The Moors Last Sigh

provocative an image. Well! My mother was inspired. She rushed home and in a single sustained burst completed the painting, in which the ‘real’ shy peck, done for a dare, was transformed into a full-scale Western-movie clinch. It was Aurora’s version – quickly displayed by Kekoo Mody and much reproduced in the national press – that everyone remembered; even those who had been at the ground that day began to speak – with much disapproving shaking of heads – of the moist licentiousness, the uninhibited writhings of that interminable kiss,which, they swore, had gone on for hours , until the umpires prised the couple apart and reminded the batsman of his duty to his team. ‘Only in Bombay,’ people said, with that cocktail of arousal and disapproval that only a scandal can properly mix’n’shake. ‘What a loose town, yaar, I swear.’
    In Aurora’s picture, the Brabourne stadium in its excitement had closed in around the two smoochers, the ogling stands had curved up and over them, almost blotting out the sky, and in the audience were pop-eyed movie stars – a few of whom really had been present – and slavering politicians and coolly observant scientists and industrialists slapping their thighs and making dirty jokes. Even the cartoonist R. K. Laxman’s celebrated Common Man,, was perched in the East Stand bleachers, looking shocked in his goofy, unworldly way. So it had become a state-of-India painting, a snapshot of cricket’s arrival at the heart of the national consciousness, and, more controversially, a generational cry of sexual revolt. The explicit hyperbole of the kiss – a tangle of womanly limbs and the cricketer’s pads and whites that recalled the eroticism of the Tantric carvings at the Chandela temples of Khajuraho – was described by a liberal art critic as ‘the call of Youth for Freedom, an act of defiance under the very noses of the Status Quo’, and by a more conservative editorial commentator as ‘an obscenity fit to be burned in the public square’. Abbas Ali Baig was forced to deny publicly that he had kissed the girl back; the popular cricket columnist ‘A.F.S.T.’ wrote a witty piece in his defence, suggesting that mere artists should henceforth cease to poke their long brushes into the really important things of life, such as cricket; and after a time the little scandal seemed to have fizzled out. But in the following series, against Pakistan, poor Baig scored only 1, 13, 19 and 1, was dropped from the team, and hardly ever played for India again. He became the target of a vicious young political cartoonist, Raman Fielding, who – in a parody of Aurora’s old Chipkali pictures – signed his caricatures with a little frog, usually shown making a snide comment in the edges of the frame. Fielding – already better known, after the frog, as Mainduck – vilely and falsely accused the honourable and richly gifted Baig of having deliberately thrown away his wicket against Pakistan because he was a Muslim. ‘And this is the fellow who has the nerve to kiss our patriotic Hindu girls,’ muttered the spotted frog in the corner.
    Aurora, shocked by the attack on Baig, wrapped the painting up and stored it away. If she allowed it to be exhibited again fifteen years later, it was because she had come to think of it as a quaint period piece. The batsman concerned had retired long ago, and kissing was no longer as outrageous an activity as it had been back in those bad old days. What she had not foreseen was that Mainduck – now a full-time communalist politician, one of the founders of ‘Mumbai’s Axis,’ the party of Hindu nationalists named after the mother-goddess of Bombay, which was growing rapidly in popularity among the poor – would return to the attack.
    He no longer drew cartoons, though in the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that he would afterwards dance with my mother – who, let it be remembered, invariably used the word ‘cartoonist’ as an insult – it was always possible to discern the heavy chip on his shoulder. He seemed undecided whether he wanted to fall on his knees before the great artist and Malabar Hill grandee, or drag her down into the dirt in which he lived; and no doubt this ambiguity is what drew grand Aurora towards him, too – towards that motu-kalu, that fatty-blacky fellow who represented most of what she most profoundly abhorred. Many of my family members have had a fondness for slumming.
    Raman Fielding’s name