#تنهيدة_المغربي_الأخيرة
#سلمان_رشدى
5 نجوم

يا أمي، يا أم!! الآن أعلم لماذا طردتني. يا أمي الميتة العظيمة، يا والدتي المغفلة، يا والدتي الحمقاء!
سلمان رشدى صاحب رائعة أطفال منتصف الليل وصاحب الراية الشهيرة ايات شيطانية التى تم تكفيرة بسببها من قبل الخمينى وتم عدة محاولات لقتله, وهو الحاصل على البوكر لرواية أطفال منتصف الليل و جائزة جوائز الأدب أي أفضل رواية حصلت على البوكر.
الكاتب هندى يكتب بالانجليزية وحصل على لقب فارس من بريطانيا.
فى مدينة بومباى ابنة الزنا تدور الأحداث.
وفى تنهيدة المغربى الأخيرة نجد صراع الزمن نجد الدم ونجد الفن و الموسيقى و السياسة و الواقعية و الواقعية السحرية و الفنتازيا و العادات و كافة الأديان و السجن و القنابل و التاريخ و الأقتصاد و الحروب و الحب و الخيانة و الدمار.
سلمان هو كاتب يكتب كلمات #شيطانية
رواية صعبة للغاية فى نظام السرد و الأحداث و الأفكار الكثيرة تتبع الهند كاملة فى القرن الماضى حتى التسيعنيات, ويظهر أشخاص ويختفوا ويعودوا للظهور ويكتمل السرد ويتلاقى ويتفرع.
كثرة الشخصياتو الأحداث و الأفكار والصفحات جعلت العمل شديد الثقل.
نجد موريس واوروا والدته واحداث رائعة , فيجيد سلمان سرد الاحداث و تشكيل الصراعات العائلية.
نجد لوحات المغربى الذي يسرد المأساة نجد الوطن فى كافة فتراته, من خلال الأبطال, نجد موريس المغربى الذى كانت خطيئته الوحيدة النمو بسرعة فائقة للغاية.
نجد الخاينة وعائلة بكاملها تسجن..
نجد ميت يتسبب فى قتل قاتل....
الرواية ملحمية شديدة الجمال ساحرة باهرة تشيب العقل , تشعر بالحزن لانك لن تقرا لسلمان, الذى كان أسلوبه عذب جدًا, شديد الجمال, مبهر , يتناسب مع مستوى قلمة الفائق الروعة, كاتب يفوق دائمًأ فى كل عمل مستوى توقعاتك, ويبهرك بذكاءة. يقوم بتحليل نفسى لشخصياته وأحداثه ويقوم بوضع فلسفته ورؤيته الخاصة للسياسة و الفن و الاديان والحب و الموت والجنس و العادات, ويضع رؤية اشخاص جعلها حية.
أن سلمان هو شيطان هندى يكتب باالأنجليزية.

الرسم الذي وجدوه على منصبها كان يدور حولي، ففي ذلك العمل الأخير "تنهيدة المغربي الأخيرة"، أعادت إلى المغربي إنسانيته. فتلك اللوحة لم تكن تهريجًا مجردًا، ولا لصق نفايات، بل لوحة لابنها الذي ضاع في منطقة انتقالية مثل خيال جوال: صورة لروح في الجحيم. وخلفه أمه التي لم تعد في لوح منفصل، بل اتحدت من جديد مع السلطان المعذب، لا تقرعه. ابك مثل النساء ملكًا مضاعًا -بل تنظر، في عينيها الذعر ويدها ممدودة. ذلك أيضًا كان اعتذارًا جاء بعد فوات الأوان، عملًا من أعمال الغفران لم يعد باستطاعتي أن أنتفع به. لقد فقدتها، فيما زادت اللوحة فقط من ألم الفقدان..
الحب يستحق أكثر من الدم أكثر من العار أكثر حتى من الموت. لن أموت من اجلك يا أوما بل من أجلك سأعيش مهما تكن الحياة قاسية.

hated it. rushdie paints very vivid pictures of his characters and their surroundings, but at a certain point i just stopped caring. if i had to guess i would say my main turn off was the way the book is structured. knowing the the story ultimately had to focus in on the moor, i just kept trudging through the loads of back story in the beginning of the book. but, on the other hand, i loved the details about his family. i guess i just felt divided between the family history and anticipating what this had to do with whatever was going to happen in the second half of the book and why the moor, of all people, was the vehicle rushdie used to tell the story and act as the main character (though he wasn't really present in half the book). i would love to read a story just about epifania and aurora, and then another book about the moor's exploits.

Honestly, I remember almost nothing about this book---something about a man who ages at twice the age that normal people are supposed to, something about his mother (who I found to be the most interesting character in the book--actually the women in this book leave the most enduring memories)--a spice plantation and fights about money.

This began my love affair with magic realism--which has since somehow curdled. At the time, I thought this is IT, this is what writing should be---but since then magic realism has become somewhat over-used---as a sort of crutch to make boring ideas interesting--similar to stream-of-conciousness rambling a generation earlier (oh yes, when it's good it's very good, but oh-so-often it is a cover for poor writing).

I'm not saying that Rushdie does this HERE however---as I recall this is a solid read, though by no means a point of entry to Rushdie's work (Midnight's Children would be a much better gateway in my opinion). I probably should read this again--but I just don't have the heart.

This is another hard book to rate and review. Rushdie is a smart, ingenious and purposeful writer. Everything is cleverly thought out and his use of language is magical. He bends the words with ease and brings out richer meanings. The plot is an original story that unfolds as a series of riddles to a satirical account of modern India.

Yet, in spite of all that, the book did not click with me.

The characters remain puppets. As exotic cartoons they act out a sort of fable that sometimes appears without direction. The novel seems another example of what is by now a well-established genre in the literature of the subcontinent, that of magical allegories of the history of its Independence. Rushdie may have been the pioneer of this trend with his “Midnight Children”. I preferred the earlier novel.

In this genre I also liked Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel, in which he mixes the Mahabharata with the account of the Partition.

Since Rushdies’s Enchantress of Florence is on my bookshelves anyway, I will certainly read one more of his books and hopefully will like it better.

But here is a brilliant review of the Moor that does the book better justice:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/18...

Salman Rushdie is the kind of author that makes me feel like an idiot. But I totally love his books, perhaps for this reason, perhaps because not many other living authors have such a command of the English language in my opinion. Or if they do, they write boring stories in a stylish prose. The Moor's Last Sigh took me a long time to get into and long time to finish, because I can only manage so many pages before my brain needs a rest and it's not what I'd call pre-bedtime reading. However, despite the odd "oh, come on Salman" moment, it's a brilliant plot which I massively enjoyed and couldn't put down by the end. Aurora Da Gama and India are my new favourite heroines. It's one of those books that despite taking an age to finish, I was sad when it did.

Saga familiare a dir poco caotica! 
Molti personaggi piuttosto particolari, donne estremamente forti e caparbie e il nostro Moro a raccontare la storia della sua vita e della sua famiglia.

È un bel romanzo, ma in tutta onestà in parecchi punti ho perso un po' il filo e l'ho trovato un po' forzato in alcune parti .

Se l'amore non è tutto, allora è nulla.

Non c'è limite alla malvagità, non c'è frontiera che qualcuno abbia scoperto. Qualunque sia l'eccesso di oggi, domani sarà peggio.

Accetta il tuo destino» disse. «Godi di ciò che ti dà sofferenza. Voltati e corri con tutta l'anima verso ciò che fuggiresti. Solo diventando la tua disgrazia la trascenderai.

<<<È difficile perdonare la vita per la forza con cui le grandi macchine di "ciò che è” si avventano sulle anime di "quelli che sono">>> disse con una certa noncuranza dopo che ci fummo seduti al tavolo di un caffè riparato da un ombrellone davanti a due forti caffè neri e a due bicchieri di Fundador. «Come perdonare il mondo per la sua bellezza, che ne maschera semplicemente la bruttura; per la sua mitezza, che ne nasconde semplicemente la crudeltà; per la sua illusione di continuare, senza pause, come la notte segue il giorno, per così dire?...

Mentre in realtà la vita è una serie di brutali spaccature, che ci piombano sul capo indifeso come i colpi d'accetta di un boscaiolo.>>

"Geçmişi yitirdiğimizde, her şey patlayıp paçavraya döndüğünde suçu nasıl paylaştıracağız? Bir hayatın enkazında nasıl anlam bulacağız?"

Nereden başlasam ki... Kötü zamanlardan geçtiğimiz şu günlerde okuma motivasyonumun biraz düşmesinden ötürü hafiften uzamış bir yolculuk oldu benim için Mağriplinin Son İç Çekişi ama güzel de oldu, sindirerek okudum. Salman Rushdie, adına aşina olduğum ama çok da merakımı cezbetmemiş bir yazardı açıkçası. Can Yayınları'nın 7 tl kampanyasından almıştım Mağriplinin Son İç Çekişi'ni. Dolayısıyla hakkında hiçbir şey bilmiyordum, hatta yakın zamanda okumayı da planmalamıştım. Tamamen spontane bir şekilde okudum ve gerçekten çok beğendim.

Kitapta güzel işlenmiş bir olay örgüsü, nesiller boyu bir aile anlatısı var ancak sadece olaylara sırtını yaslayan bir roman değil Mağriplinin Son İç Çekişi; aynı zamanda çok boyutlu oluşturulmuş karakterlere ve tüm bunları okuması zevkli hale getiren çok beğendiğim bir üsluba sahip. Özellikle kadın karakterlerin çok boyutlu ve baskın olmasına, hiçbir zaman arka planda kalmamış olmasına çok sevindim. Karakterlerin iyi ve kötü şeklinde ayrılmamasını; hepsinin gri tonlarında olmasını da çok sevdim. Örneğin romanda çok rahatsız olduğum bir kısım vardı ve okurken bir yandan da "Bu hiç romantik değil, bu çok rahatsız edici." diye düşünüyordum ama ilerleyen kısımlarda beni rahatsız eden eylemi gerçekleştiren karakterin aslında göründüğü kadar iyi olmadığını fark edince karakter oluşturmadaki başarısını bir kez daha takdir ettim Rushdie'nin.

Hindistan benim hem kültür hem de coğrafya olarak pek hakim olmadığım bir ülke; dolayısıyla kurguya yedirilen siyasi gerçeklikleri yakalamakta ve anlamakta biraz zorlandım, araştırma yapmam gerekti ve yazarın tarihi olayları kurguya dahil etmede de çok başarılı olduğunu düşünüyorum. Aynı zamanda Hindistan'ın dini ve toplumsal yapısının çeşitliliği kitaptaki karakterlerin de çok renkli oluşuna katkı sağlamış. Bu da sevdiğim bir diğer özelliğiydi romanın. Baş karakterimiz Moor'un annesi Auroa bir ressamdı ve onun yaptığı resimlerin ayrıntılı tasvirleri de kitapta hatırı sayılır bir yer kaplıyordu; resimler adeta gözümde canlandı, keşke görme şansımız da olsaydı diye düşündüm hatta. Zaten bu roman da ressam Francisco Pradilla'nın bir tablosundan ilham alınarak yazılmış, keza resim sanatına dair birçok şey okuyoruz kitapta da.

Sonuç olarak; sonlara doğru kurgudan biraz kopmuş olsam da genel olarak çok beğenerek okuduğum, üslubunu çok sevdiğim harika bir kitaptı. Salman Rushdie'nin kalemiyle tanıştığım için çok mutluyum, şimdi sırada diğer kitapları var.

Bazı alıntılar:

* "Yenilgiye uğramış aşk yine de bir hazinedir, aşksızlığı seçenler hiç zafer kazanmamış demektir."

* Bu kadın bana hem çok yakındı hem de bir yabancıydı. Bu kaderden kurtulduğumuz zaman, daha sonra onunla uzak bir şehirde bir galeri açılışında karşılaştığımızı hayal ettim. Birbirimizi kucaklar mıydık yoksa tanımazdan gelip geçer gider miydik? Birlikte titrediğimiz, birbirimizi kucakladığımız gecelerden, hamamböceklerinden sonra birbirimizin her şeyi mi olacaktık yoksa hiçbir şeyi mi? Belki hiçbir şeyden de kötüsü; ikimiz de birbirimize hayatımızın en kötü dönemini anımsatacaktık. Dolayısıyla birbirimizden nefret edecek, öfkeyle sırt çevirecektik.

* Ölmek bu aşkı ölümsüzleştirmek bir yana, değerini düşürecekti. Ben yaşayacaktım, tutkumuzun sancaktarı olacaktım; hayatım aracılığıyla aşkın kandan değerli olduğunu, utançtan değerli olduğunu, hatta ölümden bile değerli olduğunu kanıtlayacaktım. Senin için ölmeyeceğim sevgili Uma'm, senin için yaşayacağım. Ne kadar zorlu bir hayat olursa olsun.

Rushdie gelingt es, einen ganzen Kosmos von wundersamen Figuren zu erschaffen und ihnen Leben einzuhauchen. Bei allem Witz und der großen Faszination für das Panorama der babylonischen Welt von Bombay hat das Buch auch einige Längen und die letzten 50 Seiten sind recht enttäuschen. Als Portrait von Bombay erinnert Des Mauren letzter Seufzer im besten Sinne an die Istanbul Bücher von Pamuk.

This is my favorite of Rushdie's. It combines the lyrical mysticism of Midnight's Children with the hard-nosed magical-realism of the "present-day" sections of The Satanic Verses. I found Midnight's Children to have an almost apocolyptic feeling about it, especially in the later chapters -- this is hardly a knock against it. But I feel like The Moor's Last Sigh, while it certainly comes to a climactic head much as Midnight's Children, does so in a way that you feel is, I suppose, more thematically complete. In this way, Midnight's Children might be subtitled, "The Amazing Adventures of Saleem Sinai in Post-Colonial India" whereas The Moor's Last Sigh requires no subtitle whatsoever.

4.5 stars

The Moor's Last Sigh is an amazing book! (and most probably, but not yet, I would count Rushdie as an 'insane' writer, in a good way of course). But it is most certainly not for everyone.
Personally, when I read some 1-star reviews, I realized I was loving the book precisely for the reasons that some people could not go on with it.

I loved the book for :
1) its amazing prose and wordplay. This is by far the biggest reason why I kept enjoying the book. And it pretty much never ends. Use of colloquial language, and word-play using local terms made it much more interesting. Much of the book being set in Cochin and (mostly) Mumbai (where my own origins are), I was enjoying a lot of this language-play, with puns and such. 5-stars to this part :)

2) setting being Mumbai, personally made it very interesting for me, having come across a few things about the city, the lives of the kind of people described, and the satire used for real notorious people of Mumbai from that era.

3) the book being a family saga of a dysfunctional family made it very interesting for me, because of the weird nature of the characters and their doings through four generations. I have never been much a reader of the family-sagas, but them being all weird, along with the earlier two reasons, made me enjoy the book. (I am a sucker for any ideas of weirdness, deviancy, abnormalcy, etc)

The book will be enjoyed much more by people who have lived in Bombay, or at least know a little bit of the happenings in that city from the 1960s through the 90s. Also, some knowledge of the history of pre-independent India would be helpful to relate. Furthermore, readers who know the local lingo and the language are bound to get more pleasure out of the book, especially the puns.

It is quite a smooth read that way, but not exactly so. The prose can be tough at times. I used to read not more than 20-30 pages a day. That was enough to derive pleasure for that current span of time. Haha!

I would give credit to one reviewer, who has said of the book to be 'Rushdie on never-ending LSD', and I totally would agree with it, which is something I loved. It is a wildly funny book in its own way. :)

Recommended.

The final chapters of the book, and the opening chapter, to which they loop back, are packed (or “palimpsested”) with historical allusions. Moraes is not only Muhammad XI (Abu-Abd-Allah, or Boabdil, in the Spanish corruption of his name): he sees himself as Dante in “an infernal maze” of tourists, drifting yuppie zombies, and also as Martin Luther, looking for doors on which to nail the pages of his life story, as well as Jesus on the Mount of Olives, waiting for his persecutors to arrive. It is hard to avoid the impression that all the left-over analogues of the Moor fable from Rushdie’s notebooks have been poured into these chapters, which are as a result frantic and overwritten while elementary rules of fiction, like not introducing new characters in the last pages, are ignored.

Rushdie pursues palimpsesting with considerable vigour in The Moor’s Last Sigh, as a novelistic, historiographical, and autobiographical device. Thus Granada, Boabdil’s lost capital, is also Bombay, “inexhaustible Bombay of excess,” the sighed-for home of Moraes as well as of the author over whose person he is written. Both are cities from which a regenerative cross-fertilization of cultures might have taken place, but for ethnic and religious intolerance.

Like Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), and The Satanic Verses (1989), The Moor’s Last Sigh is a novel with large ambitions composed on a large scale. In its architecture, however, the Group found it disappointing. Aside from the dynastic prelude set in Cochin, and the last fifty pages set in Spain, the body of the book belongs to Moraes’s life in Bombay. But instead of the interwoven development of character, theme, and action characteristic of the middle section of what might be called the classic novel, the middle section of Rushdie’s novel makes only fitful and episodic progress. New actors are introduced with enough inventiveness and wealth of detail to justify major roles; yet all too often their contribution to the action turns out to be slight, and they slipped (or were slipped) out of the picture almost whimsically. It was also argued by some in the Group that those without a good knowledge of the history of the period both in Bombay and wider India would struggle with the narrative.

To complaints of this kind—which have been voiced with regard to the earlier books as well—defenders of Rushdie have responded by arguing that he works, and should therefore be read, within two narrative traditions: of the Western novel (with its subgenre, the anti-novel à la Tristram Shandy), and of Eastern story-cycles like the Panchatantra, with their chainlike linking of self-contained, shorter narratives. To such critics, Rushdie is a multicultural writer not merely in the weak sense of having roots in more than one culture but in the strong sense of using one literary tradition to renew another.

It is not easy to counter this defence in its general form, particularly from the position of an outsider to India. But to take a single instance from The Moor’s Last Sigh: the episode in which Moraes’s father, Abraham Zogoiby, in a fit of enthusiasm for the modern, impersonal, “management” style in business, adopts a young go-getter named Adam over Moraes as his son and heir. For some fifteen pages Adam occupies centre stage. Then he is dropped from the book. Most of the Group found the episode unsatisfying; further, we would hazard a guess that the reason why Adam disappears is not that Rushdie is following traditional Indian models but that he is only half-heartedly committed to satirizing the business-school ethos; he abandons this particular narrative strand because it is leading nowhere.

Others disagreed, enjoying the stories of Adam and other personages who blazed briefly across the pages of The Moor’s Last Sigh and then expired….

This is an extract from a review at http://monthlybookgroup.wordpress.com/. Our reviews are also to be found at http://monthlybookgroup.blogspot.com/

The Moor’s Last Sigh is a colorful, hard-hitting excursion into India. Squeezed into a paperback, it spans nearly a century, and through the tumultuous history of the Zogoibys as they enlarge their pepper trade in Cochin (wasn’t it with spices, the ‘hot’ pepper that it all started?) to a national scale diversification of all kinds of ‘spices’ of life, cruising through the intense political scenes of Independence movement to newly-acquired freedom to communal bloodshed to Indira Gandhi-led Emergency to the proliferation of the Mumbai Underworld Mafia in the 1980s and the 1990s with a parallel Upperworld Political communal Mafia, Rushdie, the master puppeteer creates a show where the Zogoibys, as Kalliope rightly points out, are the puppets of Mother India, the various myths that Mother India is, the various false myths Mother India is, and also the children of that passionately loving, passionately cruel Mother that are entranced and entrapped, approaching their doom with double the speed they are supposed to travel, and all by their own terrified consent.

Like the Moor’s tale, my own take on the tale is anything but coherent, scattered like Moor’s loose pages all over the place, messy and chaotic. Allegorical to Mother India. Full of magical-realism, it is a realism that seems magical to the onlookers, a tragi-comedy, a tragedy to the characters, a farce to the readers, a drudge to the living. Written in 1995, this is Rushdie’s first novel after The Satanic Verses, that forced an author underground because he chose to speakofy his mind not in hush-hush barely-decipherable ambiguous impotent tones but in an in-your-face to-hell-with-you don’t-askofy-if-you-don’t-want-the-bleddy-truth profane potent portent loudspeaker style. It was not Moor who was exiled by his Mother Aurora da-Gama Zogoiby, but the Unlucky (Zogoiby in Arabic) Rushdie, the Indian bastard (or as Rushdie-Moor likes it, baas stink, turd no translation needed) of a non-Indian community who was disowned and thrown out by Mother India, hurtling towards an imminent death perhaps at double the speed of his biological life-span, cursed by another Mother-Rumpelstiltskin who wanted him all for herself.

The Moor’s tale, then, is not just an allegory to Modern Mother India, or to her unfortunate children, but also particularly to one special crippled child Rushdie himself, betrayed by his mother, his housekeeper Miss Jaya He (see the point? It is a phrase in the National Anthem, loosely meaning Victory/Hail! -to who-else-but-Mom-India?), by his only lover artist Uma Sarasvati (Two Indian Goddesses in one – Uma, the wife of Shiv-who-destroys Sarasvati, the incarnation of knowledge, therefore, the brilliant girl who destroyed Moor), and lastly, by his own Muse Vasco Miranda (an allusion to another profane blasphemous Indian artist M.F. Hussain, exiled by our Mom?) for whom Moor’s mother Aurora was once his own Muse.

Where to start? After all this long dithering, I haven’t startofied my review yet. When Moor’s own tale is all over the place, how do I know where to begin? When the tale itself is a pastiche, a random sticking of images and histories that has its own method to madness, when there is no clear beginning but only a vertigo where anything can come first, beware, O Readers, I too will stick-o-fy my point wherever I wish, like Moor stickofies one page of his tale to a tree and the other to a wall and a third to a well until they’re all over Benengeli, and don’t point-o-fy your fingers at me if you don’t like my jabberings lest I Jaw-Jaw at you like that now-stuffed dog.

Ah, but it all began with the spicy “spices” trade, didn’t it? The Portuguese had the hots for all our hot stuff and came here crossing half the world for a pinch of pepper. And then the Jews, the exiles from their own Mothers came sailing and sat down in Cochin, becoming the Cochin Jews, and also came all the Portuguese Christians, all of them with their hidden mysteries that led them here, and went into the
pepper trade. So here we come to the Portuguese Epifania and Francisco da Gama in the early 1900s with their children -Aires who married Carmen-Aunt Sahara, the flat barren desert who was never touched by her homo husband and so never reaped the fortune that lay between her legs, a legal heir, and Camoens, who married Belle who made both boobies and babies with her hubby to bring forth Mother Aurora who would marry a Cochin Jew who…. But, like Moor, I’m getting ahead of my tale.

While we witness the interesting, hilarious events of the da-Gama family as Belle wages war against the dominating matriarch epiphany Epifania, what we witness in the in-house separation (Belle, Camoens,
Francisco going anti-British-Simon-go-back, Epifania-Aires-Carmen going The-Brits-gave-us-what-all-we-have)is a microcosm of an India torn into two factions – an elite pro-British bunch, especially Christians/Portuguese afraid of giving up their pretty Anglican ways simultaneously rightly fearing Indians in charge of India, and an optimistic pro-Independence pro-equality, softly flirtatiously Marxist, heavily nationalistic euphoric duds bunch rallying under the suave charm of the English-pruned Nehru and the rustic-once-upon a-time-Angrezi-imitator-now-desi-by-choice little naked man Gandhi in-a-loin-cloth.

The ballistic warfare in the da-Gama family that ends with Belle taking charge of the house and the business when national chaos descends and Aires and Camoens are dumped into jail for 15 years signals the victory of the INC, the Nehru-led Congress party that would replace the British in 1947. But as everyone knows, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru screwed up the nation that was put in his hands, that dilettante child of Macaulay who finally produced his dream Minuteman, Indians in blood and color, but English in choices and opinions, daydreaming of progress as the country burned and got beaten up in front of his closed sleeping dreaming eyes.

For all his failures, I now think, Rushdie has been really kind to him, only mocking him with semi-seriousness (Aires, out of contempt, names his bulldog Jawaharlal Jaw-Jaw to annoy the pro-Nehru family-members):

Shut up, Jaw-Jaw, you all-bark-no-bite-mutt…

Like Jaw-Jaw Jawaharlal, they made plenty of noise but didn’t draw much blood.

Panditji, Congress-tho is always chickening out in the face of radical acts. No soft options will be takeofied round here.

Once, indeed, there were giants on our stage; but at the fag-end of an age, Madam History must make do with what she can get. Jawaharlal, in these latter days, was just the name of a stuffed dog.(At this point in the story, the dog is dead and is stuffed by Aires to keep him “alive”, a brilliant metaphor by Rushdie.

While the World Wars rage and the Independence movement gains momentum, Aurora grows up mother-less, not so much as motherless, as her Mummy Belle hunts business deals during the day and tigers to feed upon at night, with Camoens tucked away in jail. And when Belle dies after Camoens is released, Aurora, the 13-year old kid unleashes her week-long mourning in isolation by maddeningly painting her room, pouring forth vivid confusing images of the family yarn and weaving them onto a carpet of colors. At 15, she chooses the quiet Arab-Jew clerk Abraham Zogoiby, as old as her father as her lover, and while her father dies, she moves in with him, because she cannot marry him. In the book, this is quite an interesting, roaring episode, a great commentary on religious/cultural clashes, of standing up to one’s family for one’s right to love, of the great complicated affair a family is within the even more complicated nuances of age-old cultural rivalries, building upon Romeo and Juliet but our lovers are no Romeo or Juliet – if they cannot marry, they will not. But they will love. Not in their sacred hearts, but in their scandalous bodies. Not from their respective captive homes, but in the freedom of their house.

Let them make their own yarn. But welcome back to India. It’s an independent country now. Aurora has taken V. Miranda the artist under her wing and at the dinner table, newly-found freedom is being celebrated while Hindus and Muslims massacre each other in Kashmir. Miranda lashes out at the self-deceived foolery around him:

’Useless fucking art-johnny clever-dicks,’ he jeered. ‘Circular sexualist India my foot. No. Bleddy tongue-twister came out wrong. Secular socialist. That’s it. Bleddy bunk. Panditji sold you that stuff like a cheap watch salesman and you all bought one and now you wonder why it doesn’t work. Bleddy Congress party full of bleddy fake Rolex Salesman. You think India’ll just roll over, all those bloodthirsty bloodsoaked gods’ll just roll over and die […]

[…]And I’ll tell you something, Mr. Big Businessman Abie, let me give you a tip. Only one power in this damn country is strong enough to stand up against those gods and it isn’t blanket blank sockular specialism. It isn’t blanket blank Pandit Nehru and his blanket blank protection-of-minorities Congress watch-wallahs. You know what it is? I’ll tell you what it is. Corruption. You get me? Bribery […]

[…]One more thing, piece of good advice for you all. Get on the boats with the British! Just get on the bleddy boats and buggeroff. This place has no use for you. It’ll beat you and eat you. Get out! Get out
while the getting’s good.

Why is Kashmir the point of contention between India and Pakistan, and not any other state, when there were and are so many other probable candidates too? It is because immediately after Independence when many states/kingdoms (Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir...) wanted to be independent nations, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was appointed to unite them under India by hook or crook. Patel succeeded, but Nehru intervened. Instead of Sardar, Nehru wanted to be the one to convince Kashmir’s Hindu king, who ruled the state’s majority population of Muslims, to join India. Bleddy Reason: Nehru was a Kashmiri Pandit. He was so much in love with his state, the dudhead wanted the glory of salvaging his darling state and he messed it up with his ineptitude. And Hindus and Muslims, torn between India and Pakistan and the chance of becoming an independent entity, slaughtered each other, sending the nation into yet another bout of shock, paranoia, enmity and accusations. The riots haven’t yet ended – they have become more frequent, all over the country. And Vasco was right. Gods are useless. Money speaks. Bleddy money speaks and bleddy gods listen.

It was not an inebriated Miranda’s senseless tirade – it was a spectacular summing up of how India was doomed from the very start, and would pay heavily for the foundation it had achieved its Independence on. And the consequences, in Moor’s words, as we jump momentarily to the end of the novel which alludes to the turning points in India’s Communal history (the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992 by BJP-RSS-VHP political right-wing Hindu party, and the subsequent terror attacks by Muslim extremists in Mumbai particularly and riots all over the twin countries) are:

Violence was violence, murder was murder, two wrongs did not make one right: these are truths of which I was fully cognizant. Also: by sinking to your adversary’s level you lose the high ground. In the days after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, ‘justly enraged Muslims’/‘fanatical killers’ smashed up Hindu temples, and killed Hindus, across India and Pakistan as well. There comes a point in the unfurling of communal violence in which it becomes irrelevant to ask, ‘Who started it?’ The lethal conjugations of death part company with any possibility of justification, let alone justice. They surge among us, left and right, Hindu and Muslim, knife and pistol, killing, burning, looting, and raising into the smoky air their clenched and bloody fists. Both their houses are damned by their deeds; both sides sacrifice the right to any shred of virtue; they are each other’s plagues.

But warnings were given even earlier, when Aurora wasn’t even born, by Camoens, referring to the hymn beloved to Gandhi, that says Ram/Ishwar and Allah are one, the Hindu and Islamic gods are but different names for one god, predicting the events of 1992 when the Mosque was partially demolished on the argument that Lord Ram was born there 5000 years ago, where the 400 years old mosque now stood:

And they say Ishwar and Allah is your name but they don’t mean it, they mean only Ram himself, king of the Raghu clan, purifier of sinners along with Sita. In the end I am afraid […] people like us will have to lock our doors and there will come a Battering Ram.’

But back to old India, to the two Mothers that captured the imagination of real India, while Aurora takes hold of Moor and Moor’s life, in the middle of the 20th century. From Cochin, the story swiftly moves to Bombay as the Zogoiby family relocates there and the nation transitions from political babysteps to an enfant terrible, a socio-political menace in the dexterous, able hands of Rushdie’s flawlessly executed introduction – Aurora’s rebellious high-parapet frenzy blasphemous scandalizing dance in contempt of Maharashtra’s beloved Hindu festival, Ganesh Chaturthi, the celebration of the Elephant-headed god first used as a pretext for banned large-scale meetings by the freedom-fighter Lokmanya Tilak who fanned the flames of armed resistance against British Raj, then recently appropriated by the notorious political hard-liner party Shiv Sena to drive out poor non-Marathi migrant workers from the state, turning an innocent festival into the hotbed of religious frenzy and fanaticism and filthy opportunistic politics, where the two make unlikely but highly-compatible bedfellows.

Rushdie takes a dig at Shiv Sena founder, the cartoonist-turned-militant Bal Thackeray, mocking his ugliness by adding a nickname “Mainduck” (Frog in Hindi) to his fictitious name Raman Fielding, blatantly accusing his party of all the dirty politics they have played, transitioning from champions of Marathi culture and people to moral policing (read: lathi-charging young couples, married or unmarried, for holding hands in public on Valentine’s Day and beating the hell out of them if they become a bit cozy on other days too) to aligning with BJP-RSS-VHP and inciting communal hatred.

And coming to Bombay, (ooops! Mumbai now, unless you want Shiv Sena pulping you for the indiscretion) how can we forget our silver screen Mother now, Mother India, the quintessential tale of the Indian mother, Indian bride, Indian wife, Indian woman (she doesn’t exist on her own, does she?), the quintessential tale of rural agricultural India, the quintessential tale of common man which the gripped the country’s imagination, with its spectacular pair of mother (played by Nargis) and rebellious son Birju (played by Sunil Dutt) who married soon in real life. The movie becomes a source of discussion for India, a metaphor for the imagined India that was so far removed from metropolitan India and yet survived through popular myth, through Metanarratives, as the essence of India. Juxtaposing the rural movie with the metro city, the fictional mother-son with real-life lovers, Aurora says, as Nargis and Sunil Dutt visit her home:

‘The first time I saw that picture’, she (Aurora) confided to the famous movie star (Nargis) on the high terrace at Elephanta, ‘I took one look at your Bad Son, Birju, and I thought, O boy, what a handsome guy – too much sizzle, too much chilli, bring water. He may be a thief and a bounder, but that is some A-class loverboy goods. And now look – you have gone and marry-o‘ed him! What sexy lives you movie people leadofy: to marry your own son, I swear, wowie.’

‘Even in the picture, but,’ Aurora went relentlessly on, ‘I knew right off that bad Birju had the hots for his gorgeous ma.’

And now, Rushdie’s own careful comment on the movie, which can be seen both in and out of context of the novel:

In Mother India, a piece of Hindu myth-making directed by a Muslim socialist, Mehboob Khan, the Indian peasant woman is idealized as bride, mother and producer of sons; as long-suffering, stoical, loving, redemptive, and conservatively wedded to the maintenance of the status-quo. But for Bad Birju, cast out from his mother’s love, she becomes, as one critic has mentioned, ‘that image of an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mother who haunts the fantasy life of Indian males.’

And what about the other Mother India, the one that haunted real-life India? Indira Gandhi, daughter of Nehru, first female PM of India, the one who boldly broke the sanctions on India and went ahead to test India’s first nuclear device in Pokhran, and in 1975 she imposed the Emergency when it became clear that she would be removed from her post. Like Aurora, she is the heroine and the antiheroine, the mother and the anti-mother figure of India’s story. While the poor and the honest beg and die, or are executed, the rich and the corrupt oil each other and reap its dirty wealth. Abraham Zogoiby enters the Underworld negotiations and his business grows exponentially, while Aurora’s stars as the beloved Indian artist rise and sink and rise.

With Uma Sarasvati’s machinations that drive mother-and-son apart, Moor’s foray into Mainduck’s clan, his prodigal return to his father who then has no use for him and discards him for the second time, it is India we see, everywhere, everywhere. This isn’t a story about the Moor or the Zogoibys at all. It is Rushdie’s impeccable skills that make you think that it is about the characters caught up in a particularly eventful century.

Even though it is about India, the surface story never flags; the two are so closely intertwined together that they cannot be told without either going missing. Each one tells the other’s tale. And so, when the characters aren’t likeable enough, or deep enough, it is because they aren’t meant to be. Generalizations are never finely woven -like a summary, they have to span over a large slice of time and eschew much of finesse. And yet, the characters are deep enough, nuanced enough to keep the reader gripped in the surface story and not just let him/her slip into the metaphorical story of India.

And like the titular painting ‘The moor’s last sigh’, the final act of forgiveness that Aurora bestows upon her son Moor -India, and the Moor’s tale too is a palimpsest, a painting upon a painting, a
superimposition of one tale over the other. Two tales that have merged into one, even though they are different.

Why this deeper story masquerading so convincingly as the surface story, or vice-versa? Because, my dears, this is what India is. A visual deception, a deception nuanced, fine enough to send the unwary casual stroller on the wrong path. The Upperworld and the Underworld don’t just co-exist as allegories, they are the same story itself. They are not two sides of the same coin. It is not you-or-me, it is you-and-me. Their threads are so finely enmeshed that to destroy one is to destroy the other too. And so, readers, is Rushdie’s tale. The Zogoibys and India don’t just co-exist. The Zogoibys are not a metaphor for India, a microcosm, a summary of India, a representative of the land. It is not India simplified, India-for-Dummies guidebook. They and India are different, but part of the same story.

Review part 2 - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...