ask Mrs Jer Bulsara, Freddy Mercury's mother, if her son would have approved of being in a book on Parsis. "Of course," she replies promptly. His only sibling, his sister Kashmira Cook, is not so sure. She doesn't know what her brother's reaction might have been. He might have thought it strange, perhaps he would have been curious.
          Few people knew his real origins-that he was a Parsi who spent his growing up years in school in Panchgani where he was in a band called the Hectics. The Hectics disbanded after school but Farrokh Bulsara went on to become the magnificent Freddy Mercury. The shy boy who became the flamboyant performer put his past behind him and didn't seem to ever look back. I wonder what his fellow Hectics must have thought when Queen first burst onto the scene?
          Would they have anticipated his success? His talent was evident from when he was a young boy, his determination never wavered. "He had this great drive, you see," says his sister. "He was a perfectionist. If he didn't get it right he would just carry on and do it again and again and again. He never gave up, because he believed in himself." Yet the world is littered with talented, determined souls, whose lives have never taken off. He was blessed. And cursed. Like so many artists before him he died far too young.
          I am sitting at the Shamiana Coffee Shop with his mother and sister who have come to Bombay with a photographic exhibition on Freddy Mercury's life. The photographs start from their days in Zanzibar, little Farrokh in a rickshaw with a flower garland around his neck on his birthday, on his way to the fire temple, the only one in Africa.
          "I went to Zanzibar in 1945 after my marriage," says his mother. "My husband was working in the High Court. Both my children were born in the government hospital there. Kashmira went to convent school in Zanzibar. When Freddy was ten we put him in boarding school in India, St Peter's in Panchgani. On holidays he used to come to my mother and sister in Dadar. Long holidays we used to call him over to Zanzibar. We left Zanzibar because of the revolution. Freddy was sixteen when he joined us in England."
          "Back in Zanzibar," says his sister, "I remember for his birthday he was always asking for a tape recorder. And then he'd have this tape recorder next to the radio and he would wait for these British programmes that came on very late and as soon as they came on he would tape the songs and then he would play them over and over and over again."
          "As a young child," his mother recalls, "right from the start, music was in his blood,.....