A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  There was no time to lose. While Julia fixed a cup of coffee for Martin, Farrokh glanced hurriedly at the library collected in the Jesuit’s suitcase. Father de Mello’s Sadhana: A Way to God drew a particularly covert look, for in it Farrokh found a dog-eared page and an assertively underlined sentence: “One of the biggest enemies to prayer is nervous tension.” I guess that’s why I can’t do it, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

  In the lobby, the doctor and the missionary didn’t escape the notice of that first-floor member of the Residents’ Society, the murderous Mr. Munim.

  “So! There is your movie star! Where is your dwarf?” Mr. Munim shouted.

  “Pay no attention to this man,” Farrokh told Martin. “He’s completely crazy.”

  “The dwarf is in the suitcase!” Mr. Munim cried. Thereupon he kicked the scholastic’s suitcase, which was ill considered, because he was wearing only a floppy pair of the most insubstantial sandals; from the instant expression of pain on Mr. Munim’s face, it was clear that he’d made contact with one of the more solid tomes in Martin Mills’s library—maybe the Compact Dictionary of the Bible, which was compact but not soft.

  “I assure you, sir, there is no dwarf in this suitcase,” Martin Mills began to say, but Dr. Daruwalla pulled him on. The doctor was beginning to realize that it was the new missionary’s most basic inclination to talk to anyone.

  In the alley, they found Vinod asleep in the Ambassador; the dwarf had locked the car. Leaning against the driver’s-side door was the exact “anyone” whom Dr. Daruwalla most feared, for the doctor imagined there was no one more inspiring of missionary zeal than a crippled child … unless there’d been a child missing both arms and both legs. By the shine of excitement in the scholastic’s eyes, Farrokh could tell that the boy with the mangled foot was sufficiently inspiring to Martin Mills.

  Bird-Shit Boy

  It was the beggar from the day before—the boy who stood on his head at Chowpatty Beach, the cripple who slept in the sand. The crushed right foot was once again an offense to the doctor’s standard of surgical neatness, but Martin Mills was fatally drawn to the rheumy discharge about the beggar’s eyes; to his missionary mind, it was as if the stricken child already clutched a crucifix. The scholastic only momentarily took his eyes off the boy—to glance heavenward—but that was long enough for the little beggar to fool Martin with the infamous Bombay bird-shit trick.

  In Dr. Daruwalla’s experience, it was a filthy trick, usually performed in the following fashion: while one hand pointed to the sky—to the nonexistent passing bird—the other hand of the little villain squirted your shoe or your pants. The instrument that applied the presumed “bird shit” was similar to a turkey baster, but any kind of bulb with a syringelike nozzle would suffice. The fluid it contained was some whitish stuff—often curdled milk or flour and water—but on your shoe or your pants, it appeared to be bird shit. When you looked down from the sky, having failed to see the bird, there was the shit—it had already hit you—and the sneaky little beggar was wiping it off your shoe or your pants with a handy rag. You then rewarded him with at least a rupee or two.

  But in this instance Martin Mills didn’t comprehend that a reward was expected. He’d looked in a heavenly direction without the boy needing to point; thereupon the beggar had drawn out the syringe and squirted the Jesuit’s scuffed black shoe. The cripple was so quick on the draw and so smooth at concealing the syringe under his shirt that Dr. Daruwalla had seen neither the quick draw nor the shot—only the slick return to the shirt. Martin Mills believed that a bird had unceremoniously shat on his shoe, and that the tragically mutilated boy was wiping off this bird shit with the tattered leg of his baggy shorts. To the missionary, this maimed child was definitely heaven-sent.

  With that in mind, there in the alley, the scholastic dropped to his knees, which wasn’t the usual response that was made to the outstretched hand of the beggar. The boy was frightened by the missionary’s embrace. “O God—thank you!” Martin Mills cried, while the cripple looked to Dr. Daruwalla for help. “This is your lucky day,” the missionary told the greatly bewildered beggar. “That man is a doctor,” Martin Mills told the lame boy. “That man can fix your foot.”

  “I can’t fix his foot!” Dr. Daruwalla cried. “Don’t tell him that!”

  “Well, certainly you can make it look better than this!” Martin replied. The cripple crouched like a cornered animal, his eyes darting back and forth between the two men.

  “It’s not as if I haven’t already thought of it,” Farrokh said defensively. “But I’m sure I can’t give him a foot that works. And what do you think a boy like this cares for the appearance of the thing? He’ll still limp!”

  “Wouldn’t you like your foot to be cleaner-looking?” Martin Mills asked the cripple. “Wouldn’t you like it to look less like a hoe or a club?” As he spoke, he cupped his hand near the bony fusion of ankle and foot, which the beggar awkwardly rested on the heel. Close up, the doctor could confirm his earlier suspicion: he would have to saw through bone. There would be little chance of success, a greater chance of risk.

  “Primum non nocere,” Farrokh said to Martin Mills. “I presume you know Latin.”

  “ ‘Above all, do no harm,’ ” the Jesuit replied.

  “He was stepped on by an elephant,” Dr. Daruwalla explained. Then Farrokh remembered what the cripple had said. Dr. Daruwalla repeated this to the missionary, but the doctor looked at the boy when he spoke: “You can’t fix what elephants do.” The boy nodded, albeit cautiously.

  “Do you have a mother or a father?” the Jesuit asked. The beggar shook his head. “Does anyone look after you?” Martin asked. The cripple shook his head again. Dr. Daruwalla knew it was impossible to understand how much the boy understood, but the doctor remembered that the boy’s English was better than he was letting on—a clever boy.

  “There’s a gang of them at Chowpatty,” the doctor said. “There’s a kind of pecking order to their begging.” But Martin Mills wasn’t listening to him; although the zealot manifested a certain “modesty of the eyes,” which was encouraged among the Jesuits, there was nonetheless an intensity to his gazing into the rheumy eyes of the crippled child. Dr. Daruwalla realized that the boy was mesmerized.

  “But there is someone looking after you,” the missionary said to the beggar. Slowly, the cripple nodded.

  “Do you have any other clothes but these?” the missionary asked.

  “No clothes,” the boy instantly said. He was undersized, but hardened by the street life. Maybe he was 8, or 10.

  “And how long has it been since you’ve had any food—since you’ve had a lot of food?” Martin asked him.

  “Long time,” the beggar said. At the most, he might have been 12.

  “You can’t do this, Martin,” Farrokh said. “In Bombay, there are more boys like this than would fit into all of St. Ignatius. They wouldn’t fit in the school or in the church or in the cloister—they wouldn’t fit in the schoolyard, or in the parking lot! There are too many boys like this—you can’t begin your first day here by adopting them!”

  “Not ‘them’—just this one,” the missionary replied. “St. Ignatius said that he would sacrifice his life if he could prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “I understand you’ve already tried that!”

  “It’s very simple, really,” said Martin Mills. “I was going to buy clothes—I’ll buy half as many for me, and the rest for him. I presume that I will eat something sometime later today. I’ll eat half as much as I normally would have eaten …”

  “And—don’t tell me!—the rest is for him,” Dr. Daruwalla said angrily. “Oh, this is brilliant. I wonder why I didn’t think of it years ago!”

  “Everything is just a start,” the Jesuit calmly replied. “Nothing is overwhelming if you take one step at a time.” Then he stood up with the child in his arms, leaving his suitcase for Dr. Daruwalla to deal with. He walked with th
e boy, circling Vinod’s taxi as the dwarf slept on and on. “Lifting … lifting … lifting,” Martin Mills said. “Moving … moving … moving,” he repeated. “Placing … placing … placing,” the missionary said. The boy thought this was a game—he laughed.

  “You see? He’s happy,” Martin Mills announced. “First the clothes, then the food, then—if not the foot—you can at least do something about his eyes, can’t you?”

  “I’m not an eye doctor,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “Eye diseases are common here. I could refer him to someone …”

  “Well, that’s a start, isn’t it?” Martin said. “We’re just going to get you started,” he told the cripple.

  Dr. Daruwalla pounded on the driver’s-side window, startling Vinod awake; the dwarf’s stubby fingers were groping for his squash-racquet handles before he recognized the doctor. Vinod hurried to unlock the car. If, in the light of day, the dwarf saw that Martin Mills bore a less-than-exact resemblance to his famous twin, Vinod gave no indication of any suspicion. Not even the missionary’s clerical collar appeared to faze the dwarf. If Dhar looked different to Vinod, the dwarf assumed this was the result of being beaten by transvestite whores. Furiously, Farrokh threw the fool’s suitcase into the trunk.

  There was no time to lose. The doctor realized that he had to get Martin Mills to St. Ignatius as soon as he could. Father Julian and the others would lock him up. Martin would have to obey them—after all, wasn’t that what a vow of obedience meant? The doctor’s advice to the Father Rector would be simple enough: keep Martin Mills in the mission, or keep him in school. Don’t let him loose in the rest of Bombay! The chaos he could cause was inconceivable!

  As Vinod backed the Ambassador out of the alley, Dr. Daruwalla saw that both the scholastic and the crippled child were smiling. That was when Farrokh thought of the word that had escaped him; it floated to his lips, in belated answer to John D.’s question regarding what Martin Mills was like. The word was “dangerous.” The doctor couldn’t stop himself from saying it.

  “You know what you are?” Dr. Daruwalla asked the missionary. “You’re dangerous.”

  “Thank you,” the Jesuit said.

  There was no further conversation until the dwarf was struggling to park the taxi on that busy stretch of Cross Maidan near the Bombay Gymkhana. Dr. Daruwalla was taking Martin Mills and the cripple to Fashion Street, where they could buy the cheapest cotton clothes—factory seconds, with small defects—when the doctor caught sight of the gob of fake bird shit that had hardened on the strap of his right sandal; Farrokh could feel that a bit of the stuff had also dried between his bare toes. The boy must have squirted Dr. Daruwalla while the doctor and the scholastic had been arguing, although the doctor supposed there was a slim possibility that the bird shit was authentic.

  “What’s your name?” the missionary asked the beggar.

  “Ganesh,” the boy replied.

  “After the elephant-headed god—the most popular god in Maharashtra,” Dr. Daruwalla explained to Martin Mills. It was the name of every other boy on Chowpatty Beach.

  “Ganesh—may I call you Bird-Shit Boy?” Farrokh asked the beggar. But there was no reading the deep-black eyes that flashed in the cripple’s feral face; either he didn’t understand or he thought it was politic to remain silent—a clever boy.

  “You certainly shouldn’t call him Bird-Shit Boy!” the missionary protested.

  “Ganesh?” said Dr. Daruwalla. “I think you are dangerous, too, Ganesh.” The black eyes moved quickly to Martin Mills; then they fixed once again on Farrokh.

  “Thank you,” Ganesh said.

  Vinod had the last word; unlike the missionary, the dwarf was not automatically moved to pity cripples.

  “You, Bird-Shit Boy,” Vinod said. “You are definitely being dangerous,” the dwarf told him.

  16

  MR. GARG’S GIRL

  A Little Something Venereal

  Deepa had taken the night train to Bombay; she’d traveled from somewhere in Gujarat—from wherever the Great Blue Nile was playing. She’d arranged to bring the runaway child prostitute to Dr. Daruwalla’s office at the Hospital for Crippled Children, intending to shepherd the girl through her examination—it was the child’s first doctor’s visit. Deepa didn’t expect there would be anything wrong; she planned to take the girl back to the Great Blue Nile with her. It was true that the child had run away from a brothel, but—according to Mr. Garg—she’d managed to run away when she was still a virgin. Dr. Daruwalla didn’t think so.

  Her name was Madhu, which means “honey.” She had the floppy, oversized hands and feet and the disproportionately small body of a large-pawed puppy, of the kind one always assumes will become a big dog. But in Madhu’s case this was a sign of malnutrition; her body had failed to develop in proportion to her hands and feet. Also, Madhu’s head wasn’t as large as it appeared at first glance. Her long, oval face was simply unmatched to her petite body. Her protuberant eyes were the tawny yellow of a lion’s, but remote with distraction; her lips were full and womanly and entirely too grown-up for her unformed face, which was still the face of a child.

  It was her child-woman appearance that must have been Madhu’s particular appeal in the brothel she’d run away from; her undersized body reflected this disquieting ambivalence. She had no hips—that is, she had the hips of a boy—but her breasts, which were absurdly small, were nonetheless as fully formed and womanly as her compelling mouth. Although Garg had told Deepa that the child was prepubescent, Dr. Daruwalla guessed that Madhu had not yet had her period because she’d never had enough to eat and she was overworked; furthermore, it was not that the girl hadn’t grown any underarm or pubic hair—someone had skillfully shaved her. Farrokh made Deepa feel the faint stubble that was growing in Madhu’s armpits.

  The doctor’s memory of his accidental encounter with Deepa’s pudenda surfaced at the oddest times. The sight of the dwarf’s wife touching the hollow of the young girl’s armpit gave Farrokh the shivers. It was the wiry strength of the former flyer’s hand that the doctor remembered—how she’d grabbed his chin as he’d struggled to raise the bridge of his nose off her pubic bone, how she’d simply wrenched his head out of her crotch. And he was off balance, his forehead pressing into her belly and the scratchy sequins on her singlet, so that a good portion of his weight rested on her; yet Deepa had cranked on his chin with only one hand and had managed to lift him. Her hands were strong from the trapeze work. And now the sight of Deepa’s sinewy hand in the girl’s armpit was enough to make Farrokh turn away—not from the exposed girl but from Deepa.

  Farrokh realized that probably there remained more innocence in Deepa than what innocence, if any, remained in Madhu; the dwarf’s wife had never been a prostitute. The indifference with which Madhu had undressed for Dr. Daruwalla’s cursory examination made the doctor feel that the girl was probably an experienced prostitute. Farrokh knew how awkwardly most children Madhu’s age undressed. After all, it wasn’t only that he was a doctor; he had daughters.

  Madhu was silent; perhaps she didn’t comprehend the reason for her physical exam, or else she was ashamed. When she covered her breasts and held her hand over her mouth, Madhu looked like an 8-year-old child. But Dr. Daruwalla believed that the girl was at least 13 or 14.

  “I’m sure it was someone else who shaved her—she didn’t shave herself,” Farrokh told Deepa. From his research for Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer, the doctor knew a few things about the brothels. In the brothels, virginity was a term of sale—not one of accuracy. Maybe in order to look like a virgin, one had to be shaved. The doctor knew that most of the older prostitutes were also shaved. Pubic hair, like underarm hair, was simply an invitation to lice.

  The dwarf’s wife was disappointed; she’d hoped that Dr. Daruwalla was going to be the first and last doctor whom Madhu would be required to see. Dr. Daruwalla didn’t think so. He found Madhu disturbingly mature; not even to please Deepa could he give the girl a clean bill of health,
not without first making Madhu see Gynecology Tata—Tata Two, as he was more commonly known.

  Dr. Tata (the son) was not the best OB/GYN in Bombay, but—like his father before him—he saw any referral from any other physician immediately. It had long been Dr. Daruwalla’s suspicion that these referrals were the heart of Tata Two’s business. Farrokh doubted that many patients were inclined to see Tata Two twice. Despite removing the adjectival “best” and “most famous” from his clinic’s description—it was now called DR TATA’s CLINIC FOR GYNECOLOGICAL & MATERNITY NEEDS—the clinic was the most steadfastly mediocre in the city. If one of his orthopedic patients had a problem of an OB/GYN nature, Dr. Daruwalla never would have referred her to Tata Two. But for a routine examination—for a simple certificate of health, or a standard venereal-disease screening—Tata Two would do, and Tata Two was fast.

  He was remarkably fast in Madhu’s case. While Vinod drove Deepa and Madhu to Dr. Tata’s office, where Dr. Tata would keep them waiting only a short time, Farrokh attempted to restrain Martin Mills from playing too zealous a role in embracing that cause which the dwarf and his wife practiced like a religion. Having observed the scholastic’s compassion for the elephant-footed beggar, Vinod had wasted little time in enlisting the famous Inspector Dhar’s services. Unfortunately, it had been impossible to conceal from the missionary that the only uncrippled child in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room was, or had been, a child prostitute.

  Even before Dr. Daruwalla could complete his examination of Madhu, the damage had been done: Martin Mills had been totally swayed by Vinod and Deepa’s insane idea that every runaway from the brothels of Bombay could become an acrobat in the circus. To Martin, sending child prostitutes to the circus was a step en route to saving their souls. Farrokh feared what was coming next—that is, as soon as it occurred to Martin. It was only a matter of time before the missionary would decide that Ganesh, the elephant-footed boy, could save his little soul at the circus, too. Dr. Daruwalla knew there weren’t enough circuses for all the children that the Jesuit believed he could rescue.