A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  She struck Dr. Daruwalla as one of those Indian women who remain uncontained by Western clothes, which Miss Tanuja was wearing with special gracelessness and folly. Perhaps the children couldn’t sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” because they were distracted by the riotous array of Miss Tanuja’s ensemble; the doctor observed that even Martin Mills appeared to be distracted by her. Farrokh cruelly assumed that Miss Tanuja was desperate to marry. She was very round-faced and of a medium, milk-chocolate complexion, and she wore very sharply angled glasses—of the kind with upward-sweeping wing tips embedded with small, bright gems. Perhaps Miss Tanuja thought that these eyeglasses contrasted pleasingly with the smoothness and roundness of her face.

  She had the plump, youthful figure of a high-school voluptuary, but she wore a dark skirt that hugged her hips too tightly and was the wrong length for her. Miss Tanuja was short and the dress chopped her legs off at midcalf, which gave Dr. Daruwalla the impression that her thick ankles were wrists and her fat little feet were hands. Her blouse had a reflecting luminosity of a blue-green nature, as if flecked with algae dredged from a pond; and although the woman’s most pleasing quality was an overall curvaceousness, she’d chosen a bra that served her badly. From what little Dr. Daruwalla knew of bras, he judged it to be the old-fashioned pointy type—one of those rigidly constructed halters more suitable for protecting women from fencing injuries than for enhancing their natural shapeliness. And between Miss Tanuja’s outrageously uplifted and sharply pointed breasts, there hung a crucifix, as if the Christ on Miss Tanuja’s cross—in addition to his other agonies—were expected to endure the misery of bouncing on the teacher’s ample but spear-headed bosoms.

  “Miss Tanuja has been with us for many years,” Father Julian whispered.

  “I see,” said Dr. Daruwalla, but Martin Mills merely stared.

  Then they passed a classroom of smaller children in I-3. The kids were napping with their heads on their desks—either “midgets” or “sub-midgets,” Farrokh guessed.

  “Do you play the piano?” the Father Rector was asking the new missionary.

  “I always wanted to learn,” Martin said. Maybe the madman could practice the piano between bouts of orienting himself in The Times of India, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

  And to change the subject from his lack of musical skills, the scholastic asked Father Julian about the sweepers, for there were everywhere about the mission an abundance of men and women who were sweeping—they also cleaned the toilets—and the missionary assumed that these sweepers were people from the untouchable castes.

  The Father Rector used the words “bhangee” and “maitrani,” but Martin Mills was a man with more of a mission than Father Julian supposed. Martin asked the Father Rector directly: “And do their children attend this school?” All of a sudden, Dr. Daruwalla liked him.

  “Well, no—that wouldn’t be suitable, you see,” Father Julian was saying, but Farrokh was impressed by how gracefully Martin Mills interrupted the Father Rector. The scholastic simply breezed into a description of “rescuing” the crippled beggar and the child prostitute; it was Martin’s one-step-at-a-time method, and the missionary virtually waltzed the Father Rector through the steps. First the circus—instead of begging, or the brothel. Then the mastery of the English language—“so civilizing as to be essential”—and then “the intelligent conversion”; Martin Mills also called this “the informed life in Christ.”

  A class of seniors, on recess, was enjoying a savage, silent dirt fight in the courtyard, but Dr. Daruwalla marveled how the Jesuits were undistracted by this minor violence; they spoke and listened with the concentration of lions stalking a kill.

  “But surely, Martin, you wouldn’t credit yourself with these children’s conversion?” Father Julian said. “That is, should they eventually be converted.”

  “Well, no … what do you mean?” Martin asked.

  “Only that I never know if I have converted anyone,” the Father Rector replied. “And if these children were converted, how could you presume it happened because of you? Don’t be too proud. If it happens, it was God. It wasn’t you.”

  “Why, no—of course not!” said Martin Mills. “If it happens, it was God!”

  Was this “obedience”? Dr. Daruwalla wondered.

  When Father Julian led Martin to his cubicle, which Dr. Daruwalla imagined as a kind of prison cell with built-in instruments to chastise the flesh, the doctor continued to roam; he wanted to look at the sleeping children again, because that image of sleeping with his head on his desk was more appealing than anything else he could remember about attending St. Ignatius School—it had been so many years ago. But when he peered into I-3 again, a teacher he hadn’t seen before regarded him sternly, as if his presence in the doorway would disturb the children. And this time the doctor noticed the exposed wiring for the fluorescent lights, which were off, and the exposed wiring for the ceiling fan, which was on. Suspended over the blackboard like a puppet on tangled, immobile strings was yet another statue of the Virgin Mary. From Farrokh’s Canadian perspective, this particular Holy Mother was covered with frost, or a light snow; but it was only rising chalk dust from the blackboard that had settled on the statue.

  Dr. Daruwalla amused himself by reading as many printed messages and announcements as he could find. There was a plea from the Social Concern Group—“to help less fortunate brothers and sisters.” Prayers were offered for the Souls in Purgatory. There was the pleasing juxtaposition of the Minimax fire extinguisher that was mounted on the wall beside the statue of Christ with the sick child; in fire-extinguisher language, a short list of instructions was printed next to a page from a lined notebook on which a child’s handwriting proclaimed, “Thanks to Infant Jesus and Our Lady of Perpetual Help.” Farrokh felt somewhat more comforted by the presence of the fire extinguisher. The great stone mission had been erected in 1865; the fluorescent lights, the ceiling fans, the vast network of haphazard wiring—these had been added later. The doctor concluded that an electrical fire was entirely possible.

  Farrokh tried to familiarize himself with all the meetings that a good Christian could go to. There was an announced Meeting of Liturgical Readers, and the Meeting of the Members of the Cross—“to make parish members more politically conscious.” The present topic of proposed conversation in the Adult Catholic Education Program was “The Christian Today in the World of Non-Christian Religions.” This month, the Hope Alive Center was conducted by Dr. Yusuf Merchant. Dr. Daruwalla wondered what “conducted by” meant. There was a Get to Know Each Other Party for the Altar Service Corps, which Farrokh suspected would be a grim gathering.

  Under the archway of the second-floor balcony, the doctor was struck by the unfinished irregularity of the pieces of stained glass—as if the very notion of God were this fragmented, this incomplete. In the Icon Chapel, the doctor abruptly closed a hymnal upon encountering the hymn called “Bring Me Oil.” Then he read the bookmark that he’d removed from the hymnal; the bookmark celebrated St. Ignatius’s upcoming jubilee year—“a labour of love in building youth for 125 years.” There was also the word “world-affirming”; Dr. Daruwalla had never had the slightest idea what this implied. Farrokh peeked into the hymnal again, but even the name of the thing offended him; it was called the “Song Book of the Charismatic Renewal in India”—he hadn’t known that there was any charismatic renewal! And so he exchanged the hymnal for a prayer book, wherein he looked no further than the opening line of the first prayer: “Keep us, Lord, as the apple of Your eye.”

  Dr. Daruwalla then discovered the Holy Father’s Intentions for 1990. For January, it was advised that the dialogue between the Catholic and Anglican communities continue in the quest for Christian unity. For February, prayers were offered for those Catholics who, in many parts of the world, suffered either verbal or physical persecution. For March, the parishioners were exhorted to give a more authentic witness for support of the needy—and fidelity to the poverty of the Gospels. Dr. Daruwalla couldn�
��t read past March, for the phrase “poverty of the Gospels” stopped him. Farrokh felt surrounded by too much that was meaningless to him.

  Even Brother Gabriel’s fastidious collecting of icons meant little to the doctor, and the icon-collection room at St. Ignatius was famous in Bombay. To Farrokh, the depictions were lugubrious and obscure. There was a 16th-century Adoration of the Magi, of the Ukrainian School; there was a 15th-century Decapitation of John the Baptist, of the Central Northern School. In the Passing of Our Lord category, there was a Last Supper, a Crucifixion, a Deposition (the taking of Christ’s body from the cross), an Entombment, a Resurrection and an Ascension; they were all icons from the 14th through the 18th centuries, and they varied among the Novgorod School, the Byzantine School, the Moscow School … and so on. There was one called the Dormition of the Virgin, and that did it for Dr. Daruwalla; the doctor didn’t know what the Dormition was.

  From the icons, the doctor roamed to the Father Rector’s office, where something resembling a cribbage board was nailed to the closed door; by means of holes and pegs, Father Julian could indicate his whereabouts or availability—“back soon” or “do not disturb,” “rec. room” or “back late,” “back for supper” or “out of Bombay.” That was when Dr. Daruwalla considered that he should be “out of Bombay”; that he’d been born here didn’t mean that he belonged here.

  When he heard the bell signifying the end of school, Farrokh realized that it was already 3:00 in the afternoon. He stood on the second-floor balcony and watched the schoolboys racing through the dusty courtyard. Cars and buses were taking them away; either their mothers or their ayahs were coming to fetch them home. From the perspective of the balcony, Dr. Daruwalla determined that they were the fattest children he’d ever seen in India. This was uncharitable; not half the children at St. Ignatius were half as plump as Farrokh. Nevertheless, the doctor knew that he would no more interfere with the new missionary’s zeal than he would choose to leap from the balcony and kill himself in front of these blameless children.

  Farrokh also knew that almost no one of rank at the mission would mistake Martin Mills for Inspector Dhar. The Jesuits weren’t known for their appreciation of so-called Bollywood, the trashy Hindi film scene; young women in soaking-wet saris weren’t their thing. Superheroes and fiendish villains, violence and vulgarity, tawdriness and corniness—and the occasional descending god, intervening in pathetic, merely human affairs … Inspector Dhar was not famous at St. Ignatius. Among the schoolboys, however, more than one student of Martin Mills might note the resemblance. Inspector Dhar was popular with schoolboys.

  Dr. Daruwalla still lingered; he had things to do, but he couldn’t make himself leave. He didn’t know that he was writing; it had never begun quite like this before. When the children were gone, he went inside St. Ignatius Church—but not to pray. A huge wheel of unlit candles hung above the center table, which resembled a refectory table only in its shape; in fact, it was a folding table of a household kind—better suited, say, for sorting laundry. The pulpit, to the right of this table (as Farrokh faced the altar), was equipped with an inappropriately shiny microphone; upon this pulpit a Lectionary lay open, from which the doctor assumed that the lector would be reading—possibly at the evening Mass. Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t resist snooping. The Lectionary was open to the Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians.

  “Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we do not lose heart,” wrote the converted one. [II Corinthians 4:1] Skipping ahead, the doctor read: “We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.” [4:8–10]

  Dr. Daruwalla felt small. He ventured into a pew in one of the side aisles—as if he wasn’t significant enough, in his lack of faith, to sit in a center-aisle seat. His own conversion seemed trifling, and very far behind him; in his daily thoughts, he barely honored it—perhaps he had been bitten by a monkey, he concluded. He noted that the church was without an organ; another, probably tuneless piano stood to the left of the folding table—another inappropriately shiny microphone stood on it.

  From far outside the church, the doctor was aware of the constantly passing mopeds—the snarling of their low-powered engines, the ducklike quacking of their infernal horns. The highly staged altarpiece drew the doctor’s eye: there was Christ on the Cross and those two familiar women forlornly flanking him. Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, Dr. Daruwalla presumed. The life-sized figures of the saints, all in stone, were mounted on the columns that defined the aisles; these massive pillars each supported a saint, and at the saints’ feet were tilted oscillating fans—pointed down, in order to cool the congregation.

  Blasphemously, Dr. Daruwalla noticed that one of the stone saints had worked herself loose from her pillar; a thick chain had been secured around the saint’s neck, and this chain was attached to the pillar by a sizable steel grommet. The doctor wished he knew which saint she was; he thought that all the female saints too closely resembled the Virgin Mary—at least as statues. Whoever this saint was, she appeared to have been hung in effigy; but without the chain around her neck, she might have toppled into a pew. Dr. Daruwalla judged that the stone saint was big enough to kill a pew of worshipers.

  Finally, Farrokh said his good-byes to Martin Mills and the other Jesuits. The scholastic suddenly begged to hear the details of Dr. Daruwalla’s conversion. The doctor supposed that Father Julian had given Martin a cunning and sarcastic rendition of the story.

  “Oh, it was nothing,” Farrokh replied modestly. This probably concurred with the Father Rector’s version.

  “But I should love to hear about it!” Martin said.

  “If you tell him yours, I’m sure he’ll tell you his,” Father Julian said to Farrokh.

  “Maybe another time,” Dr. Daruwalla said. Never had he so much desired to flee. He had to promise that he’d attend Martin’s lecture at the YWCA, although he had no intentions of attending; he would rather die than attend. He’d heard quite enough lecturing from Martin Mills!

  “It’s the YWCA at Cooperage, you know,” Father Cecil informed him. Since Dr. Daruwalla was sensitive to those Bombayites who assumed that he barely knew his way around the city, the doctor was snappish in his reply.

  “I know where it is!” Farrokh said.

  Then a little girl appeared, out of nowhere. She was crying because she’d come to St. Ignatius with her mother, to pick up her brother after school, and somehow they’d left without her. There’d been other children in the car. It wasn’t a crisis, the Jesuits decided. The mother would realize what had happened and return to the school. It was merely necessary to comfort the child, and someone should call the mother so that she’d not drive recklessly in fear that her daughter was lost. But there was another problem: the little girl confided to them that she needed to pee. Brother Gabriel declared to Dr. Daruwalla that there was “no official peeing place for girls” at St. Ignatius.

  “But where does Miss Tanuja pee?” Martin Mills asked.

  Good for him! Dr. Daruwalla thought. He’s going to drive them all crazy.

  “And I saw several women among the sweepers,” Martin added.

  “There must be three or four women teachers, aren’t there?” Dr. Daruwalla asked innocently.

  Of course there was a peeing place for girls! These old men simply didn’t know where it was.

  “Someone could see if a men’s room is unoccupied,” Father Cecil suggested.

  “Then one of us could guard the door,” Father Julian advised.

  When Farrokh finally left them all, they were still discussing this awkward necessity to bend the rules. The doctor presumed that the little girl still needed to pee.

  Tetracycline

  Dr. Daruwalla was on his way back to the Hospital for Crippled Children when he realized that he’d started an
other screenplay; he knew that this one would not be starring Inspector Dhar. In his mind’s eye, he saw a beggar working the Arab hotels along Marine Drive; he saw the Queen’s Necklace at night … that string of yellow smog lights … and he heard Julia saying that yellow wasn’t the proper color for the necklace of a queen. For the first time, Farrokh felt that he understood the start of a story—the characters were set in motion by the fates that awaited them. Something of the authority of an ending was already contained in the beginning scene.

  He was exhausted; he had much to talk about with Julia, and he had to talk to John D. Dr. Daruwalla and his wife were having an early dinner at the Ripon Club. Then the doctor had planned to write a first draft of a little speech he would be giving soon; he’d been invited to say something to the Society for the Rehabilitation of Crippled Children—they were such faithful sponsors of the hospital. But now he knew he would write all night—and not his speech. At last, he thought, he had a screenplay in him that justified the telling. In his mind’s eye, he saw the characters arriving at Victoria Terminus, but this time he knew where they were going; he wondered if he’d ever been so excited.

  The familiar figure in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room distracted the doctor from the story he’d imagined; among the waiting children, the tall man indeed stood out. Even seated, his military erectness immediately captured Farrokh’s attention. The taut sallow skin and the slack mouth; the lion-yellow eyes; the acid-shriveled ear and the raw pink smear that had burned a swath along his jawline and down the side of his throat, where it disappeared under the collar of Mr. Garg’s shirt—all this captured Dr. Daruwalla’s attention, too.

  One look at the nervously wriggling fingers of Mr. Garg’s locked hands confirmed Farrokh’s suspicions. It was clear tc the doctor that Garg was itching to know the specific nature of Madhu’s “sexually transmitted disease”; Dr. Daruwalla felt only an empty triumph. To see Garg—guilty and ready to grovel, and reduced to waiting his turn among the crippled children—would be the full extent of the doctor’s slight victory, for Dr. Daruwalla knew, even at this very moment, that something more than professional confidentiality would prevent him from disclosing Mr. Garg’s guilt to Deepa and Vinod. Besides, how could the dwarf and his wife not already know that Garg diddled young girls? It may have been Garg’s guilt that compelled him to allow Deepa and Vinod to attempt their circus rescues of so many of these children. Surely the dwarf and his wife already knew what Farrokh was only beginning to guess: that many of these little prostitutes would have preferred to stay with Mr. Garg. Like the circus, even the Great Blue Nile, maybe Garg was better than a brothel.