by John Irving
Fear No Evil
Their plane to Rajkot took off at 5:10 in the afternoon, not quite eight hours after its scheduled departure. It was a tired-looking 737. The inscription on the fuselage was legible but faded.
FORTY YEARS OF FREEDOM
Dr. Daruwalla quickly calculated that the plane had first been put in service in India in 1987. Where it had flown before then was anybody’s guess.
Their departure was further delayed by the need of the petty officials to confiscate Martin Mills’s Swiss Army knife—a potential terrorist’s tool. The pilot would carry the “weapon” in his pocket and hand it over to Martin in Rajkot.
“Well, I suppose I’ll never see it again,” the missionary said; he didn’t say this stoically, but more like a martyr.
Farrokh wasted no time in teasing him. “It can’t matter to you,” the doctor told him. “You’ve taken a vow of poverty, haven’t you?”
“I know what you think about my vows,” Martin replied. “You think that, because I’ve accepted poverty, I must have no fondness for material things. This shirt, for example—my knife, my books. And you think that, because I’ve accepted chastity, I must be free of sexual desire. Well, I’ll tell you: I resisted the commitment to become a priest not only because of how much I did like my few things, but also because I imagined I was in love. For ten years, I was smitten. I not only suffered from sexual desire; I’d embraced a sexual obsession. There was absolutely no getting this person out of my mind. Does this surprise you?”
“Yes, it does,” Dr. Daruwalla admitted humbly. He was also afraid of what the lunatic might confess in front of the children, but Ganesh and Madhu were too enthralled with the airplane’s preparations for takeoff to pay the slightest attention to the Jesuit’s confession.
“I continued to teach at this wretched school—the students were delinquents, not scholars—and all because I had to test myself,” Martin Mills told Dr. Daruwalla. “The object of my desire was there. Were I to leave, to run away, I would never have known if I had the strength to resist such a temptation. And so I stayed. I forced myself into the closest possible proximity to this person, only to see if I had the courage to withstand such an attraction. But I know what you think of priestly denial. You think that priests are people who simply don’t feel these ordinary desires, or who feel them less strongly than you do.”
“I’m not judging you!” said Dr. Daruwalla.
“Yes you are,” Martin replied. “You think you know all about me.”
“This person that you were in love with …” the doctor began.
“It was another teacher at the school,” the missionary answered. “I was crippled by desire. But I kept the object of my desire this close to me!” And here the zealot held his hand in front of his face. “Eventually, the attraction lessened.”
“Lessened?” Farrokh repeated.
“Either the attraction went away or I overcame it,” said Martin Mills. “Finally, I won.”
“What did you win?” Farrokh asked.
“Not freedom from desire,” the would-be priest declared. “It is more like freedom from the fear of desire. Now I know I can resist it.”
“But what about her?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.
“Her?” said Martin Mills.
“I mean, what were her feelings for you?” the doctor asked him. “Did she even know how you felt about her?”
“Him,” the missionary replied. “It was a he, not a she. Does that surprise you?”
“Yes, it does,” the doctor lied. What surprised him was how unsurprised he was by the Jesuit’s confession. The doctor was upset without understanding why; Farrokh felt greatly disturbed, without knowing the reason.
But the plane was taxiing, and even its lumbering movement on the runway was sufficient to panic Madhu; she’d been sitting across the aisle from Dr. Daruwalla and the missionary—now she wanted to move over and sit with the doctor. Ganesh was happily ensconced in the window seat. Awkwardly, Martin Mills changed places with Madhu; the Jesuit sat with the enraptured boy, and the child prostitute slipped into the aisle seat next to Farrokh.
“Don’t be frightened,” the doctor told her.
“I don’t want to go to the circus,” the girl said; she stared down the aisle, refusing to look out the windows. She wasn’t alone in her inexperience; half the passengers appeared to be flying for the first time. One hand reached to adjust the flow of air; then 35 other hands were reaching. Despite the repeated announcement that carry-on baggage be stowed under the seats, the passengers insisted on piling their heavy bags on what the flight attendant kept calling the hat rack, although there were few hats on board. Perhaps the fault lay with the long delay, but there were many flies on board; they were treated with a vast indifference by the otherwise excited passengers. Someone was already vomiting, and they hadn’t even taken off. At last, they took off.
The elephant boy believed he could fly. His animation appeared to be lifting the plane. The little beggar will ride a lion if they tell him to; he’ll wrestle a tiger, Dr. Daruwalla thought. How suddenly the doctor felt afraid for the cripple! Ganesh would climb to the top of the tent—the full 80 feet. Probably in compensation for his useless foot, the boy’s hands and arms were exceptionally strong. What instincts will protect him? the doctor wondered, while in his arms he felt Madhu tremble; she was moaning. In her slight bosom, the beating of her heart throbbed against Farrokh’s chest.
“If we crash, do we burn or fly apart in little pieces?” the girl asked him, her mouth against his throat.
“We won’t crash, Madhu,” he told her.
“You don’t know,” she replied. “At the circus, I could be eaten by a wild animal or I could fall. And what if they can’t train me or if they beat me?”
“Listen to me,” said Dr. Daruwalla. He was a father again. He remembered his daughters—their nightmares, their scrapes and bruises and their worst days at school. Their awful first boyfriends, who were beyond redemption. But the consequences for the crying girl in his arms were greater. “Try to look at it this way,” the doctor said. “You are escaping.” But he could say no more; he knew only what she was escaping—not what she was fleeing to. Out of the jaws of one kind of death, into the jaws of another … I hope not, was all the doctor thought.
“Something will get me,” Madhu replied. With her hot, shallow breathing against his neck, Farrokh instantly knew why Martin Mills’s admission of homosexual desire had distressed him. If Dhar’s twin was fighting against his sexual inclination, what was John D. doing?
Dr. Duncan Frasier had convinced Dr. Daruwalla that homosexuality was more a matter of biology than of conditioning. Frasier had once told Farrokh that there was a 52 percent chance that the identical twin of a gay male would also be gay. Furthermore, Farrokh’s friend and colleague Dr. Macfarlane had convinced him that homosexuality was immutable. (“If homosexuality is a learned behavior, how come it can’t be unlearned?” Mac had said.)
But what upset Dr. Daruwalla was not the doctor’s sudden conviction that John D. must also be a homosexual; rather, it was all the years of John D.’s aloofness and the remoteness of his Swiss life. Neville, not Danny, must have been the twins’ father, after all! And what does it say about me that John D. wouldn’t tell me? the doctor wondered.
Instinctively (as if she were his beloved John D.), Farrokh hugged the girl. Later, he supposed that Madhu only did as she’d been taught to do; she hugged him back, but in an inappropriately wriggling fashion. It shocked him; he pulled away from her when she began to kiss his throat.
“No, please …” he began to say.
Then the missionary spoke to him. Clearly, the elephant boy’s delight with flying had delighted Martin Mills. “Look at him! I’ll bet he’d try to walk on the wing, if we told him it was safe!” the zealot said.
“Yes, I’ll bet he would,” said Dr. Daruwalla, whose gaze never left Madhu’s face. The fear and confusion of the child prostitute were a mirror of Farrokh’s feelings.
“What do you want?” the girl whispered to him.
“No, it’s not what you think … I want you to escape,” the doctor told her. The concept meant nothing to her; she didn’t respond. She continued to stare at him; in her eyes, trust still lingered with her confusion. At the bloodred edge of her lips, the unnatural redness once more overflowed her mouth; Madhu was eating paan again. Where she’d kissed Farrokh, his throat was marked with the lurid stain, as if a vampire had bitten him. He touched the mark and his fingertips came away with the color on them. The Jesuit saw him staring at his hand.
“Did you cut yourself?” Martin Mills asked.
“No, I’m fine,” Dr. Daruwalla replied, but he wasn’t. Farrokh was admitting to himself that he knew even less about desire than the would-be priest did.
Probably sensing his confusion, Madhu once more pressed herself against the doctor’s chest. Once again, in a whisper, she asked him, “What do you want?” It horrified the doctor to realize that Madhu was asking him a sexual question.
“I want you to be a child, because you are a child,” Farrokh told the girl. “Please, won’t you try to be a child?” There was such an eagerness in Madhu’s smile that, for a moment, the doctor believed the girl had understood him. Quite like a child, she walked her fingers over his thigh; then, unlike a child, Madhu pressed her small palm firmly on Dr. Daruwalla’s penis. There’d been no groping for it; she’d known exactly where it was. Through the summer-weight material of his pants, the doctor felt the heat of Madhu’s hand.
“I’ll try what you want—anything you want,” the child prostitute told him. Instantly, Dr. Daruwalla pulled her hand away.
“Stop that!” Farrokh cried.
“I want to sit with Ganesh,” the girl told him. Farrokh let her change seats with Martin Mills.
“There’s a matter I’ve been pondering,” the missionary whispered to the doctor. “You said we had two rooms for the night. Only two?”
“I suppose we could get more …” the doctor began. His legs were shaking.
“No, no—that’s not what I’m getting at,” Martin said. “I mean, were you thinking the children would share one room, and we’d share the other?”
“Yes,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. He couldn’t stop his legs from shaking.
“But—well, I know you’ll think this is silly, but—it would seem prudent to me to not allow them to sleep together. I mean, not in the same room,” the missionary added. “After all, there is the matter of what we can only guess has been the girl’s orientation.”
“Her what?” the doctor asked. He could stop one leg from shaking, but not the other.
“Her sexual experience, I mean,” said Martin Mills. “We must assume she’s had some … sexual contact. What I mean is, what if Madhu is inclined to seduce Ganesh? Do you know what I mean?”
Dr. Daruwalla knew very well what Martin Mills meant. “You have a point,” was all the doctor said in reply.
“Well, then, suppose the boy and I take one room, and you and Madhu take the other? You see, I don’t think the Father Rector would approve of someone in my position sharing a room with the girl,” Martin explained. “It might seem contradictory to my vows.”
“Yes … your vows,” Farrokh replied. Finally, his other leg stopped shaking.
“Do you think I’m being totally silly?” the Jesuit asked the doctor. “I suppose you think it’s idiotic of me to suggest that Madhu might be so inclined—just because the poor child was … what she was.” But Farrokh could feel that he still had an erection, and Madhu had touched him so briefly.
“No, I think you’re wise to be a little worried about her … inclination,” Dr. Daruwalla answered. He spoke slowly because he was trying to remember the popular psalm. “How does it go—the twenty-third psalm?” the doctor asked the scholastic. “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …’ ”
“ ‘I will fear no evil …’ ” said Martin Mills.
“Yes—that’s it. ‘I will fear no evil,’ ” Farrokh repeated.
Dr. Daruwalla assumed that the plane had left Maharashtra; he guessed they were already flying over Gujarat. Below them, the land was flat and dry-looking in the late-afternoon haze. The sky was as brown as the ground. Limo Roulette or Escaping Maharashtra—the screenwriter couldn’t make up his mind between the two titles. Farrokh thought: It depends on what happens—it depends on how the story ends.
22
THE TEMPTATION OF DR. DARUWALLA
On the Road to Junagadh
At the airport in Rajkot, they were testing the loudspeaker system. It was a test without urgency, as if the loudspeaker were of no real importance—as if no one believed there could be an emergency.
“One, two, three, four, five,” said a voice. “Five, four, three, two, one.” Then the message was repeated. Maybe they weren’t testing the loudspeaker system, thought Dr. Daruwalla; possibly they were testing their counting skills.
While the doctor and Martin Mills were gathering the bags, their pilot appeared and handed the Swiss Army knife to the missionary. At first Martin was embarrassed—he’d forgotten that he’d been forced to relinquish the weapon in Bombay. Then he was ashamed, for he’d assumed the pilot was a thief. While this demonstration of social awkwardness was unfolding, Madhu and Ganesh each ordered and drank two glasses of tea; Dr. Daruwalla was left to haggle with the chai vendor.
“We’ll have to be stopping all the way to Junagadh, so you can pee,” Farrokh told the children. Then they waited nearly an hour in Rajkot for their driver to arrive. All the while, the loudspeaker system went on counting up to five and down to one. It was an annoying airport, but Madhu and Ganesh had plenty of time to pee.
Their driver’s name was Ramu. He was a roustabout who’d joined the Great Blue Nile Circus in Maharashtra, and this was his second round trip between Junagadh and Rajkot today. He’d been on time to meet the plane in the morning; when he learned that the flight was delayed, he drove back to the circus in Junagadh—only because he liked to drive. It was nearly a three-hour trip one way, but Ramu proudly told them that he usually covered the distance in under two hours. They soon saw why.
Ramu drove a battered Land Rover, spattered with mud (or the dried blood of unlucky pedestrians and animals). He was a slight young man, perhaps 18 or 20, and he wore a baggy pair of shorts and a begrimed T-shirt. Most notably, Ramu drove barefoot. The padding had worn off the clutch and brake pedals—their smooth metal surfaces looked slippery—and the doubtlessly overused accelerator pedal had been replaced by a piece of wood; it looked as flimsy as a shingle, but Ramu never took his right foot off it. He preferred to operate both the clutch and the brake with his left foot, although the latter pedal received little attention.
Through Rajkot, they roared into the twilight. They passed a water tower, a women’s hospital, a bus station, a bank, a fruit market, a statue of Gandhi, a telegraph office, a library, a cemetery, the Havmore Restaurant and the Hotel Intimate. When they raced through the bazaar area, Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t look anymore. There were too many children—not to mention the elderly, who weren’t as quick to get out of the way as the children; not to mention the bullock carts and the camel wagons, and the cows and donkeys and goats; not to mention the mopeds and the bicycles and the bicycle rickshaws and the three-wheeled rickshaws, and of course there were cars and trucks and buses, too. At the edge of town, off the side of the road, Farrokh was sure that he spotted a dead man—another “nonperson,” as Ganesh would say—but at the speed they were traveling, there was no time for Dr. Daruwalla to ask Martin Mills to verify the shape of death with the frozen face that the doctor saw.
Once they were out of town, Ramu drove faster. The roustabout subscribed to the open-road school of driving. There were no rules about passing; in the lane of oncoming traffic, Ramu yielded only to those vehicles that were bigger. In Ramu’s mind, the Land Rover was bigger than anything on the road—except for buses and a highly selective category of
heavy-duty trucks. Dr. Daruwalla was grateful that Ganesh sat in the passenger seat; both the boy and Madhu had wanted that seat, but the doctor was afraid that Madhu would distract the driver—a high-speed seduction. So the girl sulked in the back with the doctor and the missionary while the elephant boy chatted nonstop with Ramu.
Ganesh had probably expected that the driver would speak only Gujarati; to discover that Ramu was a fellow Maharashtrian who spoke Marathi and Hindi inspired the beggar. Although Farrokh found their conversation difficult to follow, it seemed that Ganesh wanted to list all the possible circus-related activities that a cripple with one good foot might do. For his part, Ramu was discouraging; he preferred to talk about driving while demonstrating his violent technique of up-shifting and downshifting (instead of using the brakes), assuring Ganesh that it would be impossible to match his skill as a driver without a functioning right foot.
To Ramu’s credit, he didn’t look at Ganesh when he talked; thankfully, the driver was transfixed by the developing madness on the road. Soon it would be dark; perhaps then the doctor could relax, for it would be better not to see one’s own death approaching. After nightfall, there would be only the sudden nearness of a blaring horn and the blinding, onrushing headlights. Farrokh imagined the entanglement of bodies in the rolling Land Rover; a foot here, a hand there, the back of someone’s head, a flailing elbow—and not knowing who was who, or in which direction the ground was, or the black sky (for the headlights would surely be shattered, and in one’s hair there would be fragments of glass, as fine as sand). They would smell the gasoline; it would be soaking their clothes. At last, they would see the ball of flame.
“Distract me,” Dr. Daruwalla said to Martin Mills. “Start talking. Tell me anything at all.” The Jesuit, who’d spent his childhood on the Los Angeles freeways, seemed at ease in the careening Land Rover. The burned-out wrecks off the side of the road were of no interest to him—not even the occasional upside-down car that was still on fire—and the carnage of animals that dotted the highway interested him only when he couldn’t identify their remains.