Salman Rushdie by The Moor's Last Sigh (txt)

Author:The Moor's Last Sigh (txt) [Sigh, The Moor's Last]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-06T22:00:32.703000+00:00

THE WOMAN WHO TRANSFORMED, exalted and ruined my life entered it at Mahalaxmi racecourse forty-one days after Ina's death. It was a Sunday morning at the beginning of the late-year cool season, and according to ancient custom--'How ancient?' you ask, and I reply Bombay-fashion, 'Ancient, men. From ancient time'--the city's finest citizens had risen early and taken the place of the highly strung, pedigreed local steeds, both in the paddock and on the track. No races were scheduled; only the shades of departed jockeys in their bright-hooped shirts, the phantom echoes of once and future hooves and the fading notes of the chargers' steaming whinnies, only the tumbling rustle of old, discarded copies of Cole's race-day booklets--O invaluable guides to form!--might be discerned, by the eyes and ears of fancy, glimmering like the faint traces of an overpainted picture beneath this weekly rus in urbe scene, this parasolled procession of the leisured great. Swiftly in running-shoes and shorts with their babies strapped to their backs, or gently perambulating with walking-sticks and wearing straw panamas they came, the nobles offish and steel, the counts of cloth and shipping, the lords of finance and property, the princes of land and sea and of the powers of the air, and their ladies too, dolled up to the nines in silks and gold, or track-suited and pony-tailed, with pink headbands stretched like royal circlets across athletic brows. Some there were who sped past furlong markers, stop-watches at the ready; others who sailed slowly past the old grandstand, like ocean liners coming in to dock. It was a time for encounters both licit and il-; for deals to be done and hands to be shaken on their doing; for the city's matriarchy to eye up its youth and plot its future nuptials, and for young men and women to exchange glances, and make choices of their own. It was a time for family members to come together, and a gathering of the metropolis's mightiest clans. Power, money, kinship and desire: these, concealed beneath the simpler benefits of an hour's health-giving stroll around the old course, were the driving forces behind the Mahalaxmi Weekend Constitutional, a horseless race with a class field, a derby without a starter's gun or photo-finish, but one in which there were many prizes to be won. That Sunday six weeks after Ina died we were making an effort to close the family's sadly depleted ranks. Aurora in elegant slacks and open-necked white linen shirt made a point of displaying the family's solidarity by walking arm-in-arm with Abraham, who was white of mane and magnificently straight of back, at seventy-four every inch the suited-and-booted patriarch, no longer a country cousin among the grandees, but the very grandest of them all. The morning had not begun auspiciously, however. On our way to Mahalaxmi we had picked up Minnie--Sister Floreas--who had been excused, on compassionate grounds, from morning worship at the Maria Gratiaplena convent. She sat beside me on the back seat in her

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