A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  Vera, meanwhile, had made her plans, presuming the complete cooperation of the Daruwallas. She would move into hiding, with Dr. Lowji and his family, until the child was born. The prenatal care and delivery would be the responsibility of the senile friend of the senior Dr. Daruwalla, the ancient and accident-prone Dr. Tata. It was unusual for Dr. Tata to make house calls, but he agreed, given his friendship with the Daruwallas and his understanding of the extreme sensitivity ascribed to the hypochondriac movie star. This was just as well, Meher said, because Veronica Rose would not have responded confidently to the peculiar sign with large lettering that was posted outside Dr. Tata’s office building.

  DR TATA’S BEST,

  MOST FAMOUS CLINIC

  FOR GYNECOLOGICAL &

  MATERNITY NEEDS

  It was surely wise to spare Vera the knowledge that Dr. Tata found it necessary to advertise his services as “best” and “most famous,” for Vera would doubtless conclude that Dr. Tata suffered from insecurity. And so Dr. Tata made frequent house calls to the esteemed Daruwalla residence on Ridge Road; because Dr. Tata was far too old to drive a car safely, his arrivals and departures were usually marked by the presence of taxis in the Daruwallas’ driveway—except for one time when Farrokh observed Dr. Tata stumbling into the driveway from the back seat of a private car. This wouldn’t have been of special interest to the young man except that the car was driven by Promila Rai; beside her in the passenger seat was her allegedly hairless nephew, Rahul—the very boy whose sexual ambiguity so discomforted Farrokh.

  This loomed as a violation of that secrecy which all the Daruwallas sought for Vera and her pending child; but Promila and her unnerving nephew drove off as soon as Dr. Tata was deposited in the driveway, and Dr. Tata told Lowji that he was sure he’d thrown Promila “off the trail.” He’d told her he was making a house call to see Meher. Meher was offended that a woman as loathsome to her as Promila Rai would be presuming all sorts of female plumbing problems of an intimate nature. It was long after Dr. Tata had departed that Meher’s irritation subsided and she thought to ask Lowji and Farrokh what Promila and Rahul Rai were doing with old Dr. Tata in the first place. Lowji pondered the question as if for the first time.

  “I suppose she was concluding an office visit and he asked her for a ride,” Farrokh informed his mother.

  “She is a woman past childbearing years,” Meher delightedly pointed out. “If she was concluding an office visit, it would have been for something gynecological. For such a visit, why would she take her nephew?”

  Lowji said, “Perhaps it was the nephew’s office visit—probably it has something to do with the hairlessness business!”

  “I know Promila Rai,” Meher said. “She won’t believe for one minute that Dr. Tata was house-calling to see me.”

  And then, one evening, following a function where there’d been interminable speeches at the Duckworth Club, Promila Rai approached Dr. Lowji Daruwalla and said to him, “I know all about the blond baby—I will take it.”

  The senior Dr. Daruwalla cautiously said, “What baby?” Then he added, “There’s no certainty it will be blond!”

  “Of course it will,” said Promila Rai. “I know these things. At least it will be fair-skinned.”

  Lowji considered that the child might indeed be fair-skinned; however, both Danny Mills and Neville Eden had very dark hair, and the doctor sincerely doubted the baby would be as blond as Veronica Rose.

  Meher was opposed, on principle, to Promila Rai being an adoptive mother. In the first place, Promila was in her fifties—not only a spinster but an evil, spurned woman.

  “She’s a bitter, resentful witch,” Meher said. “She’d be an awful mother!”

  “She must have a dozen servants,” Lowji replied, but Meher accused him of forgetting how offended he’d once been by Promila Rai.

  As a Malabar Hill resident, Promila had led a protest campaign against the Towers of Silence. She’d offended the entire Parsi community, even old Lowji. Promila had claimed that the vultures were certain to drop body parts in various residents’ gardens, or on their terraces. Promila even alleged that she’d spotted a bit of a finger floating in her balcony birdbath. Dr. Lowji Daruwalla had written an angry letter explaining to Promila that vultures didn’t fly around with the fingers or toes of corpses in their beaks; vultures consumed what they wanted on the ground—anyone who knew anything about vultures knew that.

  “And now you want Promila Rai to be a mother!”. Meher exclaimed.

  “It isn’t that I want her to be a mother,” the senior Dr. Daruwalla said. “However, there isn’t exactly a lineup of wealthy matrons seeking to adopt an American movie star’s unwanted child!”

  “Furthermore,” Meher said, “Promila Rai is a man-hater. What if that poor baby is a boy?”

  Lowji didn’t dare tell Meher what Promila had already said to him. Promila was not only certain that the baby would be blond, she was also quite sure it would be a girl.

  “I know these things,” Promila had told him. “You’re only a doctor—and one for joints, not babies!”

  The senior Dr. Daruwalla didn’t suggest that Veronica Rose and Promila Rai discuss their transaction with each other; instead, he did everything he could to keep them from such a discussion—they didn’t seem to have much interest in each other, anyway. It mattered to Vera only that Promila was rich, or so it appeared. It mattered most of all to Promila that Vera was healthy. Promila had a sizable fear of drugs; it was drugs, she was certain, that had poisoned her fiancé’s brain and caused him to change his mind about marrying her—twice. After all, had he been drug-free and clear-headed, why wouldn’t he have married her—at least once?

  Lowji could assure Promila that Vera was drug-free. Now that Neville and Danny had left Bombay and Vera wasn’t trying to be an actress every day, she didn’t need the sleeping pills; in fact, she slept most of the time.

  Almost anyone could see where this was going; it was a pity that Lowji couldn’t. His own wife thought him criminal even to consider putting a newborn baby into the hands of Promila Rai; Promila would doubtless reject the child if it was male, or even slightly dark-haired. And then Lowji heard the worst news, from old Dr. Tata—namely, that Veronica Rose wasn’t a true blonde.

  “I’ve seen where you haven’t seen,” old Dr. Tata told him. “She has black hair, very black—maybe the blackest hair I’ve ever seen. Even in India!”

  Farrokh felt he could imagine the conclusion to this melodrama. The child would be a boy with black hair; Promila Rai wouldn’t want him, and Meher wouldn’t want Promila to have him, anyway. Therefore, the Daruwallas would end up adopting Vera’s baby. What Farrokh failed to imagine was that Veronica Rose wasn’t entirely as artless as she’d appeared; Vera had already chosen the Daruwallas as her baby’s adoptive parents. Upon the child’s birth, Vera had planned to stage a breakdown; the reason she’d appeared so indifferent to discussions with Promila was that Vera had decided she’d reject any would-be adoptive parent—not only Promila. She’d guessed that the Daruwallas were suckers when it came to children, and she’d not guessed wrong.

  What no one had imagined was that there wouldn’t be just one dark-haired baby boy, there would be two—identical twin boys with the most gorgeous, almond-shaped faces and jet-black hair! Promila Rai wouldn’t want them, and not only because they were dark-haired boys; she would claim that any woman who had twins was clearly taking drugs.

  But the most unexpected turn of events would be engineered by the persistent love letters of Danny Mills to Veronica Rose, and by the death of Neville Eden—the victim of a car crash in Italy, an accident that also ended the flamboyant life of Subodh Rai. Until the news of the car crash, Vera had been illogically hoping that Neville might come back to her; now she determined that the fatal accident was divine retribution for Neville’s preferring Subodh to her. She would carry this thought still further in her elder years, believing that AIDS was God’s well-intentioned effort to restore a natur
al order to the universe; like many morons, Vera would believe the scourge was a godsent plague in judgment of homosexuals. This was remarkable thinking, really, for a woman who wasn’t imaginative enough to believe in God.

  It had been clear to Vera that if Neville ever would have wanted her, he wouldn’t have wanted her cluttered up with a baby. But upon Neville’s abrupt departure, Vera turned her thoughts to Danny. Would Danny still want to marry her if she brought him home a little surprise? Vera was sure he would.

  “Darling,” Vera wrote to Danny. “I’ve not wanted to test how much you love me, but all this while I’ve been carrying our child.” (Her months with Lowji and Meher had markedly improved Vera’s English.) Naturally, when she first saw the twins, Vera immediately pronounced them to be Neville’s; in her view, they were far too pretty to be Danny’s.

  Danny Mills, for his odd part, hadn’t considered having a child before. He was descended from weary but pleasant parents who’d had too many children before Danny had been born and who’d treated Danny with cordial indifference bordering on neglect. Danny wrote cautiously to his beloved Vera that he was thrilled she was carrying their child; a child was a fine idea—he hoped only that she didn’t desire to start a whole family.

  Twins are “a whole family” unto themselves, as any fool knows, and thus the dilemma would sort itself out in the predictable fashion: Vera would take one home and the Daruwallas would keep the other. Simply put, Vera didn’t want to overwhelm Danny’s limited enthusiasm for fatherhood.

  Among the host of surprises awaiting Lowji, not the least would be the advice given to him by his senile friend Dr. Tata: “When it comes to twins, put your money on the first one out.” The senior Dr. Daruwalla was shocked, but being an orthopedist, not an obstetrician, he sought to comply with Dr. Tata’s recommendation. However, such excitement and confusion attended the birth of the twins that none of the nurses kept track of which one came out first; old Dr. Tata himself couldn’t remember.

  In this respect was Dr. Tata said to be “accident-prone”: he blamed the unprofessionalism of the house calls for his failure to hear the two heartbeats whenever he put his stethoscope to Vera’s big belly; he said that in his office, under appropriate conditions, he would surely have heard the two hearts. As it was—whether it was the music that Meher played or the constant sounds of housecleaning by the several servants—old Dr. Tata simply assumed that Vera’s baby had an unusually strong and active heartbeat. On more than one occasion, he said, “Your baby has just been exercising, I think.”

  “I could have told you that,” Vera always replied.

  And so it wasn’t until she was in labor that the monitoring of the fetal heartbeats told the tale. “What a lucky lady!” Dr. Tata told Vera Rose. “You have not one but two!”

  A Knack for Offending People

  In the summer of ’49, when the monsoon rains drenched Bombay, the aforementioned melodrama lay, heavy and unseen, in young Farrokh Daruwalla’s future—like a fog so far out in the Indian Ocean, it hadn’t yet reached the Arabian Sea. He would be back in Vienna, where he and Jamshed were continuing their lengthy and proper courtship of the Zilk sisters, when he heard the news.

  “Not one but two!” And Vera took only one with her.

  To Farrokh and Jamshed, their parents were already elderly. Even Lowji and Meher might have agreed that the most vigorous of their child-raising abilities were behind them; they’d do their best with the little boy, but after Jamshed married Josefine Zilk, it made sense for the younger couple to take over the responsibility. Theirs was a mixed marriage, anyway; and Zürich, where they would settle, was an international city—a dark-haired boy of strictly white parentage would easily fit in. By then he knew Hindi in addition to English; in Zürich he would learn German, although Jamshed and Josefine would start him in an English-speaking school. After a time, the senior Daruwallas became like grandparents to the boy; from the beginning, Lowji had legally adopted him.

  And after Jamshed and Josefine had children of their own—and there came that inevitable passage through adolescence, wherein the orphaned twin expressed a disgruntled alienation from them all—it was only natural that Farrokh would emerge as a kind of big brother to the boy. The 20-year difference between them made Farrokh something of another father to the child, too. By then, Farrokh was married to the former Julia Zilk, and they’d started a family of their own. Wherever he went, the adopted boy appeared to belong, but Farrokh and Julia were his favorites.

  One shouldn’t feel sorry for Vera’s abandoned child. He was always part of a large family, even if there was something dislocating in the geographical upheavals in the young man’s life—between Toronto, Zürich and Bombay—and even if, at an early age, there could be detected in him a certain detachment. And later there was in his language—in his German, in his English, in his Hindi—something decidedly odd, if not exactly a speech impediment. He spoke very slowly, as if he were composing a written sentence, complete with punctuation, in his mind’s eye. If he had an accent, it was nothing traceable; it was more a matter of his enunciation, which was so very deliberate, as if he were in the habit of speaking to children, or addressing crowds.

  And the issue that naturally intrigued them all, which was whether he was the offspring of Neville Eden or of Danny Mills, would not be easily decided. In the medical records of One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling—which are, to this day, the only enduring records that the film was ever made—it was clearly noted that Neville and Danny were of the same common blood group, and the very same type that the twins would share.

  Various Daruwallas argued that their twin was too good-looking, and too disinclined toward strong drink, to be a conceivable creation of Danny’s, Furthermore, the boy showed little interest in reading, much less in writing—he didn’t even keep a diary—whereas he was quite a gifted and highly disciplined young actor, even in grammar school. (This pointed the finger at the late Neville.) But, of course, the Daruwallas knew very little about the other twin. If one is determined to feel sorry for either of these twins, perhaps one should indulge such a feeling for the child Vera kept.

  As for the little boy who was abandoned in India, his first days were marked by the necessity of giving him a name. He would be a Daruwalla, but in concession to his all-white appearance, it was agreed he should have an English first name. The family concurred that his name should be John, which was the Christian name of none other than Lord Duckworth himself; even Lowji conceded that the Duckworth Club was the source of the responsibility he bore for Veronica Rose’s cast-off child. Needless to say, no one would have been so stupid as to name a boy Duckworth Daruwalla. John Daruwalla, on the other hand, had a friendly Anglo-Indian ring.

  Everyone could more or less pronounce this name. Indians are familiar with the letter J; even German-speaking Swiss don’t badly maul the name John, although they tend to Frenchify the name as “Jean.” Daruwalla is as phonetic as most names come, although German-speaking Swiss pronounce the W as V, hence the young man was known in Zürich as Jean Daruvalla; this was close enough. His Swiss passport was issued in the name of John Daruwalla—plain but distinctive.

  Not for 39 years did there awaken in Farrokh that first stirring of the creative process, which old Lowji would never experience. Now, nearly 40 years after the birth of Vera’s twins, Farrokh found himself wishing that he’d never experienced the creative process, either. For it was by the interference of Farrokh’s imagination that little John Daruwalla had become Inspector Dhar, the man Bombay most loved to hate—and Bombay was a city of many passionate hatreds.

  Farrokh had conceived Inspector Dhar in the spirit of satire—of quality satire. Why were there so many easily offended people? Why had they reacted to Inspector Dhar so humorlessly? Had they no appreciation for comedy? Only now, when he was almost 60, did it occur to Farrokh that he was his father’s son in this respect: he’d uncovered a natural talent for pissing people off. If Lowji had long been perceived as an assassination-in-p
rogress, why had Farrokh been blind to this possible result in the case of Inspector Dhar? And he’d thought he was being so careful!

  He’d written that first screenplay slowly and with great attention to detail. This was the surgeon in him; he hadn’t learned such carefulness or authenticity from Danny Mills, and certainly not from his attendance at those three-hour spectacles in the shabby downtown cinema palaces of Bombay—those art-deco ruins where the air-conditioning was always “undergoing repair” and the urine frequently overflowed the lavatories.

  More than the movies, he’d watched the audience eating their snacks. In the 1950s and ’60s, the masala recipe was working—not only in Bombay but throughout South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and even in the Soviet Union. There was music mixed with murder, sob stories intercut with slapstick, mayhem in tandem with the most maudlin sentimentality—and, above all, the satisfying violence that occurs whenever the forces of good confront and punish the forces of evil. There were gods, too; they helped the heroes. But Dr. Daruwalla didn’t believe in the usual gods; when he started writing, he’d just recently become a convert to Christianity. To that Hindi hodgepodge which was the Bombay cinema, the doctor added his tough-guy voice-over and Dhar’s antiheroic sneer. Farrokh would wisely leave his newfound Christianity out of the picture.