A Son of the Circus

The Bully

Dr. Lowji Daruwalla took a personal interest in the crippling conditions affecting children. As a child, he’d developed tuberculosis of the spine. Although he recovered sufficiently to become India’s most famous pioneer in orthopedic surgery, he always said it was his own experience with spinal deformity—the fatigue and the pain imposed on him—that made his commitment to the care of cripples so steadfast and long-enduring. “A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy,” Lowji said. He tended to speak in statements. As an adult, he would forever be recognized by the telltale gibbousness of Pott’s disease. All his life, Lowji was as humpbacked as a small, upright camel.

Is it any wonder that his son Farrokh felt inferior to such a commitment? He would enter his father’s field, but only as a follower; he would continue to pay his respects to India, but he’d always feel he was a mere visitor. Education and travel can be humbling; the younger Dr. Daruwalla took naturally to feelings of intellectual inferiority. Possibly Farrokh too simplistically attributed his alienation to the one conviction in his life that was as paralyzing as his conversion to Christianity: that he was utterly without a sense of place, that he was a man without a country, that there was nowhere he could go where he felt he belonged—except the circus and the Duckworth Club.

But what can be said about a man who keeps his needs and his obsessions largely to himself? When a man expresses what he’s afraid of, his fears and longings undergo revision in the telling and retelling—friends and family have their own ways of altering the material—and soon the so-called fears and longings become almost comfortable with overuse. But Dr. Daruwalla held his feelings inside himself. Not even his wife knew how out of it the doctor felt in Bombay—and how could she, if he wouldn’t tell her? Since Julia was Viennese, however little Dr. Daruwalla knew about India, he knew more than she did. And “at home” in Toronto, Farrokh allowed Julia to be the authority; she was the boss there. This was an easy privilege for the doctor to extend to his wife because she believed that he was in charge in Bombay. For so many years now, he’d got away with this.

Of course his wife knew about the screenplays—but only that he wrote them, not what he truly felt about them. Farrokh was careful to speak lightly of them to Julia. He was quite good at mocking them; after all, they were a joke to everyone else—it was easy for Farrokh to convince his wife that the Inspector Dhar movies were just a joke to him. More important, Julia knew how much Dhar (the dear boy) meant to him. So what if she had no idea how much the screenplays meant to Farrokh, too? And so these things, because they were so deeply concealed, were more important to Dr. Daruwalla than they should have been.

As for Farrokh’s not belonging, surely the same could never be said of his father. Old Lowji liked to complain about India, and the nature of his complaints was often puerile. His medical colleagues chided him for his intrepid criticism of India; it was fortunate for his patients, they said, that his surgical procedures were more careful—and more accurate. But if Lowji was off-the-wall about his own country, at least it was his own country, Farrokh thought.

A founder of the Hospital for Crippled Children in Bombay and the chairman of India’s first Infantile Paralysis Commission, the senior Daruwalla published monographs on polio and various bone diseases that were the best of his day. A master surgeon, he perfected procedures for the correction of deformities, such as clubfoot, spinal curvature and wryneck. A superb linguist, he read the work of Little in English, of Stromeyer in German, of Guerin and Bouvier in French. An outspoken atheist, Lowji Daruwalla nevertheless persuaded the Jesuits to establish clinics, both in Bombay and in Poona, for the study and treatment of scoliosis, paralysis due to birth injuries, and poliomyelitis. It was largely Muslim money that he secured to pay for a visiting roentgenologist at the Hospital for Crippled Children; it was wealthy Hindus he hit on for the research and treatment programs he initiated for arthritis. Lowji even wrote a sympathy letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an Episcopalian, mentioning the number of Indians who suffered from the president’s condition; he received a polite reply and a personal check.

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 Austria 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 think 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.

And so, before he ruled out India as a country where he could live, he’d already ruled out England. It was the summer of ’49, during an at-home stay in Bombay, when young Farrokh Daruwalla suffered the experience that would (for him) rule out living in the United States, too. It was the same summer that another of his father’s more embarrassing weaknesses was revealed to him. Farrokh discounted the continuous discomfort of his father’s spinal deformity; this was not in the category of a weakness of any kind—on the contrary, Lowji’s hump was a source of inspiration. But now, in addition to Lowji’s overstatements of a political and religious nature, the senior Daruwalla unveiled a taste for romantic movies. Farrokh was already familiar with his father’s unbridled passion for Waterloo Bridge; tears sprang to his father’s eyes at the mere mention of Vivien Leigh, and no concept in storytelling struck old Lowji with such tragic force as those twists of fate that could cause a woman, both good and pure, to fall to the lowly rank of prostitute.

But in the summer of ’49, young Farrokh was quite unprepared to find his father so infatuated with the commonplace hysteria of a film-in-progress. To make matters worse, it was a Hollywood film—of no special distinction beyond that endless capacity for compromise which was the principal gift of the film’s participants. Farrokh was appalled to witness his father’s slavishness before everyone who was even marginally involved.

One shouldn’t be surprised that Lowji was vulnerable to movie people, or that the presumed glamour of postwar Hollywood was magnified by its considerable distance from Bombay. These particular lowlifes who’d invaded Maharashtra for the purpose of moviemaking had sizably damaged reputations—even in Hollywood, where shame is seldom suffered for long—but how could the senior Daruwalla have known this? Like many physicians the world over, Lowji imagined that he could have been a great writer—if medicine hadn’t attracted him first—and he further deluded himself that a second career opportunity lay ahead of him, perhaps in his retirement. He supposed that, with more time on his hands, it would take no great effort to write a novel—and surely less to write a screenplay. Although the latter assumption is quite true, even the effort of a screenplay would prove too great for old Lowji; it was never necessarily the power of his imagination that gave him great technique and foresight as a surgeon.

Sadly, a natural arrogance often attends the ability to heal and cure. Renowned in Bombay—even recognized abroad for his accomplishments in India—Dr. Lowji Daruwalla nevertheless craved intimate contact with the so-called creative process. In the summer of 1949, with his highly principled younger son as a witness, the senior Daruwalla got what he desired.

Inexplicable Hairlessness

Often when a man of vision and character falls among the unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity, there is an intermediary, a petty villain in the guise of a matchmaker—one skilled in currying favor for small but gratifying gain. In this instance, she was a Malabar Hill lady of imposing wealth and only slightly less imposing presence; although she wouldn’t have categorized herself as a maiden aunt, she played this role in the lives of her undeserving nephews—the two scoundrel sons of her impoverished brother. She’d also suffered the tragic history of having been jilted by the same man on two different wedding days, a condition that prompted Dr. Lowji Daruwalla to privately refer to her as “the Miss Havisham of Bombay—times two.”

Her name was Promila Rai, and prior to her insidious role of introducing Lowji to the movie vermin, her communications with the Daruwalla family had been merely rude. She’d once sought the senior Daruwalla’s advice regarding the inexplicable hairlessness of the younger of her loathsome two nephews—an odd boy named Rahul Rai. At the time of the doctor’s examination, which Lowji had at first resisted conducting on the grounds that he was an orthopedist, Rahul was only 8 or 10. The doctor found nothing “inexplicable” about his hairlessness. The absence of body hair wasn’t that unusual; the lad had bushy eyebrows and a thick head of hair. Yet Miss Promila Rai found old Lowji’s analysis lacking. “Well, after all, you’re only a joint doctor,” she said dismissively, to the orthopedist’s considerable irritation.

But now Rahul Rai was 12 or 13, and the hairlessness of his mahogany skin was more apparent. Farrokh Daruwalla, who was 19 in the summer of ’49, had never liked the boy; he was an oily brat of a disquieting sexual ambiguity—possibly influenced by his elder brother, Subodh, a dancer and occasional actor in the emerging Hindi film scene. Subodh was better known for his flamboyant homosexuality than for his theatrical talents.

For Farrokh to return from Vienna to find his father on friendly terms with Promila Rai and her sexually suspect nephews—well, one can imagine. In his undergraduate years, young Farrokh had developed intellectual and literary pretensions that were easily offended by the Hollywood scum who’d ingratiated themselves with his vulnerable, albeit famous, father.

Quite simply, Promila Rai had wanted her actor-nephew Subodh to have a role in the movie; she also had wanted the prepubescent Rahul to be employed as a plaything of this court of creativity. The hairless boy’s apparently unformed sexuality made him the little darling of the Galifornians; they found him an able interpreter and an eager errand boy. And what had the Hollywood types wanted from Promila Rai in exchange for making creative use of her nephews? They wanted access to a private club—to the Duckworth Sports Club, which was highly recommended even in their lowlife circles—and they wanted a doctor, someone to look after their ailments. In truth, it was their terror of all the possible ailments of India that needed looking after, for in the beginning there was nothing in the slightest that was ailing them.

It was a shock to young Farrokh to come home to this unlikely degradation of his father; his mother was mortified by Ms father’s choice of such crude companions and by what she considered to be his father’s shameless manipulation by Promila Rai. By giving this American movie rabble unlimited access to the club, old Lowji (who was chairman of the Rules Committee) had bent a sacred law of the Duckworthians. Previously, guests of members were permitted in the club only if they arrived and remained with a member, but the senior Daruwalla was so infatuated with his newfound friends that he’d extended special privileges to them. Moreover, the screenwriter, from whom Lowji believed he had the most to learn, was unwanted on the set; this sensitive artist and outcast had become a virtual resident of the Duckworth Club—and a constant source of bickering between Farrokh’s parents.

It’s often embarrassing to discover the marital cuteness that exists among couples whose social importance is esteemed. Farrokh’s mother, Meher, was renowned for flirting with his father in public. Because there was nothing coarse in her overtures to her husband, Meher Daruwalla was recognized among Duckworthians as an exceptionally devoted wife; therefore, she’d attracted all the more attention at the Duckworth Club when she stopped flirting with Lowji. It was plain to everyone that Meher was feuding with Lowji instead. To young Farrokh’s shame, the whole Duckworth Club was put on edge by this obvious tension in the venerable Daruwalla marriage.

A sizable part of Farrokh’s summer agenda was to prepare his parents for the romance that was developing for their two sons with the fabulous Zilk sisters—“the Vienna Woods girls,” as Jamshed called them. It struck Farrokh that the state of his parents’ marriage might make an unfavorable climate for a discussion of romance of any kind—not to mention his parents’ possible reluctance to accept the idea of their only sons marrying Viennese Roman Catholics.

It was typical of Jamshed’s successful manipulation of his younger brother that Farrokh had been selected to return home for the summer in order to broach this subject. Farrokh was less intellectually challenging to Lowji; he was also the baby of the family, and therefore he appeared to be loved with the least reservation. And Farrokh’s intentions to follow his father in orthopedics doubtless pleased the old man and made Farrokh a more welcome bearer of conceivably unwelcome tidings than Jamshed would have been. The latter’s interest in psychiatry, which old Lowji spoke of as “an inexact science”—he meant in comparison with orthopedic surgery—had already driven a wedge between the father and his elder son.

In any case, Farrokh saw that it would be poor timing for him to introduce the topic of the Fräuleins Josefine and Julia Zilk; his praise of their loveliness and virtues would have to wait. The story of their courageous widowed mother and her efforts to educate her daughters would have to wait, too. The dreadful American movie was consuming Farrokh’s helpless parents. Even the young man’s intellectual pursuits failed to capture his father’s attention.

For example, when Farrokh admitted that he shared Jamshed’s passion for Freud, his father expressed alarm that Farrokh’s devotion to the more exact science of orthopedic surgery was waning. It was certainly the wrong idea to attempt to reassure his father on this point by quoting at length from Freud’s “General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks”; the concept that “the hysterical fit is an equivalent to coitus” wasn’t welcome information to old Lowji. Furthermore, Farrokh’s father absolutely rejected the notion of the hysterical symptom corresponding to a form of sexual gratification. In regard to so-called multiple sexual identification—as in the case of the patient who attempted to rip off her dress with one hand (this was said to be her man’s hand) while at the same time she desperately clutched her dress to her body (with her woman’s hand)—old Lowji Daruwalla was outraged by the concept.

“Is this the result of a European education?” he cried. “To attach any meaning whatsoever to what a woman is thinking when she takes off her clothes—this is true madness!”

The senior Daruwalla wouldn’t listen to a sentence with Freud’s name in it. That his father should reject Freud was further evidence to Farrokh of the tyrant’s intellectual rigidity and his old-fashioned beliefs. As an intended put-down of Freud, Lowji paraphrased an aphorism of the great Canadian physician Sir William Osler. A bedside clinician extraordinaire and a gifted essayist, Osler was a favorite of Farrokh’s, too. It was outrageous of Lowji to use Sir William to refute Freud; the old blunderbuss referred to the well-known Osler admonition that warns against studying medicine without textbooks—for this is akin to going to sea without a chart. Farrokh argued that this was a half-understanding of Osler and less than half an understanding of Freud, for hadn’t Sir William also warned that to study medicine without studying patients was not to go to sea at all? Freud, after all, had studied patients. But Lowji was unbudgeable.

Farrokh was disgusted with his father. The young man had left home as a mere 17-year-old; at last he was a worldly and well-read 19. Far from being a paragon of brilliance and nobility, old Lowji now looked like a buffoon. In a rash moment, Farrokh gave his father a book to read. It was Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, a modern novel—at least it was “modern” to Lowji. It was also a religious novel, which was (in Lowji’s case) akin to holding the cape before the bull. Farrokh presented the novel to his father with the added temptation that the book had given considerable offense to the Church of Rome. This was a clever bit of baiting, and the old man was especially excited to learn that the book had been denounced by French bishops. For reasons Lowji never bothered to explain, he didn’t like the French. For reasons he explained entirely too often, Lowji thought all religions were “monsters.”

It was surely idealistic of young Farrokh to imagine that he could draw his fierce, old-fashioned father into his recently acquired European sensibilities—especially by as simple a device as a favorite novel. Naively, Farrokh hoped that a shared appreciation of Graham Greene might lead to a discussion of the enlightened Zilk sisters, who, although Roman Catholics, did not share the consternation caused the Church of Rome by The Power and the Glory. And this discussion might lead to the matter of who these liberal-thinking Zilk sisters might be, and so on and so forth.

But old Lowji despised the novel. He denounced it as morally contradictory—in his own words, “a big confusion of good and evil.” In the first place, Lowji argued, the lieutenant who puts the priest to death is portrayed as a man of integrity—a man of high ideals. The priest, on the other hand, is utterly corrupted—a lecher, a drunk, an absent father to his illegitimate daughter.

“The man should have been put to death!” the senior Daruwalla exclaimed. “Only not necessarily because he was a priest!”

Farrokh was bitterly disappointed by this pig-headed reaction to a novel he so loved that he’d already read it a half-dozen times. He deliberately provoked his father by telling him that his denouncement of the book was remarkably similar to the line of attack taken by the Church of Rome.

And so the summer and the monsoon of 1949 began.

Stuck in the Past

Here come the characters who comprise the movie vermin, the Hollywood scum, the film slime—the aforementioned “unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity.” Fortunately, they are minor characters, yet so distasteful that their introduction has been delayed as long as possible. Besides, the past has already made an unwelcome intrusion into this narrative; the younger Dr. Daruwalla, who’s no stranger to unwanted and lengthy intrusions from the past, has all this time been sitting in the Ladies’ Garden of the Duckworth Club. The past has descended upon him with such lugubrious weight that he hasn’t touched his Kingfisher lager, which has grown undrinkably warm.

The doctor knows he should at least get up from the table and call his wife. Julia should be told right away about poor Mr. Lal and the threat to their beloved Dhar: MORE MEMBERS DIE IF DHAR REMAINS A MEMBER. Farrokh should also forewarn her that Dhar is coming home for supper, not to mention that the doctor owes his wife some explanation regarding his cowardice; she will surely think him a coward for not telling Dhar the upsetting news—for Dr. Daruwalla knows that, any day now, Dhar’s twin is expected in Bombay. Yet he can’t even drink his beer or rise from his chair; it’s as if he were the second bludgeoned victim of the putter that cracked the skull of poor Mr. Lal.

And all this time, Mr. Sethna has been watching him. Mr. Sethna is worried about the doctor—he’s never seen him not finish a Kingfisher before. The busboys are whispering; they must change the tablecloths in the Ladies’ Garden. The tablecloths for dinner, which are a saffron color, are quite different from the luncheon tablecloths, which are more of a vermillion hue. But Mr. Sethna won’t allow them to disturb Dr. Daruwalla. He’s not the man his father was, Mr. Sethna knows, but Mr. Sethna’s loyalty to Lowji is unquestionably extended beyond the grave—not only to Lowji’s children but even to that mysterious fair-skinned boy whom Mr. Sethna heard Lowji call “my grandchild” on more than one occasion.

Such is Mr. Sethna’s loyalty to the Daruwalla name that he won’t tolerate the gossip in the kitchen. There is, for example, an elderly cook who swears that this so-called grandchild is the very same all-white actor who parades before them as Inspector Dhar. Although Mr. Sethna privately may believe this, he violently maintains that this couldn’t be true. If the younger Dr. Daruwalla claims that Dhar is neither his nephew nor his son—which he has claimed—this is good enough for Mr. Sethna. He declares emphatically to the kitchen staff, and to all the waiters and the busboys, too: “That boy we saw with old Lowji was someone else.”

And now a half-dozen busboys glide into the failing light in the Ladies’ Garden, Mr. Sethna silently directing them with his piercing eyes and with hand signals. There are only a few saucers and an ashtray, together with the vase of flowers and the warm beer, on Dr. Daruwalla’s table. Each busboy knows his assignment: one takes the ashtray and another removes the tablecloth, precisely following the exact second when Mr. Sethna plucks up the neglected beer. There are three busboys who, between them, exchange the vermillion tablecloth for the saffron; then the same flower vase and a different ashtray are returned to the table. Dr. Daruwalla doesn’t notice, at first, that Mr. Sethna has substituted a cold Kingfisher for the warm one.

It’s only after they’ve departed that Dr. Daruwalla appears to appreciate how the dusk has softened the brightness of both the pink and the white bougainvillea in the Ladies’ Garden, and how his brimming glass of Kingfisher is freshly beaded with condensation; the glass itself is so wet and cool, it seems to draw his hand. The beer is so cold and biting, he takes a long, grateful swallow—and then another and another. He drinks until the glass is empty, but still he stays at the table in the Ladies’ Garden, as if he’s waiting for someone—even though he knows his wife is expecting him at home.

For a while, the doctor forgets to refill his glass; then he refills it. It’s a 21-ounce bottle—entirely too much beer for dwarfs, Farrokh remembers. Then a look crosses his face, of the kind one hopes will pass quickly. But the look remains, fixed and distant, and as bitter as the aftertaste of the beer. Mr. Sethna recognizes this look; he knows at once that the past has reclaimed Dr. Daruwalla, and by the bitterness of the doctor’s expression, Mr. Sethna thinks he knows which past. It’s those movie people, Mr. Sethna knows. They’ve come back again.