The Moor's Last Sigh (16 page)

save Vasco from himself; whatever that was, whoever he might have been, or have become. Nobody could save me. In April 1947, when my sister Ina was just three months old and Aurora's pregnancy with the future Minnie-the-mouse had been confirmed, Abraham Zogoiby, proud husband and father, approached Vasco Miranda in a gruff, awkward attempt at friendliness. 'So, if you are supposed to be a proper painter, why not make a portrait of my carrying wife and child?' This portrait was Vasco's first work on canvas, which Abraham bought for him and Aurora showed him how to prime. His early work had been done on board or paper, for economic reasons; and soon after he moved into his Elephanta studio he destroyed everything he had done before that date, declaring himself to be a new man who was only now making his real start in life; only now, as he put it, being born. The Aurora portrait was that new beginning. I say 'the Aurora portrait' because, when Vasco finally unveiled it (he had refused to let anyone view the work in progress), Abraham discovered, to his fury, that Baby Ina had been wholly ignored. Having already lost half her name, my poor eldest-sister had succeeded in vanishing completely from the work of which she was a principal subject, and which had been commissioned as a direct result of her recent arrival on the scene. (New Minnie-the-bump was omitted too, but at that early stage in Aurora's second pregnancy this was more easily excused.) Vasco had depicted my mother sitting cross-legged on a giant lizard under her chhatri, cradling empty air. Her full left breast, weighty with motherhood, was exposed. 'What in tarnation?' Abraham roared. 'Miranda, men, you got eyes in your head or stones?' But Vasco waved away all naturalistic criticisms; when Abraham pointed out that his wife had at no time posed with uncovered bosom, and that the obliterated Ina was not being breast-fed anyway, the painter's face grew heavy with disdain. 'Next you will be telling me there is no outsize chipkali kept upon the premises as a pet,' he sighed. When Abraham heatedly reminded Vasco who was paying the bills, however, the artist lifted a haughty nose into the air. 'Genius is no rich man's slave,' he averred. 'A canvas is not a mirror to reflect a goo-goo smile. I have seen what I have seen: a presence, and an absence. A fullness, and an emptiness. You wanted a double portrait? Behold. He who hath eyes to see, let him see.' 'So now that you have completed your reflections,' said Abraham in a voice like a knife, 'we also have much upon which we must reflect.' Was Vasco summarily expelled from the premises for his outrageous slur on the character of Baby Ina? Did the infant's mother fall upon him with bared fang and claw? Reader, he was not; she did not. Aurora Zogoiby as a mother was always a supporter of the Hard Knock schooling system, and saw no need to defend her children against the bufferings of life (was it, I wonder, because she had to collaborate with Abraham to create us that Aurora, a natural soloist, placed us firmly among her lesser works?)... However, two days after the unveiling of my mother's portrait, Abraham summoned the painter to his office premises in Cashondeliveri Terrace--named after the nineteenth-century Parsi grandee and cut-throat moneylender Sir Duljee Duljeebhoy Cashondeliveri--to inform him that the picture was 'surplus to requirements' and that it was only on account of the extreme clemency and good nature of Mrs Zogoiby that he was not being thrown back into the street, 'where,' Abraham balefully concluded, 'in my personal opinion, you belong.' After the rejection of his portrait of my mother, Vasco ceased to wax his moustache and locked himself in his studio for three days, emerging haggard and dehydrated with the canvas, wrapped in gunny sacking, under his arm. He walked out of Elephanta past the hostile stares of chowkidar and parrot and did not return for a week. Lambajan Chandiwala had just begun to allow himself to believe that the scoundrel had gone for good when he came back in a yellow-and-black taxicab, wearing a fancy new suit, and completely restored to his old, flamboyant good humour. It turned out that in his three days' sequestration he had painted over my mother's image, hiding it beneath a new work, an equestrian portrait of the artist in Arab attire, which Kekoo Mody--who knew nothing about the rejected painting underneath this strange new depiction of Vasco Miranda in fancy dress, weeping on a great white horse--had managed to sell almost instantly, to no less a personage than the steel billionaire, the crorepati C. J. Bhabha, for a surprisingly high price that enabled Vasco to repay Abraham for the canvas and to order several more. Vasco had discovered that his work was commercial. It was the launch of that extraordinary--and in many ways meretricious--career during which it would seem, at times, that no new hotel lobby or airport terminal was complete until it had been decorated with a gigantic V. Miranda mural that managed, somehow, to be at once pyrotechnic and banal... and in every picture Vasco painted, in every triptych and mural and fresco and glass-painting, he never failed to include a small, immaculate image of a cross-legged woman with one exposed breast, sitting on a lizard with her arms cradling nothing, unless of course they were cradling the invisible Vasco, or even the whole world; unless by seeming to be nobody's mother she indeed became the mother of us all; and when he had finished this small detail, on which it often seemed that he lavished more attention than on the rest of the work, he would invariably obliterate it beneath the broad, sweeping brush-strokes by which his work came increasingly to be defined--those famous, phoney marks which looked so flamboyant and in which he could work so prolifically and so fast. 'Did you hate-o me so much to blottofy me out?' cried Aurora, bursting into his studio, both contrite and distraught. 'It was impossible to wait-o five minutes till I could calm old Abie down?' Vasco pretended not to understand. 'But of course little Ina was not the problem,' Aurora went on. 'You made me look too-much sexy, and Abraham was jealous.' 'So now he has nothing to be jealous about,' Vasco said, smiling a bitter, but also flirtatious smile. 'Or maybe he has even more cause; because now, Auroraji, you must lie buried for ever under me. Mr Bhabha will hang us on his bedroom wall, visible Vasco with invisible Aurora beneath, and even more invisible Ina in your hands. In its way, it has become a kind of family group.' Aurora shook her head. 'What nonsense, I swear. You men. Nonsensical from beginning to end. And a weeping Arab on a horse! It serves that no-taste Bhabha right. Even a bazaar painter would not make such a stupid picture.' 'I have called it The Artist as Boabdil, the Unlucky (el-Zogoybi), Last Sultan of Granada, Seen Departingfrom the Alhambra,' said Vasco with a straight face. 'Or, The Moor's Last Sigh. I trust this choice of tide will not give Abie-ji any further cause for taking offence. Appropriation of surname and family tall-stories and such-much personal material. Without, I regret, asking a by-your-leave.' Aurora Zogoiby stared at him in wonderment; then began, in loud and possibly Moorish sobs, to laugh. 'Oh you naughty Vasco,' she said at length, wiping her eyes. 'Oh you bad, black man. How to stoppo my husband from breakofying your wicked neck, that is what I must work out.' 'And you?' Vasco asked. 'Did you like the unlucky, rejected painting?' 'I liked the unlucky, rejected painter,' she said softly, and kissed his cheek, and was gone.

Ten years later the Moor found his next incarnation in me; and the time came when Aurora Zogoiby, following in V. Miranda's footsteps, also made a picture which she called The Moor's Last Sigh... I have lingered on these old tales of Vasco because the telling of my own story obliges me to face again, and reconquer, my fear. How am I to explain the wild, stomach-dropping-away, white-knuckle-ride scariness of living an over-accelerated life--of being forced, against my will, to live out the literal truth of the metaphors so often applied to my mother and her circle? In the fast lane, on the fast track, ahead of my time, a jet-setter right down to my genes, I burned--having no option--the candle at both ends, even though by inclination I was of the careful-conservation-of-candlewax brigade. How to communicate the werewolf-movie terror of feeling my rapidly-enlarging feet pushing against the insides of my shoes, of having hair that grew almost fast enough to see; how to make you feel the growing pains in my knees that often made it impossible for me to run? It was a kind of miracle that my spine grew straight. I have been a hothouse plant, a soldier on a perpetual forced march, a traveller caught in a flesh-and-blood time machine, perpetually out of breath, because I've been running faster than the years, in spite of painful knees. Please understand that I am not claiming to have been a prodigy of any kind. I had no early genius for chess or mathematics or the sitar. Yet I have always been, if only in my uncontrollable increases, prodigious. Like the city itself, Bombay of my joys and sorrows, I mushroomed into a huge urbane sprawl of a fellow, I expanded without time for proper planning, without any pauses to learn from my experiences or my mistakes or my contemporaries, without time for reflection. How then could I have turned out to be anything but a mess? Much that was corruptible in me has been corrupted; much that was perfectible, but also capable of being demolished, has been lost. 'See how beautiful, my peacock, my mor... ' my mother sang as she suckled me at her breast, and I may say without false modesty that, for all my South Indian dark skin (so unattractive to society matchmakers!), and with the exception of my crippled hand, I did indeed grow up good-looking; but for a long time that right hand made me unable to see anything but ugliness in myself. And to blossom into a handsome young man when in reality I was still a child was in fact a double curse. It first denied me the natural fruits of childhood, the smallness, the childishness of being a child, and then departed, so that by the time I had indeed become a man I no longer possessed the golden-apple beauty of youth. (By the age of twenty-three my beard had turned white; and other things, too, had ceased to function as well as they once did.) My inside and outside have always been out of sync; you will appreciate, then, that what Vasco Miranda once called my 'movie star hit-shapenness' has been of little value in my life. I will spare you the doctors; my medical history would fill a half a dozen volumes. The tree-stump hand, the super-speed ageing, the astonishing size of me, six foot six in a country where the average male rarely grows above five foot five: all these were subjected to repeated scrutiny. (To this day the words 'Breach Candy Hospital' conjure up, for me, the memory of a sort of house of correction, a benevolent torture chamber, a zone of infernal torments run by well-meaning demons who mortified me--who roasted me--who tikka-kababed and Bombay-ducked me--for my own good.) And in the end, after every effort, the slow inevitable shaking of the eminent stethoscoped head of some boss-devil, the upturned-palm gestures of helplessness, the murmurs about karma, kismet, Fate. As well as medical practitioners, I was taken to see Ayurvedic specialists, Tibia College professors, faith-healers, saints. Aurora was a thorough and determined woman, and was accordingly prepared--again, in my best interests!--to expose me to all manner of guru-fakery which she herself both despised and abhorred. 'Just in case,' I heard her say to Abraham more than once. 'I swear, if one of these ju-ju guys can fix the poor boy's clock, then I will convertofy in one tick flat.' Nothing worked. That was the time of the emergence of the boy-mahaguru Lord Khusro Khusrovani Bhagwan, who acquired a following of millions in spite of the persistent rumours that he was the wholly spurious creation of his mother, a certain Mrs Dubash. One day, when I was about five (and looked ten), Aurora Zogoiby swallowed her scruples -for my sake, naturally--and (for a high price) arranged a private audience with the magic child. We visited him aboard a luxury yacht anchored in Bombay harbour, and in his chooridar pyjamas, gold skirt and turban he struck my parents as a frightened child obliged to live his whole life trapped in wedding-party fancy-dress; in spite of this, my mother gritted her teeth, explained my problems and asked for his help. The boy Khusro looked at me with grave, sad, intelligent eyes. 'Embrace your fate,' he said. 'Rejoice in what gives you grief. That which you would flee, turn and run towards it with all your heart. Only by becoming your misfortune will you transcend it.' 'Too much wisdom,' exclaimed Mrs Dubash, who lay munching mangoes messily on a divan. 'Wah-wah! Rubies, diamonds, pearls! Now, please,' she added, concluding our audience, 'account may kindly be settled. Cash rupees only, unless foreign currency is available, in which event fifteen per cent discount may be given for cash dollars or pounds sterling.' For a long time I remembered those days with bitterness, the useless doctors, the even more useless quacks. I resented my mother for the hoops she put me through, for being the hypocrite these genuflections to the guru industry seemed to reveal her to be. I don't resent her any more; I have learned to see the love in what she did, learned to see that her humiliation at the hands of all the mango-sticky Mrs Dubashes we encountered was at least as great as mine. Also, I must admit, Lord Khusro taught me a lesson that I have often, in my life, been obliged to learn again. And on each of these occasions, the cost has been high, and no foreign-currency discount has been offered. By embracing the inescapable, I lost my fear of it. I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puf F of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot's fall, has more or less nothing to do with 'courage'. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life. I stopped being afraid because, if my time on earth was limited, I didn't have seconds to spare for funk. Lord Khusro's injunction echoed Vasco Miranda's motto, another version of which I found, years later, in a story by J. Conrad. I must live until I die. I inherited the family's gift for sleep. All of us slept like babies when sadness or trouble loomed. (Not always, it's true: the thirteen-year-old Aurora da Gama's window-opening, ornament-tossing insomnia was an old, but important, exception to this rule.) So on days when I felt badly I would lie down and switch myself off, 'close' myself, as Vasco would put it, like a light; and hope to 'open' in a better frame of mind. This didn't always work. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would awake and weep, I would cry out pitifully for love. The shakes, the sobs came from a place too deep within to be identifiable. In time I accepted these nocturnal tears, too, as the penalty I had to pay for being exceptional; though, as I have said, I had no desire for exceptionality -1 wanted to be Clark Kent, not any kind of Superman. In our fine mansion I would happily have lived out my days as a wealthy socialite like Bruce Wayne, with or without benefit of a 'ward'. But no matter how hard I wished, my secret, essential bat-nature could not be denied. Permit me to clarify a point about Vasco Miranda: from the very start, there were frightening signs that not all the bats in his belfry were harmless. We who loved him would gloss over the times when an aggressive fury would pour out of him, when he seemed to crackle with such a current of dark, negative electricity that we feared to touch him lest we stuck to him and burned up. He went on dreadful benders and, like Aires (and Belle) da Gama in another time and place, would turn up unconscious in some Kamathipura gutter or wandering dazed around the Sassoon fish dock, drunk, drugged, bruised, bleeding, robbed, and giving off a terrible fishy stench, which could not be washed off him for days. When he became successful, the darling of the international moneyed establishment, it took a lot of hush-money to keep these episodes out of the newspapers, especially because there were indications that many of the partners he found on these bisexual orphic sprees were afterwards less than happy about their experiences. There was a Hell in Vasco, born of whatever devil-deal he had done to shed his past and be born again through us, and at times he seemed capable of bursting into flames. 'I am the Grand Old Duke of York,' he would say when he was better. 'When I am up I am up, and when I am down I am down. Also, by the way, I have had ten thousand men; and ten thousand women, too.' On the night of India's independence, the red mist came over him in a rush. The contradictions of that high moment tore him apart. That celebration of freedom whose engulfing emotions he could not avoid even though, as a Goan, he was technically not involved, and which, to his horror, was taking place while great blood-rivers were still flowing in the Punjab, destroyed the fragile equilibrium at the heart of his invented self, and set the madman free. That was the way my mother told it, anyhow, and no doubt that version contained some of the truth, but I know that there was also the matter of his love for her, the love he could not openly declare, which filled him up and boiled over, turning to rage. He sat at the foot of Aurora and Abraham's long and glittering table, glaring at the many distinguished and excited guests, and drank vinho verde in quantity and at speed, sunk in darkness. As midnight burst in showers of light across the sky, his mood grew ever blacker; until, deeply drunk, he rose unsteadily to his feet and showered the guests with blurry, spittle-flecked abuse. 'What are you all so pleased about?' he shouted, swaying. 'This isn't your night. Bleddy Macaulay's minutemen! Don't you get it? Bunch of English-medium misfits, the lot of you. Minority group members. Square-peg freaks. You don't belong here. Country's as alien to you as if you were what's-the-word lunatics. Moon-men. You read the wrong books, get on the wrong side in every argument, think the wrong thoughts. Even your bleddy dreams grow from foreign roots.' 'Stop making a fool ofyourself, Vasco,' said Aurora. 'Everybody here is shocked by the Hindu-Muslim killings. You have no monopoly on that pain; only on vinho verde and on being a righteous bum.' Which would have stopped most people: but it didn't stop poor, driven Vasco, crazed by history, love and the torment of keeping up the great pretence of himself. 'Useless fucking art-johnny clever-dicks,' he jeered, leaning sideways at a dangerous angle. 'Circular sexualist India my foot. No. Bleddy tongue twister came out wrong. Secular-socialist. That's it. Bleddy bunk. Panditji sold you that stufflike a cheap watch salesman and you all bought one and now you wonder why it doesn't work. Bleddy Congress party full of bleddy fake Rolex salesmen. You think India'll just roll over, all those bloodthirsty bloodsoaked gods'll just roll over and die. Our great hostess, Aurora, great lady, great artist, thinks she can dance the gods away. Dance! Tat-tat-taa-dreegay-thun-thun! Tail Tat-tai! Tat-tai! Jesus Christ.' 'Miranda,' said Abraham, rising, 'that's enough.' 'And I'll tell you something, Mr Big Businessman Abie,' Vasco said, beginning to giggle. 'Let me give you a tip. Only one power in this damn country is strong enough to stand up against those gods and it isn't blankety blank sockular specialism. It isn't blankety blank Pandit Nehru and his blankety blank protection-of-minor-ities Congress watch-wallahs. You know what it is? I'll tell you what it is. Corruption. You get me? Bribery, and.' He lost his balance and fell backwards. Two bearers in gold-buttoned white Nehru jackets held him, preparing to remove him from the party at Abraham's signal. But Abraham Zogoiby paused, and allowed the scene to play itself out. 'Jolly old damn fine bribery and grease,' said Vasco, in tearful tones, as if speaking of an old and beloved dog. 'Backhanders, pay- offs, sweeteners. You follow me? Abie-ji: are you with me? V. Miranda's definition of democracy: one man one bribe. That's the way. That's the big secret. That's it.' His hands rushed to his mouth in sudden alarm. 'Oh. Oh. Stupid me. Stupid, stupid Vasco. It's no secret. Abie-ji being such a bleddy big shot, of course he knows it all. Such a bleddy big grandmother sucking so many bleddy big eggs. Apologies. Please to excuse.' Abraham nodded; the white jackets hooked their arms under his armpits and began to drag him backwards. 'One more thing,' Vasco roared, so loudly that the bearers faltered. He hung in their arms like a stuffed doll, waving an insane finger. 'Piece of good advice for you all. Get on the boats with the British! Just get on the bleddy boats and buggeroff. This place has no use for you. It'll beat you and eat you. Get out! Get out while the getting's good.' 'And you,' Abraham asked, standing with steely courtesy in the shocked silence. 'You, Vasco. What advice do you have for yourself?' 'Oh, me,' he sang out as the white coats bore him away. 'Don't worry about me. I'm Portuguese,'