A Son of the Circus

by John Winslow Irving

  And although Madhu would never be found, Detective Patel would keep inquiring for the girl; the child prostitute would be a woman now—if she was still managing to live with the AIDS virus, which was unlikely.

  “If we crash, do we burn or fly apart in little pieces?” Madhu had asked Dr. Daruwalla. “Something will get me,” she’d told the doctor. Farrokh couldn’t stop imagining her. He was always envisioning Madhu with Mr. Garg; they were traveling together from Junagadh to Bombay, escaping the Great Blue Nile. Although it would have been considered highly disgraceful, they would probably have been touching each other, not even secretly—secure in the misinformation that all that was wrong with them was a case of chlamydia.

  And almost as the deputy commissioner had predicted, the second Mrs. Dogar would be unable to resist the terrible temptations that presented themselves to her in her confinement with women. She bit off a fellow prisoner’s nose. In the course of the subsequent and extremely hard labor to which Rahul was then subjected, she would rebel; it would be unnecessary to hang her, for she was beaten to death by her guards.

  In another of life’s little passages, Ranjit would both retire and remarry. Dr. Daruwalla had never met the woman whose matrimonial advertisement in The Times of India finally snared his faithful medical secretary; however, the doctor had read the ad—Ranjit sent it to him. “An attractive woman of indeterminate age—innocently divorced, without issue—seeks a mature man, preferably a widower. Neatness and civility still count.” Indeed, they do, the doctor thought. Julia joked that Ranjit had probably been attracted to the woman’s punctuation.

  Other couples came and went, but the nature of couples, like violence, would endure. Even little Amy Sorabjee had married. (God help her husband.) And although Mrs. Bannerjee had died, Mr. Bannerjee wasn’t a widower for long; he married the widow Lal. Of these unsavory couplings, of course, the unchanging Mr. Sethna steadfastly disapproved.

  However set in his ways, the old steward still ruled the Duckworth Club dining room and the Ladies’ Garden with a possessiveness that was said to be enhanced by his newly acquired sense of himself as a promising actor. Dr. Sorabjee wrote to Dr. Daruwalla that Mr. Sethna had been seen addressing himself in the men’s-room mirror—long monologues of a thespian nature. And the old steward was observed to be slavishly devoted to Deputy Commissioner Patel, if not to the big blond wife who went everywhere with the esteemed detective. Apparently, the famous tea-pouring Parsi also fancied himself a promising policeman. Crime-branch investigation was no doubt perceived by Mr. Sethna as a heightened form of eavesdropping.

  Astonishingly, the old steward appeared to approve of something! The unorthodoxy of the deputy commissioner and his American wife becoming members of the Duckworth Club didn’t bother Mr. Sethna; it bothered many an orthodox Duckworthian. Clearly, the deputy commissioner hadn’t waited 22 years for his membership; although Detective Patel satisfied the requirement for “community leadership,” his instant acceptance at the club suggested that someone had bent the rules—someone had been looking for (and had found) a loophole. To many Duckworthians, the policeman’s membership amounted to a miracle; it was also considered a scandal.

  It was a minor miracle, in Detective Patel’s opinion, that no one was ever bitten by the escaped cobras in Mahalaxmi, for (according to the deputy commissioner) those cobras had been “assimilated” into the life of Bombay without a single reported bite.

  It wasn’t even a minor miracle that the phone calls from the woman who tried to sound like a man continued—not only after Rahul’s imprisonment, but also after her death. It strangely comforted Dr. Daruwalla to know that the caller had never been Rahul. Every time, as if reading from a script, the caller would leave nothing out. “Your father’s head was off, completely off! I saw it sitting on the passenger seat before flames engulfed the car.”

  Farrokh had learned how to interrupt the unslackening voice. “I know—I know already,” Dr. Daruwalla would say. “And his hands couldn’t let go of the steering wheel, even though his fingers were on fire—is that what you’re going to tell me? I’ve already heard it.”

  But the voice never relented. “I did it. I blew his head off. I watched him burn,” said the woman who tried to sound like a man. “And I’m telling you, he deserved it. Your whole family deserves it.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Farrokh had learned to say, although he generally disliked such language.

  Sometimes he would watch the video of Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer (that was Farrokh’s favorite) or Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence, which the former screenwriter believed was the most underrated of the Dhar films. But to his best friend, Mac, Farrokh would never confide that he’d written anything—not a word. Inspector Dhar was part of the doctor’s past. John D. had almost completely let Dhar go. Dr. Daruwalla had to keep trying.

  For three years, the twins had teased him; neither John D. nor Martin Mills would tell Dr. Daruwalla what had passed between them on their flight to Switzerland. While the doctor sought clarification, the twins deliberately confused him; they must have done it to exasperate him—Farrokh was such a lot of fun when he was exasperated. The former Inspector Dhar’s most irritating (and least believable) response was, “I don’t remember.” Martin Mills claimed to remember everything. But Martin never told the same story twice, and when John D. did admit to remembering something, the actor’s version unfailingly contradicted the ex-missionary’s.

  “Let’s try to begin at the beginning,” Dr. Daruwalla would say. “I’m interested in that moment of recognition, the realization that you were face-to-face with your second self—so to speak.”

  “I boarded the plane first,” both twins would tell him.

  “I always do the same thing whenever I leave India,” the retired Inspector Dhar insisted. “I find my seat and get my little complimentary toilet kit from the flight attendant. Then I go to the lavatory and shave off my mustache, while they’re still boarding the plane.”

  This much was true. It was what John D. did to un-Dhar himself. This was an established fact, one of the few that Farrokh could cling to: both twins were mustacheless when they met.

  “I was sitting in my seat when this man came out of the lavatory, and I thought I recognized him,” Martin said.

  “You were looking out the window,” John D. declared. “You didn’t turn to look at me until I’d sat down beside you and had spoken your name.”

  “You spoke his name?” Dr. Daruwalla always asked.

  “Of course. I knew who he was instantly,” the ex-Inspector Dhar would reply. “I thought to myself: Farrokh must imagine he’s awfully clever—writing a script for everyone.”

  “He never spoke my name,” Martin told the doctor. “I remember thinking that he was Satan, and that Satan had chosen to look like me, to take my own form—what a horror! I thought you were my dark side, my evil half.”

  “Your smarter half, you mean,” John D. would invariably reply.

  “He was just like the Devil. He was frighteningly arrogant,” Martin told Farrokh.

  “I simply told him that I knew who he was,” John D. argued.

  “You said nothing of the kind,” Martin interjected. “You said, ‘Fasten your fucking seat belt, pal, because are you ever in for a surprise!’”

  “That sounds like what you’d say,” Farrokh told the former Dhar.

  “I couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” John D. complained. “Here I knew all about him, but he was the one who wouldn’t stop talking. All the way to Zürich, he never shut up.”

  Dr. Daruwalla had to admit that this sounded like what Martin Mills would do.

  “I kept thinking: This is Satan. I give up the idea of the priesthood and I meet the Devil—in first class! He had this constant sneer,” Martin said. “It was a Satanic sneer—or so I thought.”

  “He started right out about Vera, our sainted mother,” John D. related. “We were still crossing the Arabian Sea—utter darkness above and below us—when
he got to the part about the roommate’s suicide. I hadn’t said a word!”

  “That’s not true—he kept interrupting me,” Martin told Farrokh. “He kept asking me, ‘Are you gay, or do you just not know it yet?’ Honestly, I thought he was the rudest man I’d ever met!”

  “Listen to me,” the actor said. “You meet your twin brother on an airplane and you start right out with a list of everyone your mother’s slept with. And you think I’m rude.”

  “You called me a ‘quitter’ before we’d even reached our cruising altitude,” Martin said.

  “But you must have started by telling him that you were his twin,” Farrokh said to John D.

  “He did nothing of the kind,” said Martin Mills. “He said, ‘You already know the bad news: your father died. Now here’s the good news: he wasn’t your father.’”

  “You didn’t!” Dr. Daruwalla said to John D.

  “I can’t remember,” the actor would say.

  “The word ‘twin’—just tell me, who said it first?” the doctor asked.

  “I asked the flight attendant if she saw any resemblance between us—she was the first to say the word ‘twin,’” John D. replied.

  “That’s not exactly how it happened,” Martin argued. “What he said to the flight attendant was, ‘We were separated at birth. Try to guess which one of us has had the better time.’”

  “He simply exhibited all the common symptoms of denial,” John D. would respond. “He kept asking me if I had proof that we were related.”

  “He was utterly shameless,” Martin told Farrokh. “He said, ‘You can’t deny that you’ve had at least one homosexual infatuation—there’s your proof.’”

  “That was bold of you,” the doctor told John D. “Actually, there’s only a fifty-two percent chance …”

  “I knew he was gay the second I saw him,” the retired movie star said.

  “But when did you realize how much… else you had in common?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. “When did you begin to recognize the traits you shared? When did your obvious similarities emerge?”

  “Oh, long before we got to Zürich,” Martin answered quickly.

  “What similarities?” John D. asked.

  “That’s what I mean by arrogant—he’s arrogant and rude,” Martin told Farrokh.

  “And when did you decide not to go to New York?” the doctor asked the ex-missionary. Dr. Daruwalla was especially interested in the part of the story where the twins told Vera off.

  “We were working on our telegram to the bitch before we landed,” John D. replied.

  “But what did the telegram say?” Farrokh asked.

  “I don’t remember,” John D. would always answer.

  “Of course you remember!” cried Martin Mills. “You wrote it! He wouldn’t let me write a word of the telegram,” Martin told Dr. Daruwalla. “He said he was in the business of one-liners—he insisted on doing it himself.”

  “What you wanted to say to her wouldn’t have fit in a telegram,” John D. reminded his twin.

  “What he said to her was unspeakably cruel. I couldn’t believe how cruel he could be. And he didn’t even know her!” Martin Mills told the doctor.

  “He asked me to send the telegram. He had no second thoughts,” John D. told Farrokh.

  “But what was it that you said? What did the damn telegram say?” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

  “It was unspeakably cruel,” Martin repeated.

  “She had it coming, and you know it,” said the ex-Inspector Dhar.

  Whatever the telegram said, Dr. Daruwalla knew that Vera didn’t live very long after she received it. There was only her hysterical phone call to Farrokh, who was still in Bombay; Vera called the doctor’s office and left a message with Ranjit.

  “This is Veronica Rose—the actress,” she told Dr. Daruwalla’s secretary. Ranjit knew who she was; he would never forget typing the report on the problem Vera had with her knees, which turned out to be gynecological—“vaginal itching,” Dr. Lowji Daruwalla had said.

  “Tell the fucking doctor I know that he betrayed me!” Vera said to Ranjit.

  “Is it your… knees again?” the old secretary had asked her.

  Dr. Daruwalla never returned her call. Vera never made it back to California before she died; her death was related to the sleeping pills she regularly took, which she’d irregularly mixed with vodka.

  Martin would stay in Europe. Switzerland suited him, he said. And the outings in the Alps—although the former scholastic had never been athletically inclined, these outings with John D. were wonderful for Martin Mills. He couldn’t be taught to downhill-ski (he was too uncoordinated), but he liked cross-country skiing and hiking; he loved being with his brother. Even John D. admitted, albeit belatedly, that they loved being with each other.

  The ex-missionary kept himself busy; he taught at City University (in the general-studies program) and at the American International School of Zürich—he was active at the Swiss Jesuit Centre, too. Occasionally, he would travel to other Jesuit institutions; there were youth centers and students’ homes in Basel and Bern, and adult-education centers in Fribourg and Bad Schönbrunn—Martin Mills was doubtless effective as an inspirational speaker. Farrokh could only imagine that this meant more Christ-in-the-parking-lot sermonizing; the former zealot hadn’t lost his energy for improving the attitudes of others.

  As for John D., he continued in his craft; the journeyman actor was content with his roles at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. His friends were in the theater, or affiliated with the university, or with a publishing firm of excellent reputation—and of course he saw a great deal of Farrokh’s brother, Jamshed, and Jamshed’s wife (and Julia’s sister), Josefine.

  It was to this social circle that John D. would introduce his twin. An oddity at first—everyone is interested in a twins-separated-at-birth story—Martin made many friends in this community; in three years, the ex-missionary probably had more friends than the actor. In fact, Martin’s first lover was an ex-boyfriend of John D.’s, which Dr. Daruwalla found strange; the twins made a joke of it—probably to exasperate him, the doctor thought.

  As for lovers, Matthias Frei died; the onetime terror of the Zürich avant-garde had been John D.’s longstanding partner. It was Julia who informed Farrokh of this; she’d known for quite some time that John D. and Frei were a couple. “Frei didn’t die of AIDS, did he?” the doctor asked his wife. She gave him the same sort of look that John D. would have given him; it was that smile from movie posters of faded memory, recalling the cutting sneer of Inspector Dhar.

  “No, Frei didn’t die of AIDS—he had a heart attack,” Julia told her husband.

  No one ever tells me anything! the doctor thought. It was just like that twinly conversation on Swissair 197, Bombay to Zürich, which would occupy a sizable part of Farrokh’s imagination, largely because John D. and Martin Mills were so secretive about it.

  “Now, listen to me, both of you,” Dr. Daruwalla would tell the twins. “I’m not prying, I do respect your privacy—it’s just that you know how much dialogue interests me. This feeling of closeness between you, for it’s obvious to me that the two of you are close… did it come from your very first meeting? It must have happened on the plane! There’s surely something more between you than your mutual hatred of your late mother—or did the telegram to Vera really bring you together?”

  “The telegram wasn’t dialogue—I thought you were interested only in our dialogue,” John D. replied.

  “Such a telegram would never have occurred to me!” said Martin Mills.

  “I couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” John D. repeated. “We didn’t have any dialogue. Martin had one monologue after another.”

  “He’s an actor, all right,” Martin told Farrokh. “I know he can create a character, as they say, but I’m telling you I was convinced he was Satan—I mean the real thing.”

  “Nine hours is a long time to talk with anyone,” John D. was fond of saying.

  “The flight was
nearly nine hours and fifteen minutes, to be more exact,” Martin corrected him.

  “The point is, I was dying to get off the plane,” John D. told Dr. Daruwalla. “He kept telling me it was God’s will that we met. I thought I was going to go mad. The only time I could get away from him was when I went to the lavatory.”

  “You practically lived in the lavatory! You drank so much beer. And it was God’s will—you see that now, don’t you?” Martin asked John D.

  “It was Farrokh’s will,” John D. replied.

  “You really are the Devil!” Martin told his twin.

  “No, both of you are the Devil!” Dr. Daruwalla told them, although he would discover that he loved them—if never quite equally. He looked forward to seeing them, and to their letters or their calls. Martin wrote lengthy letters; John D. seldom wrote letters, but he called frequently. Sometimes, when he called, it was hard to know what he wanted. Occasionally, not often, it was hard to know who was calling—John D. or the old Inspector Dhar.

  “Hi, it’s me,” he said to Farrokh one morning; he sounded smashed. It would have been early afternoon in Zürich. John D. said he’d just had a foolish lunch; when the actor called his lunch or dinner “foolish,” it usually meant that he’d had something stronger to drink than beer. Only two glasses of wine made him drunk.

  “I hope you’re not performing tonight!” Dr. Daruwalla said, regretting that he sounded like an overcritical father.

  “It’s my understudy’s night to perform,” the actor told him. Farrokh knew very little about the theater; he hadn’t known that there were understudies at the Schauspielhaus—also, he was sure that John D. was currently playing a small supporting role.