THE FIRST CHILD OF BOMI AND JER Bulsara, the boy named Farrokh was born on September 5, 1946, in the British protectorate of…

THE FIRST CHILD OF BOMI AND JER Bulsara, the boy named Farrokh was born on September 5, 1946, in the British protectorate of Zanzibar, an island off the east coast of Africa. The Bulsaras were Paris’s, Zoroastrian descendents of Persians who fled to India to escape Muslim persecution. While Bomi worked as a high-court cashier for the British government, Jer looked after Farrokh, a lively child who took an early interest in music: “Folk, opera, classical, he loved them all,” she later said. “I think he always wanted to be a showman.”

When Farrokh was six, Jer gave birth to his sister, Kashmira, but the boy’s happy home life would be short-lived. As Kashmira later said, “I only had a year of him,” referrring to the fact that her older brother was sent to St. Peter’s, a boarding school in India, not far from Bombay. “I was a precocious child,” Farrokh would say many years later, when he was known as Fred Mercury, “and my parents thought boarding school would do me good. It was an upheaval of an upbringing, which seems to have worked, I guess.”

Life magazine. Queen. Fev. 2019.