The Moors Last Sigh

southern Spain – already plagued by unemployment problems – from the jobless zones of La Mancha and Extremadura, eager for work in restaurants, hotels or domestic service; so household servants were as readily available in Benengeli as in Bombay) spoke of the frightening patterns of his behaviour, in which periods of utterly withdrawn stillness would characteristically be punctuated by gabbled harangues on abstruse, even incomprehensible themes, and embarrassing revelations of the most intimate details of his past, and chequered, career. There were colossal drinking jags, and descents into wild depressions during which he railed manically against the savage mischances of his life, notably his love of one ‘Aurora Zogoiby’ and his fear of a ‘lost needle’ that he believed to be making its inexorable way towards his heart. But he paid well, and punctually, and so he kept his staff.
    Perhaps Vasco’s life and Abraham’s were not so different after all. In the aftermath of Aurora Zogoiby’s death they both became recluses, Abraham in his high tower and Vasco in his; they both sought to bury the pain of her loss beneath new activity, new enterprises, no matter how ill-conceived. And they both, as I would learn, claimed to have seen her ghost.

    ‘She walks around here. I’ve seen her.’ Abraham in sky-orchard with stuffed dog confessed to a vision – driven, for the first time in his life, and after a lifetime of utter scepticism on the subject, to allow the possibility of life after death to stumble off his irreligious tongue. ‘She won’t wait for me; eludes me in the trees.’ Ghosts like children like to play hide-and-seek. ‘She is not at rest. I know she is not at rest. What can I do to give her peace?’ To my eye it was Abraham who seemed agitated, unable to accustom himself to her loss. ‘Maybe if her work finds its resting-place,’ he hypothesised, and there followed the huge Zogoiby Bequest, under the terms of which all of Aurora’s own collection of her work – many hundreds of pieces! – was donated to the nation on condition that a gallery was built in Bombay to store and display it properly. But in the aftermath of the Meerut massacres, the Hindu-Muslim riots in Old Delhi and elsewhere, art was not a government priority, and the collection – apart from a few masterpieces which were put on show at the National Gallery in Delhi – languished. Bombay’s civic authorities, being Mainduck-controlled, were not prepared to make good the funding which the central government’s exchequer had denied. ‘Then damn and blast all politicos,’ cried Abraham. ‘Self-help is best policy of all.’ He found other backers to join him in the project; there was money from the rapidly expanding Khazana Bank and also from the super-stockbroker V. V. Nandy, whose George Soros-sized raids on the world’s currency markets were acquiring legendary status, the more so because they came from a Third World source. ‘The Crocodile is becoming a post-colonial hero to our young,’ Abraham told me, hee-hee’ing at the vagaries of fate. ‘He fits their empire-strikes-back plus get-rich-quick double bill.’ A prime site was found – one of the few surviving old-time Parsi mansions on Cumballa Hill (‘How old?’ – ‘Old, men. From old time’) – and a brilliant young art theorist and devotee of Aurora’s oeuvre, Zeenat Vakil, already the author of an influential study of the Mughal Hamza-nama cloths, was appointed curator. Dr Vakil at once set about compiling an exhaustive catalogue, and began work, too, on an accompanying critical appreciation, Imperso-Nation and Dis/Semi/Nation: Dialogics of Eclecticism and Interrogations of Authenticity in A.Z. , which gave the Moor sequence – including the previously unseen late pictures – its rightful, central place in the corpus, and would do much to fix Aurora’s place in the ranks of the immortals. The Zogoiby Bequest opened to the public just three years after Aurora’s sad demise; there followed a certain amount of inevitable if short-lived controversy, for example over the early, and to some eyes incestuous, Moor pictures – those ‘panto-paintings’ that she had made so lightly long ago. But high in Cashondeliveri Tower her ghost still walked.
    Now Abraham began to express the conviction that her death had not been the straightforward accident that everyone had supposed. Dabbing at a rheumy eye he said in an unsteady voice that those who