A Son of the Circus

by John Winslow Irving

  “He’s well educated,” Farrokh managed to say. Both John D. and Julia groaned. “Well, damn it, he’s complicated!” Dr. Daruwalla shouted. “It’s too soon to know what he’s like!”

  “Ssshhh! You’ll wake him up,” Julia told Farrokh.

  “If it’s too soon to know what he’s like,” John D. said, “then it’s too soon for me to know if I want to meet him.”

  Dr. Daruwalla was irritated; he felt that this was a typical Inspector Dhar thing to say.

  Julia knew what her husband was thinking. “Hold your tongue,” she told him. She made coffee for herself and John D.—for Farrokh, she made a pot of tea. Together, the Daruwallas watched their beloved movie star leave by the kitchen door. Dhar liked to use the back stairs so that he wouldn’t be seen; the early morning—it wasn’t quite 6:00—was one of the few times he could walk from Marine Drive to the Taj without being recognized and surrounded. At that hour, only the beggars would hassle him; they hassled everyone equally. It simply didn’t matter to the beggars that he was Inspector Dhar; many beggars went to the cinema, but what did a movie star matter to them?

  Standing Still: An Exercise

  At exactly 6:00 in the morning, when Farrokh and Julia were sharing a bath together—she soaped his back, he soaped her breasts, but there was no more extensive hanky-panky than that—Martin Mills awoke to the soothing sounds of Dr. Aziz, the praying urologist. “Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation”—Dr. Aziz’s incantations to Allah drifted upward from his fifth-floor balcony and brought the new missionary instantly to his feet. Although he’d been asleep for less than an hour, the Jesuit felt as refreshed as a normal man who had slept the whole night through; thus invigorated, he bounded to Dr. Daruwalla’s balcony, where he could oversee the morning ritual that Urology Aziz enacted on his prayer rug. From the vantage point of the Daruwallas’ sixth-floor apartment, the view of Back Bay was stunning. Martin Mills could see Malabar Hill and Nariman Point; in the distance, a small city of people had already congregated on Chowpatty Beach. But the Jesuit had not come to Bombay for the view. He followed the prayers of Dr. Aziz with the keenest concentration. There was always something one could learn from the holiness of others.

  Martin Mills did not take prayer for granted. He knew that prayer wasn’t the same as thinking, nor was it an escape from thinking. It was never as simple as mere asking. Instead, it was the seeking of instruction; for to know God’s will was Martin’s heart’s desire, and to attain such a state of perfection—a union with God in mystical ecstasy—required the patience of a corpse.

  Watching Urology Aziz roll up his prayer rug, Martin Mills knew it was the perfect time for him to practice another exercise of Father de Mello’s Christian Exercises in Eastern Form—namely, “stillness.” Most people didn’t appreciate how impossible it was to stand absolutely still; it could be painful, too, but Martin was good at it. He stood so still that, 10 minutes later, a passing fork-tailed kite almost landed on his head. It wasn’t because the missionary so much as blinked that the bird suddenly veered away from him; the light that was reflected in the brightness of the missionary’s eyes frightened the bird away.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Daruwalla was tearing through his hate mail, wherein he found a troubling two-rupee note. The envelope was addressed to Inspector Dhar in care of the film studio; typed on the serial-number side of the money, in capital letters, was this warning: YOU’RE AS DEAD AS LAL. The doctor would show this to Deputy Commissioner Patel, of course, but Farrokh felt he didn’t need the detective’s confirmation in order to know that the typist was the same lunatic who’d typed the message on the money found in Mr. Lal’s mouth.

  Then Julia burst into the bedroom. She’d peeked into the living room to see if Martin Mills was still sleeping, but he wasn’t on the couch. The sliding-glass doors to the balcony were open, but she’d not seen the missionary on the balcony—he was standing so still, she’d missed him. Dr. Daruwalla stuffed the two-rupee note into his pocket and rushed to the balcony.

  By the time the doctor got there, the missionary had moved ahead to a new prayer tactic—this one being one of Father de Mello’s exercises in the area of “body sensations” and “thought control.” Martin would lift his right foot, move it forward, then put it down. As he did this, he would chant, “Lifting… lifting… lifting,” and then (naturally) “Moving… moving… moving,” and (finally) “Placing… placing… placing.” In short, he was merely walking across the balcony, but with an exaggerated slowness—all the while exclaiming aloud his exact movements. To Dr. Daruwalla, Martin Mills resembled a patient in physical therapy—someone recovering from a recent stroke—for the missionary appeared to be teaching himself how to speak and walk at the same time, with only modest success.

  Farrokh tiptoed back to the bedroom and Julia.

  “Perhaps I’ve underestimated his injuries,” the doctor said. “I’ll have to take him to the office with me. At least for a while, it’s best to keep an eye on him.”

  But when the Daruwallas cautiously approached the Jesuit, he was dressed in clerical garb. He was looking through his suitcase.

  “They took only my culpa beads and my casual clothes,” Martin remarked. “I’ll have to buy some cheap local wear—it would be ostentatious to show up at St. Ignatius looking like this!” Whereupon he laughed and plucked at his startlingly white collar.

  It certainly won’t do to have him walking around Bombay like this, Dr. Daruwalla thought. What was required was the sort of clothing that would allow the madman somehow to fit in. Possibly I could arrange to shave his head, the doctor thought. Julia simply gaped at Martin Mills, but as soon as he began to relate (again!) the tale of his introduction to the city, he completely charmed her, and she became as alternately flirtatious and shy as a schoolgirl. For a man who’d taken a vow of chastity, the Jesuit was remarkably at ease with women—at least with an older woman, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

  The complexities of the day ahead for Dr. Daruwalla were almost as frightening to the doctor as the thought of spending the next 12 hours in the missionary’s discarded leg iron—or being followed around by Vinod, with the angry dwarf wielding the missionary’s whip.

  There was no time to lose. While Julia fixed a cup of coffee for Martin, Farrokh glanced hurriedly at the library collected in the Jesuit’s suitcase. Father de Mello’s Sadhana: A Way to God drew a particularly covert look, for in it Farrokh found a dog-eared page and an assertively underlined sentence: “One of the biggest enemies to prayer is nervous tension.” I guess that’s why I can’t do it, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

  In the lobby, the doctor and the missionary didn’t escape the notice of that first-floor member of the Residents’ Society, the murderous Mr. Munim.

  “So! There is your movie star! Where is your dwarf?” Mr. Munim shouted.

  “Pay no attention to this man,” Farrokh told Martin. “He’s completely crazy.”

  “The dwarf is in the suitcase!” Mr. Munim cried. Thereupon he kicked the scholastic’s suitcase, which was ill considered, because he was wearing only a floppy pair of the most insubstantial sandals; from the instant expression of pain on Mr. Munim’s face, it was clear that he’d made contact with one of the more solid tomes in Martin Mills’s library—maybe the Compact Dictionary of the Bible, which was compact but not soft.

  “I assure you, sir, there is no dwarf in this suitcase,” Martin Mills began to say, but Dr. Daruwalla pulled him on. The doctor was beginning to realize that it was the new missionary’s most basic inclination to talk to anyone.

  In the alley, they found Vinod asleep in the Ambassador; the dwarf had locked the car. Leaning against the driver’s-side door was the exact “anyone” whom Dr. Daruwalla most feared, for the doctor imagined there was no one more inspiring of missionary zeal than a crippled child… unless there’d been a child missing both arms and both legs. By the shine of excitement in the scholastic’s eyes, Farrokh could tell that the boy with the mangled foot was sufficiently inspiring to Martin Mills
.

  Bird-Shit Boy

  It was the beggar from the day before—the boy who stood on his head at Chowpatty Beach, the cripple who slept in the sand. The crushed right foot was once again an offense to the doctor’s standard of surgical neatness, but Martin Mills was fatally drawn to the rheumy discharge about the beggar’s eyes; to his missionary mind, it was as if the stricken child already clutched a crucifix. The scholastic only momentarily took his eyes off the boy—to glance heavenward—but that was long enough for the little beggar to fool Martin with the infamous Bombay bird-shit trick.

  In Dr. Daruwalla’s experience, it was a filthy trick, usually performed in the following fashion: while one hand pointed to the sky—to the nonexistent passing bird—the other hand of the little villain squirted your shoe or your pants. The instrument that applied the presumed “bird shit” was similar to a turkey baster, but any kind of bulb with a syringelike nozzle would suffice. The fluid it contained was some whitish stuff—often curdled milk or flour and water—but on your shoe or your pants, it appeared to be bird shit. When you looked down from the sky, having failed to see the bird, there was the shit—it had already hit you—and the sneaky little beggar was wiping it off your shoe or your pants with a handy rag. You then rewarded him with at least a rupee or two.

  But in this instance Martin Mills didn’t comprehend that a reward was expected. He’d looked in a heavenly direction without the boy needing to point; thereupon the beggar had drawn out the syringe and squirted the Jesuit’s scuffed black shoe. The cripple was so quick on the draw and so smooth at concealing the syringe under his shirt that Dr. Daruwalla had seen neither the quick draw nor the shot—only the slick return to the shirt. Martin Mills believed that a bird had unceremoniously shat on his shoe, and that the tragically mutilated boy was wiping off this bird shit with the tattered leg of his baggy shorts. To the missionary, this maimed child was definitely heaven-sent.

  With that in mind, there in the alley, the scholastic dropped to his knees, which wasn’t the usual response that was made to the outstretched hand of the beggar. The boy was frightened by the missionary’s embrace. “O God—thank you!” Martin Mills cried, while the cripple looked to Dr. Daruwalla for help. “This is your lucky day,” the missionary told the greatly bewildered beggar. “That man is a doctor,” Martin Mills told the lame boy. “That man can fix your foot.”

  “I can’t fix his foot!” Dr. Daruwalla cried. “Don’t tell him that!”

  “Well, certainly you can make it look better than this!” Martin replied. The cripple crouched like a cornered animal, his eyes darting back and forth between the two men.

  “It’s not as if I haven’t already thought of it,” Farrokh said defensively. “But I’m sure I can’t give him a foot that works. And what do you think a boy like this cares for the appearance of the thing? He’ll still limp!”

  “Wouldn’t you like your foot to be cleaner-looking?” Martin Mills asked the cripple. “Wouldn’t you like it to look less like a hoe or a club?” As he spoke, he cupped his hand near the bony fusion of ankle and foot, which the beggar awkwardly rested on the heel. Close up, the doctor could confirm his earlier suspicion: he would have to saw through bone. There would be little chance of success, a greater chance of risk.

  “Primum non nocere,” Farrokh said to Martin Mills. “I presume you know Latin.”

  “‘Above all, do no harm,’” the Jesuit replied.

  “He was stepped on by an elephant,” Dr. Daruwalla explained. Then Farrokh remembered what the cripple had said. Dr. Daruwalla repeated this to the missionary, but the doctor looked at the boy when he spoke: “You can’t fix what elephants do.” The boy nodded, albeit cautiously.

  “Do you have a mother or a father?” the Jesuit asked. The beggar shook his head. “Does anyone look after you?” Martin asked. The cripple shook his head again. Dr. Daruwalla knew it was impossible to understand how much the boy understood, but the doctor remembered that the boy’s English was better than he was letting on—a clever boy.

  “There’s a gang of them at Chowpatty,” the doctor said. “There’s a kind of pecking order to their begging.” But Martin Mills wasn’t listening to him; although the zealot manifested a certain “modesty of the eyes,” which was encouraged among the Jesuits, there was nonetheless an intensity to his gazing into the rheumy eyes of the crippled child. Dr. Daruwalla realized that the boy was mesmerized.

  “But there is someone looking after you,” the missionary said to the beggar. Slowly, the cripple nodded.

  “Do you have any other clothes but these?” the missionary asked.

  “No clothes,” the boy instantly said. He was undersized, but hardened by the street life. Maybe he was 8, or 10.

  “And how long has it been since you’ve had any food—since you’ve had a lot of food?” Martin asked him.

  “Long time,” the beggar said. At the most, he might have been 12.

  “You can’t do this, Martin,” Farrokh said. “In Bombay, there are more boys like this than would fit into all of St. Ignatius. They wouldn’t fit in the school or in the church or in the cloister—they wouldn’t fit in the schoolyard, or in the parking lot! There are too many boys like this—you can’t begin your first day here by adopting them!”

  “Not ‘them’—just this one,” the missionary replied. “St. Ignatius said that he would sacrifice his life if he could prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “I understand you’ve already tried that!”

  “It’s very simple, really,” said Martin Mills. “I was going to buy clothes—I’ll buy half as many for me, and the rest for him. I presume that I will eat something sometime later today. I’ll eat half as much as I normally would have eaten …”

  “And—don’t tell me!—the rest is for him,” Dr. Daruwalla said angrily. “Oh, this is brilliant. I wonder why I didn’t think of it years ago!”

  “Everything is just a start,” the Jesuit calmly replied. “Nothing is overwhelming if you take one step at a time.” Then he stood up with the child in his arms, leaving his suitcase for Dr. Daruwalla to deal with. He walked with the boy, circling Vinod’s taxi as the dwarf slept on and on. “Lifting… lifting… lifting,” Martin Mills said. “Moving… moving… moving,” he repeated. “Placing… placing… placing,” the missionary said. The boy thought this was a game—he laughed.

  “You see? He’s happy,” Martin Mills announced. “First the clothes, then the food, then—if not the foot—you can at least do something about his eyes, can’t you?”

  “I’m not an eye doctor,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “Eye diseases are common here. I could refer him to someone …”

  “Well, that’s a start, isn’t it?” Martin said. “We’re just going to get you started,” he told the cripple.

  Dr. Daruwalla pounded on the driver’s-side window, startling Vinod awake; the dwarf’s stubby fingers were groping for his squash-racquet handles before he recognized the doctor. Vinod hurried to unlock the car. If, in the light of day, the dwarf saw that Martin Mills bore a less-than-exact resemblance to his famous twin, Vinod gave no indication of any suspicion. Not even the missionary’s clerical collar appeared to faze the dwarf. If Dhar looked different to Vinod, the dwarf assumed this was the result of being beaten by transvestite whores. Furiously, Farrokh threw the fool’s suitcase into the trunk.

  There was no time to lose. The doctor realized that he had to get Martin Mills to St. Ignatius as soon as he could. Father Julian and the others would lock him up. Martin would have to obey them—after all, wasn’t that what a vow of obedience meant? The doctor’s advice to the Father Rector would be simple enough: keep Martin Mills in the mission, or keep him in school. Don’t let him loose in the rest of Bombay! The chaos he could cause was inconceivable!

  As Vinod backed the Ambassador out of the alley, Dr. Daruwalla saw that both the scholastic and the crippled child were smiling. That was when Farrokh thought of the word th
at had escaped him; it floated to his lips, in belated answer to John D.’s question regarding what Martin Mills was like. The word was “dangerous.” The doctor couldn’t stop himself from saying it.

  “You know what you are?” Dr. Daruwalla asked the missionary. “You’re dangerous.”

  “Thank you,” the Jesuit said.

  There was no further conversation until the dwarf was struggling to park the taxi on that busy stretch of Cross Maidan near the Bombay Gymkhana. Dr. Daruwalla was taking Martin Mills and the cripple to Fashion Street, where they could buy the cheapest cotton clothes—factory seconds, with small defects—when the doctor caught sight of the gob of fake bird shit that had hardened on the strap of his right sandal; Farrokh could feel that a bit of the stuff had also dried between his bare toes. The boy must have squirted Dr. Daruwalla while the doctor and the scholastic had been arguing, although the doctor supposed there was a slim possibility that the bird shit was authentic.

  “What’s your name?” the missionary asked the beggar.

  “Ganesh,” the boy replied.

  “After the elephant-headed god—the most popular god in Maharashtra,” Dr. Daruwalla explained to Martin Mills. It was the name of every other boy on Chowpatty Beach.