A Son of the Circus

by John Winslow Irving

  But John D. wasn’t asleep; he was trying to compose himself, which is an actor’s nonstop job. He was thinking that it had been years since he’d felt the slightest sexual attraction to any woman; but Nancy had aroused him—it seemed to him that it was her anger he’d found so appealing—and for the second Mrs. Dogar John D. had felt an even more disturbing desire. With his eyes still closed, the actor tried to imagine his own face with an ironic expression—not quite a sneer. He was 39, an age when it was unseemly to have one’s sexual identity shaken. He concluded that it hadn’t been Mrs. Dogar who’d stimulated him; rather, he’d been reliving his attraction to the old Rahul—back in those Goa days when Rahul was still a sort of man. This thought comforted John D. Watching him, Mr. Sethna saw what he thought was a sneer on the sleeping movie star’s face; then something soothing must have crossed the actor’s mind, for the sneer softened to a smile. He’s thinking of the old days, the steward imagined… before he contracted the presumed dread disease. But Inspector Dhar had amused himself with a radical idea.

  Shit, I hope I’m not about to become interested in women! the actor thought. What a mess that would make of things.

  At this same moment, Dr. Daruwalla was experiencing another kind of irony. His arrival at the mission of St. Ignatius marked his first occasion in Christian company since the doctor had discovered who’d bitten his big toe. Dr. Daruwalla’s awareness that the source of his conversion to Christianity was the love bite of a transsexual serial killer had further diminished the doctor’s already declining religious zeal; that the toe-biter had not been the ghost of the pilgrim who dismembered St. Francis Xavier was more than a little disappointing. It was also a vulnerable time for Father Julian to have greeted Farrokh as the Father Rector did. “Ah, Dr. Daruwalla, our esteemed alumnus! Have you had any miracles happen to you lately?”

  Thus baited, the doctor couldn’t resist rebandaging Martin in an eccentric fashion. Dr. Daruwalla padded the puncture wound in the scholastic’s neck so that the bandage looked as if it were meant to conceal an enormous goiter. He then rebound the Jesuit’s slashed hand in such a way that Martin had only partial use of his fingers. As for the half-eaten earlobe, the doctor was expansive with gauze and tape; he wrapped up the whole ear. The zealot could hear out of only one side of his head.

  But the clean, bright bandages only served to heighten the new missionary’s heroic appearance. Even Julia was impressed. And quickly the story circulated through the courtyard at dusk: the American missionary had just rescued two urchins from the streets of Bombay; he’d brought them to the relative safety of a circus, where a wild animal had attacked him. At the fringes of the high tea, where Dr. Daruwalla stood sulking, he overheard the story that Martin Mills had been mauled by a lion; it was only the scholastic’s self-deprecating nature that made him say the biting had been done by a monkey.

  It further depressed the doctor to see that the source of this fantasy was the piano-playing Miss Tanuja; she’d traded her wing-tipped eyeglasses for what appeared to be rose-tinted contact lenses, which lent to her eyes the glowing red bedazzlement of a laboratory rat. She still spilled recklessly beyond the confines of her Western clothes, a schoolgirl voluptuary wearing her elderly aunt’s dress. And she still sported the spear-headed bra, which uplifted and thrust forth her breasts like the sharp spires of a fallen church. As before, the crucifix that dangled between Miss Tanuja’s highly armed bosoms seemed to subject the dying Christ to a new agony—or such was Dr. Daruwalla’s disillusionment with the religion he’d adopted when Rahul bit him.

  Jubilee Day was definitely not the doctor’s sort of celebration. He felt a vague loathing for such a hearty gathering of Christians in a non-Christian country; the atmosphere of religious complicity was uncomfortably claustrophobic. Julia found him engaged in standoffish if not openly antisocial behavior; he’d been reading the examination scrolls in the entrance hall and had wandered to that spot, at the foot of the courtyard stairs, where the statue of Christ with the sick child was mounted on the wall alongside the fire extinguisher. Julia knew why Farrokh was loitering there; he was hoping that someone would speak to him and he could then comment on the irony of juxtaposing Jesus with a fire-fighting tool.

  “I’m going to take you home,” Julia warned him. Then she noticed how tired he looked, and how utterly out of place—how lost. Christianity had tricked him; India was no longer his country. When Julia kissed his cheek, she realized he’d been crying.

  “Please do take me home,” Farrokh told her.

  26. GOOD-BYE, BOMBAY

  Well, Then

  Danny Mills died following a New Year’s Eve party in New York. It was Tuesday, January 2, before Martin Mills and Dr. Daruwalla were notified. The delay was attributed to the time difference—New York is 10½ hours behind Bombay—but the real reason was that Vera hadn’t spent New Year’s Eve with Danny. Danny, who was almost 75, died alone. Vera, who was 65, didn’t discover Danny’s body until the evening of New Year’s Day.

  When Vera returned to their hotel, she wasn’t fully recovered from a tryst with a rising star of a light-beer commercial—an unbefitting fling for a woman her age. She doubtless failed to note the irony that Danny had died with the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging optimistically from their hotel-room door. The medical examiner concluded that Danny had choked on his own vomit, which was (like his blood) nearly 20 percent alcohol.

  In her two telegrams, Vera cited no clinical evidence; yet she managed to convey Danny’s inebriation to Martin in pejorative terms.

  YOUR FATHER DIED DRUNK IN A NEW YORK HOTEL

  This also communicated to her son the sordidness, not to mention the inconvenience; Vera was going to have to spend nearly all of that Tuesday shopping. Coming from California—their visit was intended to be short—neither Danny nor Vera had packed for an extended stay in the January climate.

  Vera’s telegram to Martin continued in a bitter vein.

  BEING CATHOLIC, ALTHOUGH HARDLY A MODEL OF THE SPECIES, I’M SURE DANNY WOULD HAVE WANTED YOU TO ARRANGE SOME SUITABLE SERVICE OR LAST BIT OR WHATEVER IT’S CALLED

  “Hardly a model of the species” was the sort of language Vera had learned from the moisturizer commercial of her son’s long-ago and damaged youth.

  The last dig was pure Vera—even in what passed for grief, she took a swipe at her son.

  WILL OF COURSE UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY IF YOUR VOW OF POVERTY MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO ASSIST ME IN THIS MATTER / MOM

  There followed only the name of the hotel in New York. Martin’s “vow of poverty” notwithstanding, Vera wasn’t offering to pay for his trip with her money.

  Her telegram to Dr. Daruwalla was also pure Vera.

  I FAIL TO IMAGINE HOW DANNY’S DEATH SHOULD ALTER YOUR DECISION TO KEEP MARTIN FROM ANY KNOWLEDGE OF HIS TWIN

  So suddenly it’s my decision, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

  PLEASE DON’T UPSET POOR MARTIN WITH MORE BAD NEWS

  So now it’s “poor Martin” who would be upset! Farrokh observed.

  SINCE MARTIN HAS CHOSEN POVERTY FOR A PROFESSION, AND DANNY HAS LEFT ME A WOMAN OF INSUFFICIENT MEANS, PERHAPS YOU’LL BE SO KIND AS TO AID MARTIN WITH THE AIRFARE / OF COURSE IT’S DANNY WHO WOULD HAVE WANTED HIM HERE / VERA

  The only good news, which Dr. Daruwalla didn’t know at the time, was that Danny Mills had left Vera a woman of even less means than she supposed. Danny had bequeathed what little he had to the Catholic Church—secure in the knowledge that if he’d given anything to Martin, that’s what Martin would have done with the money. In the end, not even Vera would consider the amount worth fighting for.

  In Bombay, the day after Jubilee Day was a big one for news. Danny’s death and Vera’s manipulations overlapped with Mr. Das’s announcement that Madhu had left the Great Blue Nile with her new husband; both Martin Mills and Dr. Daruwalla had little doubt that Madhu’s new husband was Mr. Garg. Farrokh was so sure of this that his brief telegram to the Bengali ringmaster was a statement, not a question.


  YOU SAID THAT THE MAN WHO MARRIED MADHU HAD A SCAR / ACID, I PRESUME

  Both the doctor and the missionary were outraged that Mr. and Mrs. Das had virtually sold Madhu to a man like Garg, but Martin urged Farrokh not to take the ringmaster to task. In the spirit of encouraging the Great Blue Nile to support the efforts of the elephant-footed cripple, Dr. Daruwalla concluded his telegram to Mr. Das in Junagadh on a tactful note.

  I TRUST THAT THE BOY GANESH WILL BE WELL LOOKED AFTER

  He didn’t “trust”; he hoped.

  In the light of Ranjit’s message from Mr. Subhash (that Tata Two had given Dr. Daruwalla the HIV test results for the wrong Madhu), the doctor had sizably less hope for Madhu than for Ganesh. Ranjit’s account of Mr. Subhash’s offhand manner—the ancient secretary’s virtual dismissal of the error—was infuriating, but even a proper apology from Dr. Tata wouldn’t have lessened the fact that Madhu was HIV-positive. She didn’t have AIDS yet; she was merely carrying the virus.

  “How can you even think ‘merely’?” cried Martin Mills, who seemed to be more devastated by Madhu’s medical destiny than by the news of Danny’s death; after all, Danny had been dying for years.

  It was only midmorning; Martin had to interrupt their phone conversation in order to teach a class. Farrokh agreed to keep the missionary informed of the day’s developments. The upper-school boys at St. Ignatius were about to receive a Catholic interpretation of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, while Dr. Daruwalla attempted to find Madhu. But the doctor discovered that Garg’s phone number was no longer in service; Mr. Garg was lying low. Vinod told Dr. Daruwalla that Deepa had already talked to Garg; according to the dwarf’s wife, the owner of the Wetness Cabaret had complained about the doctor.

  “Garg is thinking you are being too moral with him,” the dwarf explained.

  It was not morality that the doctor wanted to discuss with Madhu, or with Garg. The doctor’s disapproval of Garg notwithstanding, Dr. Daruwalla wanted the opportunity to tell Madhu what it meant to be HIV-positive. Vinod implied that any opportunity for direct communication with Madhu was unpromising.

  “It is working better another way,” the dwarf suggested. “You are telling me. I am telling Deepa. She is telling Garg. Garg is telling the girl.”

  It was hard for Dr. Daruwalla to accept this as a “better” way, but the doctor was beginning to understand the essence of the dwarf’s Good Samaritanism. Rescuing children from the brothels was simply what Vinod and Deepa did with their spare time; they would just keep doing it—needing to succeed at it might have diminished their efforts.

  “Tell Garg he was misinformed,” Dr. Daruwalla told Vinod. “Tell him Madhu is HIV-positive.”

  Interestingly, if Garg was uninfected, his odds were good; he probably wouldn’t contract HIV from Madhu. (The nature of HIV transmission is such that it’s not that easy for a woman to give it to a man.) Depressingly, if Garg was infected, Madhu had probably contracted it from him.

  The dwarf must have sensed the doctor’s depression; Vinod knew that a functioning Good Samaritan can’t dwell on every little failure. “We are only showing them the net,” Vinod tried to explain. “We are not being their wings.”

  “Their wings? What wings?” Farrokh asked.

  “Not every girl is being able to fly,” the dwarf said. “They are not all falling in the net.”

  It occurred to Dr. Daruwalla that he should impart this lesson to Martin Mills, but the scholastic was still in the process of watering down Graham Greene for the upper-school boys. Instead, the doctor called the deputy commissioner.

  “Patel here,” said the cold voice. The clatter of typewriters resounded in the background; rising, and then falling out of hearing, was the mindless revving of a motorcycle. Like punctuation to their phone conversation, there came and went the sharp barking of the Dobermans, complaining in the courtyard kennel. Dr. Daruwalla imagined that just out of his hearing a prisoner was professing his innocence, or else declaring that he’d spoken the truth. The doctor wondered if Rahul was there. What would she be wearing?

  “I know this isn’t exactly a crime-branch matter,” Farrokh apologized in advance; then he told the deputy commissioner everything he knew about Madhu and Mr. Garg.

  “Lots of pimps marry their best girls,” Detective Patel informed the doctor. “Garg runs the Wetness Cabaret, but he’s a pimp on the side.”

  “I just want a chance to tell her what to expect,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

  “She’s another man’s wife,” Patel replied. “You want me to tell another man’s wife that she has to talk to you?”

  “Can’t you ask her?” Farrokh asked.

  “I can’t believe I’m speaking to the creator of Inspector Dhar,” the deputy commissioner said. “How does it go? It’s one of my all-time favorites: The police don’t ask—the police arrest, or the police harass.’ Isn’t that the line?”

  “Yes, that’s how it goes,” Dr. Daruwalla confessed.

  “So do you want me to harass her—and Garg, too?” the policeman asked. When the doctor didn’t answer him, the deputy commissioner continued. “When Garg throws her out on the street, or when she runs away, then I can bring her in for questioning. Then you can talk to her. The problem is, if he throws her out or she runs away, I won’t be able to find her. From what you say, she’s too pretty and smart to be a street prostitute. She’ll go to a brothel, and once she’s in the brothel, she won’t be out on the street. Someone will bring her food; the madam will buy her clothes.”

  “And when she gets sick?” the doctor asked.

  “There are doctors who go to the brothels,” Patel replied. “When she gets so sick that she can’t be a prostitute, most madams would put her out on the street. But by then she’ll be immune.”

  “What do you mean, ‘immune’?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

  “When you’re on the street and very sick, everyone leaves you alone. When nobody comes near you, you’re immune,” the policeman said.

  “And then you could find her,” Farrokh remarked.

  “Then we might find her,” Patel corrected him. “But by then it would hardly be necessary for you to tell her what to expect.”

  “So you’re saying, ‘Forget her.’ Is that it?” the doctor asked.

  “In your profession, you treat crippled children—isn’t that right?” the deputy commissioner inquired.

  “That’s right,” Dr. Daruwalla replied.

  “Well, I don’t know anything about your field,” said Detective Patel, “but I would guess that your odds of success are slightly higher than in the red-light district.”

  “I get your point,” Farrokh said. “And what are the odds that Rahul will hang?”

  For a while, the policeman was silent. Only the typewriters, responded to the question; they were the constant, occasionally interrupted by the revving motorcycle or the cacophony of Dobermans. “Do you hear the typewriters?” the deputy commissioner finally asked.

  “Of course,” Dr. Daruwalla answered.

  “The report on Rahul will be very lengthy,” Patel promised him. “But not even the sensational number of murders will impress the judge. I mean, just look at who most of the victims were—they weren’t important.”

  “You mean they were prostitutes,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

  “Precisely,” Patel replied. “We will need to develop another argument—namely, that Rahul must be confined with other women. Anatomically, she is a woman …”

  “So the operation was complete,” the doctor interrupted.

  “So I’m told. Naturally, I didn’t examine her myself,” the deputy commissioner added.

  “No, of course not …” Dr. Daruwalla said.

  “What I mean is, Rahul cannot be imprisoned with men—Rahul is a woman,” the detective said. “And solitary confinement is too expensive—impossible in cases of life imprisonment. And yet, if Rahul is confined with women prisoners, there’s a problem. She’s as strong as a man, and she has a history of ki
lling women—you see my point?”

  “So you’re saying that she might receive the death penalty only because of how awkward it will be to imprison her with other women?” Farrokh asked.

  “Precisely,” Patel said. “That’s our best argument. But I still don’t believe she’ll be hanged.”

  “Why not?” the doctor asked.

  “Almost no one is hanged,” the deputy commissioner replied. “With Rahul, they’ll probably try hard labor and life imprisonment; then something will happen. Maybe she’ll kill another prisoner.”

  “Or bite her,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

  “They won’t hang her for biting,” the policeman said. “But something will happen. Then they’ll have to hang her.”

  “Naturally, this will take a long time,” Farrokh guessed.

  “Precisely,” Patel said. “And it won’t be very satisfying,” the detective added.

  That was a theme with the deputy commissioner, Dr. Daruwalla knew. It led the doctor to ask a different sort of question. “And what will you do—you and your wife?” Farrokh inquired.

  “What do you mean?” said Detective Patel; for the first time, he sounded surprised.

  “I mean, will you stay here—in Bombay, in India?” the doctor asked.

  “Are you offering me a job?” the policeman replied.

  Farrokh laughed. “Well, no,” he admitted. “I was just curious if you were staying.”

  “But this is my country,” the deputy commissioner told him. “You’re the one who’s not at home here.”