The Moors Last Sigh

battle – heard my happy news:
    Chhaggan shrugged. As though to say: ‘You never were one of us, rich boy. Neither Hindu nor Mahratta. Just a cook with an upper-class blood-line and a fist. You came here to gratify that hammer. Pervert! Just another psycho in search of a rumble – you cared nothing for our cause. And now your class, your heredity, has come to fetch you back. You won’t be here much longer. Why would you stay? You’ve grown too old to fight.’
    But Sammy Hazaré the Tin-man gave me looks. So many that I knew at once whose hand had slipped papers under my pillow, who was my father’s man. Sammy the Christian, seduced by Abraham the Jew.
    O, Moor, beware, I murmured to myself. The conflict approaches, and the future itself is the prize. Beware, lest in that battle you lose your silly head.

    Later, in his high-rise garden, Abraham told me how often, in those long years, Aurora had yearned to extend forgiveness’s hand, and – undoing her gesture of banishment – beckon me home. But then she would remember my voice, my unspeakable words that could not be rendered unspoken, and harden her maternal heart. When I heard this, the lost years began to prey upon me, to obsess me day and night. In my sleep I invented time machines that would permit me to travel back beyond the frontier of her death; and I would be furious, when I woke, that the journey was just a dream.
    After some months of such frustrations I remembered Vasco Miranda’s portrait of my mother, and realised that in this small way, at least, I might be able to have her back again: in long art, if not short life. Of course her own work was full of self-portraits, but the lost Miranda picture, overpainted and sold off, somehow came to represent my lost mother, Abraham’s lost wife. If we could but rediscover it! It would be like her younger self reborn; it would be a victory over death. Excitedly I told my father my idea. He frowned. ‘That picture.’ But his objections had faded with the years. I could see desire dawning on his face. ‘But it was destroyed long ago.’
    ‘Not destroyed,’ I corrected him. ‘Painted over. The Artist as Boabdil, the Unlucky (el-Zogoybi), Last Sultan of Granada, Seen Departing from the Alhambra. Or, The Moor’s Last Sigh . That tearful equestrian chocolate-box picture which Mummyji said was worse than even a bazaar painter’s scrawl. To remove it would be no loss. And then we would have her back.’
    ‘Remove it, you say.’ I could tell that the idea of vandalising a Miranda, in particular the Miranda in which Vasco had purloined our own family legends, found favour with old Abraham in his lair. ‘This is possible?’
    ‘It must be,’ I said. ‘There must be experts. If you wish I can inquire.’
    ‘But the picture is Bhabha’s,’ he said. ‘Will that old bastard sell?’
    ‘If the price is right,’ I replied. And, to clinch it, added, ‘Doesn’t matter how big a bastard he is, he isn’t as big as you.’
    Abraham cackled and picked up the telephone. ‘Zogoiby,’ he told the flunkey at the other end. ‘C.P. is?’ And a moment later, ‘Arré, C.P. Why are you hiding out from your pals?’ Then some phrases – almost barked – of negotiations, in which the staccato toughness of his delivery was strikingly at odds with the words he employed, soft, curlicued words of flattery and deference. Then a sudden cessation, as of a car engine that unexpectedly stalls; and Abraham replaced the handset with a puzzle on his brow. ‘Stolen,’ he said. ‘Within last weeks. Stolen from his private home.’

    News came from Spain that the veteran (and increasingly eccentric) Indian-born painter V. Miranda, presently a resident of the Andalusian village of Benengeli, had injured himself while attempting the enigmatic feat of painting a full-grown elephant from underneath. The elephant, an ill-fed circus performer hired for the day at excessive expense, had been intended to climb a concrete ramp, specially constructed for the purpose by the celebrated (but temperamentally erratic) Señor Miranda himself, and then to stand upon a sheet of improbably reinforced glass, beneath which old Vasco had set up his easel. Journalists and television crews massed in Benengeli to record this curious stunt. However, Isabella the elephant, in spite of being accustomed to all manner of three-ring tomfoolery, had the delicacy of sensibility to refuse to co-operate in what some local commentators had dubbed a