The Moors Last Sigh

half as old as I am, I could be your daughter,’ my forty-plus mother explained, and at the time I was too young to hear anything except the lightness she used to disguise the stranger things in her voice. Nor was this our only double, or ambiguous, portrait; for there was also To Die Upon a Kiss , in which she portrayed herself as murdered Desdemona flung across her bed, while I was stabbed Othello, falling towards her in suicided remorse as I breathed my last. My mother described these canvases, self-deprecatingly, as ‘panto-pictures’, intended for the household’s private entertainment: the artist’s frivolous equivalent of fancy-dress parties. But – as in the episode of her notorious cricket-picture, which will be recounted presently – Aurora was often at her most iconoclastic, her most épatante , when she was most light-hearted; and the high-voltage eroticism of all these works, which she did not exhibit in her lifetime, created a posthumous shock-wave that only failed to grow into a full-scale tsunami because she, the brazen eroticist, was no longer around to provoke decent folks by refusing to apologize, or even to express the merest scrap of regret.
    After the Othello picture, however, the series changed direction, and began to explore the idea of placing a re-imagining of the old Boabdil story – ‘not Authorised Version but Aurorised Version’, as she told me–in a local setting, with me playing a sort of Bombay remix of the last of the Nasrids. In January 1970, for the first time, Aurora Zogoiby placed the Alhambra on Malabar Hill.
    I was thirteen years old, and in the first flush of my intoxication with Dilly Hormuz. While she painted the first of the ‘true’, the echt Moors, Aurora told me about a dream. She had been standing on the ‘back verandah’ of a rattletrap train in a Spanish night, holding my sleeping body in her arms. Suddenly she knew – knew in the way of dreams, without being told, but with absolute certainty – that if she were to toss me away, if she were to sacrifice me to the night, then she would be safe, invulnerable, for the rest of her life. ‘I tell you, kiddo, I thought about it pretty hard.’ Then she refused the dream’s offer, and took me back to my bed. You didn’t have to be a Bible expert to work out that she had cast herself in an Abrahamic rôle, and even at thirteen, in that house of artists, I was familiar with pictures of the Michelangelo Pietà, so I got the point, or most of it. ‘Thanks a lot, ma,’ I told her. ‘Nothing to it,’ she answered. ‘Let them do their worst.’
    This dream, like so many dreams, came true; but Aurora, when her Abrahamic moment really came, did not make the choice which she had dreamed.
    Once the red fort of Granada arrived in Bombay, things moved swiftly on Aurora’s easel. The Alhambra quickly became a not-quite-Alhambra; elements of India’s own red forts, the Mughal palace-fortresses in Delhi and Agra, blended Mughal splendours with the Spanish building’s Moorish grace. The hill became a not-Malabar looking down upon a not-quite-Chowpatty, and the creatures of Aurora’s imagination began to populate it – monsters, elephant-deities, ghosts. The water’s edge, the dividing line between two worlds, became in many of these pictures the main focus of her concern. She filled the sea with fish, drowned ships, mermaids, treasure, kings; and on the land, a cavalcade of local riff-raff– pickpockets, pimps, fat whores hitching their saris up against the waves – and other figures from history or fantasy or current affairs or nowhere, crowded towards the water like the real-life Bombayites on the beach, taking their evening strolls. At the water’s edge strange composite creatures slithered to and fro across the frontier of the elements. Often she painted the water-line in such a way as to suggest that you were looking at an unfinished painting which had been abandoned, half-covering another. But was it a waterworld being painted over the world of air, or vice versa? Impossible to be sure.
    ‘Call it Mooristan,’ Aurora told me. ‘This seaside, this hill, with the fort on top. Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watchtowers and towers of silence too. Place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drowno in water, or else grow gills; where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air. One universe, one dimension, one country, one