Born at Bombay 17 September 1912, son of Jamshedji Dhondy, cashier in Mulla and Mulla, solicitors to the Central Government of India, and Meherbai Shroff, his wife. They were members of the Zoroastrian Parsee community at Dadar, Bombay. He was educated at the Bharda New High School, St Xavier's College, the Royal Institute of Science, and Grant Medical College, where he won many prizes and medals and the Reid and Carnac scholarships, and qualified MB BS in the University of Bombay in 1935. He then served as house surgeon and casualty medical officer at the Jamsetji Jijibhai Hospital, and travelled widely in India. He was a keen photographer. In July 1937 he came to England, qualified MB BS London and MRCS LRCP 1939 and proceeded to the Fellowship in June 1940. He was offered an appointment on the staff of the Tata Memorial Hospital for Cancer, Bombay, and awarded a scholarship for a year's postgraduate study in America. Dhondy sailed for America in the ship *City of Benares*, which was torpedoed in the Atlantic on 17 September 1940, and he was drowned on his twenty-eighth birthday. His family endowed the Dr N J Dhondy Memorial Medal for surgical pathology at the Grant Medical College.