A Son of the Circus

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 Zurich, 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 Cafe 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