The Moor's Last Sigh (22 page)

by the minute. He was no intellectual--law school was proving a great struggle--and, even more importantly, he had not a single drop of political radicalism in his blood. So it was that Mynah was the first of us to put a spoke in Ina's wheel. When she told him that she and her colleagues expected to be arrested any day now he thought seriously about jumping from the car and heading straight back to the airport before he became guilty by association with so tainted an in-law. 'Ina is dying to see you,' Mynah said at the end of her monologue, and then reddened at her choice of metaphor. 'I mean, no, she's not,' she corrected herself, hotly, making matters worse. A silence opened. 'Oh, hell, here we are, anyway,' she added a while later. 'Now you can see for yourself.' Minnie met them at the door of the Maria Gratiaplena nursing home, looking more like Audrey Hepburn than ever, and all the way to the room where Ina waited like a miserable balloon she spoke of hellfire and damnation and till-death-us-do-part in a seraphic voice as sharp as breaking glass. Jimmy tried to tell her that he and Ina had not signed the full, holy, brimstone-and-treacle type of contract, having opted instead for the fifty-dollar Midnight Special country-style civil nuptial 'n' hoedown in a Reno quickie 'Wed-Inn' parlour, that they had been married to the music of Hank Williams Sr rather than hymns ancient or modern, standing not before an altar but beside a 'Hitching Post'; that there had been no priest officiating, but a man in a ten-gallon hat with a pair of pearl-handled six-guns riding on his hips, and that at the moment they were pronounced man and wife, a rodeo cowboy in chaps, and with a polka-dotted bandanna round his neck, had stepped up behind them with a mighty yahoo and lassoed them tightly together, crushing Ina's bridal bouquet of yellow roses against her chest. Its thorns had pricked her bosom until it bled. My sister was unmoved by such secularist excuses. 'That cowpoke', she pronounced, 'was--don't you seel--the Messenger of God.' The encounter with Minnie intensified the flight-response which Mynah's monologue had already prompted; and next, I must admit, I also did my inadvertent bit. When Minnie and Jimmy arrived outside Ina's room I was leaning against a corridor wall, daydreaming. Absent-mindedly, as I saw in my mind's eye a huge young Sikh bearing down upon me in a crowded alley, I spat on my deformed right hand. Jamshed Cashondeliveri leapt backwards in night, colliding with Mynah, and I realised that I must have looked like the avenging brother, a six-and-a-half-foot giant preparing to strike down the man who had caused his sister so much misery. I tried putting up my hands in peace but he mistook this for a boxer's challenge, and plunged into Ina's room with a look of pure terror on his face. He skidded to a halt a few inches away from Aurora Zogoiby herself. Behind my mother, on the bed, Ina had gone into a routine of moans and groans; but Jimmy had eyes only for Aurora. The great lady was at that time a woman in her fifties, but time had only increased her allure; she froze Jimmy like a dumb animal caught in the headlamps of her power, she turned the great beam of her attention upon him, wordlessly, and made him her slave. Afterwards, when that tragic farce was over, she told me--she actually admitted--that she should not have done it, she should have stood aside and let the estranged couple make what they could of their wretched lives. 'What to do?' she told me (I was her model then, and she was chatting as she worked). 'I just wanted to see if an old hen like me could still stoppofy a young fellow in his tracks.' I couldn't help it, my scorpion-mother meant. It was in my nature. Ina, behind her, was quickly losing control. It had been her pathetic plan to win back Jimmy's love by telling him how slim her chances were, how the cancer was systemic, it was pernicious, it was invasive, the lymph nodes were diseased, and the odds were that it had been discovered too late. Once he had fallen to his feet and begged forgiveness, she would allow him to sweat for a few weeks while she pretended to undergo chemotherapy (she was prepared to starve, even to thin her hair in the pursuit of love). Finally she would announce a miracle cure and they would live happily ever after. All these schemes were undone by the look of mooncalf adoration with which her husband was regarding her mother. At that moment Ina's panicky need for him spilled over into insanity. In her frenzy she made the irreversible mistake of accelerating her plan. 'Jimmy,' she shrieked, 'Jimmy, it's a miracle, men. Now that you are here I am fixed, I know it, I swear it, let them test me and you will see. Jimmy, you saved my life, Jimmy, only you could do it, it is the power of love.' He looked carefully at her then, and we could all see the scales falling from his eyes. He turned to each of us in turn and saw the conspiracy standing naked in our faces, saw the truth we could no longer hide. Ina, defeated, unleashed a foaming cascade of grief. 'What a family,' saidjamshed Cashondeliveri. 'I swear. Absolutely crack.' He left the Gratiaplena nursing home and never saw Ina again. Jimmy's parting shot was a prophecy; Ina's humiliation was a cracking-point in our family history. After that day and for all the next year she was mad, entering a kind of second childhood. Aurora had her put back into Vasco's nursery where she--where all of us--began; when her madness increased she was placed in a straitjacket and padding was put up against the walls, but Aurora would not permit her to be committed to a mental home. Now that it was too late, now that Ina had snapped, Aurora became the most loving mother in the world, spoonfeeding her, washing her like a baby, hugging and kissing her as she had never been hugged or kissed when she was sane--giving her the love, that is to say, which, had it been offered earlier, might have built in her eldest daughter the fortitude to resist the catastrophe that had ruined her mind. Soon after the end of the Emergency, Ina died of cancer. The lymphoma developed quite suddenly, and gobbled up her body like a beggar at a feast. Only Minnie, who had completed her novitiate and been reborn as Sister Floreas--'sounds like the blooming Fountain,' Aurora snorted in frustrated scorn--had the nerve to say that Ina had called the illness down upon herself, that, she had 'chosen her own gathering'. Aurora and Abraham never spoke of Ina's death, honouring it in silence, the silence which had once helped make Ina a celebrated beauty, and which was now the silence of the tomb. So Ina was dead, and Minnie was gone, and Mynah was briefly in jail--for she was arrested at the very end of the Emergency, but quickly released, her reputation much enhanced, after Mrs Gandhi's electoral defeat. Aurora wanted to tell her youngest daughter how proud she was of her, but somehow she never got round to it, somehow the coldness, the brusqueness of Philomina Zogoiby's manner whenever she had any contact with her folks succeeded in stopping her mother's loving tongue. Mynah did not often visit Elephanta; which left me. One last person had fallen through the crack in the world. Dilly Hormuz had been dismissed. Miss Jaya He, whose job in the household had evolved from ayah into housekeeper, had taken advantage of her position to pull off one final heist. From Aurora's studio she stole three charcoal sketches of me as a young boy, sketches in which my ruined hand had been wondrously metamorphosed, becoming, variously, a flower, a paintbrush and a sword. Miss Jaya took these sketches to my Dilly's flat and said they were a gift from the 'young Sahib'. Then she told Aurora that she had seen the teacher pinching them, and, excuse me, Begum Sahib, but that woman's attitude to our boy is not a moral one. Aurora visited Dilly the same day, and the pictures, which the sweet woman had placed in the silver frames on the piano, concealing her own family portraits, were all the proof my mother needed of the teacher's guilt. I tried to plead Dilly's case, but once my mother's mind was closed, no force on earth could open it. 'Anyhow,' she told me, 'you are too old for her now. There is nothing more you can learnofy from her.' Dilly spurned all my overtures--my telephone calls, letters, flowers--after she was sacked. I walked one last time down the hill to the house by Vijay Stores and when I got there she would not let me in. She opened the door about three inches and refused to move out of the way. That long stripe of her, framed in teak, that mutinous jaw and short-sighted blink, was my sweaty journey's only reward. 'Go your ways, you poor boy,' she told me. 'I wish you well on your hard road,' Such was Miss Jaya He's revenge.

THE SO-CALLED 'MOOR paintings' of Aurora Zogoiby can be divided into three distinct periods: the 'early' pictures, made between 1957 and 1977, that is to say between the year of my birth and that of the election that swept Mrs G. from power, and of Ina's death; the 'great' or 'high' years, 1977-81, during which she created the glowing, profound works with which her name is most often associated; and the so-called 'dark Moors', those pictures of exile and terror which she painted after my departure, and which include her last, unfinished, unsigned masterpiece, The Moor's Last Sigh (170 x 247 cms., oil on canvas, 1987), in which she turned, at last, to the one subject she had never directly addressed--facing up, in that stark depiction of the moment of Boabdil's expulsion from Granada, to her own treatment of her only son. It was a picture which, for all its great size, had been stripped to the harsh essentials, all its elements converging on the face at its heart, the Sultan's face, from which horror, weakness, loss and pain poured like darkness itself, a face in a condition of existential torment reminiscent of Edvard Munch. It was as different a picture from Vasco Miranda's sentimental treatment of the same theme as could possibly be imagined. But it was also a mystery picture, that 'lost painting'--and how striking that both Vasco's and Aurora's treatments of this theme should disappear within a few years of my mother's death, the one stolen from the private collection of C. J. Bhabha, the other from the Zogoiby Bequest itself! Gents, gentesses: permit me to titillate your interest by revealing that it was a picture within which Aurora Zogoiby, in her fretful last days, had concealed a prophecy of her death. (And Vasco's fate, too, was bound up with the story of these canvases.) As I set down my memories of my part in those paintings, I am naturally conscious that those who submit themselves as the models upon whom a work of art is made can offer, at best, a subjective, often wounded, sometimes spiteful, wrong-side-of-the-canvas version of the finished work. What then can the humble clay usefully say about the hands that moulded it? Perhaps simply this: that I was there. And that during the years of sittings I made a kind of portrait of her, too. She was looking at me, and I was looking right back. This is what I saw: a tall woman in a paint-spattered, mid-calf-length homespun kurta worn over dark blue sailcloth slacks, barefoot, her white hair piled up on her head with brushes sticking out of it, giving her an eccentric Madame Butterfly look, Butterfly as Katharine Hepburn or-yes!--Nargis in some zany Indian cover version, Titli Begum, might have played her: no longer young, no longer prinked and painted, and certainly no longer bothered about any pathetic Pinkerton's return. She stood before me in the least luxurious of studios, a room lacking so much as a comfortable chair, and 'non-A. C.' so that it was as hot and humid as a cheap taxi, with one slow ceiling fan moving lazily above. Aurora never showed any signs of giving a damn about the weather conditions; so neither, naturally, did I. I sat where and how she set me, and made a point of never complaining of the aches in my variously arranged limbs until she remembered to ask if I'd like a break. In this way a little of her legendary stubbornness, her determination, seeped through the canvas into me. I was the only child she suckled at her breast. It made a difference: for although I received my share of the sharp end of her tongue, there was something in her attitude towards me that was less destructive than her treatment of my sisters. Perhaps it was my 'condition', which she refused to permit anyone to call an illness, that softened her heart. The doctors gave my misfortune first one name, then another, but when we sat in her studio as artist and model Aurora told me constantly that I must not think of myself as the victim of an incurable premature-ageing disorder, but a magic child, a time traveller. 'Only four and a half months in the womb,' she reminded me. 'Baby mine, you just startofied out going too fast. Maybe you'll just take off, and zoom-o right out of this life into another space and time. Maybe--who knows?--a better.' It was as close as she ever came to stating a belief in an after-life. It seemed that she had decided to fight fear--hers as well as my own--by espousing such strategies of conjecture, by making my lot a privileged one, and presenting me to myself as well as to the world as someone special, someone with a meaning, a supernatural Entity who did not truly belong to this place, this moment, but whose presence here defined the lives of those around him, and of the age in which they lived. Well, I believed her. I needed consolations and was happy to take whatever was on offer. I believed her, and it helped. (When I learned about the missing post-Lotus night in Delhi four and a half months before my conception, I wondered if Aurora were covering up a different problem; but I don't think she was. I think she was trying to will my half-life into wholeness, by the power of mother-love.) She suckled me, and the first 'Moor' pictures were done while I nestled at her breast: charcoal sketches, watercolours, pastels and finally a large work in oils. Aurora and I posed, somewhat blasphemously, as a godless madonna and child. My stunted hand had become a glowing light, the only light-source in the picture. The fabric of her amorphous robe fell in starkly shadowed folds. The sky was an electric cobalt blue. It was what Abraham Zogoiby might have been hoping for when he had commissioned Vasco to paint her picture almost a decade earlier; no, it was more than Abraham could ever have imagined. It showed the truth about Aurora, her capacity for profound and selfless passion as well as her habit of self-aggrandisement; it revealed the magnificence, the grandeur of her falling-out with the world, and her determination to transcend and redeem its imperfections through art. Tragedy disguised as fantasy and rendered in the most beautiful, most heightened colour and light she could create: it was a mythomaniac gem. She called it A Light to Lighten the Darkness. 'Why not?' she shrugged, when questioned, by Vasco Miranda among others. 'I am getting interested in making religious pictures for people who have no god.' 'Then keep a ticket to London in your pocket,' he advised her. 'Because in this god-rotten joint, you never know when you might have to run.' (But Aurora laughed at such advice; and in the end it was Vasco who left.) As I grew, she went on using me as a subject, and this continuity, too, was a sign of love. Unable to find a way of preventing me from 'going too fast', she painted me into immortality, giving me the gift of being a part of what would persist of her. So, like the hymn-writer, let me with a gladsome mind praise her, for she was kind. For her mercy ay endures... And in truth if I am asked to put my finger- my whole birth-maimed hand--on the source of my belief that in spite of speeding and crippled limb and friendlessness I had a happy childhood in Paradise, I would finally put it here, I would say that my joy in life was born in our collaboration, in the intimacy of those private hours, when she talked of everything under the sun, absently, as if I were her confessor, and I learned the secrets of her heart as well as her mind. I learned, for example, about how she fell for my father: about the great sensuality that had burst out of my parents in an Ernakulam godown one day, forcing them together, making possible what was impossible, demanding to be allowed to come-to-be. What I loved most in my parents was this passion for each other, the simple fact of its having once been there (though as time passed it became harder and harder to see the young lovers they had been in the increasingly distant married couple they were becoming). Because they had loved so greatly I wanted such a love for myself, I thirsted for it, and even as I lost myself in the surprising tendernesses and athleticisms of Dilly Hormuz I knew she wasn't what I was looking for; O, I wanted, wanted that asli mirch masala, the thing that made you sweat beads of coriander juice and breathe hot-chilli flames through your stinging lips. I wanted their pepper love. And when I found it, I thought my mother would understand. When I needed to move a mountain for love, I thought my mother would help. Alas for us all: I was wrong. She knew about Abraham's temple girls, of course, had known from the beginning. 'Man who wants to keep-o secrets should not babble in his sleep,' she muttered vaguely one day. 'I got so bored of your Daddy's night-lingo that I moved out of his bedroom. A lady needs her rest.' And as I look back upon that proud, busy woman I hear her telling me something else beneath those casual sentences--I hear her admitting that she, who refused all compromises and made no accommodations, had settled for Abraham in spite of the weaknesses of the flesh which made him incapable of resisting the temptation to sample the goods he was importing from down south. 'Old men,' she snorted another day, 'always droolo'ing after bachchis. And the ones with many daughters are the worst.' For a time I was young and innocent enough to think of these musings as part of the process by which she thought herself into the lives of the figures in her paintings; but by the time my own lust had been awakened by Dilly Hormuz's hand I had begun to get the point. I had always wondered about the eight-year gap between Mynah and myself, and so, when understanding descended upon my young-old child-self like a tongue of flame, I--who had been denied the company of children, and so found myself at an early age using an adult vocabulary without an adult's delicacy or control--was unable to resist blurting out my discovery: 'You stopped making babies,' I cried, 'because he was fooling around.' Til give you one chapat', she promised, 'that will breakofy the teeth in your cheeky face.' The slap that followed, however, created no long-lasting dental problems. Its gentleness was all the confirmation I required. Why did she never confront Abraham about his infidelities? I ask you to consider that in spite of all her freethinking bohemian ways, Aurora Zogoiby was still, in some deep recess of her heart, a woman of her generation, a generation that would find such behaviour tolerable, even normal, in a man; whose womenfolk shrugged off their pain, burying it beneath banalities about the nature of the beast and its need, periodically, to scratch an itch. For the sake of family, that great absolute in whose name all things were possible, women averted their eyes and kept their grief knotted in a twist of fabric at the end of a dupatta, or buttoned up in a small silk purse, like small change and the household keys. And it may have been, too, because Aurora knew she needed Abraham, she needed him to take care of business and leave her free for art. It may have been as simple, complaisant and chickenshit as that. (A parenthesis on complaisance: in my musings on Abraham's decision to journey south when Aurora headed north for her last meeting with Mr Nehru and the scandal of the Lotus, I suspected my father of playing the complaisant spouse. Was this reciprocity what lay beneath his choice, this hollow open marriage, this whited sepulchre, this sham?--O, Moor, be calm, be calm. They have both gone beyond your reproach; this anger can do nothing, though it shake the very earth.) How she must have hated herself for making such a cowardly, financially motivated soft option of a devil's deal with fate! For--generation or no generation--the mother I knew, the mother I came to know during all those days in her spartan studio, was not one to take anything in life lying down. She was a confronter, a squarer-up, a haver-out. Yet, when faced with the ruin of her life's great love, and offered a choice between an honest war and an untruthful, self-serving peace, she buttoned her lip, and never offered her husband an angry word. Thus silence grew between them like an accusation; he talked in his sleep, she muttered in her studio, and they slept in separate rooms. For a moment, after his heart almost gave way on the steps to the Lonavla caves, they were able to remember what had once been. But after that the reality soon returned. Sometimes I am convinced that they both saw my crippled hand, my ageing, as a judgment upon them--a deformed child born of a stunted love, half a life born of a marriage that was no longer whole. If there had been any ghost of a chance of their becoming reconciled, my birth put that phantom to flight. First I worshipped my mother, then I hated her. Now, at the end of all our stories, I look back and can feel--at least in bursts--a measure of compassion. Which is a kind of healing, for her son as well as for her own, restless shade. Strong desire drew Abraham and Aurora together; weak lust pushed them apart. In these last days, as I have written down my accounts of Aurora's overweenings, of her sharpnesses and shrillnesses, I have heard beneath that raucous drama these sadder notes of loss. She forgave Abraham for disappointing her once, in Cochin, in the matter of Flory Zogoiby's Rumpelstiltskin attempt to take away an as-yet-unborn son. In Matheran she tried--and in trying, created me--to forgive him a second time. But he did not improve his ways, and there was no third forgiveness... yet she stayed. She, who had shaken her world for love, now stifled her revolt, and chained herself to an increasingly loveless marriage. No wonder her tongue grew sharp. And Abraham: if he had turned back towards her, forsaking all others, might she have saved him from sinking into the Mogambo-underworld of Keke and Scar and worse criminals yet to come? Might he, with the blessed ballast of their love, have failed to sink into that pit?... No point trying to rewrite one's parents' lives. It's hard enough to try and set them down; to say nothing of my own. In the 'early Moors' my hand was transformed into a series of miracles; often my body, too, was miraculously changed. In one picture--Courtship -1 was Moor-as-peacock, spreading my many-eyed tail; she painted her own head on top of a dowdy pea-hen's body. In another (painted when I was twelve and looked twenty-four) Aurora reversed our relationship, painting herself as the young Eleanor Marx and me as her father Karl. Moor and Tussy was a rather shocking idea--my mother girlish, adoring, and I in patriarchal, lapel-gripping pose, frock-coated and bewhiskered, like a prophecy of the all-too-near future. 'If you were twice as old as you look, and I was half as old as I am, I could be your daughter,' my forty-plus mother explained, and at the time I was too young to hear anything except the lightness she used to disguise the stranger things in her voice. Nor was