The Moor's Last Sigh (17 page)

NOBODY EVER MADE A movie called Father India. 'Bharat-pita?' Sounds all wrong. 'Hindustan-ke-Bapuji'? Too specifically Gandhian. 'Valid-e-Azam'? Overly Mughal. 'Mr India', however, perhaps the crudest of all such nationalistic formulations, that we did latterly get. The hero was a slick young loverboy trying to convince us of his super-heroic powers: no paternal connotations there, neither bouncy India-Abba-man nor patriarchal Indodaddy. Just a made-in-India runty-bodied imitation Bond. The great Sridevi, at her voluptuous-siren best in the wettest of wet saris, stole the movie with contemptuous ease... but I remember the picture for another reason. It seems to me that maybe, in this trashy extravaganza, as worthless in its gaudy colours as the old Nargis mother-vehicle was sombre and worthy, the producers did unintentionally provide us with an image of the National Father after all. There he sits, like a dragon in his cave, like a thousand-fingered puppet-master, like the heart of the heart of darkness; commander of uzied legions, fingertip-controller of pillars of diabolic fire, orchestrator of all the secret music of the under-spheres: the arch-villain, the dark capo, Moriartier than Moriarty, Blofelder than Blofeld, not just Godfather but Gone-farthest, the dada of all dadas: Mogambo. His name, filched from the tide of an old Ava Gardner vehicle, a forgettable piece of African hokum, is carefully chosen to avoid offending any of the country's communities; it's neither Muslim nor Hindu, Parsi nor Christian, Jain nor Sikh, and if there's an echo in it of the bongo-bongo Sanders-of-the-River caricatures inflicted by post-war Hollywood on the people of the 'Dark Continent', well, that's a brand of xenophobia unlikely to make many enemies in India today. In Mr India's struggle against Mogambo I recognise the life- and-death oppositions of many movie fathers and sons. Here is Blade Runners tragic replicant crushing his creator's skull in a lethal filial embrace; and Star Wars's Luke Skywalker in his ultimate duel with Darth Vader, as champions of the light and dark sides of the Force. And in this junk drama with its cartoon villain and gimcrack hero, I see a lurid mirror-image of what was never, will never be a movie: the story of Abraham Zogoiby and myself. On the face of it he was the very antithesis of a demon king. The Abraham Zogoiby I first came to know, sixtyish, with his stone-vase limp accentuated by age, seemed a weak, diminished figure, whose breaths came raspingly and whose right hand rested lightly against his chest, in a gesture at once self-protective and obeisant. Not much left there (except duty-managerish deference) of the fellow with whom the heiress Aurora had fallen so swiftly and deeply into pepper love! In my childhood memory of him he is a rather colourless phantom hanging around the edges of tumultuous Aurora's court, hesitant, slightly stooped, frowning the vague frown with which servitors indicate their anxiety to please. In the forward tilt of his body there appeared to be something unpleasantly over-eager, something ingratiating. 'Here's a tautology,' sharp-tongued Aurora was fond of saying to raise a laugh. ' " Weak man." ' And I, as Abraham's son, could not help despising Abraham for being the butt, of the joke, and feeling that his weakness demeaned us all--by which I meant, of course, all men. In accordance with some strange logic of the heart, Aurora's great passion for 'her Jew' had cooled rapidly after my birth. Characteristically, she announced the cooling of her ardour to anyone within earshot. 'When I see him coming at me, on heat and smellofying of curry,' she'd laugh, 'baap-re! Then I hide-o behind my kids and hold my nose.' These humiliations, too, he suffered without protest. 'Men in our part of the world!' Aurora would hold forth in the famous orange and gold drawing-rooms. 'All are either peacocks or shabbies. But even a peacock like my mor is as nothing compared to us ladies, who live-o in a blaze of glory. Look out for the shabbies, I say! They-tho are our jailers. They are the ones holding the cash-books and the keys to the gilded cage.' This was the closest she came to thanking Abraham for the uncomplaining inexhaustibility of his cheques, for the city of gold he had so quickly built from her family's wealth, which for all its old-money graciousness had been no more than, as it were, a village, a country estate, or a small provincial town, compared to the great metropolis of their present fortune. Aurora was not unaware that her lavishness required maintenance, so that she was bound to Abie by her own needs. Sometimes she came close to admitting this, even to worrying that the scale of her spending, or the looseness of her tongue, might bring the house down. Always fond of macabre bedtime stories, she would tell me the parable of the scorpion and the frog, in which the scorpion, having hitched a ride across a stretch of water in return for a promise not to attack his mount, breaks his vow and administers a potent and fatal sting. As the frog and scorpion are both drowning, the murderer apologises to his victim. 'I couldn't help it,' says the scorpion. 'It's in my nature.' Abraham, it took me a long time to see, was tougher than any frog; she stung him, for it was in her nature to do so, but he did not drown. How easy was my scorn for him, how long it took me to understand his pain! For he had never ceased to love her as fiercely as on the day of their first meeting; and everything he did, he did for her. The greater, the more public her betrayals, the more overarching, and secret, grew his love. (And when I learned the things he had done, things for which it might be said that despising was an inadequate response, I found it hard to summon back that youthful disgust; for by then I had fallen under the power of a frog of a different water, and my own deeds had taken from me the right to be my father's judge.) When she abused him in public, she did so with a diamond smile that suggested she was only teasing, that her constant belittlements were no more than a way of concealing an adoration too enormous to express; it was an ironising smile that sought to put her behaviour into quotes. This act was never completely convincing. Often, she drank--the anti-alcohol regulations came and went, paralleling Morarji Desai's political fortunes, and after the partitior of the State of Bombay into Maharashtra and Gujarat, the) disappeared from the city for good--and when she drank, she cursed. Confident of her genius, armed with a tongue as merciless as her beauty and as violent as her work, she excluded nobody from her colaratura damnations, from the hawk-swoops and rococo riffs and great set-piece ghazals of her cursing, all delivered with that cheery stone-hard smile that sought to anaesthetise her victims as she ripped out their innards. (Ask me how it felt! I was her only son. The closer to the bull you work, the likelier you are to be gored.) It was Belle all over again, of course; Belle, returning, as foretold, to occupy her daughter's body. You will see, Aurora had said. From now on I am in her place. Imagine: in a cream silk sari edged with a golden geometric design intended to call to mind a Roman senator's toga--or perhaps, if the tide of her ego is running especially high, in an even more resplendent sari of imperial purple--she lounges on a chaise and stinks out her drawing-rooms with dragon-clouds of cheap beedi smoke, presiding over one of her occasional notorious nights loosened by whisky and worse, nights whose socialite licentiousness sharpens the city's many wagging tongues; although she herself has never been seen acting improperly, neither with men nor with women nor, it should be said, with needles... and in the small hours of the debauch, she strides around like an inebriated prophetess, and launches into a savage parody of what booze unleashed in Vasco Miranda on Independence Night; without troubling to acknowledge his copyright, so that the assembled company has no idea that she is offering up the most ferocious of lampoons, she details the coming destruction of her guests -painters, models, 'middle cinema' auteurs, thespians, dancers, sculptors, poets, playboys, sporting heroes, chess masters, journalists, gamblers, antique-smugglers, Americans, Swedes, freaks, demi-mondaines, and the loveliest and wildest of the city's gilded young--and the parody is so convincing, so convinced, its irony so profoundly concealed, that it is impossible not to believe in her lip-smacking schadenfreude, or--for her moods are swinging rapidly--in her Olympian, immortal unconcern. 'Imitations oflife! Historical anomalies! Centaurs!' she declaims. 'Will you not be blownofied to bits by the coming storms? Mixtures, mongrels, ghost-dancers, shadows! Fishes out of water! Bad times are coming, darlings, don't think they won't, and then all ghosts will go to Hell, the night will blot out shadows, and mongrel blood will run-o, as thin and free as water. I, but, will survive'--this, at the height of her peroration, delivered with back arched and finger stabbing at the sky like Liberty's candle--'on account, you miserable wretches, of my Art.' Her guests lie in heaps, too far gone to listen, or to care. For her offspring, too, she foretells tragedies. 'Poor kids are such a bungle, seems like they are doomed to tumble.' ... And we spent our lives living up, down and sideways to her predictions... did I mention that she was irresistible? Listen: she was the light of our lives, the excitement of our imaginations, the beloved of our dreams. We loved her even as she destroyed us. She called out of us a love that felt too big for our bodies, as if she had made the feeling and then given it to us to feel--as if it were a work. If she trampled over us, it was because we lay down willingly beneath her spurred-and-booted feet; if she excoriated us at night, it was on account of our delight at the sweet lashings of her tongue. It was when I finally realised this that I forgave my father; for we were all her slaves, and she made our servitude feel like Paradise. Which is, they say, what goddesses can do. And in the aftermath of her fatal plunge into rocky water, it occurred to me that the fall she had been predicting, with that superb and ice-hard smile, with the irony that everybody missed, had perhaps always been her own. I forgave Abraham, too, because I began to see that even though they no longer slept in the same bed each of them was still the one whose good opinion the other needed most; that my mother needed Abraham's approval as much as he longed for hers. He was always the first to see her work (closely followed by Vasco Miranda, who invariably contradicted everything my father had said). In the decade after Independence, Aurora fell into a deep creative confusion, a semi-paralysis born of an uncertainty not merely about realism but about the nature of the real itself. Her small output of paintings from this period is tortured, unresolved, and with hindsight it is easy to see in these canvases the tension between Vasco Miranda's playful influence, his fondness for imaginary worlds whose only natural law was his own sovereign whimsicality, and Abraham's dogmatic insistence on the importance, at that historical juncture, of a clear-sighted naturalism that would help India describe herself to herself. The Aurora of those days--and this was in part why she indulged on occasion in nights of intoxicated shallow ranting--veered uneasily between clumsily revisionist mythological paintings and an uncomfortable, even stilted return to the lizard-signed documentary pictures of her Chipkali work. It was easy for an artist to lose her identity at a time when so many thinkers believed that the poignancy and passion of the country's immense life could only be represented by a kind of selfless, dedicated--even patriotic--mimesis. Abraham was by no means the only advocate of such ideas. The great Bengali film director Sukumar Sen, Aurora's friend and, of all her contemporaries, perhaps her only artistic equal, was the best of these realists, and in a series of haunting, humane films brought to Indian cinema--Indian cinema, that raddled old tart!--a fusion of heart and mind that went a long way towards justifying his aesthetic. Yet these realist movies were never popular--in a moment of bitter irony they were attacked by Nargis Dutt, Mother India herself, for their Westernised elitism--and Vasco (openly) and Aurora (secretly) preferred the series of films for children in which Sen let his fantasy rip, in which fish talked, carpets flew and young boys dreamed of previous incarnations in fortresses of gold. And apart from Sen there was the group of distinguished writers who gathered for a time under Aurora's wing, Premchand and Sadat Hasan Manto and Mulk Raj Anand and Ismat Chughtai, committed realists all; but even in their work there were elements of the fabulous, for example in Toba Tek Singh, Manto's great story of the partition of the sub-continent's lunatics at the time of the larger Partition. One of the crazies, formerly a prosperous landlord, was caught in a no-man's land of the soul, unable to say whether his Punjabi home town lay in India or Pakistan, and in his madness, which was also the madness of the time, he retreated into a kind of celestial gibberish, with which Aurora Zogoiby fell in love. Her painting of the tragic final scene of Manto's story, in which the hapless loony is stranded between two stretches of barbed wire, behind which He India and Pakistan, is perhaps her finest work of the period, and his piteous gibberish, which represents not only his personal communications breakdown but our own, forms the picture's long and wonderful title: Uper thegurgur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain. The spirit of the age, and Abraham's own preferences, dragged Aurora towards naturalism; but Vasco reminded her of her instinctive dislike of the purely mimetic, which had led her to reject her Chipkalist disciples, and tried to turn her back towards the epic-fabulist manner which expressed her true nature, encouraging her to pay attention once again not only to her dreams but to the dream-like wonder of the waking world. 'We are not a nation of "averagis",' he argued, 'but a magic race. Will you spend your life painting boot-polish boys and air-hostesses and two acres of land? Is it to be all coolies and tractor-drivers and Nargis-y hydroelectric projects from now on? In your own family you can see the disproof of such a world-view. Forget those damnfool realists! The real is always hidden--isn't it?--inside a miraculously burning bush! Life is fantastic! Paint that--you owe it to your fantastic, unreal son. What a giant he is, this beautiful child-man, your human time-rocket! "Chipko" to his incredible truth--stick to that, to him, not to that used-up lizard shit.'
Because of her desire for Abraham's good opinion, Aurora for a time put on artistic clothes that looked unnatural upon her; because Vasco was the voice of her secret identity she forgave him every excess. And because of her confusion, she drank, grew raucous, hostile and obscene. Finally, however, she took Vasco's tip; and made me, for a long while, the talisman and centrepiece of her art. As for Abraham, I often saw a melancholy shadow of puzzlement crossing his face. He was certainly mystified by me. Realism confused him, so that, after one of his long absences, on his return from business trips to Delhi or Cochin or other destinations whose identity remained secret for many years, he would either bring me absurdly tiny clothes that were appropriate for a child my age, but much too small for me; or else he would offer me books that a young man my size might enjoy, books that utterly baffled the child who dwelt within all my outsized flesh. And he was bewildered, too, by his wife, by the change in her feelings towards him, by the darkening violence within her, and by her self-destructive gifts, which had never been more fully demonstrated than on her last meeting with the Prime Minister of India, nine months before I was born...