The Moors Last Sigh

the world, and her determination to transcend and redeem its imperfections through art. Tragedy disguised as fantasy and rendered in the most beautiful, most heightened colour and light she could create: it was a mythomaniac gem. She called it A Light to Lighten the Darkness . ‘Why not?’ she shrugged, when questioned, by Vasco Miranda among others. ‘I am getting interested in making religious pictures for people who have no god.’
    ‘Then keep a ticket to London in your pocket,’ he advised her. ‘Because in this god-rotten joint, you never know when you might have to run.’
    (But Aurora laughed at such advice; and in the end it was Vasco who left.)
    As I grew, she went on using me as a subject, and this continuity, too, was a sign of love. Unable to find a way of preventing me from ‘going too fast’, she painted me into immortality, giving me the gift of being a part of what would persist of her. So, like the hymn-writer, let me with a gladsome mind praise her, for she was kind. For her mercy ay endures  … And in truth if I am asked to put my finger – my whole birth-maimed hand – on the source of my belief that in spite of speeding and crippled limb and friendlessness I had a happy childhood in Paradise, I would finally put it here, I would say that my joy in life was born in our collaboration, in the intimacy of those private hours, when she talked of everything under the sun, absently, as if I were her confessor, and I learned the secrets of her heart as well as her mind.
    I learned, for example, about how she fell for my father: about the great sensuality that had burst out of my parents in an Ernakulam godown one day, forcing them together, making possible what was impossible, demanding to be allowed to come-to-be. What I loved most in my parents was this passion for each other, the simple fact of its having once been there (though as time passed it became harder and harder to see the young lovers they had been in the increasingly distant married couple they were becoming). Because they had loved so greatly I wanted such a love for myself, I thirsted for it, and even as I lost myself in the surprising tendernesses and athleticisms of Dilly Hormuz I knew she wasn’t what I was looking for; O, I wanted, wanted that asli mirch masala , the thing that made you sweat beads of coriander juice and breathe hot-chilli flames through your stinging lips. I wanted their pepper love.
    And when I found it, I thought my mother would understand. When I needed to move a mountain for love, I thought my mother would help.
    Alas for us all: I was wrong.

    She knew about Abraham’s temple girls, of course, had known from the beginning. ‘Man who wants to keep-o secrets should not babble in his sleep,’ she muttered vaguely one day. ‘I got so bored of your Daddy’s night-lingo that I moved out of his bedroom. A lady needs her rest.’ And as I look back upon that proud, busy woman I hear her telling me something else beneath those casual sentences – I hear her admitting that she, who refused all compromises and made no accommodations, had settled for Abraham in spite of the weaknesses of the flesh which made him incapable of resisting the temptation to sample the goods he was importing from down south. ‘Old men,’ she snorted another day, ‘always droolo’ing after bachchis. And the ones with many daughters are the worst.’ For a time I was young and innocent enough to think of these musings as part of the process by which she thought herself into the lives of the figures in her paintings; but by the time my own lust had been awakened by Dilly Hormuz’s hand I had begun to get the point.
    I had always wondered about the eight-year gap between Mynah and myself, and so, when understanding descended upon my young-old child-self like a tongue of flame, I – who had been denied the company of children, and so found myself at an early age using an adult vocabulary without an adult’s delicacy or control – was unable to resist blurting out my discovery: ‘You stopped making babies,’ I cried, ‘because he was fooling around.’
    ‘I’ll give you one chapat’, she promised, ‘that will breakofy the teeth in your cheeky face.’ The slap that followed, however, created no long-lasting dental problems. Its gentleness was all the confirmation I required.
    Why did she never confront Abraham about his infidelities? I ask you to consider that in spite of all her freethinking bohemian ways, Aurora