Jumping carefully and calculatedly through four generations of a rich and demented Indian family, Salman Rushdie's cynical novel The Moor's Last Sigh mischievously mocks the world and shudders from his ailments. . Weaving a tale of murder and suicide, atheism and asceticism, affection and adultery, Rushdie's superbly crafted tale explains the "fall from grace of a high-born crossbreed," namely our narrator Moraes Zogoiby, also known as "Moor". The centerpiece of this strange and gripping story is the embers of the Moor family: a complex web including, among others, a ridiculed political activist, a shrew, a homosexual husband, an artist and a Jewish underworld gangster. The Moor sisters lead lives as abnormal and doomed as their family history predisposes them to: Ina, a washed-up model, dies in the grip of madness; Minnie takes holy orders, predicting a great plague that would sweep through Bombay and imagining talking rats; Mynah, a lesbian, desperately in love with Moor's lover, dies in an industrial "accident" caused by my father. Such is ...