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the Frenchy’s austere novelties had been obliterated by the familiar mustinesses of devotion. ‘God’s in his heaven,’ the brand-new widow announced. ‘All is tip-top with the world.’
    ‘From now on,’ Epifania determined, ‘it is the simple life for us. Salvation is not to be found in Little Man Loincloth and his ilks.’ And indeed the simplicity she sought was anything but Gandhian, it was the simplicity of rising late to a tray of strong, sweet bed-tea, of clapping her hands for the cook and ordering the day’s repasts, of having a maid come in to oil and brush her still-long but quickly greying and thinning hair, and of being able to blame the maid for the increasing quantities left each morning in the brush; the simplicity of long mornings scolding the tailor who came over to the house with new dresses, and knelt at her feet with mouthfuls of pins which he removed from time to time to unloose his flatterer’s tongue; and then of long afternoons at the fabric stores, as bolts of magnificent silks were flung across a white-sheeted floor for her delight, cloth after cloth flowing thrillingly through the air to settle in soft fold-mountains of brilliant beauty; the simplicity of gossip with her few social equals, and of invitations to the ‘functions’ of the British in the Fort district, their Sunday cricket, their dancing teas, the seasonal carolling of their plain heat-beaten children, for they were Christian after all, even if it was only the Church of England, never mind, the British had her respect though they would never have her heart, which belonged to Portugal, of course, which dreamed of walking beside the Tagus, the Douro, of sashaying through the streets of Lisbon on the arm of a grandee. It was the simplicity of daughters-in-law who would attend to most of her needs while she made their lives a living hell, and of sons who would keep the money supply flowing as freely as was required; of everything-in-its-place, of being, at long last, at the heart of the web, the top of the heap, oflounging dragonwise upon a pile of gold and letting loose, when it pleased her, a burst of cleansing, terrorising flame. ‘It will cost a fortune to keep your Mama in her simplicity,’ Belle da Gama, prefiguring a remark often made about M. K. Gandhi, complained to her husband (she married Camoens early in 1923). ‘And if she has her way it will cost-o us our youth as well.’
    What ruined Epifania’s dreams: Francisco left her nothing except her clothes, her jewellery and a modest allowance. For the rest, she learned to her fury, she would be dependent upon the goodwill of her sons, to whom everything had been bequeathed on a fifty-fifty basis, with the proviso that the Gama Trading Company should not be broken up ‘unless business circumstances dictated otherwise’, and that Aires and Camoens ‘should seek to work together lovingly, lest the family’s assets be damaged by disharmony or discord’.
    ‘Even after death,’ Great-Grandmother Epifania wailed at the reading of the will, ‘he slaps me on both sides of the face.’
    This, too, is part of my inheritance: the grave settles no quarrels.
    The Menezes family lawyers failed to find a loophole, much to the widow’s dismay. She wept, tore her hair, pounded her tiny bosom, and ground her teeth, which produced an alarmingly piercing noise; but the lawyers continued doggedly to explain that the matrilinear principle, for which Cochin, Travancore and Quilon were famous, and according to which the disposition of family property would have been a matter for Mme Epifania to decide rather than the late Dr da Gama, could by no stretch of the law be held to apply to the Christian community, being part of Hindu tradition alone.
    ‘Then bring me a Shiva lingam and a watering-can,’ Epifania, according to legend, was heard to say, though she afterwards denied it. ‘Bring me to River Ganges and I will jump in double-quick. Hai Ram!’
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