The Moors Last Sigh

smiled a thin smile at the rebuke hidden in the last phrase.
    ‘Even in the picture, but,’ Aurora went relentlessly on, ‘I knew right off that bad Birju had the hots for his gorgeous ma.’
    Nargis stood speechless, open-mouthed. Vasco Miranda, who could never resist a bit of trouble-making, saw the storm brewing and made haste to join in. ‘Sublimation’, he offered, ‘of mutual parent-child longings, is deep-rooted in the national psyche. The use of names in the picture makes the meaning clear. This “Birju” moniker is also used by God Krishna, isn’t it, and we know that milky “Radha” is the blue chap’s one true love. In the picture, Sunil, you are made up to look like the god, and you even fool with all the girls, throwing your stones to break their womby water-pots; which, admit it, is Krishna-esque behaviour. In this interpretation,’ and here clowning Vasco attempted unsuccessfully to convey a certain scholarly gravitas, ‘Mother India is the dark side of the Radha-Krishna story, with the subsidiary theme of forbidden love added on. But what the hell; Oedipus-schmoedipus! Have another chhota peg.’
    ‘Dirty talk,’ said the Living Mother Goddess. ‘Filthy-dirty, chhi. I heard tell that depraved artists and beatnik intellectuals came up here, but I gave you all benefit of doubt. Now I observe that I am among the blaspheming scum of the earth. How you people wallow-pollow in negative images! In our picture we put stress on the positive side. Courage of the masses is there, and also dams.’
    ‘Bad language, eh?’ mused Vasco, innocently. ‘Good for you! But in the final cut the censor must have removed it.’
    ‘ Bewaqoof! ’ shouted Sunil Dutt, provoked beyond endurance. ‘Bleddy dumbo! Not oathery, but new technology is being referred to: to wit, the hydro-electric project, as inaugurated by my goodwife in the opening scene.’
    ‘And when you say your wife,’ ever-helpful Vasco clarified, ‘you mean, of course, your mother.’
    ‘Sunil, come,’ said the legend, sweeping away. ‘If this godless anti-national gang is the world of art, then I-tho am happy to be on commercial side.’
    In Mother India , a piece of Hindu myth-making directed by a Muslim socialist, Mehboob Khan, the Indian peasant woman is idealised as bride, mother, and producer of sons; as long-suffering, stoical, loving, redemptive, and conservatively wedded to the maintenance of the social status quo. But for Bad Birju, cast out from his mother’s love, she becomes, as one critic has mentioned, ‘that image of an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mother who haunts the fantasy life of Indian males’.
    I, too, know something about this image; have been cast as a Bad Son in my turn. My mother was no Nargis Dutt – she was the in-your-face type, not serene. Catch her hauling a shovel on her shoulder! I am pleased to say that I have never seen a spade . Aurora was a city girl, perhaps the city girl, as much the incarnation of the smartyboots metropolis as Mother India was village earth made flesh. In spite of this I have found it instructive to compare and contrast our families. Mother India’s movie-husband was rendered impotent, his arms crushed by a rock; and ruined limbs play a central rôle in our saga, too. (You must judge for yourselves whether Abraham was a potent fellow or im-.) And as for Birju and Moor: dark skins and crookery were not all we had in common.
    I have been keeping my secret for too long. High time I spilt my beans.

    My three sisters were born in quick succession, and Aurora carried and ejected each of them with such perfunctory attention to their presence that they knew, long before their births, that she would make few concessions to their post-partum needs. The names she gave them confirmed these suspicions. The eldest, originally called Christina in spite of her Jewish father’s protests, eventually had her name sliced in half. ‘Stop sulking, Abie,’ Aurora commanded. ‘From now on she’s plain Ina without the Christ.’ So poor Ina grew up with only half a handle, and when the second child was born a year later matters were made worse because this time Aurora insisted on ‘Inamorata’. Abraham protested again: ‘People will confuse,’ he said plaintively. ‘And with this Ina-more it is like saying she is Ina-plus …’ Aurora shrugged. ‘Ina was a ten-pound baby, the little so-and-so,’ she reminded Abraham. ‘Head like a cannonball, hips like a ship’s