The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  For a time Aurora was proud of her alias, because she had indeed made of herself what she had wanted to be, an unblinking lizard on the wall of history, watching, watching; but when her pioneering work spawned followers, when other young artists began to act as public recorders and even began calling themselves the ‘Chipkalist Movement’, then, characteristically, my mother publicly disowned her disciples. In a newspaper article entitled ‘I Am The Lizard’ she admitted her authorship, defying the British to move against her (they did not) and dismissing her imitators as ‘cartoonists and photographers’.

  ‘The grand manner is all very well,’ my father, reminiscing, commented in his old age. ‘But it makes for a lonely life.’

  When Aurora Zogoiby heard that the Naval Strike Committee had been persuaded by the Congress leadership to call off the stoppage, and that it had convoked a meeting of the sailors to order them back to their posts, her disappointment with the world as it was burst its banks. Without thinking, without waiting for her driver Hanuman, she leapt into the curtained Buick and took off for the naval base. By the time she reached the Afghan Church in the Colaba Cantonment, however, the bubble of her invulnerability had burst, and she was beginning to have second thoughts about the wisdom of her journey. The road to the base was thick with defeated sailors, frustrated young men in clean uniforms and filthy moods, young men swirling listlessly like fallen leaves. Crows jeered in a plane-tree; a sailor picked up a stone and hurled it in the direction of the noise. Black forms fluttered contemptuously, circled, settled down, resumed their taunts. Police officers in short trousers muttered anxiously in small knots, like children afraid of punishment, and even my mother began to see that this was no place for a lady with a sketchbook and folding stool, let alone a gleaming Buick without so much as the protective presence of a chauffeur. It was a hot, humid, ill-tempered afternoon. A child’s lilac kite, its string cut in some other lost battle, fell pathetically from the sky.

  Aurora did not need to lower her window to ask what was on the sailors’ minds, because she was thinking the same things – that the Congress were acting like chamchas, toadies; that even now, when the British were too unsure of the army to send it in against the sailors, they could be sure that Congresswallahs would spare them the trouble of having to do so. When the masses actually do rise up, she thought, the bosses turn tail. Brown bosses, white bosses, it was the same thing. ‘This strike has scare-o’ed our lot as much as theirs.’ Aurora, too, was in a mutinous mood; but she was not a sailor, and knew that to those angry boys she would look like a rich bitch in a fancy car – as, perhaps, the enemy.

  The sullen, aimless thickening of the crowd had forced her to slow the Buick to walking pace, and when, with a gesture whose swift casualness concealed a frightening strength, one scowling young giant twisted the chrome housing of the Buick’s wing-mirror until it hung uselessly off the car like a broken limb, she felt her heart begin to pound, and decided it was time to leave. Unable to turn round, she put the car into reverse; and realised, as she pushed the accelerator, that without the wing-mirror she was unable to check her rear on account of the intervening presence of green-and-gold cloth; that some sailors, in a final show of defiance, had suddenly decided to sit down in the road; and that, thanks to her growing, thumping feeling of alarm, she had accelerated harder than she intended, and was going much, much too fast.

  As she braked, she felt a small bump.

  Stories of Aurora Zogoiby being gripped by panic are rare, but this is one such tale: feeling the bump, my horrified mother, who had at once understood that someone had been staging a sit-down protest behind her car, column-shifted the Buick into first. The car leapt forward a few feet, thus passing bumpily over the stricken sailor’s outstretched leg for a second time. At this moment several policemen, waving sticks and blowing whistles, raced towards the Buick, and Aurora, acting now in a kind of dream, motivated by some disoriented notion of guilt and escape, jerked the car into reverse once more. There was a third bump, although this time it was less noticeable than on the previous occasions. Shouts of rage mounted behind her, and, completely unhinged by the situation, she lurched forward again in a wild response to the cries – barely feeling the fourth bump – and knocked at least one policeman flat on his back. At this point, mercifully, the Buick stalled.

  What puzzled me most when I heard the story as a boy, what continues to perplex, is how, having more or less cut a man in two, she managed to get out of there in one piece. Aurora herself varied her explanations with each telling, attributing her escape, variously, to the disorientation of those unhappy sailors; or to some residue of naval discipline, which prevented them from becoming a lynch mob; or to the innate chivalry and sense of hierarchy of Indian men, which kept them from harming a lady, especially a grand one. Or, again, it might have been on account of her deep and evident concern – no grand manner there! – for the injured man, whose leg had taken on an upsetting resemblance to her dangling wing-mirror; or the result of the speed and habit of command with which she had him scooped up and placed on the Buick’s back seat, where he was shielded from angry eyes by green-and-gold cloth while she pointed out to the assembled gathering that the injured man needed transport, and hers was the most readily available vehicle. The truth was that she had no idea why she was spared by that increasingly ugly crowd, but in her dark moments she perhaps came closest to the truth, admitting that she had been saved by fame; for her image was everywhere still, and with her beautiful young face and long white hair she wasn’t hard to recognise. ‘Tell your Congress friends they let us down,’ someone shouted, and she shouted back, ‘I will’; and then they let her go. (Some months later, pirouetting on the ramparts of her home, she kept her word, and let Jawaharlal Nehru have it straight. Soon after that, the Mountbattens arrived in India, and Nehru and Edwina fell in love. Is it too much to suppose that Aurora’s plain speaking in the matter of the great naval strike turned Panditji away from her and towards the Last Viceroy’s possibly less disputatious mame?)

  Abraham’s version – Abraham, who had promised to look after her always – was different. Long after she died he confided in me. ‘Back then I kept a top team secretly on her tail, and she led us a merry dance. I don’t say it was so hard keeping your fool mummy safe when she went off on her madcap ventures, but I had to stay on my toes. Wherever that Buick turned up, my boys were also there. How could I inform her? If she knew she would have chewed me out.’

  It is difficult for me, after all these years, to know what to believe. How could Abraham have known that Aurora was going to dash off as she did? – But maybe it is her version that is suspect – perhaps her departure was not so precipitate, after all. The old biographer’s problem: even when people are telling their own life stories, they are invariably improving on the facts, rewriting their tales, or just plain making them up. Aurora needed to seem independent; her version followed from that desire, just as Abraham’s derived from his need to make the world think – to make me think – her safety depended on his care. The truth of such stories lies in what they reveal about the protagonists’ hearts, rather than their deeds. In the case of the amputated sailor, however, the truth is simpler to establish: the poor fellow lost his leg.

  She brought him home and changed his life. She had diminished him, subtracting a leg and therefore his future in the navy; and now she sought fiercely to enlarge him again, providing him with a new uniform, a new job, a new leg, a new identity and a grumpy parrot to go with it all. She had ruined his life, but she saved him from the worst, gutter-dwelling, begging-bowl consequences of that ruination. As a result, he fell in love with her, what else; he became Lambajan Chandiwala as she desired, and the fabulous elephant-tales he told were his way of expressing his love, which was the impossible dog-devoted love of a slave for his queen, and which disgusted our sour and bony ayah and housekeeper Miss Jaya Hé, who became his bride and the bane of his life. ‘Baap-ré!’ she berated him. ‘Why not go on a salt march and don’t stop wh
en you reach the sea?’

  Lambajan at Aurora’s gates – at the gates, as Vasco Miranda called them, of dawn – guarded his mistress from the coarse world outside, but he was also, in a way, protecting others against her. Nobody entered until he knew their business; but Lamba also made it his own business to give visitors the benefit of his advice. ‘Today speak soft only,’ he might say. ‘Today her head is full of whispers.’ Or else: ‘Dark thoughts are on her. You must tell good joke.’ Thus forewarned, my mother’s guests could (if they were wise enough to obey Lambajan’s tips) avoid the supernova detonations of her legendary – and highly artistic – rage.

  My mother Aurora Zogoiby was too bright a star; look at her too hard and you’d be blinded. Even now, in the memory, she dazzles, must be circled about and about. We may perceive her indirectly, in her effects on others – her bending of other people’s light, her gravitational pull which denied us all hope of escape, the decaying orbits of those too weak to withstand her, who fell towards her sun and its consuming fires. Ah, the dead, the unended, endlessly ending dead: how long, how rich is their story. We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep.

  Must we also die before our souls, so long suppressed, can find utterance – before our secret natures can be known? To whom it may concern, I say No, and again I say, No Way. When I was young I used to dream – like Carmen da Gama, but for less masochistic, masturbatory reasons; like photophobic, God-bothered Oliver D’Aeth – of peeling off my skin plantain-fashion, of going forth naked into the world, like an anatomy illustration from Encyclopaedia Britannica, all ganglions, ligaments, nervous pathways and veins, set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of colour, race and clan. (In another version of the dream I would be able to peel away more than skin, I would float free of flesh, skin and bones, having become simply an intelligence or a feeling set loose in the world, at play in its fields, like a science-fiction glow which needed no physical form.)

  So, in writing this, I must peel off history, the prison of the past. It is time for a sort of ending, for the truth about myself to struggle out, at last, from under my parents’ stifling power; from under my own black skin. These words are a dream come true. A painful dream, that I do not deny; for in the waking world a man’s not as easy to flay as a banana, no matter how ripe he be. And Aurora and Abraham will take some shaking off.

  Motherness – excuse me if I underline the point – is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet. Ladies-O, gents-O: I’m talking major mother country. The year I was born, Mehboob Productions’ all-conquering movie Mother India – three years in the making, three hundred shooting days, in the top three all-time mega-grossing Bollywood flicks–hit the nation’s screens. Nobody who saw it ever forgot that glutinous saga of peasant heroinism, that super-slushy ode to the uncrushability of village India made by the most cynical urbanites in the world. And as for its leading lady– O Nargis with your shovel over your shoulder and your strand of black hair tumbling forward over your brow! – she became, until Indira-Mata supplanted her, the living mother-goddess of us all. Aurora knew her, of course; like every other luminary of the time the actress was drawn towards my mother’s blazing flame. But they didn’t hit it off, perhaps because Aurora could not refrain from raising the subject – how close to my own heart! – of mother-son relations.

  ‘The first time I saw that picture’, she confided to the famous movie star on the high terrace at Elephanta, ‘I took one look at your Bad Son, Birju, and I thought, O boy, what a handsome guy – too much sizzle, too much chilli, bring water. He may be a thief and a bounder, but that is some A-class loverboy goods. And now look– you have gone and marry-o’ed him! What sexy lives you movie people leadofy: to marry your own son, I swear, wowie.’

  The film actor under discussion, Sunil Dutt, stood stiffly beside his wife and sipped lemonade, flushing. (In those days Bombay was a ‘dry’ state, and even though whisky-soda was plentiful at Elephanta, the actor was making a moral point.) ‘Auroraji, you are mixing truth and make-believe,’ he said pompously, as if it were a sin. ‘Birju and his mother Radha are fictions only, in two dimensions on the silver screen; but we are flesh and blood, available in full 3D – as guests in your fine home.’ Nargis, sipping nimbu-pani, smiled a thin smile at the rebuke hidden in the last phrase.

  ‘Even in the picture, but,’ Aurora went relentlessly on, ‘I knew right off that bad Birju had the hots for his gorgeous ma.’

  Nargis stood speechless, open-mouthed. Vasco Miranda, who could never resist a bit of trouble-making, saw the storm brewing and made haste to join in. ‘Sublimation’, he offered, ‘of mutual parent-child longings, is deep-rooted in the national psyche. The use of names in the picture makes the meaning clear. This “Birju” moniker is also used by God Krishna, isn’t it, and we know that milky “Radha” is the blue chap’s one true love. In the picture, Sunil, you are made up to look like the god, and you even fool with all the girls, throwing your stones to break their womby water-pots; which, admit it, is Krishna-esque behaviour. In this interpretation,’ and here clowning Vasco attempted unsuccessfully to convey a certain scholarly gravitas, ‘Mother India is the dark side of the Radha-Krishna story, with the subsidiary theme of forbidden love added on. But what the hell; Oedipus-schmoedipus! Have another chhota peg.’

  ‘Dirty talk,’ said the Living Mother Goddess. ‘Filthy-dirty, chhi. I heard tell that depraved artists and beatnik intellectuals came up here, but I gave you all benefit of doubt. Now I observe that I am among the blaspheming scum of the earth. How you people wallow-pollow in negative images! In our picture we put stress on the positive side. Courage of the masses is there, and also dams.’

  ‘Bad language, eh?’ mused Vasco, innocently. ‘Good for you! But in the final cut the censor must have removed it.’

  ‘Bewaqoof!’ shouted Sunil Dutt, provoked beyond endurance. ‘Bleddy dumbo! Not oathery, but new technology is being referred to: to wit, the hydro-electric project, as inaugurated by my goodwife in the opening scene.’

  ‘And when you say your wife,’ ever-helpful Vasco clarified, ‘you mean, of course, your mother.’

  ‘Sunil, come,’ said the legend, sweeping away. ‘If this godless anti-national gang is the world of art, then I-tho am happy to be on commercial side.’

  In Mother India, a piece of Hindu myth-making directed by a Muslim socialist, Mehboob Khan, the Indian peasant woman is idealised as bride, mother, and producer of sons; as long-suffering, stoical, loving, redemptive, and conservatively wedded to the maintenance of the social status quo. But for Bad Birju, cast out from his mother’s love, she becomes, as one critic has mentioned, ‘that image of an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mother who haunts the fantasy life of Indian males’.

  I, too, know something about this image; have been cast as a Bad Son in my turn. My mother was no Nargis Dutt – she was the in-your-face type, not serene. Catch her hauling a shovel on her shoulder! I am pleased to say that I have never seen a spade. Aurora was a city girl, perhaps the city girl, as much the incarnation of the smartyboots metropolis as Mother India was village earth made flesh. In spite of this I have found it instructive to compare and contrast our families. Mother India’s movie-husband was rendered impotent, his arms crushed by a rock; and ruined limbs play a central rôle in our saga, too. (You must judge for yourselves whether Abraham was a potent fellow or im-.) And as for Birju and Moor: dark skins and crookery were not all we had in common.

  I have been keeping my secret for too long. High time I spilt my beans.

  My three sisters were born in quick succession, and Aurora carried and ejected each of them with such perfunctory attention to their presence that they knew, long before their births, that she would make few concessions to their post-partum needs. The names she gave them confirmed these suspicions. The eldest, originally ca
lled Christina in spite of her Jewish father’s protests, eventually had her name sliced in half. ‘Stop sulking, Abie,’ Aurora commanded. ‘From now on she’s plain Ina without the Christ.’ So poor Ina grew up with only half a handle, and when the second child was born a year later matters were made worse because this time Aurora insisted on ‘Inamorata’. Abraham protested again: ‘People will confuse,’ he said plaintively. ‘And with this Ina-more it is like saying she is Ina-plus …’ Aurora shrugged. ‘Ina was a ten-pound baby, the little so-and-so,’ she reminded Abraham. ‘Head like a cannonball, hips like a ship’s behind. How can this little pocket mousey be anything but Ina-minus?’ Within a week, she had decided that Baby Inamorata, the five-pound mouse, bore a close resemblance to a famous cartoon rodent – ‘all big ears, wide eyes and polka dots’ – and my middle sister was always Minnie after that. When Aurora announced, eighteen months later, that her newborn third daughter would be Philomina, Abraham tore his hair. ‘Now comes this Minnie-’meena mix-up,’ he groaned. ‘And another -ina, too.’ Philomina, listening in on this dispute, began to cry, a fat tuneless roar of a noise that convinced everyone except her mother of the comical inappropriateness of naming her after the nightingale. When the child was three months old, however, Miss Jay a Hé the ayah heard a series of alarming caws and piercing trills emanating from the nursery and rushed in to find the baby lying contentedly in her cot with bird-song pouring from her lips. Ina and Minnie stared at their sister through the bars of the cot with expressions of terror and awe. Aurora was summoned and, with an unfazed casualness that instantly normalised the miracle, nodded brusquely and gave judgment: ‘So if she can mimic like this she is not a bulbul but a mynah,’ and from then on it was Ina, Minnie, Mynah, except that at Walsingham House School on Nepean Sea Road they became Eeny Meeny Miney, three quarters of an unfinished line followed by a hollow beat, a silent space where a fourth word should be. Three sisters waiting – and they had a long wait of it, because between Mynah and me there was an eight-year gap – to catch a brother by his toe.