The Moors Last Sigh

Zogoiby was still, in some deep recess of her heart, a woman of her generation, a generation that would find such behaviour tolerable, even normal, in a man; whose womenfolk shrugged off their pain, burying it beneath banalities about the nature of the beast and its need, periodically, to scratch an itch . For the sake of family, that great absolute in whose name all things were possible, women averted their eyes and kept their grief knotted in a twist of fabric at the end of a dupatta, or buttoned up in a small silk purse, like small change and the household keys. And it may have been, too, because Aurora knew she needed Abraham, she needed him to take care of business and leave her free for art. It may have been as simple, complaisant and chickenshit as that.
    (A parenthesis on complaisance: in my musings on Abraham’s decision to journey south when Aurora headed north for her last meeting with Mr Nehru and the scandal of the Lotus, I suspected my father of playing the complaisant spouse. Was this reciprocity what lay beneath his choice, this hollow open marriage, this whited sepulchre, this sham? – O, Moor, be calm, be calm. They have both gone beyond your reproach; this anger can do nothing, though it shake the very earth.)
    How she must have hated herself for making such a cowardly, financially motivated soft option of a devil’s deal with fate! For – generation or no generation – the mother I knew, the mother I came to know during all those days in her spartan studio, was not one to take anything in life lying down. She was a confronter, a squarer-up, a haver-out. Yet, when faced with the ruin of her life’s great love, and offered a choice between an honest war and an untruthful, self-serving peace, she buttoned her lip, and never offered her husband an angry word. Thus silence grew between them like an accusation; he talked in his sleep, she muttered in her studio, and they slept in separate rooms. For a moment, after his heart almost gave way on the steps to the Lonavla caves, they were able to remember what had once been. But after that the reality soon returned. Sometimes I am convinced that they both saw my crippled hand, my ageing, as a judgment upon them – a deformed child born of a stunted love, half a life born of a marriage that was no longer whole. If there had been any ghost of a chance of their becoming reconciled, my birth put that phantom to flight.
    First I worshipped my mother, then I hated her. Now, at the end of all our stories, I look back and can feel – at least in bursts – a measure of compassion. Which is a kind of healing, for her son as well as for her own, restless shade.
    Strong desire drew Abraham and Aurora together; weak lust pushed them apart. In these last days, as I have written down my accounts of Aurora’s overweenings, of her sharpnesses and shrillnesses, I have heard beneath that raucous drama these sadder notes of loss. She forgave Abraham for disappointing her once, in Cochin, in the matter of Flory Zogoiby’s Rumpelstiltskin attempt to take away an as-yet-unborn son. In Matheran she tried – and in trying, created me – to forgive him a second time. But he did not improve his ways, and there was no third forgiveness … yet she stayed. She, who had shaken her world for love, now stifled her revolt, and chained herself to an increasingly loveless marriage. No wonder her tongue grew sharp.
    And Abraham: if he had turned back towards her, forsaking all others, might she have saved him from sinking into the Mogambo-underworld of Kéké and Scar and worse criminals yet to come? Might he, with the blessed ballast of their love, have failed to sink into that pit? … No point trying to rewrite one’s parents’ lives. It’s hard enough to try and set them down; to say nothing of my own.

    In the ‘early Moors’ my hand was transformed into a series of miracles; often my body, too, was miraculously changed. In one picture – Courtship – I was Moor-as-peacock, spreading my many-eyed tail; she painted her own head on top of a dowdy pea-hen’s body. In another (painted when I was twelve and looked twenty-four) Aurora reversed our relationship, painting herself as the young Eleanor Marx and me as her father Karl. Moor and Tussy was a rather shocking idea – my mother girlish, adoring, and I in patriarchal, lapel-gripping pose, frock-coated and bewhiskered, like a prophecy of the all-too-near future. ‘If you were twice as old as you look, and I was