The Moor's Last Sigh (31 page)

disinheritance. I was allotted quarters in the Bandra house, and treated, always, with just a hint of a cosseting tenderness he extended to no other employee; letting slip, on occasion, the formal Hindi 'y�u>> the aap of respect, rather than the tu of command. It is to the credit of my colleagues that they gave no sign of resenting this special treatment, and to my discredit, I suppose, that I took whatever was going--regular use of a hot-and-cold-running-water bathroom, gifts of lungis and kurta-pajamas, offers of beer. A soft upbringing leaves a residue of softness in the blood. What was interesting was how much the city's blue-bloods cared for Fielding. There was a steady stream of visitors from Everest Vilas and Kanchenjunga Bhavan, from Dhaulagiri Nivas, Nanga Parbat House and Manaslu Mansion and all the other super-desirable super-high-rise Himalayas of the Hill. The youngest, sleekest, hippest young cats in the urban jungle came to prowl in his Lalgaum grounds, and all of them were hungry, but not for my banquets; they hung on Mainduck's words and lapped up every syllable. He was against unions, in favour of breaking strikes, against working women, in favour of sati, against poverty and in favour of wealth. He was against 'immigrants' to the city, by which he meant all non-Marathi speakers, including those who had been born there, and in favour of its 'natural residents', which included Marathi-medium types who had just stepped off the bus. He was against the corruption of the Congress (I) and for 'direct action', by which he meant paramilitary activity in support of his political aims, and the institution of a bribery-system of his own. He derided the Marxist analysis of society as class struggle and lauded the Hindu preference for the eternal stability of caste. In the national flag he was in favour of the colour saffron and against the colour green. He spoke of a golden age 'before the invasions' when good Hindu men and women could roam free. 'Now our freedom, our beloved nation, is buried beneath the things the invaders have built. This true nation is what we must reclaim from beneath the layers of alien empires.' It was while serving up my own cooking at Mainduck's table that I first heard of the existence of a list of sacred sites at which the country's Muslim conquerors had deliberately built mosques on the birthplaces of various Hindu deities--and not only their birthplaces, but their country residences and love-nests, too, to say nothing of their favourite shops and preferred eateries. Where was a deity to go for a decent evening out? All the prime sites had been hogged by minarets and onion domes. It would not do! The gods had rights, too, and must be given back their ancient way of life. The invaders would have to be repulsed. The eager young things from Malabar Hill agreed enthusiastically. Yes, indeed, a campaign for divine rights! What could be smarter, more cutting edge?--But when they began, in their guffawing way, to belittle the culture of Indian Islam that lay palimpsest-fashion over the face of Mother India, Mainduck rose to his feet and thundered at them until they shrank back in their seats. Then he would sing ghazals and recite Urdu poetry--Faiz, Josh, Iqbal--from memory and speak of the glories of Fatehpur Sikri and the moonlit splendour of the Taj. An intricate fellow, indeed. There were women, but they were peripheral. They were imported at night and he would slobber over them, but he never seemed very interested. He had a power-drive rather than a sex-drive, and women bored him, no matter how assiduously they tried to hold his interest. I must record that I never saw any sign of my mother, and what I did see suggested to me that any liaison between her and my new employer would have been a very shortlived affair. He preferred male company. There would be evenings when in the company of a group of saffron-headbanded MA Youth Wingers he would institute a sort of macho, impromptu mini-Olympiad. There would be arm-wrestling and mat-wrestling, push-up contests and living-room boxing bouts. Lubricated by beer and rum, the assembled company would arrive at a point of sweaty, brawling, raucous, and finally exhausted nakedness. At these moments Fielding seemed truly happy. Shedding his flower-patterned lungi he would loll among his cadres, itching, scratching, belching, farting, slapping buttocks and patting thighs. 'Now nobody can stand against us!' he would bellow as he passed out in a state of Dionysiac bliss. 'Bloody hell! Now we are one.' I joined in when requested, and in those nocturnal boxing bouts the reputation of the Hammer grew and grew. The oiled perspiring bodies of naked Youth Wingers lay down and took the count. (The gathered Olympians, crowding around us in a rough square, chanted the numbers in unison: 'Nine!... Ten!... Kayo!!') And Five-in-a-Bite, likewise, was the champion wrestler of us all. Listen: I do not deny that there was much about Mainduck that elicited in me profound reactions of nausea and disgust, but I schooled myself to overcome these. I had hitched my fortunes to his star. I had rejected the old, for it had rejected me, and there was no point bringing its attitudes into my new life. I too would be like this, I resolved; I would become this man. I studied Fielding closely. I must say as he said, do as he did. He was the new way, the future. I would learn him, like a road. Weeks passed, then months. At length my probationary period came to an end; I had come through some invisible test. Mainduck summoned me into his office, the one with the green frog-phone. When I entered it I saw standing before me a figure so terrifying, so bizarre, that in a rush of dreadful enlightenment I understood that I had never really left the phantasmal city, that other Bombay- Central or Central-Bombay into which I had been plunged after my arrest on Cuffe Parade and from which, in my naivety, I believed that Lambajan had rescued me in the hypothecated taxi of my blessed freedom-ride. It was the figure of a man, but a man with metal parts. A sizeable steel plate had somehow been bolted into the left side of his face, and one of his hands, too, was shiny and smooth. The iron breastplate, it gradually dawned on me, was not a part of his body, but an affectation, a defiant embellishment of the eerie cyborg-image created by the metal cheek and hand. It was fashion. 'Say namaskar to Sammy Hazare, our famous Tin-man,' said Mainduck from his seat behind the desk. 'He is the Captain of your appointed XI. It is time for you to take off your cook's hat, put on your whites, and go out into the field.' The 'Moor in exile' sequence--the controversial 'dark Moors', born of a passionate irony that had been ground down by pain, and later unjustly accused of'negativity', 'cynicism', even 'nihilism' -constituted the most important work of Aurora Zogoiby's later years. In them she abandoned not only the hill-palace and seashore motifs of the earlier pictures, but also the notion of 'pure' painting itself. Almost every piece contained elements of collage, and over time these elements became the most dominant features of the series. The unifying narrator/narrated figure of the Moor was usually still present, but was increasingly characterised as jetsam, and located in an environment of broken and discarded objects, many of which were 'found' items, pieces of crates or vanaspati tins that were fixed to the surface of the work and painted over. Unusually, however, Aurora's re-imagined 'Sultan Boabdil' was absent from what became known as the 'transitional' painting of the long Moor series, a diptych entitled The Death of Chimene, whose central figure--a female corpse tied to a wooden broom -*as borne aloft, in the left-hand panel, by a mighty, happy throng, ^ a statue of rat-riding Ganesha making its way to the water on e day of the Ganpati festival. In the second, right-hand panel the crowd had dispersed, and the composition concerned itself only with a section of beach and water, in which, among broken effigies and empty bottles and soggy newspapers, lay the dead woman, lashed to her broomstick, blue and bloated, denied beauty and dignity, reduced to the status of junk. When the Moor did reappear it was in a highly fabulated milieu, a kind of human rag-and-bone yard that took its inspiration from the jopadpatti shacks and lean-to's of the pavement dwellers and the patched-together edifices of the great slums and chawls of Bombay. Here everything was a collage, the huts made of the city's unwanted detritus, rusting corrugated iron, bits of cardboard boxes, gnarled lengths of driftwood, the doors of crashed motorcars, the windscreen of a forgotten tempo; and the tenements built out of poisonous smoke, out of water-taps that had started lethal quarrels between queuing women (e. g. Hindus versus Bene-Issack Jews), out of kerosene suicides and the unpayable rents collected with extreme violence by gangland Bhaiyyas and Pathans; and the people's lives, under the pressure that is only felt at the bottom of a heap, had also become composite, as patched-up as their homes, made of pieces ofpetty thievery, shards of prostitution and fragments of beggary, or, in the case of the more self-respecting individuals, of boot-polish and paper garlands and earrings and cane baskets and one-paisa-per-seam shirts and coconut milk and car-minding and cakes of carbolic soap. But Aurora, for whom reportage had never been enough, had pushed her vision several stages further; in her pieces it was the people themselves who were made of rubbish, who were collages composed of what the metropolis did not value: lost buttons, broken windscreen wipers, torn cloth, burned books, exposed camera film. They even went scavenging for their own limbs: discovering great heaps of severed body parts, they pounced on what they lacked, and they weren't too particular, couldn't afford to be choosers, so that many of them ended up with two left feet or gave up the search for buttocks and fixed a pair of plump, amputated breasts where their missing behinds should be. The Moor had entered the invisible world, the world of ghosts, of people who did not exist, and Aurora followed him into it, forcing it into visibility by the strength of her artistic will. And the Moor-figure: alone now, motherless, he sank into immorality, and was shown as a creature of shadows, degraded in tableaux of debauchery and crime. He appeared to lose, in these last pictures, his previous metaphorical role as a unifier of opposites, a standard-bearer of pluralism, ceasing to stand as a symbol--however approximate--of the new nation, and being transformed, instead, into a semi-allegorical figure of decay. Aurora had apparently decided that the ideas of impurity, cultural admixture and melange which had been, for most of her creative life, the closest things she had found to a notion of the Good, were in fact capable of distortion, and contained a potential for darkness as well as for light. This 'black Moor' was a new imagining of the idea of the hybrid--a Baudelairean flower, it would not be too farfetched to suggest, of evil: ... Aux objets rlpugnants nous trouvons des appas; Chaque jour vers I'Enfernous descendons d'unpas, Sans horreur, a travers des tenebres quipuent. And of weakness: for he became a haunted figure, fluttered about by phantoms of his past which tormented him though he cowered and bid them begone. Then slowly he grew phantom-like himself, became a Ghost That Walked, and sank into abstraction, was robbed of his lozenges and jewels and the last vestiges of his glory; obliged to become a soldier in some petty warlord's army (here Aurora--interestingly enough--for once stayed close to the historically established facts about Sultan Boabdil), reduced to mercenary status where once he had been a king, he rapidly became a composite being as pitiful and anonymous as those amongst whom he moved. Garbage piled up, and buried him. Repeated use was made of the diptych format, and in the second panels of these works Aurora gave us that anguished, magisterial, appallingly unguarded series of late self-portraits in which there is something of Goya and something of Rembrandt, but much more of a wild erotic despair of which there are few examples in the whole history of art. Aurora/Ayxa sat alone in these panels, beside the infernal chronicle of the degradation of her son, and never shed a tear. Her face grew hard, even stony, but in her eyes there shone a horror that was never named--as if she were looking at a thing that struck at the very depths of her soul, a thing standing before her, where anyone looking at the pictures would naturally stand--as if the human race itself had shown her its most secret and terrorising face, and by doing so had petrified her, turning her old flesh to stone. These 'Portraits of Ayxa' are ominous, lowering works. In the Ayxa panels, too, there recurred the twin themes of doubles, and of ghosts. A phantom-Ayxa haunted the garbaged Moor; and behind Ayxa/Aurora, at times, hovered the faint translucent images of a woman and a man. Their faces were left blank. Was the woman Uma (Chimene), or was it Aurora herself? And was I--or rather 'the Moor'--the phantom male? And if not I, then who? In these 'ghost' or 'double' portraits, the Ayxa/Aurora figure looks--or am I imagining this?--hunted, the way Uma looked when I went to see her after the news of Jimmy Cash's accident. I'm not imagining it. I know that look. She looks as if she might be coming to pieces. She looks pursued. As, in those pictures, she pursued me. As if she were a witch upon a crag, watching me in her crystal ball with a winged monkey by her side. For it was true: I was moving through those dark places, across the moon, behind the sun, which she created in her work. I inhabited her fictions and the eye of her imagination saw me plain. Or almost: because there were things she could not imagine, things which even her piercing eye could not see. What she missed in herself was the snobbery that her contemptuous rage revealed, her fear of the invisible city, the Malabar-ness of her. How radical Aurora, the nationalists' queen, would have hated that! To have it pointed out that in her later years she was just another grande dame on the Hill, sipping tea and looking with distaste upon the poor man at her gate... And what she missed in me was that in that surreal stratum, with a tin man, a toothsome scarecrow and a cowardly frog for company (for Mainduck was certainly a coward--he did none of his own rough stuff), I found, for the first time in my short-long life, the feeling of normality, of being nothing special, the sense of being among kindred spirits, among people-like-me, that is the defining quality of home. There was a thing that Raman Fielding knew, which was his power's secret source: that it is not the civil social norm for which men yearn, but the outrageous, the
outsize, the out-of-bounds--for that by which our wild potency may be unleashed. We crave permission openly to become our secret selves. So, mother: in that dreadful company, doing those dreadful deeds, without need of magic slippers, I found my own way home.