The Moors Last Sigh

rivals’ fortunes. Aurora Plunged Into Darkness , said the headline on the Times’s op-ed page, but for Indira, Another New Dawn .
    Elsewhere in town, at the Gandhys’ Chemould Gallery, the work of the young sculptor Uma Sarasvati was receiving its first Bombay showing. The centrepiece of the show was a group of seven roughly spherical, metre-high stone pieces with a small hollow scooped out at the top and filled with richly coloured powders – scarlet, ultramarine, saffron, emerald, purple, orange, gold. This work, entitled Alterations in/Reclamations of the Essence of Motherhood in the Post-Secularist Epoch , had been the hit of the Documenta in Germany the year before, and had only now returned after showings in Milan, Paris, London and New York. Back home, the critics who had mauled Aurora Zogoiby hailed Uma as Indian art’s new star – young, beautiful, and driven by her strong religious faith.
    These were sensational events; but for me the shock of the two shows was of a more personal nature. My first exposure to Uma’s work – for until this moment she had maintained her ban on my visiting her Baroda studio – was also my first intimation that she was in any sense religious. That she should now commence giving interviews declaring herself a devotee of Lord Ram was bewildering, to say the least. For days after her opening she professed herself to be ‘busy’, but at length she agreed to meet me at the Retiring Rooms above Victoria Terminus, and I asked her why she had concealed so great a part of her mind from me.
    ‘You even called Mainduck a bastard,’ I reminded her. ‘And now the papers are full of you spouting out this stuff that will be music to his ears.’
    ‘I did not tell you before, because religion is a private business,’ she said. ‘And, as you know, I am maybe too much a private person. Also, I do think Fielding is a goonda and a salah and a snake, because he is trying to make my love of Ram into his weapon to hit out at “Mughals”, i.e. what-else-but Muslims. But my dear boy’ – she persisted in using such youthy epithets even though, in 1979, I had been alive for twenty-two years, and my body had turned forty-four – ‘you must see that just as you are from a tiny minority, so I am a child of the gigantic Hindu nation, and as an artist I must reckon with the same. I must make my own encounter with origins, my own accommodations with eternal verities. And it is just none of your business, mister; no, not at all. Plus, if I am such a fanatic, then, please, sir, what am I doing with you?’ Which was a reasonable point.
    Aurora, in deep retreat at Elephanta , had a different view. ‘That girl of yours is the most ambitious person I ever met, excuse me,’ she told me. ‘Bar none. She sees how the breeze is changeofying and her public attitudes are blowing in that wind. Wait on; in two minutes she will be standing on MA platforms and shriekofying with hate.’ Then her face grew dark. ‘You think I don’t know how hard she workoed to wreckofy my show?’ she said softly. ‘You think I haven’t traced her links to those people who wrote that abuse?’
    This was too much; it was unworthy. Aurora in her emptied studio – for all the Moors were down at the Prince of Wales Museum–faced me hollow-eyed across an untouched canvas with brushes falling from her piled-up hair, like arrows missing their mark. I stood in the doorway, fuming. I had come for a fight – because there had been a great shock for me in her show, too; until it opened I had not been shown those monochrome canvases in which her lozenged Moor and his snow-white Chimène made love while the black mother watched. Aurora’s gibes about Uma – which were pretty rich, I raged inwardly, coming from Main-duck’s secret mistress! – allowed me to start lashing out. ‘I am sorry your show got panned,’ I yelled. ‘But even if Uma wanted to fix the notices, Mummyji, how could she do it? Don’t you realise she was embarrassed that she was praised at your expense? Poor girl is so red-faced she doesn’t dare to come over! From the beginning she worshipped you, and you rewarded her by throwing filth. Your persecution mania has gotten out of control! And as to tracing links, how do you think I felt to see those pictures of you peeping-tomming at us in our room? How long have you been prying and spying?’
    ‘Save yourself from that woman,’ said Aurora, quietly. ‘She is a madwoman and a liar too. She is a