A Son of the Circus

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 Fraulein Hellein was a giraffe.

“Excuse me, sir,” young Farrokh said to the British interpreter. “You’ve made a slight error. Fraulein 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 Fraulein 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 Fraulein 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