A musician by chance

"When you have seen a tiger in the wild, your life changes forever. Or at least mine did,” says Meher Toorkey who has played charity concerts for Global Tiger Patrol and 21st Century Tiger, both organizations which fund wild tiger conservation projects in India and the Russian Far East, where she says the tiger is even more critically endangered. Toorkey was scheduled to give one of her charity performances on March 20, 2009 at Hampstead’s Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel for Global Tiger Patrol which is based at the London Zoo and is affiliated with the Zoological Society of London.

In this way Toorkey manages to combine her passion for animal welfare and conservation with music. She is happy her CD of Russian piano music (Prokofiev and Rachmaninov) for 21st Century Tiger sold more than 500 copies. "I hope my contribution helped a little bit towards saving the last of these animals who struggle for survival,” she notes fervently.

Toorkey gives strong support to Tiger Watch in India. "They have worked marvels as they realize that it is only by educating people and bettering their lot that there will be any future for the wild tiger. They are educating the children of the poachers, setting up insurance policies for forest guards, giving free medical treatment... I am grateful that I have the gift to be able to do something for these causes I am so passionate about, by making people aware of these issues when I play, and also being able to raise considerable funds for various charities through my music,” she notes.

It was her friend Soonoo Taraporewala (granddaughter of the acclaimed savant of Zoroastrianism Irach Taraporewala) "who is as tiger mad as I am” who first took Toorkey to "the magic kingdom,” the tiger reserve of Ranthambhore in Rajasthan. "It was there that I saw my first wild tigers: a mother and her two cubs in the early morning light. She was washing them and they were playing around her like a couple of domestic kittens before they disappeared in the jungle…

"It was then that I swore that I would do everything within my power to save this magnificent animal from the cruel fate that it seems to be facing in these times. Poaching, logging, mining and above all human encroachment have all taken their toll on our wildlife and if something is not done about it now, we will lose it all forever. India has only two percent of its wild areas left, and if we cannot look after that, we should be ashamed of ourselves.

"People never seem to realize that when we are saving the wild tiger, we are saving this planet for the future for generations to come. The tiger is at the pinnacle of the food chain, he is the barometer of our ecological health. If he disappears, we disappear. It is as simple as that. The human race cannot continue to destroy everything that comes in its path without very serious repercussions, as is obvious from the famines, the floods, the soil degradation, the pollution. India has some of the best scientists and conservationists and the government and people should be doing everything to help these brave and totally dedicated men and women,” Toorkey voices her commitment.

Every time this animal lover visits Bombay she says she goes to the Sakarbai Petit Animal Hospital. She finds the sight of so many abandoned dogs, "who have so much to offer,” put away in the shelter for ownerless animals "heartbreaking.”

"My life has been a series of random events that somehow cohered to form a pattern,” says the daughter of the late Keki and Amy Toorkey (née Shroff who passed away last February). "I did not plan on becoming a concert pianist. I started taking formal piano lessons rather late in life, at the age of 17, and that is considered aged by most standards today when students can rattle off all 24 of the Chopin Etudes.” But in eight years she had completed her Licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music, standing first in India and winning the Sir Adrian Boult Cup and Shield (founded in memory of the famed conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra). Subsequently she was awarded a British Council Scholarship to study in London with the eminent Swiss pianist Albert Ferber, himself a pupil of renowned composer Sergei Rachmaninov, according to Toorkey, who had heard him play in Bombay many years earlier. "I had never dreamt that one day I would be taking lessons from this wonderfully inspiring musician. From then on I was tossed onto the concert platform as it seemed to be the career I had chosen without even realizing it.”

Toorkey attributes her success to the kindness and encouragement given to her in Bombay in her college days by her "good friend Feroza Dubash Labonne and her mother, the late Farida Dubash of Walsingham School and a very fine teacher indeed,” who also gave her piano lessons. "I shall also always be thankful to my teacher Tehmie Gazdar for teaching me to make a lovely sound at the piano, something which people seem to forget all too often nowadays in the dash of fast loud efficiency. In recent years, I have worked with the distinguished pianist Katharina Wolpe who is a dear friend and a constant musical inspiration and support.”

The London based pianist has an eclectic repertoire and says she plays everything from Scarlatti to Schoenberg. "But if I am forced to name my favorite composers, then I would choose those I come back to again and again and miss passionately when I am not working on them: Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms… and lately when working on the Mozart concertos, I realize that I am forever discovering new and amazing things in phrase after phrase and never tiring of the practising, and that can only be the magic of Mozart!”

Her family had not supported her desire to go for music as a career. "You do not get rich doing music unless you are famous like Vladimir Ashkenazy and Daniel Barenboim (both legendary pianists and conductors) or you are a pop star. But making choices is what life is about, and I could have become a lawyer or an accountant and failed dismally and been miserable, and I chose to do music instead,” says Toorkey. However, her parents did attend many of her concerts.

We learn that father Keki Toorkey had been a Tata employee. Mother Amy had spent much of life tending a son born with cerebral palsy who passed away 10 years ago. The impact on Meher seemed to have been that of her mother’s sister Dr Homai Shroff, the distinguished professor of English and principal of Elphinstone College where the future musician acquired an MA in English literature. Meher also remembers her mother’s brother Cavas Shroff, a professor of mathematics at St Xavier’s College.

Toorkey, who had entertained the international Zoroastrian community in June 2005 during the Eighth World Zoroastrian Congress in London, says she has always found the community in the UK "very supportive and helpful.” She feels the Parsis are "a very nice community: open minded and civilized. And we have the ability to laugh at ourselves. We are eccentric and rather endearing.”

It is unfortunate, she says, that we are decreasing in numbers. "Maybe (we) should allow converts and inter racial marriages. But I will stop there, as I do not wish to fuel a furious debate on these topics. Let the great and the good of the community continue to argue and counter argue until the voices get more complicated than a Bach fugue. It is flattering that intellectuals from other faiths take such an active interest in our religion. This should be encouraged.”

She is not a religious zealot, she notes with emphasis. "I hate bigotry and intolerance. I probably am a true Zoroastrian in that I am ecologically sensitive and I think our religion is very conscious of the sanctity of all the elements, earth, fire, air and water. I will not apologize when I say that I find more peace in a forest than in a fire temple. Perhaps our religion needs to evolve a little with the times if we wish to keep it going for the future and stop it from being stuffy and incomprehensible to young people.”

When Toorkey is not practising music or working at the animal shelter whence she has adopted two cats — "Harry, a long haired tabby and white who looks like a Sher Khan of the wild, but who is a complete wimp who loves his cushions, and Gypsy, an elegant tortoiseshell (who listens to Mozart)”— she spends her time reading, doing yoga and taking "long fun walks on Hampstead Heath with my pack of gorgeous, rowdy dogs (whose owners are too busy or too ill to walk them) whom I love to bits as I do all furry creatures, large, medium and small.”