The Moors Last Sigh

Minnie, Mynah long ago! How hard for them to be their mother’s girls. Though they were beautiful, she was lovelier. The magic mirror on her bedroom wall never preferred the younger women. And she was brainier, and more gifted, and with the knack of captivating any young beaux her daughters might dare to introduce to her, of intoxicating them so deeply as to ruin the girls’ chances for good; the youths, blinded by the mother, could no longer see poor Eeny-Meenie-Miney at all … and there was her sharp tongue, and her lack of a shoulder to cry on, and her willingness to leave them for long stretches of their childhood in Miss Jaya Hé’s bony, joyless clutches … Aurora lost them all, you know, they all found ways of leaving her, though they loved her bitterly, loved her more passionately than she could love them back, loved her harder than, in the absence of her reciprocating love, they could ever feel allowed to love themselves.
    Ina, the eldest, Ina of the halved name, was the greatest beauty of the trio and also, I’m afraid, what her sisters liked to call ‘the Family Stupe’. Aurora, ever the kind and generous mama, would wave airily in Ina’s direction at the most exalted of gatherings and tell her guests, ‘She-tho is just to lookofy at, not to talk-o to. Poor girl is limitoed in brain.’ At the age of eighteen Ina screwed up the courage to have her ears pierced at Jhaveri Bros, the jewellery store on Warden Road, and was unfortunately rewarded for her courage by an infection; the backs of her ears came up in suppurating lumps which were made worse by her decision, taken for reasons of vanity, to keep pricking them and mopping up the pus. In the end she had to be treated as a hospital out-patient and the whole sorry three-month episode gave her mother a new weapon to use against her. ‘Maybe it would have been better to have them slice-o’d off,’ Aurora scolded her. ‘Maybe it would have fixofied the blockage. Because some blockage there is, isn’t it? Some ear wax or plug. Outside shape is super, but nothing ever goes in.’
    Certainly she blocked her ears against her mother, and competed with her in the only way she thought she could: by using her looks. One by one she offered herself as a model to the male artists in Aurora’s circle – the Lawyer, the Sarangi Player, the Jazz Singer – and when she unveiled her extraordinary physique in their studios its gravitational force drew them into her at once; like satellites falling from their orbits they crash-landed on her soft hills. After every conquest she arranged for her mother to discover a lover’s note or a pornographic sketch, as if she were an Apache brave displaying scalps to the big chief in his tent. She entered the field of commerce as well as art, becoming the first Indian catwalk model and cover girl – Femina, Buzz, Celebrity, Patakha, Debonair, Bombay, Bombshell, Ciné Blitz, Lifestyle, Gentleman, Eleganza , Chic-pronounced-chick – whose fame grew to rival those of the Bollywood movie stars. Ina became a silent goddess of sex, prepared to wear the most exhibitionist garments designed by the new breed of radical young designers emerging in the city, garments so revealing that many of the top girls felt embarrassed. Ina, unembarrassable, with her hip-swinging Super Sashay, stole every show. Her face on a magazine cover was estimated to increase sales by a third; but she gave no interviews, rebuffing all attempts to discover her most intimate secrets, such as the colour of her bedroom, or her favourite movie heero , or the song she liked to hum while taking a bath. No beauty tips were handed out, nor autographs given. She remained aloof: every inch the upper-crust femme from Malabar Hill, she allowed people to imagine she only modelled ‘for a laugh’. Her silence increased her allure; it allowed men to dream their own versions of her and women to imagine themselves into her strappy sandals or crocodile shoes. At the height of the Emergency, when in Bombay it was almost business-as-usual except that everyone kept missing trains because they had started leaving on time, when the plague-spores of communal fanaticism were still spreading and the disease had not yet erupted in the metropolis – in that strange time my sister Ina was voted #1 Role Model by the city’s young magazine-reading females, beating Mrs Indira Gandhi by a factor of two to one.
    But Mrs Gandhi was not the rival she was trying to defeat, and her