The Moors Last Sigh

group.’
    Aurora shook her head. ‘What nonsense, I swear. You men. Nonsensical from beginning to end. And a weeping Arab on a horse! It serves that no-taste Bhabha right. Even a bazaar painter would not make such a stupid picture.’
    ‘I have called it The Artist as Boabdil, the Unlucky (el-Zogoybi), Last Sultan of Granada, Seen Departing from the Alhambra,’ said Vasco with a straight face. ‘Or, The Moor’s Last Sigh . I trust this choice of title will not give Abie-ji any further cause for taking offence. Appropriation of surname and family tall-stories and such-much personal material. Without, I regret, asking a by-your-leave.’
    Aurora Zogoiby stared at him in wonderment; then began, in loud and possibly Moorish sobs, to laugh. ‘Oh you naughty Vasco,’ she said at length, wiping her eyes. ‘Oh you bad, black man. How to stoppo my husband from breakofying your wicked neck, that is what I must work out.’
    ‘And you?’ Vasco asked. ‘Did you like the unlucky, rejected painting?’
    ‘I liked the unlucky, rejected painter,’ she said softly, and kissed his cheek, and was gone.

    Ten years later the Moor found his next incarnation in me; and the time came when Aurora Zogoiby, following in V. Miranda’s footsteps, also made a picture which she called The Moor’s Last Sigh  … I have lingered on these old tales of Vasco because the telling of my own story obliges me to face again, and reconquer, my fear. How am I to explain the wild, stomach-dropping-away, white-knuckle-ride scariness of living an over-accelerated life – of being forced, against my will, to live out the literal truth of the metaphors so often applied to my mother and her circle? In the fast lane, on the fast track, ahead of my time, a jet-setter right down to my genes, I burned – having no option – the candle at both ends, even though by inclination I was of the careful-conservation-of-candlewax brigade. How to communicate the werewolf-movie terror of feeling my rapidly-enlarging feet pushing against the insides of my shoes, of having hair that grew almost fast enough to see; how to make you feel the growing pains in my knees that often made it impossible for me to run? It was a kind of miracle that my spine grew straight. I have been a hothouse plant, a soldier on a perpetual forced march, a traveller caught in a flesh-and-blood time machine, perpetually out of breath, because I’ve been running faster than the years, in spite of painful knees.
    Please understand that I am not claiming to have been a prodigy of any kind. I had no early genius for chess or mathematics or the sitar. Yet I have always been, if only in my uncontrollable increases, prodigious. Like the city itself, Bombay of my joys and sorrows, I mushroomed into a huge urbane sprawl of a fellow, I expanded without time for proper planning, without any pauses to learn from my experiences or my mistakes or my contemporaries, without time for reflection. How then could I have turned out to be anything but a mess?
    Much that was corruptible in me has been corrupted; much that was perfectible, but also capable of being demolished, has been lost.
    ‘ See how beautiful, my peacock, my mór  … ’ my mother sang as she suckled me at her breast, and I may say without false modesty that, for all my South Indian dark skin (so unattractive to society matchmakers!), and with the exception of my crippled hand, I did indeed grow up good-looking; but for a long time that right hand made me unable to see anything but ugliness in myself. And to blossom into a handsome young man when in reality I was still a child was in fact a double curse. It first denied me the natural fruits of childhood, the smallness, the childishness of being a child, and then departed, so that by the time I had indeed become a man I no longer possessed the golden-apple beauty of youth. (By the age of twenty-three my beard had turned white; and other things, too, had ceased to function as well as they once did.)
    My inside and outside have always been out of sync; you will appreciate, then, that what Vasco Miranda once called my ‘movie star hit-shapenness’ has been of little value in my life.
    I will spare you the doctors; my medical history would fill a half a dozen volumes. The tree-stump hand, the super-speed ageing, the astonishing size of me, six foot six in a country where the average male rarely grows above five foot five: all these were subjected to repeated scrutiny. (To this day the