The Moors Last Sigh

rich man’s slave,’ he averred. ‘A canvas is not a mirror to reflect a goo-goo smile. I have seen what I have seen: a presence, and an absence. A fullness, and an emptiness. You wanted a double portrait? Behold. He who hath eyes to see, let him see.’
    ‘So now that you have completed your reflections,’ said Abraham in a voice like a knife, ‘we also have much upon which we must reflect.’
    Was Vasco summarily expelled from the premises for his outrageous slur on the character of Baby Ina? Did the infant’s mother fall upon him with bared fang and claw? Reader, he was not; she did not. Aurora Zogoiby as a mother was always a supporter of the Hard Knock schooling system, and saw no need to defend her children against the buffetings of life (was it, I wonder, because she had to collaborate with Abraham to create us that Aurora, a natural soloist, placed us firmly among her lesser works?) … However, two days after the unveiling of my mother’s portrait, Abraham summoned the painter to his office premises in Cashondeliveri Terrace – named after the nineteenth-century Parsi grandee and cut-throat moneylender Sir Duljee Duljeebhoy Cashondeliveri – to inform him that the picture was ‘surplus to requirements’ and that it was only on account of the extreme clemency and good nature of Mrs Zogoiby that he was not being thrown back into the street, ‘where,’ Abraham balefully concluded, ‘in my personal opinion, you belong.’
    After the rejection of his portrait of my mother, Vasco ceased to wax his moustache and locked himself in his studio for three days, emerging haggard and dehydrated with the canvas, wrapped in gunny sacking, under his arm. He walked out of Elephanta past the hostile stares of chowkidar and parrot and did not return for a week. Lambajan Chandiwala had just begun to allow himself to believe that the scoundrel had gone for good when he came back in a yellow-and-black taxicab, wearing a fancy new suit, and completely restored to his old, flamboyant good humour. It turned out that in his three days’ sequestration he had painted over my mother’s image, hiding it beneath a new work, an equestrian portrait of the artist in Arab attire, which Kekoo Mody – who knew nothing about the rejected painting underneath this strange new depiction of Vasco Miranda in fancy dress, weeping on a great white horse – had managed to sell almost instantly, to no less a personage than the steel billionaire, the crorepati C.J. Bhabha, for a surprisingly high price that enabled Vasco to repay Abraham for the canvas and to order several more. Vasco had discovered that his work was commercial. It was the launch of that extraordinary–and in many ways meretricious – career during which it would seem, at times, that no new hotel lobby or airport terminal was complete until it had been decorated with a gigantic V. Miranda mural that managed, somehow, to be at once pyrotechnic and banal … and in every picture Vasco painted, in every triptych and mural and fresco and glass-painting, he never failed to include a small, immaculate image of a cross-legged woman with one exposed breast, sitting on a lizard with her arms cradling nothing, unless of course they were cradling the invisible Vasco, or even the whole world; unless by seeming to be nobody’s mother she indeed became the mother of us all; and when he had finished this small detail, on which it often seemed that he lavished more attention than on the rest of the work, he would invariably obliterate it beneath the broad, sweeping brush-strokes by which his work came increasingly to be defined – those famous, phoney marks which looked so flamboyant and in which he could work so prolifically and so fast.
    ‘Did you hate-o me so much to blottofy me out?’ cried Aurora, bursting into his studio, both contrite and distraught. ‘It was impossible to wait-o five minutes till I could calm old Abie down?’ Vasco pretended not to understand. ‘But of course little Ina was not the problem,’ Aurora went on. ‘You made me look too-much sexy, and Abraham was jealous.’
    ‘So now he has nothing to be jealous about,’ Vasco said, smiling a bitter, but also flirtatious smile. ‘Or maybe he has even more cause; because now, Auroraji, you must lie buried for ever under me. Mr Bhabha will hang us on his bedroom wall, visible Vasco with invisible Aurora beneath, and even more invisible Ina in your hands. In its way, it has become a kind of family