The Moors Last Sigh

him purely by his race) are waved away. A fair-minded couple, indeed; a pair of Daniels, come to judgment … I adduce all this evidence to show why, when I say that our tale’s Aurora was no Portia, I do not mean it wholly as a criticism. She was rich (like Portia in this), but chose her own husband (unlike in this); she was certainly intelligent (like), and, at seventeen, near the height of her very Indian beauty (most unlike). Her husband was – as Portia’s could never have been – a Jew. But, as the maid of Belmont denied Shylock his bloody pound, so my mother found a way, with justice, of denying Flory the child.
    ‘Tell your mother’, Aurora commanded Abraham that night, ‘that there will be no children born in this house while she remains alive.’ She moved him out of her bedroom. ‘You do your work and I’ll do mine,’ she said. ‘But the work Flory is waiting for, that she never will see.’

    She, too, had drawn a line. That night she scrubbed her body until the skin was raw and not a trace of love’s peppery perfume remained. (‘ I scrubbofy and tubbofy …’) Then she locked and bolted her bedroom door, and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. In the following months, however, her work – drawings, paintings, and terrible little skewered dolls moulded in red clay – grew full of witches, fire, apocalypse. Later she would destroy most of this ‘Red’ material, with the consequence that the surviving pieces have gained greatly in value; they have rarely been seen in the saleroom and when they were, a fevered excitement prevailed.
    For several nights Abraham mewled piteously at her locked door, but was not admitted. At length, Cyrano-fashion, he hired a local accordionist and ballad-singer who serenaded her in the courtyard below her window, while he, Abraham, stood idiotically beside the music-man and mouthed the words of the old love-songs. Aurora opened her shutters, and threw flowers; then the water from the flower-vase; and finally the vase itself. All three scored direct hits. The vase, a heavy piece of stoneware, struck Abraham on his left ankle, breaking it. He was taken, wet and yowling, to hospital, and thereafter did not try to change her mind. Their lives moved along diverging paths.
    After the episode of the stone vase, Abraham always walked with a slight limp. Misery was etched in every line of his face, misery dragged down the corners of his mouth and damaged his good looks. Aurora continued, contrastingly, to blossom. Genius was being born in her, filling the empty spaces in her bed, her heart, her womb. She needed no-one but herself.

    She was absent from Cochin from most of the war years, at first on long visits to Bombay, where she met, and was taken up by, a young Parsee, Kekoo Mody, who had begun dealing in contemporary Indian artists – not, at the time, a very lucrative field – from his home on Cuffe Parade. Limping Abraham did not accompany her on these trips; and when she left, her invariable parting words were, ‘Okay, fine, Abie! Mindofy the store.’ So it was in his absence, away from his lamed, hangdog expression of unbearable longing, that Aurora Zogoiby grew into the giant public figure we all know, the great beauty at the heart of the nationalist movement, the loose-haired bohemian marching boldly alongside Vallabhbhai Patel and Abul Kalam Azad when they took out processions, the confidante – and, according to persistent rumours, mistress – of Pandit Nehru, his ‘friend of friends’, who would later vie with Edwina Mountbatten for his heart. Distrusted by Gandhiji, loathed by Indira Gandhi, her arrest after the Quit India resolution of 1942 made her a national heroine. Jawaharlal Nehru was jailed, too, in Ahmadnagar Fort, where in the cinquecento the warrior-princess Chand Bibi had resisted the armies of the Mughal Empire – of the Grand Mughal Akbar himself. People began saying that Aurora Zogoiby was the new Chand Bibi, standing up against a different and even more powerful Empire, and her face began to appear everywhere. Painted on walls, caricatured in the papers, the maker of images became an image herself. She spent two years in Dehra Dun District Jail. When she emerged she was twenty years old, and her hair was white. She returned to Cochin, translated into myth.Abraham’s first words to her were: ‘Store is in good shape.’ She nodded briefly, and went back to work.
    Some things had changed on Cabral Island. During Aurora’s jail