I was the only child she suckled at her breast. It made a difference: for although I received my share of the sharp end of her tongue, there was something in her attitude towards me that was less destructive than her treatment of my sisters. Perhaps it was my ‘condition’, which she refused to permit anyone to call an illness, that softened her heart. The doctors gave my misfortune first one name, then another, but when we sat in her studio as artist and model Aurora told me constantly that I must not think of myself as the victim of an incurable premature-ageing disorder, but a magic child, a time traveller. ‘Only four and a half months in the womb,’ she reminded me. ‘Baby mine, you just startofied out going too fast. Maybe you’ll just take off, and zoom-o right out of this life into another space and time. Maybe – who knows? – a better.’ It was as close as she ever came to stating a belief in an after-life. It seemed that she had decided to fight fear – hers as well as my own – by espousing such strategies of conjecture, by making my lot a privileged one, and presenting me to myself as well as to the world as someone special, someone with a meaning, a supernatural Entity who did not truly belong to this place, this moment, but whose presence here defined the lives of those around him, and of the age in which they lived.
Well, I believed her. I needed consolations and was happy to take whatever was on offer. I believed her, and it helped. (When I learned about the missing post-Lotus night in Delhi four and a half months before my conception, I wondered if Aurora were covering up a different problem; but I don’t think she was. I think she was trying to will my half-life into wholeness, by the power of mother-love.)
She suckled me, and the first ‘Moor’ pictures were done while I nestled at her breast: charcoal sketches, watercolours, pastels and finally a large work in oils. Aurora and I posed, somewhat blasphemously, as a godless madonna and child. My stunted hand had become a glowing light, the only light-source in the picture. The fabric of her amorphous robe fell in starkly shadowed folds. The sky was an electric cobalt blue. It was what Abraham Zogoiby might have been hoping for when he had commissioned Vasco to paint her picture almost a decade earlier; no, it was more than Abraham could ever have imagined. It showed the truth about Aurora, her capacity for profound and selfless passion as well as her habit of self-aggrandisement; it revealed the magnificence, the grandeur of her falling-out with the world, and her determination to transcend and redeem its imperfections through art. Tragedy disguised as fantasy and rendered in the most beautiful, most heightened colour and light she could create: it was a mythomaniac gem. She called it A Light to Lighten the Darkness. ‘Why not?’ she shrugged, when questioned, by Vasco Miranda among others. ‘I am getting interested in making religious pictures for people who have no god.’
‘Then keep a ticket to London in your pocket,’ he advised her. ‘Because in this god-rotten joint, you never know when you might have to run.’
(But Aurora laughed at such advice; and in the end it was Vasco who left.)
As I grew, she went on using me as a subject, and this continuity, too, was a sign of love. Unable to find a way of preventing me from ‘going too fast’, she painted me into immortality, giving me the gift of being a part of what would persist of her. So, like the hymn-writer, let me with a gladsome mind praise her, for she was kind. For her mercy ay endures … And in truth if I am asked to put my finger – my whole birth-maimed hand – on the source of my belief that in spite of speeding and crippled limb and friendlessness I had a happy childhood in Paradise, I would finally put it here, I would say that my joy in life was born in our collaboration, in the intimacy of those private hours, when she talked of everything under the sun, absently, as if I were her confessor, and I learned the secrets of her heart as well as her mind.
I learned, for example, about how she fell for my father: about the great sensuality that had burst out of my parents in an Ernakulam godown one day, forcing them together, making possible what was impossible, demanding to be allowed to come-to-be. What I loved most in my parents was this passion for each other, the simple fact of its having once been there (though as time passed it became harder and harder to see the young lovers they had been in the increasingly distant married couple they were becoming). Because they had loved so greatly I wanted such a love for myself, I thirsted for it, and even as I lost myself in the surprising tendernesses and athleticisms of Dilly Hormuz I knew she wasn’t what I was looking for; O, I wanted, wanted that asli mirch masala, the thing that made you sweat beads of coriander juice and breathe hot-chilli flames through your stinging lips. I wanted their pepper love.
And when I found it, I thought my mother would understand. When I needed to move a mountain for love, I thought my mother would help.
Alas for us all: I was wrong.
She knew about Abraham’s temple girls, of course, had known from the beginning. ‘Man who wants to keep-o secrets should not babble in his sleep,’ she muttered vaguely one day. ‘I got so bored of your Daddy’s night-lingo that I moved out of his bedroom. A lady needs her rest.’ And as I look back upon that proud, busy woman I hear her telling me something else beneath those casual sentences – I hear her admitting that she, who refused all compromises and made no accommodations, had settled for Abraham in spite of the weaknesses of the flesh which made him incapable of resisting the temptation to sample the goods he was importing from down south. ‘Old men,’ she snorted another day, ‘always droolo’ing after bachchis. And the ones with many daughters are the worst.’ For a time I was young and innocent enough to think of these musings as part of the process by which she thought herself into the lives of the figures in her paintings; but by the time my own lust had been awakened by Dilly Hormuz’s hand I had begun to get the point.
I had always wondered about the eight-year gap between Mynah and myself, and so, when understanding descended upon my young-old child-self like a tongue of flame, I – who had been denied the company of children, and so found myself at an early age using an adult vocabulary without an adult’s delicacy or control – was unable to resist blurting out my discovery: ‘You stopped making babies,’ I cried, ‘because he was fooling around.’
‘I’ll give you one chapat’, she promised, ‘that will breakofy the teeth in your cheeky face.’ The slap that followed, however, created no long-lasting dental problems. Its gentleness was all the confirmation I required.
Why did she never confront Abraham about his infidelities? I ask you to consider that in spite of all her freethinking bohemian ways, Aurora Zogoiby was still, in some deep recess of her heart, a woman of her generation, a generation that would find such behaviour tolerable, even normal, in a man; whose womenfolk shrugged off their pain, burying it beneath banalities about the nature of the beast and its need, periodically, to scratch an itch. For the sake of family, that great absolute in whose name all things were possible, women averted their eyes and kept their grief knotted in a twist of fabric at the end of a dupatta, or buttoned up in a small silk purse, like small change and the household keys. And it may have been, too, because Aurora knew she needed Abraham, she needed him to take care of business and leave her free for art. It may have been as simple, complaisant and chickenshit as that.
(A parenthesis on complaisance: in my musings on Abraham’s decision to journey south when Aurora headed north for her last meeting with Mr Nehru and the scandal of the Lotus, I suspected my father of playing the complaisant spouse. Was this reciprocity what lay beneath his choice, this hollow open marriage, this whited sepulchre, this sham? – O, Moor, be calm, be calm. They have both gone beyond your reproach; this anger can do nothing, though it shake the very earth.)
How she must have hated herself for making such a cowardly, financially motivated soft option of a devil’s deal with fate! For – generation or no generation – the mother I knew, the mother I came to know during all those days in her spartan studio, was not one to take anything in life lying down. She was a confronter, a squarer-up, a haver-out. Yet, when faced with the ruin of her life’s great love
, and offered a choice between an honest war and an untruthful, self-serving peace, she buttoned her lip, and never offered her husband an angry word. Thus silence grew between them like an accusation; he talked in his sleep, she muttered in her studio, and they slept in separate rooms. For a moment, after his heart almost gave way on the steps to the Lonavla caves, they were able to remember what had once been. But after that the reality soon returned. Sometimes I am convinced that they both saw my crippled hand, my ageing, as a judgment upon them – a deformed child born of a stunted love, half a life born of a marriage that was no longer whole. If there had been any ghost of a chance of their becoming reconciled, my birth put that phantom to flight.
First I worshipped my mother, then I hated her. Now, at the end of all our stories, I look back and can feel – at least in bursts – a measure of compassion. Which is a kind of healing, for her son as well as for her own, restless shade.
Strong desire drew Abraham and Aurora together; weak lust pushed them apart. In these last days, as I have written down my accounts of Aurora’s overweenings, of her sharpnesses and shrillnesses, I have heard beneath that raucous drama these sadder notes of loss. She forgave Abraham for disappointing her once, in Cochin, in the matter of Flory Zogoiby’s Rumpelstiltskin attempt to take away an as-yet-unborn son. In Matheran she tried – and in trying, created me – to forgive him a second time. But he did not improve his ways, and there was no third forgiveness … yet she stayed. She, who had shaken her world for love, now stifled her revolt, and chained herself to an increasingly loveless marriage. No wonder her tongue grew sharp.
And Abraham: if he had turned back towards her, forsaking all others, might she have saved him from sinking into the Mogambo-underworld of Kéké and Scar and worse criminals yet to come? Might he, with the blessed ballast of their love, have failed to sink into that pit? … No point trying to rewrite one’s parents’ lives. It’s hard enough to try and set them down; to say nothing of my own.
In the ‘early Moors’ my hand was transformed into a series of miracles; often my body, too, was miraculously changed. In one picture – Courtship – I was Moor-as-peacock, spreading my many-eyed tail; she painted her own head on top of a dowdy pea-hen’s body. In another (painted when I was twelve and looked twenty-four) Aurora reversed our relationship, painting herself as the young Eleanor Marx and me as her father Karl. Moor and Tussy was a rather shocking idea – my mother girlish, adoring, and I in patriarchal, lapel-gripping pose, frock-coated and bewhiskered, like a prophecy of the all-too-near future. ‘If you were twice as old as you look, and I was half as old as I am, I could be your daughter,’ my forty-plus mother explained, and at the time I was too young to hear anything except the lightness she used to disguise the stranger things in her voice. Nor was this our only double, or ambiguous, portrait; for there was also To Die Upon a Kiss, in which she portrayed herself as murdered Desdemona flung across her bed, while I was stabbed Othello, falling towards her in suicided remorse as I breathed my last. My mother described these canvases, self-deprecatingly, as ‘panto-pictures’, intended for the household’s private entertainment: the artist’s frivolous equivalent of fancy-dress parties. But – as in the episode of her notorious cricket-picture, which will be recounted presently – Aurora was often at her most iconoclastic, her most épatante, when she was most light-hearted; and the high-voltage eroticism of all these works, which she did not exhibit in her lifetime, created a posthumous shock-wave that only failed to grow into a full-scale tsunami because she, the brazen eroticist, was no longer around to provoke decent folks by refusing to apologize, or even to express the merest scrap of regret.
After the Othello picture, however, the series changed direction, and began to explore the idea of placing a re-imagining of the old Boabdil story – ‘not Authorised Version but Aurorised Version’, as she told me–in a local setting, with me playing a sort of Bombay remix of the last of the Nasrids. In January 1970, for the first time, Aurora Zogoiby placed the Alhambra on Malabar Hill.
I was thirteen years old, and in the first flush of my intoxication with Dilly Hormuz. While she painted the first of the ‘true’, the echt Moors, Aurora told me about a dream. She had been standing on the ‘back verandah’ of a rattletrap train in a Spanish night, holding my sleeping body in her arms. Suddenly she knew – knew in the way of dreams, without being told, but with absolute certainty – that if she were to toss me away, if she were to sacrifice me to the night, then she would be safe, invulnerable, for the rest of her life. ‘I tell you, kiddo, I thought about it pretty hard.’ Then she refused the dream’s offer, and took me back to my bed. You didn’t have to be a Bible expert to work out that she had cast herself in an Abrahamic rôle, and even at thirteen, in that house of artists, I was familiar with pictures of the Michelangelo Pietà, so I got the point, or most of it. ‘Thanks a lot, ma,’ I told her. ‘Nothing to it,’ she answered. ‘Let them do their worst.’
This dream, like so many dreams, came true; but Aurora, when her Abrahamic moment really came, did not make the choice which she had dreamed.
Once the red fort of Granada arrived in Bombay, things moved swiftly on Aurora’s easel. The Alhambra quickly became a not-quite-Alhambra; elements of India’s own red forts, the Mughal palace-fortresses in Delhi and Agra, blended Mughal splendours with the Spanish building’s Moorish grace. The hill became a not-Malabar looking down upon a not-quite-Chowpatty, and the creatures of Aurora’s imagination began to populate it – monsters, elephant-deities, ghosts. The water’s edge, the dividing line between two worlds, became in many of these pictures the main focus of her concern. She filled the sea with fish, drowned ships, mermaids, treasure, kings; and on the land, a cavalcade of local riff-raff– pickpockets, pimps, fat whores hitching their saris up against the waves – and other figures from history or fantasy or current affairs or nowhere, crowded towards the water like the real-life Bombayites on the beach, taking their evening strolls. At the water’s edge strange composite creatures slithered to and fro across the frontier of the elements. Often she painted the water-line in such a way as to suggest that you were looking at an unfinished painting which had been abandoned, half-covering another. But was it a waterworld being painted over the world of air, or vice versa? Impossible to be sure.
‘Call it Mooristan,’ Aurora told me. ‘This seaside, this hill, with the fort on top. Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watchtowers and towers of silence too. Place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drowno in water, or else grow gills; where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air. One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo’ing into another, or being under, or on top of. Call it Palimpstine. And above it all, in the palace, you.’
(For the rest of his life Vasco Miranda would remain convinced that she had taken the idea from him; that his painting-over-a-painting was the source of her palimpsest-art, and that his lachrymose Moor was the inspiration for her dry-eyed pictures of me. She neither confirmed nor denied. ‘Nothing new under the sun,’ she would say. And in her vision of the opposition and intermingling of land and water there was something of the Cochin of her youth, where the land pretended to be a part of England, but was washed by an Indian sea.
There was no stopping her. Around and about the figure of the Moor in his hybrid fortress she wove her vision, which in fact was a vision of weaving, or more accurately interweaving. In a way these were polemical pictures, in a way they were an attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation; she was using Arab Spain to re-imagine India, and this land-sea-scape in which the land could be fluid and the sea stone-dry was her metaphor – idealised? sentimental? probably – of the present, and the future, that she hoped would evolve. So, yes, there was a didacticism here, but what with the vivid surrealism of her images and the kingfisher brilliance of her colouring and the dynamic acceleration of her brush, it was easy not to feel preached at, to revel in the carnival without listeni
ng to the barker, to dance to the music without caring for the message in the song.
Characters – so plentiful outside the palace – now began to appear within its walls. Boabdil’s mother, the old battleaxe Ayxa, naturally turned up wearing Aurora’s face; but in these early paintings the gloom of the future, the reconquering armies of Ferdinand and Isabella, were hardly to be glimpsed. In one or two canvases you saw, on the horizon, the protrusion of a flag-waving lance; but for the most part, during my childhood, Aurora Zogoiby was seeking to paint a golden age. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains crowded into her paint-Boabdil’s fancy-dress balls, and the Sultan himself was represented less and less naturalistically, appearing more and more often as a masked, particoloured harlequin, a patchwork quilt of a man; or, as his old skin dropped from him chrysalis-fashion, standing revealed as a glorious butterfly, whose wings were a miraculous composite of all the colours in the world.
As the Moor pictures moved further down this fabulist road, it became plain that I barely needed to pose for my mother any more; but she wanted me there, she said she needed me, she called me her lucky talis-moor. And I was happy to be there, because the story unfolding on her canvases seemed more like my autobiography than the real story of my life.
During the Emergency years, while her daughter Philomina went into battle against tyranny, Aurora stayed in her tent and worked: and maybe this, too, was a spur for the Moor paintings of the period, maybe Aurora saw the work as her own answer to the brutalities of the time. Ironically enough, however, an old picture by my mother, innocently included by Kekoo Mody in an otherwise banal exhibition of paintings on sporting themes, provoked a greater rumpus than anything Mynah was able to stir up. The painting, dating from 1960, was called The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig, and was based on an actual incident that occurred during the third Test Match against Australia at Bombay’s Brabourne Stadium. The series was level at 1–1, and the third game had not been going India’s way. In the second innings, Baig’s half-century – his second of the match – enabled the home side to force a draw. When he reached 50, a pretty young woman ran out from the usually rather staid and upper-crust North Stand and kissed the batsman on the cheek. Eight runs later, perhaps a little overcome, Baig was dismissed (c Mackay b Lindwall), but by that time the match was safe.