A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  Thus, in the dead of night, while almost five million residents of Bombay were fast asleep on the sidewalks of the city, these two men were wide awake and mumbling. One spoke only to himself—“a story set in motion by the Virgin Mary”—and this allowed him to get started. The other spoke not only to himself but to God; understandably, his mumbles were a little louder. He was saying, “I’ll take the turkey,” and his repetitions—he hoped—would prevent him from being consumed by that past which everywhere surrounded him. It was the past that had given him his tenacious will, which he believed was the will of God within him; yet how he feared the past.

  “I’ll take the turkey,” said Martin Mills. By now his knees were throbbing. “I’ll take the turkey, I’ll take the turkey, I’ll take the turkey.”

  18

  A STORY SET IN MOTION BY THE VIRGIN MARY

  Limo Roulette

  In the morning, Julia found Farrokh slumped over the glass-topped table as if he’d fallen asleep while looking through the glass at the big toe of his right foot. Julia knew this was the same toe that had been bitten by a monkey, for which the family had suffered some religious disruption; she was thankful that the effects of the monkey bite had been neither fanatical nor long-lasting, but to observe her husband in the apparent position of praying to this same toe was disconcerting.

  Julia was relieved to see the pages of the screenplay-in-progress, which she realized had been the true object of Farrokh’s scrutiny—not his toe. The typewriter had been pushed aside; the typed pages had many penciled corrections written on them, and the doctor still held the pencil in his right hand. It appeared to Julia that her husband’s own writing had served him as a soporific. She assumed she was a witness to the genesis of yet another Inspector Dhar disaster, but she saw at a glance that Dhar was not the voice-over character; after reading the first five pages, she wondered if Dhar was even in the movie. How odd! she thought. Altogether, there were about 25 pages. She took them into the kitchen with her; there she made coffee for herself and tea for Farrokh.

  The voice-over was that of a 12-year-old boy who’d been crippled by an elephant. Oh, no—it’s Ganesh! Julia thought. She knew the beggar. Whenever she left the apartment building, he was there to follow her; she’d bought him many things, most of which he’d sold, but his unusually good English had charmed her. Unlike Dr. Daruwalla, Julia knew why Ganesh’s English was so polished.

  Once, when he’d been begging at the Taj, an English couple had spotted him; they were traveling with a shy, lonely boy a little younger than Ganesh, and the child had requested that they find him someone to play with. There was also a nanny in tow, and Ganesh had traveled with this family for over a month. They fed him and clothed him and kept him atypically clean—they had him examined by a doctor, to be sure he wasn’t carrying any infectious diseases—just so he could be a playmate for their lonely child. The nanny taught Ganesh English during the several hours of every day that she was under orders to give language instruction to the English boy. And when it was time for the family to return to England, they simply left Ganesh where they’d found him—begging at the Taj. He quickly sold the unnecessary clothes. For a time, Ganesh said, he’d missed the nanny. The story had touched Julia. It also struck her as highly unlikely. But why would the beggar have made it up? Now here was her husband, putting the poor cripple in a movie!

  And Farrokh had given Ganesh a sister, a six-year-old girl named Pinky; she was a gifted street acrobat, a sidewalk beggar who performed various tricks. This didn’t fool Julia. Julia knew the real Pinky—she was a circus star. It was also obvious that another inspiration for the fictional Pinky was Madhu, Deepa and Vinod’s newest child prostitute; in the movie, Farrokh had made Pinky totally innocent. These fictional children were also fortunate to have a mother. (Not for long.)

  The mother is a sweeper at St. Ignatius, where the Jesuits have not only employed her—they’ve converted her. Her children are strict vegetarian Hindus; they’re quite disgusted by their mother’s conversion, but especially by the concept of Holy Communion. The idea that the wine really is Christ’s blood, and the bread really is his body … well, understandably, this is nauseating to the little vegetarians.

  It shocked Julia to see that her husband, as a writer, was such a shameless borrower, for she knew he’d robbed the memoir of a nun; it was a terrible story that had long amused him—and old Lowji before him. The nun was working hard to convert a tribe of former cannibals. She had a difficult time explaining the concept of the body and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist. Since there were many former cannibals in the tribe who could still remember eating human flesh, the theological notion of Holy Communion pushed a lot of buttons for them.

  Julia saw that her husband was up to his usual blasphemies. But where was Inspector Dhar?

  Julia half-expected to see Dhar come to the children’s rescue, but the story went on without him. The mother is killed in St. Ignatius Church, while genuflecting. A statue of the Virgin Mary falls from a pedestal and crushes her; she is given Extreme Unction on the spot. Ganesh does not mourn her passing greatly. “At least she was happy,” says his voice-over. “It is not every Christian who is fortunate enough to be instantly killed by the Blessed Virgin.” If there was ever a time for Dhar to come to the rescue, now’s the time, Julia thought. But Dhar didn’t come.

  Instead, the little beggars begin to play a game called “limo roulette.” All the street children in Bombay know there are two special limousines that cruise the city. In one is a scout for the circus—a dwarf named Vinod, of course. The dwarf is a former circus clown; his job is looking for gifted acrobats. Pinky is so gifted, the crippled Ganesh believes that Vinod would let him go to the circus with Pinky—so that he could look after her. The problem is, there’s another scout. He’s a man who steals children for the freak circus. He’s called Acid Man because he pours acid on your face. The acid is so disfiguring that your own family wouldn’t recognize you. Only the circus for freaks will take care of you.

  So Farrokh was after Mr. Garg again, Julia thought. What an appalling story! Even without Inspector Dhar, good and evil were once more plainly in position. Which scout would find the children first? Would it be the Good Samaritan dwarf, or would it be Acid Man?

  The limos move around at night. We see a sleek car pass the children, who run after it. We see the brake lights flicker, but then the dark car drives on; other children are chasing after it. We see a limousine stopped at the curb, motor running; the children approach it cautiously. The driver’s-side window opens a crack; we see the stubby fingers on the edge of the glass, like claws. When the window is rolled down, there is the dwarf’s big head. This is the right limo—this is Vinod.

  Or else it’s the wrong limo. The back door opens, a kind of frost escapes; it’s as if the car’s air-conditioning is too cold—the car is like a freezer or a meat locker. Possibly the acid must be preserved at such a temperature; maybe Acid Man himself must be kept this cold, or else he’ll rot.

  Apparently, the poor children wouldn’t be forced to play “limo roulette” if the Virgin Mary hadn’t toppled off a pedestal and murdered their mother. What was her husband thinking? Julia wondered. She was used to reading Farrokh’s first drafts, his raw beginnings. Normally, she felt she wasn’t invading her husband’s privacy; he always shared with her his work-in-progress. But Julia was worried that this screenplay was something he’d never share with her. There was something desperate about it. Probably it suffered from the potential disappointment of attempted art—a vulnerability that had certainly been lacking in the doctor’s Inspector Dhar scripts. It occurred to Julia that Farrokh might care too much about this one.

  It was this reasoning that led her to return the manuscript to its previous position on the glass-topped table, more or less between the typewriter and her husband’s head. Farrokh was still asleep, although a smile of drooling-idiot proportions indicated that he was dreaming, and he emitted a nasal humming—an unfollowable tune. The awkw
ard position of the doctor’s head on the glass-topped table allowed him to imagine that he was a child again, napping at St. Ignatius School with his head on his desk in I-3.

  Suddenly, Farrokh snorted in his sleep. Julia could tell that her husband was about to wake up, but she was startled when he woke up screaming. She thought he’d had a nightmare but it turned out to be a cramp in the arch of his right foot. He looked so disheveled, she was embarrassed for him. Then her anger with him returned … that he’d thought it “inappropriate” for her to attend the interesting lunch with the deputy commissioner and the limping hippie from 20 years ago. Worse, Farrokh drank his tea without mentioning his screenplay-in-progress; he even attempted to conceal the pages in his doctor’s bag.

  Julia remained aloof when he kissed her good-bye, but she stood in the open doorway of the apartment and watched him push the button for the lift. If the doctor was demonstrating the early symptoms of an artistic temperament, Julia thought she should nip such an ailment in the bud. She waited until the elevator door opened before she called to him.

  “If that ever was a movie,” Julia said, “Mr. Garg would sue you.”

  Dr. Daruwalla stood dumbfounded while the elevator door closed on his doctor’s bag, and then opened; the door kept opening and closing on his bag as he stared indignantly at his wife. Julia blew him a kiss, just to make him cross. The elevator door grew more aggressive; Farrokh was forced to fight his way inside. He hadn’t time to retort to Julia before the door closed and he was descending; he’d never successfully kept a secret from her. Besides, Julia was right: Garg would sue him! Dr. Daruwalla wondered if the creative process had eclipsed his common sense.

  In the alley, another blow to his common sense awaited him. When Vinod opened the door of the Ambassador for him, the doctor saw the elephant-footed beggar asleep in the back seat. Madhu had chosen to sit up front, beside the dwarf driver. Except for the crusty exudation on his eyelashes, the sleeping boy looked angelic. His crushed foot was covered with one of the rags he carried for wiping off the fake bird shit; even in his sleep, Ganesh had managed to conceal his deformity. This wasn’t a make-believe Ganesh, but a real boy; nevertheless, Farrokh found himself looking at the cripple as he might stand back and take pride in one of his fictional creations. The doctor was still thinking about his story; he was thinking that what would happen next to Ganesh was entirely a matter of the screenwriter’s imagination. But the real beggar had found a benefactor; until the circus took him, the back seat of Vinod’s Ambassador would do—it was already better than what he was used to.

  “Good morning, Ganesh,” the doctor said. The boy was instantly awake, as alert as a squirrel.

  “What are we doing today?” the beggar asked.

  “No more bird-shit tricks,” the doctor said.

  The beggar registered his understanding with a tight-lipped smile. “But what are we doing?” the boy repeated.

  “We’re going to my office,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “We’re waiting for some test results for Madhu, before we make our plans. And this morning you will be kind enough not to practice the bird-shit trick on those postoperative children in the exercise yard.” The boy’s black eyes kept darting with the movements of the traffic. The doctor could see Madhu’s face reflected in the rearview mirror; she’d not responded—she’d not even glanced in the mirror at the mention of her name.

  “What concerns me, about the circus …” Dr. Daruwalla said; he paused deliberately. The emphasis he’d given to the word had gained Ganesh’s full attention, but not Madhu’s.

  “My arms are the best—very strong. I could ride a pony—no legs necessary with hands as strong as mine,” Ganesh suggested. “I could do lots of tricks—hang by my arms from an elephant’s trunk, maybe ride a lion.”

  “But what concerns me is that they won’t let you do tricks—no tricks,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “They’ll give you all the bad jobs, all the hard work. Scooping up the elephant shit, for example—not hanging from their trunks.”

  “I’ll have to show them,” Ganesh said. “But what do you do to the lions to make them stand on those little stools?”

  “Your job would be to wash the lion piss off the stools,” Farrokh told him.

  “And what do you do with tigers?” Ganesh asked.

  “What you would do with tigers is clean their cages—tiger shit!” said Dr. Daruwalla.

  “I’ll have to show them,” the boy repeated. “Maybe something with their tails—tigers have long tails.”

  The dwarf entered the roundabout that the doctor hated. There were too many easily distracted drivers who stared at the sea and at the worshipers milling in the mudflats around Haji Ali’s Tomb; the rotary was near Tardeo, where Farrokh’s father had been blown to smithereens. Now, in the midst of this roundabout, the traffic swerved to avoid a lunatic cripple; a legless man in one of those makeshift wheelchairs powered by a hand crank was navigating the rotary against the flow of other vehicles. The doctor could follow Ganesh’s roaming gaze; the boy’s black eyes either ignored or avoided the wheelchair madman. The little beggar was probably still thinking about the tigers.

  Dr. Daruwalla didn’t know the exact ending of his screenplay; he had only a general idea of what would happen to his Pinky, to his Ganesh. Caught in the roundabout, the doctor realized that the fate of the real Ganesh—in addition to Madhu’s fate—was out of his hands. But Farrokh felt responsible for beginning their stories, just as surely as he’d begun the story he was making up.

  In the rearview mirror, Dr. Daruwalla could see that Madhu’s lion-yellow eyes were following the movements of the legless maniac. Then the dwarf needed to brake sharply; he brought his taxi to a full stop in order to avoid the crazed cripple in the wrong-way wheelchair. The wheelchair sported a bumper sticker opposed to horn blowing.

  PRACTICE THE VIRTUE OF PATIENCE

  A battered oil truck loomed over the wheelchair lunatic; in a fury, the oil-truck driver repeatedly blew his horn. The great cylindrical body of the truck was covered with foot-high lettering the color of flame,

  WORLD’S FIRST CHOICE

  ——GULF ENGINE OILS

  The oil truck also sported a bumper sticker, which was almost illegible behind flecks of tar and splattered insects.

  KEEP A FIRE EXTINGUISHER IN YOUR GLOVE COMPARTMENT

  Dr. Daruwalla knew that Vinod didn’t have one.

  As if it wasn’t irritating enough to be obstructing traffic, the cripple was begging among the stopped cars. The clumsy wheelchair bumped against the Ambassador’s rear door. Farrokh was incensed when Ganesh rolled down the rear window, toward which the wheelchair madman extended his arm.

  “Don’t give that idiot anything!” the doctor cried, but Farrokh had underestimated the speed of Bird-Shit Boy. Dr. Daruwalla never saw the bird-shit syringe, only the look of surprise on the face of the crazed cripple in the wheelchair; he quickly withdrew his arm—his palm, his wrist, his whole forearm dripping bird shit. Vinod cheered.

  “Got him,” Ganesh said.

  A passing paint truck nearly obliterated the wheelchair lunatic. Vinod cheered for the paint truck, too.

  CELEBRATE WITH ASIAN PAINTS

  When the paint truck was gone from view, the traffic moved again—the dwarf’s taxi taking the lead. The doctor remembered the bumper sticker on Vinod’s Ambassador.

  HEY YOU WITH THE EVIL EYE,

  MAY YOUR FACE TURN BLACK!

  “I said no more bird-shit tricks, Ganesh,” Farrokh told the boy. In the rearview mirror, Dr. Daruwalla could see Madhu watching him; when he met her eyes, she looked away. Through the open window, the air was hot and dry, but the pleasure of a moving car was new to the boy, if not to the child prostitute. Maybe nothing was new to her, the doctor feared. But for the beggar, if not for Madhu, this was the start of an adventure.

  “Where is the circus?” Ganesh asked. “Is it far?”

  Farrokh knew that the Great Blue Nile might be anywhere in Gujarat. The question that concerned Dr
. Daruwalla was not where the circus was, but whether it would be safe.

  Ahead, the traffic slowed again; probably pedestrians, Dr. Daruwalla thought—shoppers from the nearby chowk, crowding into the street. Then the doctor saw the body of a man in the gutter; his legs extended into the road. The traffic was squeezed into one lane because the oncoming drivers didn’t want to drive over the dead man’s feet or ankles. A crowd was quickly forming; soon there would be the usual chaos. For the moment, the only concession made to the dead man was that no one drove over him.

  “Is the circus far?” Ganesh asked again.

  “Yes, it’s far—it’s a world apart,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “A world apart” was what he hoped for the boy, whose bright black eyes spotted the body in the road. Ganesh quickly looked away. The dwarf’s taxi inched past the dead man; once more, Vinod moved ahead of the traffic.

  “Did you see that?” Farrokh asked Ganesh.

  “See what?” the cripple said.

  “There is a man being dead,” Vinod said.

  “They are nonpersons,” Ganesh replied. “You think you seem them but they are not really being there.”

  O God, keep this boy from becoming a nonperson! Dr. Daruwalla thought. His fear surprised him; he couldn’t bring himself to seek the cripple’s hopeful face. In the rearview mirror, Madhu was watching the doctor again. Her indifference was chilling. It had been quite a while since Dr. Daruwalla had prayed, but he began.

  India wasn’t limo roulette. There were no good scouts or bad scouts for the circus; there was no freak circus, either. There were no right-limo, wrong-limo choices. For these children, the real roulette would begin after they got to the circus—if they got there. At the circus, no Good Samaritan dwarf could save them. At the Great Blue Nile, Acid Man—a comic-book villain—wasn’t the danger.