The Moors Last Sigh

advice. ‘Today speak soft only,’ he might say. ‘Today her head is full of whispers.’ Or else: ‘Dark thoughts are on her. You must tell good joke.’ Thus forewarned, my mother’s guests could (if they were wise enough to obey Lambajan’s tips) avoid the supernova detonations of her legendary – and highly artistic – rage.

    My mother Aurora Zogoiby was too bright a star; look at her too hard and you’d be blinded. Even now, in the memory, she dazzles, must be circled about and about. We may perceive her indirectly, in her effects on others – her bending of other people’s light, her gravitational pull which denied us all hope of escape, the decaying orbits of those too weak to withstand her, who fell towards her sun and its consuming fires. Ah, the dead, the unended, endlessly ending dead: how long, how rich is their story. We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep.
    Must we also die before our souls, so long suppressed, can find utterance – before our secret natures can be known? To whom it may concern, I say No, and again I say, No Way. When I was young I used to dream – like Carmen da Gama, but for less masochistic, masturbatory reasons; like photophobic, God-bothered Oliver D’Aeth – of peeling off my skin plantain-fashion, of going forth naked into the world, like an anatomy illustration from Encyclopaedia Britannica , all ganglions, ligaments, nervous pathways and veins, set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of colour, race and clan. (In another version of the dream I would be able to peel away more than skin, I would float free of flesh, skin and bones, having become simply an intelligence or a feeling set loose in the world, at play in its fields, like a science-fiction glow which needed no physical form.)
    So, in writing this, I must peel off history, the prison of the past. It is time for a sort of ending, for the truth about myself to struggle out, at last, from under my parents’ stifling power; from under my own black skin. These words are a dream come true. A painful dream, that I do not deny; for in the waking world a man’s not as easy to flay as a banana, no matter how ripe he be. And Aurora and Abraham will take some shaking off.
    Motherness – excuse me if I underline the point – is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet. Ladies-O, gents-O: I’m talking major mother country. The year I was born, Mehboob Productions’ all-conquering movie Mother India – three years in the making, three hundred shooting days, in the top three all-time mega-grossing Bollywood flicks–hit the nation’s screens. Nobody who saw it ever forgot that glutinous saga of peasant heroinism, that super-slushy ode to the uncrushability of village India made by the most cynical urbanites in the world. And as for its leading lady– O Nargis with your shovel over your shoulder and your strand of black hair tumbling forward over your brow! – she became, until Indira-Mata supplanted her, the living mother-goddess of us all. Aurora knew her, of course; like every other luminary of the time the actress was drawn towards my mother’s blazing flame. But they didn’t hit it off, perhaps because Aurora could not refrain from raising the subject – how close to my own heart! – of mother-son relations.
    ‘The first time I saw that picture’, she confided to the famous movie star on the high terrace at Elephanta , ‘I took one look at your Bad Son, Birju, and I thought, O boy, what a handsome guy – too much sizzle, too much chilli, bring water. He may be a thief and a bounder, but that is some A-class loverboy goods. And now look– you have gone and marry-o’ed him! What sexy lives you movie people leadofy: to marry your own son, I swear, wowie.’
    The film actor under discussion, Sunil Dutt, stood stiffly beside his wife and sipped lemonade, flushing. (In those days Bombay was a ‘dry’ state, and even though whisky-soda was plentiful at Elephanta , the actor was making a moral point.) ‘Auroraji, you are mixing truth and make-believe,’ he said pompously, as if it were a sin. ‘Birju and his mother Radha are fictions only, in two dimensions on the silver screen; but we are flesh and blood, available in full 3D – as guests in your fine home.’ Nargis, sipping nimbu-pani,