The Moors Last Sigh

right hand lightly and said in a voice almost too quiet to be audible, ‘This hand could smash down whatever stood in its way. I would feel very safe near a hand like this.’ Then she looked into my eyes and added, ‘There is a young guy in there. I can see him looking out at me. What a combination, yaar. Youthful-spirit, plus this older-man look that I must tell you I have gone for all my life. Too hot, men, I swear.’
    So this is it, I told myself in wonderment. This prickle of tears, his throat-lump, this heat risen in the blood. My perspiration had acquired a peppery smell. I felt my self, my true self, the secret identity I had hidden so long that I feared it might no longer exist, come rising out of the corners of my being and filling my centre. Now I was nobody’s man, and also wholly, immutably and for ever, hers.
    She took away her hands; leaving behind a Moor in love.

    On the morning of Uma’s first visit my mother had decided she wanted to paint me in the nude. Nudity was nothing special in our circle; over the years many of the painters and their friends had posed for one another in the buff. Not so long ago, the guest toilet at Elephanta had been decorated by Vasco Miranda’s mural of himself and Kekoo Mody in bowler hats and nothing else. Kekoo was as thin and elongated as ever, but success and years of debauchery and carousing had plumped out Vasco, who was also much the shorter man. The interest of the painting lay in the obvious fact that the two men seemed to have exchanged penises. The cock on Vasco was astoundingly long and thin, like a pale pepperoni sausage, whereas tall Kekoo sported a squat dark organ of impressive diameter and circumference. However, both men swore that there had been no switch. ‘I have the paintbrush and he has the bankroll,’ Vasco explained. ‘What could be more appropriate?’ It was Uma Sarasvati who gave the painting the name by which it was always subsequently known. ‘Looks like Laurel and Hardon,’ she giggled, and it stuck.
    After our visit to Laurel and Hardon I found myself telling Uma about the history of the Moor pictures, and about the new project for a Nude Moor . She listened gravely as I proudly described my artistic collaboration with my mother, and then she blasted me with that huge smile, with the ray-gun beams she could unleash from her pale grey eyes. ‘It isn’t right you should stand naked in front of your Mummyji at your age,’ she reproved. ‘Let us only get to know each other better and I will be the one to sculpt your beauty in imported Carrara marble. Like the David with his too-big hand I will make your big old club the loveliest limb in the world. Until then, Mister Moor, please to save yourself for me.’
    She left soon afterwards, not wishing to disturb the great painter at work. In spite of this proof of the refinement of her sensibilities, my egotistical mother was unable to find a good word for our new friend. When I told her I would be unable to pose for her new painting on account of the long hours I felt obliged to put in at my new job at the Baby Softo offices in Worli, she erupted. ‘Don’t you Softo me,’ she yelled. ‘That little fisherwoman has her hook in you and like a stupid fish you think she only wants to play. Soon you will be out of water and she will fryofy you in ghee with ginger-garlic, mirch-masala, cumin seed, and maybe some potato chips on the side.’ She slammed her studio door, shutting me out for good; I was never asked to pose for her again.
    The picture, Mother-Naked Moor Watches Chimène’s Arrival , was as formal as Velázquez’s Las Meninas , a picture to which, in its play with sight-lines, it was somewhat in debt. In a chamber of Aurora’s fictional Malabar Alhambra, against a wall decorated with intricate geometric patterns, the Moor stood naked in the lozenge-patterned Technicolor of his skin. Behind him on the sill of a scalloped window stood a vulture from the Tower of Silence, and leaning on the wall next to this macabre casement was a sitar, with a mouse nibbling through its lacquered-melon drum. To the Moor’s left was his fearsome mother, Queen Ayxa-Aurora in flowing dark robes, holding up a full-length mirror to his nakedness. The mirror-image was beautifully naturalistic – no harlequin there, no pretence at ‘Boabdil’; just me. But the lozenged Moor was not looking at himself in the mirror, for in the doorway to his right stood a beautiful young woman – Uma,