The Last Painting

Aurora’s final Moor paintings draw such visions to their extreme conclusion, thus foreshadowing her own failure to bring any real change to the India she depicts on her canvases. Not only do these last paintings give expression to her agony over the departure of her son and the death of her older daughter, Mynah, but they also reflect “the defeat of the pluralist philosophy” she has envisioned for India throughout her career. It is the period when Moraes is mistakenly imprisoned in the ghastly Bombay Central dungeons for the suspected murder of Uma Sarasvati and then bailed out by Raman Fielding. Fielding is an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, pro-caste, pro-sati Hindu nationalist whom Rushdie models after Bal Thackeray, the notorious leader of the ultra-right Shiv Sena Party. Dismayed by the grotesqueries of Hindu revivalist politics, and more so by her own son’s involvement in them, Aurora begins the last phase of her Moor paintings, also referred to as the “dark Moors” series. These final Moor paintings begin to exhibit a postmodern sense of disintegration and fragmentation evident through his “haunted figure, fluttered about by phantoms”.

The painting though modeled after the sultan captures the Moor’s own essential characteristics as the incomplete subject, the anti-hero and the homeless son. He is a “composite figure as pitiful and anonymous as those amongst whom he moved”. The painting reveals Aurora’s failure at motherhood, the heinous crime she commits on her own son and the final painting seems to be the last possible way of any reconciliation between the mother and son.