The Moor's Last Sigh (25 page)

commitment to the struggle had renewed Mynah's own appetite for the fray. Abraham Zogoiby dismissed both these views as 'so much foolishness' and praised Uma's razor-sharp financial brain, and her mastery of the very latest in modern deal-making and takeover theory. And Jamshed Cashondeliveri, he of the bulging eye and dropping jaw, confessed in hushed tones that she was the living reincarnation of gorgeous departed Ina, Ina as she had been before the burgers of Nashville ruined her, 'only she', he blurted out, like the fool he had always been, 'is like an Ina with a singing voice, and also brains.' He had just begun to explain that Uma and he had slipped away behind the grandstand for a few moments, and there the young girl had sung to him in the sweetest country voice he had ever heard; but Aurora Zogoiby had had enough. 'Everybody here has gone to pot today,' she thundered. 'But Jimmy boy, you just passofied the point of no return. Be off with you! Get going ek-dum and never darken our door.' We left Jimmy standing in the paddock with a stunned-fish glaze in his eye. Aurora resisted Uma from the start; she alone left the racecourse with a sceptical twist to her lip. Permit me to emphasise this point: she never gave the younger woman a chance, though Uma was unfailingly modest about her own artistic abilities, volubly worshipful of my mother's genius, and asked no favours. Indeed, after her triumph at the 1978 Documenta show in Kassel, when the most illustrious of London and New York dealers snapped her up, she telephoned Aurora long-distance from Germany and shouted through the international crackle, 'I made Kasmin and Mary Boone promise to show your work as well. Otherwise, I said, I could not permit them to show mine.' Like a goddess from the machine she came among us, speaking to our inmost selves. Only godless Aurora failed to hear. Uma came diffidently to Elephanta two days later and Aurora locked her studio door. Which was--to put it mildly--neither adult nor polite. To make up for my mother's rudeness, I offered to show Uma around the old place, and said hotly, 'You are welcome in our home as often as you like.' What Uma said to me at Mahalaxmi I repeated to no-one. For public consumption she had said laughingly, 'So if this is a racecourse then I want to race,' kicked off her chappals, picked them up in her left hand, and gone flying down the track, her long hair zooming out behind her like speed-lines in strip cartoons, marking the air through which she had passed as jet trails mark the sky. I had run after her, of course; it had not occurred to her that I would not. She was a speedy runner, faster than me, and finally I had to give up, because my chest commenced to heave and wheeze. I leaned gasping against the white rails, with both hands pressing against my lungs, trying to calm the spasm. She came back to me and placed her hands over mine. As my breathing settled down she caressed my mangled right hand lighdy and said in a voice almost too quiet to be audible, 'This hand could smash down whatever stood in its way. I would feel very safe near a hand like this.' Then she looked into my eyes and added, 'There is a young guy in there. I can see him looking out at me. What a combination, yaar. Youthful-spirit, plus this older-man look that I must tell you I have gone for all my life. Too hot, men, I swear.' So this is it, I told myself in wonderment. This prickle of tears, his throat-lump, this heat risen in the blood. My perspiration had acquired a peppery smell. I felt my self, my true self, the secret identity I had hidden so long that I feared it might no longer exist, come rising out of the corners of my being and filling my centre. Now I was nobody's man, and also wholly, immutably and for ever, hers. She took away her hands; leaving behind a Moor in love. On the morning of Uma's first visit my mother had decided she wanted to paint me in the nude. Nudity was nothing special in our circle; over the years many of the painters and their friends had posed for one another in the buff. Not so long ago, the guest toilet at Elephanta had been decorated by Vasco Miranda's mural of himself and Kekoo Mody in bowler hats and nothing else. Kekoo was as thin and elongated as ever, but success and years of debauchery and carousing had plumped out Vasco, who was also much the shorter man. The interest of the painting lay in the obvious fact that the two men seemed to have exchanged penises. The cock on Vasco was astoundingly long and thin, like a pale pepperoni sausage, whereas tall Kekoo sported a squat dark organ of impressive diameter and circumference. However, both men swore that there had been no switch. 'I have the paintbrush and he has the bankroll,' Vasco explained. 'What could be more appropriate?' It was Uma Sarasvati who gave the painting the name by which it was always subsequently known. 'Looks like Laurel and Harden,' she giggled, and it stuck. After our visit to Laurel and Harden I found myself telling Uma about the history of the Moor pictures, and about the new project for a Nude Moor. She listened gravely as I proudly described my artistic collaboration with my mother, and then she blasted me with that huge smile, with the ray-gun beams she could unleash from her pale grey eyes. 'It isn't right you should stand naked in front of your Mummyji at your age,' she reproved. 'Let us only get to know each other better and I will be the one to sculpt your beauty in imported Carrara marble. Like the David with his too-big hand I will make your big old club the loveliest limb in the world. Until then, Mister Moor, please to save yourself for me.' She left soon afterwards, not wishing to disturb the great painter at work. In spite of this proof of the refinement of her sensibilities, my egotistical mother was unable to find a good word for our new friend. When I told her I would be unable to pose for her new painting on account of the long hours I felt obliged to put in at my new job at the Baby Softo offices in Worli, she erupted. 'Don't you Softo me,' she yelled. 'That little fisherwoman has her hook in you and like a stupid fish you think she only wants to play. Soon you will be out of water and she will fryofy you in ghee with ginger-garlic, mirch-masala, cumin seed, and maybe some potato chips on the side.' She slammed her studio door, shutting me out for good; I was never asked to pose for her again. The picture, Mother-Naked Moor Watches Chimene's Arrival, was as formal as Velazquez's Las Meninas, a picture to which, in its play with sight-lines, it was somewhat in debt. In a chamber of Aurora's fictional Malabar Alhambra, against a wall decorated with intricate geometric patterns, the Moor stood naked in the lozenge-patterned Technicolour of his skin. Behind him on the sill of a scalloped window stood a vulture from the Tower of Silence, and leaning on the wall next to this macabre casement was a sitar, with a mouse nibbling through its lacquered-melon drum. To the Moor's left was his fearsome mother, Queen Ayxa-Aurora in flowing dark robes, holding up a full-length mirror to his nakedness. The mirror-image was beautifully naturalistic--no harlequin there, no pretence at 'Boabdi T; just me. But the lozenged Moor was not looking at himself in the mirror, for in the doorway to his right stood a beautiful young woman--Uma, naturally, Uma fictionalised, Hispanicised, as this 'Chimene', Uma incorporating aspects of Sophia Loren in El Cid, pinched from the story of Rodrigo de Vivar and introduced without explanation into the hybrid universe of the Moor- and between her outspread, inviting hands were many marvels--golden orbs, bejewelled birds, tiny homun-culi--floating magically in the lucent air. Aurora in her maternal jealousy of her son's first true love had created this cry of pain, in which a mother's attempts to show her son the simple truth about himself were doomed to failure by a sorceress's head-turning tricks; in which mice gnawed away the possibility of music and vultures waited patiently for lunch. Ever since Isabella Ximena da Gama on her deathbed had united in her own person the figures of the Cid Campeador and his Chimene, her daughter Aurora who had picked up Belle's fallen torch had seen herself, too, as hero and heroine combined. That she should now make this separation--that the painted Moor should be given the Charlton Heston role and a woman with Uma's face should be baptised with a Frenchified version of my grandmother's middle name--was almost an admission of defeat, an intimation of mortality. Now Aurora, like the old dowager Ayxa, was not the one looking into the mirror-mirror; now it was Boabdil-Moor who was reflected there. But the real magic mirror was the one in his (my) eyes; and in that occult glass, there could be no doubt that the sorceress in the doorway was the fairest one of all. The picture, painted like many of the mature Moors in the layered manner of the old European masters, and important in art-history for the entry into the Moor sequence of the 'Chimene' character, seemed to me to demonstrate that art, ultimately, was not life; that what might feel truthful to the artist--for example, this tale of malevolent usurpation, of a pretty witch come to separate a mother from her son--did not necessarily bear the slightest connection to events and feelings and people in the real world. Uma was a free spirit; she came and went as she pleased. Her absences in Baroda tore at my heart, but she refused me permission to visit her. 'You must not see my work until I am ready for you,' she said. 'I want you to fall for me, not for what I do.' For against all probability and with the royal whimsicality of beauty she, who could have had her pick, had set her heart on this damaged young-old fool, and whispering in my ear she promised me entry into the garden of earthly delights. 'Wait on,' she told me. 'Wait on, beloved innocent, for I am the goddess who knows your secret heart, and I will surely give you everything you want, and more.' Wait just some while, she pleaded without saying why, but my puzzlement was wiped away by the lyric excitement of her promises. And then until death I will be your minor, yourself s other self, your equal, your empress and your slave. I must confess it surprised me to learn that she made a number of visits to Bombay without contacting me. Minnie telephoned from the Gratiaplena to tell me in a trembling voice that Uma had visited her to enquire how a non-Christian might embark on a life in Christ. 'I truly think she will come to Jesus,' said Sister Floreas, 'and to his Holy Mother too.' I think I may have snorted, whereupon Minnie's voice took on a strange note. 'Yes,' she said. 'Uma, blessed girl, told me how worried she is that the Devil has got a stranglehold on you.' Mynah, too--Mynah, who never called!--rang to report exhilarating encounters with my beloved on the front-line of a political demonstration that had temporarily prevented the demolition of the invisible shacks of the invisible poor that were taking up valuable space within sight of the high-rises of Cuffe Parade. Apparently Uma had led the demonstrators and shack-dwellers in a rousing chorus of We launched a movement, what's there to fear? Abruptly Mynah confided--Mynah, who never confided!--that she had formed the opinion that Uma was definitely a lesbian. (Philomina Zogoiby had revealed to no-one the secrets of her own sexuality, but it was well known that she had never stepped out with any man; nearing thirty, she cheerfully admitted she was 'on the shelf--it's a spinster's life for me.' But now, perhaps, Uma Sarasvati had found out more.) 'We have become pretty close -you know?' Mynah startlingly confessed, with an odd combination of girlishness and defiance. 'Finally, somebody to curl up with, and gossip through the night with a bottle of rum and a couple of packs of ciggies. My bloody sisters were never any fucking use.' What nights? When? And in Mynah's digs there wasn't enough room for a spare chair, let alone an extra mattress: so where had this 'curling up' occurred? 'I hear you've been hanging your tongue out, by the way,' my sister's voice said in my ear, and was it just the hyper-sensitivity of love or was I actually being warned off? 'Little bro, let me give you a tip: no chance. Go hunt a different chicky. This one prefers hens.' I did not know what to make of these telephone calls, particularly as Uma's telephone in Baroda was never answered. At the shoot of a Baby Softo television commercial, amid the gurgles of seven well-talcumed babies, I was so distracted by my inner wranglings that I neglected the simple task I had been given--that is, to make sure, with the help of a stop-watch, that the powerful klieg-lights were never on the babies for more than one minute in five--and was jerked from my reverie only by the wrath of the camera crew, the shrieks of mothers, and the wails of the babies as they began, bubbling and blistering, to fry. I fled in shame and confusion from the studio and found Uma sitting on the doorstep, waiting for me. 'Let's go for dosa, yaar,' she said. 'I'm starving.' And of course over lunch she showed me that everything had a perfectly reasonable explanation. 'I wanted to know you,' she said, her eyes brimming with tears, 'I wanted to amaze you with how hard I had tried to learn everything there is to know. Also I want to be close to your blood family, close as blood, or closer even. Now you must know that our poor Minnie is a little bothered-up by God; out of friendship I asked her questions and she, poor holy dear, got the wrong end of the stick. Me a nun! Don't kid me, mister. And that Devil line was just a joke. I meant, if Minnie is on the God squad then you and me and everybody normal is on the Devil's team, isn't it?' And all the while my face cradled in her hands, her hands caressing mine as they had at our first meeting; her face suffused with such love, such pain at having been doubted... and Mynah?--I persisted, though it felt like an act of appalling cruelty to continue to interrogate so loving, so devoted a creature. 'Of course I came to see her. For her sake I joined in her fight. And because I can sing, I sang. So what?' And curling up? 'O goodness. If you want to know who is the lady's lady, you complete ignoramus, look at your tough-guy sis, not me. Sharing a bed is nothing, in college we girls do it all the time. But curling up is your Philomina's wet dream, excuse me for being frank. Yes, frankly, I am pretty angry. I try to make friends and you all accuse me of being a holy roller and a liar and even fucking your sister. What are you people that you act so nasty? Why can't you see that I have done everything for love?' The big splashy tears were bouncing off her empty plate. Misery had not affected her healthy appetite. 'Stop, please stop,' I begged, apologising. Til never--never again...' Her smile burst through her