A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  “He always fell apart at the ninth hole!” Mr. Bannerjee exclaimed. “I never should have teased him about it!”

  Dr. Daruwalla was thinking that he’d often teased Mr. Lal along similar lines; it had been irresistible to tease Mr. Lal in regard to the zeal with which he played a game for which he manifested minimal talent. But now that he appeared to have died at the game, Mr. Lal’s enthusiasm for golf seemed less funny than before.

  Farrokh found himself sensing some faint analogy between his creation of Inspector Dhar and Mr. Lal’s golf game, and this unwanted connection came to him as the result of a sudden, unpleasant odor. It wasn’t as strong an impression as the stench of a man defecating at close quarters, but instead the smell was at once more familiar and more removed—sun-rotted garbage, perhaps, or clogged drains. Farrokh thought of potted flowers and human urine.

  Far-fetched or not, the nature of the comparison between Mr. Lal’s lethal golf habit and Dr. Daruwalla’s screenwriting was simply this: the Inspector Dhar movies were judged to be of no artistic merit whatsoever, but the labors that the doctor performed to write these screenplays were intense; the nature of Inspector Dhar’s character was crude to most viewers, and outrageously offensive to many, but the doctor had created Dhar out of the purest love; and Farrokh’s fragile self-esteem rested as much on his sense of himself as a closet writer as it did on his established reputation as a surgeon, even if he was only a screenwriter and, worse, even though he was perceived to be such a shameless hack—such a whore for the money—that he wouldn’t even lend his name to his creations. Understandably, since the actor who played Inspector Dhar had himself become (in the public eye) the very character he portrayed, the authorship of the screenplays was ascribed to Dhar. What gave Farrokh so much pleasure was the actual writing of the screenplays themselves; yet, despite his own enjoyment of the craft, the results were ridiculed and hated.

  Recently, in the light of certain death threats that Inspector Dhar had received, Dr. Daruwalla had even considered retiring; the doctor had meant to sound out the actor in regard to this notion. If I stop, Farrokh wondered, what will Dhar do? If I stop, what will I do? he’d also wondered, for he’d long suspected that Dhar wouldn’t be opposed to the idea of getting out of the business of being Dhar—especially now. To suffer the verbal abuse of The Times of India was one thing; death threats were something altogether different.

  And now this unlikely association to Mr. Lal’s golf game, this unveiled reek of sun-rotted garbage, this ancient smell from a clogged drain—or had someone been peeing in the bougainvillea? These thoughts were most unwelcome. Dr. Daruwalla suddenly saw himself as the poor, doomed Mr. Lal; he thought he was as bad but as compulsive a writer as Mr. Lal had been a golfer. For example, he’d not only written another screenplay; they’d already finished the final cut of the picture. Coincidentally, the new movie would be released shortly before or after the arrival in Bombay of Dhar’s twin. Dhar himself was just hanging around—he was under contract for a very limited number of interviews and photo opportunities to publicize the new release. (This forced intimacy with the film press could never be limited enough to suit Dhar.) Also, there was every reason to believe that the new film might make as much trouble as the last. And so the time to stop is now, thought Dr. Daruwalla, before I begin another one!

  But how could he stop? It was something he loved. And how could he hope to improve? Farrokh was doing the best that he could; like poor Mr. Lal, he was hopelessly returning to the ninth green. Each time, the flowers would fly but the golf ball would remain more or less unresponsive; each time, he would be knee-deep in the blighted bougainvillea, slashing wildly at the little white ball. Then, one day, the vultures would be overhead and descending.

  There was just one choice: either hit the ball and not the flowers, or stop the game. Dr. Daruwalla understood this, yet he couldn’t decide—no more than he could bring himself to tell Inspector Dhar the upsetting news. After all, the doctor thought, how can I hope to be any better than my proven abilities? And how can I stop it, when “it” is merely what I do?

  It soothed him to think of the circus. Like a child who’s proud to recite the names of Santa’s reindeer or the Seven Dwarfs, Farrokh tested himself by remembering the names of the Great Royal’s lions: Ram, Raja, Wazir, Mother, Diamond, Shanker, Crown, Max, Hondo, Highness, Lillie Mol, Leo and Tex. And then there were the cubs: Sita, Gita, Julie, Devi, Bheem and Lucy. The lions were most dangerous between their first and second feedings of meat. The meat made their paws slippery; while they paced in their cages, in expectation of their second serving, they often slipped and fell down, or they slid sideways into the bars. After their second feeding, they calmed down and licked the grease off their paws. With lions, you could count on certain things. They were always themselves. Lions didn’t try to be what they couldn’t be, the way Dr. Daruwalla kept trying to be a writer—the way I keep trying to be an Indian! he thought.

  And in 15 years, he’d not found a genetic marker for achondroplastic dwarfism, nor had anyone encouraged him to look. But he kept trying. The doctor’s dwarf-blood project wasn’t dead; he wouldn’t let it die—not yet.

  Because an Elephant Stepped on a Seesaw

  By the time Dr. Daruwalla was in his late fifties, the exuberant details of the doctor’s conversion to Christianity were entirely absent from his conversation; it was as if he were slowly becoming unconverted. But 15 years ago—as the doctor drove to the circus grounds at Cross Maidan to assess what damage had been done to the dwarf—Farrokh’s faith was still new enough that he’d already imparted the miraculous particulars of his belief to Vinod. If the dwarf was truly dying, the doctor was at least slightly comforted by his memory of their religious discussion—for Vinod was a deeply religious man. In the coming years, Farrokh’s faith would comfort him less deeply, and he would one day flee from any religious discourse with Vinod. Over time, the dwarf would strike the doctor as a giant zealot.

  But while the doctor was en route to discover whatever disaster had befallen the dwarf at the Great Blue Nile, he found it heartening to dwell on the dwarf’s expressed excitement over the parallels between Vinod’s version of Hinduism and Dr. Daruwalla’s Christianity.

  “We are having a kind of Trinity, too!” the dwarf had exclaimed.

  “Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu—is that what you mean?” the doctor asked.

  “All creation is being in the hands of three gods,” Vinod said. “First is Brahma, the God of Creation—there is only one temple in all of India to him! Second is Vishnu, the God of Preservation or Existence. And third is Shiva, the God of Change.”

  “Change?” Farrokh asked. “I thought Shiva was the Destroyer—the God of Destruction.”

  “Why is everyone saying this?” the dwarf exclaimed. “All creation is being cyclic—there is no finality. I am liking it better to think of Shiva as the God of Change. Sometimes death is change, too.”

  “I see,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “That’s a positive way of looking at it.”

  “This is our Trinity,” the dwarf went on. “Creation, Preservation, Change.”

  “I guess I don’t understand the female forms,” Farrokh boldly admitted.

  “The power of the gods is being represented by the females,” Vinod explained. “Durga is the female form of Shiva—she is the Goddess of Death and Destruction.”

  “But you just said Shiva was the God of Change,” the doctor interjected.

  “His female form, Durga, is the Goddess of Death and Destruction,” the dwarf repeated.

  “I see,” Dr. Daruwalla responded; it seemed best to say so.

  “Durga is looking after me—I am praying to her,” Vinod added.

  “The Goddess of Death and Destruction is looking after you?” Farrokh inquired.

  “She is always protecting me,” the dwarf insisted.

  “I see,” Dr. Daruwalla said; he guessed that being protected by the Goddess of Death and Destruction had a kind of karmic ring to it.

>   Finally, Farrokh found Vinod lying in the dirt under the bleachers; it appeared that the dwarf had fallen through the wooden planks, from perhaps the fourth or fifth row of seats. The roustabouts had cleared the crowd from only a small section of the audience area, below which Vinod lay, unmoving. But how and why the dwarf had landed there wasn’t immediately clear. Was there a clown act that required audience participation?

  On the far side of the ring, a desultory gathering of dwarf clowns was bravely trying to keep the crowd’s attention; it was the familiar Farting Clown act—through a hole in the seat of his colorful pants, one dwarf kept “farting” talcum powder on the other dwarfs. They didn’t appear to be weakened or otherwise the worse for giving the doctor a Vacutainer of their blood, which Vinod had shamelessly entreated them to do; just as shamelessly, Dr. Daruwalla had lied to them—exactly as Vinod had advised him. The dwarfs’ blood would be used to give strength to a dying dwarf; Vinod had even compounded this fiction by telling his fellow clowns that he’d already been bled to the doctor’s satisfaction.

  This time, mercifully, the ringmaster’s voice on the loudspeaker had not heralded the doctor’s arrival. Since Vinod lay under the bleacher seats, most of the crowd couldn’t see him. Farrokh knelt in the dirt, which was littered with the audience’s leavings: greasy paper cones, soft-drink bottles, peanut shells and discarded betel-nut pieces. On the underside of the bleachers, Farrokh could see the white stripes of lime paste that streaked the wooden planks; the paan users had wiped their fingers under their seats.

  “I think I am not ending up here,” Vinod whispered to the doctor. “I think I am not dying—just changing.”

  “Try not to move,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “Just tell me where you’re hurting.”

  “I am not moving. I am not hurting,” the dwarf answered, “I am just not feeling my backside.”

  Quite in character for a man of faith, the dwarf lay stoically suffering with his trident hands crossed upon his chest. He complained later that no one had dared to approach him, except a vendor—a channa-walla with his tray of nuts around his neck. Vinod had told the vendor about the numbness in his backside; hence the ringmaster assumed that the dwarf had broken his neck or his back. Vinod thought that someone should at least have talked to him or listened to the story of his life; someone should have held his head or offered him water until the stretcher bearers in their dirty-white dhotis came for him.

  “This is Shiva—this is being his business,” the dwarf told Dr. Daruwalla. “This is change—not death, I think. If Durga is doing this, then okay—I am dying. But I think I am merely changing.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Dr. Daruwalla replied; he made Vinod grip his fingers. Then the doctor touched the backs of Vinod’s legs.

  “I am feeling you only a little,” the dwarf responded.

  “I’m touching you only a little,” Farrokh explained.

  “This is meaning I am not dying,” said the dwarf. “This is merely the gods advising me.”

  “What are they telling you?” the doctor asked.

  “They are saying I am ready to leave the circus,” Vinod answered. “At least this circus.”

  Slowly, the faces from the Great Blue Nile gathered around them. The ringmaster, the boneless girls and the plastic ladies—even the lion tamer, who toyed with his whip. But the doctor wouldn’t allow the stretcher bearers to move the dwarf until someone explained how Vinod had been injured. Vinod believed that only the other dwarfs could describe the accident properly; for this reason, the Farting Clown act had to be halted. By now the act had deteriorated in the usual fashion: the offending dwarf was farting talcum powder into the front-row seats. Since the front row of the audience was chiefly populated with children, the farting was considered no great offense. However, the crowd was already dispersing; the Farting Clown act was never funny for very long. The Great Blue Nile had exhausted its entire repertoire in a half-successful effort to keep the audience seated until the doctor arrived.

  Now the gathering clowns confessed to the doctor that Vinod had been injured in other acts, before. Once he’d fallen off a horse; once he’d been chased and bitten by a chimpanzee. Once, when the Blue Nile had a female bear, the bear had butted Vinod into a bucket of diluted shaving lather; this was a scripted part of the act, but the bear had butted Vinod too hard—he’d had his breath knocked out, and (as a consequence) the dwarf had then inhaled and swallowed the soapy water. Vinod’s fellow clowns had also seen him hurt in the Cricket-Playing Elephants act. Apparently, to the degree that Dr. Daruwalla could understand the stunt at all, one elephant was the bowler and a second elephant was the batsman; it held and swung the bat with its trunk. Vinod was the cricket ball. It hurt to be bowled by one elephant and batted by another, even though the bat was made of rubber.

  As Farrokh would learn later, the Great Royal Circus never put their dwarf clowns at such risk, but this was the Great Blue Nile. The terrible teeterboard accident, which was responsible for Vinod’s pained position under the bleacher seats, was simply another elephant act of ill repute. The acts in an Indian circus are called “items”; in terms of accuracy, the Elephant on a Teeterboard item wasn’t as precise as the Cricket-Playing Elephants but it was a favorite with children, who were more familiar with a seesaw or a teeter-totter than with cricket.

  In the Elephant on a Teeterboard item, Vinod acted the part of a crabby clown, a spoilsport who wouldn’t play with his fellow dwarfs on the seesaw. Whenever they balanced the teeter-totter, Vinod jumped on one end and knocked them all off. Then he sat on the teeterboard with his back to them. One by one, they crept onto the other end of the board, until Vinod was up in the air; whereupon, he turned around and slid down the board into the other dwarfs, knocking them all off again. It was thus established for the audience that Vinod was guilty of antisocial behavior. His fellow dwarfs left him sitting on one end of the seesaw, with his back to them, while they fetched an elephant.

  The only part of this act that is of possible interest to grownups is the demonstration that elephants can count—at least as high as three. The dwarfs tried to coax the elephant to stamp on the raised end of the teeterboard while Vinod was sitting on the other end, but the elephant was taught to delay stamping on the teeterboard until the third time. The first two times that the elephant raised its huge foot above the teeterboard, it didn’t stamp on the board; twice, at the last second, it flapped its ears and turned away. The idea was planted with the audience that the elephant wouldn’t really do it. The third time, when the elephant stamped down on the seesaw and Vinod was propelled into the air, the crowd was properly surprised.

  Vinod was supposed to be launched upward into the rolled nets that were lowered only for the trapeze performance. He would cling to the underside of this netting like a bat, screaming at his fellow dwarfs to get him down. Naturally, they couldn’t reach him without the help of the elephant, of which Vinod was demonstrably afraid. Typical circus slapstick; yet it was important that the teeterboard was aimed exactly at the rolled-up safety nets. That fateful night his life changed, Vinod realized (as he sat on the seesaw) that the teeterboard was pointed into the audience.

  This could be blamed on the Kingfisher lager; such big bottles of beer had an unsteadying effect on dwarfs. Dr. Daruwalla would never again bribe dwarfs with beer. Sadly, the seesaw was pointed in the wrong direction and Vinod had neglected to count the number of times that the elephant had raised its foot, which the dwarf had previously managed to do without seeing the elephant; Vinod always counted the times the elephant raised its foot by the gasps of anticipation in the audience. Of course, Vinod could have turned his head and looked at the elephant to see where the beast’s great foot was. But Vinod held himself accountable for certain standards: if he’d turned to look at the elephant, it would have spoiled the act completely.

  As it happened, Vinod was flung into the fourth row of seats. He remembered hoping that he wouldn’t land on any children, but he needn’t have worried; the audie
nce scattered before he arrived. He struck the empty wooden bleachers and fell through the space between the planks.

  Created by spontaneous mutation, an achondroplastic dwarf lives in pain; his knees ache, his elbows ache—not to mention that they won’t extend. His ankles ache and his back aches, too—not to mention the degenerative arthritis. Of course there are worse types of dwarfism: pseudoachondroplastic dwarfs suffer so-called windswept deformities—bowleg on one limb, knock-knee on the other. Dr. Daruwalla had seen dwarfs who couldn’t walk at all. Even so, given the pain that Vinod was accustomed to, the dwarf didn’t mind that his backside was numb; it was possibly the best that the dwarf had felt in years—in spite of being catapulted 40 feet by an elephant and landing on his coccyx on a wooden plank.

  Thus did the injured dwarf become Dr. Daruwalla’s patient. Vinod had suffered a slight fracture in the apex of his coccyx, and he’d bruised the tendon of his external sphincter muscle, which is attached to this apex; in short, he’d quite literally busted his ass. Vinod had also torn some of the sacrosciatic ligaments, which are attached to the narrow borders of the coccyx. The numbness of his backside, which soon abated—thence Vinod would return to the world of his routine aches and pains—was possibly the result of some pressure on one or more of the sacral nerves. His recovery would be complete, although slower than Deepa’s; yet Vinod insisted he’d been permanently disabled. What he meant was he’d lost his nerve.

  Future flight experiments with the clowns of the Great Blue Nile would have to be conducted without Vinod’s participation—or so the dwarf claimed. If Shiva was the God of Change, and not merely the Destroyer, perhaps the change that Lord Shiva intended for Vinod was actually a career move. But the veteran clown would always be a dwarf, and Vinod struck Farrokh as lacking the qualifications for a job outside the circus.

  Vinod and his wife were recovering from their respective surgeries when the Great Blue Nile completed its term of engagement in Bombay. While both Deepa and her dwarf husband were hospitalized, Dr. Daruwalla and his wife took care of Shivaji; after all, someone had to look after the dwarf child—and the doctor still held himself accountable for the Kingfisher. It had been some years since the Daruwallas had struggled to manage a two-year-old, and they’d never before tried to manage a dwarf two-year-old, but this period of convalescence proved fruitful for Vinod.