The Moors Last Sigh

and served the adults contraband cashew and coconut feni liquor and at night I would sit with him in the room of magic casements while he told me his fishy Goan tales. ‘Down with Mother India,’ he cried dismissively, striking an attitude, while I giggled under my sheet. ‘Viva Mother Portugoose!’
    After forty days Aurora put an end to our very own Goan invasion. ‘Mourning period is over,’ she announced. ‘Henceforth history will proceedofy.’
    ‘Colonialist,’ complained Vasco dolefully. ‘Cultural supremacist, plus.’ But – as we all did when Aurora issued a command – he obediently complied.
    I loved him; but for a long time I did not see – how could I? – the crossfire within him, the battle between his rage-to-become and his shallowness, between loyalty and careerism, between ability and desire. I did not understand the price he had paid on his way to our gates.
    He had no friends who preceded our knowledge of him; at least, none was ever mentioned or produced. He never spoke about his family, and rarely about his early life. Even his village of origin, Loutulim with its houses of red laterite stone and its windows with panes of oyster-shell, was a fact we had to take on trust. He did not speak of it, though he did let slip a reference to a period as a market porter in the north Goan town of Mapusa, and at another time there was some mention made of a casual job in the port of Marmagoa. It seemed that in the pursuit of his chosen future he had shed all affiliations of blood and place, a decision which implied a certain ruthlessness, and hinted, too, at instability. He was his own invention, and it should have occurred to Aurora–as it occurred to Abraham and to many members of their circle, as it occurred to my sisters but not to me – that the invention might not work, that in the end it might fall apart. For a long time, however, Aurora refused to hear the slightest criticism of her pet; as, afterwards, in the matter of Uma Sarasvati, another self-inventor, I refused in my turn. When a mistake of the heart is revealed as folly, we think of ourselves as fools, and ask our near-and-dear why they failed to save us from ourselves. But that is an enemy against whom no-one can defend us. Nobody could save Vasco from himself; whatever that was, whoever he might have been, or have become. Nobody could save me.

    In April 1947, when my siseer Ina was just three months old and Aurora’s pregnancy with the future Minnie-the-mouse had been confirmed, Abraham Zogoiby, proud husband and father, approached Vasco Miranda in a gruff, awkward attempt at friendliness. ‘So, if you are supposed to be a proper painter, why not make a portrait of my carrying wife and child?’
    This portrait was Vasco’s first work on canvas, which Abraham bought for him and Aurora showed him how to prime. His early work had been done on board or paper, for economic reasons; and soon after he moved into his Elephanta studio he destroyed everything he had done before that date, declaring himself to be a new man who was only now making his real start in life; only now, as he put it, being born. The Aurora portrait was that new beginning.
    I say ‘the Aurora portrait’ because, when Vasco finally unveiled it (he had refused to let anyone view the work in progress), Abraham discovered, to his fury, that Baby Ina had been wholly ignored. Having already lost half her name, my poor eldest-sister had succeeded in vanishing completely from the work of which she was a principal subject, and which had been commissioned as a direct result of her recent arrival on the scene. (New Minnie-the-bump was omitted too, but at that early stage in Aurora’s second pregnancy this was more easily excused.) Vasco had depicted my mother sitting cross-legged on a giant lizard under her chhatri, cradling empty air. Her full left breast, weighty with motherhood, was exposed. ‘What in tarnation?’ Abraham roared. ‘Miranda, men, you got eyes in your head or stones?’ But Vasco waved away all naturalistic criticisms; when Abraham pointed out that his wife had at no time posed with uncovered bosom, and that the obliterated Ina was not being breast-fed anyway, the painter’s face grew heavy with disdain. ‘Next you will be telling me there is no outsize chipkali kept upon the premises as a pet,’ he sighed. When Abraham heatedly reminded Vasco who was paying the bills, however, the artist lifted a haughty nose into the air. ‘Genius is no