The Moors Last Sigh

hooded black cloak slipped out of the fortress and down the hill. In her traitorous hand was the key to the gates. The one-legged watchman saw her and saluted. It was his mistress’s cloak. But at the foot of the hill the traitor let the cloak fall away. She stood in brilliant white with the key of Boabdil’s defeat held in her faithless hand .
    She gave it to the besieging armies, and her whiteness faded into theirs .
    The palace fell. Its image faded; into white .

    At the age of fifty-five Aurora Zogoiby allowed Kekoo Mody to curate a large retrospective of her work at the Prince of Wales Museum – the first time this institution had so honoured a living artist. Jade, china, sculpture, miniatures and antique textiles shuffled respectfully out of the way as Aurora’s pictures took their places. It was a considerable event in the life of the city. Banners advertising the show were everywhere. (Apollo Bunder, Colaba Causeway, Flora Fountain, Churchgate, Nariman Point, Civil Lines, Malabar Hill, Kemp’s Corner, Warden Road, Mahalaxmi, Hornby Vellard, Juhu, Sahar, Santa Cruz. O blessed mantra of my lost city! The places have slipped away from me for ever; all I possess of them is memory. Forgive, please, if I yield to the temptation to conjure them up, by the power of naming, before my absent eyes. Thacker’s Bookstore, Bombelli’s Cakes, Eros Cinema, Pedder Road. Om mani padmé hum …) The specially designed ‘A.Z.’ symbol was inescapable; it was on the ubiquitous fly-posted bills, and in all the papers and magazines. The opening, from which no figure of consequence in the city was absent, for to miss such an event would have been social death, felt more like a coronation than an art show. Aurora was garlanded, eulogised, and showered with flower-petals, flattery and gifts. The city bowed down before her and touched her feet.
    Even Raman Fielding, the powerful MA boss, turned up, blinking his toady eyes, and made a respectful pranam. ‘Let everyone see today what-what we do for minorities,’ he said loudly. ‘Is it a Hindu who is given this honour? Is it one of our great Hindu artists? No matter. In India every community must have its place, its leisure activity – art et cetera – all. Christians, Parsis, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews, Mughals. We accept this. This too is part of ideology of Ram Rajya, rule of Lord Ram. Only when other communities are usurping our Hindu places, when minority seeks to dictate to majority, then we say that the small also must accept to bend and move before the big. In the case of art also this applies. I myself was an artist originally. Therefore I say with some authority that art and beauty must serve national interest also. Madame Aurora, I congratulate you on your privileged exhibit. As to what art survives, rarefied-élite-intellectual or beloved-of-the-masses, noble or degenerate, self-aggrandising or demure, great-souled or gutter-sleeping, spiritual or pornographic, you will agree I am sure’ – and here he laughed to indicate a joke – ‘that-tho the Times alone will tell.’
    The next morning the Times of India (Bombay edition), along with every other newspaper in the city, would carry prominent news reports of the gala opening, and jumbo-sized reviews of the work. In these reviews, the long and distinguished career of Aurora da Gama-Zogoiby would come close to being completely destroyed. Familiar as she had become, over the years, with high praise, but also with aesthetic, political and moral attacks, with charges ranging from arrogance, immodesty and obscenity to inauthenticity and even – in the Manto-inspired Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain – covert pro-Pakistani sympathies, my mother was a thick-skinned old bird; nothing, however, had prepared her for the suggestion that she had become, quite simply, an irrelevance. Yet, in one of those disorientating but also radical shifts by which a changing society all at once reveals that it is of a new mind, the tigers of the critical fraternity, burning bright and with fearful symmetry, turned upon Aurora Zogoiby and savaged her as a ‘society artist’, out of tune with, and even ‘deleterious’ to, the temper of the age. On the same day the lead story on every front page was that of the dissolution of Parliament after the disintegration of the post-Emergency, anti-Indira coalition government; and several editorials made use of the contrast in the two old