After our visit to Laurel and Hardon 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 Chimène’s Arrival, was as formal as Velázquez’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 Technicolor 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 ‘Boabdil’; 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 ‘Chimène’, 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 homunculi – 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 Chimène, 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 rôle 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 ‘Chimène’ 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 mirror, 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 inquire 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. ‘I’ll never – never again …’
Her smile burst through her tears, so bright that I almost expected a rainbow.
‘Maybe it’s time’, she breathed, ‘that I proved to you that I am hetero as hell.’
And she was seen with Abraham Zogoiby himself, wolfing club sandwiches by the poolside at the Willingdon Club before losing gracefully to the old man at golf. ‘She was a wonder, that Uma of yours,’ he told me years later, high in his I. M. Pei Eden. ‘So knowledgeable, so original, and staring so intently with those swimming-pool eyes. Never seen anything like them since I first gazed upon your mother’s own face. God knows how much I babbled on! My own children had no interest – you, for example, my only son! – and an old man must talk to someone. I would have employed her on the spot but she said she had to prioritise her art. And Jesus Christ, the tits on her. Tits the size of your head.’ He cackled disgustingly and made a perfunctory apology without troubling to put the faintest trace of sincerity into his voice. ‘What to tell you, boy, women have been my lifetime weakness.’ Then suddenly a great cloud did pass across his face. ‘We both lost your beloved mother because we looked at other girls,’ he mumbled.
Corrupt global-scale banking schemes, stock market fixing at the super-epic Mogambo level, multi-billion-dollar arms deals, nuclear technology conspiracies involving stolen computers and Maldivian Mata Haris, export of antiquities including the symbol of the nation itself, the four-headed Lion of Sarnath … how much of his ‘black’ world, how many of his grand designs, did Abraham disclose to Uma Sarasvati? How much, for example, about certain special export consignments of Baby Softo powder? When I asked him he just shook his head. ‘Not much, I suppose. I don’t know. Everything. I am told I talk in my sleep.’
But I am getting ahead of myself. Uma told me about the game she played with my father, praising his golf swing – ‘not a wobble – and at his age!’ – and his generosity to a young girl new in town. We had taken to meeting in a series of modestly-priced rooms in Colaba or at Juhu (the city’s five-star joints were too risky; too many telephoto eyes and long-distance tongues). But our favourites were the Railway Retiring Rooms at V.T. and Bombay Central: in those high-ceilinged, shuttered, cool, clean, anonymous chambers I began my journey to Heaven and Hell. ‘Trains,’ Uma Sarasvati said. ‘All those pistons-shistons. Don’t they just turn you on?’
It is hard for me to speak of our lovemaking. Even now, and in spite of everything, the memory of it makes me shiver with yearning for what is lost. I remember its ease and tenderness, its quality of revelation; as if a door were opened in the flesh and through it poured an unsuspected fifth-dimension universe: its ringed planets and comets’ tails. Its whirling galaxies. Its bursting suns. But beyond expression, beyond language was the plain bodyness of it, the movement of hands, the tensing of buttocks, the arching of backs, the rise and fall of it, the thing with no meaning but itself, that meant everything; that brief animal doing, for the sake of which anything – anything – might be done. I cannot imagine – no, even now, my fancy will not stretch to it – that such passion, such essentiality, could have been faked. I do not believe she lied to me there, in that way, above the come and go of trains. I do not believe it; I believe it; I do not believe; I believe; I do not; I do not; I do.
There is one embarrassing detail. Uma, my Uma, murmured in my ear near the Everest of our ecstasy, on the South Col of desire, that there was a thing which made her sad. ‘Your Mummyji I revere; she-tho doesn’t like me, but.’ And I, gasping, and otherwise engaged, consoled her. Yes she does. But Uma – sweating, panting, hurling her body upon mine – repeated her grief. ‘No, my darling boy. She doesn’t. Bilkul not.’ I confess that at that high instant I had no stomach for this talk. An obscenity sprang unbidden to my lips. Fuck her then. – ‘What was that you said?’ – I said fuck her. Fuck my mother. O. – At which she dropped the subject and concentrated on matters in hand. Her lips at my ear spoke of other things. You want this my darling and this, to do this, you can do this, if you want to, if you want. O God yes I want to let me yes yes O …
Such chitter-chatter is better participated in than eavesdropped upon, so I will not set down any more. But I must admit – and it makes me blush to do so – that she, Uma, returned time and again to the topic of my mother’s hostility, until it seemed to become a part of what excited her. – She hates me hates me tell me what to do. – And I was expected to reply, and, forgive me, in the grip of lust I answered as required. Screw her I said. Screw her stupid the stupid bitch. And Uma: How? Darling, my darling, how? – Fuck her. Fuck her upside down and sideways too. – O, you can, my only sweet, if you want to, if you only say you want. – God yes. I want to. Yes. O God.
Thus at the moment of my greatest joy I spilt the seeds of ruin: my ruin, and my mother’s, and the ruin of our great house.
We were, all but one of us, in love with Uma in those days, and even Aurora, who was not, relented; for Uma’s presence in our house brought my sisters home, too, and in addition she could also see the delight on my face. No matter how occasional a mother she had been, a mother she remained, and accordingly softened her heart. Also, Aurora was serious about work, and after Kekoo Mody visited Baroda and came back raving about the young woman’s pieces, great Aurora melted further. Uma was installed as guest of honour at one of my mother’s now-infrequent Elephanta soirées. ‘To genius,’ she pronounced, ‘everything must be forgiven.’ Uma looked sweetly flattered and shy. ‘And to the second-rate,’ added Aurora, ‘nothing must be given – not one paisa, not one kauri, not one dam. Ohé, Vasco – what do you say to that?’ Vasco Miranda in his fifties no longer spent very much time in Bombay; when he did turn up, Aurora wasted no time on niceties, and laid into his ‘airport art’ with a venom that was unusual even for that most abrasive of women. Aurora’s own work had never ‘travelled’. A few important European galleries – the Stedelijk, the Tate – had bought pieces, but America remained impervious, with the exception of the Gobler family of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., without whose collecting zeal so many Indian artists would have been penniless; so it was possible that envy had honed my mother’s tongue. ‘How are your Transit Lounge Specials, eh, Vasco?’ she wanted to know. ‘Have you noticed how passengers on Travolators never pause to take a look at your stuff? And jet-lag! Is it good for the critical faculties?’ Under these assaults, Vasco smiled weakly and bowed his head. He had amassed a huge foreign-currency fortune, and had recently given up his residences and studios in Lisbon and New York to construct a hilltop folly in Andalusia, on which, according to rumour, he was spending more than the combined lifetime income of the entire community of Indian artists. This story, which he did nothing to deny, served only to he
ighten his unpopularity in Bombay, and the intensity of Aurora Zogoiby’s attacks.
His waistline had ballooned, his moustache was a Daliesque double exclamation mark, his greasy hair was parted just above his left ear and plastered across his bald, Brylcreem-shiny dome. ‘No wonder you’re still a bachelor boy,’ Aurora taunted him. ‘A spare tyre the ladies can tolerate, but boy, you bought the whole Goodyear factory.’ For once, Aurora’s gibes were in tune with majority opinion. Time, which had been kind to Vasco’s bank balance, had dealt harshly with his Indian reputation as well as his body. In spite of his myriad commissions, his work’s stock was presently in free fall, dismissed as thin and meretricious, and although the national collection had acquired a couple of his pieces in the early days it had not done so for years. Not one of its purchases was presently on show. Among the sharper critics and the younger generation of artists V. Miranda was a busted flush. As Uma Sarasvati’s star rose, Vasco’s plummeted; but when Aurora kicked out at him, he kept his answers to himself.
The Picasso-Braque collaboration between Vasco and Aurora had never materialised; recognising the inadequacy of his gift, she had gone her own way, allowing him to maintain his studio at Elephanta only for old times’ sake, and perhaps because she enjoyed having him around to poke fun at. Abraham, who had always loathed Vasco, showed Aurora news clippings from abroad, proving that V. Miranda had more than once been charged with violent behaviour, and had only narrowly avoided deportation from both the United States and Portugal; and that he had been obliged to undergo extensive treatment in mental homes, drying-out centres for alcoholics, and drug rehabilitation clinics across Europe and North America. ‘Get rid of this posturing old phoney,’ he implored.
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