother a new weapon to use against her. 'Maybe it would have been better to have them sliee-o'd off,' Aurora scolded her. 'Maybe it would have fixofied the blockage. Because some blockage there is, isn't it? Some ear wax or plug. Outside shape is super, but nothing ever goes in.' Certainly she blocked her ears against her mother, and competed with her in the only way she thought she could: by using her looks. One by one she offered herself as a model to the male artists in Aurora's circle--the Lawyer, the Sarangi Player, the Jazz Singer--and when she unveiled her extraordinary physique in their studios its gravitational force drew them into her at once; like satellites falling from their orbits they crash-landed on her soft hills. After every conquest she arranged for her mother to discover a over's note or a pornographic sketch, as if she were an Apache rave displaying scalps to the big chief in his tent. She entered the eld of commerce as we U as art, becoming the first Indian catwalk model and cover girl--Femina, Buzz, Celebrity, Patakha, Debonair, Bombay, Bombshell, Cine Blitz, Lifestyle, Gentleman, Eleganza, C/iic-pronounced-chick--whose fame grew to rival those of the Bollywood movie stars. Ina became a silent goddess of sex, prepared to wear the most exhibitionist garments designed by the new breed of radical young designers emerging in the city, garments so revealing that many of the top girls felt embarrassed. Ina, unembarra-ssable, with her hip-swinging Super Sashay, stole every show. Her face on a magazine cover was estimated to increase sales by a third; but she gave no interviews, rebuffing all attempts to discover her most intimate secrets, such as the colour of her bedroom, or her favourite movie heero, or the song she liked to hum while taking a bath. No beauty tips were handed out, nor autographs given. She remained aloof: every inch the upper-crust femme from Malabar Hill, she allowed people to imagine she only modelled 'for a laugh'. Her silence increased her allure; it allowed men to dream their own versions of her and women to imagine themselves into her strappy sandals or crocodile shoes. At the height of the Emergency, when in Bombay it was almost business-as-usual except that everyone kept missing trains because they had started leaving on time, when the plague-spores of communal fanaticism were still spreading and the disease had not yet erupted in the metropolis--in that strange time my sister Ina was voted #1 Role Model by the city's young magazine-reading females, beating Mrs Indira Gandhi by a factor of two to one. But Mrs Gandhi was not the rival she was trying to defeat, and her triumphs were rendered meaningless by Aurora's failure to rise to the bait, to condemn her licentiousness and exhibitionism; until at last Ina was able to send her great mother epistolary proof of a liaison--a stolen weekend, as it turned out, at the Lord's Central House at Matheran--with Vasco Miranda. That did it all right. Aurora summoned her eldest daughter, cursed her for a nymphomaniac whore and threatened to throw her into the street. 'You don't have to push,' Ina answered, proudly. 'Don't worry on; I-tho will jump.' Within twenty-four hours she had eloped to Nashville, Tennessee with the young playboy who was the sole heir of what was left of the Cashondeliveri family fortune after Abraham's buyout of his father and uncle. Jamshedjee Jamibhoy Cashondeliveri had become well known in Bombay's nightclubs as the purveyor, under the stage name of 'Jimmy Cash', of what he liked to call 'Country and Eastern' music, a set of twangy songs about ranches and trains and love and cows with an idiosyncratic Indian twist. Now he and Ina had lit out for the territory, they were taking their love to town. She took the stage name of Gooddy (that is, 'Dolly') Gama--the use of a shortened version of her mother's family name suggested Aurora's continued influence over her daughter's thoughts and deeds--and there was a further development. She, who had become a legend by remaining silent, now opened her mouth and sang. She led a group of three back-up singers, and the name of their act, to which she agreed in spite of its regrettable equine connotations, was Jimmy Cash and the G. G. s. Ina came home in disgrace a year later. We were all shocked. She was greasy-haired and dishevelled and had put on over seventy pounds: not-so-Gooddy Gama now! Immigration officers had trouble believing she was the young woman in her passport photograph. Her marriage was over, and though she said Jimmy had turned out to be a monster and 'we didn't know' the things he had done, it also emerged, as time passed, that her omnivorous sexual appetite for yodelling rhinestone cowboys and her ever-increasing exhibitionism had not gone down well with the moralistic arbiters of singers' fates in Tennessee, or, indeed, with her husband Jamshed; and to top it offshe sang with the untrainable terminal squawk of a strangled goose. She had spent money as freely as she had partaken of the joys of American cooking, and her tantrums had grown larger along with the rest of her. In the end Jimmy had run away from her, and had given up Country and Eastern music to become a law student in California. 'I have to get him back,' she begged us. 'You must help me with my plan.' Home is the place to which you can always return, no matter now painful the circumstances of your leaving. Aurora made no lention of their year-old rift, and took the prodigal child into her ms. 'We will fix-o that rotter,' she comforted weeping Ina. 'Just tell us what you want.' 'I have to bring him here,' she wept. 'If he thinks I am dying then he will surely return. Send a cable saying there is suspicion of I don't know what. Something not infectious. Heart attack.' Aurora fought back a grin. 'How about', she suggested, hugging her newly girthsome child, 'some type of wasting sickness?' Ina missed the sardonic note. 'No, stupid,' she said into Aurora's shoulder. 'How to lose so much weight in time? Don't have any more bad ideas. Tell him,' and here she brightened hugely, 'cancer.' And Minnie: in the year Ina was away she found her own escape route. I am sorry to inform you that our sweet Inamorata, most mild-natured of young women, became, that year, enamoured of no less a personage than Jesus of Nazareth himself; of the Son of Man, and his holy mother, too. Mousey Minnie, always the easily shocked one, always the sister for whom our household's beatnik licence had been a matter for tuttings and hand-over-mouth shocks, our wide-eyed, innocent mini-Minnie who had been studying nursing with the nuns of Altamount Road, announced her desire to swap Aurora, the mother of her flesh, for Maria Gratiaplena, the Mother of God, to give up her sisterhood in favour of Sisterhood, and to spend the rest of her days away from Elephanta, in the house of, and wrapped in the love of... 'Christ!' Aurora swore, angrier than I had ever seen her. 'This is how you payofy us back for everything we have done.' Minnie coloured, and you could see her wanting to tell her mother not to take the name of the Lord in vain, but she bit her lip until it bled, and went on hunger strike. 'Let her die,' said Aurora obdurately. 'Better a corpse than a nun.' But for six days little Minnie neither ate nor drank, until she started fainting and becoming more and more resistant to being revived. Under pressure from Abraham, Aurora relented. I did not often see my mother weep, but on that seventh day she wept, the tears being wrenched from her and emerging in harsh, hacking sobs. Sister John from the Gratiaplena nunnery was summoned--Sister John who had assisted at all our births--and she arrived with the serene authority of a conquering queen, as if she were Queen Isabella of Spain entering Granada's Alhambra to accept the surrender of Boabdil the Moor. She was a large old boat of a woman with white sails around her head and soft billows of flesh under her chin. Everything about her took on symbolic resonances that day; she seemed to be the vessel in which our sister would sail away. There was a knotty tree-stump of a mole--signifying the recalcitrance of true faith--on her upper lip, and from it there protruded like arrows--hinting at the sufferings of a true believer--half a dozen needles of hair. 'Blessed is this house,' she said, 'for it gives a bride to Christ.' It took Aurora Zogoiby all her self-control not to kill her on the spot. So Minnie had become a novice and when she visited us in her Audrey Hepburn Nun's Story outfit the servants called her--of all things--Minnie mausi. Little mother, they meant, but I couldn't help finding the sound of it a bit creepy, as if Vasco Miranda's Disney figures on our nursery wall were somehow responsible for my sister's metamorphosis. Also, this new Minnie, this composed, remote, certain Minnie with the Mona Lisa smile and the devotional sparkle in her eternity-fixated eye, this Minnie felt as alien to me as if she had become a member of a different species: an angel, or a Martian, or a two-dimensional mouse. Her elder sister, however, acted as if nothing had changed in their relationship, as if Minnie--in spite of having been drafted into a different army--were still obliged to obey her Big Sis's commands. 'Talk to your nuns,' Ina ordered her. 'Get me a bed in their nursing home.' (The Gratiaplena nuns of Altamount Road specialised in the two ends of life, in helping people in and out of this sinful world.) 'I must be in such a place when my Jimmy Cash returns.' Why did we do it?--For we all collaborated in Ina's plot, you know; Aurora sent the cancergram and Minnie persuaded the Altamount sisters to make a bed available on compassionate grounds, arguing that anything that might save a marriage, that might protect that high sacrament, was pure in the eyes of God. And when the cable worked and Jamshed Cashondeliveri flew into town, the fiction was maintained. Even Mynah, third and toughest of my sisters, who had recendy been admitted to the Bombay Bar, and of whom we saw less and less in those days, rallied round. We have been a cussed lot, we da Gama-Zogoibys, each of us needing to strike out in a direction unlike the others, to lay claim to a territory we could call our own. After Abraham's business and Aurora's art came Ina's professionalisation of her sexuality and Minnie's surrender to God. As for Philomina Zogoiby--she dropped the 'Mynah' as soon as she could, and the magic child who imitated bird-calls had vanished long ago, though with the obstinacy of family we continued to annoy her by using the loathed nickname whenever she visited us at home--she had chosen to make a career out of what every youngest-daughter must do to get attention; that is, protest. No sooner had she qualified as an advocate than she told Abraham that she had joined a radical all-woman group of activists, film-makers and lawyers whose purpose was to expose the double scandals of invisible people and invisible skyscrapers out of which he had done so well. She took Keke Kolatkar and his cronies at the Municipal Corporation to court, in a landmark case that lasted many years and shook the old F. W. Stevens Corporation building--'How old?'--'Old. From Old Time'--to its foundations. Years later she would succeed in putting crooked old Keke in jail; Abraham Zogoiby, however, escaped, having been offered a deal by the court after negotiations with the tax authorities, much to his daughter's fury. He paid a large fine cheerfully, testified for the prosecution against his old ally, was granted immunity from prosecution in return, and, some months later, bought the beautiful K. K. Chambers for a song from the jailed politico's crumbling property company. And there was one further defeat for Mynah; for although she had successfully proved the existence of the invisible buildings, she failed to establish the reality of the invisible people who built them. They continued to -be classified as phantoms, to move through the city like wraiths, except that these were the wraiths that kept the city going, building its houses, hauling its goods, cleaning up its droppings, and then simply and terribly dying, each in their turn, unseen, as their spectral blood poured out of their ghostly mouths in the middle of the bitch-city's all-too-real, uncaring streets. When Ina holed up at the Altamount sisters' nursing home to await Jimmy Cash's return, Philomina surprised us all by paying her sister a visit. There was a Dory Previn song that you heard a lot back then--we sometimes got to things a little late--in which she accused her lover of being prepared to die for total strangers, though he would not live with her... Well, we thought much the same of our Philomina. Which was why her concern for poor Ina was so unexpected. Why did we do it? I think because we understood that something had broken, that this was Ina's last throw of the dice. I think because we had always known that although Minnie was smaller and Mynah was younger it was Ina who was the most fragile, that she had never really been all there ever since her parents chopped her name in half, and that what with her nymphomania and all she had been cracking up for years. So she was drowning, she was clutching at straws as she had always clutched at men, and cheesy Jimmy was the last straw on offer. Mynah offered to collect Jamshed Cashondeliveri from the airport, reasoning that, what with his new life as a law student and all, he might find it easiest to open up to her. He arrived looking very scared and very young, and to put him at his ease she began prattling, as she drove into town, about her own work, her 'struggle against the phallocracy'--about the case of the invisible world, and also her women's group's efforts to fight the Emergency in the courts. She spoke of the climate of fear pervading much of the country and the importance of the struggle for democratic and human rights. 'Indira Gandhi', she said, 'has lost the right to call herself a woman. She has grown an invisible dick.' Because she was so absorbed in her own concerns and so convinced of their justness she failed to notice that Jimmy was becoming more tense