A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  Mr. Garg was tall and of military erectness, but with the sort of sallow complexion that Farrokh associated with a lack of exposure to daylight. The skin on Garg’s face had an unhealthy, waxy sheen, and it was unusually taut, like the skin of a corpse. Further enhancing Mr. Garg’s cadaverlike appearance was an unnatural slackness to his mouth; his lips were always parted, like the lips of someone who’d fallen asleep in a seated position, and his eye sockets were dark and bloated, as if full of stagnant blood. Worse, Mr. Garg’s eyes were as yellow and opaque as a lion’s—and as unreadable, Dr. Daruwalla thought. Worst of all was the burn scar. Acid had been flung in Mr. Garg’s face, which he’d managed to turn to the side; the acid had shriveled one ear and burned a swath along his jawline and down the side of his throat, where the raw pink smear disappeared under the collar of his shirt. Not even Vinod knew who’d thrown the acid, or why.

  All Mr. Garg’s girls needed from Dr. Daruwalla was the trusted physician’s assurance to the circuses that these girls were in the pink of health. But what could Farrokh say about the health of those girls from the brothels? Some of them were born in brothels; certain indications of congenital syphilis were easy to spot. And nowadays, the doctor couldn’t recommend them to a circus without having them tested for AIDS; few circuses—not even the Great Blue Nile—would take a girl if she was HIV-positive. Most of them carried something venereal; at the very least, the girls always had to be de-wormed. So few of them were ever taken, even by the Great Blue Nile.

  When the girls were rejected by the circus, what became of them? (“We are being good by trying,” Vinod would answer.) Did Mr. Garg sell them back to a brothel, or did he wait for them to grow old enough to be Wetness Cabaret material? It appalled Farrokh that, by the standards of Kamathipura, Mr. Garg was considered a benevolent presence; yet Dr. Daruwalla knew of no evidence against Mr. Garg—at least nothing beyond the common knowledge that he bribed the police, who only occasionally raided the Wetness Cabaret.

  The doctor had once imagined Mr. Garg as a character in an Inspector Dhar movie; in a first draft of Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer, Dr. Daruwalla had written a cameo role for Mr. Garg—he was a child molester named Acid Man. Then Farrokh had thought better of it. Mr. Garg was too well known in Bombay. It might have become a legal matter, and there’d been the added risk of insulting Vinod and Deepa, which Dr. Daruwalla would never do. If Garg was no Good Samaritan, the doctor nevertheless believed that the dwarf and his wife were the real thing—they were saints to these children, or they tried to be. They were, as Vinod had said, “being good by trying.”

  Vinod’s off-white Ambassador was approaching Marine Drive when the doctor gave in to the dwarf’s nagging. “All right, all right—I’ll examine her,” Dr. Daruwalla told Vinod. “Who is she this time, and what’s her story?”

  “She is being a virgin,” the dwarf explained. “Deepa is saying that she is already an almost boneless girl—a future plastic lady!”

  “Who is saying she’s a virgin?” the doctor asked.

  “She is saying so,” Vinod said. “Garg is telling Deepa that the girl is running away from a brothel before anyone is touching her.”

  “So Garg is saying she’s a virgin?” Farrokh asked Vinod.

  “Maybe almost a virgin—maybe close,” the dwarf replied. “I am thinking she used to be a dwarf, too,” Vinod added. “Or maybe she is being part-dwarf. I am almost thinking so.”

  “That’s not possible, Vinod,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

  As the dwarf shrugged, the Ambassador surged into a rotary; the roundabout turn caused several tennis balls to roll across Farrokh’s feet, and the doctor heard the clunking of squash-racquet handles from under Vinod’s elevated seat. The dwarf had explained to Dr. Daruwalla that the handles of badminton racquets were too flimsy—they broke—and the handles of tennis racquets were too heavy to swing with sufficient quickness. The squash-racquet handles were just right.

  Only because he already knew where it was, Farrokh could faintly make out the odd billboard that floated on the boat moored offshore in the Arabian Sea; the hoarding bobbed on the water. TIKTOK TISSUES were being advertised again tonight.

  And tonight, and every night, the metal signs on the lampposts promised a good ride on APOLLO TYRES. The rush-hour traffic along Marine Drive had long ago subsided, and the doctor could tell by the lights from his own apartment that Dhar had already arrived; the balcony was lit up and Julia never sat on the balcony alone. They’d probably watched the sunset together, the doctor thought; he was aware, too, that the sun had set a long time ago. They’ll both be mad at me, Farrokh decided.

  The doctor told Vinod that he’d examine the “almost boneless” girl in the morning—the almost-a-virgin, Dr. Daruwalla almost said. The half-dwarf or former dwarf, the doctor imagined. Mr. Garg’s girl! he thought grimly.

  In the stark lobby of his apartment building, Farrokh felt for a moment that he could have been anywhere in the modern world. But when the elevator door opened, he was greeted by a familiar sign, which he detested.

  SERVANTS ARE NOT ALLOWED

  TO USE THE LIFT

  UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY CHILDREN

  The sign assaulted him with a numbing sense of inadequacy. It was a part of the pecking order of Indian life—not only the acceptance of discrimination, which was worldwide, but the deification of it, which Lowji Daruwalla had believed was so infuriatingly Indian, even though much of it was inherited from the Raj.

  Farrokh had tried to convince the Residents’ Society to remove the offensive sign, but the rules about servants were inflexible. Dr. Daruwalla was the only resident of the building who wasn’t in favor of forcing servants to use the stairs. Also, the Residents’ Society discounted Farrokh’s opinion on the grounds that he was a Non-Resident Indian—“NRI” was the doctor’s official government category. If this dispute about the use of the lift was the kind of issue that old Lowji would have got himself killed over, the younger Dr. Daruwalla self-deprecatingly viewed his failure with the Residents’ Society as typical of his political ineffectualness and his general out-of-itness.

  As he got off the elevator, he said to himself, I’m not a functioning Indian. The other day, someone at the Duckworth Club had been outraged that a political candidate in New Delhi was conducting a campaign “strictly on the cow issue”; Dr. Daruwalla had been unable to contribute an opinion because he was unsure what the cow issue was. He was aware of the rise of groups to protect cows, and he supposed they were a part of the Hindu-revivalist wave, like those Hindu-chauvinist holy men proclaiming themselves to be reincarnations of the gods themselves—and demanding to be worshiped as gods, too. He knew that there was still Hindu-Muslim rioting over the Mosque of Babar—the underlying subject of his first Inspector Dhar movie, which he’d found so funny at the time. Now thousands of bricks had been consecrated and stamped SHRI RAMA, which means “respected Rama,” and the foundation for a temple to Rama had been laid less than 200 feet from the Babri mosque. Not even Dr. Daruwalla imagined that the outcome of the 40-year feud over the Mosque of Babar would be “funny.”

  Here he was again, with his pathetic sense of not belonging. He knew that there were Sikh extremists, but he didn’t know one personally. At the Duckworth Club, he was on the friendliest terms with Mr. Bakshi—a Sikh novelist, and a great conversationalist on the subject of American movie classics—yet they’d never discussed Sikh terrorists. And Farrokh knew about the Shiv Sena and the Dalit Panthers and the Tamil Tigers, but he knew nothing personally. There were more than 600 million Hindus in India; there were 100 million Muslims, and millions of Sikhs and Christians, too. There were probably not even 80,000 Parsis, Farrokh thought. But in his own small part of India—in his ugly apartment building on Marine Drive—all these contentious millions were reduced in the doctor’s mind to what he called the elevator issue. Concerning the stupid lift, all these warring factions concurred: they disagreed only with him. Make the servants climb the stairs.

  F
arrokh had recently read about a man who was murdered because his mustache gave “caste offense”; apparently, the mustache was waxed to curl up—it should have drooped down. Dr. Daruwalla decided: Inspector Dhar should leave India and never come back. And I should leave India and never come back, too! he thought. For so what if he helped a few crippled children in Bombay? What business did he have even imagining “funny” movies about a country like this? He wasn’t a writer. And what business did he have taking blood from dwarfs? He wasn’t a geneticist, either.

  Thus, with a characteristic loss of self-confidence, Dr. Daruwalla entered his apartment to face the music he was certain he would hear. He’d been late in telling his beloved wife that he’d invited his beloved John Daruwalla for the evening meal, and the doctor had kept them both waiting. Also, he’d lacked the courage to tell Inspector Dhar the upsetting news.

  Farrokh felt he was trapped in a circus act of his own creation, an annoying pattern of procrastination that he couldn’t break out of. He was reminded of an item in the Great Royal Circus; at first he’d found it a charming sort of madness, but now he thought it might drive him crazy if he ever saw it again. It conveyed such a meaningless but relentless insanity, and the accompanying music was so repetitious; in Dr. Daruwalla’s mind, the act stood for the lunatic monotony that weighed on everyone’s life from time to time. The item was called Load Cycle, and it was a case of simplicity carried to idiotic extremes.

  There were two bicycles, each one pedaled by a very solid, strong-looking woman. The pair followed each other around the ring. They were joined by other plump, dark-skinned women, who found a variety of means by which to mount the moving bicycles. Some of the women perched on little posts that extended from the hubs of the front and back wheels; some mounted the handlebars and wobbled precariously there—others teetered on the rear fenders. And regardless of how many women mounted the bicycles, the two strong-looking women kept pedaling. Then little girls appeared; they climbed on the shoulders and stood on the heads of the other women—including the laboring, sturdy pedalers—until two struggling pyramids of women were clinging to these two bicycles, which never stopped circling the ring.

  The music was of a sustained madness equal to one fragment of the cancan, repeated and repeated, and all the dark-skinned women—both the fat, older women and the little girls—wore too much face powder, which gave them a minstrel-like aura of unreality. They also wore pale-purple tutus, and they smiled and smiled and smiled as they tottered around and around and around the ring. The last time the doctor had seen a performance of this item, he’d thought it would never end.

  Perhaps there’s a Load Cycle in everyone’s life, thought Dr. Daruwalla. As he paused at the door of his apartment, Farrokh felt he’d been enduring a Load Cycle sort of day. Dr. Daruwalla could imagine the cancan music starting up again, as if he were about to be greeted by a dozen dark-skinned girls in pale-purple tutus—all of them white-faced and moving to the insane, incessant rhythm.

  7

  DR. DARUWALLA HIDES IN HIS BEDROOM

  Now the Elephants Will Be Angry

  But the past is a labyrinth. Where’s the way out? In the front hall of his apartment, where there were no dark-skinned, white-faced women in tutus, the doctor was halted by the clear but distant sound of his wife’s voice. It reached him all the way from the balcony, where Julia was indulging Inspector Dhar with his favorite view of Marine Drive. On occasion, Dhar slept on that balcony, either when he stayed so late that he preferred to spend the night, or else when he’d just arrived in Bombay and needed to reacquaint himself with the city’s smell.

  Dhar swore this was the secret to his successful, almost instant adjustment to India. He could arrive from Europe, straight from Switzerland’s fresh air—tainted, in Zürich, with restaurant fumes and diesel exhaust, with burning coal and hints of sewer gas—but after just two or three days in Bombay, Dhar claimed, he was unbothered by the smog, or by the two or three million small fires for cooking food in the slums, or by the sweet rot of garbage, or even by the excremental horror of the four or five million who squatted at the curb or at the water’s edge of the surrounding sea. For in a city of nine million, surely the shit of half of these was evident in the Bombay air. It took Dr. Daruwalla two or three weeks to adjust to that permeating odor.

  In the front hall, where the prevailing smell was of mildew, the doctor quietly removed his sandals; he deposited his briefcase and his old dark-brown doctor’s bag. He noted that the umbrellas in the umbrella stand were dusty with disuse; it had been three months since the end of the monsoon rains. Even from the closed kitchen he could detect the mutton and the dhal—so that’s what we’re having, again, he thought—but the aroma of the evening meal couldn’t distract Dr. Daruwalla from the powerful nostalgia of his wife speaking German, which she always spoke whenever she and Dhar were alone.

  Farrokh stood and listened to the Austrian rhythms of Julia’s German—always the ish sound, never the ick—and in his mind’s eye he could see her when she was 18 or 19, when he’d courted her in her mother’s old yellow-walled house in Grinzing. It was a house cluttered with Biedermeier culture. There was a bust of Franz Grillparzer by the coat tree in the foyer. The work of a portraitist obsessively committed to children’s innocent expressions dominated the tea room, which was crowded with more cutesiness in the form of porcelain birds and silver antelopes. Farrokh remembered the afternoon he’d made a nervous, sweeping gesture with the sugar bowl—he broke a painted-glass lamp shade.

  There were two clocks in the room. One of them played a fragment of a waltz by Lanner on the half hour and a slightly longer fragment of a Strauss waltz on the hour; the second clock paid similar token acknowledgments to Beethoven and Schubert—understandably, it was set a full minute behind the other. Farrokh remembered that, while Julia and her mother cleaned up the mess he’d made of the lamp shade, first the Strauss and then the Schubert played.

  Whenever he recalled their many afternoon teas together, he could visualize his wife as a teenager. She was always dressed in a fashion Lady Duckworth would have admired. Julia wore a cream-colored blouse with flounced sleeves and a high, ruffled collar. They spoke German because her mother’s English wasn’t as good as theirs. Nowadays, Farrokh and Julia spoke German only occasionally. It was still their lovemaking language, or what they spoke in the dark. It was the language in which Julia had told him, “I find you very attractive.” After two years of courting her, he’d nevertheless felt this was forward of her; he’d been speechless. He was struggling with how to phrase the question—whether or not she was troubled by his darker color—when she’d added, “Especially your skin. The picture of your skin against my skin is very attractive.” (Das Bild—“the picture.”)

  When people say that German or any other language is romantic, Dr. Daruwalla thought, all they really mean is that they’ve enjoyed a past in the language. There was even a certain intimacy in listening to Julia speak German to Dhar, whom she always called John D. This was the servants’ name for him, which Julia had adopted, much as she and Dr. Daruwalla had “adopted” the servants.

  They were a feeble old couple, Nalin and Swaroop—Dr. Daruwalla’s children and John D. had always called her Roopa—but they’d outlived Lowji and Meher, whom they’d first served. It was a form of semiretirement to work for Farrokh and Julia; they were so infrequently in Bombay. The rest of the time, Nalin and Roopa were caretakers for the flat. If Dr. Daruwalla sold the apartment, where could the old couple go? He’d agreed with Julia that they would try to sell the place, but only after the old servants died. Even if Farrokh kept returning to India, he was rarely in Bombay so long that he couldn’t afford to stay in a decent hotel. Once, when one of the doctor’s Canadian colleagues had teased him for being so conservative about things, Julia had remarked, “Farrokh isn’t conservative—he’s absolutely extravagant. He maintains an apartment in Bombay so that his parents’ former servants will have a place to live!”

  Just then
the doctor overheard Julia say something about the Queen’s Necklace, which was the local name for the string of lights along Marine Drive. This name originated when the lamplights were white; the smog lights were yellow now. Julia was saying that yellow wasn’t a proper color for the necklace of a queen.

  What a European she is! Dr. Daruwalla thought. He had the greatest affection for the way she’d managed to adapt to their life in Canada and to their sporadic visits to India without ever losing her old-world sensibility, which remained as distinctive in her voice as in her habit of “dressing” for dinner—even in Bombay. It wasn’t the content of Julia’s speech that Dr. Daruwalla was listening to—he wasn’t eavesdropping. It was only to hear the sound of her German, her soft accent in combination with such exact phrasing. But he realized that if Julia was talking about the Queen’s Necklace, she couldn’t possibly have told Dhar the upsetting news; the doctor’s heart sank because he realized how much he’d been hoping that his wife would have told the dear boy.

  Then John D. spoke. If it soothed Farrokh to hear Julia’s German, it disturbed him to hear German from Inspector Dhar. In German, the doctor could barely recognize the John D. he knew, and it disquieted Dr. Daruwalla to hear how much more energetically Dhar spoke in German than he spoke in English. This emphasized to Dr. Daruwalla the distance that had grown between them. But Dhar’s university education had been in Zürich; he’d spent most of his life in Switzerland. And his serious (if not widely recognized) work as an actor in the theater, at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, was something that John Daruwalla took more pride in than he appeared to take in the commercial success of his role as Inspector Dhar. Why wouldn’t his German be perfect?