The Moors Last Sigh

imaginary worlds whose only natural law was his own sovereign whimsicality, and Abraham’s dogmatic insistence on the importance, at that historical juncture, of a clear-sighted naturalism that would help India describe herself to herself. The Aurora of those days – and this was in part why she indulged on occasion in nights of intoxicated shallow ranting – veered uneasily between clumsily revisionist mythological paintings and an uncomfortable, even stilted return to the lizard-signed documentary pictures of her Chipkali work. It was easy for an artist to lose her identity at a time when so many thinkers believed that the poignancy and passion of the country’s immense life could only be represented by a kind of selfless, dedicated – even patriotic – mimesis. Abraham was by no means the only advocate of such ideas. The great Bengali film director Sukumar Sen, Aurora’s friend and, of all her contemporaries, perhaps her only artistic equal, was the best of these realists, and in a series of haunting, humane films brought to Indian cinema – Indian cinema, that raddled old tart! – a fusion of heart and mind that went a long way towards justifying his aesthetic. Yet these realist movies were never popular – in a moment of bitter irony they were attacked by Nargis Dutt, Mother India herself, for their Westernised élitism – and Vasco (openly) and Aurora (secretly) preferred the series of films for children in which Sen let his fantasy rip, in which fish talked, carpets flew and young boys dreamed of previous incarnations in fortresses of gold.
    And apart from Sen there was the group of distinguished writers who gathered for a time under Aurora’s wing, Premchand and Sadat Hasan Manto and Mulk Raj Anand and Ismat Chughtai, committed realists all; but even in their work there were elements of the fabulous, for example in Toba Tek Singh , Manto’s great story of the partition of the sub-continent’s lunatics at the time of the larger Partition. One of the crazies, formerly a prosperous landlord, was caught in a no-man’s land of the soul, unable to say whether his Punjabi home town lay in India or Pakistan, and in his madness, which was also the madness of the time, he retreated into a kind of celestial gibberish, with which Aurora Zogoiby fell in love. Her painting of the tragic final scene of Manto’s story, in which the hapless loony is stranded between two stretches of barbed wire, behind which lie India and Pakistan, is perhaps her finest work of the period, and his piteous gibberish, which represents not only his personal communications breakdown but our own, forms the picture’s long and wonderful title: Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal of the laltain .
    The spirit of the age, and Abraham’s own preferences, dragged Aurora towards naturalism; but Vasco reminded her of her instinctive dislike of the purely mimetic, which had led her to reject her Chipkalist disciples, and tried to turn her back towards the epic-fabulist manner which expressed her true nature, encouraging her to pay attention once again not only to her dreams but to the dream-like wonder of the waking world. ‘We are not a nation of “averagis”,’ he argued, ‘but a magic race. Will you spend your life painting boot-polish boys and air-hostesses and two acres of land? Is it to be all coolies and tractor-drivers and Nargis-y hydroelectric projects from now on? In your own family you can see the disproof of such a world-view. Forget those damnfool realists! The real is always hidden – isn’t it? – inside a miraculously burning bush! Life is fantastic! Paint that – you owe it to your fantastic, unreal son. What a giant he is, this beautiful child-man, your human time-rocket! “Chipko” to his incredible truth – stick to that, to him, not to that used-up lizard shit.’
    Because of her desire for Abraham’s good opinion, Aurora for a time put on artistic clothes that looked unnatural upon her; because Vasco was the voice of her secret identity she forgave him every excess. And because of her confusion, she drank, grew raucous, hostile and obscene. Finally, however, she took Vasco’s tip; and made me, for a long while, the talisman and centrepiece of her art.
    As for Abraham, I often saw a melancholy shadow of puzzlement crossing his face. He was certainly mystified by me. Realism confused him, so that, after one of his long absences, on his return from business trips to Delhi or