THE MOOR’S LAST SIGH
Salman Rushdie is the author of six novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Prize), Shame (winner of the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger), The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers’ Guild Award), and The Moor’s Last Sigh (winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award). He has also published a collection of short stories, East, West; a book of reportage, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey; a volume of essays, Imaginary Homelands; and a work of film criticism, ‘The Wizard of Oz’.
Salman Rushdie was awarded Germany’s Author of the Year Award for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989. In 1993, Midnight’s Children was adjudged the ‘Booker of Bookers’, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In the same year he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is also an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books have been published in more than two dozen languages.
BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
Fiction
Grimus
Midnight’s Children
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun And The Sea Of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sigh
Non-Fiction
The Jaguar Smile:
A Nicaraguan Journey
Imaginary Homelands
‘The Wizard Of Oz’
‘The Moor’s Last Sigh is to be hailed as a triumph of imaginative indomitability. With it, Rushdie triumphantly unfurls his pent-up creativity and lets it gorgeously ripple out’
Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
‘A spicy Indian family saga about the loss of love …
Believe me, it’s a great read’
Victoria Glendinning, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph
‘An amazing, rambunctious epic which has the reader in fits of side-splitting laughter even as it chills to the bone’
India Today
‘The Moor’s Last Sigh is story-telling at its best.’
The Calgary Herald
‘The seven-league boots of Rushdie’s imaginative power carry him far ahead of any other novel this year. All that is joyous and terrible in human life is encompassed in grand ebullience in this book’
Nadine Gordimer, Books of the Year, Observer
‘A rich, wonderfully readable novel’
The Toronto Star
‘My novel of the year’
Martin Amis, Books of the Year, Sunday Times
‘Brilliant.’
The Montreal Gazette
‘The Moor’s Last Sigh towers over this year’s home-grown novel. It is a colossus of a book, to me, heartbreaking, a tale of the unloved son, the outsider, the rejected. Its scope and exuberant wit obscures its sadness’
Doris Lessing, Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph
‘A wonderful book’
Malcolm Bradbury, The Times
‘Every page bubbles with Rushdie’s trademark linguistic virtuosity and explodes with jokes, confirming the author’s position as the most inventive novelist writing in English’
Elle
‘The Moor’s Last Sigh is possessed by a demonic narrative energy and has colossal imaginative reach’
Ian McEwan, Books of the Year, Financial Times
‘This book is so funny and wonderful that I have marked 25 passages to come back to which I will do again and again’
Rosie Boycott, Books of the Year, The Times
‘Irresistible … Rushdie is on the form that makes him one of the world’s leading novelists’
Melvyn Bragg, Books of the Year, Sunday Times
‘The Moor’s Last Sigh held me captured with its prose, richness, brilliant colour and fun’
Ruth Rendell, Books of the Year, Daily Mail
FIRST VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 1996
Copyright © 1995 by Salman Rushdie
All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. First published in Canada in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, and simultaneously in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., in 1995. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Rushdie, Salman
The Moor’s last sigh
eISBN: 978-0-307-36774-7
I. Title
PR9499.3.R8M6 1996 832’.914 C96-930457-9
v3.1
For E.J.W.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I
A House Divided
II
Malabar Masala
III
Bombay Central
IV
‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’
I
A HOUSE DIVIDED
1
I HAVE LOST COUNT of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda’s mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door. And since then along my hungry, heat-hazed way there have been further bunches of scribbled sheets, swings of the hammer, sharp exclamations of two-inch nails. Long ago when I was green my beloved said to me in fondness, ‘Oh, you Moor, you strange black man, always so full of theses, never a church door to nail them to.’ (She, a self-professedly godly un-Christian Indian, joked about Luther’s protest at Wittenberg to tease her determinedly ungodly Indian Christian lover: how stories travel, what mouths they end up in!) Unfortunately, my mother overheard; and darted, quick as snakebite: ‘So full, you mean, of faeces.’ Yes, mother, you had the last word on that subject, too: as about everything.
‘Amrika’ and ‘Moskva’, somebody once called them, Aurora my mother and Uma my love, nicknaming them for the two great super-powers; and people said they looked alike but I never saw it, couldn’t see it at all. Both of them dead, of unnatural causes, and I in a far-off country with death at my heels and their story in my hand, a story I’ve been crucifying upon a gate, a fence, an olive-tree, spreading it across this landscape of my last journey, the story which points to me. On the run, I have turned the world into my pirate map, complete with clues, leading X-marks-the-spottily to the treasure of myself. When my pursuers have followed the trail they’ll find me waiting, uncomplaining, out of breath, ready. Here I stand. Couldn’t’ve done it differently.
(Here I sit, is more like it. In this dark wood – that is, upon this mount of olives, within this clump of trees, observed by the quizzically tilting stone crosses of a small, overgrown graveyard, and a little down the track from the Ultimo Suspiro gas station – without benefit or need of Virgils, in what ought to be the middle pathway of my life, but has become, for complicated reasons, the end of the road, I bloody well collapse with exhaustion.)
And yes, ladies, much is being nailed down. Colours, for example, to the mast. But after a not-so-long (though gaudily colourful) life I am fresh out of theses. Life itself being crucifixion enough.
When you’re running out of steam, when the puff that blows you onward is almost gone, it’s time to make confession. Call it testament or (what you) will; life’s Last Gasp Saloon. Hence this here-I-stand-or-sit with my life’s sentences nailed to the landscape and the keys to a red fort in my pocket, these moments of waiting before a final surrender.
Now, therefore, it is meet to si
ng of endings; of what was, and may be no longer; of what was right in it, and wrong. A last sigh for a lost world, a tear for its passing. Also, however, a last hurrah, a final, scandalous skein of shaggy-dog yarns (words must suffice, video facility being unavailable) and a set of rowdy tunes for the wake. A Moor’s tale, complete with sound and fury. You want? Well, even if you don’t. And to begin with, pass the pepper.
– What’s that you say? –
The trees themselves are surpriséd into speech. (And have you never, in solitude and despair, talked to the walls, to your idiot pooch, to empty air?)
I repeat: the pepper, if you please; for if it had not been for peppercorns, then what is ending now in East and West might never have begun. Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama’s tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon’s Tower of Belém to the Malabar Coast: first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in the period called Discovery-of-India – but how could we be discovered when we were not covered before? – we were ‘not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment’, as my distinguished mother had it. ‘From the beginning, what the world wanted from bloody mother India was daylight-clear,’ she’d say. ‘They came for the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.’
Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high-born cross-breed: me, Moraes Zogoiby, called ‘Moor’, for most of my life the only male heir to the spice-trade-’n’-big-business crores of the da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin, and of my banishment from what I had every right to think of as my natural life by my mother Aurora, née da Gama, most illustrious of our modern artists, a great beauty who was also the most sharp-tongued woman of her generation, handing out the hot stuff to anybody who came within range. Her children were shown no mercy. ‘Us rosary-crucifixion beatnik chicks, we have red chillies in our veins,’ she would say. ‘No special privileges for flesh-and-blood relations! Darlings, we munch on flesh, and blood is our tipple of choice.’
‘To be the offspring of our daemonic Aurora,’ I was told when young by the Goan painter V. (for Vasco) Miranda, ‘is to be, truly, a modern Lucifer. You know: son of the blooming morning.’ By then my family had moved to Bombay, and this was the kind of thing that passed, in the Paradise of Aurora Zogoiby’s legendary salon, for a compliment; but I remember it as a prophecy, because the day came when I was indeed hurled from that fabulous garden, and plunged towards Pandaemonium. (Banished from the natural, what choice did I have but to embrace its opposite? Which is to say, unnaturalism, the only real ism of these back-to-front and jabberwocky days. Placed beyond the Pale, would you not seek to make light of the Dark? Just so. Moraes Zogoiby, expelled from his story, tumbled towards history.)
– And all this from a pepperpot! –
Not only pepper, but also cardamoms, cashews, cinnamon, ginger, pistachios, cloves; and as well as spice’n’nuts there were coffee beans, and the mighty tea leaf itself. But the fact remains that, in Aurora’s words, ‘it was pepper first and onemost – yes, yes, onemost, because why say foremost? Why come forth if you can come first?’ What was true of history in general was true of our family’s fortunes in particular – pepper, the coveted Black Gold of Malabar, was the original stock-in-trade of my filthy-rich folks, the wealthiest spice, nut, bean and leaf merchants in Cochin, who without any evidence save centuries of tradition claimed wrong-side-of-the-blanket descent from great Vasco da Gama himself …
No secrets any more. I’ve already nailed them up.
2
AT THE AGE OF thirteen my mother Aurora da Gama took to wandering barefoot around her grandparents’ large, odorous house on Cabral Island during the bouts of sleeplessness which became, for a time, her nightly affliction, and on these nocturnal odysseys she would invariably throw open all the windows – first the inner screen-windows whose fine-meshed netting protected the house from midges mosquitoes flies, next the leaded-glass casements themselves, and finally the slatted wooden shutters beyond. Consequently, the sixty-year-old matriarch Epifania – whose personal mosquito-net had over the years developed a number of small but significant holes which she was too myopic or stingy to notice – would be awakened each morning by itching bites on her bony blue forearms and would then unleash a thin shriek at the sight of flies buzzing around the tray of bed-tea and sweet biscuits placed beside her by Tereza the maid (who swiftly fled). Epifania fell into a useless frenzy of scratching and swatting, lunging around her curvaceous teak boat-bed, often spilling tea on the lacy cotton bedclothes, or on her white muslin nightgown with the high ruffled collar that concealed her once swan-like, but now corrugated, neck. And as the fly-swatter in her right hand thwacked and thumped, as the long nails on her left hand raked her back in search of ever more elusive mosquito-bites, so Epifania da Gama’s nightcap would slip from her head, revealing a mess of snaky white hair through which mottled patches of scalp could (alas!) all too easily be glimpsed. When young Aurora, listening at the door, judged that the sounds of her hated grandmother’s fury (oaths, breaking china, the impotent slaps of the swatter, the scornful buzzing of insects) were nearing peak volume, she would put on her sweetest smile and breeze into the matriarch’s presence with a gay morning greeting, knowing that the mother of all the da Gamas of Cochin would be pushed right over the edge of her wild anger by the arrival of this youthful witness to her antique helplessness. Epifania, hair a-straggle, kneeling on stained sheets, upraised swatter flapping like a broken wand, and seeking a release for her rage, howled like a weird sister, rakshasa or banshee at intruding Aurora, to the youngster’s secret delight.
‘Oho-ho, girl, what a shock you gave, one day you will killofy my heart.’
So it was that Aurora da Gama got the idea of murdering her grandmother from the lips of the intended victim herself. After that she began making plans, but these increasingly macabre fantasies of poisons and cliff-edges were invariably scuppered by pragmatic problems, such as the difficulty of getting hold of a cobra and inserting it between Epifania’s bedsheets, or the flat refusal of the old harridan to walk on any terrain that, as she put it, ‘tiltoed up or down’. And although Aurora knew very well where to lay her hands on a good sharp kitchen knife, and was certain that her strength was already great enough to choke the life out of Epifania, she nevertheless ruled out these options, too, because she had no intention of being found out, and too obvious an assault might lead to the asking of uncomfortable questions. The perfect crime having failed to make its nature known, Aurora continued to play the perfect granddaughter; but brooded on, privately, though it never occurred to her to notice that in her broodings there was more than a little of Epifania’s ruthlessness:
‘Patience is a virtue,’ she told herself. ‘I’ll just bide-o my time.’
In the meanwhile she went on opening windows during those humid nights, and sometimes threw out small valuable ornaments, carved wooden trunk-nosed figures which bobbed away on the titles of the lagoon lapping at the walls of the island mansion, or delicately worked ivory tusks which naturally sank without trace. For several days the family was at a loss to understand these developments. The sons of Epifania da Gama, Aurora’s uncle Aires-pronounced-Irish and her father Camoens-pronounced-Camonsh-through-the-nose, would awake to find that mischievous night-breezes had blown bush-shirts from their closets and business papers from their pending trays. Nimble-fingered draughts had untied the necks of the sample-bags, jute sacks full of big and little cardamoms and karri-leaves and cashews that always stood like sentinels along the shady corridors of the office wing, and as a result there were fenugreek seeds and pistachios tumbling crazily across the worn old floor made of limestone, charcoal, egg-whites and other, forgotten ingredients, and the scent of spices in the air tormented the matriarch, who had grown more and more allergic with the passing years to the sources of her family’s fortune.
And if the flies buzzed in through the opened netting-windows, and the naughty gusts through the parted pan
es of leaded glass, then the opening of the shutters let in everything else: the dust and the tumult of boats in Cochin harbour, the horns of freighters and tugboat chugs, the fishermen’s dirty jokes and the throb of their jellyfish stings, the sunlight as sharp as a knife, the heat that could choke you like a damp cloth pulled tightly around your head, the calls of floating hawkers, the wafting sadness of the unmarried Jews across the water in Mattancherri, the menace of emerald smugglers, the machinations of business rivals, the growing nervousness of the British colony in Fort Cochin, the cash demands of the staff and of the plantation workers in the Spice Mountains, the tales of Communist troublemaking and Congresswallah politics, the names Gandhi and Nehru, the rumours of famine in the east and hunger strikes in the north, the songs and drum-beats of the oral storytellers, and the heavy rolling sound (as they broke against Cabral Island’s rickety jetty) of the incoming titles of history. ‘This low-class country, Jesus Christ,’ Aires-uncle swore at breakfast in his best gaitered and hatterred manner. ‘Outside world isn’t dirtyfilthy enough, eh, eh? Then what frightful bumbolina, what dash-it-all bugger-boy let it in here again? Is this a decent residence, by Jove, or a shithouse excuse-my-French in the bazaar?’
That morning Aurora understood that she had gone too far, because her beloved father Camoens, a little goateed stick of a man in a loud bush-shirt who was already a head shorter than his beanpole daughter, took her down to the little jetty, and positively capering in his emotion and excitement so that against the improbable beauty and mercantile bustle of the lagoon his silhouette seemed like a figure out of a fantasy, a leprechaun dancing in a glade, perhaps, or a benign djinni escaped from a lamp, he confided in a secret hiss his great and heartbreaking news. Named after a poet and possessed of a dreamy nature (but not the gift), Camoens timidly suggested the possibility of a haunting.