The Moors Last Sigh

accidentally into a cricketing image, ‘I don’t have any runs on the bloody board.’ Or, at another time: ‘It’s as if I don’t have any money in the bloody bank.’ Remembering Vasco’s warnings, she responded in a characteristically unpredictable fashion. One day in those dark years of the mid-Seventies – years that somehow seem darker in the memory because so little of their tyranny could be seen, because on Malabar Hill the Emergency was as invisible as the illegal skyscrapers and disenfranchised poor– she presented me, at the end of a long studio day, with an envelope containing a one-way airline ticket to Spain, and my passport, stamped with a Spanish visa. ‘Always keep it valid,’ she told me. ‘The ticket you can renew-o every year, and the visa too. I-tho will run nowhere. If that Indira who always hate-o’ed me to pieces wants to come and get, she will know where to find me. But maybe the day will come when you should takeofy Vasco’s tip. Only don’t go to the English. We have had enough of them. Go find Palimpstine; go see Mooristan.’
    And for Lambajan at the gates she also had a present: a black leather cartridge-belt, and hanging from it a police holster with a button-down flap, and inside the holster, loaded, a gun. She arranged for him to be given shooting lessons. As for me, I tucked her gift away; and thereafter, superstitiously, never failed to do as she had suggested. I kept my back door open, and made sure there was a plane standing on the runway. I had begun to come unstuck. We all had. After the Emergency people started seeing through different eyes. Before the Emergency we were Indians. After it we were Christian Jews.
    Plank, plonk, plink.

    Nothing happened. No mob came to the gate, no arresting officers arrived to perform the rôle of Indira’s avenging angels. Lamba’s gun remained in its holster. It was Mynah who was detained, but only for a few weeks, and she was treated with great courtesy and allowed to receive visitors, books and food in her cell. The Emergency ended. Life went on.
    Nothing happened, and everything. There was turmoil in Paradise. Ina died, and after her funeral Aurora came home and painted a Moor painting in which the line between land and sea had ceased to be a permeable frontier. Now she painted it as a harshly-delineated zig-zag crack, into which the land was pouring along with the ocean. The munchers of mango and singhani, the drinkers of electric-blue syrups so sugary that one endangered one’s teeth just by looking at them, the office workers in their rolled trousers with their cheap shoes in their hands, and all the barefoot lovers walking along the version of Chowpatty Beach beneath the Moor’s Palace were screaming as the sand beneath their feet sucked them down towards the fissure, along with the cutpurses, the neon-lit stalls of the snack vendors, and the trained monkeys in soldier’s uniform who had been dying-for-their-country to entertain the promenading crowds. They all poured into the jagged darkness along with the pomfret and jellyfish and crabs. The evening arc of Marine Drive itself, Marine Drive with its banal, cultured-pearl necklace of lights, had grown distorted; the very esplanade was being pulled towards the void. And in his palace on the hill, the harlequin Moor looked down at the tragedy, impotent, sighing, and old before his time. Dead Ina stood translucent by his side, the pre-Nashville Ina, shown at the height of her voluptuous beauty. This painting, Moor and Ina’s Ghost Look into the Abyss , was afterwards seen as the first in the ‘high period’ of the Moor series, those high-energy, apocalyptic canvases into which Aurora poured all her agony at the death of a daughter, all the maternal love that had remained unexpressed for too long; but also her larger, prophetic, even Cassandran fears for the nation, her fierce grief at the sourness of what had once, at least in an India of dreams, been sweet as sugar-cane juice. All that was in the pictures, yes, and her jealousy, too.
    – Jealousy? – Ofwhat, ofwhom, ofwhich? –
    Everything happened. The world changed. Uma Sarasvati arrived.

14
    T HE WOMAN WHO TRANSFORMED , exalted and ruined my life entered it at Mahalaxmi racecourse forty-one days after Ina’s death. It was a Sunday morning at the beginning of the late-year cool season, and according to ancient custom – ‘How ancient?’ you ask, and I reply Bombay-fashion, ‘Ancient , men. From ancient t