The Moors Last Sigh

telling visiting foreign journalists that his father had been an educated, cultured, literary man, an internationalist, who had taken the name of ‘Fielding’ as a genuflection to the author of Tom Jones . ‘You call me narrow and parochial,’ he reproached the journalists. ‘Bigot and prude, you have also called. But from my childhood time, intellectual horizons were broad and free. They were – let me so put it – picaresque .’
    Aurora first heard that her work had re-ignited the wrath of this mighty amphibian when Kekoo Mody phoned in some agitation from his gallery on Cuffe Parade. The MA had announced its intention to march on Kekoo’s little showroom, claiming it was flagrantly displaying a pornographic representation of a sexual assault by a Muslim ‘sportsman’ on an innocent Hindu maiden. Raman Fielding himself was expected to head the march, and to address the crowd. Police were present, but in insufficient numbers; the danger of violence, even of a fire-attack on the gallery, was very real. ‘Wait on,’ my mother told him. ‘This little frog-face, I know how to fixofy. Give me thirty ticks.’
    Within half an hour the march had been called off. In a prepared statement, a representative of the First XI of the MA told a hastily convened press conference that on account of the imminence of Gudhi Padwa, the Maharashtrian New Year, the pornography protest had been suspended, lest an outbreak of violence – God forbid! – should mar the happy day. Additionally, in deference to the outrage of the people, the Mody Gallery had agreed to withdraw the offending painting from view. Without leaving Elephanta , my mother had averted a crisis.
    But mother: it was not a victory. It was a defeat.
    The first-ever conversation between Aurora Zogoiby and Raman Fielding had been short and to the point. For once she had not asked Abraham to do her dirty work. She made her own telephone call. I know it: I was there. Years later I learned that the telephone on Raman Fielding’s desk was a special instrument, an American import; the receiver looked like a bright green plastic frog, and croaked instead of ringing. Fielding must have put the frog against his face and heard my mother’s voice issuing through its lips.
    ‘How much?’ she asked.
    And Mainduck named his price.

    I have chosen to set down the full saga of The Kissing of Abbas Ali Baig because the entry of Fielding into our lives was a moment of some significance; and because for a while this cricket-scene was the picture for which Aurora Zogoiby became, let us say, too well-known. The threat of violence receded a little, but the work was obliged to remain concealed – could only be rescued by joining the city’s many invisibles. A principle had been eroded; a pebble bounced down a hill: plink, plonk, plank. There would be many further such erosions in the years that followed, and the bouncing pebble would be joined by many larger stones. But Aurora herself never made great claims – whether of principle or quality – for The Kissing; to her it was a jeu d’esprit, quickly conceived, lightly executed. It became, however, an albatross, and I witnessed both her ennui at having endlessly to defend it, and her fury at the ease with which this ‘teapot monsoon’ had distracted attention from the body of her real work. She was required by the public prints to speak ponderously of ‘underlying motives’ when she had had only whims, to make moral statements where there had been only (‘only’!) play, and feeling, and the unfolding inexorable logic of brush and light. She was obliged to counter accusations of social irresponsibility by divers ‘experts’, and took to muttering bad-temperedly that, throughout history, efforts to make artists socially accountable had resulted in nullity: tractor art, court art, chocolate-box junk. ‘What I resent most, but, about these Ologistas springofying up like dragon’s teeth,’ she told me, painting furiously, ‘is they force me to become too much an Olojee myself.’
    Suddenly she found herself being described – by MA voices, but not only by them – as a ‘Christian artist’, even, on one occasion, as ‘that Christian female married to a Jew’. At first such formulations made her laugh; but she soon saw that they weren’t funny. How easily a self, a lifetime of work and action and affinity and opposition, could be washed away under such an attack! ‘It’s as if’, she said to me, falling