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my view Epifania’s willingness to perform puja and pilgrimage sounds unconvincing, apocryphal; but wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of hair and beating of bosom there most certainly was.)
    The sons of the late magnate neglected business affairs, it must be admitted, being too often distracted by worldly matters. Aires da Gama, more distressed than he cared to reveal by his father’s suicide, sought solace in promiscuity, provoking a deluge of correspondence – letters on cheap paper, written in a barely legible, semi-literate script. Love-letters, messages of desire and anger, threats of violence if the beloved persisted in his too-hurtful ways. The author of this anguished correspondence was none other than the boy in the wedding-night rowing-boat: Prince Henry the Navigator himself. Do not think I do not hear what all you do. Give me heart or I will cut it from your body. If love is not whole world and sky above then it is nothing, worse than dirt .
    If love is not all, then it is nothing: this principle, and its opposite (I mean, infidelity), collide down all the years of my breathless tale.
    Aires, out tom-catting all night, as often as not spent the daylight hours sleeping off the effects of hashish or opium, recovering from his exertions, and, not infrequently, needing attention for various minor wounds; Carmen, without a word, applied medication and drew hot baths to soothe his bruises; and, when he fell into snoring sleep in that bathwater drawn from the deep well of her grief, if she ever thought about pushing his head below the surface, then she did not give in to temptation. Soon there would be another outlet for her rage.
    As for Camoens, in his timid, soft-spoken way he was his father’s son. Through Belle, he fell in with a group of young nationalist radicals who, impatient with talk of non-violence and passive resistance, were intoxicated by the great events in Russia. He began to attend, and later to deliver, talks with titles like Forward! and Terrorism: Does End Justify This Means?
    ‘Camoens, who wouldn’t say booski to a mouseski,’ Belle laughed. ‘What a big bad redski you will make.’
    It was Grandfather Camoens who found out about the fake Ulyanovs. In late 1923 he informed Belle and their friends that an élite group of Soviet actors had been given exclusive rights to the rôle of V. I. Lenin: not only in specially prepared touring productions which told the Soviet people about their glorious revolution, but also at the thousands upon thousands of public functions at which the leader was unable to be present owing to the pressures on his time. The Lenin-thesps memorised, and then delivered, the speeches of the great man, and when they appeared in full make-up and costume people shouted, cheered, bowed and quaked as if they were in the presence of the real thing. ‘And now,’ Camoens excitedly concluded, ‘applications from foreign-language actors are being solicited. We can have our personal Lenins right here, properly accredited, speaking Malayalam or Tulu or Kannada or any damn thing we please.’
    ‘So they are reproducing the big boss in the See See See Pee,’ Belle told him, placing his hand on her belly, ‘but, husband, see see see please, you have already begun a little reproduction of your own.’
    It is a demonstration of the ludicrous – yes! I dare to use that word – the ridiculous and ludicrous perversity of my family that – in a period when the country and indeed the planet was engaged in such momentous affairs – and when the family business needed the most scrupulous attention, because in the aftermath of Francisco’s death the lack of leadership was becoming alarming, there was discontent in the plantations and slackness at the two Ernakulam godowns, and even the Gama Company’s long-term customers had begun to listen to the siren voices of its competitors – and when, to crown it all, his own wife had announced her pregnancy, and was bearing what turned out