The Moors Last Sigh

built in her eldest daughter the fortitude to resist the catastrophe that had ruined her mind.
    Soon after the end of the Emergency, Ina died of cancer. The lymphoma developed quite suddenly, and gobbled up her body like a beggar at a feast. Only Minnie, who had completed her novitiate and been reborn as Sister Floreas – ‘sounds like the blooming Fountain,’ Aurora snorted in frustrated scorn – had the nerve to say that Ina had called the illness down upon herself, that she had ‘chosen her own gathering’. Aurora and Abraham never spoke of Ina’s death, honouring it in silence, the silence which had once helped make Ina a celebrated beauty, and which was now the silence of the tomb.
    So Ina was dead, and Minnie was gone, and Mynah was briefly in jail – for she was arrested at the very end of the Emergency, but quickly released, her reputation much enhanced, after Mrs Gandhi’s electoral defeat. Aurora wanted to tell her youngest daughter how proud she was of her, but somehow she never got round to it, somehow the coldness, the brusqueness of Philomina Zogoiby’s manner whenever she had any contact with her folks succeeded in stopping her mother’s loving tongue. Mynah did not often visit Elephanta; which left me.

    One last person had fallen through the crack in the world. Dilly Hormuz had been dismissed. Miss Jaya Hé, whose job in the household had evolved from ayah into housekeeper, had taken advantage of her position to pull off one final heist. From Aurora’s studio she stole three charcoal sketches of me as a young boy, sketches in which my ruined hand had been wondrously metamorphosed, becoming, variously, a flower, a paintbrush and a sword. Miss Jaya took these sketches to my Dilly’s flat and said they were a gift from the ‘young Sahib’. Then she told Aurora that she had seen the teacher pinching them, and, excuse me, Begum Sahib, but that woman’s attitude to our boy is not a moral one . Aurora visited Dilly the same day, and the pictures, which the sweet woman had placed in the silver frames on the piano, concealing her own family portraits, were all the proof my mother needed of the teacher’s guilt. I tried to plead Dilly’s case, but once my mother’s mind was closed, no force on earth could open it. ‘Anyhow,’ she told me, ‘you are too old for her now. There is nothing more you can learnofy from her.’
    Dilly spurned all my overtures – my telephone calls, letters, flowers – after she was sacked. I walked one last time down the hill to the house by Vijay Stores and when I got there she would not let me in. She opened the door about three inches and refused to move out of the way. That long stripe of her, framed in teak, that mutinous jaw and short-sighted blink, was my sweaty journey’s only reward. ‘Go your ways, you poor boy,’ she told me. ‘I wish you well on your hard road.’
    Such was Miss Jaya Hé’s revenge.

13
    T HE SO-CALLED ‘MOOR paintings’ of Aurora Zogoiby can be divided into three distinct periods: the ‘early’ pictures, made between 1957 and 1977, that is to say between the year of my birth and that of the election that swept Mrs G. from power, and of Ina’s death; the ‘great’ or ‘high’ years, 1977–81, during which she created the glowing, profound works with which her name is most often associated; and the so-called ‘dark Moors’, those pictures of exile and terror which she painted after my departure, and which include her last, unfinished, unsigned masterpiece, The Moor’s Last Sigh (170 × 247 cms., oil on canvas, 1987), in which she turned, at last, to the one subject she had never directly addressed – facing up, in that stark depiction of the moment of Boabdil’s expulsion from Granada, to her own treatment of her only son. It was a picture which, for all its great size, had been stripped to the harsh essentials, all its elements converging on the face at its heart, the Sultan’s face, from which horror, weakness, loss and pain poured like darkness itself, a face in a condition of existential torment reminiscent of Edvard Munch. It was as different a picture from Vasco Miranda’s sentimental treatment of the same theme as could possibly be imagined. But it was also a mystery picture, that ‘lost painting’ – and how striking that both Vasco’s and Aurora’s treatments of this theme should disappear within a few years of my mother’s death, the one stolen from the private collection of C. J. Bhabha, the