The Moors Last Sigh

call her (but then he was always giving people names, imposing his private universe bully-fashion upon the world): Isabella Ximena da Gama, the grandmother I never knew. Between her and Epifania it had been war from the start. Widowed at forty-five, Epifania at once commenced to play the matriarch, and would sit with a lapful of pistachios in the morning shadow of her favourite courtyard, fanning herself, cracking nutshells with her teeth in a loud, impressive demonstration of power, singing the while in a high, implacable voice,
Booby Shafto’s gone to sea-ea
Silver bottles on his knee-ee  …
    Ker-rick! Ker-rack! went the nutshells in her mouth.
He’ll come back to bury me-ee
Boney Booby Shafto .
    In all the years of her life only Belle refused to be scared of her. ‘Four b-minuses,’ the nineteen-year-old Isabella told her mother-in-law brightly the day after she entered the household as a disapproved-of but grudgingly accepted bride. ‘Not booby, not bottles, not bury, not boney. So sweet you sing a love song at your age, but wrong words make it nonsense, isn’t it.’
    ‘Camoens,’ said stony Epifania, ‘inform your goodwife to shuttofy her tap. Some hot-water-trouble is leaking from her face.’ In the days that followed she launched indomitably into a full medley of personalised shanties: What shall we do with the shrunken tailor? caused her new daughter-in-law much inadequately stifled merriment, whereupon Epifania, frowning, changed her tune: Row, row, row your beau, gently down istream , she sang, perhaps advising Belle to concentrate on her spousely duties, and then added the rather more metaphysical put-down: Morally, morally, morally, morally  … ker-runch! …  wife is not a queen .
    Ah, the legends of the battling da Gamas of Cochin! I tell them as they have come down to me, polished and fantasticated by many re-tellings. These are old ghosts, distant shadows, and I tell their tales to be done with them; they are all I have left and so I set them free. From Cochin harbour to Bombay harbour, from Malabar Coast to Malabar Hill: the story of our comings-together, tearings-apart, our rises, falls, our tiltoings up and down . And after that it’s goodbye, Mattancherri, farewell, Marine Drive … at any rate, by the time my mother Aurora had arrived in that baby-starved household and grown into a tall and mutinous thirteen-year-old, the lines were clearly drawn.
    ‘Too long for a girl,’ was Epifania’s disapproving verdict on her granddaughter as Aurora entered her teens. ‘Trouble in her eye means devil in her heart. Shame on her front, also, as any eye can see. It stickofies too far out.’ To which Belle angrily replied, ‘And what so-so-perfect child has your darling Aires provided? At least one young da Gama is here, alive and kicking, and never mind her big booby-shaftoes. From Aires-brother and Sister Sahara, no sign of any produce: boobies or babies, both.’ Aires’s wife’s name was Carmen, but Belle, mimicking her brother-in-law’s fondness for inventing names, had named her after the desert, ‘because she is barren-flat as sand and in all that waste ground I can’t see any place to get a drink.’
    Aires da Gama, brilliantine struggling to keep slicked-down his thick, wavy white hair (premature whitening has long been a family characteristic; my mother Aurora was snow-white at twenty, and what fairy-tale glamour, what icy gravitas was added to her beauty by the soft glaciers cascading from her head!): how my great-uncle postured! In the small, two-inch-by-two-inch monochrome photographs I remember, what a ludicrous figure he cut in his monocle, stiff collar, and three-piece suit of finest gabardine. There was an ivory-topped cane in one hand ( it was a swordstick , family history whispers in my ear), a long cigarette-holder in the other; and he was also, I regret to mention, in the habit of wearing spats. Add height, and a pair of twirling moustachios, and the picture of a comic-opera villain would be complete; but Aires was as pocket-sized as his brother, clean-shaven and a little shiny of face, so that his look of a counterfeit Drone was, perhaps, more to be pitied than hissed at.
    Here, too, on another page of memory’s photograph album, is stooping, squint-eyed Great-Aunt Sahara, the Woman Without Oases, masticating betel-nut in those just-so-cameelious jowls and looking like she’s got the hump. Carmen da Gama was Aires’s first cousin, the orphan child of