Farrukh Dhondy: In The Beginning Was The Word
Farrukh Dhondy explores the beginnings of his desire for revolutionary change and his introduction to Marxism.
It’s only with hindsight I realise that the desire, however naive at the time, for social revolutionary change in my growing years was entwined with the ambition to be a writer. They were two strands of realisation and activity which came together like the double helix of DNA. There wouldn’t be one without the other.
And again, it is looking back at events that forces my realisation that the political convictions I acted on gave rise to and created opportunities for writing and being published. These political convictions led to experiences that formed the subject and substance of several writings, those which prompted the editors of journals and then of a publishing house to tolerate and invite my writing.
The convictions towards ‘leftish’ thoughts began early. Perhaps they began in revolt against the Zoroastrian religious tradition which required the suspension of understanding. Let me explain.
The Parsi prayers one is taught to repeat by heart in order to undergo the Zoroastrian investiture or thread ceremony—the Navjote—are in the Avestan language, and no Parsi child even vaguely understands what they mean. Neither do the adults who teach these. The language has been painstakingly translated over the centuries, and yet there is no definitive version of the prayers we offer. We are told it’s our conversation with god and necessary for preserving life and good thoughts, words and deeds. I was inducted into the religion at the early age of seven, because my sister, with whom I shared the ceremonial and joyous induction, was nearing nine. Girls were to be presented for the ceremony before the onset of puberty as the families didn’t want priests touching the pubescent breasts of young girls during the rituals. I still believed in god then; it had been drummed into me. But something seemed wrong with the world.
In Madras, every day on the way to school, we passed destitute people who lived on pavements. Some, like Mr Wokoo, suffered from leprosy without hope of any help or a cure. There was abject poverty all round. It was apparent that there were very many who went hungry and had almost nothing. Then there were the taboos. Even in our by and-large liberal household, my grandmother assigned mugs and metal plates to the domestic workers in our house. They were not to put their lips to our cups. And the workers accepted this as the natural order.
There were other trivial observations, which nevertheless weighed down on my growing mind. In my grandad’s house in Poona, the cook Hukam Ali would spend the mornings buying fresh produce from the meat and vegetable markets and bring the stuff home for the family’s lunch and dinner. On some days, I noticed two or three ragged-looking children standing at our gate, having followed Hukams from the market.
‘Why are they following you and why are they hanging around outside?’ I asked Hukams.
‘They saw me buying bhindi, Farrukh, or maybe French beans, and they are waiting for me to start preparing the food.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they want the tops and tails that I chop off from the bhindi or the beans. Instead of chucking them in the garbage, I give them those bits, and they take them back to their families to cook and eat.’
He deliberately chopped larger bits of tops and tails, he said, so they could have more of the vegetable, while our family wouldn’t notice any missing bhindi in a vegetable medley. Through observations and experiences like these, a vision of this imperfect, disappointing world grew.
With it grew the idea, though it was never at that tender age formulated as such—call it an inclination—that this poverty and degradation were connected somehow to the belief in the irrational, in the superstitious, which abounded all round. I was ripe for recruitment into a faith, a new way of seeing the world, an ideology.
In a partitioned house about twenty yards down from ours lived Aspi Khambatta, the first part of his name a short form for the very Parsi Zoroastrian name Aspandiar. In the 1930s, the Khambattas, Aspi’s mother and her husband, had owned and run a bookshop called the English Book Exchange. It was a thriving business patronised by the British officers and by Indians interested in English reading. The Khambattas had a son and a daughter and were expecting another child. The boy was born to Mrs Khambatta, but her husband and mother-in-law took one look at the new-born baby and disowned it. The infant had fair skin, blue eyes and blonde hair. Mr Khambatta said he had suspected all along that she was having an affair with a British sergeant who frequented the English Book Exchange under the pretence of a love for literature. It was obviously his child that his wife had given birth to.
Mrs Khambatta denied the charge. It was her husband’s baby, she insisted. She had never been with another man. The evidence against her assertion was the new-born’s clearly European or mixed-race features. Mr Khambatta threw his wife out of the house, and she came to live in the two rooms of the partitioned building opposite our house on Sachapir Street. The central rooms in the same partitioned house were occupied by the Cama family and the third division on the other side of the Cama’s three rooms by Mr Hodywalla, who made a living showing films to indoor and outdoor gatherings on a mobile projector and screen.
Mrs Khambatta named her allegedly mixed-race child Aspandiar and brought him up on her own in abject circumstances. Her older son and daughter, it was said in the neighbourhood, visited her and kept her and their half-brother alive. How else could she have survived, no one knew, though there was a rumour that some money trickled in through compassionate and possibly guilty transfers from a very-married army sergeant in Britain. When Aspi was nearing ten, Mrs Khambatta arranged for his Navjote. A priest performed the ceremony in the front room of the tiny accommodation, but a demonstration of a few score Parsis, instigated by Mr Khambatta, gathered outside with black flags to denounce the boy as a non-Parsi and to stop the ceremony.
My grandfather, who was trained as a Parsi priest and was of ultra-liberal views, watched from our veranda the hubbub of protest as the ceremony progressed. He believed that anyone of any parentage could be inducted into the Zoroastrian faith. It wasn’t a matter of blood; it was a matter of belief. But Grandpa was in the progressive, ignored minority. Mrs Khambatta, known as ‘Bootki’, meaning ‘shorty’ in Gujarati, led a sad existence. She would visit neighbours before dinner time and wait to be invited. My aunts, whom she visited on these rounds, would not only invite her to eat at their table but also pack cooked food for her and Aspi’s next meal. Other neighbours may have done the same.
I encountered Aspi, the unusual-looking Parsi, when he began gathering four or five of us lads from the neighbourhood. I was twelve or thirteen years old then, and Aspi was eight or so years older than me. He wanted to preach ‘communism’ to us. He didn’t quite define what this term was but said it would abolish superstition and poverty and usher in equality and prosperity in the country. I was willing to listen. He was eager to tell us who Karl Marx was and what he had said about the future of the world. It was the first time I had encountered such an all-embracing idea.
— An edited excerpt from Fragments Against My Ruin: A Life by Farrukh Dhondy.
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