The Moors Last Sigh

made love to her dream-image he knew it wasn’t real. But the scratches were real enough and even though he didn’t say so to Aurora his feeling that Belle had returned had as much to do with these love-marks as with the open windows and the missing elephant items.
    His brother Aires took a simpler approach to the riddle of the lost ivory-tusks and Ganeshas. He assembled the staff in the main courtyard under the peepul tree with the lower part of its trunk painted white, and in the afternoon heat he strutted up and down before them in a straw panama, collarless shirt and white duck pants held up by red braces, icily bellowing out his certain-sure conviction that one of them was a thief. The domestic servants, gardeners, boatmen, sweepers, latrine-cleaners, all faced him in a sweating, terror-stricken line, wearing the ingratiating smile of their fear while Jawaharlal the bulldog emitted a low menacing rumble and his master Aires taunted them with nicknames.
    ‘Who will speak up here?’ he demanded. ‘ Gobbledy gokhale, you? Nallappa boomdiay ? Karampal stiltskin ? Out with it, pronto!’ And the houseboys were Tweedlydum and Tweedlydee as he slapped them once each on the face, and the gardeners were nuts and spices as he poked them in the chest, Cashew, Pista, Big and Little Cardamom , and the latrine-cleaners whom of course he would not touch were Number One and Number Two .
    Aurora came running when she heard what was happening, and for the first time in her life the presence of the servants filled her with shame, she couldn’t meet their eyes, she turned to the assembled family (for impassive Epifania, Carmen with the ice-splinter in her heart and even Camoens – squirming but not, it must be pointed out, interrupting – had come out to study Aires’s interrogation technique) and in a high ascending shriek confessed, it-wasn’t-them-it-was-ME .
    ‘What?’ Aires screeched back, mocking, annoyed: a tormentor deprived of his pleasure. ‘Speak up can’t hear a word.’
    ‘Stop bullying them,’ Aurora howled. ‘They did nothing; they didn’t touch your something something elephants and their blankety blank teeth. I did it all.’
    Her father paled. ‘Baby, for what?’ The bulldog, snarling, bared his gums.
    ‘Don’t call me baby,’ she answered, defying even him. ‘It is what my mother always wanted to do. You will see: from now I am in her place. And Aires-uncle, you should lock up that crazy dog, by the way, I’ve got a pet-name for him that he really deserves: call him Jaw-jaw , that all-bark-no-bite mutt.’ And turned, head held high, and marched off, leaving her family open-mouthed in wonder: as if they had truly seen an avatar, a reincarnation, her mother’s living ghost.

    But it was Aurora who was locked up; as a punishment, she was banished to her room on a rice-and-water diet for a week. However, food and drink – idli and sambar , but also mince-and-potato ‘cutlets’, pomfret fried in breadcrumbs, spicy prawn plates, banana jelly, crème caramel, soda-pop – were smuggled up to her by doting Josy; and the old ayah also covertly brought her the instruments – charcoal, brushes, paints – through which Aurora chose, at this true moment of her coming-of-age, to make public her inner self. All that week she worked, hardly pausing for sleep. When Camoens came to the door she told him to go away, she would endure her sentence by herself and had no need of an ex-jailbird father who would not fight to keep his own daughter out of the lock-up, and he hung his head and obeyed.
    At the end of her period of house arrest, however, Aurora invited Camoens inside, making him the second person on earth to see her work. Every inch of the walls and even the ceiling of the room pullulated with figures, human and animal, real and imaginary, drawn in a sweeping black line that transformed itself constantly, that filled here and there into huge blocks of colour, the red of the earth, the purple and vermilion of the sky, the forty shades of green; a line so muscular and free, so teeming, so violent, that Camoens with a proud father’s bursting heart found himself saying, ‘But it is the great swarm of being itself.’ As he grew accustomed to his daughter’s newly revealed universe he began to see her visions: she had put history on the walls, King Gondophares inviting St Thomas the Apostle to India; and from the North, Emperor Asoka with his Pillars of Law, and the lines of people waiting to