A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  Dr. Daruwalla was about to tell her his full name, his profession, his age—even the number of his children and his grandchildren, if she liked. But before he could speak, she screamed at him. “Who are you, anyway? What are you?”

  Dr. Daruwalla answered her with such conviction and pride that he surprised himself. “I’m a volunteer,” the doctor said. The concept pleased him. Farrokh wondered if it felt as good to be assimilated as it did to be a volunteer.

  The Bottommost Drawer

  After Dr. Daruwalla left Bombay, there were other departures; in one case, there was a departure and a return. Suman, the skywalker par excellence, left the Great Royal Circus. She married a man in the milk business. Then, after various discussions with Pratap Walawalkar, the owner, Suman came back to the Great Royal, bringing her milk-business husband with her. Only recently, the doctor had heard that Suman’s husband had become one of the managers of the Great Royal Circus, and that Suman was once again walking on the sky; she was still very much the star.

  Farrokh also learned that Pratap Singh had quit the Great Royal; the ringmaster and wild-animal trainer had left with his wife, Sumi, and their troupe of child acrobats—the real Pinky among them—to join the New Grand Circus. Unlike the Pinky character in Limo Roulette, the real Pinky wasn’t killed by a lion who mistook her for a peacock; the real Pinky was still performing, in one town after another. She would be 11 or 12, Farrokh guessed.

  Dr. Daruwalla had heard that a girl named Ratna was performing the Skywalk at the New Grand; remarkably, Ratna could skywalk backward! The doctor was further informed that, by the time the New Grand Circus performed in Changanacheri, Pinky’s name had been changed to Choti Rani, which means Little Queen. Possibly Pratap had chosen the new name not only because Choti Rani was suitably theatrical, but also because Pinky was so special to him; Pratap always said she was absolutely the best. Just plain Pinky was a little queen now.

  As for Deepa and Shivaji, the dwarf’s dwarf son, they had escaped the Great Blue Nile. Shivaji was very much Vinod’s son, in respect to the dwarf’s determination; as for Shivaji’s talent, the young man was a better acrobat than his father—and, at worst, Vinod’s equal as a clown. On the strength of Shivaji’s abilities, he and his mother had moved to the Great Royal Circus, which was unquestionably a move up from the Great Blue Nile—and one that Deepa never could have made on the strength of her own or Vinod’s talents. Farrokh had heard that the subtleties of Shivaji’s Farting Clown act—not to mention the dwarf’s signature item, which was called Elephant Dodging—put India’s other farting clowns to shame.

  The fate of those lesser performers who toiled for the Great Blue Nile was altogether less kind; there would be no escape for them. The elephant-footed boy had never been content to be a cook’s helper; a higher aspiration afflicted him. The knife thrower’s wife, Mrs. Bhagwan—the most mechanical of skywalkers—had failed to dissuade Ganesh from his delusions of athleticism. Despite falling many times from that model of the ladderlike device which hung from the roof of the Bhagwans’ troupe tent, the cripple would never let go of the idea that he could learn to skywalk.

  The perfect ending to Farrokh’s screenplay is that the cripple learns to walk without a limp by walking on the sky; such an ending would not conclude the real Ganesh’s story. The real Ganesh wouldn’t rest until he’d tried the real thing. It was almost as Dr. Daruwalla had imagined it, almost as it was written. But it’s unlikely that the real Ganesh was as eloquent; there would have been no voice-over. The elephant boy must have looked down at least once—enough to know that he shouldn’t look down again. From the apex of the main tent, the ground was 80 feet below him. With his feet in the loops, it’s doubtful that he even thought as poetically as Farrokh’s fictional character.

  (“There is a moment when you must let go with your hands. At that moment, you are in no one’s hands. At that moment, everyone walks on the sky.”) Not likely—not a sentiment that would spontaneously leap to the mind of a cook’s helper. The elephant-footed boy would probably have made the mistake of counting the loops, too. Whether counting or not counting, it’s far-fetched to imagine him coaching himself across the ladder.

  (“What I tell myself is, I am walking without a limp.”) That would be the day! Dr. Daruwalla thought. Judging from where they found the cripple’s body, the real Ganesh fell when he was less than halfway across the top of the tent. There were 18 loops in the ladder; the Skywalk was 16 steps. It was Mrs. Bhagwan’s expert opinion that the elephant boy had fallen after only four or five steps; he’d never managed more than four or five steps across the roof of her tent, the skywalker said.

  This news came slowly to Toronto. Mr. and Mrs. Das conveyed their regrets, by letter, to Dr. Daruwalla; the letter was late—it was misaddressed. The ringmaster and his wife added that Mrs. Bhagwan blamed herself for the accident, but she also felt certain that the cripple could never have been taught to skywalk. Doubtless her distress distracted her. The next news from Mr. and Mrs. Das was that Mrs. Bhagwan had been cut by her knife-throwing husband as she lay spread-eagled on the revolving bull’s-eye; it wasn’t a serious wound, but she gave herself no time to heal. The following night, she fell from the Skywalk. She was only as far across the top of the tent as Ganesh had been, and she fell without a cry. Her husband said that she’d been having trouble with the fourth and fifth steps ever since the elephant boy had fallen.

  Mr. Bhagwan wouldn’t throw another knife, not even when they offered him a choice of targets, all of whom were small girls. The widower went into semiretirement, performing only the Elephant Passing item. There seemed to be some self-punishment about this elephant act—or so the ringmaster confided to Dr. Daruwalla. Mr. Bhagwan would lie down under the elephant—at first with fewer and fewer mattresses between his body and the elephant-walking plank, and between his body and the ground. Then he did it with no mattresses at all. There were internal injuries, the ringmaster and his wife implied. Mr. Bhagwan became ill; he was sent home. Later, Mr. and Mrs. Das heard that Mr. Bhagwan had died.

  Then Dr. Daruwalla heard that they’d all become ill. There were no more letters from Mr. and Mrs. Das. The Great Blue Nile Circus had vanished. Their last place of performance was Poona, where the prevailing story about the Blue Nile was that they were brought down by a flood; it was a small flood, not a major disaster, except that the hygiene at the circus became lax. An unidentified disease killed several of the big cats, and bouts of diarrhea and gastroenteritis were rampant among the acrobats. Just that quickly, the Great Blue Nile was gone.

  Had Gautam’s death been a harbinger? The old chimpanzee had died of rabies not two weeks after he’d bitten Martin Mills; Kunal’s efforts to discipline the ape by beating him had been wasted. But, among them all, Dr. Daruwalla mainly remembered Mrs. Bhagwan—her tough feet and her long black shiny hair.

  The death of the elephant boy (a cripple no more) destroyed a small but important part of Farrokh. What happened to the real Ganesh had an immediate and diminishing effect on the screenwriter’s already waning confidence in his powers of creation. The screenplay of Limo Roulette had suffered from comparisons to real life. In the end, the real Ganesh’s remark rang truest. “You can’t fix what elephants do,” the cripple had said.

  Like Mr. Bhagwan, who had retreated into Elephant Passing, which led to his death, the screenplay of Limo Roulette went into radical retirement. It occupied the bottommost drawer in Dr. Daruwalla’s desk at home; he wouldn’t keep a copy in his office at the hospital. If he were to die suddenly, he wouldn’t have wanted anyone but Julia to discover the unproduced screenplay. The single copy was in a folder marked

  PROPERTY OF INSPECTOR DHAR

  for it was Farrokh’s conviction that only John D. would one day know what to do with it.

  Doubtless there would be compromises required in order for Limo Roulette to be produced; there were always compromises in the movie business. Someone would say that the voice-over was “emotionally distancing”—that w
as the fashionable opinion of voice-over. Someone would complain about the little girl being killed by the lion. (Couldn’t Pinky be confined to a wheelchair, but happy, for the rest of the movie?) And despite what had happened to the real Ganesh, the screenwriter loved the ending as it was written; someone would want to tamper with that ending, which Dr. Daruwalla could never allow. The doctor knew that Limo Roulette would never be as perfect as it was in those days when he was writing it and he imagined that he was a better writer than he was.

  It was a deep drawer for a mere 118 pages. As if to keep the abandoned screenplay company, Farrokh filled the drawer with photographs of chromosomes; ever since Duncan Frasier had died, Dr. Daruwalla’s dwarf-blood project had passed beyond languishing—the doctor’s enthusiasm for drawing blood from dwarfs was as dead as the gay geneticist. If anything or anyone were to tempt Dr. Daruwalla to return to India, this time the doctor couldn’t claim that the dwarfs were bringing him back.

  From time to time, Dr. Daruwalla would read that perfect ending to Limo Roulette—when the cripple walks on the sky—for only by this artificial means could the doctor keep the real Ganesh alive. The screenwriter loved that moment after the Skywalk when the boy is descending on the dental trapeze, spinning in the spotlight as the gleaming sequins on his singlet throw back the light. Farrokh loved how the cripple never touches the ground; how he descends into Pratap’s waiting arms, and how Pratap holds 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 have worked, the screenwriter thought; it should have worked.

  Dr. Daruwalla was 62; he was reasonably healthy. His weight was a small problem and he’d done little to rid his diet of admitted excesses, but the doctor nevertheless expected to live for another decade or two. John D. might well be in his sixties by the time Limo Roulette was put into the actor’s hands. The former Inspector Dhar would know for whom the part of the missionary had been intended; the actor would also be relatively free of any personal attachments to the story or its characters. If certain compromises were necessary in order to produce Limo Roulette, John D. would be able to look at the screenplay objectively. Dr. Daruwalla had no doubt that the ex-Inspector Dhar would know what to do with the material.

  But for now—for the rest of his life, Farrokh knew—the story belonged in the bottommost drawer.

  Sort of Fading Now

  Almost three years after he left Bombay, the retired screenwriter read about the destruction of the Mosque of Babar; the unending hostilities he’d once mocked in Inspector Dhar and the Hanging Mali had turned uglier still. Fanatical Hindus had destroyed the 16th-century Babri mosque; rioting had left more than 400 dead—Prime Minister Rao called for shooting rioters on sight, both in Bhopal and in Bombay. Hindu fundamentalists weren’t pleased by Mr. Rao’s promise to rebuild the mosque; these fanatics continued to claim that the mosque had been built on the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama—they’d already begun building a temple to Rama at the site of the destroyed mosque. The hostilities would go on and on, Dr. Daruwalla knew. The violence would endure; it was always what lasted longest.

  And although Madhu would never be found, Detective Patel would keep inquiring for the girl; the child prostitute would be a woman now—if she was still managing to live with the AIDS virus, which was unlikely.

  “If we crash, do we burn or fly apart in little pieces?” Madhu had asked Dr. Daruwalla. “Something will get me,” she’d told the doctor. Farrokh couldn’t stop imagining her. He was always envisioning Madhu with Mr. Garg; they were traveling together from Junagadh to Bombay, escaping the Great Blue Nile. Although it would have been considered highly disgraceful, they would probably have been touching each other, not even secretly—secure in the misinformation that all that was wrong with them was a case of chlamydia.

  And almost as the deputy commissioner had predicted, the second Mrs. Dogar would be unable to resist the terrible temptations that presented themselves to her in her confinement with women. She bit off a fellow prisoner’s nose. In the course of the subsequent and extremely hard labor to which Rahul was then subjected, she would rebel; it would be unnecessary to hang her, for she was beaten to death by her guards.

  In another of life’s little passages, Ranjit would both retire and remarry. Dr. Daruwalla had never met the woman whose matrimonial advertisement in The Times of India finally snared his faithful medical secretary; however, the doctor had read the ad—Ranjit sent it to him. “An attractive woman of indeterminate age—innocently divorced, without issue—seeks a mature man, preferably a widower. Neatness and civility still count.” Indeed, they do, the doctor thought. Julia joked that Ranjit had probably been attracted to the woman’s punctuation.

  Other couples came and went, but the nature of couples, like violence, would endure. Even little Amy Sorabjee had married. (God help her husband.) And although Mrs. Bannerjee had died, Mr. Bannerjee wasn’t a widower for long; he married the widow Lal. Of these unsavory couplings, of course, the unchanging Mr. Sethna steadfastly disapproved.

  However set in his ways, the old steward still ruled the Duckworth Club dining room and the Ladies’ Garden with a possessiveness that was said to be enhanced by his newly acquired sense of himself as a promising actor. Dr. Sorabjee wrote to Dr. Daruwalla that Mr. Sethna had been seen addressing himself in the men’s-room mirror—long monologues of a thespian nature. And the old steward was observed to be slavishly devoted to Deputy Commissioner Patel, if not to the big blond wife who went everywhere with the esteemed detective. Apparently, the famous tea-pouring Parsi also fancied himself a promising policeman. Crime-branch investigation was no doubt perceived by Mr. Sethna as a heightened form of eavesdropping.

  Astonishingly, the old steward appeared to approve of something! The unorthodoxy of the deputy commissioner and his American wife becoming members of the Duckworth Club didn’t bother Mr. Sethna; it bothered many an orthodox Duckworthian. Clearly, the deputy commissioner hadn’t waited 22 years for his membership; although Detective Patel satisfied the requirement for “community leadership,” his instant acceptance at the club suggested that someone had bent the rules—someone had been looking for (and had found) a loophole. To many Duckworthians, the policeman’s membership amounted to a miracle; it was also considered a scandal.

  It was a minor miracle, in Detective Patel’s opinion, that no one was ever bitten by the escaped cobras in Mahalaxmi, for (according to the deputy commissioner) those cobras had been “assimilated” into the life of Bombay without a single reported bite.

  It wasn’t even a minor miracle that the phone calls from the woman who tried to sound like a man continued—not only after Rahul’s imprisonment, but also after her death. It strangely comforted Dr. Daruwalla to know that the caller had never been Rahul. Every time, as if reading from a script, the caller would leave nothing out. “Your father’s head was off, completely off! I saw it sitting on the passenger seat before flames engulfed the car.”

  Farrokh had learned how to interrupt the unslackening voice. “I know—I know already,” Dr. Daruwalla would say. “And his hands couldn’t let go of the steering wheel, even though his fingers were on fire—is that what you’re going to tell me? I’ve already heard it.”

  But the voice never relented. “I did it. I blew his head off. I watched him burn,” said the woman who tried to sound like a man. “And I’m telling you, he deserved it. Your whole family deserves it.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Farrokh had learned to say, although he generally disliked such language.

  Sometimes he would watch the video of Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer (that was Farrokh’s favorite) or Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence, which the former screenwriter believed was the most underrated of the Dhar films. But to his best friend, Mac, Farrokh would never confide that he’d written anything—not a word. Inspector Dhar was part of the doctor’s past. John D. had almost completely let Dhar go. Dr. Daruwal
la had to keep trying.

  For three years, the twins had teased him; neither John D. nor Martin Mills would tell Dr. Daruwalla what had passed between them on their flight to Switzerland. While the doctor sought clarification, the twins deliberately confused him; they must have done it to exasperate him—Farrokh was such a lot of fun when he was exasperated. The former Inspector Dhar’s most irritating (and least believable) response was, “I don’t remember.” Martin Mills claimed to remember everything. But Martin never told the same story twice, and when John D. did admit to remembering something, the actor’s version unfailingly contradicted the ex-missionary’s.

  “Let’s try to begin at the beginning,” Dr. Daruwalla would say. “I’m interested in that moment of recognition, the realization that you were face-to-face with your second self—so to speak.”

  “I boarded the plane first,” both twins would tell him.

  “I always do the same thing whenever I leave India,” the retired Inspector Dhar insisted. “I find my seat and get my little complimentary toilet kit from the flight attendant. Then I go to the lavatory and shave off my mustache, while they’re still boarding the plane.”

  This much was true. It was what John D. did to un-Dhar himself. This was an established fact, one of the few that Farrokh could cling to: both twins were mustacheless when they met.

  “I was sitting in my seat when this man came out of the lavatory, and I thought I recognized him,” Martin said.

  “You were looking out the window,” John D. declared. “You didn’t turn to look at me until I’d sat down beside you and had spoken your name.”

  “You spoke his name?” Dr. Daruwalla always asked.

  “Of course. I knew who he was instantly,” the ex-Inspector Dhar would reply. “I thought to myself: Farrokh must imagine he’s awfully clever—writing a script for everyone.”