A Son of the Circus Read online

  Lowji made a name for himself in the short-lived movement called Disaster Medicine, especially during the demonstrations prior to Independence and the bloody rioting before and after the Partition. To this day, volunteer workers in Disaster Medicine attempt to revive the movement by quoting his much-advertised advice. “In order of importance, look for dramatic amputations and severe extremity injuries before treating fractures or lacerations. Best to leave all head injuries to the experts, if there are any.” Any experts, he meant—there were always head injuries. (Privately, he referred to the failed movement as Riot Medicine—“something India will always be in need of,” old Lowji said.)

  He was the first in India to respond to the revolutionary change in thinking about the origin of low back pain, for which he said the credit belonged to Harvard’s Joseph Seaton Barr. Admittedly, Farrokh’s esteemed father was better remembered at the Duckworth Sports Club for his ice treatments of tennis elbow and his habit, when drinking, of denouncing the waiters for their deplorable posture. (“Look at me! I have a hump, and I’m still standing up straighter than you!”) In reverence of the great Dr. Lowji Daruwalla, rigidity of the spine was a habit ferociously maintained by the old Parsi steward Mr. Sethna.

  Why, then, did the younger Dr. Daruwalla not revere his late father?

  It wasn’t because Farrokh was the second-born son and the youngest of Lowji’s three children; he’d never felt slighted. Farrokh’s elder brother, Jamshed, who’d led Farrokh to Vienna and now practiced child psychiatry in Zürich, had also led Farrokh to the idea of a European wife. But old Lowji never opposed mixed marriages—not on principle, surely, and not in the case of Jamshed’s Viennese bride, whose younger sister married Farrokh. Julia became old Lowji’s favorite in-law; he preferred her company even to the London otologist who married Farrokh’s sister—and Lowji Daruwalla was an unabashed Anglophile. After Independence, Lowji admired and clung to whatever Englishness endured in India.

  But the source of Farrokh’s lack of reverence for his famous father wasn’t old Lowji’s “Englishness,” either. His many years in Canada had made a moderate Anglophile out of the younger Dr. Daruwalla. (Granted, Englishness in Canada is quite different from in India—not politically tainted, always socially acceptable; many Canadians like the British.)

  And that old Lowji was outspoken in his loathing for Mohandas K. Gandhi did not upset Farrokh in the slightest. At dinner parties, especially with non-Indians in Toronto, the younger Daruwalla was quite pleased at the surprise he could instantly evoke by quoting his late father on the late Mahatma.

  “He was a bloody charka-spinning, loin-clothed pandit!” the senior Daruwalla had complained. “He dragged his religion into his political activism—then he turned his political activism into a religion.” And the old man was unafraid of expressing his views in India—and not only in the safety of the Duckworth Club. “Bloody Hindus… bloody Sikhs… bloody Muslims,” he would say. “And bloody Parsis, too!” he would add, if the more fervent of the Zoroastrian faith pressed him for some display of Parsi loyalty. “Bloody Catholics,” he would murmur on those rare occasions when he appeared at St. Ignatius—only to attend those dreadful school plays in which his own sons took small parts.

  Old Lowji declared that dharma was “sheer complacency—nothing but a justification for nondoing.” He said that caste and the upholding of untouchability was “nothing but the perpetual worship of shit—if you worship shit, most naturally you must declare it the duty of certain people to take the shit away!” Absurdly, Lowji presumed he was permitted to make such irreverent utterances because the evidence of his dedication to crippled children was unparalleled.

  He railed that India was without an ideology. “Religion and nationalism are our feeble substitutes for constructive ideas,” he pronounced. “Meditation is as destructive to the individual as caste, for what is it but a way of diminishing the self? Indians follow groups instead of their own ideas: we subscribe to rituals and taboos instead of establishing goals for social change—for the improvement of our society. Move the bowels before breakfast, not after! Who cares? Make the woman wear a veil! Why bother? Meanwhile, we have no rules against filth, against chaos!”

  In such a sensitive country, brashness is frankly stupid. In retrospect, the younger Dr. Daruwalla realized that his father was a car bomb waiting to happen. No one—not even a doctor devoted to crippled children—can go around saying that “karma is the bullshit that keeps India a backward country.” The idea that one’s present life, however horrible, is the acceptable payment for one’s life in the past may fairly be said to be a rationale for doing nothing conducive to self-improvement, but it’s surely best not to call such a belief “bullshit.” Even as a Parsi, and as a convert to Christianity—and although Farrokh was never a Hindu—the younger Dr. Daruwalla saw that his father’s overstatements were unwise.

  But if old Lowji was dead set against Hindus, he was equally offensive in speaking of Muslims—“Everyone should send a Muslim a roast pig for Christmas!”—and his prescriptions for the Church of Rome were dire indeed. He said that every last Catholic should be driven from Goa, or, preferably, publicly executed in remembrance of the persecutions and burnings at the stake that they themselves had performed. He proposed that “the disgusting cruelty depicted on the crucifix shouldn’t be allowed in India”—he meant the mere sight of Christ on the cross, which he called “a kind of Western pornography.” Furthermore, he declared that all Protestants were closet Calvinists—and that Calvin was a closet Hindu! Lowji meant by this that he loathed anything resembling the acceptance of human wretchedness—not to mention a belief in divine predestination, which Lowji called “Christian dharma.” He was fond of quoting Martin Luther, who had said: “What wrong can there be in telling a downright good lie for a good cause and for the advancement of the Christian Church?” By this Lowji meant that he believed in free will, and in so-called good works, and in “no damn God at all.”

  As for the car bomb, there was an old rumor at the Duckworth Club that it had been the brainchild of a Hindu-Muslim-Christian conspiracy—perhaps the first cooperative effort of its kind—but the younger Dr. Daruwalla knew that even the Parsis, who were rarely violent, couldn’t be ruled out as contributing assassins. Although old Lowji was a Parsi, he was as mocking of the true believers of the Zoroastrian faith as he was of any true believers. Somehow, only Mr. Sethna had escaped his contempt, and Lowji stood alone in Mr. Sethna’s esteem; he was the only atheist who’d never suffered the zealous steward’s undying scorn. Perhaps it was the hot-tea incident that bound them together and overcame even their religious differences.

  To the end, it was the concept of dharma that Lowji could least leave alone. “If you’re born in a latrine, it’s better to die in the latrine than to aspire to a better-smelling station in life! Now I ask you: Is that not nonsense?” But Farrokh felt that his father was crazy—or that, outside the field of orthopedic surgery, the old humpback simply didn’t know what he was talking about. Even beggars aspired to improve, didn’t they? One can imagine how the calm of the Duckworth Club was often shattered by old Lowji declaring to everyone—even the waiters with bad posture—that caste prejudice was the root of all evil in India, although most Duckworthians privately shared this view.

  What Farrokh most resented about his father was how the contentious old atheist had robbed him of a religion and a country. More than intellectually spoiling the concept of a nation for his children, because of his unrestrained hatred of nationalism, Dr. Lowji Daruwalla had driven his children away from Bombay. For the sake of their education and refinement, he’d sent his only daughter to London and his two sons to Vienna; then he had the gall to be disappointed with all three of them for not choosing to live in India.

  “Immigrants are immigrants all their lives!” Lowji Daruwalla had declared. It was just another of his pronouncements, but this one had a lasting sting.

  Austrian Interlude

  Farrokh had arrived in Au
stria in July of 1947 to prepare for his undergraduate studies at the University of Vienna; hence he missed Independence. (Later he thought he’d simply not been at home when it counted; thereafter, he supposed, he was never “at home.”) What a time to be an Indian in India! Instead, young Farrokh Daruwalla was acquainting himself with his favorite dessert, Sachertorte mit Schlag, and making himself known to the other residents of the Pension Amerling on the Prinz Eugene Strasse, which was in the Soviet sector of occupation. In those days, Vienna was divided in four. The Americans and British grabbed the choicest residential districts, and the French took the best shopping areas. The Russians were realistic: they settled themselves in the outlying working-class precincts, where all the industry was, and they crouched around the Inner City, near the embassies and government buildings.

  As for the Pension Amerling, its tall windows, with the rusted-iron flower boxes and yellowing curtains, overlooked the war rubble on the Prinz Eugene Strasse and faced the chestnut trees of the Belvedere Gardens. From his third-story bedroom window, young Farrokh could see that the stone wall between the upper and the lower Belvedere Palace was pockmarked from machine-gun fire. Around the corner, on the Schwindgasse, the Russians had taken charge of the Bulgarian Embassy. There was no explanation for the round-the-clock armed guard in the foyer of the Polish Reading Room. On the Schwindgasse corner of the Argentinierstrasse, the Café Schnitzler was emptied periodically so that the Soviets could conduct a bomb search. Sixteen out of 21 districts had Communist police chiefs.

  The Daruwalla brothers were certain that they were the only Parsis in the occupied city, if not the only Indians. To the Viennese, they didn’t look especially Indian; they weren’t brown enough. Farrokh wasn’t as fair-skinned as Jamshed, but both brothers reflected their faraway Persian ancestry; to some Austrians, they might have looked like Iranians or Turks. To most Europeans, the Daruwalla brothers more closely resembled the immigrants from the Middle East than those from India; yet, if Farrokh and Jamshed weren’t as brown as many Indians, they were browner than most Middle Easterners—browner than Israelis and Egyptians, browner than Syrians and Libyans and the Lebanese, and so on.

  In Vienna, young Farrokh’s first racial mistreatment occurred when a butcher mistook him for a Hungarian Gypsy. On more than one occasion, Austria being Austria, Farrokh was jeered by drunks in a Gasthof; they called him a Jew, of course. And before Farrokh’s arrival, Jamshed had discovered it was easier to find housing in the Russian sector; no one really wanted to live there, and so the pensions were less discriminatory. Jamshed had earlier tried to rent an apartment on the Mariahilferstrasse, but the landlady had refused him on the grounds that he would create unwelcome cooking smells.

  It wasn’t until he was in his fifties that Dr. Daruwalla appreciated the irony: he’d been sent away from home precisely at the time India became its own country; he would spend the next eight years in a war-damaged city that was occupied by four foreign powers. When he returned to India in September of 1955, he just missed the Flag Day festivities in Vienna. In October, the city celebrated the official end of the occupation—Austria was its own country, too. Dr. Daruwalla wouldn’t be on hand for the historic event; once more, he’d moved just ahead of it.

  As the smallest of footnotes, the Daruwalla brothers were nonetheless among the actual recorders of Viennese history. Their youthful vigor for foreign languages made them useful transcribers of the minutes for the Allied Council meetings, at which they scribbled profusely but were told to remain as silent as cobblestones. The British representative had vetoed their promotion to the more sought-after jobs of interpreters, the stated reason being that they were only university students. (It was racially reassuring that at least the British knew they were Indians.)

  If only as flies on the wall, the Daruwalla brothers were witnesses to the many grievances expressed against the methods of occupation conducted in the old city. For example, both Farrokh and Jamshed attended the investigations of the notorious Benno Blum Gang—a cigarette-smuggling ring and the alleged black marketeers of the much-desired nylon stocking. For the privilege of operating unmolested in the Soviet sector, the Benno Blum Gang eliminated political undesirables. Naturally, the Russians denied this. But Farrokh and Jamshed were never molested by the alleged cohorts of Benno Blum, who himself was never apprehended or even identified. And the Soviets, in whose sector the two brothers lived for years, never once bothered them.

  At the Allied Council meetings, young Farrokh Daruwalla’s harshest treatment came from a British interpreter. Farrokh was transcribing the minutes for a reinvestigation of the Anna Hellein rape and murder case when he discovered an error in translation; he quickly pointed it out to the interpreter.

  Anna Hellein was a 29-year-old Viennese social worker who was dragged off her train by a Russian guard at the Steyregg Bridge checkpoint on the United States-Soviet demarcation line; there she was raped and murdered and left on the rails, later to be decapitated by a train. A Viennese witness to all this, a local housewife, was quoted as saying that she didn’t report the incident because she was sure that Fräulein Hellein was a giraffe.

  “Excuse me, sir,” young Farrokh said to the British interpreter. “You’ve made a slight error. Fräulein Hellein was not mistaken for a giraffe.”

  “That’s what the witness said, mate,” the interpreter replied. He added, “I don’t care to have my English corrected by a bloody wog.”

  “It isn’t your English that I’m correcting, sir,” Farrokh said. “It’s your German.”

  “It’s the same word in German, mate,” the British interpreter said. “The Hausfrau called her a bloody giraffe!”

  “Nur Umgangssprache,” Farrokh Daruwalla said. “It’s merely colloquial speech; giraffe is Berliner slang—for a prostitute. The witness mistook Fräulein Hellein for a whore.”

  Farrokh was almost relieved that his assailant was British and that the term “wog”—at least the correct racial slur—was used. Doubtless it would have unnerved him to have been mistaken for a Hungarian Gypsy twice. And by his bold interference, young Daruwalla had saved the Allied Council from committing an embarrassing error; it was, therefore, never entered into the official minutes that a witness to Fräulein Hellein’s rape and murder and decapitation had mistaken the victim for a giraffe. On top of everything else that the deceased had suffered, she was spared this further outrage.

  But when young Farrokh Daruwalla returned to India in the fall of 1955, this episode was as much a part of history as he felt himself to be; he didn’t come home a confident young man. Granted, he had not spent the entire eight years outside of India, but a brief visit in the middle of his undergraduate studies (in the summer of 1949) hardly prepared him for the confusion he would encounter six years later—when he came “home” to an India that would forever make him feel like a foreigner.

  He was used to feeling like a foreigner; Vienna had prepared him for that. And his several pleasant visits to London to see his sister were marred by his one trip to London that coincided with his father’s invitation to address the Royal College of Surgeons—a great honor. It was the obsession of Indians, and of former British colonies in general, to become Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons—old Lowji was extremely proud of his “F,” as it was called. The “F” would mean less to the younger Dr. Daruwalla, who would also become an F.R.C.S.—of Canada. But on the occasion of Farrokh attending his father’s lecture in London, old Lowji chose to pay tribute to the American founder of the British Orthopedic Association—the celebrated Dr. Robert Bayley Osgood, one of the few Americans to captivate this British institution—and it was during Lowji’s speech (which would go on to emphasize the problems of infantile paralysis in India) that young Farrokh overheard a most disparaging remark. It would keep him from ever considering a life in London.

  “What monkeys they are,” said a florid orthopedist to a fellow Brit. “They are the most presumptuous imitators. They observe us for all of five minutes, then they t
hink they can do it, too.”

  Young Farrokh sat paralyzed in a room of men fascinated by the diseases of bones and joints; he couldn’t move, he couldn’t speak. This wasn’t a simple matter of mistaking a prostitute for a giraffe. His own medical studies had just begun; he wasn’t sure if he understood what the “it” referred to. Farrokh was so unsure of himself, he first supposed that the “it” was something medical—some actual knowledge—but before his father’s speech had ended, Farrokh understood. “It” was only Englishness, “it” was merely being them. Even in a gathering of what his father boastfully called “fellow professionals,” the “it” was all they’d noticed—simply what of their Englishness had been successfully or unsuccessfully copied. And for the remainder of old Lowji’s exploration of infantile paralysis, young Farrokh was ashamed that he saw his ambitious father as the British saw him: a smug ape who’d succeeded in imitating them. It was the first time Farrokh realized how it was possible to love Englishness and yet loathe the British.