II
MALABAR MASALA
9
ONCE A YEAR, MY mother Aurora Zogoiby liked to dance higher than the gods. Once a year, the gods came to Chowpatty Beach to bathe in the filthy sea: fat-bellied idols by the thousand, papier-mâché effigies of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha or Ganpati Bappa, swarming towards the water astride papier-mâché rats – for Indian rats, as we know, carry gods as well as plagues. Some of these tusk’n’tail duos were small enough to be borne on human shoulders, or cradled in human arms; others were the size of small mansions, and were pulled along on great-wheeled wooden carts by hundreds of disciples. There were, in addition, many Dancing Ganeshas, and it was these wiggle-hipped Ganpatis, love-handled and plump of gut, against whom Aurora competed, setting her profane gyrations against the jolly jiving of the much-replicated god. Once a year, the skies were full of Color-by-DeLuxe clouds: pink and purple, magenta and vermilion, saffron and green, these powder-clouds, squirted from re-used insecticide guns, or floating down from some bursting balloon-cluster wafting across the sky, hung in the air above the deities ‘like aurora-not-borealis-but-bombayalis’, as the painter Vasco Miranda used to say. Also sky-high above crowds and gods, year after year – for forty-one years in all – fearless upon the precipitous ramparts of our Malabar Hill bungalow, which in a spirit of ironic mischief or perversity she had insisted on naming Elephanta, there twirled the almost-divine figure of our very own Aurora Bombayalis, plumed in a series of dazzle-hued mirrorwork outfits, outdoing in finery even the festival sky with its hanging gardens of powdered colour. Her white hair flying out around her in long loose exclamations (O prophetically premature white hair of my ancestors!), her exposed belly not old-bat-fat but fit-cat-flat, her bare feet stamping, her ankles a-jingle with silver jhunjhunna bell-bracelets, snapping her neck from side to side, speaking incomprehensible volumes with her hands, the great painter danced her defiance, she danced her contempt for the perversity of humankind, which led these huge crowds to risk death-by-trampling ‘just to dumpofy their dollies in the drink,’ as she liked incredulously, and with much raising of eyes to skies and wry twisting of the mouth, to jeer.
‘Human perversity is greater than human heroism’ – jingle-jangle! – ‘or cowardice’ – th-th-thump! – ‘or art,’ my dancing mother declaimed. ‘For there are limits to these things, there are points beyond which we will not go in their name; but to perversity there is no limit set, no frontier that anyone has found. Whatever today’s excess, tomorrow’s will exceed-o it.’
As if to prove her belief in the polymorphous power of the perverse, dancing Aurora became, over the years, a star attraction of the event she despised, a part of what she had been dancing against. The crowds of the devout – wrongly but incorrigibly – saw their own devotion mirrored in her swirling (and faithless) skirts; they assumed she, too, was paying homage to the god. Ganpati Bappa morya, they chanted, jigging, amid the blaring of cheap trumpets and giant conches and the hammer-blows of drug-speedy drummers with egg-white eyes and mouths stuffed with the appreciative banknotes of the faithful, and the more scornfully the legendary lady danced on her high parapet, the further above it all she seemed to herself to be, the more eagerly the crowds sucked her down towards them, seeing her not as a rebel but as a temple dancer: not the scourge, but rather the groupie, of the gods.
(Abraham Zogoiby, as we shall see, had other uses for temple dancers.)
Once, in a family quarrel, I reminded her angrily of the many newspaper reports of her assimilation by the festival. By that time Ganesha Chaturthi had become the occasion for fist-clenched, saffron-headbanded young thugs to put on a show of Hindu-fundamentalist triumphalism, egged on by bellowing ‘Mumbai’s Axis’ party politicos and demagogues such as Raman Fielding, a.k.a. Mainduck (‘Frog’). ‘You’re not just a tourist sight now,’ I gibed. ‘You’re an advert for the Beautification Programme.’ This attractively-named MA policy involved, to put it simply, the elimination of the poor from the city’s streets; but Aurora Zogoiby’s armour-plating was too strong to be pierced by so crude a thrust.
‘You think I can be squashed by gutter pressure?’ she howled, dismissively. ‘You think I can be dirtified by your black tongue? What is this Mumbo’s Jumbos fundo foolery to me? I-tho am up against a greater opponent: Shiva Nataraja himself, yes, and his big-nosed holy-poly disco-baby too – for years I have been dancing them off the stage. Watch on, blackfellow. Maybe even you will learn how to whirl-up a whirlwind, how to hurry-up a hurricane – yes! How to dance up a storm.’ Thunder, right on cue, rolled overhead. Fat rain would soon start tumbling from the sky.
Forty-one years of dancing on the day of Ganpati: she danced without a care for the danger of it, without a downward glance towards the barnacled, patient boulders gnashing below her like black teeth. The very first time she emerged from Elephanta in full regalia and began her cliff-edged pirouettes, Jawaharlal Nehru himself begged her to desist. This was not long after the anti-British strike by the navy in Bombay harbour, and the supporting shutdown in the city, the hartal, had ended at Gandhiji and Vallabhbhai Patel’s joint request, and Aurora did not fail to get in her little dig. ‘Panditji, Congress-tho is always chickening out in the face of radical acts. No soft options will be takeofied round here.’ When he continued to plead with her she set him a forfeit, saying she would only descend if he recited from memory the whole of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’; which, to general admiration, he did. As he helped her down from her dizzy balustrade, he said, ‘The strike was a complex matter.’
‘I know what I think about the strike,’ she retorted. ‘Tell me about the poem.’ At which Mr Nehru flushed heavily and swallowed hard.
‘It is a sad poem,’ he said after a moment, ‘because the oysters are so young; a poem, one could say, about the eating of children.’
‘We all eat children,’ my mother rejoined. This was about ten years before I was born. ‘If not other people’s, then our own.’
She had four of us. Ina, Minnie, Mynah, Moor; a four-course meal with magic properties, because no matter how often and how heartily she tucked in, the food never seemed to run out.
For four decades, she ate her fill. Then, dancing her Ganpati dance for the forty-second time at the age of sixty-three, she fell. A thin, salivating title washed over her body, as the black jaws went to work. By that time, however, although she was still my mother, I was no longer her son.
At the gate to Elephanta stood a man with a wooden leg, propped against a crutch. If I close my eyes it is still easy to conjure him up: that simple Peter at the doors of an earthly Paradise, who became my personal cut-price Virgil, leading me down to Hell – to the great city of Hell, Pandaemonium, that dark-side, through-the-looking-glass evil twin of my own and golden city: not Proper, but Improper Bombay. Beloved monopod guardian! The parents in their lingo-garbling way called him Lambajan Chandiwala. (It seems they had become infected by Aires da Gama’s habit of nicknaming the world.) In those days many more people would have understood the inter-lingual joke: lamba, long; jan, sounds like John, chandi, silver. Long John Silverfellow, terrifyingly hairy-faced but literally and metaphorically as toothless as the day he was born, grinding paans between his betel- or blood-red gums. ‘Our private pirate,’ Aurora called him, and yes, you guessed it, there was normally a green clipped-winged Totah squawking obscenities on his shoulder. My mother, a perfectionist in all things, arranged for the bird; would settle for nothing less.
‘So what point in a pirate if no parrot?’ she’d inquire, arching her eyebrows and twisting her right hand as if it held an invisible doorknob; adding, lightly, and scandalously (for it was not done to make lewd jokes about the Mahatma): ‘Might as well have had the little man without the loincloth.’ She tried hard to teach the parrot pirate-speak, but it was a stubborn old Bombay bird. ‘Pieces of eight! Me hearties!’ my mother shrieked, but her pupil maintained a mutinous silence. However, after years of such persecution Totah gave in and snapped, bad-tempered
ly: ‘Peesay – saféd – hathi!’ This remarkable utterance, translating approximately as mashed white elephants, became the family’s oath of choice. I was not present at the occasion of Aurora Zogoiby’s last dance, but many who were later testified that the parrot’s magnificent curse trailed after her, diminuendo, as she plummeted to her doom: ‘Ohhh … Mashed White Elephants,’ my mother howled before hitting the rocks. Next to her body, borne towards her on the title, was a broken effigy of Dancing Ganesha. But that was not what she had meant at all.
Totah’s utterance had a profound effect upon Lambajan Chandiwala also, for he – like so many of us – was a man with elephants on the brain; after the parrot spoke up, Lamba recognised the presence upon his shoulder of a kindred spirit, and opened up his heart thereafter to that intermittently oracular, but more often taciturn and (if the truth be told) irascible and fucking awful bird.
Of what isles of treasure did our parroted pirate dream? Chiefly and most often he spoke of the real Elephanta. To the Zogoiby children, who were being educated beyond the point at which it was possible to see visions, Elephanta Island was nothing, a hilly lump in the Harbour. Before Independence – before Ina, Minnie and Mynah – people could go out there if they got hold of a boat and were willing to brave the possibility of snakes &c.; by the time I arrived, however, the island had long been tamed and there were regular motor-launch excursions from the Gateway of India. My three big sisters were bored by the place. So for my child-self as it squatted beside Lambajan in the afternoon heat Elephanta was anything but a fantasy island; but for Lambajan, to hear him tell it, it was the land of milk and honey itself.
‘Once in that place there were elephant kings, baba,’ he confided. ‘Why do you think-so god Ganesha is so popular in Bombay City? It is because in the days before men there were elephants sitting on thrones and arguing philosophy, and it was the monkeys who were their servants. It is said that when men first came to Elephanta Island in the days after the elephants’ fall they found statues of mammoths higher than the Qutb Minar in Delhi, and they were so afraid that they smashed up the whole lot. Yes, men wiped away the memory of the great elephants but still not all of us have forgotten. Up there in Elephanta in the hills is the place where they buried their dead. No? Head is shaking? See, he does not believe us, Totah. Okay, baba. Forehead is frowning? Then look at this!’
And here to much parroty noising he produced – what else, what else, O my nostalgic heart? – a crumple of cheap paper, which even the boy Moor could see was not in the least bit ancient. It was, of course, a map.
‘One great elephant, maybe the Great Elephant, hides up there still, baba. I have seen what I have seen! Who else do you think bit away my leg? And then in his grandness and his scorn he let me crawl bleeding down the jungly hill and into my little boat. What-what I saw! Jewels he guards, baba, a hoard greater than the khazana of the Nizam of Hyderabad himself.’
Lambajan accommodated our piratical fantasy of him – for naturally my mother the great explainer had made sure he understood his nickname – and in doing so constructed a dream of his own, an Elephanta for Elephanta, in which, as the years passed, he appeared more and more deeply to believe. Without knowing it, he connected himself to the legends of the da. Gama-Zogoibys, in which hidden jewel-boxes were a prominent feature. And thus Malabar Coast masala found its yet-more-fabulous counterpart on Malabar Hill, as was perhaps inevitable, because no matter what pepper’n’spices goings-on there might be or have been in Cochin, this great cosmopolis of ours was and is the Central Junction of all such tamashas, and the hottest tales, the juiciest-bitchiest yarns, the most garish and lurid not-penny-but-paisa-dreadfuls, are the ones walking our streets. In Bombay you live crushed in this crazy crowd, you are deafened by its blaring horns of plenty, and – like the figures of family members in Aurora’s Cabral Island mural – your own story has to shove its way through the throngs. Which was fine by Aurora Zogoiby; never one for a quiet life, she sucked in the city’s hot stenches, lapped up its burning sauces, she gobbled its dishes up whole. Aurora came to think of herself as a corsair, as the city’s outlaw queen. ‘In this residence it’s the Jolly Roger we flyofy,’ she declared repeatedly, to her children’s embarrassment and ennui. She actually had one made up by her tailor and handed it to the chowkidar. ‘Come on quick, Mister Lambajan! Run-o it up the flagstaff and let’s see who-who salutes.’
As for me, I did not salute Aurora’s skull-and-crossbones; was not, in those days, at all the piratical type. Besides, I knew how Lambajan had really lost his leg.
The first point to note is that people’s limbs got detached more easily in those days. The banners of British domination hung over the country like strips of flypaper, and, in trying to unstick ourselves from those fatal flags, we flies – if I may use the term ‘we’ to refer to a time before my birth – would often leave legs or wings behind, preferring freedom to wholeness. Of course, now that the sticky paper is ancient history, we find ways of losing our limbs in the struggle against other equally lethal, equally antiquated, equally adhesive standards of our own devising. – Enough, enough; away with this soap-box! Unplug this loud-hailer, and be still, my wagging finger! – To continue: the second essential piece of info in the matter of Lambajan’s leg concerns my mother’s window-curtains; the fact, I mean to say, that there were gold-and-green curtains, kept permanently closed, on the rear windscreen and back windows of her American motor car …
In February 1946, when Bombay, that super-epic motion picture of a city, was transformed overnight into a motionless tableau by the great naval and landlubber strikes, when ships did not sail, steel was not milled, textile looms neither warped nor woofed, and in the movie studios there was neither turnover nor cut – the twenty-one-year-old Aurora began to zoom around the paralysed town in her famous curtained Buick, directing her driver Hanuman to the heart of the action, or, rather, of all that grand inaction, being set down outside factory gates and dockyards, venturing alone into the slum-city of Dharavi, the rum-dens of Dhobi Talao and the neon fleshpots of Falkland Road, armed only with a folding wooden stool and a sketchbook. Opening them both up, she set about capturing history in charcoal. ‘Ignore-o me,’ she commanded the open-mouthed strikers whom she sketched at high speed as they picketed, whored and drank. ‘I-tho am here just-like-that; like a lizard on the wall; or call me a doodling bug.’
‘Crazy woman,’ Abraham Zogoiby marvelled many years later. ‘Your mother, my boy. Crazy as a monkey in a monkey-puzzle tree. God only knows what she thought. Even in Bombay it is no small thing for unaccompanied ladies to sit in the public thoroughfare and stare men in the face, to go into bad-area gambling dens and get out a portrait pad. And a doodle-bug, remember, was a bomb.’
It was no small thing. Burly goldtooth stevedores accused her of trying to steal their souls by literally drawing them out of their bodies, and striking men of steel suspected that in another, secret, identity she might be a police spy. The sheer strangeness of the activity of art made her a questionable figure; as it does everywhere; as it always has and perhaps always will. All this and more she overcame: the jostlings, the sexual menace, the physical threats were all stared down by that level, unyielding gaze. My mother always possessed the occult power of making herself invisible in the pursuit of her work. With her long white hair twisted up into a bun, dressed in a cheap floral-print dress from Crawford Market, she quietly and indomitably returned day after day to her chosen scenes, and in slow steps the magic worked, people stopped noticing her; they forgot that she was a great lady descending from a car that was as big as a house and even had curtains over its windows, and allowed the truth of their lives to return to their faces, and that was why the charcoal in her flying fingers was able to capture so much of it, the face-slapping quarrels of naked children at a tenement standpipe, the grizzled despair of idling workers smoking beedis on the doorsteps of locked-up pharmacies, the silent factories, the sense that the blood in men’s eyes was just about to burst through and
flood the streets, the toughness of women with saris pulled over their heads, squatting by tiny primus stoves in pavement-dwellers’ jopadpatti shacks as they tried to conjure meals from empty air, the panic in the eyes of lathi-charging policemen who feared that one day soon, when freedom came, they would be seen as oppression’s enforcers, the elated tension of the striking sailors at the gates to the naval yards, the guilty-kiddie pride on their faces as they munched channa at Apollo Bunder and stared out at the immobilised ships flying red flags in praise of revolution as they lay at anchor in the Harbour, the shipwrecked arrogance of the English officers from whom power was ebbing like the waves, leaving them beached, with no more than the strut and posture of their old invincibility, the rags of their imperial robes; and beneath all this was her own sense of the inadequacy of the world, of its failure to live up to her expectations, so that her own disappointment with reality, her anger at its wrongness, mirrored her subjects’, and made her sketches not merely reportorial, but personal, with a violent, breakneck passion of line that had the force of a physical assault.
Kekoo Mody hastily rented a hall in the Fort district and put up these sketches, which came to be known as her ‘Chipkali’ or lizard pictures, because at Mody’s suggestion – the pictures were clearly subversive, clearly pro-strike and therefore a challenge to British authority – Aurora did not sign them but simply placed a tiny drawing of a lizard in a corner of each sketch. Kekoo himself fully expected to be arrested, had decided he was happy to take the fall on Aurora’s behalf (for he had been under her spell from their first meeting) and when he was not – when, in fact, the British chose to ignore the exhibition entirely – he took it as a further indication of the waning not only of their power but of their will. Tall, pale, awkward and majestically short-sighted, his round glasses almost thick-lensed enough to be bullet-proof, he paced around the Chipkali show waiting for the arrest that never came, took too many sips from an innocent-looking thermos flask which he had filled with cheap rum that was the same colour as strong tea, and buttonholed visitors to the gallery to expatiate at inordinate length on the Empire’s imminent demise. Abraham Zogoiby – visiting the exhibition alone one afternoon, behind Aurora’s back–took a different view. ‘You art-wallahs,’ he told Kekoo. ‘Always so certain-sure of your impact. Since when do the masses come to such shows? And as for the Britishers, just now, kindly permit me to inform, pictures are not their problem.’