A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  He opened the window and leaned outside. The heat at midday was oppressive in the rising dust, although (for Bombay) the weather had remained relatively cool and dry. The cries of the children commingled with the car horns and the chainsaw clamor of the mopeds. Dr. Daruwalla breathed it all in. He squinted into the dusty glare. He gave the exercise yard an almost detached appraisal; it was a good-bye look. Then the doctor called Ranjit for his messages.

  It was no surprise to Dr. Daruwalla that Deepa had already negotiated with the Great Blue Nile; the doctor hadn’t expected the dwarf’s wife to get a better deal. The circus would attempt to train the talented “sister.” They would commit themselves to this effort for three months; they’d feed her, clothe her, shelter her and care for her crippled “brother.” If Madhu could be trained, the Great Blue Nile would keep both children; if she was untrainable, the circus would let them go.

  In Farrokh’s screenplay, the Great Royal paid Pinky three rupees a day while they trained her; the fictional Ganesh worked without pay for his food and shelter. At the Great Blue Nile, Madhu’s training was considered a privilege; she wouldn’t be paid at all. And for a real boy with a crushed foot, it was enough of a privilege to be fed and sheltered; the real Ganesh would work, too. At the parents’ expense—or, in the case of orphans, it was the obligation of the children’s “sponsors”—Madhu and Ganesh would be brought to the site of the Great Blue Nile’s present location. At this time, the circus was performing in Junagadh, a small city of about 100,000 people in Gujarat.

  Junagadh! It would take a day to get there, another day to get back. They would have to fly to Rajkot and then endure a car ride of two or three hours to the smaller town; a driver from the circus would meet their plane—doubtless a reckless roustabout. But the train would be worse. Farrokh knew that Julia hated him to be away overnight, and in Junagadh there would probably be nowhere to stay but the Government Circuit House; lice were likely, bedbugs a certainty. There would be 48 hours of conversation with Martin Mills, and no time to keep writing the screenplay. It had also occurred to the screenwriter that the real Dr. Daruwalla was part of a parallel story-in-progress.

  Raging Hormones

  When Dr. Daruwalla phoned St. Ignatius School to alert the new missionary to their upcoming journey, the doctor wondered if his writing was prophetic. He’d already described the fictional Mr. Martin as “the most popular teacher at the school”; now here was Father Cecil telling the screenwriter that Martin Mills, on the evidence of his first morning of visiting the classrooms, had instantly made “a most popular impression.” Young Martin, as Father Cecil still called him, had even persuaded the Father Rector to permit the teaching of Graham Greene to the upper-school boys; although controversial, Graham Greene was one of Martin Mills’s Catholic heroes. “After all, the novelist popularized Catholic issues,” Father Cecil said.

  Farrokh, who considered himself an old fan of Graham Greene, asked suspiciously, “Catholic issues?”

  “Suicide as a mortal sin, for example,” Father Cecil replied. (Apparently, Father Julian was allowing Martin Mills to teach The Heart of the Matter to the upper school.) Dr. Daruwalla felt briefly uplifted; on the long trip to Junagadh and back, perhaps the doctor would be able to steer the missionary’s conversation to Graham Greene. Who were some of the zealot’s other heroes? the doctor wondered.

  Farrokh hadn’t had a good discussion of Graham Greene in quite a while. Julia and her literary friends were happier discussing more contemporary authors; they found it old-fashioned of Farrokh to prefer rereading those books he regarded as classics. Dr. Daruwalla was intimidated by Martin Mills’s education, but possibly the doctor and the scholastic would discover a common ground in the novels of Graham Greene.

  Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t have known that the subject of suicide was of more interest to Martin Mills than the craft of Graham Greene as a writer. For a Catholic, suicide was a violation of God’s dominion over human life. In the case of Arif Koma, Martin reasoned, the Muslim hadn’t been in full possession of his faculties; falling in love with Vera surely suggested a loss of faculties, or a vastly different set of faculties altogether.

  The denial of ecclesiastical burial was a horror to Martin Mills; however, the Church permitted suicides among those who’d lost their senses or were unaware that they were killing themselves. The missionary hoped that God would judge the Turk’s suicide as an out-of-his-head kind. After all, Martin’s mother had fucked the boy’s brains out. How could Arif have made a sane decision after that?

  But if Dr. Daruwalla would be unprepared for Martin Mills’s Catholic interpretation of the doctor’s much-admired author, Farrokh was also in the dark regarding the unwelcome disturbance that had shaken St. Ignatius School in the late morning, to which Father Cecil made incoherent references. The mission had been disrupted by an unruly intruder; the police had been forced to subdue the violent individual, whose violence Father Cecil attributed to “raging hormones.”

  Farrokh liked the phrase so much that he wrote it down.

  “It was a transvestite prostitute, of all things,” Father Cecil whispered into the phone.

  “Why are you whispering?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

  “The Father Rector is still upset about the episode,” Father Cecil confided to Farrokh. “Can you imagine? A hijra coming here—and during school hours!”

  Dr. Daruwalla was amused at the presumed spectacle. “Perhaps he, or she, wanted to be better educated,” the doctor suggested to Father Cecil.

  “It claimed it had been invited,” Father Cecil replied.

  “It!” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

  “Well, he or she—whatever it was, it was big and strong. A rampaging prostitute, a crazed cross-dresser!” Father Cecil whispered. “They give themselves hormones, don’t they?”

  “Not hijras,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “They don’t take estrogens; they have their balls and their penises removed—with a single cut. The wound is then cauterized with hot oil. It resembles a vagina.”

  “Goodness—don’t tell me!” Father Cecil said.

  “Sometimes, but not usually, their breasts are surgically implanted,” Dr. Daruwalla informed the priest.

  “This one was implanted with iron!” Father Cecil said enthusiastically. “And young Martin was busy teaching. The Father Rector and I, and poor Brother Gabriel, had to deal with the creature by ourselves—until the police came.”

  “It sounds exciting,” Farrokh remarked.

  “Fortunately, none of the children saw it,” Father Cecil said.

  “Aren’t transvestite prostitutes allowed to convert?” asked Dr. Daruwalla, who enjoyed teasing any priest.

  “Raging hormones,” Father Cecil repeated. “It must have just given itself an overdose.”

  “I told you—they don’t usually take estrogens,” the doctor said.

  “This one was taking something,” Father Cecil insisted.

  “May I speak with Martin now?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. “Or is he still busy teaching?”

  “He’s eating his lunch with the midgets, or maybe he’s with the submidgets today,” Father Cecil replied.

  It was almost time for the doctor’s lunch at the Duckworth Club. Dr. Daruwalla left a message for Martin Mills, but Father Cecil struggled with the message to such a degree that the doctor knew he’d have to call again. “Just tell him I’ll call him back,” Farrokh finally said. “And tell him we’re definitely going to the circus.”

  “Oh, won’t that be fun!” Father Cecil said.

  The Hawaiian Shirt

  Detective Patel had wanted to compose himself before his lunch at the Duckworth Club; however, there was the interruption of this incident at St. Ignatius. It was merely a misdemeanor, but the episode had been brought to the deputy commissioner’s attention because it fell into the category of Dhar-related crimes. The perpetrator was one of the transvestite prostitutes who’d been injured by Dhar’s dwarf driver in the fracas on Falkland Road; it was the hijra whose wrist had
been broken by a blow from one of Vinod’s squash-racquet handles. The eunuch-transvestite had shown up at St. Ignatius, clubbing the old priests with his cast; his story was that Inspector Dhar had told all the transvestite prostitutes that they’d be welcome at the mission. Also, Dhar had told the hijras that they could always find him there.

  “But it wasn’t Dhar,” the hijra told Detective Patel in Hindi. “It was someone being a Dhar imposter.” It would have been laughable to Patel, to hear a transvestite complaining that someone else was an “imposter,” if the detective had been in a laughing mood; instead, the deputy commissioner looked at the hijra with impatience and scorn. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, bony-faced hooker whose small breasts were showing because the top two buttons of his Hawaiian shirt were unbuttoned and the shirt was too loose for him; the looseness of his shirt and the tightness of his scarlet miniskirt were an absurd combination—hijra prostitutes usually wore saris. Also, they generally made more of an effort to be feminine than this one was making; his breasts (what the deputy commissioner could see of them) were shapely—in fact, they were very well formed—but there were whiskers on his chin and the noticeable shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. Possibly the hijra had thought that the colors of the Hawaiian shirt were feminine, not to mention the parrots and flowers; yet the shirt did little for his figure.

  D.C.P. Patel continued the interrogation in Hindi. “Where’d you get that shirt?” the detective asked.

  “Dhar was wearing it,” the prostitute replied.

  “Not likely,” said the deputy commissioner.

  “I told you he was being an imposter,” the prostitute said.

  “What sort of fool would pretend to be Dhar, and dare show his face on Falkland Road?” Patel asked.

  “He looked like he didn’t know he was Dhar,” the hijra replied.

  “Oh, I see,” said Detective Patel. “He was an imposter but he didn’t know he was an imposter.” The hijra scratched his hooked nose with the cast on his wrist. Patel was bored with the interrogation; he kept the hijra sitting there only because the preposterous sight of him helped the detective to focus on Rahul. Of course Rahul would be 53 or 54 now, and she wouldn’t stand out as someone who was making a half-assed effort to look like a woman.

  It had occurred to the deputy commissioner that this might be one of the ways that Rahul managed to commit so many murders in the same area of Bombay. Rahul could enter a brothel as a man and leave looking like a hag; she could also leave looking like an attractive, middle-aged woman. And until this waste-of-time hijra had interrupted him, Patel had been enjoying a fairly profitable morning’s work; the deputy commissioner’s research on Rahul was progressing rather nicely. The list of new members at the Duckworth Club had been helpful.

  “Did you ever hear of a zenana by the name of Rahul?” Patel asked the hijra.

  “That old question,” the transvestite said.

  “Only she’d be a real woman now—the complete operation,” the detective added. He knew there were some hijras who envied the very idea of a complete transsexual, but not most; most hijras were exactly what they wanted to be—they had no use for a fully fashioned vagina.

  “If I knew of there being someone like that, I’d probably kill her,” the hijra said good-naturedly. “For her parts,” he added with a smile; he was just kidding, of course. Detective Patel knew more about Rahul than this hijra did; in the last 24 hours, the detective had learned more about Rahul than he’d known for 20 years.

  “You may go now,” said the deputy commissioner. “But leave the shirt. By your own admission, you stole it.”

  “But I have nothing else to wear!” the hijra cried.

  “We’ll find you something you can wear,” the policeman said. “It just may not match your miniskirt.”

  When Detective Patel left Crime Branch Headquarters for his lunch at the Duckworth Club, he took a paper bag with him; in it was the Hawaiian shirt that belonged to Dhar’s imposter. The deputy commissioner knew that not every question would or could be answered over one lunch, but the question posed by the Hawaiian shirt seemed a relatively simple one.

  The Actor Guesses Right

  “No,” said Inspector Dhar. “I would never wear a shirt like that.” He’d glanced quickly and indifferently into the bag, not bothering to draw out the shirt—not even touching the material.

  “It has a California label,” Detective Patel informed the actor.

  “I’ve never been to California,” Dhar replied.

  The deputy commissioner put the paper bag under his chair; he seemed disappointed that the Hawaiian shirt had not served as an icebreaker to their conversation, which had halted once again. Poor Nancy hadn’t spoken at all. Worse, she’d chosen to wear a sari, wound up in the navel-revealing fashion; the golden hairs that curled upward in a sleek line to her belly button were as worrisome to Mr. Sethna as the unsightly paper bag the policeman had placed under his chair. It was the kind of bag that a bomb would be in, the old steward thought. And how he disapproved of Western women in Indian attire! Furthermore, the fair skin of this particular woman’s midriff clashed with her sunburned face. She must have been lying in the sun with tea saucers over her eyes, Mr. Sethna thought; any evidence of women lying on their backs disturbed him.

  As for the ever-voyeuristic Dr. Daruwalla, his eyes were repeatedly drawn to Nancy’s furry navel; since she’d pulled her chair snugly to their table in the Ladies’ Garden, the doctor was restless because he could no longer see this marvel. Farrokh found himself glancing sideways at Nancy’s raccoon eyes instead. The doctor made Nancy so nervous that she took her sunglasses out of her purse and put them on. She had the look of someone who was trying to gather herself together for a performance.

  Inspector Dhar knew how to handle sunglasses. He simply stared into them with a satisfied expression on his face, which implied to Nancy that her sunglasses were no impediment to his vision—that he could see her clearly nonetheless. Dhar knew this would soon cause her to take the sunglasses off.

  Oh great—they’re both acting! Dr. Daruwalla thought.

  Mr. Sethna was disgusted with all of them. They were as socially graceless as teenagers. Not one of them had glanced at a menu; none of them had so much as raised an eyebrow to a waiter to suggest an aperitif, and they couldn’t even talk to one another! Mr. Sethna was also full of indignation at the explanation that was now before him of why Detective Patel spoke such good English: the policeman’s wife was a slatternly American! Needless to say, Mr. Sethna considered this a “mixed marriage,” of which he strongly disapproved. And the old steward was no less outraged that Inspector Dhar should have brashly presented himself at the Duckworth Club so soon after the warning in the late Mr. Lal’s mouth; the actor was recklessly endangering other Duckworthians! That Mr. Sethna had come by this information through the relentlessness and the practiced stealth of his eavesdropping didn’t cause the old steward to consider that he might not know the whole story. To a man with Mr. Sethna’s readiness to disapprove, a mere shred of information was sufficient to form a full opinion.

  But of course Mr. Sethna had another reason to be outraged with Inspector Dhar. As a Parsi and a practicing Zoroastrian, the old steward had reacted predictably to the posters for the newest Inspector Dhar absurdity. Not since his days at the Ripon Club, and his famous decision to pour hot tea on the head of the man wearing the wig, had Mr. Sethna felt so aroused to righteous anger. He’d seen the work of the poster-wallas on his way home from the Duckworth Club, and he blamed Inspector Dhar and Towers of Silence for giving him uncharacteristically lurid dreams.

  He’d suffered a vision of a ghostly-white statue of Queen Victoria that resembled the one they took away from Victoria Terminus, but in his dream the statue was levitating; Queen Victoria was hovering about a foot off the floor of Mr. Sethna’s beloved fire-temple, and all the Parsi faithful were bolting for the doorway. Were it not for the blasphemous cinema poster, Mr. Sethna believed he would never have had suc
h a blasphemous dream. He’d promptly woken up and donned his prayer cap, but the prayer cap fell off when he suffered another dream. He was riding in the Parsi Panchayat Hearse to the Towers of Silence; although he was already a dead body, he could smell the rites attendant to his own death—the scent of burning sandalwood. Suddenly the stink of putrefaction, which clung to the vultures’ beaks and talons, was choking him; he woke again. His prayer cap was on the floor, where he mistook it for a waiting hunchbacked crow; pathetically, he’d tried to shoo the imagined crow away.

  Dr. Daruwalla glanced only once at Mr. Sethna. From the steward’s withering stare, the doctor wondered if another hot-tea incident was brewing. Mr. Sethna interpreted the doctor’s glance as a summons.

  “An aperitif before lunch, perhaps?” the steward asked the awkward foursome. Since “aperitif” wasn’t a word much used in Iowa—nor had Nancy heard it from Dieter, nor was it ever spoken in her life with Vijay Patel—she made no response to Mr. Sethna, who was looking directly at her. (If anywhere, Nancy might have encountered the word in one or another of the remaindered American novels she’d read, but she wouldn’t have known how to pronounce “aperitif” and she would have assumed that the word was inessential to understanding the plot.)

  “Would the lady enjoy something to drink before her lunch?” Mr. Sethna asked, still looking at Nancy. No one at the table could hear what she said, but the old steward understood that she’d whispered for a Thums Up cola. The deputy commissioner ordered a Gold Spot orange soda, Dr. Daruwalla asked for a London Diet beer and Dhar wanted a Kingfisher.

  “Well, this should be lively,” Dr. Daruwalla joked. “Two teetotalers and two beer drinkers!” This lead balloon lay on the table, which inspired the doctor to discourse, at length, on the history of the lunch menu.