Fiction: Farrukh Dhondy’s new short stories depict growing up in Bombay in a newly independent India

My grandfather used to sing in the bath. It wasn’t really a bath. It was a room with one corner of it paved with flagstones and the paved section enclosed by two parapets, one low enough to climb over into the bathing space and the other waist-high to shut off the wet area from the dry. There was a single cold-water tap, and buckets of scalding water, heated on a wood-burning stove, were brought from the kitchen to make up the tepid bath water. In the corner of this mori there was a hole with a metal grill for the waste to run into. That’s where we, a crew of siblings and cousins below the age of four, believed the demons lived. In all the holes in the floor of this decaying mansion, the last house in Khambatta Gully, Byculla, Bombay, grandiosely named Dhondy Terrace, we intuited demons.

Dhondy Terrace had pseudo-Art Nouveau wrought-iron balconies and mosaic floors. I was two-and-a-half years old. I was my grandfather’s companion, and he took me for walks and told me stories. I didn’t know it at the time but the stories were an anthology of Greek myths, tales from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the story of Rustom and Sohrab and a hundred others.

By all accounts my grandfather was an accomplished and literate man, fluent in Urdu and Persian and something of an expert on Persian poetry. I don’t think he knew Sanskrit, though there were books and manuscripts in that language that remained in the family archive, such as it was.

My grandfather, Khurshedji, had inherited lands, estates and houses in several towns and territories of the Raj’s Western Presidency, around Bombay and in a town further north called Deolali in which there was even a road named after our family.

Khurshedji was the eldest of four brothers, two of whom had left the joint family household and moved out. The first one to leave had taken up medicine as a profession, had joined the army and married a lady who wanted to live in a style more elevated than that of the Parsi joint family into which she had married. She was always accused of causing the first breach. She had illusions of being like the British memsahibs, the wives of my granduncle’s fellow officers in the British Indian army.

The youngest brother, Rustom, Russi, a Gandhian by conviction, had left home and moved into his wife’s old fashioned, dark but sumptuously large mansion and had inherited from his father a factory that manufactured industrial soap. To the two older brothers then, the building trade and the reputation of Master Builders and to the youngest son, the soap.

My great-grandfather had brought his family to Bombay, made his fortune there and, immersing himself in the enterprise that was the spirit of nascent Bombay, invested in an industrial soap factory, which then grew from being a shed with woodfires boiling animal fat and oil in large vats stirred by sweated labour into a small mill with oil-powered, paddled machines to do the stirring and metal casts in which the cakes of soap solidified.

The Diana Soap factory and its success brought him to the attention of a British civil service grandee of the time who, impressed with the progress of my great-grandfather’s personal hand and determination in converting a sweatshop shed into a factory, encouraged him to start a small building business and gave him government contracts to get him going.

Bombay was undergoing its late nineteenth-century industry and building boom. Ships from London, Southampton, Liverpool, Leith and Glasgow and from other more exotic places that were clients of the British Empire, harboured in the bay. The swamp and sea between the seven islands were being reclaimed as land, with cartloads of mud and rock displacing the shallow slush. The peninsula that was to be thus integrated and become Bombay was well on the way to becoming the metropolis of western India.

It was this building business that my grandfather had inherited from his father. He set about as a young man expanding it, hiring young Parsi civil engineers, architects trained in England and Germany and gangs of labourers who came from the villages into the city looking for work.

He grew rich and befriended the Jamsaheb, Maharaja of Jamnagar, through their mutual love of polo. Khurshedji, my grandfather, was reputed to have kept a fine stable of polo ponies. The Raja had a retinue, and the friends would eat, drink and travel the country in carriages together. They sailed to Paris and London on an eight-month cruise. And all the while, the joint family was amassing a small fortune, buying more property and building for governments and kings.

One drunken evening, Jamsaheb, sitting in his palace in the capital Jamnagar, turned to Khurshedji and said, “This kingdom needs a hospital and a university. Build me both.”

Khurshedji is said to have replied that a friend’s wish was his command, and the next day the lands were allocated and work began. No cost was spared. The most famous architects from Europe were contracted, marble and stone were imported, artworks and scientific laboratories to rival those of Cambridge were commissioned. As the months progressed so did the buildings. The university with its vast gardens and the hospital with its spacious wards, an art-nouveau frontage and gothic towers, became the pride of the town.

The buildings were nearly complete when Jamsaheb fell off his polo horse and was trampled to death. His eldest widow, who had from the day she was married to Jamsaheb resented my grandfather as the influence that was leading him to drink, to the pleasures of dancing girls in the court and to Paris and London, was appointed regent for her twelve-year-old son.

Khurshedji had no written contracts for the buildings and now owed lakhs or even crores of rupees to the sub-contractors, suppliers and his workforce. He had counted on the money coming in as it would most certainly have if Jamsaheb had lived. He approached the Queen-regent who smiled and turned him away. What money was he talking about? Surely the buildings had been paid for?

To which court would he appeal? The British Agent resident in Kirtinagar knew the whole story, and sided with Khurshedji in sentiment, but was powerless to intervene. Larger political considerations of the Raj meant that the Queen-regent had to be kept loyal to the British Raj administration still in Calcutta.

My grandfather’s brothers, one who worked with him and one who had kept his dormant share in the business while enlisting in the King’s Indian army, fell upon him, securing their own possessions and positions by demanding that the lands and buildings they jointly owned be transferred to them so as to avoid the creditors getting hold of them. As my father told the story, his father was an honourable man and didn’t want to defraud his creditors by declaring himself bankrupt. He agreed to a division of the properties with his brothers, handed his own share over to the courts of the British Raj in which he and his building firm were being sued for settlement of debts and declared himself a pauper, unable to pay. Bankruptcy was unavoidable.

It all went: the polo ponies, the estates, the grand houses down the road named after our family, a family not of proud Parsi aristocracy now but of a foolish and disgraced bankrupt.

Excerpted with permission from Deccan Queen: Take Two, Farrukh Dhondy, Om Books International.