The Moors Last Sigh

her seventieth birthday, and became hysterical. Her newspaper’s headlines grew inches high, making accusations of foul play. But nothing was ever proved; Prince Henry’s body was never found, and after a decent interval the case was closed. The loss of the man who had become her closest friend and friendliest rival knocked the stuffing out of Carmen, and one night she dreamed that she was standing by a lake surrounded by forested hills, and Prince Henry was beckoning to her from the back of a wild elephant. ‘Nobody killed me,’ he told her. ‘It was just time to fold my hand.’ The next morning Aires and Carmen sat for the last time in their island garden and Carmen told her husband about the dream. Aires bowed his head, having perceived the meaning of the vision, and did not look up until he heard his wife’s china teacup fall from her lifeless hands.

    I try to imagine how Elephanta must have seemed to Great-Uncle Aires when he arrived with a stuffed dog and a broken heart, what bewilderment it must have created in his diluted spirit. What, after the near-isolation of Cabral Island, would he have made of the daily mayhem of chez nous , of Aurora’s towering ego and the great working jags which would conceal her from us for days at a time, until she staggered out of her studio cross-eyed with starvation and fatigue; of my three crazy sisters and Vasco Miranda, of thieving Miss Jaya and one-legged Lambajan and Totah and Dilly Hormuz’s myopic lust? What about me ?
    And then there was the constant come-and-go of painters and collectors and gallery-folk and gawpers and models and assistants and mistresses and nudes and photographers and packers and stone-merchants and brush-salesmen and Americans and layabouts and dope-fiends and professors and journalists and celebrities and critics and the endless talk about the West as problematic and the myth of authenticity and the logic of dream and the languid contours of Sher-Gil’s figuration and the presence in the work of B. B. Mukherjee of both exaltation and dissent and the derivative progressivism of Souza and the centrality of the magical image and the proverb and the relationship between gesture and revealed motifs , to say nothing of rivalrous discussions of how-much and to-whom and group-hang and one-man-show and New York and London , and the arriving and departing processions of paintings, paintings, paintings. For it seemed that every painter in the country had developed the urge to make pilgrimages to Aurora’s door to ask for her blessing on their work – which she gave to the ex-banker with his luminous Indianised Last Supper , and withheld with a harrumph from the talentless New Delhi self-publicist with the beautiful dancer wife, with whom Aurora went off to practise her Ganpati routine, leaving the painter alone with his awful canvases … was this glorious too-muchness simply too much for poor old Aires? – In which case, our earlier supposition, that one boy’s Paradise could be another fellow’s Hell, would be, perhaps, well proven.
    Alas for such hypotheses! The truth was nothing of the sort. Let me say at once that Great-Uncle Aires found more than sanctuary at Elephanta . He found, to his amazement and everyone else’s, a moment of late, sweet fellowship. Not love, perhaps. But ‘something’. The ‘something’ that is far, far better than ‘nothing’, even near the end of all our half-satisfied days.
    Many of the painters who came to sit at great Aurora’s feet earned their livings in other professions and were known within our walls as – to name only a few – the Doctor, the Lady Doctor, the Radiologist, the Journalist, the Professor, the Sarangi Player, the Playwright, the Printer, the Curator, the Jazz Singer, the Lawyer, and the Accountant. It was the last of these – the artist who is without a doubt the present-day inheritor of Aurora’s fallen mantle – who adopted Aires: a fortyish floppy-haired fellow he was then, wearing huge glasses with lenses the size and shape of portable TV’s, and, behind them, an expression of such perfect innocence that it instantly made you suspicious of a prank. He had become my great-uncle’s close friend within weeks. In that last year of his life, Great-Uncle Aires became the Accountant’s regular model, and in my opinion his lover as well. The paintings are there for all to see, above all the extraordinary You Can’t Always Get Your Wish , 114×114 cms., oil on canvas, in which