The Moor's Last Sigh Read Online Free

the breeze, and pictures of devil-women with both eyes on the same side of their noses, and giant canvases that looked like an accident had befallen with the paint, and all these calamities Epifania was obliged to put on the walls and in the courtyards of her own beloved home, and look at every day, as if they were decent stuff. 'Your art-shart, Francisco,' she told her husband venomously, 'it will blindofy me with ugliness.' But he was immune to her poisons. 'Old beauty is not enough,' he told her. 'Old palaces, old behaviour, old gods. These days the world is full of questions, and there are new ways to be beautiful.' Francisco was hero material from the day he was born, destined for questions and quests, as ill-at-ease with domesticity as Quixote. He was handsome as sin but twice as virtuous, and on the coir-matting cricket-pitches of the time he proved, when young, a devilish slow left arm tweaker and elegant number four bat. At college he was the most brilliant student physicist of his year, but was orphaned early and chose, after much reflection, to forgo the academic life, do his duty, and enter the family business. He grew up, becoming an adept of the age-old da Gama art of turning spice and nuts into gold. He could smell money on the wind, could sniff the weather and tell you if it was bringing in profit or loss; but he was also a philanthropist, funding orphanages, opening free health clinics, building schools for the villages lining the back-waterways, setting up institutes researching coco-palm blight, initiating elephant conservation schemes in the mountains beyond his spice-fields, and sponsoring annual contests at the time of the Onam flower festival to find and crown the finest oral storytellers in the region: so free with his philanthropy, in fact, that Epifania was driven to wailing (uselessly): 'And then, when funds are frittered, and children are cap-in-hand? Then can we eatofy your thisthing, your anthropology?' She fought him every inch of the way, and lost every battle except the last. Francisco the modernist, his eyes fixed on the future, became a disciple first of Bertrand Russell--Religion and Science and A Free Man's Worship were his ungodly Bibles--and then of the increasingly fervent nationalist politics of the Theo-sophical Society of Mrs Annie Besant. Remember: Cochin, Travancore, Mysore, Hyderabad were technically not part of British India; they were Indian States, with their own princes. Some of them--like Cochin--could boast, for example, of educational and literacy standards far in excess of those prevailing under British direct rule, while in others (Hyderabad) there existed what Mr Nehru called a condition of'perfect feudalism', and in Travancore even the Congress was declared illegal; but let us not confuse (Francisco did not confuse) appearance with reality; the fig-leaf is not the fig. When Nehru raised the national flag in Mysore, the local (Indian) authorities destroyed not only the flag but even the flagpole the moment he had left town, lest the event annoy the true rulers... Soon after the Great War broke out on his thirty-eighth birthday, something snapped inside Francisco. 'The British must go,' he announced solemnly at dinner beneath the oil-paintings of his suited-and-booted ancestors. 'O God, where are they going?' asked Epifania, missing the point. 'In such a bad moment they will abandon us to our fate and that boogyman, Kaiser Bill?' Francisco exploded, and twelve-year-old Aires and eleven-year-old Camoens froze in their seats. 'The Kaiser is one bill we are already paying,' he thundered. 'Taxes doubled! Our youngsters dying in British uniform! The nation's wealth is being shipped off, madam: at home our people starve, but British Tommy is utilising our wheat, rice, jute and coconut products. I personally am required to send out goods below cost-price. Our mines are being emptied: saltpetre, manganese, mica. I swear! Bombay-wallahs getting rich and nation going to pot.' 'Too