The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  As for myself, I remembered Vasco’s many kindnesses when I was a young and frightened child, and loved him for them still, but could see that his demons had won their battle against his lighter side. The Vasco who visited us on Uma’s evening, that bloated comic-opera clown, was a sad sight indeed.

  Towards the end of the night, when alcohol had lowered his defences, he cracked. ‘To hell with the lot of you,’ he cried. ‘I’m off to my Benengeli soon, and if I’ve got any brains I will never return.’ Then he burst into tuneless song. ‘Goodbye, Flora Fountain,’ he began. ‘Farewell, Hutatma Chowk.’ He stopped, blinking, and shook his head. ‘No. Not right. Goodbye, Marine Dri-ive, Farewell, Netaji-Subhas-Chandra-Bose-Road!’ (Many years later, when I, too, came to Spain, I would remember Vasco’s uncompleted ditty, and even sing a version of it quietly to myself.)

  Uma Sarasvati walked over to this sad, painful figure, put her hands on his shoulders, and kissed him on the mouth.

  Which had an unexpected effect. Instead of being grateful – and there were many in that salon, myself included, who would very happily have received such a kiss – Vasco rounded on Uma. ‘Judas,’ he said to her. ‘I know you. Devotee of Our Lord Judas Christ the Betrayer. I know you, missy. I’ve seen you in that church.’ Uma coloured deeply, and retreated. I sprang to her defence. ‘You’re making a fool of yourself,’ I told Vasco, who stalked out, nose-in-air; and a moment later, fell noisily into the pool.

  ‘Good, that’s that,’ said Aurora briskly. ‘Let’s play Three characters, seven sins.’

  It was her favourite parlour game. Random selection by coin-toss determined the sex and age of three imaginary ‘characters’, and papers picked from a hat were used to specify the deadly sin of which each was ‘guilty’. The assembled company was then required to improvise a story involving the three sinners. On this occasion the characters came out as Old Woman, Young Woman and Young Man; and their sins were, respectively, Wrath, Vainglory and Lust. No sooner were the choices made than Aurora, sharp as ever and possibly more affected than she seemed by Vasco’s latest little hurricane, cried: ‘I’ve got one.’

  Uma applauded, admiringly. ‘Tell, na.’

  ‘Okay, here goes,’ said Aurora, looking straight at her young guest of honour. ‘A wrathful old queen discovers that her lustful fool of a son has been seduced by her young and vainglorious deadly rival.’

  ‘Great story,’ Uma said, beaming serenely. ‘Wah-wah! Plenty of meat on that bone. Yes, sir.’

  ‘Your turn,’ said Aurora, her smile as wide as Uma’s. ‘What happens next? What should the Wrathful Old Queen do? Should she maybe banish the lovers for good – should she just let rip and drive them out of her sight?’

  Uma pondered. ‘Not good enough,’ she said. ‘I think so some more permanent solution would be needed. Because such an opponent – e.g. this Vainglorious Young Pretender – if she was not finished off, and I mean completely funtooshed, would certainly set out to smash the Wrathful Old Queen. Sure! She would want the Lusty Young Prince all to herself, and the kingdom, too; and she would be too proud to share the throne with his Ma.’

  ‘What do you suggest, then?’ Aurora asked, glacial sweet in the suddenly hushed drawing-room.

  ‘Murder,’ said Uma, shrugging. ‘Obviously it is a murder story. One way or the other, somebody-tho has to die. White Queen takes Black Pawn, or else Black Pawn, reaching the queening square, becomes a Black Queen and takes the White Queen instead. No other ending that I at least can see.’

  Aurora looked impressed. ‘Uma, daughter, you’re a secretive one. Why didn’t you tell me you’d played this game before?’

  You’re a secretive one … My mother could not let go of the idea that Uma had something to hide. ‘She comes out of nowhere and chipkos to our family,’ Aurora constantly worried – as, it must be said, she had never worried, in the old days, about Vasco Miranda’s equally questionable past. ‘But who are her people? Where are her friends? What is her past life?’ I conveyed these doubts to Uma as the shadows of a Retiring Room ceiling fan stroked her naked body and the fan’s breeze towelled her dry. ‘Your family can’t talk about secrets,’ she said. ‘Excuse me. I hate to speak badness about your loved ones but I am not the person with one crazy sister already dead, another seeing talking rats in a convent and the third trying to untie the cord of her lady-friends’ pajamas. And please: whose father is up to here in dirty business and under-age tarts? And whose mother – forgive me, my love, but you must know it – is currently having not one, not two, but three different love affairs?’

  I sat up in bed. ‘Who have you been talking to?’ I cried. ‘Who has been pouring this snake poison for you to swallow down and then throw up?’

  ‘The whole town is talking,’ Uma said, embracing me. ‘Poor softo. You think she is some sort of goddess or what. But it is common knowledge. Number one, that Parsi retard Kekoo Mody, number two Vasco Miranda the fat fraud, and the worst is number three: that MA bastard Mainduck. Raman Fielding! That bhaenchod! I am sorry but the lady has no class. People even whisper that she has seduced her own son – yes! my poor innocent boy, you don’t know what people are like! – but I tell them there are limits, it is not so, I can vouch for it myself. So you see your good name is now in my hands.’

  It was the occasion of our first real quarrel, but even as I defended Aurora I felt the truth of Uma’s accusations in my heart. Kekoo’s canine devotion had had its reward, and Aurora’s prolonged tolerance, and simultaneous abuse, of Vasco finally made sense, if seen in the context of an ‘involvement’, however decayed. Now that she and Abraham no longer shared a bed, where could Aurora look for comfort? Her genius and grandeur had isolated her; powerful women scare men off, and there were few Bombay males who would have dared to woo her. That explained Mainduck. Coarse, physically strong, ruthless, he was one of the few men in the city for whom Aurora would hold no terrors. Their encounter in the matter of The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig would have aroused him; he had taken her bribe and would have wanted – or so I speculated–to conquer her in return. And in my mind’s eye I saw her both revolted and entranced by this gutter-creature of real potency, this savage, this walking slum. If her husband preferred Falkland Road cage-girls to her, then she, Aurora the great, would gain her revenge by surrendering her body to Fielding’s pawings and thrustings; yes, I could see how that would arouse her, how it might unleash her own wildness. Maybe Uma was right: maybe my mother was Mainduck’s whore.

  No wonder she had started to be a little paranoid, to worry about being followed; such a complex secret life, and so much to lose if it came to light! Art-loving Kekoo, the ever more Westernised figure of V. Miranda, and the communalist toad; add to these Abraham Zogoiby’s invisible world of money and black markets, and you have a portrait of the things my mother truly loved, the points of her inner compass, revealed by her choice of men. Seen through this lens, her work looked rather like a distraction from the harsh realities of her character; like a gallant coat laid over the filthy mud-puddle of her soul.

  In my confusion I found myself simultaneously weeping and becoming erect. Uma laid me back on the bed and straddled me, kissing away the tears. ‘Does everyone know but me?’ I asked her. ‘Mynah? Minnie? Who?’

  ‘Don’t think about your sisters,’ she said, moving slowly, soothingly. ‘Poor man, you love everyone, you want nothing but love. If only they cared for you as you care for them. But you should hear what they say about you to me. Such things! You don’t know the fights I have had with them over you.’

  I made her stop. ‘What are you saying? What are you saying to me?’

  ‘Poor baby,’ she said, curling against me like a spoon. How I adored her; how grateful I was, in this treacherous world, to have her maturity, her serenity, her worldly wisdom, her strength, her love.

  ‘Poor unlucky Moor. I will be your family now.’

  15

  THE PAINTINGS GREW STEADILY less colourful, until Aurora was working only in black, white and oc
casional shades of grey. The Moor was an abstract figure now, a pattern of black and white diamonds covering him from head to foot. The mother, Ayxa, was black; and the lover, Chimène, was brilliant white. Many of these pictures were love-scenes. The Moor and his lady made love in many settings. They left their palace to travel the city streets. They sought out cheap hotels, and lay naked in shuttered rooms above the come and go of trains. Ayxa the mother was always somewhere in these pictures, behind a curtain, stooped at a keyhole, flying up to the window of the lovers’ eyries. The black-and-white Moor turned towards his white love and away from his black dam; yet both were apart of him. And now, on the paintings’ far horizons, there were armies massing. Horses stamped, lances glittered. The armies drew nearer over the years.

  But the Alhambra is invincible, the Moor told his beloved. Our stronghold – like our love – will never fall.

  He was black and white. He was the living proof of the possibility of the union of opposites. But Ayxa the Black pulled one way, and Chimène the White, the other. They began to tear him in half. Black diamonds, white diamonds fell from the gash, like teardrops. He tore himself away from his mother, clung to Chimène. And when the armies came to the foot of the hill, when that great white force was gathered on Chowpatty beach, a figure in a hooded black cloak slipped out of the fortress and down the hill. In her traitorous hand was the key to the gates. The one-legged watchman saw her and saluted. It was his mistress’s cloak. But at the foot of the hill the traitor let the cloak fall away. She stood in brilliant white with the key of Boabdil’s defeat held in her faithless hand.

  She gave it to the besieging armies, and her whiteness faded into theirs.

  The palace fell. Its image faded; into white.

  At the age of fifty-five Aurora Zogoiby allowed Kekoo Mody to curate a large retrospective of her work at the Prince of Wales Museum – the first time this institution had so honoured a living artist. Jade, china, sculpture, miniatures and antique textiles shuffled respectfully out of the way as Aurora’s pictures took their places. It was a considerable event in the life of the city. Banners advertising the show were everywhere. (Apollo Bunder, Colaba Causeway, Flora Fountain, Churchgate, Nariman Point, Civil Lines, Malabar Hill, Kemp’s Corner, Warden Road, Mahalaxmi, Hornby Vellard, Juhu, Sahar, Santa Cruz. O blessed mantra of my lost city! The places have slipped away from me for ever; all I possess of them is memory. Forgive, please, if I yield to the temptation to conjure them up, by the power of naming, before my absent eyes. Thacker’s Bookstore, Bombelli’s Cakes, Eros Cinema, Pedder Road. Om mani padmé hum …) The specially designed ‘A.Z.’ symbol was inescapable; it was on the ubiquitous fly-posted bills, and in all the papers and magazines. The opening, from which no figure of consequence in the city was absent, for to miss such an event would have been social death, felt more like a coronation than an art show. Aurora was garlanded, eulogised, and showered with flower-petals, flattery and gifts. The city bowed down before her and touched her feet.

  Even Raman Fielding, the powerful MA boss, turned up, blinking his toady eyes, and made a respectful pranam. ‘Let everyone see today what-what we do for minorities,’ he said loudly. ‘Is it a Hindu who is given this honour? Is it one of our great Hindu artists? No matter. In India every community must have its place, its leisure activity – art et cetera – all. Christians, Parsis, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews, Mughals. We accept this. This too is part of ideology of Ram Rajya, rule of Lord Ram. Only when other communities are usurping our Hindu places, when minority seeks to dictate to majority, then we say that the small also must accept to bend and move before the big. In the case of art also this applies. I myself was an artist originally. Therefore I say with some authority that art and beauty must serve national interest also. Madame Aurora, I congratulate you on your privileged exhibit. As to what art survives, rarefied-élite-intellectual or beloved-of-the-masses, noble or degenerate, self-aggrandising or demure, great-souled or gutter-sleeping, spiritual or pornographic, you will agree I am sure’ – and here he laughed to indicate a joke – ‘that-tho the Times alone will tell.’

  The next morning the Times of India (Bombay edition), along with every other newspaper in the city, would carry prominent news reports of the gala opening, and jumbo-sized reviews of the work. In these reviews, the long and distinguished career of Aurora da Gama-Zogoiby would come close to being completely destroyed. Familiar as she had become, over the years, with high praise, but also with aesthetic, political and moral attacks, with charges ranging from arrogance, immodesty and obscenity to inauthenticity and even – in the Manto-inspired Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain – covert pro-Pakistani sympathies, my mother was a thick-skinned old bird; nothing, however, had prepared her for the suggestion that she had become, quite simply, an irrelevance. Yet, in one of those disorientating but also radical shifts by which a changing society all at once reveals that it is of a new mind, the tigers of the critical fraternity, burning bright and with fearful symmetry, turned upon Aurora Zogoiby and savaged her as a ‘society artist’, out of tune with, and even ‘deleterious’ to, the temper of the age. On the same day the lead story on every front page was that of the dissolution of Parliament after the disintegration of the post-Emergency, anti-Indira coalition government; and several editorials made use of the contrast in the two old rivals’ fortunes. Aurora Plunged Into Darkness, said the headline on the Times’s op-ed page, but for Indira, Another New Dawn.

  Elsewhere in town, at the Gandhys’ Chemould Gallery, the work of the young sculptor Uma Sarasvati was receiving its first Bombay showing. The centrepiece of the show was a group of seven roughly spherical, metre-high stone pieces with a small hollow scooped out at the top and filled with richly coloured powders – scarlet, ultramarine, saffron, emerald, purple, orange, gold. This work, entitled Alterations in/Reclamations of the Essence of Motherhood in the Post-Secularist Epoch, had been the hit of the Documenta in Germany the year before, and had only now returned after showings in Milan, Paris, London and New York. Back home, the critics who had mauled Aurora Zogoiby hailed Uma as Indian art’s new star – young, beautiful, and driven by her strong religious faith.

  These were sensational events; but for me the shock of the two shows was of a more personal nature. My first exposure to Uma’s work – for until this moment she had maintained her ban on my visiting her Baroda studio – was also my first intimation that she was in any sense religious. That she should now commence giving interviews declaring herself a devotee of Lord Ram was bewildering, to say the least. For days after her opening she professed herself to be ‘busy’, but at length she agreed to meet me at the Retiring Rooms above Victoria Terminus, and I asked her why she had concealed so great a part of her mind from me.

  ‘You even called Mainduck a bastard,’ I reminded her. ‘And now the papers are full of you spouting out this stuff that will be music to his ears.’

  ‘I did not tell you before, because religion is a private business,’ she said. ‘And, as you know, I am maybe too much a private person. Also, I do think Fielding is a goonda and a salah and a snake, because he is trying to make my love of Ram into his weapon to hit out at “Mughals”, i.e. what-else-but Muslims. But my dear boy’ – she persisted in using such youthy epithets even though, in 1979, I had been alive for twenty-two years, and my body had turned forty-four – ‘you must see that just as you are from a tiny minority, so I am a child of the gigantic Hindu nation, and as an artist I must reckon with the same. I must make my own encounter with origins, my own accommodations with eternal verities. And it is just none of your business, mister; no, not at all. Plus, if I am such a fanatic, then, please, sir, what am I doing with you?’ Which was a reasonable point.

  Aurora, in deep retreat at Elephanta, had a different view. ‘That girl of yours is the most ambitious person I ever met, excuse me,’ she told me. ‘Bar none. She sees how the breeze is changeofying and her public attitudes are blowing in that wind. Wait on; in two minutes sh
e will be standing on MA platforms and shriekofying with hate.’ Then her face grew dark. ‘You think I don’t know how hard she workoed to wreckofy my show?’ she said softly. ‘You think I haven’t traced her links to those people who wrote that abuse?’

  This was too much; it was unworthy. Aurora in her emptied studio – for all the Moors were down at the Prince of Wales Museum–faced me hollow-eyed across an untouched canvas with brushes falling from her piled-up hair, like arrows missing their mark. I stood in the doorway, fuming. I had come for a fight – because there had been a great shock for me in her show, too; until it opened I had not been shown those monochrome canvases in which her lozenged Moor and his snow-white Chimène made love while the black mother watched. Aurora’s gibes about Uma – which were pretty rich, I raged inwardly, coming from Main-duck’s secret mistress! – allowed me to start lashing out. ‘I am sorry your show got panned,’ I yelled. ‘But even if Uma wanted to fix the notices, Mummyji, how could she do it? Don’t you realise she was embarrassed that she was praised at your expense? Poor girl is so red-faced she doesn’t dare to come over! From the beginning she worshipped you, and you rewarded her by throwing filth. Your persecution mania has gotten out of control! And as to tracing links, how do you think I felt to see those pictures of you peeping-tomming at us in our room? How long have you been prying and spying?’

  ‘Save yourself from that woman,’ said Aurora, quietly. ‘She is a madwoman and a liar too. She is a bloodsucker lizard who loves your blood, not you. She will suck you like a mango and throw away the stone.’

  I was horrified. ‘You are sick,’ I shouted at her. ‘Sick, sick in the head.’

  ‘Not I, my son,’ she replied, yet more softly. ‘A sick woman, however, there is – sick, or evil. Mad, or bad, or both. I can’t decide. As to being a nosey parker, I plead guilty as charged. Since some time I have employoed Dom Minto to find out the truth about your mystery lady friend. May I tell you what he dug up?’