#I don't know very much about Parsi culture but must cultures have something similar to a marriage or partnership bonding ceremony-

[solradguy]

You know, we all make jokes about Sol/Frederick and Jack-O'/Aria being married (myself included), but they never actually refer to Aria as Frederick's wife in Begin (or anywhere else, afaik) and definitely not with Jack-O' anywhere.

I think the closest they got with Aria has been 恋人 (koibito; lover/boyfriend/girlfriend), which was kinda tricky to render in English when it was used gender neutrally. I ended up translating it as "partner" at least once for the Begin translation.

[a-froger-epic]

Do you think there was a part of Freddie... i don't know how to describe, maybe his Parsi-Indian part? And i don't mean his difficult childhood at the boarding school, i mean maybe he still had some good feelings/memories related to his nationality, maybe he dreamed in Gujarati and remembered palm trees and ocean and beaches of Zanzibar. Or maybe felt something connecting him to the history of his people who moved from Iran to India a thousand years ago. Would be so interesting if he did.

I'm replying to this late because I kind of needed to put some thought into it.

First off, let me say that basically - no idea. All I can speak from here is personal experience as an immigrant child, myself. As for dreaming in different languages... that's rare. Usually you always have a dominant language that you speak and that's the language you dream in. When I moved to Germany I was only 5 so I don't remember then, but when I moved to London at age 20 I stopped dreaming in German after about 1 1/2-2 years. Only very, very, very rarely does German or Russian pop up in my dreams. Like, once a year, if that.

Also, when I moved away from Germany, I kind of had a lot of resentment towards the place. Don't get me wrong, Germany is wonderful and I hold a German passport due to my naturalisation there, German culture has influenced me greatly - I love Germany. Now. At the time, some things had happened to me, many of them related to feeling out of place, a lack of belonging, etc., that I associated with Germany at the time. So for at least a decade, there was very little I remembered fondly that wasn't tainted by my negative feelings. I have a feeling, although I could be wrong, that it was similar for Freddie at least with regard to India. Maybe not! One biography I read claimed that he liked Kensington Market because it would have reminded him of the markets of Bombay. I really don't know, perhaps. I have a hunch (based on not very much, frankly) that he did love being near bodies of water, even if not necessarily in them so much. lol But I'm sure that growing up near the sea in early childhood did leave an impression. I'm sure that the more time passed, the more fond early memories became, because that is what happens.

I don't think that he ever felt a particularly deep connection to where he was from culturally, because he was born in a foreign country (they were a Parsi-Indian family living abroad), he grew up in a country that must have felt pretty foreign, and he consciously decided that London was where he belonged, in the end. I feel like he was also somebody who didn't actually reflect on his past excessively (or his future), I think he lived in the moment a fair bit of the time.

So those are my thoughts regarding your thoughts, anon. 😀