A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  Dr. Daruwalla’s wife wore wonderful jewelry, some of which had belonged to his mother; none of it was at all memorable to the doctor, who (however) could describe in the most exact detail a tiger-claw necklace that belonged to Pratap Singh, the ringmaster and wild-animal trainer for the Great Royal Circus—a man much admired by Farrokh. Pratap Singh had once shared his remedy for dizziness with the doctor: a potion of red chili and burned human hair. For asthma, the ringmaster recommended a clove soaked in tiger urine; you allow the clove to dry, then you grind it up and inhale the powder. Moreover, the animal trainer warned the doctor, you should never swallow a tiger’s whiskers; swallowing tiger whiskers will kill you.

  Had Farrokh read of these remedies in some crackpot’s column in The Times of India, he’d have written a scathing letter for publication in the Opinion section. In the name of real medicine, Dr. Daruwalla would have denounced such “holistic folly,” which was his phrase of choice whenever he addressed the issue of so-called unscientific or magical thinking. But the source of the human-hair-and-red-chili recipe, as well as of the tiger-urine cure (not to mention the tiger-whiskers warning), was the great Pratap Singh. In Dr. Daruwalla’s view, the ringmaster and wild-animal trainer was undeniably a man who knew his business.

  This kind of lore, and blood from dwarfs, enhanced Farrokh’s abiding feeling that, as a result of flopping around in a safety net and falling on a poor dwarf’s wife, he had become an adopted son of the circus. For Farrokh, the honor of clumsily coming to Deepa’s rescue was lasting. Whenever any circus was performing in Bombay, Dr. Daruwalla could be found in a front-row seat; he could also be detected mingling with the acrobats and the animal trainers—most of all, he enjoyed observing the practice sessions and the tent life. These intimate views from the wing of the main tent, these close-ups of the troupe tents and the cages—they were the privileges that made Farrokh feel he’d been adopted. At times, he wished he were a real son of the circus; instead, Farrokh supposed, he was merely a guest of honor. Nevertheless, this wasn’t a fleeting honor—not to him.

  Ironically, Dr. Daruwalla’s children and grandchildren were unimpressed by the Indian circuses. These two generations had been born and raised in London or Toronto; they’d not only seen bigger and fancier circuses—they’d seen cleaner. The doctor was disappointed that his children and grandchildren were so dirt-obsessed; they considered the tent life of the acrobats and the animal trainers to be shabby, even “underprivileged.” Although the dirt floors of the tents were swept several times daily, Dr. Daruwalla’s children and grandchildren believed that the tents were filthy.

  To the doctor, however, the circus was an orderly, well-kept oasis surrounded by a world of disease and chaos. His children and grandchildren saw the dwarf clowns as merely grotesque; in the circus, they existed solely to be laughed at. But Farrokh felt that the dwarf clowns were appreciated—maybe even loved, not to mention gainfully employed. The doctor’s children and grandchildren thought that the risks taken by the child performers were especially “harsh”; yet Farrokh felt that these acrobatic children were the lucky ones—they’d been rescued.

  Dr. Daruwalla knew that the majority of these child acrobats were (like Deepa) sold to the circus by their parents, who’d been unable to support them; others were orphans—they’d been truly adopted. If they hadn’t been performing in the circus, where they were well fed and protected, they’d have been begging. They would be the street children you saw doing handstands and other stunts for a few rupees in Bombay, or in the smaller towns throughout Gujarat and Maharashtra, where even the Great Royal Circus more frequently performed—these days, fewer circuses came to Bombay. During Diwali and the winter holidays, there were still two or three circuses performing in or around the city, but TV and the videocassette recorder had hurt the circus business; too many people rented movies and stayed at home.

  To hear the Daruwalla children and grandchildren discuss it, the child acrobats who were sold to the circus were long-suffering child laborers in a high-risk profession; their hardworking, no-escape existence was tantamount to slavery. Untrained children were paid nothing for six months; thereafter, they started with a salary of 3 rupees a day—only 90 rupees a month, less than 4 dollars! But Dr. Daruwalla argued that safe food and a safe place to sleep were better than nothing; what these children were given was a chance.

  Circus people boiled their water and their milk. They bought and cooked their own food; they dug and cleaned their own latrines. And a well-trained acrobat was often paid 500 or 600 rupees a month, even if it was only 25 dollars. Granted, although the Great Royal took good care of its children, Farrokh couldn’t say with certainty that the child performers were as well treated in all the Indian circuses; the performances in several of these circuses were so abject—not to mention unskilled and careless—that the doctor surmised that the tent life in such places was shabbier, too.

  Life was surely shabby in the Great Blue Nile; indeed, among the Great This and Great That circuses of India, the Great Blue Nile was the shabbiest—or at least the least great. Deepa would agree. A former child contortionist, the dwarf’s wife, reincarnated as a trapeze artist, was lacking both in polish and in common sense; it wasn’t merely the beer that had made her let go of the bar too soon.

  Deepa’s injuries were complicated but not severe; in addition to the dislocation of her hip joint, she’d suffered a tear in the transverse ligament. Not only would Dr. Daruwalla brand Deepa’s hip with a memorable scar, but, in prepping the area, he would be confronted by the irrefutable blackness of Deepa’s pubic hair; this would be a dark reminder of the disturbing contact between her pubis and the bridge of his nose.

  Farrokh’s nose was still tingling when he helped Deepa be admitted to the hospital; out of guilt, he’d left the circus grounds with her. But the admitting process had barely begun when the doctor was summoned by one of the hospital secretaries; there’d been a phone call for him while he was en route from the Blue Nile.

  “Do you know any clowns?” the secretary asked him.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, yes,” Farrokh admitted.

  “Dwarf clowns?” asked the secretary.

  “Yes—several! I just met them,” the doctor added. Farrokh was too ashamed to admit that he’d also just bled them.

  “Apparently, one of them has been injured at that circus at Cross Maidan,” the secretary said.

  “Not Vinod!” Dr. Daruwalla exclaimed.

  “Yes, that’s him,” she said. “That’s why they want you back at the circus.”

  “What happened to Vinod?” Dr. Daruwalla asked the somewhat disdainful secretary; she was one of many medical secretaries who embraced sarcasm.

  “I couldn’t ascertain the clown’s condition from a phone message,” she replied. “The description was hysterical. I gather he was trampled by elephants or shot from a cannon, or both. And now that this dwarf lies dying, he is declaring you to be his doctor.”

  And so to the circus grounds at Cross Maidan did Dr. Daruwalla go. All the way back to the deeply flawed performance of the Great Blue Nile, the doctor’s nose tingled.

  For 15 years, merely remembering the dwarf’s wife would activate Farrokh’s nose. And now, the fact that Mr. Lal had fallen without a net (for the body on the golf course was indeed dead)—even this evidence of death reminded Dr. Daruwalla that Deepa had survived her fall and her unwelcome and painful contact with the clumsy doctor.

  The Famous Twin

  Upon Inspector Dhar’s intrusion, the vultures had risen but they’d not departed. Dr. Daruwalla knew that the carrion eaters still floated overhead because their putrescence lingered in the air and their shadows drifted back and forth across the ninth green and the bougainvillea, where Dhar—a mere movie-star detective—knelt beside poor Mr. Lal.

  “Don’t touch the body!” Dr. Daruwalla said.

  “I know,” the veteran actor replied coldly.

  Oh, he’s not in a good mood, Farrokh thought; it would be unwise to
tell him the upsetting news now. The doctor doubted that Dhar’s mood would ever be good enough to make him magnanimous upon receiving such news—and who could blame him? An overwhelming sense of unfairness lay at the heart of it, for Dhar was an identical twin who’d been separated from his brother at birth. Although Dhar had been told the story of his birth, Dhar’s twin knew nothing of the story; Dhar’s twin didn’t even know he was a twin. And now Dhar’s twin was coming to Bombay.

  Dr. Daruwalla had always believed that nothing good could come from such deception. Although Dhar had accepted the willful arbitrariness of the situation, a certain aloofness had been the cost; he was a man who, as far as Farrokh knew, withheld affection and resolutely withstood any display of affection from others. Who could blame him? the doctor thought. Dhar had accepted the existence of a mother and father and identical twin brother he’d never seen; Dhar had abided by that tiresome adage, which is still popularly evoked—to let sleeping dogs lie. But now: this most upsetting news was surely in that category of another tiresome adage which is still popularly evoked—this was the last straw.

  In Dr. Daruwalla’s opinion, Dhar’s mother had always been too selfish for motherhood; and 40 years after the accident of conception, the woman was demonstrating her selfishness again. That she’d arbitrarily decided to take one twin and abandon the other was sufficient selfishness for a normal lifetime; that she’d chosen to protect herself from her husband’s potentially harsh opinion of her by keeping from him the fact that there’d ever been a twin was selfishness of a heightened, even of a monstrous, kind; and that she’d so sheltered the twin whom she’d kept from any knowledge of his identical brother was yet again as selfish as it was deeply insensitive to the feelings of the twin she’d left behind … the twin who knew everything.

  Well, the doctor thought, Dhar knew everything except that his twin was coming to Bombay and that his mother had begged Dr. Daruwalla to be sure that the twins didn’t meet!

  In such circumstances Dr. Daruwalla felt briefly grateful for the distraction of old Mr. Lal’s apparent heart attack. Except when eating, Farrokh embraced procrastination as one greets an unexpected virtue. The belch of exhaust from the head gardener’s truck blew a wave of flower petals from the wrecked bougainvillea over Dr. Daruwalla’s feet; he stared in surprise at his light-brown toes in his dark-brown sandals, which were almost buried in the vivid pink petals.

  That was when the head mali, who’d left the truck running, sidled over to the ninth green and stood smirking beside Dr. Daruwalla. The mali was clearly more excited by the sight of Inspector Dhar in action than he appeared to be disturbed by the death of poor Mr. Lal. With a nod toward the scene unfolding in the bougainvillea, the gardener whispered to Farrokh, “It looks just like a movie!” This observation quickly returned Dr. Daruwalla to the crisis at hand, namely the impossibility of shielding Dhar’s twin from the existence of his famous brother, who, even in a city of movie stars, was indubitably the most recognizable star in Bombay.

  Even if the famous actor agreed to keep himself in hiding, his identical twin brother would constantly be mistaken for Inspector Dhar. Dr. Daruwalla admired the mental toughness of the Jesuits, but the twin—who was what the Jesuits call a scholastic (in training to be a priest)—would have to be more than mentally tough in order to endure a recurring mistaken identity of this magnitude. And from what Farrokh had been told of Dhar’s twin, self-confidence was not high on the man’s listed features. After all, who is almost 40 and only “in training” to be a priest? the doctor wondered. Given Bombay’s feelings for Dhar, Dhar’s Jesuit twin might be killed! Despite his conversion to Christianity, Dr. Daruwalla had little faith in the powers of a presumably naïve American missionary to survive—or even comprehend—the depth of resentment that Bombay harbored for Inspector Dhar.

  For example, it was common in Bombay to deface all the advertisements for all the Inspector Dhar movies. Only on the higher-placed hoardings—those larger-than-life billboards that were everywhere in the city—was the giant likeness of Inspector Dhar’s cruel, handsome face spared the abundant filth that was flung at it from street level. But even above human reach, the familiar face of the detested antihero couldn’t escape creative defilement from Bombay’s most expressive birds. The crows and the fork-tailed kites appeared to be drawn, as to a target, to the dark, piercing eyes—and to that sneer which the famous actor had perfected. All over town, Dhar’s movie-poster face was spotted with bird shit. But even his many detractors admitted that Inspector Dhar achieved a kind of perfection with his sneer. It was the look of a lover who was leaving you, while thoroughly relishing your misery. All of Bombay felt the sting of it.

  The rest of the world, even most of the rest of India, didn’t suffer the sneer with which Inspector Dhar constantly looked down upon Bombay. The box-office success of the Inspector Dhar movies was inexplicably limited to Maharashtra and stood in violent contradiction to how unanimously Dhar himself was loathed; not only the character, but also the actor who brought him to life, was one of those luminaries in popular culture whom the public loves to hate. As for the actor who took responsibility for the role, he appeared to so enjoy the passionate hostility he inspired that he undertook no other roles; he used no other name—he had become Inspector Dhar. It was even the name on his passport.

  It was the name on his Indian passport, which was a fake. India doesn’t permit dual citizenship. Dr. Daruwalla knew that Dhar had a Swiss passport, which was genuine; he was a Swiss citizen. In truth, the crafty actor had a Swiss life, for which he would always be grateful to Farrokh. The success of the Inspector Dhar movies was based, at least in part, on how closely Dhar had guarded his privacy, and how well hidden he’d kept his past. No amount of public scrutiny, which was considerable, could unearth more biographical information on the mystery man than he permitted—and, like his movies, Dhar’s autobiography was highly far-fetched and contrived, wholly lacking in credible detail. That Inspector Dhar had invented himself, and that he appeared to have got away with his preposterous and unexaminable fiction, was surely a contributing reason for the virulence with which he was despised.

  But the fury of the film press only fed Dhar’s stardom. Since he refused to give these gossip journalists the facts, they wrote completely fabricated stories about him; Dhar being Dhar, this suited him perfectly—lies merely served to heighten his mystery and the general hysteria he inspired. Inspector Dhar movies were so popular, Dhar must have had fans, probably a multitude of admirers; but the film audience swore that they despised him. Dhar’s indifference to his audience was also a reason to hate him. The actor himself suggested that even his fans were largely motivated to watch his films because they longed to see him fail; their faithful attendance, even if they hoped to witness a flop, assured Dhar of one hit after another. In the Bombay cinema, demigods were common; hero worship was the norm. What was uncommon was that Inspector Dhar was loathed but that he was nonetheless a star.

  As for twins separated at birth, the irony was that this is an extremely popular theme with Hindi screenwriters. Such a separation frequently happens at the hospital—or during a storm, or in a railway accident. Typically, one twin takes a virtuous path while the other wallows in evil. Usually, there is some key that links them—maybe a torn two-rupee note (each twin keeps a half). And often, at the moment they are about to kill each other, the telltale half of the two-rupee note flutters out from one twin’s pocket. Thus reunited, the twins vent their always-justifiable anger on a real villain, an inconceivable scoundrel (conveniently introduced to the audience at an earlier stage in the preposterous story).

  How Bombay hated Inspector Dhar! But Dhar was a real twin, truly separated at birth, and Dhar’s actual story was more unbelievable than any story concocted in the imagination of a Hindi screenwriter. Moreover, almost no one in Bombay, or in all of Maharashtra, knew Dhar’s true story.

  The Doctor as Closet Screenwriter

  On the ninth green, with the pink petals of the b
ougainvillea caressing his feet, Dr. Daruwalla could detect the hatred that the moronic head mali felt for Inspector Dhar. The lout still lurked at Farrokh’s side, clearly relishing the irony that Dhar, who only pretended to be a police inspector, found himself playing the role in close proximity to an actual corpse. Dr. Daruwalla then remembered his own first response to the awareness that poor Mr. Lal had fallen prey to vultures; he recalled how he’d relished the irony, too! What had he whispered to Dhar? “This is your line of work, Inspector.” Farrokh was mortified that he’d said this.

  If Dr. Daruwalla felt vaguely guilty that he knew very little about either his native or his adopted country, and if his self-confidence was a mild casualty of his general out-of-itness in both Bombay and Toronto, the doctor was more clearly and acutely agonized by anything in himself that identified him with the lowly masses—the poor slob on the street, the mere commoner: in short, his fellow man. If it embarrassed him to be a passive resident of both Canada and India, which was a passivity born of insufficient knowledge and experience, it shamed him hugely to catch himself thinking like anyone else. He may have been alienated but he was also a snob. And here, in the presence of death itself, Dr. Daruwalla was humiliated by his apparent lack of originality—namely, he discovered he was on the same wavelength as an entirely stupid and disagreeable gardener.

  The doctor was so ashamed that he briefly turned his attention to Mr. Lal’s grief-stricken golfing partner, Mr. Bannerjee, who’d approached no closer than a spot within reach of the number-nine flag, which hung limply from the slender pole stuck in the cup.

  Then Dhar spoke quite suddenly, and with more curiosity than surprise. “There’s quite a lot of blood by one ear,” he said.

  “I suppose the vultures were pecking at him for some time,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. He wouldn’t venture any nearer himself—after all, he was an orthopedist, not a medical examiner.