A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  It wasn’t as if Danny had contributed a word to The Big Sleep or even Cobra Woman, and he’d had nothing to do with Woman of the Year or even Hot Cargo; he’d written neither Rope nor Gaslight—he hadn’t added so much as a comma to Son of Dracula, or taken one away from Frisco Sal—and although for a while he’d been identified as the uncredited screenwriter for When Strangers Marry, this proved to be false. In Hollywood, he simply hadn’t been playing in the big leagues; the general feeling was that “additional dialogue” was the very zenith of his ability, and so he came to Bombay with more experience in fixing other people’s messes than with creating his own. Doubtless it hurt Danny that Gordon Hathaway didn’t refer to him as “the writer” at all. Gordon called Danny Mills “the fixer,” but in truth there was more that needed fixing in One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling after Hathaway started changing it.

  Danny had envisioned the movie as a love story with a twist; the “twist” was the wife dying. In the original screenplay, the couple—in her dying days—succumbs to the fakery of a snake guru; they are rescued from this charlatan and his gang of demonic snake-worshipers by a true guru. Instead of pretending to cure the wife, the true guru teaches her how to die with dignity. According to the philistine producer, or else to his wife—Gordon Hathaway’s interfering C. of M. sister—this last part was lacking in both action and suspense.

  “Despite how happy the wife is, she still fuckin’ dies, doesn’t she?” Gordon said.

  Therefore, against the slightly better instincts of Danny Mills, Gordon Hathaway altered the story. Gordon believed that the snake guru wasn’t villainous enough; hence the snake-worshipers were revised. The snake guru actually abducts the wife from the Taj and keeps her a prisoner in his harem of drugged women, while he instructs them in a method of meditation that concludes with having sex—either with the snakes or with him. This is an ashram of evil, surely. The distraught husband, in the company of a Jesuit missionary—a none-too-subtle replacement for the true guru—tracks the wife down and saves her from a fate presumed worse than her anticipated death by cancer. It is Christianity that the dying wife embraces at the end, and—no surprise!—she doesn’t die after all.

  Gordon Hathaway explained it to a surprised Lowji Daruwalla: “The cancer just sort of goes away—it just fuckin’ dries up and goes away. That happens sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, it doesn’t exactly ‘dry up,’ but there are cases of remission,” the senior Dr. Daruwalla answered uncertainly, while Farrokh and Meher suffered enormous embarrassment for him.

  “What’s that?” Gordon Hathaway asked. He knew what a remission was; he just hadn’t heard the doctor because his ears were crammed full of fungus and gentian violet and cotton balls.

  “Yes! Sometimes a cancer can just sort of go away!” old Lowji shouted.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought—I knew that!” Gordon Hathaway said.

  In his embarrassment for his father, Farrokh sought to turn the conversation toward India itself. Surely the gravity of the Partition and Independence—when a million Hindus and Muslims were killed, and 12 million became refugees—interested the foreigners a little.

  “Listen, kid,” Gordon Hathaway said, “when you’re makin’ a fuckin’ movie, nothin’ else interests you.” There was hearty consent to this at the dinner table; Farrokh felt that even the silence of his usually opinionated father served to rebuke him. Only Danny Mills appeared to be interested in the subject of local color; Danny also appeared to be drunk.

  Although Danny Mills considered religion and politics as tedious forms of “local color,” Danny was nevertheless disappointed that One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling had very little to do with India. Danny had already suggested that the climate of religious violence in the days of the Partition might at least make a brief appearance in the background of the story.

  “Politics is just fuckin’ exposition,” Gordon Hathaway had said, dismissing the idea. “I’d end up cutting the shit out of it later.”

  In response to the present debate between the director and Farrokh, Danny Mills once more expressed his desire that the movie reflect at least a hint of Muslim-Hindu tensions, but Gordon Hathaway bluntly challenged Farrokh to tell him just one “sore point” between Muslims and Hindus that wouldn’t be boring on film. And since this was the year that Hindus had snuck into the Mosque of Babar with idols of their god-prince Rama, Farrokh imagined that he knew a good story. The Hindus had claimed that the site of the mosque was the birthplace of Rama, but the placing of Hindu idols in an historic mosque wasn’t well received by Muslims—they hate idols of any kind. Muslims don’t believe in representations of God, not to mention lots of gods, while Hindus pray to idols (and to lots of gods) all the time. To avoid more Hindu-Muslim bloodshed, the state had locked up the Mosque of Babar. “Perhaps they should have removed the idols of Rama first,” Farrokh explained. Muslims were enraged that these Hindu idols were occupying their mosque. Hindus not only wanted the idols to remain—they wanted to build a temple to Rama at the site.

  At this point, Gordon Hathaway interrupted Farrokh’s story to express anew his dislike of exposition. “You’ll never write for the movies, kid,” Gordon said. “You wanna write for the movies, you gotta get to the point quicker than this.”

  “I don’t think we can use it,” said Danny Mills thoughtfully, “but I thought it was a nice story.”

  “Thank you,” Farrokh said.

  Poor Meher, the oft-neglected Mrs. Daruwalla, was sufficiently provoked to change the subject. She offered a comment on the pleasure of a sudden evening breeze. She noted the rustling of a neem tree in the Ladies’ Garden. Meher would have elaborated on the merits of the neem tree, but she saw that the foreigners’ interest—which was never great—had already waned.

  Gordon Hathaway was holding the violet-colored cotton balls he’d taken from his ears, shaking them in the closed palm of one hand, like dice. “What’s a fuckin’ neem tree?” he asked, as if the tree itself had annoyed him.

  “They’re all around town,” said Danny Mills. “They’re a tropical kind of tree, I think.”

  “I’m sure you’ve seen them,” Farrokh said to the director.

  “Listen, kid,” said Gordon Hathaway, “when you’re makin’ a movie, you don’t have time to look at the fuckin’ trees.”

  It must have hurt Meher to see by her husband’s expression that Lowji had found this remark most sage. Meanwhile, Gordon Hathaway indicated that the conversation was over by turning his attention to a pretty, underage girl at an adjacent table. This left Farrokh with a view of the director’s arrogant profile, and an especially alarming glimpse of the deep and permanent purple of Hathaway’s inner ear. The ear was actually a rainbow of colors, from raw red to violet, as unsuitably iridescent as the face of a mandrill baboon.

  Later, after the colorful director had returned to the Taj—presumably to wash more food in his bathtub before retiring to bed—Farrokh was forced to observe his father fawning over the drunken Danny Mills.

  “It must be difficult to revise a screenplay under these conditions,” Lowji ventured.

  “You mean at night? Over food? After I’ve been drinking?” Danny asked.

  “I mean so spur-of-the-moment,” Lowji said. “It would seem more prudent to shoot the story you’ve already written.”

  “Yes, it would,” poor Danny agreed. “But they never do it that way.”

  “They like the spontaneity, I suppose,” Lowji said.

  “They don’t think the writing is very important,” said Danny Mills.

  “They don’t?” Lowji exclaimed.

  “They never do,” Danny told him. Poor Lowji had never considered the unimportance of the writer of a movie. Even Farrokh looked with compassion on Danny Mills, who was an affectionate, sentimental man with a gentle manner and a face that women liked—until they knew him better. Then they either disliked his central weakness or exploited it. Alcohol was certainly a problem for him, but his drinking was m
ore a symptom of his failure than a cause of it. He was always out of money and, as a consequence, he rarely finished a piece of writing and sold it from any position of strength; usually, he would sell only an idea for a piece of writing, or a piece of writing that was very much a fragment—a story barely in progress—and as a result he lost all control of the outcome of whatever the piece of writing was.

  He’d never finished a novel, although he’d begun several; when he needed money, he would put the novel aside and write a screenplay—selling the screenplay before he finished it. That was always the pattern. By the time he went back to the novel, he had enough distance from it to see how bad it was.

  But Farrokh couldn’t dislike Danny the way he disliked Gordon Hathaway; Farrokh could see that Danny liked Lowji, too. Danny also made an effort to protect Farrokh’s father from further embarrassing himself.

  “Here’s the way it is,” Danny told Lowji. He swirled the melting ice in the bottom of his glass; in the kilnlike heat before the monsoon, the ice melted quickly—but never as quickly as Danny drank the gin. “You’re screwed if you sell something before you finish it,” Danny Mills told the senior Daruwalla. “Never even show anybody what you’re writing until you finish it. Just do the work. When you know it’s good, show it to someone who’s made a movie you like.”

  “Like a director, you mean?” asked Lowji, who was still writing everything down.

  “Definitely a director,” said Danny Mills. “I don’t mean a studio.”

  “And so you show it to someone you like, a director, and then you get paid?” asked the senior Daruwalla.

  “No,” said Danny Mills. “You take no money until the whole deal is in place. The minute you take any money, you’re screwed.”

  “But when do you take the money?” Lowji asked.

  “When they’ve signed the actors you want, when they’ve signed the director—and given him the final cut of the picture. When everyone likes the screenplay so much, you know they wouldn’t dare change a word of it—and if you doubt this, demand final script approval. Then be prepared to walk away.”

  “This is what you do?” Lowji asked.

  “Not me,” Danny said. “I take the money up front, as much as I can get. Then they screw me.”

  “But who does it the way you suggest?” Lowji asked; he was so confused, he’d stopped writing.

  “Nobody I know,” said Danny Mills. “Everyone I know gets screwed.”

  “So you didn’t go to Gordon Hathaway—you didn’t choose him?” Lowji asked.

  “Only a studio would choose Gordon,” Danny said.

  He had that uncommon smoothness of skin which appears so confounding on the faces of some alcoholics; it was as if Danny’s baby-faced complexion were the direct result of the pickling process—as if the growth of his beard were as arrested as his speech. Danny looked like he needed to shave only once a week, although he was almost 35.

  “I’ll tell you about Gordon,” Danny said. “It was Gordon’s idea to expand the role of the snake guru in the story—Gordon’s idea of the epitome of evil is an ashram with snakes. I’ll tell you about Gordon,” Danny Mills went on, when neither Lowji nor Farrokh had interrupted him. “Gordon’s never met a guru, with or without snakes. Gordon’s never seen an ashram, not even in California.”

  “It would be easy to arrange a meeting with a guru,” Lowji said. “It would be easy to visit an ashram.”

  “I’m sure you know what Gordon would say to that idea,” said Danny Mills, but the drunken screenwriter was looking at Farrokh.

  Farrokh attempted the best imitation of Gordon Hathaway that he could manage. “I’m makin’ a fuckin’ movie,” Farrokh said. “Do I got the time to meet a fuckin’ guru or go to a fuckin’ ashram when I’m in the middle of makin’ a fuckin’ movie?”

  “Smart boy,” said Danny Mills. It was to old Lowji that Danny confided: “Your son understands the movie business.”

  Although Danny Mills appeared to be a destroyed man, it was hard not to like him, Farrokh thought. Then he looked down in his beer and saw the two vivid violet cotton balls from Gordon Hathaway’s ears. How did they end up in my beer? Farrokh wondered. He needed to use a parfait spoon to extract them, dripping, from his beer glass. He put Gordon Hathaway’s soggy ear-cottons on a tea saucer, wondering how long they’d been soaking in his beer—and how much beer he’d drunk while Gordon Hathaway’s ear-cottons were sponging up the beer at the bottom of his glass. Danny Mills was laughing so hard, he couldn’t speak. Lowji could see what his critical son was thinking.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Farrokh!” his father told him. “Surely it was an accident.” This made Danny Mills laugh harder and harder, drawing Mr. Sethna to their table—where the steward stared in disapproval at the tea saucer containing the beer-soaked, still-purple cotton balls. Farrokh’s remaining beer was purple, too. Mr. Sethna was thinking that it was at least fortunate that Mrs. Daruwalla had already gone home for the evening.

  Farrokh helped his father arrange Danny Mills in the back seat of the car. Danny would be sound asleep before they’d traveled the length of the driveway of the Duckworth Club, or at least by the time they’d left Mahalaxmi. The screenwriter was always asleep by that time, if he didn’t go home earlier; when they dropped him at the Taj, Farrokh’s father would tip one of the tall Sikh doormen, who would transport Danny to his room on a luggage cart.

  This night—Farrokh in the passenger seat, his father driving, and Danny Mills asleep in the back seat—they had just entered Tardeo when his father said, “In your nearly constant expression, you might be wise not to display such obvious distaste for these people. I know you think you’re very sophisticated—and that they are vermin, beneath your contempt—but I’ll tell you what is most unsophisticated, and that is to wear your feelings so frankly on your face.”

  Farrokh would remember this, for he took the sting of such a rebuke very much to heart, while at the same time he sat silently seething in anger at his father, who wasn’t as entirely stupid as his young son had presumed him to be. Farrokh would remember this, too, because the car was exactly at that location in Tardeo where, 20 years later, his father would be blown to smithereens.

  “You should listen to these people, Farrokh,” his father was telling him. “It isn’t necessary for them to be your moral equals in order for you to learn something from them.”

  Farrokh would remember the irony, too. Although this was his father’s idea, Farrokh would be the one who actually learned something from the wretched foreigners; he’d be the one who took Danny’s advice.

  But Had He Learned Anything Worth Knowing?

  Farrokh wasn’t 19 now; he was 59. It was already past dusk at the Duckworth Club, but the doctor still sat slumped in his chair in the Ladies’ Garden. The younger Dr. Daruwalla wore an expression generally associated with failure; although he’d maintained absolute control of his Inspector Dhar screenplays—Farrokh was always granted “final script approval”—what did it matter? Everything he’d written was crap. The irony was, he’d been very successful writing movies that were no better than One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling.

  Dr. Daruwalla wondered if other screenwriters who’d written crap nevertheless dreamed, as he did, of writing a “quality” picture. In Farrokh’s case, his quality story always began in the same way; he just couldn’t get past the beginning.

  There was an opening shot of Victoria Terminus, the Gothic station with its stained-glass windows, its friezes, its flying buttresses, its ornate dome with the watchful gargoyles—in Farrokh’s opinion, it was the heart of Bombay. Inside the echoing station were a half-million commuters and the ever-arriving migrants; these latter travelers had brought everything with them, from their children to their chickens.

  Outside the huge depot was the vast display of produce in Crawford Market, not to mention the pet stalls, where you could buy parrots or piranhas or monkeys. And among the porters and the vendors, the beggars and the newcomers and the pickpocket
s, the camera (somehow) would single out his hero, although he was just a child and crippled. What other hero would an orthopedic surgeon imagine? And with the magical simultaneity that movies can occasionally manage, the boy’s face (a close-up) would let us know that his story had been chosen—among millions—while at that exact moment the boy’s voice-over would tell us his name.

  Farrokh was overly fond of the old-fashioned technique of voice-over; he’d used it to excess in every Inspector Dhar movie. There’s one that begins with camera following a pretty young woman through Crawford Market. She’s anxious, as if she knows she’s being followed, and this causes her to topple a heaped-up pile of pineapples at a fruit stand, which makes her run; this causes her to slip on the rotting compost underfoot, which makes her bump into a pet stall, where a vicious cockatoo pecks her hand. That’s when we see Inspector Dhar. As the young woman runs on, Dhar calmly follows her. He pauses by the stand of exotic birds only long enough to give the cockatoo a cuff with the back of his hand.

  His voice-over says, “It was the third time I’d tailed her, but she was still crazy enough to think she could shake me.”