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Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh As A Story Of Bombay City

In ‘The Moor's last Sigh', we witness a reeling pageant of mad passions and dark secrets, deep crimes and high art, poignant innocence and cruel revenge, hopping in a careful, calculated manner across four generations of a rich and demented Indian family. Salman Rushdie's cynical post-modernistic novel ‘The Moor's Last Sigh' laughs mischievously at the world and shivers from its evils. It is also, by analogy, one version of the history of India in the 20th century. Weaving a tale of murder and suicide, of atheism and asceticism, of affection and adultery, Rushdie's exquisitely crafted storytelling explains the "fall from grace of a high-born crossbreed," namely our narrator Moraes Zogoiby, also known as "Moor" set predominantly in the city of Bombay.

Bombay – the "City of Dreams"; but there is a lot more than just dreams. It is the city of glamour and glitz, but also the city of poverty and squalor. It is the city of "Bollywood" and "pav-bhaji", the city of real-life "Mogambos" and small time "bhais". Bombay is the city of contradictions – the city we love to hate and hate to love. Salman Rushdie in his novel "The Moor's Last Sigh" pays his tribute to the spirit of the city of Bombay and his protagonist ‘Moor' is perhaps a metaphor for post-independent India – both, in terms of population and development, and specifically Bombay, as he ages: "like the city itself … I expanded without time for proper planning – just like the city which kept on growing in all directions."

At the centerpiece of this odd and captivating tale stand the embers of Moor's family: a complex web including a ridiculed political activist, a shrew, a homosexual husband, an artist, and a Jewish underworld gangster, among others. Moor's sisters lead lives as abnormal and doomed as their family history would predispose them towards: Ina, a washed-up model, dies in the throes of insanity; Minnie takes holy orders, predicting a great plague washing over Bombay and envisioning talking rats;...