Alas for such hypotheses! The truth was nothing of the sort. Let me say at once that Great-Uncle Aires found more than sanctuary at Elephanta. He found, to his amazement and everyone else’s, a moment of late, sweet fellowship. Not love, perhaps. But ‘something’. The ‘something’ that is far, far better than ‘nothing’, even near the end of all our half-satisfied days.
Many of the painters who came to sit at great Aurora’s feet earned their livings in other professions and were known within our walls as – to name only a few – the Doctor, the Lady Doctor, the Radiologist, the Journalist, the Professor, the Sarangi Player, the Playwright, the Printer, the Curator, the Jazz Singer, the Lawyer, and the Accountant. It was the last of these – the artist who is without a doubt the present-day inheritor of Aurora’s fallen mantle – who adopted Aires: a fortyish floppy-haired fellow he was then, wearing huge glasses with lenses the size and shape of portable TV’s, and, behind them, an expression of such perfect innocence that it instantly made you suspicious of a prank. He had become my great-uncle’s close friend within weeks. In that last year of his life, Great-Uncle Aires became the Accountant’s regular model, and in my opinion his lover as well. The paintings are there for all to see, above all the extraordinary You Can’t Always Get Your Wish, 114×114 cms., oil on canvas, in which a teeming Bombay street-scene – Muhammad Ali Road, perhaps – is surveyed from a first-floor balcony by the full-length nude figure of Aires da Gama, trim-and-slim as a young god, but with the unfulfilled, unfulfillable, unexpressed, inexpressible longings of old age in every brush-stroke of his painted form. There is an old bulldog sitting at his feet; and it may just be my imagination, but down below him in the crowd – yes, just there! – those two tiny figures on the back of the elephant with the Vimto advertisements painted on its flanks! – could they be – surely they are! – Prince Henry the Navigator and Carmen da Gama, beckoning Great-Uncle to join them on their trip?
(Once upon a time, there were two figures in a boat, one in a wedding-dress, one not, and a third figure left alone in her nuptial bed. Aurora immortalised that painful scene; and here in the Accountant’s work, surely, were the same three figures. Only their disposition was different. The dance had moved on; had become a dance of death.)
Soon after the completion of You Can’t Always Get Your Wish, Aires da Gama passed away. Aurora, as well as Abraham, made a trip south to bury him. Disregarding the custom of the tropics, where men go hastily to their sleep, lest by their tarrying they leave the world in bad odour, my mother called the undertakers, Mahalaxmi Deadbody Disposicians Pvt Ltd (motto: ‘Corpse is here? Want it there? Okay, dear! It’s your affair!’), and had Aires put on ice for the journey, so that he could be laid beside Carmen in the consecrated family plot on Cabral Island, where Prince Henry the Navigator could find him if he ever chose to ride down from the Spice Hills on his elephant. When Aires arrived at his last destination and they opened up his aluminium Dispotainer to transfer him to his coffin he looked – Aurora told us – like a ‘big blue Popsicle’. There was a hoar-frost on his eyebrows and he was colder than the grave. ‘Never mind, Uncle,’ Aurora murmured during the funeral service at which she and Abraham were the only mourners. ‘Where you’re off to they’ll soon warmofy you up.’
But her heart wasn’t in it. The quarrels of the past were long forgotten. The house on Cabral Island felt like a leftover, an irrelevance. Even the room which Aurora, as a young prodigy, had covered with painting during the period of her ‘house arrest’ no longer concerned her, for she had returned to its themes many times, had gone back obsessively to the mythic-romantic mode in which history, family, politics and fantasy jostled each other like the great crowds at V.T. or Churchgate Stations; and had returned, too, to that exploration of an alternative vision of India-as-mother, not Nargis’s sentimental village-mother but a mother of cities, as heartless and lovable, brilliant and dark, multiple and lonely, mesmeric and repugnant, pregnant and empty, truthful and deceitful as the beautiful, cruel, irresistible metropolis itself. ‘My father thought I had made a masterpiece here,’ she said to Abraham as they stood in the painted room. ‘But as you see they are only a child’s first steps.’
Aurora had the old house dust-sheeted and locked up. She never returned to Cochin, and even after she died Abraham spared her the humiliation of being flown south like a frozen fish. He sold the old place and it became a decaying, modestly priced hotel for young back-packers and old India hands returning, on inadequate pensions, for a last look at their lost world. Eventually, or so I heard, it fell down. I am sorry that it did; but then, I was, I think, the only member of our family to give a fig for the past.
When Great-Uncle Aires died, every one of us had the sense of arriving at a turning-point. Iced, blue, he marked the end of a generation. It was our turn now.
I decided I would no longer accompany Miss Jaya on her sorties around town. Even that act of distancing proved insufficient; the events in Zaveri Bazaar continued to rankle. So, finally, I went to see Lambajan at the gates, and, blushing hotly with the knowledge that I was humiliating him, told him what I knew. When I had finished I watched him in trepidation. Never before, after all, had I told a man that his wife was a thief. Would he want to fight me for his family’s honour, to kill me where I stood? Lambajan said nothing, and his silence spread outwards from him, muffling the hooting of taxis, the cigarette-vendor’s cries, the shrieks of street-urchins as they played fighting-kite and hoop and dodge-the-traffic, and the loud playback music emerging from the ‘Sorryno’ Irani restaurant up the hill (so called because of the huge blackboard at the entrance reading Sorry, No Liquor, No Answer Given Regarding Addresses in Locality, No Combing of Hair, No Beef, No Haggle, No Water Unless Food Taken, No News or Movie Magazine, No Sharing of Liquid Sustenances, No Taking Smoke, No Match, No Feletone Calls, No Incoming with Own Comestible, No Speaking of Horses, No Sigret, No Taking of Long Time on Premises, No Raising of Voice, No Change, and a crucial last pair, No Turning Down of Volume – It Is How We Like, and No Musical Request – All Melodies Selected Are To Taste of Prop). Even the blasted parrot seemed interested in the chowkidar’s response.
‘In my job, baba,’ Lambajan said at length, ‘one sees many things to guard against. A man comes with cheap gemstones, the ladies of the house must be protected. Another person comes with bad watches up his wrist, I must pack him off. Beggars, badmashes, lafangas, all. Better they go from here and so I do my job. I stand and face the street and what it asks I answer. But now I learn that I must have eyes also in the back of my head.’
‘Okay, forget it,’ I said clumsily. ‘You’re angry. Let’s forget the whole thing.’
‘You don’t know, baba, but I am a god-fearing man,’ Lamba went on, as if I had not spoken. ‘I stand outside this godless house on guard and I do not say. But at Walkeshwar Tank and Mahalaxmi Temple they know my poor face. Now I must go and make offering to Lord Ram and ask for extra back-side eyes. Also for deaf ears, so that I cannot hear such so-bad too-bad things.’
After I accused Miss Jaya the thieving stopped. Nothing was said between us, but Lamba had done the needful and her pilfering days were over. And there was another ending, too: Lambajan no longer acted as my boxing coach, no longer pogo’ed around the garden shouting ‘Come on, mister parrot; you want to feather-tickle me? Come with your best hit!’, no longer wished to take me into the alley of the street fighters to try my hand against the biggest ruffians in town. The question of whether my breathing problems would cancel out my natural pugilistic talent would have to wait many years to be resolved. Our relations were badly strained, and did not really recover until my own great fall. And in the interim Miss Jaya Hé plotted, and successfully achieved, her revenge.
Such was my time in Paradise: a full life but a friendless one. Kept out of school, I was starved for contemporaries; and in this world in which appearance becomes reality and we must be what we seem, I quickly became an honorary grown-up, spoken to and treated as such by one and all, exclu
ded from the world of what I was. How I have dreamed of innocence! – of childhood days playing cricket on the Cross Maidan, of excursions to Juhu or Marvé beaches or the Aarey Milk Colony, of making fish-lips at the angel-fish in the Taraporevala Aquarium and musing sweetly with one’s chums on how they might be to eat; of short trousers and snake-buckled belts and the ecstasy of pistachio kulfi and outings for Chinese food and the first incompetent kisses of the young; of being taught to swim on Sunday mornings at the Willingdon Club by that instructor who liked to terrify his pupils by lying flat on the floor of the pool and letting all the air out of his lungs. The larger-than-lifeness of a child’s life, its roller-coaster highs and lows, its alliances and treacheries, its boy-stuff rollick ‘n’ scrape, were denied me by my size and appearance. Mine was a knowing Eden. Still I was happy there.
– Why?– Why?– Why?–
– That’s easy: because it was home. –
So, yes, I was happy amid the wildnesses of its adult lives, amid the travails of my siblings and the parental bizarreries which came to feel like everyday occurrences, and in a way still do, they still persuade me that it is the idea of the norm that is bizarre, the notion that human beings have normal, everyday lives … go behind the door of any household, I want to argue, and you’ll find a macabre wonderland as untamed as our own. And maybe I’m right; or maybe this attitude, too, is a part of my complaint, maybe this – what? – this fucked-up dissident mind-set, too, is all my mother’s fault.
My sisters would probably say it was. O my Ina, Minnie, Mynah long ago! How hard for them to be their mother’s girls. Though they were beautiful, she was lovelier. The magic mirror on her bedroom wall never preferred the younger women. And she was brainier, and more gifted, and with the knack of captivating any young beaux her daughters might dare to introduce to her, of intoxicating them so deeply as to ruin the girls’ chances for good; the youths, blinded by the mother, could no longer see poor Eeny-Meenie-Miney at all … and there was her sharp tongue, and her lack of a shoulder to cry on, and her willingness to leave them for long stretches of their childhood in Miss Jaya Hé’s bony, joyless clutches … Aurora lost them all, you know, they all found ways of leaving her, though they loved her bitterly, loved her more passionately than she could love them back, loved her harder than, in the absence of her reciprocating love, they could ever feel allowed to love themselves.
Ina, the eldest, Ina of the halved name, was the greatest beauty of the trio and also, I’m afraid, what her sisters liked to call ‘the Family Stupe’. Aurora, ever the kind and generous mama, would wave airily in Ina’s direction at the most exalted of gatherings and tell her guests, ‘She-tho is just to lookofy at, not to talk-o to. Poor girl is limitoed in brain.’ At the age of eighteen Ina screwed up the courage to have her ears pierced at Jhaveri Bros, the jewellery store on Warden Road, and was unfortunately rewarded for her courage by an infection; the backs of her ears came up in suppurating lumps which were made worse by her decision, taken for reasons of vanity, to keep pricking them and mopping up the pus. In the end she had to be treated as a hospital out-patient and the whole sorry three-month episode gave her mother a new weapon to use against her. ‘Maybe it would have been better to have them slice-o’d off,’ Aurora scolded her. ‘Maybe it would have fixofied the blockage. Because some blockage there is, isn’t it? Some ear wax or plug. Outside shape is super, but nothing ever goes in.’
Certainly she blocked her ears against her mother, and competed with her in the only way she thought she could: by using her looks. One by one she offered herself as a model to the male artists in Aurora’s circle – the Lawyer, the Sarangi Player, the Jazz Singer – and when she unveiled her extraordinary physique in their studios its gravitational force drew them into her at once; like satellites falling from their orbits they crash-landed on her soft hills. After every conquest she arranged for her mother to discover a lover’s note or a pornographic sketch, as if she were an Apache brave displaying scalps to the big chief in his tent. She entered the field of commerce as well as art, becoming the first Indian catwalk model and cover girl – Femina, Buzz, Celebrity, Patakha, Debonair, Bombay, Bombshell, Ciné Blitz, Lifestyle, Gentleman, Eleganza, Chic-pronounced-chick – whose fame grew to rival those of the Bollywood movie stars. Ina became a silent goddess of sex, prepared to wear the most exhibitionist garments designed by the new breed of radical young designers emerging in the city, garments so revealing that many of the top girls felt embarrassed. Ina, unembarrassable, with her hip-swinging Super Sashay, stole every show. Her face on a magazine cover was estimated to increase sales by a third; but she gave no interviews, rebuffing all attempts to discover her most intimate secrets, such as the colour of her bedroom, or her favourite movie heero, or the song she liked to hum while taking a bath. No beauty tips were handed out, nor autographs given. She remained aloof: every inch the upper-crust femme from Malabar Hill, she allowed people to imagine she only modelled ‘for a laugh’. Her silence increased her allure; it allowed men to dream their own versions of her and women to imagine themselves into her strappy sandals or crocodile shoes. At the height of the Emergency, when in Bombay it was almost business-as-usual except that everyone kept missing trains because they had started leaving on time, when the plague-spores of communal fanaticism were still spreading and the disease had not yet erupted in the metropolis – in that strange time my sister Ina was voted #1 Role Model by the city’s young magazine-reading females, beating Mrs Indira Gandhi by a factor of two to one.
But Mrs Gandhi was not the rival she was trying to defeat, and her triumphs were rendered meaningless by Aurora’s failure to rise to the bait, to condemn her licentiousness and exhibitionism; until at last Ina was able to send her great mother epistolary proof of a liaison – a stolen weekend, as it turned out, at the Lord’s Central House at Matheran – with Vasco Miranda. That did it all right. Aurora summoned her eldest daughter, cursed her for a nymphomaniac whore and threatened to throw her into the street. ‘You don’t have to push,’ Ina answered, proudly. ‘Don’t worry on; I-tho will jump.’
Within twenty-four hours she had eloped to Nashville, Tennessee with the young playboy who was the sole heir of what was left of the Cashondeliveri family fortune after Abraham’s buy-out of his father and uncle. Jamshedjee Jamibhoy Cashondeliveri had become well known in Bombay’s nightclubs as the purveyor, under the stage name of ‘Jimmy Cash’, of what he liked to call ‘Country and Eastern’ music, a set of twangy songs about ranches and trains and love and cows with an idiosyncratic Indian twist. Now he and Ina had lit out for the territory, they were taking their love to town. She took the stage name of Gooddy (that is, ‘Dolly’) Gama – the use of a shortened version of her mother’s family name suggested Aurora’s continued influence over her daughter’s thoughts and deeds – and there was a further development. She, who had become a legend by remaining silent, now opened her mouth and sang. She led a group of three back-up singers, and the name of their act, to which she agreed in spite of its regrettable equine connotations, was Jimmy Cash and the G.G.s.
Ina came home in disgrace a year later. We were all shocked. She was greasy-haired and dishevelled and had put on over seventy pounds: not-so-Gooddy Gama now! Immigration officers had trouble believing she was the young woman in her passport photograph. Her marriage was over, and though she said Jimmy had turned out to be a monster and ‘we didn’t know’ the things he had done, it also emerged, as time passed, that her omnivorous sexual appetite for yodelling rhinestone cowboys and her ever-increasing exhibitionism had not gone down well with the moralistic arbiters of singers’ fates in Tennessee, or, indeed, with her husband Jamshed; and to top it off she sang with the untrainable terminal squawk of a strangled goose. She had spent money as freely as she had partaken of the joys of American cooking, and her tantrums had grown larger along with the rest of her. In the end Jimmy had run away from her, and had given up Country and Eastern music to become a law student in California. ‘I have to get him back,’ she beg
ged us. ‘You must help me with my plan.’
Home is the place to which you can always return, no matter how painful the circumstances of your leaving. Aurora made no mention of their year-old rift, and took the prodigal child into her arms. ‘We will fix-o that rotter,’ she comforted weeping Ina. ‘Just tell us what you want.’
‘I have to bring him here,’ she wept. ‘If he thinks I am dying then he will surely return. Send a cable saying there is suspicion of I don’t know what. Something not infectious. Heart attack.’
Aurora fought back a grin. ‘How about’, she suggested, hugging her newly girthsome child, ‘some type of wasting sickness?’
Ina missed the sardonic note. ‘No, stupid,’ she said into Aurora’s shoulder. ‘How to lose so much weight in time? Don’t have any more bad ideas. Tell him,’ and here she brightened hugely, ‘cancer.’
And Minnie: in the year Ina was away she found her own escape route. I am sorry to inform you that our sweet Inamorata, most mild-natured of young women, became, that year, enamoured of no less a personage than Jesus of Nazareth himself; of the Son of Man, and his holy mother, too. Mousey Minnie, always the easily shocked one, always the sister for whom our household’s beatnik licence had been a matter for tuttings and hand-over-mouth shocks, our wide-eyed, innocent mini-Minnie who had been studying nursing with the nuns of Altamount Road, announced her desire to swap Aurora, the mother of her flesh, for Maria Gratiaplena, the Mother of God, to give up her sisterhood in favour of Sisterhood, and to spend the rest of her days away from Elephanta, in the house of, and wrapped in the love of …
The Moor's Last Sigh Page 23
