A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  “No, no—you’ve done your job. I am where I should be,” the missionary said. A circle of pickpockets and street prostitutes with their pimps were slowly surrounding the scholastic, but Bahadur wanted the hijras to be certain to see their enemy, and so he pushed against the gathering crowd.

  “Dhar—Inspector Dhar! Dhar! Dhar!” the taxi-walla cried. But this was entirely unnecessary, for the word that Dhar was on Falkland Road had traveled ahead of the taxi-walla’s cries. Martin Mills quite easily made his own way through the crowd; the degraded women in those cages were the ones he wished to address. (It never occurred to him, of course, that they weren’t really women.)

  “Please, let me speak with you,” the missionary said to a transvestite in his cage. Most of the hijras were, at first, too stunned to attack the hated actor. “Surely you must know of the diseases—nowadays, of the certain death you are exposing yourselves to! But I tell you, if you want to be saved, that is all you need—to want to be.”

  Two pickpockets and several pimps were fighting over the money that Martin had tried to give back to the taxi-walla. Bahadur had already been beaten to his knees, and several prostitutes continued to kick at him. But Martin Mills was oblivious to what was behind him. The apparent women in the cages faced him, and it was only to them that he spoke. “St. Ignatius,” he said. “In Mazagaon? You must know it. I can always be found there. You have only to come there.”

  It is intriguing to imagine how Father Julian and Father Cecil might have responded to this generous invitation, for surely the mission’s 125th jubilee would be a much more colorful celebration with the added presence of several eunuch-transvestite prostitutes in search of salvation. Unfortunately, the Father Rector and the senior priest were not on hand to witness Martin Mills’s extraordinary proposition. Did Martin suppose that if the prostitutes arrived at St. Ignatius during school hours, the schoolchildren might benefit from the visible conversion of these fallen women?

  “If you feel but the slightest remorse, you must take this as a sign that you can be saved,” the scholastic told them.

  It wasn’t a hijra who struck the first blow, but one of the street prostitutes; probably she was feeling ignored. She shoved Martin in the small of his back and he stumbled forward on one knee; then the pimps and pickpockets pulled his suitcase away from him—that was when the hijras became involved. After all, Dhar had been speaking to them; they didn’t want their territory, or their vengeance, trespassed on—certainly not by this common rabble off the street. The transvestite prostitutes easily beat away the street prostitutes and their pimps, and not even the pickpockets could escape with the heavy suitcase, which the hijras opened for themselves.

  They wouldn’t touch the wrinkled black suit and the black shirts or the clerical collars—these weren’t their style—but the Hawaiian shirts were appealing to them, and they quickly took these. Then one of them stripped the shirt off Martin Mills, being careful not to tear it, and when the missionary was naked above his waist, one of the hijras discovered the whip with the braided cords, which was too tempting to ignore. With the first of the stinging lashes from the whip, Martin lay on his stomach; then he curled himself into a ball. He wouldn’t cover his face, for it mattered too much to him that he clasped his hands together in prayer; thus he maintained the extreme conviction that even such a beating as this was ad majorem Dei Gloriam (“to the greater glory of God”).

  The transvestite prostitutes were respectful of all the assembled evidence of education that was contained in the suitcase; even in their excitement to each take a turn with the whip, they wouldn’t tear or wrinkle a page of a single book. The leg iron, however, was misinterpreted by them, as were the culpa beads; a transvestite prostitute tried to eat the beads before he threw them away. As for the leg iron, the hijras didn’t know it went around the thigh—or else they simply thought it would be more suitable to attach the device around Inspector Dhar’s neck, which they did. It wasn’t too tight a fit, but the wire prongs had raked the missionary’s face—the hijras were so impatient that they’d scraped the leg iron over their victim’s head—and now the prongs dug into Martin’s throat, which caused a multitude of minor cuts. The missionary’s torso was striped with blood.

  Gamely, he tried to stand. As he kept trying, he faced the whip. The transvestites stepped away from him, for he wasn’t behaving as they’d expected. He didn’t fight back; he didn’t beg for his life, either. “It is you, and everything that happens to you, that I care for!” Martin Mills called to them. “Though you revile me, and I am nothing, I want only for you to save yourselves. I can show you how, but only if you let me.”

  The hijras passed the whip, but there was noticeably less enthusiasm among them. When one would hold it, he would quickly pass it on, without taking a whack. The raised red welts covered Martin’s exposed flesh—they were especially startling on his face—and the blood from the wrongly placed leg iron streaked his chest. He protected not himself but his books! He closed the suitcase safely around these treasures of his learning, and still he beseeched the prostitutes to join him.

  “Take me to Mazagaon,” he said to them. “Take me to St. Ignatius, and you shall also be welcome there.” To those few of them who understood what he said, the concept was preposterous. To their surprise, the man before them was a physical weakling, but his courage seemed unsurpassed; it wasn’t the kind of toughness they’d anticipated. Suddenly, no one wanted to hurt him. They hated him; yet he made them feel ashamed.

  But the street prostitutes and their pimps, and the pickpockets—they would have made short work of him, just as soon as the hijras left him. This was precisely when that familiar off-white Ambassador, which all night had cruised between Kamathipura and Grant Road and Falkland Road, cruised by them again. In the driver’s-side window, soberly looking them over, was the driver they all thought of as Dhar’s thug dwarf.

  One can imagine Vinod’s surprise upon seeing his famous client stripped of half his clothes and bloodied. The wretched villains had even shaved off Inspector Dhar’s mustache! This was a humiliation beyond the obvious pain that the beloved movie star had suffered. And what ghastly instrument of torture had the filthy prostitutes fitted around the actor’s neck? It looked like a dog’s collar, only the spikes were on the inside. Furthermore, poor Dhar was as pale and scrawny as a cadaver. It looked like Vinod’s famous client had lost 20 pounds!

  A pimp with a big brass ring of keys scratched a key against the driver’s-side door of the Ambassador—all the while meeting Vinod’s eyes, straight on. He didn’t see Vinod reach under his specially constructed car seat, where the dwarf driver kept a ready supply of squash-racquet handles. There was confusion regarding what happened next. Some claimed that the dwarf’s taxi swerved and deliberately ran over the pimp’s foot; others explained that the Ambassador jumped the curb and that it was the panicked crowd that pushed the pimp—either way, his foot was run over by the car. All agreed that Vinod was hard to see in the crowd; he was so much shorter than everyone else. His presence could be detected by the wary, however, for everywhere people were dropping from sight, clutching their knees or their wrists and writhing on the garbage-strewn pavement. Vinod swung the squash-racquet handles at a level equal to most people’s knees. Their cries commingled with the cries of the cage girls on Falkland Road continuously hawking their wares.

  When Martin Mills saw the grim face of the dwarf who was whacking his way toward him, the scholastic thought that his time had come. He repeated what Jesus said to Pilate [John 18:36], “My kingdom is not of this world.” Then he turned to face the oncoming dwarf. “I forgive you,” Martin said; he bowed his head, as if awaiting the executioner’s blow. It didn’t occur to him that if he hadn’t bowed his head, Vinod never could have reached his head with the racquet handles.

  But Vinod simply grabbed the missionary by the rear pocket of his pants and steered him to the taxi. When Martin was rescued—pinned under the weight of his suitcase in the back seat of the ca
r—the scholastic foolishly struggled, albeit briefly, to return to Falkland Road.

  “Wait!” he cried. “I want my whip—that’s my whip!”

  Vinod had already swung a racquet handle and cracked the wrist of the unfortunate hijra who was the last to hold the whip. The dwarf easily retrieved Martin Mills’s mortification toy and handed it to him. “Bless you!” the scholastic said. The doors of the Ambassador slammed solidly around him; the sudden acceleration pressed him against the seat. “St. Ignatius,” he told the brutal driver. Vinod thought that Dhar was praying, which was dismaying to the dwarf because he’d never thought of Dhar as a religious man.

  At the intersection of Falkland Road and Grant Road, a boy who was a tea-server for one of the brothels threw a glass of tea at the passing taxi. Vinod just kept going, although his stubby fingers reached under the car seat to reassure himself that the squash-racquet handles were properly in place.

  Before the taxi turned onto Marine Drive, Vinod stopped the car and lowered the rear windows; he knew how Dhar enjoyed the smell of the sea. “You sure are fooling me,” Vinod said to his battered client. “I am thinking you are sleeping the whole night on Daruwalla’s balcony!” But the missionary was asleep. In the rearview mirror, the sight of him took Vinod’s breath away. It wasn’t the lash marks on his swollen face, or even his bare, bloodied torso; it was the spiked leg iron around his neck, for the dwarf had seen the terrible depictions that the Christians worshiped—their gory versions of Christ on the Cross—and to Vinod it appeared that Inspector Dhar had undertaken the role of Christ. However, his crown of thorns had slipped; the cruel device gripped the famous actor by his throat.

  All Together—in One Small Apartment

  As for Dhar, the real Dhar, a smog the consistency and color of egg whites had rolled over Dr. Daruwalla’s balcony, where the actor was still sleeping. Had he looked, he couldn’t have seen through this soup—at least not six floors below him to the predawn sidewalk, where Vinod struggled with the movie star’s semiconscious twin. Nor did Dhar hear the predictable eruption from the first-floor dogs. Vinod allowed the missionary to lean heavily on him, while the dwarf dragged the suitcase carrying Martin Mills’s education across the lobby to the forbidden lift. A first-floor apartment owner, a member of the Residents’ Society, got a glimpse of the thug driver and his mangled companion before the elevator door closed.

  Martin Mills, even as mauled and mindless of his surroundings as he was, was surprised by the elevator and the modernity of the apartment building, for he knew that the mission school and its venerable church were 125 years old. The sound of savage dogs seemed out of place.

  “St. Ignatius?” the missionary asked the Good Samaritan midget.

  “You are not needing a saint—you are needing a doctor!” the dwarf told him.

  “Actually, I know a doctor in Bombay. He’s a friend of my mother and father—a certain Dr. Daruwalla,” Martin Mills said.

  Vinod was truly alarmed. The lashes from the whip and even the bleeding from the leg iron around the poor man’s neck seemed superficial; but this incomprehensible muttering about Dr. Daruwalla was an indication to Vinod that the movie star was suffering from some sort of amnesia. A serious head injury, perhaps!

  “Of course you are knowing Dr. Daruwalla!” Vinod shouted. “We are going to see Dr. Daruwalla!”

  “Ah, so you know him, too?” said the astonished scholastic.

  “Try to not be moving your head,” the worried dwarf replied.

  In a reference to the echoing dogs, which Vinod completely failed to grasp, Martin Mills said, “It sounds like a veterinarian’s—I thought he was an orthopedist.”

  “Of course he is being an orthopedist!” Vinod cried. Standing on tiptoe, the dwarf tried to peer into Martin’s ears, as if he were expecting to see some stray brain matter there. But Vinod wasn’t tall enough.

  Dr. Daruwalla woke to the distant orchestra of the dogs. From the sixth floor, their barks and howls were muted but nonetheless identifiable; the doctor had no doubt as to the cause of their cacophony.

  “That damn dwarf !” he said aloud, to which Julia didn’t respond; she was familiar with the many things her husband said in his sleep. But when Farrokh got out of bed and put on his robe, Julia was instantly awake.

  “Is it Vinod again?” she asked him.

  “I assume so,” Dr. Daruwalla replied.

  It was a little before 5:00 in the morning when the doctor crept past the closed sliding-glass doors that led to the balcony, which was completely enveloped in a mournful-looking mist. The smog had mingled with a dense sea fog. The doctor couldn’t see Dhar’s cot or the Tortoise mosquito coils with which the actor surrounded himself whenever he slept on the balcony. In the foyer, Farrokh seized a dusty umbrella; he was hoping to give Vinod a good scare. Then the doctor opened his apartment door. The dwarf and the missionary had just exited from the lift; when Dr. Daruwalla first saw Martin Mills, the doctor feared that Dhar had violently shaved off his mustache in the smog—thus inflicting on himself a multitude of razor cuts—and then, doubtless depressed, the much-reviled actor had jumped off the sixth-floor balcony.

  As for the missionary, he was taken aback to see a man in a black kimono holding a black umbrella—an ominous image. But the umbrella was undaunting to Vinod, who slipped close to Dr. Daruwalla and whispered, “I am finding him preaching to transvestite prostitutes—the hijras are almost killing him!”

  Farrokh knew who Martin Mills was as soon as the missionary spoke: “I believe you’ve met my mother and father—my name is Martin, Martin Mills.”

  “Please come in—I’ve been expecting you,” Dr. Daruwalla said, taking the beaten man’s arm.

  “You have?” said Martin Mills.

  “There is being brain damage!” Vinod whispered to the doctor, who supported the wobbly missionary into the bathroom, where he told Martin to strip. Then the doctor prepared an Epsom-salts bath. While the bath was filling, Farrokh got Julia out of bed and told her to get rid of Vinod.

  “Who’s taking a bath at this hour?” she asked her husband.

  “It’s John D.’s twin,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

  Free Will

  Julia had managed to coax Vinod no farther than the foyer when the phone rang. She answered quickly. Vinod could hear the entire conversation because the man on the other end of the phone was screaming. It was Mr. Munim, the first-floor member of the Residents’ Society.

  “I saw him getting on the lift! He woke all the dogs! I saw him—your dwarf!” Mr. Munim shouted.

  Julia said, “I beg your pardon—we don’t own a dwarf.”

  “You don’t fool me!” Mr. Munim hollered. “That movie star’s dwarf—that’s who I mean!”

  “We don’t own a movie star, either,” Julia told him.

  “You are violating a stated rule!” Mr. Munim screamed.

  “I don’t know what you mean—you must be out of your mind,” Julia replied.

  “The taxi-walla used the lift—that midget thug!” Mr. Munim cried.

  “Don’t make me call the police,” Julia said; then she hung up.

  “I am using the stairs, but they are making me limp—the whole six floors,” Vinod said. Martyrdom strangely suited him, Julia thought, but she realized that Vinod was lingering in the foyer for a purpose. “There are being five umbrellas in your umbrella stand,” the dwarf observed.

  “Would you like to borrow one, Vinod?” Julia asked him.

  “Only for helping me on the stairs,” Vinod replied. “I am needing a cane.” He’d left the squash-racquet handles in his taxi; were he to encounter either a first-floor dog or Mr. Munim, Vinod wanted a weapon. Therefore, he took an umbrella with him; Julia let him out the kitchen door, which led to the back stairs.

  “Maybe you are never seeing me again,” Vinod told her. As the dwarf peered down the stairwell, Julia noticed that he was slightly shorter than the umbrella that he’d chosen; Vinod had taken the biggest umbrella.

  In th
e bathtub, Martin Mills looked as if he welcomed the stings from his raised red welts, and he never flinched while Dr. Daruwalla sponged off the multitude of minor wounds caused by the gruesome leg iron; the doctor thought that the missionary appeared to miss the leg iron after it had been removed, and Martin twice expressed concern that he’d left his whip in the heroic dwarf’s car.

  “Vinod will surely return it to you,” Dr. Daruwalla said. The doctor was not as amazed by the missionary’s story as the missionary himself was amazed; given the magnitude of the mistaken identity, Dr. Daruwalla was astonished that Martin Mills was still alive—not to mention that his wounds were minor. And the more the missionary babbled on and on about his experience, the less he bore any resemblance, in Farrokh’s eyes, to his taciturn twin. Dhar didn’t babble.

  “Well, I mean I knew I wasn’t among Christians,” Martin Mills said, “but still I hardly expected the violent hostility toward Christianity that I encountered.”

  “Now, now—I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion,” Dr. Daruwalla cautioned the agitated scholastic. “There is some sensitivity, however, toward proselytizing … of any kind.”

  “Saving souls is not proselytizing,” Martin Mills said defensively.

  “Well, as you say, you were not exactly in Christian territory,” Dr. Daruwalla replied.

  “How many of those prostitutes are carrying the AIDS virus?” Martin asked.

  “I’m an orthopedist,” the doctor reminded the scholastic, “but people who know say forty percent—some say sixty.”

  “Either way,” said Martin Mills, “that’s Christian territory.”