Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (6 page)

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I’d be woken by the servant. Clutching an orange juice, I’d literally step out onto the beach.

Freddie Mercury

He was very secretive about his background. He never even told me his real name. He was fairly dark-skinned, a cross between Oriental and Asian, so there was no disguising the fact that he came from somewhere off the beaten track, or at least had exotic parents. He must have been in denial about it. Not for sinister reasons, or that he was racist in any way. Not when you consider how he hero-worshipped Jimi Hendrix.

Tony Brainsby, Queen’s first publicist

P
erhaps Freddie
believed that music fans of the seventies were not ready for a rock star with African and Indian roots. It would not matter now. On the contrary, many would see it as an advantage. The more blended and obscure an artist’s cultural and musical heritage today, the more desirable. Back then, things were different. It is not hard to imagine that he regarded the facts of his life as out of kilter with the image he yearned to create. A rock star, by definition, was ideally American, and hailed from California (the Beach Boys), New York (Lou
Reed), Florida (Jim Morrison), Mississippi (Elvis Presley), or Washington state (Jimi Hendrix). Liverpool was also cool, thanks to the Beatles, as was London, courtesy of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. White Anglo-Saxon was favorite, black American almost as good. It was common in those days for musicians to blur the detail of their backgrounds, as this facilitated glamour and mystery: the kind of thing that publicity people were paid relative fortunes to invent. There was so much by way of conflicting information about Freddie’s birth and childhood that I realized I would have to go looking for myself.

I flew to Dar es Salaam via Nairobi, and hitched a boat to Zanzibar Town across a harbor rocking with dhows and simple fishing canoes. Everything about the place felt exotic. To someone like me, born in the dullest of backwaters, Freddie’s dismissal of Zanzibar began to seem puzzling. The thought of him camping it up in front of his dinner party guests with stories of Ali Baba and Sinbad, of wild Arabian princes and Eastern promise galore is irresistible. Why didn’t he? There had to be a reason. An “enchanted past” was so quintessentially Freddie.

*   *   *

Zanzibar, no more than a speck in the atlas, lies just south of the equator off Africa’s east coast. Peer closer and it’s actually two specks: the main island, Unguja, and the more remote Pemba, a destination popular today with European honeymooners. Together with neighboring former German and subsequently British colony Tanganyika, they now form the United Republic of Tanzania. For a tiny territory, Zanzibar has suffered more corruption, disruption, and massacre than perhaps it was due. Invaded down the centuries by Assyrians, Sumerians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Indians, Persians, and Arabs, as well as Malays, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, and British, its history reads like
One Thousand and One Nights
. Some, notably the Shirazi Persians from what is today Southern Iran, the Omani Arabs and much later the British, stayed on to settle and rule. The Swahili civilization here dates back to the earliest awakenings of Islam. When the clove tree was introduced in 1818, Zanzibar’s spice industry was born. Ginger, nutmeg, vanilla, cloves,
and cardamom began to be exported around the world. Thanks to missionaries and explorers passing through its portals en route to the Dark Continent, tales of harems, palace intrigues and royal elopements all added to its romance. As a flourishing trade center of ivory and human trafficking, it acquired an awful notoriety. Until abolition in 1897, some 50,000 Africans a year, drawn from as far away as the continent’s central lakes, were dragged through its barbaric market to be flogged, in both senses, as slaves.

On Unguja’s shores stand imposing sultans’ palaces, an ancient Arab fort with rusting cannons, colonial buildings, and merchants’ mansions, some in a state of lingering renovation, some dilapidated beyond repair. Behind these lie labyrinths of bazaars and narrow streets crammed with dwellings. For the first eighteen years of Freddie’s life, a Stone Town flat overlooking the sea was home.

His mother Jer was little more than a child herself when she gave birth to him in Zanzibar’s Government Hospital, on Thursday 5 September 1946—which happened to be the Parsee New Year’s Day. That the tiny eighteen-year-old’s firstborn was male was a blessing. When the news reached her husband at work, Bomi rejoiced. The family name would continue. At least, they assumed that it would, blissfully ignorant of lifestyle choices that lay distantly ahead. The couple mused together on what they might call their baby. As Parsees—adherents of the monotheistic Zoroastrian faith dating back to early sixth century
BC
Persia—their options were limited. They settled on Farrokh, the name duly registered by Bomi according to legal decree at the Government Records Office.

“I remember very clearly when Freddie was born,” Perviz Darunkhanawala, née Bulsara, told me, when I visited her at home in Shangani district. Perviz was Bomi Bulsara’s niece. Her father Sorabji and Freddie’s father Bomi were two of eight brothers.

“Freddie’s father and mine were born and brought up in Bulsar, a small town north of Bombay [known today as Mumbai] in the Indian state of Gujarat,” she explained.

“That was how they got the name Bulsara. The brothers all came to Zanzibar one after the other to look for work. My father got a job with Cable and Wireless. Bomi took a job in the High Court, as a cashier for the British government. When Bomi came to Zanzibar he was not yet married. It was only later that he returned to India and married Freddie’s mother Jer in Bombay. After that he brought her here, and Freddie was born.

“He was so small, like a little pet. Even when he was a very young baby, he used to come to my home with his parents. They used to leave him with my mother and go out. When he was a bit older, he would play about in our house. He was such a naughty little one. I was much older than him, and I liked taking care of him. He was such a small boy, a very nice child. I loved him so much. Every time he came, I wanted him to stay. But his parents would always collect him and take him back home at the end of an evening out.”

Perviz described how the Bulsaras enjoyed a relatively sophisticated social life within the confines of their rigid religion and culture. On a salary that would have defined him as little more than a modest civil servant in Britain, Bomi was able to support a comfortable home and domestic servants, including Freddie’s ayah (nanny), Sabine. The family wanted for nothing and the climate was good. In 1952, when Freddie was six years old, his sister Kashmira was born.

Bomi Bulsara was based at offices in the nonresidential Beit-el Ajaib, the House of Wonders, built for ceremonial purposes by Sultan Sayyid Barghash in the late nineteenth century. In its day, it had been the tallest building in East Africa, and boasted lush botanical gardens. It survived bombardment by a British fleet following a brief uprising, and later underwent extensive conversion to become Zanzibar’s main museum. Bomi’s job necessitated travel throughout the colony and into India, which may well have influenced his decision to send his only son far away to school. But there was also the question of how far the child’s education could be taken domestically. While his parents continued to practice Zoroastrianism, Farrokh attended the Zanzibar Missionary
School from the age of five, where his teachers were Anglican nuns. Considered brighter than average, he displayed early aptitude for painting, drawing, and sculpting.

“He was developing quickly into a delightfully courteous, serious, and precise little boy,” remembers Perviz.

“He had a twinkle in his eye and a mischievous streak, which would now and then get the better of him. But I remember him most vividly as secretive and shy. Painfully shy. He would not talk much, even when he came with his parents to see us. That was his nature. As he grew older, we didn’t see each other so much, as he would be out playing on the streets and on the beach with all the other boys.”

“As a young boy, he was very happy and loved music,” his mother Jer recalled. “Folk, opera, classical, he loved them all. I think he always wanted to be a showman.”

Perviz was surprised to learn that my efforts to procure a copy of her cousin’s birth certificate from official sources had ended inconclusively. Not even an audience with the chief registrar produced good news.

“So you are here for Freddie Mercury’s birth certificate?” He smiled. “It’s not here. It
was
here. An Argentinian woman came some years ago, to look for it. A copy was made out for her, and the original has not been seen since, although it has been asked for on numerous occasions—I presume by his fans. The main problem is that, in 1946, 1947, proper records were not yet kept. Just pieces of paper, which now lie in a jumble all over the place. I will show you.”

Behind the counter in the main office, the registrar rummaged in filing cabinets and returned with handfuls of loose birth certificates. Perhaps a dozen of these spilled onto the floor and were left there.

“There is one person, a physician by the name of Dr. Mehta, who is currently in Oman but returning next week. I know he has a copy of Freddie’s birth certificate.” Try as I might, however, I was never able to track Dr. Mehta down.

My investigations into the family’s roots did not meet with the
approval of all concerned. Perviz’s beautiful daughter Diana was unimpressed, while insisting that she was not at all interested in “Freddie
Mercouri
.” Why?

“He went away from Zanzibar when I was only a baby,” she shrugged, her face flushing. “He gave up his family name. He did not live like us. He was nothing at all to do with us. He never came back. He wasn’t proud of Zanzibar. He was a stranger. He was of another life.”

She declined to elaborate. So there was more.

Diana’s attitude was in keeping with what I found elsewhere. Although several Zanzibaris now claim to live in dwellings once owned by the Bulsara family, none could offer tangible evidence, and no one, it seemed, really cared. As one Indian shopkeeper explained, “I don’t know anything—and neither does anyone else. Anybody who tells you they do is only guessing. Especially these guides who take you round the island and show you the sights. They just want money. There is no one left here who knows. So many people left suddenly at the same time, a long time ago. But if ever you find out, will you come back here and tell me, please? Because I am heartily sick of people always asking me. Americans. South Americans. English. German. Japanese. Local people don’t understand. Who was this person anyway?”

Who was Zanzibar’s most famous son? For Queen pilgrims, this island is the ultimate destination. Specialist tour operators run expensive fan-friendly holidays to the singer’s birthplace, where a few restaurants with beautiful views and a couple of gift shops cash in on the connection. But Freddie was never in his lifetime accorded star status here. No Freedom of the City. No official archive entry. No acknowledgment, at the time of visiting, at the local museum. No former dwelling converted into personal shrine. No statue, waxwork, or effigy, no mass-produced ashtray nor fridge magnet, not so much as a postcard bearing his likeness—although there are postcards of almost everything else. Perhaps not even thermometers here have mercury in them. If ever one had cause to seek the antithesis of Elvis Presley’s Graceland in Memphis, this must be it.

The mystery of the missing birth certificate reared its head again when I got home. Out of the blue, Marcela Delorenzi, an Argentinian—
that
Argentinian—made contact. She was, she told me, on her way to London with a gift for me. What the Buenos Aires–based broadcaster and journalist brought me was a copy of Freddie’s birth certificate. I hadn’t asked for it. We’d never spoken. I hadn’t tried to track her down, she asked for nothing in return. If there was guilt, this was not discussed. At the time that she obtained it, she insisted, the original handwritten document was still in place in the Records Office. She’d seen it. Perhaps, in the end, it changed hands for vast profit, and is tucked away in a private collection somewhere.