A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  It was never acknowledged that John D. had played the role of the Patels’ benefactor or the part of Nancy’s guardian angel. But not only had John D.’s resignation from the Duckworth Club provided a membership for the Patels; it had been John D.’s idea that the view from the Daruwallas’ balcony would do Nancy some good. Without questioning the doctor’s motives, the Patels had moved into the Marine Drive apartment—ostensibly to look after the aged servants.

  In one of several flawlessly typed letters, Deputy Commissioner Patel wrote to Dr. Daruwalla that although the offensive elevator sign had not been replaced—that is, after it was stolen a second time—the Daruwallas’ ancient servants nevertheless continued to struggle up and down the stairs. The old rules had penetrated Nalin and Roopa; the rules were permanently in place—they would outlive any sign. The servants themselves refused to ride in the lift; their tragic preconditioning couldn’t be helped. The policeman expressed a deeper sympathy for the thief. The Residents’ Society had assigned the task of catching the culprit to Detective Patel. The deputy commissioner confided to Dr. Daruwalla that he wasn’t making much progress in solving the case, but that he suspected the second thief was Nancy—not Vinod.

  As for the continued disruption to the building that was caused by the first-floor dogs, this always happened at an ungodly hour of the early morning. The first-floor residents claimed that the dogs were deliberately incited to bark by a familiar, violent-looking dwarf taxi driver—formerly a “chauffeur” for Dr. Daruwalla and the retired Inspector Dhar—but Detective Patel was inclined to lay the blame on various stray beggars off Chowpatty Beach. Even after a lock was fashioned for the lobby door, the dogs were occasionally driven insane, and the first-floor residents insisted that the dwarf had managed to gain unlawful entrance to the lobby; several of them said they’d seen an off-white Ambassador driving away. But these allegations were discounted by the deputy commissioner, for the first-floor dogs were barking in May of 1993—more than a month after those Bombay bombings that killed more than 200 people, Vinod among them.

  The dogs were still barking, Detective Patel wrote to Dr. Daruwalla. It was Vinod’s ghost who was disturbing them, Farrokh felt certain.

  On the door of the downstairs bathroom in the Daruwallas’ house on Russell Hill Road, there hung the sign that the dwarf had stolen for them. It was a big hit with their friends in Toronto.

  SERVANTS ARE NOT ALLOWED

  TO USE THE LIFT

  UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY CHILDREN

  In retrospect, it seemed cruel that the ex-clown had survived the terrible teeterboard accident at the Great Blue Nile. It appeared that the gods had toyed with Vinod’s fate—that he’d been launched by an elephant into the bleachers and had risen to a kind of local stardom in the private-taxi business seemed trivial. And that the dwarf had come to the rescue of Martin Mills, who’d fallen among those unusually violent prostitutes, seemed merely mock-heroic now. It struck Dr. Daruwalla as completely unfair that Vinod had been blown up in the bombing of the Air India building.

  On the afternoon of March 12, 1993, a car bomb exploded on the exit ramp of the driveway, not far from the offices of the Bank of Oman. People were killed on the street; others were killed in the bank, which occupied that part of the Air India building nearest the site of the explosion. The Bank of Oman was demolished. Probably Vinod was waiting for a passenger who was doing business in the bank. The dwarf had been sitting at the wheel of his taxi, which was unfortunately parked next to the vehicle containing the car bomb. Only Deputy Commissioner Patel was capable of explaining why so many squash-racquet handles and old tennis balls were scattered all over the street.

  There was a clock on the Air India hoarding, the billboard above the building; for two or three days after the bombing, the time was stuck at 2:48—strangely, Dr. Daruwalla would wonder if Vinod had noticed the time. The deputy commissioner implied that the dwarf had died instantly.

  Patel reported that the pitiful assets of Vinod’s Blue Nile, Ltd., would scarcely provide for the dwarf’s wife and son; but Shivaji’s success at the Great Royal Circus would take care of the young dwarf and his mother, and Deepa had earlier been left a sizable inheritance. To her surprise, she’d been more than mentioned in Mr. Garg’s will. (Acid Man had died of AIDS within a year of the Daruwallas’ departure from Bombay.) The holdings of the Wetness Cabaret had been huge in comparison to those of Vinod’s Blue Nile, Ltd. The size of Deepa’s share of the strip joint had been sufficient to close the cabaret down.

  Exotic dancing had never meant actual stripping—real strip joints weren’t allowed in Bombay. What passed for exotic dancing at the Wetness Cabaret had never amounted to more than stripteasing. The clientele, as Muriel had once observed, was truly vile, but the reason someone had thrown an orange at her was that the exotic dancer wouldn’t take off her clothes. Muriel was a stripper who wouldn’t strip, just as Garg had been a Good Samaritan who wasn’t a Good Samaritan—or so Dr. Daruwalla supposed.

  There was a photograph of Vinod that John D. had framed; the actor kept it on his desk in his Zürich apartment. It wasn’t a picture of the dwarf in his car-driving days, when the former Inspector Dhar had known Vinod best; it was an old circus photo. It had always been John D.’s favorite photograph of Vinod. In the picture, the dwarf is wearing his clown costume; the baggy polka-dotted pants are so short, Vinod appears to be standing on his knees. He’s wearing a tank top, a muscle shirt—with spiraling stripes, like the stripes on a barber’s pole—and he’s grinning at the camera, his smile enhanced by the larger smile that’s painted on his face; the edges of his painted smile extend to the corners of the dwarf’s bright eyes.

  Standing directly beside Vinod, in profile to the camera, is an open-mouthed hippopotamus. What’s shocking about the photograph is that the whole dwarf, standing up straight, would easily fit in the hippo’s yawning mouth. The oddly opposed lower teeth are within Vinod’s reach; the hippo’s teeth are as long as the dwarf’s arms. At the time, the little clown must have felt the heat from the hippo’s mouth—the breath of rotting vegetables, the result of the lettuce that Vinod recalled feeding to the hippo, who swallowed the heads whole. “Like grapes,” the dwarf had said.

  Not even Deepa could remember how long ago the Great Blue Nile had had a hippo; by the time the dwarf’s wife joined the circus, the hippopotamus had died. After the dwarf’s death, John D. typed an epitaph for Vinod on the bottom of the hippo picture. Clearly, the epitaph was composed in memory of the forbidden elevator—that elite lift which the dwarf had never officially been allowed to use. Presently accompanied by children, the commemoration read.

  It wasn’t a bad epitaph, the retired screenwriter thought. Farrokh had acquired quite a collection of photographs of Vinod, most of which the dwarf had given him over the years. When Dr. Daruwalla wrote his condolences to Deepa, the doctor wanted to include a photo that he hoped the dwarf’s wife and son would like. It was hard to select only one; the doctor had so many pictures of Vinod—many more were in his mind, of course.

  While Farrokh was trying to find the perfect picture of Vinod to send to Deepa, the dwarf’s wife wrote to him. It was just a postcard from Ahmedabad, where the Great Royal was performing, but the thought was what mattered to Dr. Daruwalla. Deepa had wanted the doctor to know that she and Shivaji were all right. “Still falling in the net,” the dwarf’s wife wrote.

  That helped Farrokh find the photo he was looking for; it was a picture of Vinod in the dwarf’s ward at the Hospital for Crippled Children. The dwarf is recovering from surgery, following the results of the Elephant on a Teeterboard item. This time, there’s no clownish smile painted over Vinod’s grin; the dwarf’s natural smile is sufficient. In his stubby-fingered, trident hand, Vinod is clutching that list of his talents which featured car driving; the dwarf is holding his future in one hand. Dr. Daruwalla only vaguely remembered taking the picture.

  Under the circumstances, Farrokh felt it was necessary for him to inscribe some end
earment on the back of the photograph; Deepa wouldn’t need to be reminded of the occasion of the photo—at the time, she’d been occupying a bed in the women’s ward of the same hospital, recovering from the doctor’s surgery on her hip. Inspired by John D.’s epitaph for Vinod, the doctor continued with the forbidden-elevator theme. Allowed to use the lift at last, the former screenwriter wrote, for although Vinod had missed the net, the dwarf had finally escaped the rules of the Residents’ Society.

  Not the Dwarfs

  One day, how would Dr. Daruwalla be remembered? As a good doctor, of course; as a good husband, a good father—a good man, by all counts, though not a great writer. But whether he was walking on Bloor Street or stepping into a taxi on Avenue Road, almost no one seeing him would have thought twice about him; he was so seemingly assimilated. A well-dressed immigrant, perhaps; a nice, naturalized Canadian—maybe a well-to-do tourist. Although he was small, one could quibble about his weight; for a man in the late afternoon of his life, he would be wise to be thinner. Nevertheless, he was distinguished-looking.

  Sometimes he seemed a little tired—chiefly in the area of his eyes—or else there was something faraway about his thoughts, which, for the most part, he kept to himself. No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind. Possibly what passed for his tiredness was nothing more than the cost of his considerable imagination, which had never found the outlet that it sought.

  At the AIDS hospice, Farrokh would forever be remembered as Dr. Balls, but this was largely out of fondness. The one patient who’d bounced his tennis ball instead of squeezing it hadn’t irritated the nurses or the other staff for very long. When a patient died, that patient’s tennis ball would be returned to Dr. Daruwalla. The doctor had been only briefly bitten by religion; he wasn’t religious anymore. Yet these tennis balls of former patients were almost holy objects to Farrokh.

  At first, he would be at a loss with what to do with the old balls; he could never bring himself to throw them away, nor did he approve of giving them to new patients. Eventually, he disposed of them—but in an oddly ritualistic fashion. He buried them in Julia’s herb garden, where dogs would occasionally dig them up. Dr. Daruwalla didn’t mind that the dogs got to play with the tennis balls; the doctor found this a suitable conclusion to the life of these old balls—a pleasing cycle.

  As for the damage to the herb garden, Julia put up with it; after all, it wasn’t her husband’s only eccentricity. She respected his rich and hidden interior life, which she thoroughly expected to yield a puzzling exterior; she knew Farrokh was an interior man. He had always been a daydreamer; now that he didn’t write, he seemed to daydream a little more.

  Once, Farrokh told Julia that he wondered if he was an avatar. In Hindu mythology, an avatar is a deity, descended to earth in an incarnate form or some manifest shape. Did Dr. Daruwalla really believe he was the incarnation of a god?

  “Which god?” Julia asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Farrokh humbly told her. Certainly he was no Lord Krishna, “the dark one”—an avatar of Vishnu. Just whom did he imagine he was an avatar of? The doctor was no more the incarnation of a god than he was a writer; he was, like most men, principally a dreamer.

  It’s best to picture him on a snowy evening, when darkness has fallen early in Toronto. Snow always made him melancholic, for it snowed all night the night his mother died. On snowy mornings, Farrokh would go sit in the guest bedroom where Meher had drifted away; some of her clothes were in the closet—something of her scent, which was the scent of a foreign country and its cooking, still lingered in her hanging saris.

  But picture Dr. Daruwalla in the streetlight, standing directly under a lamppost in the falling snow. Picture him at the northeast corner of Lonsdale and Russell Hill Road; this Forest Hill intersection was familiar and comforting to Farrokh, not only because it was within a block of where he lived, but because, from this junction, he could view the route he’d taken those many days when he’d walked his children to school. In the opposite direction, there was Grace Church on-the-Hill … where he’d passed a few reflective hours in the safety of his former faith. From this street corner, Dr. Daruwalla could also see the chapel and the Bishop Strachan School, where the doctor’s daughters had ably demonstrated their intelligence; and Farrokh wasn’t far from Upper Canada College, where his sons might have gone to school—if he’d had sons. But, the doctor reconsidered, he’d had two sons—counting John D. and the retired Inspector Dhar.

  Farrokh tipped his face up to the falling snow; he felt the snow wet his eyelashes. Although Christmas was long past, Dr. Daruwalla was pleased to see that some of his neighbors’ houses still displayed their yuletide ornamentation, which gave them unusual color and cheer. The snow falling in the streetlight gave the doctor such a pure-white, lonely feeling, Farrokh almost forgot why he was standing on this street corner on a winter evening. But he was waiting for his wife; the former Julia Zilk was due to pick him up. Julia was driving from one of her women’s groups; she’d phoned and told Farrokh to wait at the corner. The Daruwallas were dining at a new restaurant not far from Harbourfront; Farrokh and Julia were a faithful audience for the authors’ readings at Harbourfront.

  As for the restaurant, Dr. Daruwalla would find it ordinary; also, they were eating too early for the doctor’s taste. As for the authors’ readings, Farrokh detested readings; so few writers knew how to read aloud. When you were reading a book to yourself, you could close the cover without shame and try something else, or watch a video, which the ex-screenwriter was more and more apt to do. His usual beer—and he often had wine with his dinner—made him too sleepy to read. At Harbourfront, he feared he’d start snoring in the audience and embarrass Julia; she loved the readings, which the doctor increasingly viewed as an endurance sport. Often, too many writers read in a single night, as if to make a public demonstration of Canada’s esteemed subsidy of the arts; usually, there was an intermission, which was Dr. Daruwalla’s principal reason for loathing the theater. And at the Harbourfront intermission, they’d be surrounded by Julia’s well-read friends; her friends were more literary than Farrokh, and they knew it.

  On this particular evening (Julia had warned him), there was an Indian author reading from his or her work; that always presented problems for Dr. Daruwalla. There was the palpable expectation that the doctor should “relate” to this author in some meaningful way, as if there were that recognizable “it” which the author would either get right or get wrong. In the case of an Indian writer, even Julia and her literary friends would defer to Farrokh’s opinion; therefore, he would be pressed to have an opinion, and to state his views. Often, he had no views and would hide during the intermission; on occasion, to his shame, the retired screenwriter had hidden in the men’s room.

  Recently, quite a celebrated Parsi writer had read at Harbourfront; Dr. Daruwalla had the feeling that Julia and her friends expected the doctor to be aggressive enough to speak to the author, for Farrokh had read the justly acclaimed novel–he’d much admired it. The story concerned a small but sturdy pillar of a Parsi community in Bombay—a-decent, compassionate family man was severely tested by the political corruption and deceit of that time when India and Pakistan were at war.

  How could Julia and her friends imagine that Farrokh could talk with this author? What did Dr. Daruwalla know of a real Parsi community—either in Bombay or in Toronto? What “community” could the doctor presume to talk about?

  Farrokh could only tell tales of the Duckworth Club—Lady Duckworth exposing herself, flashing her famous breasts. One didn’t have to be a Duckworthian to have already heard that story, but what other stories did Dr. Daruwalla know? Only the doctor’s own story, which was decidedly unsuitable for first acquaintances. Sex change and serial slaying; a conversion by love bite; the lost children who were not saved by the circus; Farrokh’s father, blown to smithereens … and how could he talk about the twins to a total stranger?

  It seeme
d to Dr. Daruwalla that his story was the opposite of universal; his story was simply strange—the doctor himself was singularly foreign. What Farrokh came in contact with, everywhere he went, was a perpetual foreignness—a reflection of that foreignness he carried with him, in the peculiarities of his heart. And so, in the falling snow, in Forest Hill, a Bombayite stood waiting for his Viennese wife to take him into downtown Toronto, where they would listen to an unknown Indian reader—perhaps a Sikh, possibly a Hindu, maybe a Muslim, or even another Parsi. It was likely that there would be other readers, too.

  Across Russell Hill Road, the wet snow clung to the shoulders and hair of a mother and her small son; like Dr. Daruwalla, they stood under a lamppost, where the radiant streetlight brightened the snow and sharpened the features of their watchful faces—they appeared to be waiting for someone, too. The young boy seemed far less impatient than his mother. The child had his head tilted back, with his tongue stuck out to catch the falling snow, and he swung himself dreamily from his mother’s arm—whereas she kept clutching at his hand, as if he were slipping from her grasp. She would occasionally jerk his arm to make him stop swinging, but this never worked for long, and nothing could compel the boy to withdraw his tongue; it remained sticking out, catching the snow.

  As an orthopedist, Dr. Daruwalla disapproved of the way the mother jerked on her son’s arm, which was totally relaxed—the boy was almost limp. The doctor feared for the child’s elbow or his shoulder. But the mother had no intention of hurting her son; she was just impatient, and it was tedious for her—how the boy hung on her arm.