A Son of the Circus Page 13

  “I’ll tell you about Gordon,” Danny said. “It was Gordon’s idea to expand the role of the snake guru in the story—Gordon’s idea of the epitome of evil is an ashram with snakes. I’ll tell you about Gordon,” Danny Mills went on, when neither Lowji nor Farrokh had interrupted him. “Gordon’s never met a guru, with or without snakes. Gordon’s never seen an ashram, not even in California.”

  “It would be easy to arrange a meeting with a guru,” Lowji said. “It would be easy to visit an ashram.”

  “I’m sure you know what Gordon would say to that idea,” said Danny Mills, but the drunken screenwriter was looking at Farrokh.

  Farrokh attempted the best imitation of Gordon Hathaway that he could manage. “I’m makin’ a fuckin’ movie,” Farrokh said. “Do I got the time to meet a fuckin’ guru or go to a fuckin’ ashram when I’m in the middle of makin’ a fuckin’ movie?”

  “Smart boy,” said Danny Mills. It was to old Lowji that Danny confided: “Your son understands the movie business.”

  Although Danny Mills appeared to be a destroyed man, it was hard not to like him, Farrokh thought. Then he looked down in his beer and saw the two vivid violet cotton balls from Gordon Hathaway’s ears. How did they end up in my beer? Farrokh wondered. He needed to use a parfait spoon to extract them, dripping, from his beer glass. He put Gordon Hathaway’s soggy ear-cottons on a tea saucer, wondering how long they’d been soaking in his beer—and how much beer he’d drunk while Gordon Hathaway’s ear-cottons were sponging up the beer at the bottom of his glass. Danny Mills was laughing so hard, he couldn’t speak. Lowji could see what his critical son was thinking.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Farrokh!” his father told him. “Surely it was an accident.” This made Danny Mills laugh harder and harder, drawing Mr. Sethna to their table—where the steward stared in disapproval at the tea saucer containing the beer-soaked, still-purple cotton balls. Farrokh’s remaining beer was purple, too. Mr. Sethna was thinking that it was at least fortunate that Mrs. Daruwalla had already gone home for the evening.

  Farrokh helped his father arrange Danny Mills in the back seat of the car. Danny would be sound asleep before they’d traveled the length of the driveway of the Duckworth Club, or at least by the time they’d left Mahalaxmi. The screenwriter was always asleep by that time, if he didn’t go home earlier; when they dropped him at the Taj, Farrokh’s father would tip one of the tall Sikh doormen, who would transport Danny to his room on a luggage cart.

  This night—Farrokh in the passenger seat, his father driving, and Danny Mills asleep in the back seat—they had just entered Tardeo when his father said, “In your nearly constant expression, you might be wise not to display such obvious distaste for these people. I know you think you’re very sophisticated—and that they are vermin, beneath your contempt—but I’ll tell you what is most unsophisticated, and that is to wear your feelings so frankly on your face.”

  Farrokh would remember this, for he took the sting of such a rebuke very much to heart, while at the same time he sat silently seething in anger at his father, who wasn’t as entirely stupid as his young son had presumed him to be. Farrokh would remember this, too, because the car was exactly at that location in Tardeo where, 20 years later, his father would be blown to smithereens.

  “You should listen to these people, Farrokh,” his father was telling him. “It isn’t necessary for them to be your moral equals in order for you to learn something from them.”

  Farrokh would remember the irony, too. Although this was his father’s idea, Farrokh would be the one who actually learned something from the wretched foreigners; he’d be the one who took Danny’s advice.

  But Had He Learned Anything Worth Knowing?

  Farrokh wasn’t 19 now; he was 59. It was already past dusk at the Duckworth Club, but the doctor still sat slumped in his chair in the Ladies’ Garden. The younger Dr. Daruwalla wore an expression generally associated with failure; although he’d maintained absolute control of his Inspector Dhar screenplays—Farrokh was always granted “final script approval”—what did it matter? Everything he’d written was crap. The irony was, he’d been very successful writing movies that were no better than One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling.

  Dr. Daruwalla wondered if other screenwriters who’d written crap nevertheless dreamed, as he did, of writing a “quality” picture. In Farrokh’s case, his quality story always began in the same way; he just couldn’t get past the beginning.

  There was an opening shot of Victoria Terminus, the Gothic station with its stained-glass windows, its friezes, its flying buttresses, its ornate dome with the watchful gargoyles—in Farrokh’s opinion, it was the heart of Bombay. Inside the echoing station were a half-million commuters and the ever-arriving migrants; these latter travelers had brought everything with them, from their children to their chickens.

  Outside the huge depot was the vast display of produce in Crawford Market, not to mention the pet stalls, where you could buy parrots or piranhas or monkeys. And among the porters and the vendors, the beggars and the newcomers and the pickpockets, the camera (somehow) would single out his hero, although he was just a child and crippled. What other hero would an orthopedic surgeon imagine? And with the magical simultaneity that movies can occasionally manage, the boy’s face (a close-up) would let us know that his story had been chosen—among millions—while at that exact moment the boy’s voice-over would tell us his name.

  Farrokh was overly fond of the old-fashioned technique of voice-over; he’d used it to excess in every Inspector Dhar movie. There’s one that begins with camera following a pretty young woman through Crawford Market. She’s anxious, as if she knows she’s being followed, and this causes her to topple a heaped-up pile of pineapples at a fruit stand, which makes her run; this causes her to slip on the rotting compost underfoot, which makes her bump into a pet stall, where a vicious cockatoo pecks her hand. That’s when we see Inspector Dhar. As the young woman runs on, Dhar calmly follows her. He pauses by the stand of exotic birds only long enough to give the cockatoo a cuff with the back of his hand.

  His voice-over says, “It was the third time I’d tailed her, but she was still crazy enough to think she could shake me.”

  Dhar pauses again as the pretty girl, in her haste, collides with a heaped-up pile of mangoes. Dhar is enough of a gentleman to wait for the vendor to clear a path through the fallen fruit, but the next time he catches up with the woman, she’s dead. A bullet hole is smack between her wide-open eyes, which Dhar politely closes for her.

  His voice-over says, “It’s a pity I wasn’t the only one tailing her. She had trouble shaking someone else, too.”

  From his view of the younger Dr. Daruwalla in the Ladies’ Garden, old Mr. Sethna was sure he knew the source of the hatred he saw in the doctor’s eyes; the steward thought he knew the particular, long-ago vermin that the doctor was thinking of. But Mr. Sethna was unfamiliar with self-doubt and self-loathing. The old Parsi would never have imagined that Dr. Daruwalla was thinking about himself.

  Farrokh was taking himself to task for leaving that crippled boy at Victoria Terminus, where he’d arrived; so many Bombay stories began at Victoria Terminus, but Dr. Daruwalla had been unable to imagine any story for that abandoned child. The doctor was still wondering what could happen to the boy after he came to Bombay. Anything and everything could happen, Farrokh knew; instead, the screenwriter had settled for Inspector Dhar, whose tough-guy talk was as unoriginal as the rest of him.

  Dr. Daruwalla tried to save himself by thinking of a story with the innocence and purity of his favorite acts from the Great Royal Circus, but Farrokh couldn’t imagine a story as good as even the simplest of the so-called items that he loved. He couldn’t even think of a story as good as the daily routine of the circus. There were no wasted efforts in the course of the long day, which began with tea at 6:00 in the morning. The child performers and other acrobats did their strength and flexibility exercises and practiced their new items until 9:00 or 1
0:00, when they ate a light breakfast and cleaned their tents; in the rising heat, they sewed sequins on their costumes or they attended to other, almost motionless chores. There was no animal training from midmorning on; it was too hot for the big cats, and the horses and the elephants stirred up too much dust.

  Through the middle of the day, the tigers and lions lolled in their cages with their tails and paws and even their ears sticking out between the bars, as if they hoped that these extremities might attract a breeze; only their tails moved, among an orchestra of flies. The horses remained standing—it was cooler than lying down—and two boys took turns dusting the elephants with a torn cloth sack that had once held onions or potatoes. Another boy watered the floor of the main tent with a hose; in the midday heat, this didn’t dampen the dust for long. The overall torpor affected even the chimpanzees, who stopped swinging from their cages; they still screamed occasionally—and they jumped up and down, as always. But if a dog so much as whined, not to mention barked, someone kicked it.

  At noon, the animal trainers and the acrobats ate a big lunch; then they slept until midafternoon—their first performance always began after 3:00. The heat was still stultifying, and the motes of dust rose and sparkled like stars in the sunlight, which slanted through the vents in the main tent; in these harsh slashes of light, the dust appeared to swarm as intensely as the flies. In the breaks between their musical numbers, the band members passed a wet rag with which they wiped their brass instruments and, more often, their heads.

  There was usually a sparse audience in attendance at the 3:30 performance. They were an odd mix of people too old for a full day’s work and preschool children; in both cases, their alertness to the performances of the acrobats and the animals was below average, as if their limited powers of concentration were further impaired by the lingering heat and dust. Over the years, Dr. Daruwalla had never sensed that the 3:30 performance itself was ever a diminished effort; the acrobats and the animal trainers, and even the animals, were as steady as they had to be. It was the audience that was a little off.

  For this reason, Farrokh preferred the early-evening performance. Whole families came—young workingmen and -women, and children who were old enough to pay attention—and the scant, dying sunlight seemed distant, even gentle; the dust motes weren’t visible. It was the time of the evening when the flies appeared to have departed with the glare, and it was still too early for the mosquitoes. For the 6:30 performance, the place was always packed.

  The first item was the Plastic Lady, a “boneless” girl named Laxmi (the Goddess of Wealth). She was a beautiful contortionist—no sign of rickets. Laxmi was only 14, but the sharp definition of the bones in her face made her seem older. She wore a bright-orange bikini with yellow and red sequins that glittered in the strobe light; she looked like a fish with its scales reflecting a light that shone from underwater. It was dark enough in the main tent so that the changing colors of the stroboscope were effective, but enough of the late sunlight still illuminated the tent so that you could make out the faces of the children in the audience. Dr. Daruwalla thought that whoever said circuses were for children was only half right; the circus was also for grownups who enjoyed seeing children so enthralled.

  Why can’t I do that? the doctor wondered, thinking about the simple brilliance of the boneless girl named Laxmi—thinking of the crippled boy abandoned in Victoria Terminus, where Dr. Daruwalla’s imagination had stalled as soon as it had begun. Instead of creating something as pure and riveting as the circus, he’d turned his mind to mayhem and murder—personified by Inspector Dhar.

  What old Mr. Sethna mistook in Dr. Daruwalla’s miserable expression was simply the doctor’s deep disappointment with himself. With a sympathetic nod to the doctor, who sat forlornly in the Ladies’ Garden, the Parsi steward allowed himself a rare moment of familiarity with a passing waiter.

  “I’m glad I’m not the rat he’s thinking of,” Mr. Sethna said.

  Not the Curry

  Of course there was more wrong with One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling than Danny Mills’s alcoholism or his unsubtle plagiarism of Dark Victory; much more was amiss than Gordon Hathaway’s crass alterations of Danny’s “original” screenplay, or the director’s attendant hemorrhoids and fungus. To make matters worse, the actress who was playing the dying but saved wife was that talentless beauty and denizen of the gossip columns Veronica Rose. Her friends and colleagues called her Vera, but she was born in Brooklyn with the name Hermione Rosen and she was Gordon Hathaway’s niece (the C. of M.’s daughter). Small world, Farrokh would learn.

  The producer, Harold Rosen, would one day find his daughter as tiresomely tasteless as the rest of the world judged her to be upon the merest introduction; however, Harold was as easily bullied by his wife (the C. of M. sister of Gordon Hathaway) as Gordon was. Harold was operating on his wife’s assumption that Hermione Rosen, by her transformation to Veronica Rose, would one day be a star. Vera’s lack of talent and intelligence would prove too great an obstacle for such a goal—this in tandem with a compulsion to expose her breasts that even Lady Duckworth would have scorned.

  But at the Duckworth Club in the summer of ’49, a rumor was in circulation that Vera was soon to have a huge success. Concerning Hollywood, what did Bombay know? That Vera had been cast in the role of the dying but saved wife was all that Lowji Daruwalla knew. It would take a while for Farrokh to find out that Danny Mills had objected to Vera having the part—until she seduced him and made him imagine that he was in love with her. Then he trotted at her heels like a dog. Danny believed it was the intense pressure of the role that had cooled Vera’s brief ardor for him—Vera had her own room at the Taj, and she’d refused to sleep with Danny since the commencement of principal photography—but, in truth, she was having an obvious affair with her leading man. It wasn’t obvious to Danny, who usually drank himself to sleep and got up late.

  As for the leading man, he was a bisexual named Neville Eden. Neville was an uprooted Englishman and a properly trained actor, if not exactly brimming with natural ability, but his move to Los Angeles had turned sour when a certain predictability in the parts he was offered grew clear to him. He’d become too easy to cast as any number of stereotypical Brits. There was the Brit-twit role—the kind of instant Brit whom more rowdy and less educated Americans deplore—and then there was the sophisticated English gentleman who becomes the love interest of an impressionable American girl before she realizes her mistake and chooses the more substantial (if duller) American male. There was also the role of the visiting British cousin—sometimes this was a war buddy—who would comically display his inability to ride a horse, or to drive a car on the right-hand side of the road, or to successfully engage in fisticuffs in low bars. In all these roles, Neville felt he was supplying moronic reassurance to an audience that equated manliness with qualities only to be found in American men. This discovery tended to irritate him; doubtless it also fueled what he called his “homosexual self.”

  About One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling Neville was philosophic: at least it was a leading role, and the part wasn’t quite in the vein of the dimly perceived British types he was usually asked to portray—after all, in this story he was a happily married Englishman with a dying American wife. But even for Neville Eden the loser combination of Danny Mills, Gordon Hathaway and Veronica Rose was a trifle daunting. Neville knew from past experience that contact with a compromised script, a second-rate director and a floozy for a co-star tended to make him churlish. And Neville cared nothing for Vera, who was beginning to imagine that she was in love with him; yet he found fornicating with her altogether more inspiring, and amusing, than acting with her—and he was mightily bored.

  He was also married, which Vera knew; it caused her great anguish, or at least virulent insomnia. Of course she did not know that Neville was bisexual; this revelation was often the means by which Neville broke off such passing affairs. He’d found it instantly effective—to tell whichever floozy it wa
s that she was the first woman to capture his heart and his attention to such a degree, but that his homosexual self was simply stronger than both of them. That usually worked; that got rid of them, in a hurry. All but the wife.

  As for Gordon Hathaway, he had his hands full; his hemorrhoids and his fungus were trifling in comparison to the certain catastrophe he was facing. Veronica Rose wanted Danny Mills to go home so she could lavish even more obvious attention on Neville Eden. Gordon Hathaway complied with Vera’s request only to the degree that he forbade Danny’s presence on the set. The writer’s presence, Gordon claimed, “fuckin’ confused” the cast. But Gordon could hardly comply with his niece’s request to send Danny home; he needed Danny every night, to revise the ever-changing script. Understandably, Danny Mills wanted to reinstate his original script, which Neville Eden had agreed was better than the picture they were making. Danny thought Neville was a good chap, though it would have destroyed him to learn that Neville was fornicating with Vera. Vera, above all, dearly desired to sleep, and Dr. Lowji Daruwalla was alarmed by the sleeping pills she requested; yet he was such a fool for movies—he found her “charming,” too.

  His son Farrokh wasn’t exactly charmed by Veronica Rose; neither was he altogether immune to her attractions. Soon a conflict of emotions engulfed the tender 19-year-old. Vera was clearly a coarse young woman, which is not without allure to 19-year-olds, especially when the woman in question is intriguingly older—Vera was 25. Furthermore, while he knew nothing of the random pleasure Vera took in exposing her breasts, Farrokh found that the actress bore a remarkable resemblance to the old photographs he so relished of Lady Duckworth.

  It had been an evening in the empty dance hall when not even that depth of stone and the constant stirring of the ceiling fans could cool the stifling and humid night air, which had entered the Duckworth Club as heavily as a fog from the Arabian Sea. Even atheists, like Lowji, were praying for the monsoon rains. After dinner, Farrokh had escorted Vera from the table to the dance hall, not to dance with her but to show her Lady Duckworth’s photographs.