A Son of the Circus Read online

  When either too much Kingfisher or his run-amuck imagination caused Dr. Daruwalla to speculate in this fashion, the doctor was grateful that he was merely an orthopedic surgeon. He truly didn’t want to know too much about these other things. Yet Farrokh had to force himself from further contemplation, for he found that he was wondering what would be worse: that the second Mrs. Dogar sought to emasculate Inspector Dhar, or that she was in amorous pursuit of the handsome actor—and that she possessed a clitoris of an altogether unseemly size.

  Dr. Daruwalla was in such a transfixed state of mind, he didn’t notice that Vinod had one-handedly wheeled into the circular driveway of the Duckworth Club and was, with his other hand, belatedly applying the brakes. The dwarf nearly ran the doctor down. At least this served to take Dr. Daruwalla’s mind off the second Mrs. Dogar. If only for the moment, Farrokh forgot her.

  Load Cycle

  The better of the dwarf’s two taxis—of those two that were equipped with hand controls—was in the shop. “The carburetor is being revised,” Vinod explained. Since Dr. Daruwalla had no idea how one accomplished a carburetor revision, he didn’t press the dwarf for details. They departed the Duckworth Club in Vinod’s decaying Ambassador, which was the off-white color of a pearl—like graying teeth, Farrokh reflected. Also, its hand control for acceleration was inclined to stick.

  Nevertheless, Dr. Daruwalla abruptly asked the dwarf to drive him past his father’s former house on old Ridge Road, Malabar Hill; this was doubtless because Farrokh had his father and Malabar Hill on his mind. Farrokh and Jamshed had sold the house shortly after their father’s murder—when Meher had decided to live out the rest of her life in the company of her children and her grandchildren, all of whom had already chosen not to live in India. Dr. Daruwalla’s mother would die in Toronto, in the doctor’s guest bedroom. Meher’s death, in her sleep—when it had snowed all night—was as peaceful as the bombing of old Lowji had been violent.

  It wasn’t the first time Farrokh had asked Vinod to drive by his old Malabar Hill home. From the moving taxi, the house was barely visible. The former Daruwalla family estate reminded the doctor of how tangential his contact with the country of his birthplace had become, for Farrokh was a foreigner on Malabar Hill. Dr. Daruwalla lived, like a visitor, in one of those ugly apartment buildings on Marine Drive; he had the same view of the Arabian Sea as could be found from a dozen similar places. He’d paid 60 lakhs (about 250,000 dollars) for a flat of less than 1,200 square feet, and he hardly lived there at all—he visited India so rarely. He was ashamed that, the rest of the time, he didn’t rent it out. But Farrokh knew he would have been a fool to do so; the tenancy laws in Bombay favor the tenants. If Dr. Daruwalla had tenants, he’d never get them out. Besides, from the Inspector Dhar movies, the doctor had made so many lakhs that he supposed he should spend some of them in Bombay. Through the marvels of a Swiss bank account and the guile of a cunning money-dealer, Dhar had been successful in getting a sizable portion of their earnings out of India. Dr. Daruwalla also felt ashamed of that.

  Vinod seemed to sense when Dr. Daruwalla was vulnerable to charity. It was his own charitable enterprise that the dwarf was thinking of; Vinod was routinely shameless in seeking the doctor’s support of his most fervent cause.

  Vinod and Deepa had taken it upon themselves to rescue various urchins from the slums of Bombay; in short, they recruited street kids for the circus. They sought the more acrobatic beggars—demonstrably well coordinated children—and Vinod made every effort to steer these talented waifs toward circuses of more merit than the Great Blue Nile. Deepa was particularly devoted to saving child prostitutes, or would-be child prostitutes; rarely were these girls suitable circus material. To Dr. Daruwalla’s knowledge, the only circus that had stooped to adopt any of Vinod and Deepa’s discoveries was the less-than-great Blue Nile.

  To Farrokh’s considerable discomfort, many of these girls were Mr. Garg’s discoveries—that is, long before Vinod and Deepa had found them. Mr. Garg was the owner and manager of the Wetness Cabaret, where a kind of concealed grossness was the norm. Strip joints, not to mention sex shows, aren’t permitted in Bombay—at least not to the degree of explicitness that exists in Europe and in North America. In India, there’s no nudity, whereas “wetness”—meaning wet, clinging, almost transparent clothing—is much in evidence, and sexually suggestive gestures are the mainstay of so-called exotic dancers in such seedy entertainment spots as Mr. Garg’s. Among such spots, even including the Bombay Eros Palace, the Wetness Cabaret was the worst; yet the dwarf and his wife insisted to Dr. Daruwalla that Mr. Garg was the Good Samaritan of Kamathipura. In the many lanes of brothels that were there, and throughout the red-light district on Falkland Road and on Grant Road, the Wetness Cabaret was a haven.

  It was only a haven compared to a brothel, Farrokh supposed. Whether one called Garg’s girls strippers or “exotic dancers,” most of them weren’t whores. But many of them were runaways from the Kamathipura brothels, or from the brothels on Falkland Road and on Grant Road. In the brothels, the virginity of these girls had been only briefly prized—until the madam supposed they were old enough, or until there was a high enough offer. But when many of these girls ran away to Mr. Garg, they were much too young for what the Wetness Cabaret offered; ironically, they were old enough for prostitution but far too young to be exotic dancers.

  According to Vinod, most men who wanted to look at women wanted the women to look like women; apparently, these weren’t the same men who wanted to have sex with underage girls—and even those men, Vinod claimed, didn’t necessarily want to look at those young girls. Therefore, Mr. Garg couldn’t use them at the Wetness Cabaret, although Farrokh fantasized that Mr. Garg had used them in some private, unmentionable way.

  Dr. Daruwalla’s Dickensian theory was that Mr. Garg was perverse because of his physical appearance. The man gave Farrokh the creeps. Mr. Garg had made an astonishingly vivid impression on Dr. Daruwalla, considering that they had met only once; Vinod had introduced them. The enterprising dwarf was also Garg’s driver.

  Mr. Garg was tall and of military erectness, but with the sort of sallow complexion that Farrokh associated with a lack of exposure to daylight. The skin on Garg’s face had an unhealthy, waxy sheen, and it was unusually taut, like the skin of a corpse. Further enhancing Mr. Garg’s cadaverlike appearance was an unnatural slackness to his mouth; his lips were always parted, like the lips of someone who’d fallen asleep in a seated position, and his eye sockets were dark and bloated, as if full of stagnant blood. Worse, Mr. Garg’s eyes were as yellow and opaque as a lion’s—and as unreadable, Dr. Daruwalla thought. Worst of all was the burn scar. Acid had been flung in Mr. Garg’s face, which he’d managed to turn to the side; the acid had shriveled one ear and burned a swath along his jawline and down the side of his throat, where the raw pink smear disappeared under the collar of his shirt. Not even Vinod knew who’d thrown the acid, or why.

  All Mr. Garg’s girls needed from Dr. Daruwalla was the trusted physician’s assurance to the circuses that these girls were in the pink of health. But what could Farrokh say about the health of those girls from the brothels? Some of them were born in brothels; certain indications of congenital syphilis were easy to spot. And nowadays, the doctor couldn’t recommend them to a circus without having them tested for AIDS; few circuses—not even the Great Blue Nile—would take a girl if she was HIV-positive. Most of them carried something venereal; at the very least, the girls always had to be de-wormed. So few of them were ever taken, even by the Great Blue Nile.

  When the girls were rejected by the circus, what became of them? (“We are being good by trying,” Vinod would answer.) Did Mr. Garg sell them back to a brothel, or did he wait for them to grow old enough to be Wetness Cabaret material? It appalled Farrokh that, by the standards of Kamathipura, Mr. Garg was considered a benevolent presence; yet Dr. Daruwalla knew of no evidence against Mr. Garg—at least nothing beyond the common knowledge that he bribed the police,
who only occasionally raided the Wetness Cabaret.

  The doctor had once imagined Mr. Garg as a character in an Inspector Dhar movie; in a first draft of Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer, Dr. Daruwalla had written a cameo role for Mr. Garg—he was a child molester named Acid Man. Then Farrokh had thought better of it. Mr. Garg was too well known in Bombay. It might have become a legal matter, and there’d been the added risk of insulting Vinod and Deepa, which Dr. Daruwalla would never do. If Garg was no Good Samaritan, the doctor nevertheless believed that the dwarf and his wife were the real thing—they were saints to these children, or they tried to be. They were, as Vinod had said, “being good by trying.”

  Vinod’s off-white Ambassador was approaching Marine Drive when the doctor gave in to the dwarf’s nagging. “All right, all right—I’ll examine her,” Dr. Daruwalla told Vinod. “Who is she this time, and what’s her story?”

  “She is being a virgin,” the dwarf explained. “Deepa is saying that she is already an almost boneless girl—a future plastic lady!”

  “Who is saying she’s a virgin?” the doctor asked.

  “She is saying so,” Vinod said. “Garg is telling Deepa that the girl is running away from a brothel before anyone is touching her.”

  “So Garg is saying she’s a virgin?” Farrokh asked Vinod.

  “Maybe almost a virgin—maybe close,” the dwarf replied. “I am thinking she used to be a dwarf, too,” Vinod added. “Or maybe she is being part-dwarf. I am almost thinking so.”

  “That’s not possible, Vinod,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

  As the dwarf shrugged, the Ambassador surged into a rotary; the roundabout turn caused several tennis balls to roll across Farrokh’s feet, and the doctor heard the clunking of squash-racquet handles from under Vinod’s elevated seat. The dwarf had explained to Dr. Daruwalla that the handles of badminton racquets were too flimsy—they broke—and the handles of tennis racquets were too heavy to swing with sufficient quickness. The squash-racquet handles were just right.

  Only because he already knew where it was, Farrokh could faintly make out the odd billboard that floated on the boat moored offshore in the Arabian Sea; the hoarding bobbed on the water. TIKTOK TISSUES were being advertised again tonight.

  And tonight, and every night, the metal signs on the lampposts promised a good ride on APOLLO TYRES. The rush-hour traffic along Marine Drive had long ago subsided, and the doctor could tell by the lights from his own apartment that Dhar had already arrived; the balcony was lit up and Julia never sat on the balcony alone. They’d probably watched the sunset together, the doctor thought; he was aware, too, that the sun had set a long time ago. They’ll both be mad at me, Farrokh decided.

  The doctor told Vinod that he’d examine the “almost boneless” girl in the morning—the almost-a-virgin, Dr. Daruwalla almost said. The half-dwarf or former dwarf, the doctor imagined. Mr. Garg’s girl! he thought grimly.

  In the stark lobby of his apartment building, Farrokh felt for a moment that he could have been anywhere in the modern world. But when the elevator door opened, he was greeted by a familiar sign, which he detested.

  SERVANTS ARE NOT ALLOWED

  TO USE THE LIFT

  UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY CHILDREN

  The sign assaulted him with a numbing sense of inadequacy. It was a part of the pecking order of Indian life—not only the acceptance of discrimination, which was worldwide, but the deification of it, which Lowji Daruwalla had believed was so infuriatingly Indian, even though much of it was inherited from the Raj.

  Farrokh had tried to convince the Residents’ Society to remove the offensive sign, but the rules about servants were inflexible. Dr. Daruwalla was the only resident of the building who wasn’t in favor of forcing servants to use the stairs. Also, the Residents’ Society discounted Farrokh’s opinion on the grounds that he was a Non-Resident Indian—“NRI” was the doctor’s official government category. If this dispute about the use of the lift was the kind of issue that old Lowji would have got himself killed over, the younger Dr. Daruwalla self-deprecatingly viewed his failure with the Residents’ Society as typical of his political ineffectualness and his general out-of-itness.

  As he got off the elevator, he said to himself, I’m not a functioning Indian. The other day, someone at the Duckworth Club had been outraged that a political candidate in New Delhi was conducting a campaign “strictly on the cow issue”; Dr. Daruwalla had been unable to contribute an opinion because he was unsure what the cow issue was. He was aware of the rise of groups to protect cows, and he supposed they were a part of the Hindu-revivalist wave, like those Hindu-chauvinist holy men proclaiming themselves to be reincarnations of the gods themselves—and demanding to be worshiped as gods, too. He knew that there was still Hindu-Muslim rioting over the Mosque of Babar—the underlying subject of his first Inspector Dhar movie, which he’d found so funny at the time. Now thousands of bricks had been consecrated and stamped SHRI RAMA, which means “respected Rama,” and the foundation for a temple to Rama had been laid less than 200 feet from the Babri mosque. Not even Dr. Daruwalla imagined that the outcome of the 40-year feud over the Mosque of Babar would be “funny.”

  Here he was again, with his pathetic sense of not belonging. He knew that there were Sikh extremists, but he didn’t know one personally. At the Duckworth Club, he was on the friendliest terms with Mr. Bakshi—a Sikh novelist, and a great conversationalist on the subject of American movie classics—yet they’d never discussed Sikh terrorists. And Farrokh knew about the Shiv Sena and the Dalit Panthers and the Tamil Tigers, but he knew nothing personally. There were more than 600 million Hindus in India; there were 100 million Muslims, and millions of Sikhs and Christians, too. There were probably not even 80,000 Parsis, Farrokh thought. But in his own small part of India—in his ugly apartment building on Marine Drive—all these contentious millions were reduced in the doctor’s mind to what he called the elevator issue. Concerning the stupid lift, all these warring factions concurred: they disagreed only with him. Make the servants climb the stairs.

  Farrokh had recently read about a man who was murdered because his mustache gave “caste offense”; apparently, the mustache was waxed to curl up—it should have drooped down. Dr. Daruwalla decided: Inspector Dhar should leave India and never come back. And I should leave India and never come back, too! he thought. For so what if he helped a few crippled children in Bombay? What business did he have even imagining “funny” movies about a country like this? He wasn’t a writer. And what business did he have taking blood from dwarfs? He wasn’t a geneticist, either.

  Thus, with a characteristic loss of self-confidence, Dr. Daruwalla entered his apartment to face the music he was certain he would hear. He’d been late in telling his beloved wife that he’d invited his beloved John Daruwalla for the evening meal, and the doctor had kept them both waiting. Also, he’d lacked the courage to tell Inspector Dhar the upsetting news.

  Farrokh felt he was trapped in a circus act of his own creation, an annoying pattern of procrastination that he couldn’t break out of. He was reminded of an item in the Great Royal Circus; at first he’d found it a charming sort of madness, but now he thought it might drive him crazy if he ever saw it again. It conveyed such a meaningless but relentless insanity, and the accompanying music was so repetitious; in Dr. Daruwalla’s mind, the act stood for the lunatic monotony that weighed on everyone’s life from time to time. The item was called Load Cycle, and it was a case of simplicity carried to idiotic extremes.

  There were two bicycles, each one pedaled by a very solid, strong-looking woman. The pair followed each other around the ring. They were joined by other plump, dark-skinned women, who found a variety of means by which to mount the moving bicycles. Some of the women perched on little posts that extended from the hubs of the front and back wheels; some mounted the handlebars and wobbled precariously there—others teetered on the rear fenders. And regardless of how many women mounted the bicycles, the two strong-looking women kept pedalin
g. Then little girls appeared; they climbed on the shoulders and stood on the heads of the other women—including the laboring, sturdy pedalers—until two struggling pyramids of women were clinging to these two bicycles, which never stopped circling the ring.

  The music was of a sustained madness equal to one fragment of the cancan, repeated and repeated, and all the dark-skinned women—both the fat, older women and the little girls—wore too much face powder, which gave them a minstrel-like aura of unreality. They also wore pale-purple tutus, and they smiled and smiled and smiled as they tottered around and around and around the ring. The last time the doctor had seen a performance of this item, he’d thought it would never end.

  Perhaps there’s a Load Cycle in everyone’s life, thought Dr. Daruwalla. As he paused at the door of his apartment, Farrokh felt he’d been enduring a Load Cycle sort of day. Dr. Daruwalla could imagine the cancan music starting up again, as if he were about to be greeted by a dozen dark-skinned girls in pale-purple tutus—all of them white-faced and moving to the insane, incessant rhythm.

  7. DR. DARUWALLA HIDES IN HIS BEDROOM

  Now the Elephants Will Be Angry

  But the past is a labyrinth. Where’s the way out? In the front hall of his apartment, where there were no dark-skinned, white-faced women in tutus, the doctor was halted by the clear but distant sound of his wife’s voice. It reached him all the way from the balcony, where Julia was indulging Inspector Dhar with his favorite view of Marine Drive. On occasion, Dhar slept on that balcony, either when he stayed so late that he preferred to spend the night, or else when he’d just arrived in Bombay and needed to reacquaint himself with the city’s smell.