A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  “No, of course not,” said Dr. Daruwalla, who was appalled.

  When there were lulls in the acts, which there often were—or when the band was resting between items—they could hear the sounds of the chimp being beaten. Kunal was “disciplining” Gautam, Mr. Das explained. In some of the towns where the Great Blue Nile played, there might be other white males in the audience; they couldn’t allow Gautam to think that white males were fair game.

  “No, of course not,” said Dr. Daruwalla. The big ape’s screams and the sounds of Kunal’s stick were carried to them in the still night air. When the band played, no matter how badly, the doctor and the missionary and the children were grateful.

  If Gautam was rabid, the ape would die; better to beat him, in case he wasn’t rabid and he lived—this was Kunal’s philosophy. As for treating Martin Mills, Dr. Daruwalla knew it was wise to assume the chimp was rabid. But, for now, the children were laughing.

  When one of the lions pissed violently on its stool and then stamped in the puddle, both Madhu and Ganesh laughed. Yet Farrokh felt obliged to remind the elephant boy that washing this same stool might be his first job.

  There was a Peacock Dance, of course—two little girls played the peacocks, as always—and the screenwriter thought that his Pinky character should be in a peacock costume when the escaped lion kills her. Farrokh thought it would be best if the lion kills her because the lion thinks she is a peacock. More poignant that way … more sympathy for the lion. Thus would the screenwriter act out his old presentiment—that the restless lions in the holding tunnel were restless because their act was next and the peacock girls were temptingly in sight. When Acid Man applied his acid to the locked cage, the lion that got loose would be in an agitated, antipeacock mood. Poor Pinky!

  There was an encore to the Skywalk item. Mrs. Bhagwan didn’t climb all the way to the top of the tent to repeat the Skywalk, which had left the audience largely unimpressed the first time. She climbed to the top of the tent only to repeat her descent on the dental trapeze. It was the dental trapeze that the audience had liked; more specifically, it was Mrs. Bhagwan’s neck that they had liked. She had an extremely muscular neck, overdeveloped from all her dental-trapezing, and when she descended—twirling, from the top of the tent, with the trapeze clamped tightly in her teeth—her neck muscles bulged, the spotlight turning from green to gold.

  “I could do that,” Ganesh whispered to Dr. Daruwalla. “I have a strong neck. And strong teeth,” he added.

  “And I suppose you could hang, and walk, upside down,” the doctor replied. “You have to hold both feet rigid, at right angles—your ankles support all your weight.” As soon as he spoke, Farrokh realized his error. The cripple’s crushed foot was permanently fused at his ankle—a perfect right angle. It would be no problem for him to keep that foot in a rigid right-angle position.

  There was an idiotic finale in progress in the ring—chimps and dwarf clowns riding mopeds. The lead chimp was dressed as a Gujarati milkman, which the local crowd loved. The elephant-footed boy was smiling serenely in the semidarkness.

  “So it would be only my good foot that I would have to make stronger—is this what you are telling me?” the cripple asked.

  “What I’m telling you, Ganesh, is that your job is with the lion piss and the elephant shit. And maybe, if you’re lucky,” Farrokh told the boy, “you’ll get to work with the food.”

  Now the ponies and the elephants entered the ring, as in the beginning, and the band played loudly; it was impossible to hear Gautam being beaten. Not once had Madhu said, “I could do that”—not about a single act—but here was the elephant-footed boy, already imagining that he could learn to walk on the sky.

  “Up there,” Ganesh told Dr. Daruwalla, pointing to the top of the tent, “I wouldn’t walk with a limp.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” the doctor said.

  But the screenwriter couldn’t stop thinking about it, for it would be the perfect ending to his movie. After the lion kills Pinky—and justice is done to Acid Man (perhaps acid could accidentally be spilled in the villain’s crotch)—Ganesh knows that the circus won’t keep him unless he can make a contribution. No one believes he can be a skywalker—Suman won’t give the crippled boy lessons, and Pratap won’t let him practice on the ladder in the troupe tent. There is nowhere he can learn to skywalk, except in the main tent; if he’s going to try it, he must climb up to the real device and do the real thing—at 80 feet, with no net.

  What a great scene! the screenwriter thought. The boy slips out of the cook’s tent in the predawn light. There’s no one in the main tent to see him climb the trapeze rope to the top. “If I fall, death happens,” his voice-over says. “If no one sees you die, no one says any prayers for you.” Good line! Dr. Daruwalla thought; he wondered if it was true.

  The camera is 80 feet below the boy when he hangs upside down from the ladder; he holds the sides of the ladder with both hands as he puts his good foot and then his bad one into the first two loops. There are 18 loops of rope running the length of the ladder; the Skywalk requires 16 steps. “There is a moment when you must let go with your hands,” Ganesh’s voice-over says. “I do not know whose hands I am in then.”

  The boy lets go of the ladder with both hands; he hangs by his feet. (The trick is, you have to start swinging your body; it’s the momentum you gather, from swinging, that allows you to step forward—one foot at a time, out of the first loop and into the next one, still swinging. Never stop the momentum … keep the forward motion constant.) “I think there is a moment when you must decide where you belong,” the boy’s voice-over says. Now the camera approaches him, from 80 feet away; the camera closes in on his feet. “At that moment, you are in no one’s hands,” the voice-over says. “At that moment, everyone walks on the sky.”

  From another angle, we see that the cook has discovered what Ganesh is doing; the cook stands very still, looking up—he’s counting. Other performers have come into the tent—Pratap Singh, Suman, the dwarf clowns (one of them still brushing his teeth). They follow the crippled boy with their eyes; they’re all counting—they all know how many steps there are in the Skywalk.

  “Let other people do the counting,” Ganesh’s voice-over says. “What I tell myself is, I am just walking—I don’t think skywalking, I think just walking. That’s my little secret. Nobody else would be much impressed by the thought of just walking. Nobody else could concentrate very hard on that. But for me the thought of just walking is very special. What I tell myself is, I am walking without a limp.”

  Not bad, Dr. Daruwalla thought. And there should be a scene later, with the boy in full costume—a singlet sewn with blue-green sequins. As he descends on the dental trapeze, spinning in the spotlight, the gleaming sequins throw back the light. Ganesh should never quite touch the ground; instead, he descends into Pratap’s waiting arms. Pratap lifts the boy up to the cheering crowd. Then Pratap runs out of the ring with Ganesh in his arms—because after a cripple has walked on the sky, no one should see him limp.

  It could work, the screenwriter thought.

  After the performance, they managed to find where Ramu had parked the Land Rover, but they couldn’t find Ramu. The four of them required two rickshaws for the trip across town to the Government Circuit House; Madhu and Farrokh followed the rickshaw carrying Ganesh and Martin Mills. These were the three-wheeled rickshaws that Dr. Daruwalla hated; old Lowji had once declared that a three-wheeled rickshaw made as much sense as a moped towing a lawn chair. But Madhu and Ganesh were enjoying the ride. As their rickshaw bounced along, Madhu tightly gripped Farrokh’s knee with one hand. It was a child’s grip—not sexual groping, Dr. Daruwalla assured himself. With her other hand, Madhu waved to Ganesh. Looking at her, the doctor kept thinking: Maybe the girl will be all right—maybe she’ll make it.

  On the mud flaps of the rickshaw ahead of them, Farrokh saw the face of a movie star; he thought it might be a poor likeness of either Madhuri Dixit or Jaya Prada�
�in any case, it wasn’t Inspector Dhar. In the cheap plastic window of the rickshaw, there was Ganesh’s face—the real Ganesh, the screenwriter reminded himself. It was such a perfect ending, Farrokh was thinking—all the more remarkable because the real cripple had given him the idea.

  In the window of the bouncing rickshaw, the boy’s dark eyes were shining. The headlight from the following rickshaw kept crossing the cripple’s smiling face. Given the distance between the two rickshaws and the fact that it was night, Dr. Daruwalla observed that the boy’s eyes looked healthy; you couldn’t see the slight discharge or the cloudiness from the tetracycline ointment. From such a partial view, you couldn’t tell that Ganesh was crippled; he looked like a happy, normal boy.

  How the doctor wished it were true.

  The Night of 10,000 Steps

  There was nothing to do about the missing piece of Martin’s earlobe. Altogether, Dr. Daruwalla used two 10mL vials of the human rabies immune globulin; he injected a half-vial directly into each of the three wound areas—the earlobe, the neck, the hand—and he administered the remaining half-vial by a deep intramuscular injection in Martin’s buttocks.

  The hand was the worst—a slash wound, which the doctor packed with iodophor gauze, A bite should drain, and heal from the inside, so Dr. Daruwalla wouldn’t stitch the wound—nor did the doctor offer anything for the pain. Dr. Daruwalla had observed that the missionary was enjoying his pain. However, the zealot’s limited sense of humor didn’t permit him to appreciate Dr. Daruwalla’s joke—that the Jesuit appeared to suffer from “chimpanzee stigmata.” The doctor also couldn’t resist pointing out to Martin Mills that, on the evidence of the scholastic’s wounds, whatever had bitten Farrokh (and converted him) in Goa was certainly not a chimp; such an ape would have consumed the whole toe—maybe half the foot.

  “Still angry about your miracle, I see,” Martin replied.

  On that testy note, the two men said their good-nights. Farrokh didn’t envy the Jesuit the task of calming Ganesh down, for the elephant boy was in no mood to sleep; the cripple couldn’t wait for his first full day at the circus to begin. Madhu, on the other hand, seemed bored and listless, if not exactly sleepy.

  Their rooms at the Government Circuit House were adjacent to each other on the third floor. Off Farrokh and Madhu’s bedroom, two glass doors opened onto a small balcony covered with bird droppings. They had their own bathroom with a sink and a toilet, but no door; there was just a rug hung from a curtain rod—it didn’t quite touch the floor. The toilet could be flushed only with a bucket, which was conveniently positioned under a faucet that dripped. There was also a shower, of sorts; an open-ended pipe, without a showerhead, poked out of the bathroom wall. There was no curtain for the shower, but there was a sloped floor leading to an open drain, which (upon closer inspection) appeared to be the temporary residence of a rat; Farrokh saw its tail disappearing down the hole. Very close to the drain was a diminished bar of soap, the edges nibbled.

  In the bedroom, the two beds were too close together—and doubtless infested. Both mosquito nets were yellowed and stiff, and one was torn. The one window that opened had no screen, and little air was inclined to move through it. Dr. Daruwalla thought they might as well open the glass doors to the balcony, but Madhu said she was afraid that a monkey would come inside.

  The ceiling fan had only two speeds: one was so slow that the fan had no effect at all, and the other was so fast that the mosquito nets were blown away from the beds. Even in the main tent at the circus, the night air had felt cool, but the third floor of the Government Circuit House was hot and airless. Madhu solved this problem by using the bathroom first; she wet a towel and wrung it out, and then she lay naked under the towel—on the better bed, the one with the untorn mosquito net. Madhu was small, but so was the towel; it scarcely covered her breasts and left her thighs exposed. A deliberate girl, the doctor thought.

  Lying there, she said, “I’m still hungry. There was nothing sweet.”

  “You want a dessert?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

  “If it’s sweet,” she said.

  The doctor carried the thermos with the rest of the rabies vaccine and the immune globulin down to the lobby; he hoped there was a refrigerator, for the thermos was already tepid. What if Gautam bit someone else tomorrow? Kunal had informed the doctor that the chimpanzee was “almost definitely” rabid. Rabid or not, the chimp shouldn’t be beaten; in the doctor’s opinion, only a second-rate circus beat its animals.

  In the lobby, a Muslim boy was tending the desk, listening to the Qawwali on the radio; he appeared to be eating ice cream to the religious verses—his head nodding while he ate, the spoon conducting the air between the container and his mouth. But it wasn’t ice cream, the boy told Dr. Daruwalla; he offered the doctor a spoon and invited him to take a taste. The texture differed from that of ice cream—a cardamom-scented, saffron-colored yogurt, sweetened with sugar. There was a refrigerator full of the stuff, and Farrokh took a container and spoon for Madhu. He left the vaccine and the immune globulin in the refrigerator, after assuring himself that the boy knew better than to eat it.

  When the doctor returned to his room, Madhu had discarded the towel. He tried to give her the Gujarati dessert without looking at her; probably on purpose, she made it awkward for him to hand her the spoon and container—he was sure she was pretending that she didn’t know where the mosquito net opened. She sat naked in bed, eating the sweetened yogurt and watching him while he arranged his writing materials.

  There was an unsteady table, a thick candle affixed by wax to a dirty ashtray, a packet of matches alongside a mosquito coil. When Farrokh had spread out his pages and smoothed his hand over the pad of fresh paper, he lit the candle and the mosquito coil and turned off the overhead light. At high speed, the ceiling fan would have disturbed his work and Madhu’s mosquito net, so the doctor kept the fan on low; although this was ineffectual, he hoped that the movement of the blade might make Madhu sleepy.

  “What are you doing?” the child prostitute asked him.

  “Writing,” he told her.

  “Read it to me,” Madhu asked him.

  “You wouldn’t understand it,” Farrokh replied.

  “Are you going to be sleeping?” the girl asked.

  “Maybe later,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

  He tried to block her out of his mind, but this was difficult. She kept watching him; the sound of her spoon in the container of yogurt was as regular as the drone of the fan. Her purposeful nakedness was oppressive, but not because he was actually tempted by her; it was more that the pure evil of having sex with her (the very idea of it) was suddenly his obsession. He didn’t want to have sex with her—he felt only the most passing desire for her—but the sheer obviousness of her availability was numbing to his other senses. It struck him that an evil this pure, something so clearly wrong, wasn’t often presented without consequence; the horror was that it seemed there could be no harmful result of sex between them. If he permitted her to seduce him, nothing would come of it—nothing beyond what he would remember and feel guilty for, forever.

  The lucky girl was not HIV-positive; besides, he happened to be traveling in India, as usual—with condoms. And Madhu wasn’t a girl who would ever tell anyone; she wasn’t a talker. In her present situation, she might never have the occasion to tell anyone. It was not only the child’s tarnished innocence that convinced him of the purity of this evil, like almost no other evil he’d ever imagined; it was also her strident amorality—whether this had been acquired in the brothel or, hideously, taught to her by Mr. Garg. Whatever one did to her, one wouldn’t pay for it—not in this life, or only in the torments of one’s soul. These were the darkest thoughts that Dr. Daruwalla had ever had, but he nevertheless thought his way through them; soon he was writing again.

  By the movement of his pen (for she’d never stopped watching him), Madhu seemed to sense that she’d lost him. Also, her dessert was gone. She got out of the bed and walked naked to him; s
he peered over his shoulder, as if she knew how to read what he was writing. The screenwriter could feel her hair against his cheek and neck.

  “Read it to me—just that part,” Madhu said. She leaned more firmly against him as she reached and touched the paper with her hand; she touched his last sentence. The cardamom-scented yogurt smelled sickly on her breath, and there was something like the smell of dead flowers—possibly the saffron.

  The screenwriter read aloud to her: “ ‘Two stretcher bearers in white dhotis are running with the body of Acid Man, who is curled in a fetal position on the stretcher—his face glazed in pain, smoke still drifting from the area of his crotch.’ ”

  Madhu made him read it again; then she said, “In what position?”

  “Fetal,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “Like a baby inside its mother.”

  “Who is Acid Man?” the child prostitute asked him.

  “A man who’s been scarred by acid—like Mr. Garg,” Farrokh told her. At the mention of Garg’s name, there wasn’t even a flicker of recognition in the girl’s face. The doctor refused to look at her naked body, although Madhu still clung to his shoulder; where she pressed against him, he felt himself begin to sweat.

  “The smoke is coming from what area?” Madhu asked.

  “From his crotch,” the screenwriter replied.

  “Where’s that?” the child prostitute asked him.

  “You know where that is, Madhu—go back to bed,” he told her.

  She raised one arm to show him her armpit. “The hair is growing back,” she said. “You can feel it.”

  “I can see that it’s growing back—I don’t need to feel it,” Farrokh replied.

  “It’s growing back everywhere,” Madhu said.

  “Go back to bed,” the doctor told her.