The Moors Last Sigh

had rejected the old, for it had rejected me, and there was no point bringing its attitudes into my new life. I too would be like this, I resolved; I would become this man. I studied Fielding closely. I must say as he said, do as he did. He was the new way, the future. I would learn him, like a road.
    Weeks passed, then months. At length my probationary period came to an end; I had come through some invisible test. Mainduck summoned me into his office, the one with the green frog-phone. When I entered it I saw standing before me a figure so terrifying, so bizarre, that in a rush of dreadful enlightenment I understood that I had never really left the phantasmal city, that other Bombay-Central or Central-Bombay into which I had been plunged after my arrest on Cuffe Parade and from which, in my naivety, I believed that Lambajan had rescued me in the hypothecated taxi of my blessed freedom-ride.
    It was the figure of a man, but a man with metal parts. A sizeable steel plate had somehow been bolted into the left side of his face, and one of his hands, too, was shiny and smooth. The iron breastplate, it gradually dawned on me, was not a part of his body, but an affectation, a defiant embellishment of the eerie cyborg-image created by the metal cheek and hand. It was fashion . ‘Say namaskar to Sammy Hazaré, our famous Tin-man,’ said Mainduck from his seat behind the desk. ‘He is the Captain of your appointed XI. It is time for you to take off your cook’s hat, put on your whites, and go out into the field.’

    The ‘Moor in exile’ sequence – the controversial ‘dark Moors’, born of a passionate irony that had been ground down by pain, and later unjustly accused of ‘negativity’, ‘cynicism’, even ‘nihilism’ – constituted the most important work of Aurora Zogoiby’s later years. In them she abandoned not only the hill-palace and seashore motifs of the earlier pictures, but also the notion of ‘pure’ painting itself. Almost every piece contained elements of collage, and over time these elements became the most dominant features of the series. The unifying narrator/narrated figure of the Moor was usually still present, but was increasingly characterised as jetsam, and located in an environment of broken and discarded objects, many of which were ‘found’ items, pieces of crates or vanaspati tins that were fixed to the surface of the work and painted over. Unusually, however, Aurora’s re-imagined ‘Sultan Boabdil’ was absent from what became known as the ‘transitional’ painting of the long Moor series, a diptych entitled The Death of Chimène , whose central figure – a female corpse tied to a wooden broom – was borne aloft, in the left-hand panel, by a mighty, happy throng, like a statue of rat-riding Ganesha making its way to the water on the day of the Ganpati festival. In the second, right-hand panel the crowd had dispersed, and the composition concerned itself only with a section of beach and water, in which, among broken effigies and empty bottles and soggy newspapers, lay the dead woman, lashed to her broomstick, blue and bloated, denied beauty and dignity, reduced to the status of junk.
    When the Moor did reappear it was in a highly fabulated milieu, a kind of human rag-and-bone yard that took its inspiration from the jopadpatti shacks and lean-to’s of the pavement dwellers and the patched-together edifices of the great slums and chawls of Bombay. Here everything was a collage, the huts made of the city’s unwanted detritus, rusting corrugated iron, bits of cardboard boxes, gnarled lengths of driftwood, the doors of crashed motorcars, the windshield of a forgotten tempo; and the tenements built out of poisonous smoke, out of water-taps that had started lethal quarrels between queuing women (e.g. Hindus versus Bene-Issack Jews), out of kerosene suicides and the unpayable rents collected with extreme violence by gangland Bhaiyyas and Pathans; and the people’s lives, under the pressure that is only felt at the bottom of a heap, had also become composite, as patched-up as their homes, made of pieces of petty thievery, shards of prostitution and fragments of beggary, or, in the case of the more self-respecting individuals, of boot-polish and paper garlands and earrings and cane baskets and one-paisa-per-seam shirts and coconut milk and car-minding and cakes of carbolic soap. But Aurora, for whom reportage had never been enough, had pushed her vision several stages further;