Dubash

The Dubashes came to Karachi from Surat, or at least that’s Jamshed’s understanding, and it’s the same move a lot of Parsi families made in the 1800s. Karachi’s port was busy with British shipping, and much of the work of loading and unloading it was done by Parsi firms of stevedores and dubashes, who dealt with the ships on the owners’ behalf.

One of the first was Pestonji Bhicaji, who arrived in 1855 and trained his sons Phirojshah and Mehyarji to carry the business on. I don’t think we’re descended from him (I spent a while wondering, because the names are so similar), but our side of the story does start in his firm.

According to a history of Karachi’s Parsis compiled by Jehangir Punthakey, which Jamshed has a copy of, Jivanji P. Dubash started out as a clerk on the Sind-Punjab Railway and then joined Mehyarji’s sons as a partner, along with his own father and brother. After that he went into business with an Englishman, G. A. Brigstocke, and their firm, Brigstocke Jewanjee & Co, worked as stevedores and dubashes at Kiamari. A 1920 book on the businesses of the Bombay Presidency says they founded it in 1875. An advert from 1962 says 1878 and names a Captain E. A. Brigstocke instead, so I’m keeping both until something settles it. Punthakey says Jivanji ran it for 45 years and that his sons carried it on after him.

By 1920 both founders had died, because the book calls them “the late Mr. G. A. Brigstocke and the late Mr. Jewanjee Pestonji Dubash”, and that’s also how I found out what his P stood for. The partners by then were a G. A. Brigstocke (presumably the founder’s son), an A. F. Brigstocke, a Pestonji A. Dubash and a Hormusjee Jewanjee, and during the First World War the firm handled the loading and unloading of all the military transports at Karachi. It was still going in 1962, as Brigstocke Eduljee & Co.

Jivanji married Dinbai, the eldest daughter of Rustomji and Bachamai Bamboatwalla. I think Jivanji and Dinbai were Sam’s great-grandparents, but this is the one link in the whole line I haven’t been able to prove. Nothing I’ve found says in black and white that Ardeshir, Sam’s grandfather, was their son. What I do have is a post from 2015 by a Bamboatwalla descendant saying that an “Adil Gandi” (almost certainly Ader) descends from Dinbai and Jivanjee Dubash, and the simplest way for that to work is through Ardeshir.

The partner called Pestonji A. Dubash might settle it one day. If his A turns out to stand for Ardeshir, he’d have been Nariman’s brother and Jivanji’s grandson, and the book does say that “sons and grandsons of the founders” had become partners. I don’t know yet.

The two old portraits of Sam’s grandfather came from I. Sequeira and Sons, a Goan photography studio in Saddar founded in 1898 by Ignatius Sequeira. It was quite a studio (Arthur Sequeira took the official portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah). I’d hoped their archive might still exist, but Menin Rodrigues, who has researched the Sequeira family, told me in August 2026 that it was all lost in a move.

I hadn’t heard of this man until August 2026. I’d always had Sam’s father down as plain Nariman, and I’d assumed Jivanji was his father. Then the 1932 Karachi residents directory turned up a Nariman Ardeshir Dubash on Napier Street in Saddar, and a family postcard signed “Nariman A. Dubash” said the same thing.

In Parsi naming your middle name is your father’s first name, so Nariman’s father was called Ardeshir, and that put a whole generation back into my tree. It wasn’t news to everyone, though. When I shared it, Jamshed said Ardeshir and Jivanji were both names he’d heard mentioned several times, and he came to the same conclusion himself from the naming rule. The residents list in his Punthakey book (the material is said to date from around 1919, though I haven’t been able to check that) has “Nariman A. Dubash: Napier Street” as well, and a few lines away there’s a Jamshedji R. Gahndi on the same street. Jamshed thinks that’s his Gandi grandfather, which would mean both his grandfathers lived on Napier Street years before Gulmoher married Behram.

The 1932 directory also lists a Jal Ardeshir Dubash on Napier Street. Same middle name, same street, so I think he was Nariman’s brother, but I can’t prove it yet. Ardeshir himself isn’t listed in 1932, so he’d probably died by then.

Nariman married Villoo Daroga, one of the six children of Mehrwanji and Jerbai Daroga (Jerbai was born an Atmaramsa, according to Shireen Shish’s family tree). In 1926 the Darogas built Jer Lodge at 29 Parsi Colony, Bunder Road Extension, and named it after Jerbai. It stayed the family’s address for decades, and it’s where Sam asked for the telegram to be sent when he died.

Nariman died in Karachi in the early 1970s. Mohsin and Ader both think it was before the Gandis moved to America in 1975. Villoo lived until about 1991 (Mohsin remembers her dying when he was four or five), so she outlived Sam by a few years.

Dina was the eldest, born on 10 October 1924. Sam came next, on 6 August 1926, then Gulmoher on 17 June 1930, and Mehli was the youngest (Ader’s sure of that, though none of us knows his birth date). Dina married Meherwanji Minwalla. Gulmoher is almost certainly the Gulmohar Nariman Dubash on the Mama Parsi Girls’ School’s list of 1946 leavers, and she married Behram Gandi and eventually settled in California. Mehli stayed in Karachi with his wife Arnawaz, who everyone knows as Annu.

Freny Sethna tells me that Villoo’s sister Alla, who everyone called Aloo, took care of Sam a lot when he was young, and later of Dina’s four children too. Aloo’s own arranged marriage, to a man in Quetta, didn’t last, and she came home to Karachi and never remarried. She died in 1980, according to Shireen’s family tree. I’d love to know more about her, to be honest, and about what Sam was like as a boy.

All four of them are in the family tree, with the people they married and their children.

In the spring of 1955 Sam sailed from Bombay, calling at Karachi and Aden, to Liverpool on the Anchor Line’s SS Circassia, arriving on 13 April. The passenger list has him as a Pakistani citizen, single, working as an Assistant Cashier. He was 28. I don’t know yet why he went, or whether he meant to stay.

The following year he married my grandmother, Jean Margaret Taft, in the Paddington registration district, and for a while they lived at 21 Inverness Terrace in W2. On the back of the postcard portrait below he wrote Jean a love letter. He calls her “My Dearest of Dear Jinoo” and calls the photograph “a postcard of a Baboon whom you love so very much”, and he signs it just “Dubash”.

I’ve ordered their marriage certificate. It should show the full name Sam gave when he married, along with his father’s name and job, which might help with a couple of the questions further down.

Jean went out to Karachi with Sam, probably early in 1957, and my uncle Nariman says she was already pregnant with my dad. Ader and Jamshed remember that she didn’t really take to it (they say she found it noisy and overwhelming), and Jamshed remembers his dad Behram recording a message from her on tape while they were there. She came home early and on her own, and Sam followed a little later. Nariman adds that she had to be flown home by the British authorities in Karachi, who then asked her parents to pay back the fare. There was a letter about it until quite recently, and he suspects it didn’t help things.

My dad, Neville, was born in Paignton in 1957, and the family called him Aalo. His brother Nariman followed in 1959.

Most of what I know about these years comes from my uncle Nariman, and he was only a toddler at the time, so a lot of it is what Jean told him later. After he was born, Sam and Jean moved round a few addresses in south Devon and ended up renting a house in Denbury, a village a few miles outside Newton Abbot (about two miles from where Nariman lives now).

At some point Sam fell out with Jean’s parents, and for months they weren’t speaking. Then one Christmas Eve, as Jean told it, he decided to invite them over for Christmas Day. They said it was too late in the day, he took offence, and things only got worse. Nariman describes his grandfather, Freddy Taft, as a domineering and rigid man who, as far as he always understood, never approved of the marriage in the first place.

Things came to a head on a summer’s day, in 1961 he thinks. Jean came back from Paignton with the two boys and Sam wouldn’t let them into the house, and nothing would change his mind. She rang her dad, who drove over to Denbury and took the three of them home. Nariman can easily imagine Freddy telling her that was the final straw and taking her to a solicitor the next day, and knowing how much her parents steered her life he thinks that’s probably how it went, though he’s the first to say it’s his guess. The divorce itself came through in 1964, going by Sam’s will (Nariman had remembered it as 1962).

Soon afterwards Sam had some sort of breakdown and was sectioned, and he was taken first to Digby Hospital in Exeter. The diagnosis at the time was schizophrenia, which Nariman points out “was used as a catch-all for various mental health issues”. He used to have some paperwork saying that the probation officer in Paignton, Jimmy Vorse, had taken him to see his dad at Digby. People called Jimmy “Mr Probation”, and funnily enough that’s a title Nariman was given himself before he retired.

My dad remembered a version of that day too. He told me Sam had held him hostage in his own house, and that after that Sam seemed to vanish from his life altogether. He thought it happened while Sam was out of hospital on day release, but I think it was probably the same day Nariman describes and Dad just had the timing wrong. It’s all second-hand now, though, so I can’t be completely sure. According to Jamshed, Sam’s mum Villoo came over from Karachi in the early 1960s and stayed with him, but by then he and Jean had split, so she never got to meet Jean or the boys.

After that the family in England mostly lost sight of him. Jean brought the boys up in Devon, and she kept the name Dubash for the rest of her life.

A few people did see him. Jamshed visited him in Bristol for a day in 1974, he thinks, and met a good friend of his there called Gerty. Sam told him that he used to watch my dad and Nariman getting on the school bus, from a distance. Jamshed says he was heartbroken hearing it, and honestly so am I. A couple of years later, in about 1976, Jamshed and his cousin Rosheni spent three days with Sam in London and they all went to Canvey Island together.

Freny Sethna, his cousin, saw him too. In 1969 she, her husband and their two children came through England on their way to Canada, and Sam turned up to see them without any warning, got his landlady to give them her spare room, and took them round the art galleries. Afterwards he drew Freny and both children and posted the drawings out to them in Canada. Freny remembers him drawing portraits long before that, and helping her and her sister Katy with the albums of famous people they put together for school. So even while he’d lost touch with us, he hadn’t lost touch with everyone, and he was obviously still drawing.

By the end of 1987 Sam was living in a ground floor flat at 4 Hanbury Road in Clifton, with a collection of furniture, drawings, paintings, sculpture and ceramics. On 18 November 1987 he made a will with Watson Sennett, a firm of solicitors on John Street in Bristol. It’s the most personal thing of his I’ve got.

He asked for the rent on the flat to keep being paid after he died, so his things wouldn’t be cleared out in a hurry, and for anything nobody wanted to be sold at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. He wrote “I am a Zorastrian” (his spelling), asked to be cremated rather than laid out in a chapel or a church, and wanted his ashes scattered on the sea. He even asked for doctors to make sure he was actually dead first.

Ader remembers him as a follower of Meher Baba, the Indian spiritual teacher, and I’ll come back to that.

He left it to his uncle, Khurshed Meherwanjee Daroga, at 29 Parsi Colony, and asked for it to be sent out as soon as possible after his death, with the customs paid from his estate, and “treated as an heirloom by my family and shall not be altered or disposed of in any way”.

I don’t know if it ever got there. Khurshed later moved to America and died in Massachusetts in 2003, so if it did arrive, it might still be with his children. I’ve asked.

Sam died on 3 January 1988, and not in England. His death was never registered in England or Wales: only fourteen Dubash deaths were registered there at all between 1916 and 2007, and none of them is his. Freny remembers that he was on holiday in India and had her uncle Khurshed’s name and address in his wallet, which is how the family in Karachi found out.

The rest comes through Ader, from his cousin Faredoon Minwalla, Dina’s son. As Faredoon tells it, Sam was travelling with a British woman described to the family as a faith healer. He died in India, possibly of a heart attack, and was cremated there. She wrote to Khurshed to let them know and sent a photograph of three people: Sam, herself, and a tall man said to be her son. Faredoon kept it in a folder he’d put together, but he left that behind in Pakistan when he emigrated, so it’s probably lost. I’m told he tried to find out more at the time through the British Consulate in India, and I’ve since learned that my dad worked on it with him. Ader has been careful to say he can’t vouch for all of it, and it’s a second-hand account from nearly forty years ago, but a lot of it matches the will, including the small funeral insurance policy in it, which Faredoon knew about without ever having seen the will.

The will names one executrix and main beneficiary, Gabriel Peters, of Portishead. It calls her “she”, so Gabriel was a woman. I think she was probably the woman he went to India with, but nothing I’ve found proves it, and I haven’t found any other trace of her in the records of England and Wales. If she had died before Sam, the rest of his estate was to go to his sister Dina. Faredoon’s understanding, as Ader passed it on, is that Sam meant the money to go to Dina, though Ader is the first to say he can’t know the truth of it. What I can say is that the will was signed in Bristol in front of two of the solicitors’ staff six weeks before he died, and it’s the one that was proved, so whatever happened on the trip, it wasn’t changed in India. The estate came to under £70,000 before debts and under £10,000 after.

Probate was granted in Bristol on 25 March 1988, to “Minocher Nariman Dubash otherwise Sam Nariman Dubash”. When I asked, neither Ader nor Jamshed had ever heard him called Minocher. He’s Sam on his passenger list, on his marriage record and on the backs of his photographs, and as far as I can find, Minocher only appears in the will and the two documents made from it. My own reading is that he used it so that Jean and his sons couldn’t easily find a record of his death, and it would fit with what he asked for in clause 8.

I can’t prove that’s what he was thinking, and it’s possible Minocher was a formal name on paper that nobody ever used. I’ve ordered the marriage certificate, which should tell me one way or the other.

And why India? One possibility is Meher Baba. His tomb at Meherabad, near Ahmednagar, is where his followers go on pilgrimage, and January is the season for it. The Meher Baba Association in the UK were very kind when I wrote to them, and their archivist wondered whether Sam might be related to Adi and Rhoda Dubash, who lived at Meherabad for many years and were close to Meher Baba. I don’t know yet, and for now it’s only a guess.

This part is hypothetical, and I want to say that up front. None of it was ever diagnosed, and most of the people in it can’t be asked. But the more of the family I’ve found, the more I’ve noticed the same couple of things turning up, and to be honest they’re a big part of why I started looking in the first place.

The first is making things. Sam drew portraits and collected paintings and drawings all his life. His sister Gulmoher was an artist too, and Ader remembers her moving in Karachi’s art circles. Freny’s mother Khorshed painted saris in oils and sold them, and Freny’s sister Katy still paints. My grandmother Jean was at art college during the war. My dad was a professional landscape photographer and a graphic designer, and he drew portraits as well, and he definitely had the eye for something looking right. Ader used to run a photography gallery in Mumbai. I’m a graphic designer and photographer myself, my sister Rachel does some graphic design, and we’re both musical. For me, anyway, it’s always felt less like a hobby than a compulsion.

The second is harder to pin down, a kind of restlessness and appetite for risk. When I met Ader in London in May 2026, he told me his grandfather Nariman, Sam’s father, was a gambler. He remembers him losing money and coming to Ader’s mother, Gulmoher, to ask her for more, with his hands shaking. Ader does a bit of stock trading himself, and he told me that when he catches himself gambling on the markets he sometimes thinks of Nariman, and wonders whether there’s a line between the two of them, straight, dotted or curved.

And then there’s the way our heads work. I’ve almost certainly got ADHD, though I’ve never been formally diagnosed, and Rachel thinks she’s autistic, which I’d agree with. I’m fairly sure my dad had ADHD too, and I suspect a bit of autism as well, going by how he was with people at times. Sam’s diagnosis in the 1960s was schizophrenia, but from the stories I’ve heard, with his moods rising and falling over months at a time, I think something like bipolar disorder might fit him better, though that’s only my reading from a long way off. Jean clearly worried about it running in the family too. Years later, when they thought she might be dying, she told Nariman “Your father didn’t leave you, he was sectioned due to his mental health”, that he “would have terrible mood swings”, and asked him not to tell my dad, because she was afraid it could be hereditary and that just knowing might trigger it in him. Nariman kept it to himself until Dad started talking about wanting to find his father, and then told him, so he’d understand what he might be taking on. Neither of them knew Sam had already died. For me the ADHD comes with a constant need for something new, which is great for creative work and for saying yes to things like meeting Ader, and not so great for anything that’s important but not urgent yet.

ADHD, autism and bipolar disorder all tend to run in families, and they overlap quite a lot, so I don’t think it’s far-fetched that some of this goes back a few generations. I can’t prove any of it though, and plenty of families have artists and gamblers in them by chance. We seem to be quite a family of oversharers and thinkers, so I don’t think writing it down is a bad thing. If anyone in the family recognises any of this, in themselves or in someone they remember, I’d really love to hear about it.

If you’ve read this far and something’s wrong, or you know something I don’t, please tell me. That goes for dates, spellings and who married who, and for the stories too. A lot of the people reading this knew these people and I didn’t, so I’d much rather be corrected than keep a mistake in here. If you’re in the family WhatsApp group that’s probably the easiest place, otherwise just message me.