The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie Page A

bodies of the (Lobo) overseer, his wife and daughters were found, tied to trees with barbed wire: burned, like heretics, at the stake. And in the smouldering ruins of a fertile cardamom grove, the charred corpses of three Menezes brothers were also found on fire-eaten trees. Their arms were outstretched, and through the centre of each of their six palms an iron nail had been driven. I say these things baldly because they make me shake with shame. My family has been under many clouds. What sort of family is this? Is this normal'? Is this what we are all like? We are like this; not always, but potentially. This, too, is what we are. Fifteen years: Epifania fainted in the courtroom, Carmen wept, but Belle was dry-eyed and hard-faced, with Aurora similarly silent and grave upon her lap. Many Menezes and Lobo men, and some women, were jailed or condemned; the survivors melted away, returning ash-stained to Mangalore. When they had gone the house on Cabral Island became very quiet, but the walls, the furniture, the rugs were still a-crackle with the electricity generated by the recently departed; there were parts of the house so highly charged that just to enter them made your hair stand on end. The old place released the memory of the mob slowly, slowly, as if it half-expected the bad times to return. But in the end it relaxed, and peace and silence began to think about moving back in. Belle had her own ideas about how civilisation should be restored, and she wasted no time. Ten days after the jailings of Aires and Camoens, as an afterthought, the authorities ordered the arrest of Epifania and Carmen as well; but a week later, just as whimsically, they released them again. During those seven days, with Camoens's written authorisation--as a Grade A prisoner, he was allowed to receive daily meals from home, as well as writing materials, books, newspapers, soap, towels, fresh clothes, and could send out dirty laundry and letters--Belle went to see the lawyers of the Gama Trading Company, the appointed trustees of Francisco da Gama's last testament, and persuaded them of the immediate necessity of dividing the business in two. 'The conditions of the will are clearly met,' she said. 'Disharmony and discord have been introduce-o'ed everywhere by appointees of Aires, whether direct or indirect does not signify; business circumstances plainly dictate that company integrity is impossible to maintain. If the Gama Company remains a single cell, then the shame of these atrocities will finish it off. Divide, and maybe the sickness can be contained m one half only. If we do not live separately then we will die together.' While lawyers were busying themselves with a proposal for the halving of the family business, Belle went back to Cabral Island and divided the grand old house itself, from deepest-bottom to % highest-top; the old family sets of linen, cutlery, crockery were all summarily divorced, down to the last tea spoon, pillow-slip and quarter-plate. With the one-year-old Aurora on her hip she directed the household staff; almirahs, tallboys, pouffes, long-armed cane chairs, bamboo poles for mosquito-nets, summer charpoys for those who preferred to sleep in the open air during the hot season, spittoons, thunderbox pots, hammocks, wine-glasses were all moved around; even the lizards on the walls were captured, and evenly distributed on both sides of the great divide. Studying the house's crumbling old ground plans, and paying scrupulous attention to exact allocation of floor-space windows balconies, she split the mansion, its contents, courtyards and gardens, right down the middle. She had sackfuls of spices piled high along her newly established frontiers and where such barriers were inappropriate -for example on the main staircase--she drew white lines down the centre and demanded that these demarcations be respected. In the kitchen she parted the pots and pans, and put up a chart of hours on the wall that bisected the week, day by day.