The Moors Last Sigh

other from the Zogoiby Bequest itself! Gents, gentesses: permit me to titillate your interest by revealing that it was a picture within which Aurora Zogoiby, in her fretful last days, had concealed a prophecy of her death. (And Vasco’s fate, too, was bound up with the story of these canvases.)
    As I set down my memories of my part in those paintings, I am naturally conscious that those who submit themselves as the models upon whom a work of art is made can offer, at best, a subjective, often wounded, sometimes spiteful, wrong-side-of-the-canvas version of the finished work. What then can the humble clay usefully say about the hands that moulded it? Perhaps simply this: that I was there . And that during the years of sittings I made a kind of portrait of her, too. She was looking at me, and I was looking right back.
    This is what I saw: a tall woman in a paint-spattered, mid-calf-length homespun kurta worn over dark blue sailcloth slacks, barefoot, her white hair piled up on her head with brushes sticking out of it, giving her an eccentric Madame Butterfly look, Butterfly as Katharine Hepburn or–yes! – Nargis in some zany Indian cover version, Titli Begum , might have played her: no longer young, no longer prinked and painted, and certainly no longer bothered about any pathetic Pinkerton’s return. She stood before me in the least luxurious of studios, a room lacking so much as a comfortable chair, and ‘non-A.C.’ so that it was as hot and humid as a cheap taxi, with one slow ceiling fan moving lazily above. Aurora never showed any signs of giving a damn about the weather conditions; so neither, naturally, did I. I sat where and how she set me, and made a point of never complaining of the aches in my variously arranged limbs until she remembered to ask if I’d like a break. In this way a little of her legendary stubbornness, her determination, seeped through the canvas into me.
    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