The Sanjanas planned to enjoy the tiger cub and surrender the adult to the zoo, but no plan had been made for the adolescent. The family is breakfasting in the compound of their bungalow when the cub gets its first taste of blood from a cut on Sohrab Sanjana’s hand. Also in attendance are Daisy (Sohrab’s English wife, married when she was stranded by WWII in India); Rustom (Sohrab’s brother, back from the war in Burma); Dolly (their mother, afraid the rivalry between her sons may erupt into violence echoing the rivalry between the two brothers she had married in succession); and Phiroze (Dolly’s second husband, younger brother of her first). Their story spans the years from 1910 to 1945, and the globe from rural Navsari to cosmopolitan Bombay to 1930s London to wartorn Burma and Mesopotamia.
The Sanjanas planned to enjoy the tiger cub and surrender the adult to the zoo, but no plan had been made for the adolescent. The family is breakfasting in the compound of their bungalow when the cub gets its first taste of blood from a cut on Sohrab Sanjana’s hand. Also in attendance are Daisy (Sohrab’s English wife, married when she was stranded by WWII in India); Rustom (Sohrab’s brother, back from the war in Burma); Dolly (their mother, afraid the rivalry between her sons may erupt into violence echoing the rivalry between the two brothers she had married in succession); and Phiroze (Dolly’s second husband, younger brother of her first). Their story spans the years from 1910 to 1945, and the globe from rural Navsari to cosmopolitan Bombay to 1930s London to wartorn Burma and Mesopotamia.
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The bungalow appeared depressed. It had housed a tragedy for decades and the further the tragedy receded the deeper grew the depression. It was depressed no less for its location beside the high Ashapuri road into the town of Navsari. Low and flat and sprawling, it lay hidden from the road, tucked into a coverlet of foliage (banyan, mango, banana, guava).
Steps embedded in the ground led down the incline to the gate. The gateposts, like giant chesspieces, two castles with crenellated crowns, once whitewashed and clean, were overrun with vines, webs, and bugs. Grillwork arching over the gateposts, no longer bronzed and bright, proclaimed the name of the Sanjana home: Truth Bungalow. The basin of the fountain ahead was choked with dead leaves. The wand of the pudgy Cupid pointing skyward was dry. The path around the fountain, once crackling with gravel and damp with spray, had vanished under mud, weeds, and twigs.
The height of the road made passers-by seem onstage, but passers-by were few and had been fewer when Dolly Sanjana, then Dolly Dalal, had been just another Navsari girl. The road arrowed through wooded areas harboring among other animals monkeys, wolves, snakes, and pigs. Dolly could hear their chatter, howls, grunts, and screeches by night—and her bed, cozy for its tent of mosquito netting and nest of blankets, became cozier yet for the whistle and chug of steam engines from the railway station on the far side of town.
Shortly after she married Kavas Sanjana, Dolly had seen a caravan of camels pass along the high road, goats trotting knee-high to the camels, scoring magical silhouettes against a pink dawn, underscoring how dramatically marriage had changed her life. She had been born and raised in a dark row house in town from which even the dawn looked smoky and grey showcasing silhouettes of squat tenements, clothes on a line, and rows of crows roosting on the roofs.
She had twice become a Sanjana: first, at fourteen, marrying Kavas; and after Kavas’s death just three years later, marrying his younger brother, Phiroze. They lived in Bombay, a few hours south of Navsari by train, rarely visiting Truth, but returned every anniversary to solemnize Kavas’s death with ritual: organized prayers and sanctified meals to be delivered to relatives and friends. The ritual wasn’t meant to continue beyond the first anniversary, but Dolly and Phiroze persevered despite the stories that had mushroomed. Some called it penance, but reaching the twenty-ninth anniversary of the tragedy, penance long paid in full, they continued to observe the ritual.
Kavas’s death had marked the beginning of the decline, followed half a dozen years later by the death of his father, Sohrabji Sanjana. Kavas had shown promise as successor to the Sanjana enterprises; Phiroze had shown not even interest, and after losing his right arm in the Great War had seemed to retire from life itself. There was capital enough to sustain generations of nonworking members of the family, but folks liked to speculate that the heart of Sohrabji Sanjana coagulated as he watched the heart of his enterprises shift to cousins and nephews instead of sons, leading to his final thrombosis. The mali had been pensioned, and the compound, once a lacework of manicured hedges and cushions of color, was infiltrated by the roaming fingers of the forest.
A flagstoned verandah spanned the front of the house, harboring an upholstered swing, once pink and plush, now hard and faded, wood showing through the upholstery. The fanlight over the front door portrayed the rising sun in glass red and orange and yellow, an emblem of Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Parsis. Windows were barred to keep out monkeys who stole objects from the bungalow, anything that glinted, anything they could lift, and what they couldn’t lift they tipped over. Dolly sometimes strode through the forest shooting to warn them away. The right wing of the house led to an outhouse for servants, the left to a freestanding room with an adjoining bath meant for women during menstruation.
The Sanjanas were modern enough not to put the room to its traditional use, but they had found a use novel even for a modern family, refurbishing it with a hutch, blankets, and toys for Victoria, a tiger cub. The compound walls would have kept her from straying, but she had shown no inclination to stray. Curiosity pulled her into the forest under the watchful eye of Fakhro, the caretaker, but hunger and thirst pulled her as reliably back. She darted after anything that moved, but nothing held her attention long. Fakhro saw in her more than a charge, more than a pet, a child—more precious than his own because his wife Laxmi had borne him no sons, but three daughters: Radha, Rekha, and Rupma. Fakhro lived with his family in a single room in the left wing of the bungalow.
Arriving the night before, the Sanjanas had peeked through Victoria’s barred window, but she had been asleep, it had been dark, and they had let her alone, all agreeing with Daisy that she appeared too snug in a hutch she had long outgrown. Daisy was Dolly’s English daughter-in-law, married to her older son, Sohrab. When Sandy Corbett, a family friend, had bagged Victoria’s mother (eight and a half feet from tip to tail) on a shoot with the Maharajah of Bharatpur, he had returned with three cubs, all promised to a zoo—until Sohrab had requested one for Dinyar and Neville, their sons. Sandy had given them the cub, but Victoria’s final destination had never been in doubt: Victoria Gardens (the Bombay zoo), cub and zoo named for the dead queen who had styled herself Empress of India.
The compound in the back, once as much a garden as the front, was now wild with grass. The Sanjanas breakfasted in a circle on wicker furniture in their usual configuration: Dolly to the right of Phiroze (a stronger right arm than the one he had lost); Rustom, her second son, to her right; Daisy to his right; and Sohrab closing the circle. In previous years they had brought Dinyar and Neville, but they were now five and four, without friends in Navsari, and insisted on staying with Jamshed and Jehangir Shroff, their best friends in Bombay.
They had enjoyed Victoria in the dawn of her cubhood in Bombay, but once she had grown too large for the room she shared with Patty and Nancy (the ayahs), not to mention too gamy for the flat, they had brought her to Navsari. Phiroze had wanted to send her to the zoo even then, but some expert had objected: the cub smelled too much of humans to be trusted by other cats who might attack her, and so they had brought her to Navsari to roam the forest, regain a more natural smell, grow a little larger. The plan had always been to enjoy the cub and surrender the adult to the zoo—but, as Dolly liked to say, no plan had been made for the adolescent.
Kavas’s tragedy bonded the family every year, but looking at her sons Dolly still felt a weakness in her bones, like the change of weather on a fracture long healed, teeth gnawing at the crack, tongue flicking at the marrow. They were halfbrothers, their fathers had been brothers, and Dolly wondered at the role she had played in fusing the genes of the brothers in the halfbrothers. Sohrab was fair as an Englishman and Rustom dark as an Indian—like their fathers (Kavas fair with green eyes, Phiroze dark with black). Rustom was younger, but bigger, brawnier, and had regained the fifty pounds he had lost in the three years since his return from the war. Sohrab had suffered at Rustom’s hands through boyhood even as the older brother. Dolly remained vigilant, after almost thirty years, for the bad gene which had destroyed Kavas, and sat up straighter as her younger son challenged her older. “Sorry, Sohrab, but I have to disagree. Of course, the Americans would have dropped another bomb. Otherwise, what would have been the point of dropping the first two?”
Sohrab grimaced, exasperated to have to explain himself. “Don’t be an idiot, Rustom! I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just saying it’s not in for a penny, in for a pound. I mean—Hiroshima, Nagasaki, how many hundreds of thousands dead already, women and children—and then what? on top of that another bomb? as if it were a Sunday picnic? Hell, Rustom, you of all people should know better.”
He referred to the Burma campaign which Rustom had survived with a fractured finger and a bullet in his brain. For months after his return, shellshocked, he had kept to himself, interested only in news about the war, particularly in Burma, collecting and reading and filing articles and pictures and books, stepping gradually into his former life at the gymkhana, attending concerts and movies and plays, fostering the illusion that he had needed nothing more than time to return to his previous life, but more than anything Dolly was pleased that he planned to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh once the world had regained its feet. Sohrab had insisted the Americans would not have bombed Tokyo, but Rustom spoke quietly, wishing no more discord with his brother than did his mother. “I do know better. That’s why I say they would have dropped the bomb. It’s not a question of a Sunday picnic. It’s just common sense.”
Sohrab’s sigh seemed to rise from the depth of a well as he shook his head, salting and peppering his acouri. “I swear, Rustom, you never listen. Of course, it’s common sense. Of course, they would have dropped the bomb—foregone conclusion. That’s just what I’m saying. If the buggers refused to surrender, of course they would have dropped the bloody bomb, but it’s not something they would have undertaken lightly, not after they had dropped two bombs already.”
Rustom shrugged, peppering his own acouri, familiar with Sohrab’s debating style. He snatched victory from defeat by reversing himself, fooling only himself, talking to impress himself and impressing only himself—and changing the subject, as he did now, if a new subject suited him better.
“The madness is over, but not for us Indians. We are still mad. Once more we have helped our enemy win the war. Once more we are so bloody hungry for our bloody swaraj we believe everything they bloody well tell us, even after decades of broken promises—and they know it. How else do you think a handful of Englishmen have kept millions of stupid bloody Indians under their thumb for so long? They tell us what we want to hear and do bloody well just what they want. We are Indians, and what do promises matter when they are made to Indians?”
Dolly bustled in her seat as she buttered toast for Phiroze. “Come, now, Sohrab. No need to be so cynical. We don’t exactly live hand-to-mouth, you know.”
Sohrab frowned. “Mummy, no need to patronize me. If we are stupid enough to fight their battles we have only ourselves to blame. I mean, just look at good old daddy. What more evidence do you need?”
Phiroze, veteran of the Great War, had lost his right arm in Mesopotamia. Dolly flinched at the implication that Phiroze was stupid. Phiroze knew better than to heed Sohrab’s careless talk, but not she. He had been the best father to Sohrab, technically his nephew and stepson, but Sohrab clung to this difference between him and his brother—halfcousin and halfbrother, as he liked to emphasize—imagining he elevated himself in the process. Without looking at her son she cut the buttered slices of toast into three strips and placed the plate next to Phiroze’s tea. “Sohrab! Apologize at once!”
“Whatever for?”
“You bloody well know whatever for!”
Dolly rarely spoke strongly anymore except in Phiroze’s defense. Phiroze never spoke in his own defense—but spoke instead, softly as always, and as she might have expected, in Sohrab’s defense. “It’s all right, darling. I’m sure Sohrab meant nothing by it.”
Dolly said nothing, but Daisy smiled, smashing bacon into her acouri. “Of course not. Of course, he didn’t. He never means anything—and he never stops his needling.”
Sohrab turned to Phiroze, adopting the humble tone of a babu and saluting. “Arrererere! Sorrysorry, so sorry, Daddyji! Please forgive. Please forgive.”
Dolly said nothing and neither did Daisy though she turned her head from Sohrab.
Sohrab ignored her, returning his attention to Rustom. “To get back to what I was saying: We Indians are so bloody stupid we even pay the bloody English to let us fight for them. We are the biggest bloody volunteer army in the world, two and a half million strong—and what do we do? We fight for the bloody English after they have looted us blind. Such a forgiving lot we are. Bharatmata ki jai! Three cheers! Hip hip hooray! God save the King and all the rest of it.”
Sohrab’s apparent anglophobia was at odds with his appearance. He looked the perfect Englishman of the 1920s when he had studied in London, cleanshaven, black hair parted down the middle, smooth, shiny, and flat as a cap. He was dressed, like his halfbrother and stepfather, in a white shirt and baggy grey pants. His only concession to Indianness was sandals. His face remained expressionless; his irony was met by silence. He tore his toast into bits over his acouri, mixed the egg and toast with his fork, and heaped his first mouthful.
Daisy shook her head. “What rubbish! You can hardly say that about Gandhi. You can hardly say that about the Nehrus.”
Sohrab’s lip curled. “The father, the son, and the holy ghost—but the father is dead, and if we are lucky the son and the holy ghost will soon follow.”
He spoke as the British sometimes did of the Nehrus (the elder and the younger) and of Gandhi. Daisy grinned. “Spoken like a true Englishman, Sohrab.”
Dolly liked Daisy for speaking her mind to Sohrab, almost the only one among them who dared. She never knew what Rustom thought and Phiroze preferred not to challenge his dead brother’s son, milking instead the empty sleeve of his shirt like an udder in an effort it seemed to grow back his arm. She herself had grown rigid, a spine of steel, too long the only member of the family to challenge him, but since Daisy’s arrival she had happily surrendered the chore. They knew one another well enough not to have to talk much to communicate, but what little needed to be said she would never say—she could never say, and neither could Phiroze, though neither could forget what Kavas had done—oh, so very many years ago. Silence was best; there was no telling what they would reveal if they started to talk.
Sohrab shook his head. “I tell you they are fools, without exception they are all fools, the whole jingbang lot of them. Gandhi is an old fool, Nehru is a young fool, and the rest of the bloody Congresswallahs fill up all the spaces in between—all of them bloody fools.”
Daisy laughed. “Say what you wish, but there’s no fool like a fool who will not see.”
Dolly grinned, encouraging Daisy, seeing in Sohrab’s frown her own victory. In appearance the two women differed clearly: one had salmon skin, the other sallow; one chestnut hair, the other black streaked with grey; one green eyes dominating the freckled bump of a nose, the other a commanding nose dominating large black eyes; one wore a blue pleated skirt and white sleeveless blouse, the other black slacks and a white shortsleeved blouse; one was small for an Englishwoman, the other big for a Parsi, making them the same size. In temperament they were alike: Dolly rarely confronted her son, but often seconded Daisy when she did. “Sohrab’s got it all wrong as usual. He should be the one defending Gandhi, not Daisy.”
Sohrab grimaced as if she didn’t rate a reply and she wished she’d said nothing, left the teasing to Daisy. She was forty-five, almost twice Daisy’s age, hardly old, but the older she grew the more she grew superstitious. She feared another death, progeny of the first, seed of the bad seed, transmitted through her from husbands to sons. She wished they hadn’t named their sons Sohrab and Rustom: the Rustom of legend had killed his son, Sohrab, but they had wanted to be traditional, naming their first son after his paternal grandfather, their second after his maternal; and they had wanted to be modern, free of superstition; and they had kept the names despite the legend to prove they were free of the past as much as of superstition, but she realized she would never be free of either.
The book is a rich tapestry of the cultural roots of an Indian community, its neighboring city of Bombay, the influence of Britain, and the effects of WWII. Notable differences in perspectives as an Englishman, views of Americans'Â role in dropping bombs, and on Gandhi, as well as education and employment. Opportunities to study overseas - a view of London as only the study of 'Law' contrived by man and the opportunity to live off the family's money. The conditions of a bungalow life may mean an entire family to a room and initially a whiplash tour of lunacy, inbreeding, children taken from the family and early into the novel,
the imagery of cracked cement, cockroaches, and other vivid details that should serve as motivation to improve the condition.
The contemplation over love and relationships ring universally in coming of age, 'we have to complicate things with talk of love'
The marriage of Dolly and Phiroze is contrasted between worldliness and lack thereof as well as rich vs poor. The book moves fast between paragraphs, if not sentences in what seem like snippets of life in whirlwind fashion rather than actual scenes - randomness spewing of global facts, a sort of delusion in glorification of Romeo and Juliet and spanning historical global affairs, a visit to Bundobast astrology, women's suffrage, and too many topics to name.
It is not without tension in the portrayal of hierarchies and customs:
Gaining respect through firmness, vs shouting and a firm hand in dealing with servants, punishments that involve violence, reflections on cheating, prostitution, and manners.Â
Poetic verse interwoven throughout suggests an ability to find beauty amidst questioning of circumstances that are not fully understood or able to grapple with as does the increasing interjection of cultural influences ranging from the British classics like Jane Eyre to the Marriage of Figaro, Michaelangelo and Rodin.
The recognition of Britain's superiority in English royalty, Royal Courts of Justice, and cricket, and Basil's attendance of Mozart concerts that led him to pursue piano lessons on return to Bombay. Â
The exploration of inequality in how one views society and its members and in the wars, and the identity as a 'foreigner' are important topics when it comes to inclusion. If one does not understand the value that education or cross-cultural appreciation brings to society, it is difficult to bridge these gaps such as the dismissal in the pursuit of studying law in London as it is just rules fabricated by man.
There is no aspect of the society that is not broached from the scandals that plague everyday life also surface in elite classes of government officials. The looming political tensions and effects of war tatters such as Phiroze loss of his arm brood during the time in which war is declared.
A pivotal moment when the reader learns Daisy has begun publishing and can make a life for herself in Bombay:
 "Ideas had begun to ferment, and she once more to fill with a hope that she might carve a life for herself in Bombay. “Really? How canÂ
they know what they mean?” “From the context.” “Just one of the anomalies of language, I suppose?” “That’s too kind an interpretation. Language does say something about the way a people think—sort of a key to the mind, wouldn’t you say?”
In the following chapter, a progression in cultural values and professionalism is noted when Bhaksar is told,
“My uncle told me once, to get the measure of a man you must talk to his subordinates—teacher and students, sergeant and privates, doctor and nurses, executive and secretaries, master and servants, and so on and so forth. Do you realize what those boys are actually saying about you? They are not just talking about what kind of a teacher you are. They are talking about what kind of a man you are.”Â
And, then the effects of enlistment and the terrors of war between the British and Japanese as Britain had provided India with defense funds and recruitment. The images portray the horrors and pillage beyond the front lines - women and babies.
Throughout the withdrawal and summation of outcomes, it became clear that there were different identities between a uniquely Indian voice and that of a 'loyal Briton'.
The book further highlights the cost of war in impacts on families and ability to earn income and the contracts of Daisy’s Friendship Circle met for lunch every Tuesday at the Willingdon Club, activities including talks, debates, guest lecturers, poetry readings, gramophone concerts. But, it is not until the tribal realities of the 'googly' as in the title portray a far more gory depiction of the threats of wildlife than of their exotic allure in images, cinema, cartoons, etc, and Daisy steps up to shoot with lives at risk.
The effects of the war, Muslims in coexistence with Hindu, and the Royal Navy's backlash movement - 'Quit India' and the lingering threats of conflicted loyalties and lives lost including children, and the mental health tolls all mount.Â
There is both a looming sense of the domino effect from the past's unresolved effects and a foreshadowing of conflicts that perpetuate. There are scenes of an idyllic life in a return to normalcy suggesting there is both hope and an opportunity to flourish should they heed the lessons of the past. History and the narratives of unique voices are how we best learn and a cautionary tale.