The Moors Last Sigh

to seize the love offered with many blushes and sarcasms by Aurora da Gama in the chiaroscuro of the Ernakulam godown …
    Over the years Abraham found his father wealthy and fat in one tile, seated upon cushions in the Position of Royal Ease and waited upon by eunuchs and dancing-girls; but only a few months later he was skinny and mendicant in another twelve-by-twelve scenario. Now Abraham understood that the former caretaker had left all restraints behind him, and was oscillating wildly through a life that had deliberately been allowed to go out of control. He was a Sindbad seeking his fortune in the oceanic happenstance of the earth. He was a heavenly body which had managed by an act of will to wrench itself free of its fixed orbit, and now wandered the galaxies accepting whatever destiny might provide. It seemed to Abraham that his father’s breakaway from the gravity of the everyday had used up all his reserves of will-power, so that after that initial and radical act of transformation he was broken-ruddered, at the mercy of the winds and tides.
    As Abraham Zogoiby neared adolescence, Solomon Castile began to appear in semi-pornographic tableaux whose appropriateness for a synagogue would have been the subject of much controversy had they come to anyone else’s notice but Abraham’s. These tiles cropped up in the dustiest and murkiest recesses of the building and Abraham preserved them by allowing mould to form and cobwebs to gather over their more reprehensible zones, in which his father disported himself with startling numbers of individuals of both sexes in a fashion which his wide-eyed son could only think of as educational. And yet in spite of the salacious gymnastics of these activities the ageing wanderer had regained his old lugubriousness of mien, so that, perhaps, all his journeys had done no more than wash him up at the last on the same shores of discontent whence he had first set forth. On the day Abraham Zogoiby’s voice broke he was gripped by the notion that his father was about to return. He raced through the alleys of the Jewish quarter down to the waterfront where cantilevered Chinese fishing nets were spread out against the sky; but the fish he sought did not leap out of the waves. When he returned in despondency to the synagogue all the tiles depicting his father’s odyssey had changed, and showed scenes both anonymous and banal. Abraham in a feverish rage spent hours crawling across the floor in search of magic. To no avail: for the second time in his life his unwise father Solomon Castile had vanished into the blue.

    I no longer remember when I first heard the family story which provided me with my nickname and my mother with the theme of her most famous series of paintings, the ‘Moor sequence’ that reached its triumphant culmination in the unfinished, and subsequently stolen masterpiece, The Moor’s Last Sigh . I seem to have known it all my life, this lurid saga from which, I should add, Mr Vasco Miranda derived an early work of his own; but in spite of long familiarity I have grave doubts about the literal truth of the story, with its somewhat overwrought Bombay-talkie masala narrative, its almost desperate reaching back for a kind of authentication, for evidence  … I believe, and others have since confirmed, that simpler explanations can be offered for the transaction between Abraham Zogoiby and his mother, most particularly for what he did or did not find in an old trunk underneath the altar; I will offer one such alternative version by and by. For the moment, I present the approved, and polished, family yarn; which, being so profound a part of my parents’ pictures of themselves – and so significant a part of contemporary Indian art history – has, for those reasons if no other, a power and importance I will not attempt to deny.
    We have reached a key moment in the tale. Let us return briefly to young Abraham on hands and knees, frantically searching the synagogue for the father who had just abandoned him again, calling out to him in a cracked voice swooping from bulbul to crow; until at length, overcoming an unspoken taboo, he ventured for the first time in his life behind & beneath the pale blue drape with golden hem that graced the high altar … Solomon Castile wasn’t there; the teenager’s flashlight fell, instead, upon an old box marked with a Z and fastened with a cheap padlock, which was soon picked; for schoolboys have skills which adults forget as