The Moor's Last Sigh (23 page)

this our only double, or ambiguous, portrait; for there was also To Die Upon a Kiss, in which she portrayed herself as murdered Desdemona flung across her bed, while I was stabbed Othello, falling towards her in suicided remorse as I breathed my last. My mother described these canvases, self-deprecatingly, as 'panto-pictures', intended for the household's private entertainment: the artist's frivolous equivalent of fancy-dress parties. But--as in the episode of her notorious cricket-picture, which will be recounted presently--Aurora was often at her most iconoclastic, her most epatante, when she was most light-hearted; and the high-voltage eroticism of all these works, which she did not exhibit in her lifetime, created a posthumous shock-wave that only failed to grow into a full-scale tsunami because she, the brazen eroticist, was no longer around to provoke decent folks by refusing to apologise, or even to express the merest scrap of regret. After the Othello picture, however, the series changed direction, and began to explore the idea of placing a re-imagining of the old Boabdil story--'not Authorised Version but Aurorised Version', as she told me--in a local setting, with me playing a sort of Bombay remix of the last of the Nasrids. In January 1970, for the first time, Aurora Zogoiby placed the Alhambra on Malabar Hill. I was thirteen years old, and in the first flush of my intoxication with Dilly Hormuz. While she painted the first of the 'true', the echt Moors, Aurora told me about a dream. She had been standing on the 'back verandah' of a rattletrap train in a Spanish night, holding my sleeping body in her arms. Suddenly she knew--knew in the way of dreams, without being told, but with absolute certainty--that if she were to toss me away, if she were to sacrifice me to the night, then she would be safe, invulnerable, for the rest of her life. 'I tell you, kiddo, I thought about it pretty hard.' Then she refused the dream's offer, and took me back to my bed. You didn't have to be a Bible expert to work out that she had cast herself in an Abrahamic role, and even at thirteen, in that house of artists, I was familiar with pictures of the Michelangelo Pieta, so I got the point, or most of it. 'Thanks a lot, ma,' I told her. 'Nothing to it,' she answered. 'Let them do their worst.' This dream, like so many dreams, came true; but Aurora, when her Abrahamic moment really came, did not make the choice which she had dreamed. Once the red fort of Granada arrived in Bombay, things moved swiftly on Aurora's easel. The Alhambra quickly became a not-quite-Alhambra; elements of India's own red forts, the Mughal palace-fortresses in Delhi and Agra, blended Mughal splendours with the Spanish building's Moorish grace. The hill became a not-Malabar looking down upon a not-quite-Chowpatty, and the creatures of Aurora's imagination began to populate it--monsters, elephant-deities, ghosts. The water's edge, the dividing line between two worlds, became in many of these pictures the main focus of her concern. She filled the sea with fish, drowned ships, mermaids, treasure, kings; and on the land, a cavalcade of local riffraff- pickpockets, pimps, fat whores hitching their saris up against the waves--and other figures from history or fantasy or current affairs or nowhere, crowded towards the water like the real-life Bombayites on the beach, taking their evening strolls. At the water's edge strange composite creatures slithered to and fro across the frontier of the elements. Often she painted the water-line in such a way as to suggest that you were looking at an unfinished painting which had been abandoned, half-covering another. But was it a waterworld being painted over the world of air, or vice versa? Impossible to be sure. 'Call it Mooristan,' Aurora told me. 'This seaside, this hill, with the fort on top. Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watchtowers and towers of silence too. Place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drowno in water, or else grow gills; where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air. One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo'ing into another, or being under, or on top of. Call it Palimpstine. And above it all, in the palace, you.' (For the rest of his life Vasco Miranda would remain convinced that she had taken the idea from him; that his painting-over-a-painting was the source of her palimpsest-art, and that his lachrymose Moor was the inspiration for her dry-eyed pictures of me. She neither confirmed nor denied. 'Nothing new under the sun,' she would say. And in her vision of the opposition and intermingling of land and water there was something of the Cochin of her youth, where the land pretended to be a part of England, but was washed by an Indian sea. There was no stopping her. Around and about the figure of the Moor in his hybrid fortress she wove her vision, which in fact was a vision of weaving, or more accurately interweaving. In a way these were polemical pictures, in a way they were an attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation; she was using Arab Spain to re-imagine India, and this land-sea-scape in which the land could be fluid and the sea stone-dry was her metaphor--idealised? sentimental? probably--of the present, and the future, that she hoped would evolve. So, yes, there was a didacticism here, but what with the vivid surrealism of her images and the kingfisher brilliance of her colouring and the dynamic acceleration of her brush, it was easy not to feel preached at, to revel in the carnival without listening to the barker, to dance to the music without caring for the message in the song. Characters--so plentiful outside the palace--now began to appear within its walls. Boabdil's mother, the old battleaxe Ayxa, naturally turned up wearing Aurora's face; but in these early paintings the gloom of the future, the reconquering armies of Ferdinand and Isabella, were hardly to be glimpsed. In one or two canvases you saw, on the horizon, the protrusion of a flag-waving lance; but for the most part, during my childhood, Aurora Zogoiby was seeking to paint a golden age. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains crowded into her paint-Boabdil's fancy-dress balls, and the Sultan himself was represented less and less naturalistically, appearing more and more often as a masked, particoloured harlequin, a patchwork quilt of a man; or, as his old skin dropped from him chrysalis-fashion, standing revealed as a glorious butterfly, whose wings were a miraculous composite of all the colours in the world. As the Moor pictures moved further down this fabulist road, it became plain that I barely needed to pose for my mother any more; but she wanted me there, she said she needed me, she called me her lucky talis-moor. And I was happy to be there, because the story unfolding on her canvases seemed more like my autobiography than the real story of my life. During the Emergency years, while her daughter Philomina went into battle against tyranny, Aurora stayed in her tent and worked: and maybe this, too, was a spur for the Moor paintings of the period, maybe Aurora saw the work as her own answer to the brutalities of the time. Ironically enough, however, an old picture by my mother, innocently included by Kekoo Mody in an otherwise banal exhibition of paintings on sporting themes, provoked a greater rumpus than anything Mynah was able to stir up. The painting, dating from 1960, was called The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig, and was based on an actual incident that occurred during the third Test Match against Australia at Bombay's Brabourne Stadium. The series was level at i--I, and the third game had not been going India's way. In the second innings, Baig's half-century--his second of the match--enabled the home side to force a draw. When he reached 50, a pretty young woman ran out from the usually rather staid and upper-crust North Stand and kissed the batsman on the cheek. Eight runs later, perhaps a litde overcome, Baig was dismissed (c Mackay b Lindwall), but by that time the match was safe. Aurora liked cricket--back then more and more women were being drawn to the game, and young stars like A. A. Baig were getting to be as popular as the demi-gods of the Bombay talkies--and by chance she was at the ground on the day of the gasp-provoking, scandalous kiss, a kiss between beautiful strangers, perpetrated in broad daylight and in a packed stadium, and at a time when no movie house in the city was permitted to offer its audiences so obscenely provocative an image. Well! My mother was inspired. She rushed home and in a single sustained burst completed the painting, in which the 'real' shy peck, done for a dare, was transformed into a full-scale Western-movie clinch. It was Aurora's version--quickly displayed by Kekoo Mody and much reproduced in the national press--that everyone remembered; even those who had been at the ground that day began to speak--with much disapproving shaking of heads--of the moist licentiousness, the uninhibited writhings of that interminable kiss, which, they swore, had gone on for hours, until the umpires prised the couple apart and reminded the batsman of his duty to his team. 'Only in Bombay,' people said, with that cocktail of arousal and disapproval that only a scandal can properly mix'n'shake. 'What a loose town, yaar, I swear.' In Aurora's picture, the Brabourne stadium in its excitement had closed in around the two smoochers, the ogling stands had curved up and over them, almost blotting out the sky, and in the audience were pop-eyed movie stars--a few of whom really had been present--and slavering politicians and coolly observant scientists and industrialists slapping their thighs and making dirty jokes. Even the cartoonist R. K. Laxman's celebrated Common Man, "^W, was perched in the East Stand bleachers, looking shocked in his goofy, unworldly way. So it had become a state-of-India painting, a snapshot of cricket's arrival at the heart of the national consciousness, and, more controversially, a generational cry of sexual revolt. The explicit hyperbole of the kiss--a tangle of womanly limbs and the cricketer's pads and whites that recalled the eroticism of the Tantric carvings at the Chandela temples of Khajuraho--was described by a liberal art critic as 'the call of Youth for Freedom, an act of defiance under the very noses of the Status Quo', and by a more conservative editorial commentator as 'an obscenity fit to be burned in the public square'. Abbas Ali Baig was forced to deny publicly that he had kissed the girl back; the popular cricket columnist 'A.F.S.T.' wrote a witty piece in his defence, suggesting that mere artists should henceforth cease to poke their long brushes into the really important things of life, such as cricket; and after a time the litde scandal seemed to have fizzled out. But in the following series, against Pakistan, poor Baig scored only 1,13, 19 and i, was dropped from the team, and hardly ever played for India again. He became the target of a vicious young political cartoonist, Raman Fielding, who--in a parody of Aurora's old Chipkali pictures--signed his caricatures with a little frog, usually shown making a snide comment in the edges of the frame. Fielding--already better known, after the frog, as Mainduck--vilely and falsely accused the honourable and richly gifted Baig of having deliberately thrown away his wicket against Pakistan because he was a Muslim. 'And this is the fellow who has the nerve to kiss our patriotic Hindu girls,' muttered the spotted frog in the corner. Aurora, shocked by the attack on Baig, wrapped the painting up and stored it away. If she allowed it to be exhibited again fifteen years later, it was because she had come to think of it as a quaint period piece. The batsman concerned had retired long ago, and kissing was no longer as outrageous an activity as it had been back in those bad old days. What she had not foreseen was that Mainduck--now a full-time communalist politician, one of the founders of 'Mumbai's Axis,' the party of Hindu nationalists named after the mother-goddess of Bombay, which was growing rapidly in popularity among the poor--would return to the attack. He no longer drew cartoons, though in the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that he would afterwards dance with my mother--who, let it be remembered, invariably used the word 'cartoonist' as an insult--it was always possible to discern the heavy chip on his shoulder. He seemed undecided whether he wanted to fall on his knees before the great artist and Malabar Hill grandee, or drag her down into the dirt in which he lived; and no doubt this ambiguity is what drew grand Aurora towards him, too--towards that motu-kalu, that fatty-blacky fellow who represented most of what she most profoundly abhorred. Many of my family members have had a fondness for slumming. Raman Fielding's name derived, according to legend, from a cricket-mad father, a street-wise Bombay ragamuffin who hung around the Bombay Gymkhana pleading to be given a chance: 'Please, babujis, you give this poor cholera one batting? One bowling only? Okay, okay--then just one fielding?' He turned out to be a lousy cricketer but when the Brabourne Stadium was opened in 1937 he gained employment as a security guard, and over the years his skill at nabbing and expelling gatecrashers came to the notice of the immortal C. K. Nayudu, who recognised him from the old days at the Gymkhana and joked, 'So, my little just-one-fielding-you sure grew up to take some expert catches.' After that the fellow was always known as J. O. Fielding, and proudly accepted the name as his own. His son learned a different lesson from cricket (to the distress, it was said, of his father). Not for him the humble democratic pleasure of simply being a part, however menial, however marginal, of that cherished world. No: as a young man in the Bombay Central rum-dens he would harangue his friends about the Indian game's origins in inter-community rivalry. 'From the start the Parsis and Muslims tried to steal the game from us,' he would declaim. 'But when we Hindus got our teams together, naturally we proved too strong. By-the-same-token we must make changes beyond the boundary. For too long we have been lying back and allowing un-Indian types to steal a march. Let us only marshal our forces, and what can stand against us?' In his bizarre conception of cricket as a fundamentally communalist game, essentially Hindu but with its Hindu-ness constantly under threat from the country's other, treacherous communities, lay the origins of his political philosophy, and of'Mumbai's Axis' itself. There was even a moment when Raman Fielding considered naming his new political movement after a great Hindu cricketer--Ranji's Army, Mankad's Martinets--but in the end he went for the goddess--a. k. a Mumba-Ai,
Mumbadevi, Mumbabai--thus uniting regional and religious nationalism in his potent, explosive new group. Cricket, most individualistic of all team sports, ironically enough became the basis of the rigidly hierarchic, neo-Stalinist inner structures of'Mumbai's Axis', or the MA, as it quickly came to be known: for--as I afterwards discovered at first hand--Raman Fielding insisted on grouping his dedicated cadres into 'elevens', and each of these little platoons had a 'team captain' to whom absolute allegiance had to be sworn. The ruling council of the MA is known as the First XI to this day. And Fielding insisted on being addressed as 'Skipper' from the start. His old nickname from the cartoonist days was never used in his presence, but throughout the city his famous frog-symbol--Vote for Mainduck--could be seen painted on walls and stuck on the sides of cars. Oddly for so successful a populist leader, he was a man who detested familiarity. So it was always Captain to his face and Mainduck behind his back. And in the fifteen years between his two attacks on The Kissing of Abbas AH Baig, like a man who comes to resemble his pet, he had truly grown into a giant version of that long-abandoned cartoon frog. He held court beneath a gulmohr tree in the garden of his two-storey villa in the Lalgaum suburb of Bandra East, surrounded by aides and supplicants, beside a lily-padded pond, and amid literally dozens of statues of Mumbadevi, large and small; golden blossoms floated down to anoint the statues' heads as well as Fielding's. Mostly he was a brooding stillness; but every so often, goaded by some visitor's injudicious remark, speech would burst from him, foul-tongued, terrifying, lethal. And in his low cane chair with his great belly slung across his knees like a burglar's sack, with his frog's croak of a voice bursting through his fat frog's lips and his little dart of a tongue licking at the edges of his mouth, with his hooded froggy eyes gazing greedily down upon the little beedi-rolls of money with which his quaking petitioners sought to pacify him, and which he rolled lusciously between his plump little fingers until at length he broke slowly into a huge, red-gummed smile, he was indeed a Frog King, a Mainduck Raja whose commands could not be gainsaid. By this time he had decided to rewrite his father's life-story, erasing the tale of just-one-fielding from his repertoire. He had started telling visiting foreign journalists that his father had been an educated, cultured, literary man, an internationalist, who had taken the name of'Fielding' as a genuflection to the author of Tom Jones. 'You call me narrow and parochial,' he reproached the journalists. 'Bigot and prude, you have also called. But from my childhood time, intellectual horizons were broad and free. They were--let me so put it-picaresque.' Aurora first heard that her work had re-ignited the wrath of this mighty amphibian when Kekoo Mody phoned in some agitation from his gallery on Cuffe Parade. The MA had announced its intention to march on Kekoo's little showroom, claiming it was flagrantly displaying a pornographic representation of a sexual assault by a Muslim 'sportsman' on an innocent Hindu maiden. Raman Fielding himself was expected to head the march, and to address the crowd. Police were present, but in insufficient numbers; the danger of violence, even of a fire-attack on the gallery, was very real. 'Wait on,' my mother told him. 'This little frog-face, I know how to fixofy. Give me thirty ticks.' Within half an hour the march had been called off. In a prepared statement, a representative of the First XI of the MA told a hastily convened press conference that on account of the imminence of Gudhi Padwa, the Maharashtrian New Year, the pornography protest had been suspended, lest an outbreak of violence--God forbid!--should mar the happy day. Additionally, in deference to the outrage of the people, the Mody Gallery had agreed to withdraw the offending painting from view. Without leaving Elephanta, my mother had averted a crisis. But mother: it was not a victory. It was a defeat. The first-ever conversation between Aurora Zogoiby and Raman Fielding had been short and to the point. For once she had not asked Abraham to do her dirty work. She made her own telephone call. I know it: I was there. Years later I learned that the telephone on Raman Fielding's desk was a special instrument, an American import; the receiver looked like a bright green plastic frog, and croaked instead of ringing. Fielding must have put the frog against his face and heard my mother's voice issuing through its lips. 'How much?' she asked. And Mainduck named his price. I have chosen to set down the full saga of The Kissing of Abbas All Baig because the entry of Fielding into our lives was a moment of some significance; and because for a while this cricket-scene was the picture for which Aurora Zogoiby became, let us say, too well-known. The threat of violence receded a little, but the work was obliged to remain concealed--could only be rescued by j oining the city's many invisibles. A principle had been eroded; a pebble bounced down a hill: plink, plonk, plank. There would be many further such erosions in the years that followed, and the bouncing pebble would be joined by many larger stones. But Aurora herself never made great claims--whether of principle or quality--for The Kissing; to her it was a jeu d'esprit, quickly conceived, lightly executed. It became, however, an albatross, and I witnessed both her ennui at having endlessly to defend it, and her fury at the ease with which this 'teapot monsoon' had distracted attention from the body of her real work. She was required by the public prints to speak ponderously of'underlying motives' when she had had only whims, to make moral statements where there had been only ('only'!) play, and feeling, and the unfolding inexorable logic of brush and light. She was obliged to counter accusations of social irresponsibility by divers 'experts', and took to muttering bad-temperedly that, throughout history, efforts to make artists socially accountable had resulted in nullity: tractor art, court art, chocolate-box junk. 'What I resent most, but, about these Ologistas springofying up like dragon's teeth,' she told me, painting furiously, 'is they force me to become too much an Olojee myself.' Suddenly she found herself being described--by MA voices, but not only by them- as a 'Christian artist', even, on one occasion, as 'that Christian female married to a Jew'. At first such formulations made her laugh; but she soon saw that they weren't funny. How easily a self, a lifetime of work and action and affinity and opposition, could be washed away under such an attack! 'It's as if, she said to me, falling accidentally into a cricketing image, 'I don't have any runs on the bloody board.' Or, at another time: 'It's as if I don't have any money in the bloody bank.' Remembering Vasco's warnings, she responded in a characteristically unpredictable fashion. One day in those dark years of the mid-Seventies--years that somehow seem darker in the memory because so little of their tyranny could be seen, because on Malabar Hill the Emergency was as invisible as the illegal skyscrapers and disenfranchised poor-she presented me, at the end of a long studio day, with an envelope containing a one-way airline ticket to Spain, and my passport, stamped with a Spanish visa. 'Always keep it valid,' she told me. 'The ticket you can renew-o every year, and the visa too. I-tho will run nowhere. If that Indira who always hate-o'ed me to pieces wants to come and get, she will know where to find me. But maybe the day will come when you should takeofy Vasco's tip. Only don't go to the English. We have had enough of them. Go find Palimpstine; go see Mooristan.' And for Lambajan at the gates she also had a present: a black leather cartridge-belt, and hanging from it a police holster with a button-down flap, and inside the holster, loaded, a gun. She arranged for him to be given shooting lessons. As for me, I tucked her gift away; and thereafter, superstitiously, never failed to do as she had suggested. I kept my back door open, and made sure there was a plane standing on the runway. I had begun to come unstuck. We all had. After the Emergency people started seeing through different eyes. Before the Emergency we were Indians. After it we were Christian Jews. Plank, plonk, plink. Nothing happened. No mob came to the gate, no arresting officers arrived to perform the role of Indira's avenging angels. Lamba's gun remained in its holster. It was Mynah who was detained, but only for a few weeks, and she was treated with great courtesy and allowed to receive visitors, books and food in her cell. The Emergency ended. Life went on. Nothing happened, and everything. There was turmoil in Paradise. Ina died, and after her funeral Aurora came home and painted a Moor painting in which the line between land and sea had ceased to be a permeable frontier. Now she painted it as a harshly-delineated zig-zag crack, into which the land was pouring along with the ocean. The munchers of mango and singhani, the drinkers of electric-blue syrups so sugary that one endangered one's teeth just by looking at them, the office workers in their rolled trousers with their cheap shoes in their hands, and all the barefoot lovers walking along the version of Chowpatty Beach beneath the Moor's Palace were screaming as the sand beneath their feet sucked them down towards the fissure, along with the cutpurses, the neon-lit stalls of the snack vendors, and the trained monkeys in soldier's uniform who had been dying-for-their-country to entertain the promenading crowds. They all poured into the jagged darkness along with the pomfret and jellyfish and crabs. The evening arc of Marine Drive itself, Marine Drive with its banal, cultured-pearl necklace of lights, had grown distorted; the very esplanade was being pulled towards the void. And in his palace on the hill, the harlequin Moor looked down at the tragedy, impotent, sighing, and old before his time. Dead Ina stood translucent by his side, the pre-Nashville Ina, shown at the height of her voluptuous beauty. This painting, Moor and Ina's Ghost Look into the Abyss, was afterwards seen as the first in the 'high period' of the Moor series, those high-energy, apocalyptic canvases into which Aurora poured all her agony at the death of a daughter, all the maternal love that had remained unexpressed for too long; but also her larger, prophetic, even Cassandran fears for the nation, her fierce grief at the sourness of what had once, at least in an India of dreams, been sweet as sugar-cane juice. All that was in the pictures, yes, and her jealousy, too. --Jealousy?--Of what, of whom, of which?--Everything happened. The world changed. Uma Sarasvati arrived.