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  His grandfather Dhanjibhoy had arrived in Malabar in the 1850s, and quickly transformed from a sunken-cheeked boxwallah into the very Moses of Parsi society there. On the broad Beypore he had built Malabar’s first steam-powered sawmill, turning its estuary into one of the busiest timber yards in the world, and himself into the patron of Calicut’s industrial and civic life.

  Bobby was relieved to have never known him, and to encounter him principally through the clipping books in which his obituaries were preserved. He was a ‘sincere admirer of British rule and British institutions’ (the Statesman) ‘held in high esteem among a very wide circle of European friends and admirers’. He was ‘the Grand Old Man of Calicut’ (the Spectator). Yet the most captivating image of his grandfather was from the story, gleaned from these admiring reports, of a single spectacular failure.

  The coffee-planters of Wynaad had long struggled with transport between plantation and coast. Dhanjibhoy had an inspired solution: a camel caravan. He purchased a herd from the Rann of Kutch, had it transported by boat and equipped in Calicut. But there his animals perished, unable to tolerate the tropical climate. Nothing could displace the picture in Bobby’s mind of a silver-bearded prophet, brow shining with sweat, struggling up the slick incline to the promised plateau, followed by a train of damp, doomed camels.

  Young eyes primed for slights, Bobby noticed that every obituary tipped its hat to Dhanjibhoy’s older surviving son, his Uncle Kobad. None bothered to name the younger son, Bobby’s father Khodadad. Kobad, a doctor, had both retained ‘a large practice among the European community’ and ‘nobly maintained the traditional charity of his honoured and esteemed father’. He was in a big book called Who’s Who, and was the sole Indian member of the Whites-only Malabar Club. Nothing persuaded the British to embrace an Indian as warmly as when the Indian could treat a baby that had squalled through the night.

  Kobad served the Empire directly, too. The Great War had ended the year before Bobby was born. In Europe they said there’d be no war ever again, but in Asia it started at once: in the Arab states, in Afghanistan, and eventually in Malabar. The Maplah Muslims, many of them soldiers demobilised after 1918, rose in rebellion and took the districts around Calicut hostage. Thousands were killed, even British soldiers, before order was restored. Afterwards, hundreds of Maplahs were sent to penal settlements in the Andaman Islands. When an Indian delegation was sent to check on their welfare, Kobad was asked to join. The other delegates reported that the convicts were half-dead, but Kobad authored a minority report, insisting that ‘the Maplah had proved himself to be an ideal colonist and pioneer’. For this – for recognising the humane intentions of the Maplah Colonisation Scheme – he was specially thanked by the Excellency-in-Council in Madras.

  Britain was their good master. Dhanjibhoy’s early career had been testament to how the colonial economy rewarded enterprise, and his later life showed how the government rewarded loyalty. The family firm was given a monopoly contract to supply salt to all of Malabar. They had, even in a literal sense, accepted the salt of the Raj.3

  They were happily out of the salt trade by 1930, when Gandhi rallied against the monopoly, leading his long march to lift a clump of slimy salt at Dandi.4 Inspired, the local Congressmen planned their own salt satyagraha, to start out on the Calicut beach and end up at Payyanur. But the police let them have it, right there in front of the Cosmopolitan Club. Bobby could hear the cries from his house, and drew a picture of the thin men being knocked one way and the other by the arcing lathis and the curl of the morning waves. Some left on stretchers.

  School reopened, and while the Civil Disobedience Movement ran its course, eleven-year-old Bobby led a thrilling double life. The Congress was demanding purna swaraj, complete independence. He was swept up in the boys’ talk of boycott and bonfires, and their ardent horror at the convulsions in the furthest reaches of the country: revolt in Chittagong and massacre in Peshawar. At home there was only contempt for Gandhi and his eruptions; Bobby’s father was no less loyal to the British order than his father before him.

  Khodadad had always been bright, but had achieved nothing to the hurricane lamp of his brother’s success. What made it worse was that when a certain kind of Calicut conversation came up about Uncle Kobad, it drifted into a vague and unnecessary reproach of Bobby’s father. Khodadad ran the firm, chased shipments at the Harbour Works, and managed the increase of a venture that was already big. He built up accounting successes that interested nobody. His disappointment did not move him to draw his family closer. Instead he pressed his affections like flowers between the pages of two books: his Avesta and his accounts ledger.

  He began to assume a pious scrutiny of the community: a prerogative recognised mainly by himself. During Sunday service at the dharamsala, a building built by his father, Khodadad would clear his throat if the dastur misspoke a prayer, to embarrass him into repeating it. When Khodadad came down the street, kids scattered, abandoning their game. By the time they were teenagers, Khodadad only seemed to notice his children when he carried the aferghaniyu, swinging it on its thin, squeaking chains and puffing sweet smoke into every room of the house. He’d present it to each child, and watch from behind a veil of smoke as each one added a piece of frankincense to earn its benediction.

  While the country fought for freedom, it was his sisters who first showed Bobby what that might mean. There were four children – one every four years, like clockwork. Bobby was third; the only boy. The oldest, Subur, was eight when Bobby was born and featured in his life mainly as an exemplar of good schoolwork, which never struck him as much of an identity. Subur was a regular bluestocking, and her academic career was for a while the light of Khodadad’s eyes.

  Nurgesh, the next sister, was clever too, but her nature was tempered by her strident and overbroad compassion. ‘Nugs’ was the one who sighed and worried about the ribbed creatures, man or horse, that pulled the family around Calicut on rickshaws and tongas. To the world she turned a bright and stubborn face, though on her own she was prayerful and nervous about the hard work it took to be a woman, and furthermore, a doctor, which was her intention. Khorshed – ‘Kosh’ – four years younger than Bobby, was spoilt and a baby. She had looted the family’s share of good looks, with an oval face and delicate nose, and without the wide mouth that made them look so Parsi. People said she looked like a movie star – like Ingrid Bergman, they would say later on. Bobby said that was ridiculous.

  When Khodadad had a photographer come to take family portraits (always at home, never with backdrops, though it pleased him to have a mat printed with a lion at his feet), the girls behaved but their faces gave much away. Subur wore the faint beginning of a smirk, Nugs alone would be smiling; Kosh had her cheek and her neck turned just so. Bobby’s expression was the most elusive. His face was a good one, with large, somnolent eyes under dark brows, smooth cheeks, and a bundle of dark hair with the slightest widow’s peak. He could easily make himself look both handsome and sincere, which was useful for a young man so capricious. But in every photograph his expression was slightly translucent, as if he meant to defy the picture, or anyone looking at it, to record what he really was.

  The house belonged to the women. Every room was a warehouse of lace and muslin, light sadras and blouse pieces and petticoats, nighties and Chinese borders and vials of rose water. It was the girls who paid the real price of Khodadad’s piety, however. Trapped at home, confined for five or six days each month to a dim room that held nothing but an iron bedstead, and kept from going to the cinema – even when the Crown and Coronation showed pictures that would be the summer’s sole conversation.

  Their freedom movement began with Subur, who won a scholarship to Oxford in 1932, before Khodadad knew women could even go to Oxford. Yet off she went, past the horizon of his control, to dilate on the poetry of the contemporaries of Alexander Pope. For four years she was reduced to a monthly telegram that reported her successes in exams and Society. Then Subur cabled from Marseilles, to sa
y she was about to board the HMS Strathaird and come home. She was not returning alone, but with a man she planned to marry: Gopalaswami Parthasarathi. The Iyengar name hit Khodadad like a lead weight, and left the rest of the boy’s identity (… a double blue at Wadham, son of a distinguished civil servant …) barely ringing in his ears.

  It was betrayal. The pure blood in their veins had been poured carefully from the cup of one generation into the cup of the next through centuries, without admitting a drop of pollution. Subur was allowing a Hindu’s spit in it. A Parsi woman who married a non-Parsi lost her religion and her community. She could never enter a fire temple, not even for her parents’ last rites. That Khodadad, whose distinction in Calicut was his religious excellence, had to watch his favourite daughter stray from the faith was vandalism – not only of her soul but of his. A carriage came to the gate one evening and Subur was in it. Her parents had not seen her in four years, and now they would not. Khodadad sat by the door, curled and tense and hard as a scorpion to see that she wasn’t let in. Out front, Nugs and Subur hugged each other’s heads through the carriage window and sobbed.

  Those were hot months, mingling too many tears in the sweat of the coastal summer. Bobby watched from the sidelines, ready to run away into the street and ripen his Malayalam in the sun. The house weighed less heavily on him, except that he was the only boy. He must inherit the town’s most eminent trading concern, to manage in his turn. Sons turn into their fathers, Bobby knew, but an end so inevitable could only be treated as impossible: same as death. The picture playing on the screen in Bobby’s head was different. Its action would not be caught in the stifling funnel of the southern coasts, between that seaward gate of the Calicut customs office and the cargo bay of the Madras docks. His story would take him further, though he could not yet imagine how far.

  He went hunting with the Heerjee boys and daydreamed down his barrel. Out on the estuary were the only decent summer game – fat, mean muggers lying still and inconspicuous by the water’s edge, looking like sunbaked cowpats unless one had its jaws open. As long as they were sunbathing, the advantage was yours. Once the crocodiles entered the water, it was theirs. You had to get a mugger at the base of its neck, where the scales weren’t armour-hard. If you missed, they were in the water in an instant. They could overturn a boat and slide a child down their throats as if it were a prawn. Or so he’d been told, when he was a child. In the bellies of the oldest muggers there was royal treasure, silver nose-rings and anklets, intact long after the princesses who wore them had been digested.

  The moss-mirror surface of the Beypore gave him no foreboding of what lay ahead; bridges on the Ganga, pontoons on the Euphrates or the ferry across the boiling waters of the Manipur. The decade already hastened towards war, but it was someone else’s war, very far away. Bobby never imagined, any more than the egg boy, how the war would rise up around India, or how it would divide the country, divide the army that enlisted him, and even divide Bobby against himself. Or that he, his sisters and new-found brothers, his countrymen and men from all over the Empire, would be drawn out onto roads that led very far from home, and did not all lead back.

  If he had known, he might not have been in such a hurry to leave. But nothing was changing yet in Calicut. Every year on his birthday, his family bathed him in milk and rose petals. Every year he protested, letting only his mother Tehmina do it, and every year his sisters would break in, shrieking, to fling the petals at him before he even had his pants on. In his teens, his long face revealed a strong jawline, to balance the effect of the sweet mouth and eyes. As soon as he could, he wore the sharp moustache that was in fashion, like Errol Flynn’s – two sabres crossed on his lip. He was seventeen. It was time to get moving.

  2

  Hukm Hai

  Madras, 1939–40

  Time to get moving.

  Bobby’s eyes opened and passed over the area. No room for error now – this was where it got dangerous. He surveyed obstacles and alternative escapes, in the event that the exit was blocked. To his left, the elderly owner of the Irani café dozed at his desk, his head drooping forward and jerking back. His son, the manager, thick-armed but mild, hid behind a rustling headline: ‘KEEP THE ENEMY AWAY FROM INDIA: Contribute again to the Governor’s War Fund’. A Tamil bus boy moved between tables, clattering thick china plates and steel forks into a tub.

  Bobby pinched the last saffron streaks from the plate, licked his fingers, and moved into action. He stretched out wide, wincing with satisfaction. As his left arm reached into the air, his right hand danced the plate across the table, ringing out the signal he was finished. Smooth as a top, the bus boy turned toward him, and Bobby rose and strolled to the desk.

  ‘What you had, beta?’

  ‘Two plates dhansak, uncle,’ he answered, beaming. ‘But I don’t have any money to pay.’

  ‘Suu? What?’ The drooping spectacles marched up the length of nose.

  Bobby pursed his lips, contrite. The idea was to keep the volume down.

  ‘Bloody bugger!’ the old man shouted, rising to his feet. So much for the volume. ‘Who the hell are you that I should feed you for nothing? Heh?’

  ‘Uncle, what can I say. I’m a Parsi.’

  ‘What Parsi! Who’s a Parsi! I never saw a Parsi giving … to not pay for his food! What behaviour? You rascal, you don’t … You are not a Parsi!’

  Bobby stumbled backward into a chair, aghast. A soda fell over and fizzed in somebody’s rice. His expression wobbled from the wound, and he turned his palms out to the wrathful Irani. ‘Me, not a Parsi? Uncle, say anything, but don’t question my ancestry …’

  ‘You are never a Parsi!’

  Bobby swung his head in fierce reproach. The son was now trotting across the shop, wagging his index fingers to call for peace, but Bobby had changed gear. His fingers flew down the buttons of his shirt, and pulled it open. Clutching his white undershirt like a loose cotton skin of his heart, he said, ‘Sadra!’ Without lifting his eyes from the Irani’s refracted glare, he reached back for a chair, and clambered onto it to stand above the room.

  All eyes were pinned on him.

  ‘Daddy, for God’s sake what –’ said the son.

  Bobby chanted:

  Yatha ahuvariyo

  Atha ratush ashat chit hacha,

  Vangheush dazda manangho –

  (‘As the Lord is chosen,

  So is judgement chosen

  In accordance with truth –’)

  ‘Get out!’ the old Irani screamed. ‘You – just get out right now!’

  Bobby dropped off the chair and was out the door. As he ran down the street, he squeezed his trouser pocket, checking for the change he would need to get back to Guindy, the suburb down the shore from Madras. His leather soles clapped against the asphalt, applauding his daring and his escape.

  Madras was a city that, if not on the boil, was at least kept simmering. Its skyline bubbled with domes, each bunch marking a grand institution beneath: a court, a college, a church of any faith. The older domes were Gothic fruit, and the newer domes raised in this century were called Saracenic: white hemispheres with brims like sola topis, sly effigies of the White men who built them. They had some opposition from the baroque gopurams of the city temples, and the rustling ficus trees. But Madras was the founding British city in India, the first to be lit up by the bulbs of modernity, and it was the domes that drew young men and women from a hundred peninsular towns, especially at the start of an academic year.

  To say that Bobby arrived here, in 1936, to go to college would be misleading. He did attend the Loyola College, a new Jesuit institute at the edge of the city, and did matriculate in two years. But he was enrolled more seriously in a programme of unlearning than of learning; specifically, unlearning the habits of his upbringing. One new friend, Sankaran Nair, had the pleasure of walking into Bobby’s room and finding him on his bed stark naked, knees splayed out, trimming his toenails with his teeth. The joke became that Bobby, ‘while at his pedicur
e’, had gone wide and ‘made himself a Muslim’. If anyone asked, he said, sure, he could prove it.

  He had a good length of leash in his head, and sometimes he would just run to its end, to see how far he went. He stood outside his chemistry lecture hall once, poised until he had thrown a brick through the window – just to see if his arm had the nerves to do it, to let fly – and then he appeared in the doorway, while the curses and the clear solutions were still rolling off the table tops, and the lecturer’s eyes fell on him as though Bobby had sacked a temple, and Bobby said, ‘Spot of fun …’

  You didn’t forget a guy like that. Nair would later write about his two Parsi friends, Bobby Mugaseth and Manek Dadabhoy, ‘There is a belief that Parsis are weirdos in some way, perhaps due to inbreeding. These two did exhibit some craziness occasionally. It only added to their charm.’1 Bobby looked up to Manek: he was the type of Parsi brimming with dash and confidence, which came from growing up in the big city. He was shorter than Bobby and broader – square in the shoulders, square in the jaw, with a heavy brow, and he looked you square in the eye. Nobody called Manek lovely, or cooed over his features as they did to Bobby, but girls did call out when they saw him on the street.

  He had ‘a craze for suicidal speeding’, Nair found, on the day he borrowed his uncle’s brand-new motorbike, a 350cc Ariel Red Hunter. Manek swiped it whenever he could. They rode it out along the sweltering Cooum river, or idled by the gates of the Women’s Christian College, gunning the engine for looks. On the sweep of College Road the boys did stunts, opening up the throttle and trying to pull a 180-degree turn without crashing. Only Manek could. In fact, he could pull out of an awful, squealing, imminent catastrophe, rebalance, and ride back with his hands off the handlebars, patting his pockets for his Hohner harmonica and puffing out a tune just as he sliced back through the group.