A Parsi Boy Meets a Filipino Girl at the I-House
A New York Love Story
My father, Rusi Kaikhusroo Nanabhoy Patell, was born on May 3, 1928 in Karachi, India (now Pakistan). He passed away in early 2021 during the Covid pandemic at the age of 92 in the apartment where I grew up and in which he had lived since 1962. Cardiac arrest, peaceful and quick it seems.
I miss him, and I spent the ninety-fifth anniversary of his birth reflecting on his life and his legacy.
He was a Parsi: his ancestors were Zoroastrians who migrated from Persia to the Indian subcontinent to avoid religious persecution by the Muslims who had conquered the region. Tradition has it that they first settled in Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, a legend that is perhaps based on the similarity between the name “Hormuz” and “Hormoz,” a Persian variant of “Ahura Mazda,” the Zoroastrian name for God.
At some point, the Parsis set sail for India (some date it in the eighth century, while others say it was as late at the tenth), eventually settling in Gujarat, where they created an agricultural community. Gujarati is the language that Parsis in the subcontinent speak today, and my father grew up speaking both Gujarati and English.
Apparently, our surname — originally “Patel” — means something like “head of a village.” It’s a very common name in the subcontinent, though our spelling, with a double-L at the end, is odd and looks like a mistake. Think of the common English name “Smith,” and imagine it with an extra H tacked on: “Smithh.” People of Indian extraction — especially in the UK but sometimes in New York — will misspell my surname, because they think the double-L is a typo.
Once the British began to establish trading posts in Surat, India, in the early seventeenth century, the Parsis began to shift from agriculture to commerce. I recently heard from a distant relative on my father’s mother’s side who is trying to sort out ownership of the family’s ancestral land holdings in Surat.
The Parsis did well under the British, perhaps because they were more receptive to Western influence than other inhabitants of the subcontinent. When I visited my father’s eldest sister, Freny, in Karachi in 1984 (at the time she was still living in the apartment on Preedy Street where my father grew up), she told me (with one of my cousins acting as an interpreter, since Freny spoke little English) that it was too bad the British were gone, because everything worked better when they were around.
It was a sentiment that seemed to be shared by many Parsis I met, who felt little in common with the Muslim communities in Pakistan. Apparently it was the same for Parsis living in India, who didn’t tend to mix much with Hindus. More than one Parsi in Karachi told me that one of the significant drawbacks of the Partition of India in 1947 was that it became much more difficult for Parsis in Pakistan to visit their relatives in India.
My father told me that, after he’d graduated from college, a chance meeting with an old high school friend led to an introduction to a wealthy Parsi benefactor, who provided him with a scholarship to attend graduate school at Columbia University in 1952. He was there for a year, returned to Pakistan, and then came back for doctoral studies in Mathematical Statistics at Columbia in 1955, where he lived at the university’s International House.
That’s where he met my mother, Estrella Dahilig Raña, who had come from the Philippines to do doctoral work at Columbia in English and Theater. My parents called it “I-House,” and as a kid I thought it was “Eye House,” somehow associated with vision. It turns out I wasn’t exactly wrong.
Each of my parents had gone abroad to pursue their educational dreams, but their intention was to return home to teach in Pakistan and the Philippines respectively. Instead, they met each other, fell in love, and never left New York. They became dyed-in-the wool New Yorkers, who could never imagine living outside of Manhattan, let alone outside of “the city.”
In his moving account of New York in the middle of the twentieth-century, Here Is New York (1949), written just a few years before my father’s first trip to the city, E. B. White described three different kinds of New Yorkers:
There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.
My parents were that third kind of New Yorker: they came to New York looking for something (educations that they could take home with them) and found something else instead: a soul mate to love and a city to love.
And so my father commuted to work at IBM in White Plains for years. The reverse commute in the car wasn’t so bad from the standpoint of traffic, but I remember how difficult it often was to find a parking space on the street outside their apartment building. How frustrating it must have been to be almost home after a long day, to look up and see the lights of your apartment, but to have to circle around and around until a parking space opened up!
I think my parents occasionally contemplated moving to Westchester so that he could be closer to work, but they could never bring themselves to do it. They just weren’t prepared to become suburbanites.
One of the costs of this choice was that my parents had to spend a great deal of their disposable income on private-school tuitions for my sister and me. Public school wasn’t an option, because we lived on Riverside Drive near Columbia University and were zoned for public schools in Harlem that had been neglected by the city and were thus full of problems.
Like many Asian immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s, my parents cared deeply about their children’s education, seeing it as the only viable road to future happiness and prosperity. Luckily, they had a rent-controlled apartment, and their tenancy predated Columbia’s acquisition of their building, so the university couldn’t kick them out. But they always had to be careful about money.
When I think about their marriage now, it seems to me to be not only a great love story, but also a symbol of the boundary-crossing cosmopolitanism that has been central to my research and teaching for three decades now. Their marriage was a crossing of cultural and ethnic boundaries against the wishes of their families.
It was also a crossing of disciplinary boundaries between the sciences and the humanities. I always thought that it was ironic that it was my mother rather than my father the mathematician who kept the family checkbook.
Moreover, when it came time to clear out the apartment two years ago, I realized that my love of physical books came not from my mother but my father, whose books on mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and economics lined both sides of the apartment’s long hallway. His books far outnumbered those belonging to my mother, who had passed away in 2006.
What I got from her was my love of reading fiction. My father had read Classics Comics as a child, he told me, but he never cared much for fiction. As far as I know, the only work of fiction that he had read since I was born was Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and I always suspected it was because the voices of the novel’s narrators reminded him of my mother.
I later gave him a copy of Rohinton Mistry’s book of short stories, Tales from Firozha Baag (1987) about the residents of a Parsi community in Bombay. He tried it but didn’t like it. I was never sure whether it was because he thought Mistry’s largely humorous portrayal of Parsis was accurate or inaccurate.
Their marriage was also a meeting of religious traditions. As a Pakistani Parsi, my father was a Zoroastrian, while my mother was that rarity — a Filipino Protestant, her mother having converted to a Pentecostal sect when my mother was young. She told me that as a young girl she envied the Catholics, because they had elaborate ceremonies and rituals with incense.
My upbringing wasn’t religious, though we did celebrate Christmas and made it a point to attend the Christmas eve services at Riverside Church in New York, a few blocks up the street from where we lived. My mother sometimes liked to attend Easter services there as well.
And we did attend the dinners held by the Zoroastrian Association of Greater New York at Columbia University — my father and mother called them “functions” — until it moved outside New York City. When I was young, my father would perform his morning Zoroastrian prayer routine, saying prayers in the Avestan language as he tied his kusti each morning around the waist of his thin cotton sudreh (undershirt).
When it came time for me to have a formal religion, my parents decided I should have a Zoroastrian navjote ceremony because, as my mother explained it, I could then keep my options open. I could always convert to Christianity, but Zoroastrianism was passed down on the father’s side, and Zoroastrians didn’t accept converts. But, when the time came during third grade for the ceremony to be performed, we couldn’t find a priest. We kept hearing excuses along the lines of “I would do it, but my mother-in-law is very old-fashioned.” Finally, we managed to secure the services of Mr. Bamjee, a priest from Bombay who was traveling in the U.S. and spending some time in New York.
When it came time for my sister to have her ceremony four years later, we couldn’t find anyone to perform it, so we had to go to London, where my father’s other sister, Banoo, was living and was well connected to the Parsi community. For certain parts of the preparations, however, my aunt had to deputize for my mother, because there were areas of the agiary (Zoroastrian fire temple) where non-Zoroastrians were not allowed to go.
I used to tell these stories in the course of the sample classes on “Cosmopolitanism Now” that I gave as part of our admissions weekends at NYU Abu Dhabi from 2009 to 2021. I described this narrative as an early lesson in the dynamics of culture, though it had taken me years to recognize it: my parents’ marriage was an emblem of cosmopolitan cultural mixing, while the Parsi priests’ belief in the importance of cultural purity served as an emblem of all the forces that are arrayed against cosmopolitanism.
My mother passed away in 2006. She didn’t live to see me begin to work on the NYU Abu Dhabi project two years later, but I always thought that she would have been proud of the work I was doing. My father certainly was, and he encouraged us to move the family to Abu Dhabi in 2011, even though it meant being halfway around the world from him.
In the eulogy that I gave at the small funeral ceremony that we were able to have despite the pandemic in 2021, I said that I had realized that my going to NYU Abu Dhabi was a version of what my parents had done. They’d left their home countries to pursue their educational dreams, then shifted those dreams to be with one another and start a family. I said that going to NYU Abu Dhabi was my way of paying it forward: going abroad to pursue my educational dreams, to share the light of the liberal arts with students from around the world.
When I was growing up, strangers would ask me, “Where are you from?” and I’d say, “New York” or “the upper West Side.” They’d look vaguely disappointed and then say, “No, I meant, ‘What’s your background’”? I wasn’t really being disingenuous, though I was well aware of what the first question really meant. It’s just that I never particularly identified with either of my parents’ cultural traditions. We spoke English at home, and my parents had gradually lost their fluency in their mother tongues (Gujarati and Tagalog, respectively). What I identified with was being mixed and being able to slip from one cultural context to another.
Is it any wonder, then, that cosmopolitanism is the animating principle of my research and teaching? I owe that, and so much, more to my parents and their New York love story.
Cyrus R. K. Patell is Professor of English at New York University. His most recent book is Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe (Bloomsbury). www.patell.net.
