A Son of the Circus Read online

And so, before he ruled out India as a country where he could live, he’d already ruled out England. It was the summer of ’49, during an at-home stay in Bombay, when young Farrokh Daruwalla suffered the experience that would (for him) rule out living in the United States, too. It was the same summer that another of his father’s more embarrassing weaknesses was revealed to him. Farrokh discounted the continuous discomfort of his father’s spinal deformity; this was not in the category of a weakness of any kind—on the contrary, Lowji’s hump was a source of inspiration. But now, in addition to Lowji’s overstatements of a political and religious nature, the senior Daruwalla unveiled a taste for romantic movies. Farrokh was already familiar with his father’s unbridled passion for Waterloo Bridge; tears sprang to his father’s eyes at the mere mention of Vivien Leigh, and no concept in storytelling struck old Lowji with such tragic force as those twists of fate that could cause a woman, both good and pure, to fall to the lowly rank of prostitute.

  But in the summer of ’49, young Farrokh was quite unprepared to find his father so infatuated with the commonplace hysteria of a film-in-progress. To make matters worse, it was a Hollywood film—of no special distinction beyond that endless capacity for compromise which was the principal gift of the film’s participants. Farrokh was appalled to witness his father’s slavishness before everyone who was even marginally involved.

  One shouldn’t be surprised that Lowji was vulnerable to movie people, or that the presumed glamour of postwar Hollywood was magnified by its considerable distance from Bombay. These particular lowlifes who’d invaded Maharashtra for the purpose of moviemaking had sizably damaged reputations—even in Hollywood, where shame is seldom suffered for long—but how could the senior Daruwalla have known this? Like many physicians the world over, Lowji imagined that he could have been a great writer—if medicine hadn’t attracted him first—and he further deluded himself that a second career opportunity lay ahead of him, perhaps in his retirement. He supposed that, with more time on his hands, it would take no great effort to write a novel—and surely less to write a screenplay. Although the latter assumption is quite true, even the effort of a screenplay would prove too great for old Lowji; it was never necessarily the power of his imagination that gave him great technique and foresight as a surgeon.

  Sadly, a natural arrogance often attends the ability to heal and cure. Renowned in Bombay—even recognized abroad for his accomplishments in India—Dr. Lowji Daruwalla nevertheless craved intimate contact with the so-called creative process. In the summer of 1949, with his highly principled younger son as a witness, the senior Daruwalla got what he desired.

  Inexplicable Hairlessness

  Often when a man of vision and character falls among the unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity, there is an intermediary, a petty villain in the guise of a matchmaker—one skilled in currying favor for small but gratifying gain. In this instance, she was a Malabar Hill lady of imposing wealth and only slightly less imposing presence; although she wouldn’t have categorized herself as a maiden aunt, she played this role in the lives of her undeserving nephews—the two scoundrel sons of her impoverished brother. She’d also suffered the tragic history of having been jilted by the same man on two different wedding days, a condition that prompted Dr. Lowji Daruwalla to privately refer to her as “the Miss Havisham of Bombay—times two.”

  Her name was Promila Rai, and prior to her insidious role of introducing Lowji to the movie vermin, her communications with the Daruwalla family had been merely rude. She’d once sought the senior Daruwalla’s advice regarding the inexplicable hairlessness of the younger of her loathsome two nephews—an odd boy named Rahul Rai. At the time of the doctor’s examination, which Lowji had at first resisted conducting on the grounds that he was an orthopedist, Rahul was only 8 or 10. The doctor found nothing “inexplicable” about his hairlessness. The absence of body hair wasn’t that unusual; the lad had bushy eyebrows and a thick head of hair. Yet Miss Promila Rai found old Lowji’s analysis lacking. “Well, after all, you’re only a joint doctor,” she said dismissively, to the orthopedist’s considerable irritation.

  But now Rahul Rai was 12 or 13, and the hairlessness of his mahogany skin was more apparent. Farrokh Daruwalla, who was 19 in the summer of ’49, had never liked the boy; he was an oily brat of a disquieting sexual ambiguity—possibly influenced by his elder brother, Subodh, a dancer and occasional actor in the emerging Hindi film scene. Subodh was better known for his flamboyant homosexuality than for his theatrical talents.

  For Farrokh to return from Vienna to find his father on friendly terms with Promila Rai and her sexually suspect nephews—well, one can imagine. In his undergraduate years, young Farrokh had developed intellectual and literary pretensions that were easily offended by the Hollywood scum who’d ingratiated themselves with his vulnerable, albeit famous, father.

  Quite simply, Promila Rai had wanted her actor-nephew Subodh to have a role in the movie; she also had wanted the prepubescent Rahul to be employed as a plaything of this court of creativity. The hairless boy’s apparently unformed sexuality made him the little darling of the Galifornians; they found him an able interpreter and an eager errand boy. And what had the Hollywood types wanted from Promila Rai in exchange for making creative use of her nephews? They wanted access to a private club—to the Duckworth Sports Club, which was highly recommended even in their lowlife circles—and they wanted a doctor, someone to look after their ailments. In truth, it was their terror of all the possible ailments of India that needed looking after, for in the beginning there was nothing in the slightest that was ailing them.

  It was a shock to young Farrokh to come home to this unlikely degradation of his father; his mother was mortified by Ms father’s choice of such crude companions and by what she considered to be his father’s shameless manipulation by Promila Rai. By giving this American movie rabble unlimited access to the club, old Lowji (who was chairman of the Rules Committee) had bent a sacred law of the Duckworthians. Previously, guests of members were permitted in the club only if they arrived and remained with a member, but the senior Daruwalla was so infatuated with his newfound friends that he’d extended special privileges to them. Moreover, the screenwriter, from whom Lowji believed he had the most to learn, was unwanted on the set; this sensitive artist and outcast had become a virtual resident of the Duckworth Club—and a constant source of bickering between Farrokh’s parents.

  It’s often embarrassing to discover the marital cuteness that exists among couples whose social importance is esteemed. Farrokh’s mother, Meher, was renowned for flirting with his father in public. Because there was nothing coarse in her overtures to her husband, Meher Daruwalla was recognized among Duckworthians as an exceptionally devoted wife; therefore, she’d attracted all the more attention at the Duckworth Club when she stopped flirting with Lowji. It was plain to everyone that Meher was feuding with Lowji instead. To young Farrokh’s shame, the whole Duckworth Club was put on edge by this obvious tension in the venerable Daruwalla marriage.

  A sizable part of Farrokh’s summer agenda was to prepare his parents for the romance that was developing for their two sons with the fabulous Zilk sisters—“the Vienna Woods girls,” as Jamshed called them. It struck Farrokh that the state of his parents’ marriage might make an unfavorable climate for a discussion of romance of any kind—not to mention his parents’ possible reluctance to accept the idea of their only sons marrying Viennese Roman Catholics.

  It was typical of Jamshed’s successful manipulation of his younger brother that Farrokh had been selected to return home for the summer in order to broach this subject. Farrokh was less intellectually challenging to Lowji; he was also the baby of the family, and therefore he appeared to be loved with the least reservation. And Farrokh’s intentions to follow his father in orthopedics doubtless pleased the old man and made Farrokh a more welcome bearer of conceivably unwelcome tidings than Jamshed would have been. The latter’s interest in psychiatry, which old Lowji spoke of as “an inexac
t science”—he meant in comparison with orthopedic surgery—had already driven a wedge between the father and his elder son.

  In any case, Farrokh saw that it would be poor timing for him to introduce the topic of the Fräuleins Josefine and Julia Zilk; his praise of their loveliness and virtues would have to wait. The story of their courageous widowed mother and her efforts to educate her daughters would have to wait, too. The dreadful American movie was consuming Farrokh’s helpless parents. Even the young man’s intellectual pursuits failed to capture his father’s attention.

  For example, when Farrokh admitted that he shared Jamshed’s passion for Freud, his father expressed alarm that Farrokh’s devotion to the more exact science of orthopedic surgery was waning. It was certainly the wrong idea to attempt to reassure his father on this point by quoting at length from Freud’s “General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks”; the concept that “the hysterical fit is an equivalent to coitus” wasn’t welcome information to old Lowji. Furthermore, Farrokh’s father absolutely rejected the notion of the hysterical symptom corresponding to a form of sexual gratification. In regard to so-called multiple sexual identification—as in the case of the patient who attempted to rip off her dress with one hand (this was said to be her man’s hand) while at the same time she desperately clutched her dress to her body (with her woman’s hand)—old Lowji Daruwalla was outraged by the concept.

  “Is this the result of a European education?” he cried. “To attach any meaning whatsoever to what a woman is thinking when she takes off her clothes—this is true madness!”

  The senior Daruwalla wouldn’t listen to a sentence with Freud’s name in it. That his father should reject Freud was further evidence to Farrokh of the tyrant’s intellectual rigidity and his old-fashioned beliefs. As an intended put-down of Freud, Lowji paraphrased an aphorism of the great Canadian physician Sir William Osler. A bedside clinician extraordinaire and a gifted essayist, Osler was a favorite of Farrokh’s, too. It was outrageous of Lowji to use Sir William to refute Freud; the old blunderbuss referred to the well-known Osler admonition that warns against studying medicine without textbooks—for this is akin to going to sea without a chart. Farrokh argued that this was a half-understanding of Osler and less than half an understanding of Freud, for hadn’t Sir William also warned that to study medicine without studying patients was not to go to sea at all? Freud, after all, had studied patients. But Lowji was unbudgeable.

  Farrokh was disgusted with his father. The young man had left home as a mere 17-year-old; at last he was a worldly and well-read 19. Far from being a paragon of brilliance and nobility, old Lowji now looked like a buffoon. In a rash moment, Farrokh gave his father a book to read. It was Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, a modern novel—at least it was “modern” to Lowji. It was also a religious novel, which was (in Lowji’s case) akin to holding the cape before the bull. Farrokh presented the novel to his father with the added temptation that the book had given considerable offense to the Church of Rome. This was a clever bit of baiting, and the old man was especially excited to learn that the book had been denounced by French bishops. For reasons Lowji never bothered to explain, he didn’t like the French. For reasons he explained entirely too often, Lowji thought all religions were “monsters.”

  It was surely idealistic of young Farrokh to imagine that he could draw his fierce, old-fashioned father into his recently acquired European sensibilities—especially by as simple a device as a favorite novel. Naively, Farrokh hoped that a shared appreciation of Graham Greene might lead to a discussion of the enlightened Zilk sisters, who, although Roman Catholics, did not share the consternation caused the Church of Rome by The Power and the Glory. And this discussion might lead to the matter of who these liberal-thinking Zilk sisters might be, and so on and so forth.

  But old Lowji despised the novel. He denounced it as morally contradictory—in his own words, “a big confusion of good and evil.” In the first place, Lowji argued, the lieutenant who puts the priest to death is portrayed as a man of integrity—a man of high ideals. The priest, on the other hand, is utterly corrupted—a lecher, a drunk, an absent father to his illegitimate daughter.

  “The man should have been put to death!” the senior Daruwalla exclaimed. “Only not necessarily because he was a priest!”

  Farrokh was bitterly disappointed by this pig-headed reaction to a novel he so loved that he’d already read it a half-dozen times. He deliberately provoked his father by telling him that his denouncement of the book was remarkably similar to the line of attack taken by the Church of Rome.

  And so the summer and the monsoon of 1949 began.

  Stuck in the Past

  Here come the characters who comprise the movie vermin, the Hollywood scum, the film slime—the aforementioned “unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity.” Fortunately, they are minor characters, yet so distasteful that their introduction has been delayed as long as possible. Besides, the past has already made an unwelcome intrusion into this narrative; the younger Dr. Daruwalla, who’s no stranger to unwanted and lengthy intrusions from the past, has all this time been sitting in the Ladies’ Garden of the Duckworth Club. The past has descended upon him with such lugubrious weight that he hasn’t touched his Kingfisher lager, which has grown undrinkably warm.

  The doctor knows he should at least get up from the table and call his wife. Julia should be told right away about poor Mr. Lal and the threat to their beloved Dhar: MORE MEMBERS DIE IF DHAR REMAINS A MEMBER. Farrokh should also forewarn her that Dhar is coming home for supper, not to mention that the doctor owes his wife some explanation regarding his cowardice; she will surely think him a coward for not telling Dhar the upsetting news—for Dr. Daruwalla knows that, any day now, Dhar’s twin is expected in Bombay. Yet he can’t even drink his beer or rise from his chair; it’s as if he were the second bludgeoned victim of the putter that cracked the skull of poor Mr. Lal.

  And all this time, Mr. Sethna has been watching him. Mr. Sethna is worried about the doctor—he’s never seen him not finish a Kingfisher before. The busboys are whispering; they must change the tablecloths in the Ladies’ Garden. The tablecloths for dinner, which are a saffron color, are quite different from the luncheon tablecloths, which are more of a vermillion hue. But Mr. Sethna won’t allow them to disturb Dr. Daruwalla. He’s not the man his father was, Mr. Sethna knows, but Mr. Sethna’s loyalty to Lowji is unquestionably extended beyond the grave—not only to Lowji’s children but even to that mysterious fair-skinned boy whom Mr. Sethna heard Lowji call “my grandchild” on more than one occasion.

  Such is Mr. Sethna’s loyalty to the Daruwalla name that he won’t tolerate the gossip in the kitchen. There is, for example, an elderly cook who swears that this so-called grandchild is the very same all-white actor who parades before them as Inspector Dhar. Although Mr. Sethna privately may believe this, he violently maintains that this couldn’t be true. If the younger Dr. Daruwalla claims that Dhar is neither his nephew nor his son—which he has claimed—this is good enough for Mr. Sethna. He declares emphatically to the kitchen staff, and to all the waiters and the busboys, too: “That boy we saw with old Lowji was someone else.”

  And now a half-dozen busboys glide into the failing light in the Ladies’ Garden, Mr. Sethna silently directing them with his piercing eyes and with hand signals. There are only a few saucers and an ashtray, together with the vase of flowers and the warm beer, on Dr. Daruwalla’s table. Each busboy knows his assignment: one takes the ashtray and another removes the tablecloth, precisely following the exact second when Mr. Sethna plucks up the neglected beer. There are three busboys who, between them, exchange the vermillion tablecloth for the saffron; then the same flower vase and a different ashtray are returned to the table. Dr. Daruwalla doesn’t notice, at first, that Mr. Sethna has substituted a cold Kingfisher for the warm one.

  It’s only after they’ve departed that Dr. Daruwalla appears to appreciate how the dusk has softened the brightness of both the pink and the white bougai
nvillea in the Ladies’ Garden, and how his brimming glass of Kingfisher is freshly beaded with condensation; the glass itself is so wet and cool, it seems to draw his hand. The beer is so cold and biting, he takes a long, grateful swallow—and then another and another. He drinks until the glass is empty, but still he stays at the table in the Ladies’ Garden, as if he’s waiting for someone—even though he knows his wife is expecting him at home.

  For a while, the doctor forgets to refill his glass; then he refills it. It’s a 21-ounce bottle—entirely too much beer for dwarfs, Farrokh remembers. Then a look crosses his face, of the kind one hopes will pass quickly. But the look remains, fixed and distant, and as bitter as the aftertaste of the beer. Mr. Sethna recognizes this look; he knows at once that the past has reclaimed Dr. Daruwalla, and by the bitterness of the doctor’s expression, Mr. Sethna thinks he knows which past. It’s those movie people, Mr. Sethna knows. They’ve come back again.

  5. THE VERMIN

  Learning the Movie Business

  The director, Gordon Hathaway, would meet his end on the Santa Monica Freeway, but in the summer of ’49 he was riding the fading success of a private-investigator movie. Perversely, it had inflamed his long-dormant desire to make what movie people call a “quality” picture. This picture wouldn’t be it. Although the director would manage to shoot the film, overcoming considerable adversity, the movie would never be released. Having had his fling with “quality,” Hathaway would return with a modest vengeance, and more modest success, to the so-called P.I. genre. In the 1960s, he would make the downward move to television, where he awaited the unnoticed conclusion of his career.

  Few aspects of Gordon Hathaway’s personality were unique. He called all actors and actresses by their first names, including the ones he’d never met, which was the case with most of them, and he wetly kissed on both cheeks both the men and women he was saying adieu to, which included those he’d met for only the first or second time. He would marry four times, in each marriage goatishly siring children who would revile him before they were teenagers. In each account, Gordon would be unsurprisingly cast as the villain, while the four respective mothers (his ex-wives) emerged as highly compromised yet sainted. Hathaway said he’d had the misfortune to sire only daughters. Sons, he claimed, would have taken his side—to quote him, “At least one out of four fuckin’ times.”