Newspaper: Bombay Rhapsody
22nd November 1996, Daily Mail, author: David Jones
TURNED OUT immaculately in a loose-fitting sudreh — a shirt of white muslin symbolizing his innocence and purity — the proud eight-year-old boy appeared indistinguishable from dozens of young Parsee Indians undergoing their initiation into the Zoroastrian faith.
With rice grains and rose petals flecking his neatly-clipped hair, little Farrokh Bulsara left the traditional Navjote ceremony to smiles from his parents, Bomi and Jer, and returned to his boarding school where he was already being groomed for a privileged colonial adulthood.
That was never to be, but another, infinitely greater elite awaited young Farrokh. As Freddie Mercury, the brilliant singer of the rock band Queen, he became one of the world's pop icons. But few of the millions of fans who mourned his death in November 1991 could have had any idea that he was in fact Asia's first rock superstar.
So why did Mercury, who might have become a respected and high-profile spokesman for the new generation of integrated British Asians, so ruthlessly deny his roots? And why only now — five years to the month after he died from an Aids-related illness — are those roots being publicly exposed in a collection of previously unseen photographs due to be exhibited in London next week?
To discover the answer we must start with his childhood.
His father Bomi, a middle-ranking cashier at the High Court in the then British-controlled East African island of Zanzibar where Farrokh was born at the Government Hospital on September 5, 1946, hoped his son might become a doctor, lawyer or perhaps even an airline pilot, a profession to which the Parsees increasingly gravitated."
HIS petite mother, Jer, who relished the cocktail party lifestyle of a civil servant's wife, had similar dreams for her son. To ensure that he had the best education possible they sent him back to India, their home land, and enrolled him at the exclusive St Peter's School in Panchgani, several hundred miles from Bombay in the cool hills of Maharashtra.
It seemed their wishes would be fulfilled. Bulsara, who was seven when he arrived at the school, was a bright pupil and he prospered, though, inevitably, he was nicknamed 'Bucky' by his fellow pupils.
At the age of eight he met his maternal aunt Sheroo Khory when she visited him at the school. Sheroo, now 74, says: 'I remember him with great affection. Even before I got to the gate, he saw me and came out to greet me. Then he showed me round with great enthusiasm. He was fond of school and made friends easily.'
Mohammadi Dholkawala, one of Bulsara's classmates, remembers how the boy topped the class in most subjects in the six years he was at St Peter's.
Yet it was not only in academic work that Mercury found his metier. Sheroo Khory says: 'Bulsara bagged so many prizes in school. He was an all-round junior champion. He excelled at everything — boxing, fencing, table tennis, you name it. He was also a very talented artist. When I discovered that, I asked him to paint me two horses.
But it was the summer holidays at her home in Bombay that Mercury looked forward to most of all. He was a born leader and always dominated his young playmates — the three children of Sheroo Khory's brother, Nariman. 'He was always inventing games for them,' she says. 'I remember one was a pillow fight. I came into the room one time and it was full of fluff and feathers. I said: "What's going on here?" He just giggled away.'
But it was his talent for music which really startled her. Once, while Bulsara's parents were visiting, his mother began playing the piano and he copied it right away.
“He was so small that he had to turn the stool up on its end to reach the keys," says Mrs Khory. "Then he began the tune that his mother had just played. I asked him who had taught him and he replied that he'd heard mommy playing it.”
“Then another time he was listening to the radio. It was Indian music and when it was over he played the same tune. Still we didn't believe he could do it right off like that. We thought someone must be teaching him.
“But he did it once more and we realised he had real talent. That's when his parents arranged for him to have special music lessons at school. He must have been about nine or ten."
By his mid-teens, there was only one slight concern. Though still neatly-groomed, and with his black hair clipped respectfully short, young Farok Bulsara was among a small group of pupils who had cottoned on to a disturbing new import from Western society: rock 'n' roll.
Supplementing their shirts with boot-lace ties and sporting dark sunglasses, the boys had even gone as far as forming the school's first pop group, daringly named The Hectics after Farrokh’s flamboyant piano-playing style. At about this time his excellent academic record began to falter.
Though the boys were never allowed to perform outside school, Warman Khory recalls what was probably Farrokh’s first public performance when the family went for dinner at an Italian restaurant and the restaurant band struck up How Much Is That Doggie In The Window.
Aware that Farrokh was humming along, a member of the band asked him to join in and he took to the stage and sang.
"After the song he was all flushed and shy, but while he was on the stage you could see that he had presence, even at that age," says Warman.
SOME 15 years later, the boy's name having been changed to Freddie Mercury and the piano switched for a twirling microphone stand, his showmanship was to become the trademark of the world's most successful glam-rock band, Queen.
By then all traces of India had been removed. Though his aquiline nose, dark eyes and deep olive complexion gave him a Latino or vaguely oriental look, few of his many millions of fans ever guessed they were hero-worshipping the first Asian pop star.
Mercury was certainly not about to alert them to the fact. In the few personal interviews that he granted, he deliberately obscured his past, divulging only that he hailed from Zanzibar. Even some biographers referred to him as Persian — which, since the Parsees resettled in the Bombay region around the ninth century and consider themselves Indian, is stretching the truth to its limits.
What brought Mercury to Europe was the changing face of African politics. Fearful that their comfortable position might be jeopardized by Zanzibar's independence, Bomi and Jer joined thousands of Asian families seeking a secure future in prosperous Britain.
Along with 17-year-old Farrokh and his sister Kashmira, ten, they packed their belongings and arrived in decidedly unexotic Feltham, a London dormitory town under the Heathrow flight-path.
As they moved into Gladstone Avenue, a dreary cul-de-sac of Thirties semis, residents peeping through their frilly net-curtains at the area's first influx of Asian immigrants raised eyebrows at Jer's traditional sari. The unfamiliar scent of spices wafting from the kitchen window further aroused their suspicions.
Yet if their neighbours found themselves lapsing into prejudice, their fears were soon allayed. ‘Within a month,’ recalls Derek Burgess, who lived next-door-but-one, ‘the Bulsaras looked every inch the English suburban family.’
“Jer quickly discarded the sari and started wearing dresses. They were eating roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, and there certainly wasn't any sitar music," said Mr Burgess, who is now one of the Bulsaras' closest friends.
"In that first winter they adapted to Western ways. It was quite remarkable how quickly it happened, really. Their house was decorated much the same as mine. The only difference was that they had a religious painting on the wall and they had a little statue and candles to burn when they said prayers each morning.”
“TO BE honest, we probably looked down our noses because Asian people had arrived in the street, but you have to remember we're talking 30 years ago."
“Perhaps the desire to fit in was what had 'Westernised' Mr and Mrs Bulsara,” he added, but he thought, rather, that they had adapted because they were so well-travelled and had lived in a British colonial community.
Whatever the Bulsaras' reasoning, they maintained links with the Parsee community. During holidays from her job in Marks & Spencer's Hounslow branch, where she rose to supervisor, Jer returned with Bomi — who worked for an airline — to visit Freddie's grandfather, a respected priest in their home town of Bulsar on the the Gujarati coast.
They also attended Parsee functions at a centre in West Hampstead. But Freddie, who had changed his name while still in India, rarely accompanied them.
Reshaping his hair, first into a Jimi Hendrix-like bush and later into the long-back, feathered top cut that epitomised the Seventies, he turned his back on his upbringing. And after he left Ealing College of Art and his pop career began to take off, Bulsar, Bombay and the Parsees were never mentioned.
Rock writer Rick Sky, whose book The Show Must Go On: The Life Of Freddie Mercury, chronicles his Indian beginnings, believes Mercury had two interlocking reasons for recreating his past: fear of rejection and a shrewd commercial sense.
Sky, who interviewed Mercury at length four times and was never apprised of his early background, is also convinced that his parents' religious beliefs explain why he never emulated fellow superstars like Elton John in openly admitting his homosexuality.
"He would never have talked about being Asian because he was an astute businessman and he knew it would have been the kiss of death to his career," says Sky. "He preferred to keep an air of mystery.”
“In any case, no one ever really asked him. They assumed he was colonial British, I think, because his boarding school background had given him this phoney, upper-class, if rather ramp-atone. Also, because he had a light complexion he didn't look Indian."
As his reputation grew, Mercury became more and more secretive he instructed Bomi and Jer never to speak about his past, and they still respect his wishes today. Visitors are politely turned away from the affluent Nottingham suburb of Mapperley, where 84-year-old Mr Bulsara and his wife, who is about ten years younger, moved into a newly-built bungalow to be close to Kashmira and her family earlier this year.
However, distant relatives and friends among Britain's small Parsee community were more forthcoming. 'The family definitely consider themselves Indian, but we heard that Freddie expressly forbade his origins being known a long time ago,' said one. 'In the early days there was discrimination, and I think it all stemmed from that.'
Derek Burgess, a regular guest during the Gladstone Avenue days, says Freddie was equally coy about his sexuality. He would arrive in his Rolls-Royce with his female companion of many years, Mary Austin, but never with his boyfriend, Jim Hutton.
Perhaps this explains why, in all the photographs, Hutton is conspicuous by his absence. If so, Mr Burgess is convinced Bomi and Jer would have been fully aware of their son's unspoken preference. 'I would have thought Mary would have informed them. Anyway, they are very intelligent people,' he added. Whatever his fans would have made of his gay Indian background is, in any case, of no concern whatsoever to Mr and Mrs Bulsara today. To his doting parents he was, and remains, a brilliant and beloved son.
As Jer Bulsara wistfully said, while providing the captions for the photographs due to be exhibited next week: 'This was our baby.'
Sheroo Khory has her own wistful thoughts about his death. 'I haven't been the same since he died. I remember when I first heard he had Aids, I didn't believe it. I thought it was a publicity stunt.'
“But when his mother told me finally, I started praying and praying. On the night he died I was reading my scripture book until late, and then I closed it and knew he was at peace. His mother told me later he'd died at about that time.'
