A Son Of The Circus (83 page)

‘Is this a popular musical?’ the Jesuit whispered to Dr Daruwalla.

‘It’s the [_Mahabharata – _]be quiet!’ Farrokh told him.

The
Mahabharata
is on television?’ the missionary cried. The whole thing? It must be ten times as long as the Bible!’

‘
Ssshhh
!’ the doctor replied. Mrs Das waved both her arms again.

There on the screen was Lord Krishna, ‘the dark one’ – an avatar of Vishnu. The child acrobats gaped in awe; Ganesh and Madhu were transfixed. Mrs Das rocked back and forth; she was quietly humming. Even the ringmaster hung on Krishna’s every word. The sound of weeping was in the background of the scene; apparently Lord Krishna’s speech was emotionally stirring.

‘Who’s that guy?’ Martin whispered.

‘Lord Krishna,’ whispered Dr Daruwalla.

There went both of Mrs Das’s arms again, but the scholastic was too excited to keep quiet. Just before the show was over, the Jesuit whispered once more in the doctor’s ear; the zealot felt compelled to say that Lord Krishna reminded him of Charlton Heston.

But Sunday morning at the circus was special for more reasons than the
Mahabharata
. It was the only morning in the week when the child acrobats didn’t practice their acts, or learn new items, or even do their strength and flexibility exercises. They did do their chores; they would sweep and neaten their bed areas, and they swept and cleaned the tiny kitchen in the troupe tent. If there were sequins missing from their costumes, they would get out the old tea tins that were filled with sequins — one color per tin — and sew new sequins on their singlets.

Mrs Das wasn’t unfriendly as she introduced Madhu to these chores; nor were the other girls in the troupe tent unwelcoming to Madhu. An older girl went through the costume trunks, pulling out the singlets that she thought might fit the child prostitute, Madhu was interested in the costumes; she was even eager to try them on.

Mrs Das confided to Dr Daruwalla that she was happy Madhu wasn’t from Kerala. ‘Kerala girls want too much,’ said the ringmaster’s wife. They expect good food all the time, and coconut hair oil.’

Mr Das spoke to Dr Daruwalla in hushed confidentiality; Kerala girls were reputed to be a hot lay, a virtue negated by the fact that these girls would attempt to unionize everyone. The circus was no place for a Communist-party revolt; the ringmaster concurred with his wife – it was a good thing Madhu wasn’t a Kerala girl. This was as close as Mr and Mrs Das could come to sounding reassuring — by expressing a common prejudice against people from somewhere else.

The child acrobats were not unkind to Ganesh; they simply ignored him. Martin Mills in his bandages was more interesting to them; they’d all heard about the chimp attack – many of them had seen it. The elaborately bandaged wounds excited them, although they were disappointed that Dr Daruwalla refused to unwrap the ear; they wanted to see what was missing.

‘How much? This much?’ one of the acrobats asked the missionary.

‘Actually,’ Martin replied, ‘I didn’t see how much was missing.’

This conversation deteriorated into speculation about whether or not Gautam had swallowed the piece of earlobe. Dr Daruwalla observed that none of the child acrobats appeared to notice how the missionary resembled Inspector Dhar, although Hindi films were a part of their world. Their interest was in the missing piece of Martin’s earlobe, and whether or not the ape had eaten it.

‘Chimps aren’t meat eaters,’ said an older boy. ‘If Gautam swallowed it, he’d be sick this morning.’ Some of them, those who’d finished their chores, went to see if Gautam was sick; they insisted that the missionary come with them. Dr Daruwalla realized that he shouldn’t linger; it wouldn’t do Madhu any good.

‘I’ll say good-bye now,’ the doctor told the child prostitute. ‘I hope that your new life is happy. Please be careful.’

When she put her arms around his neck, Farrokh flinched; he thought she was going to kiss him, but he was mistaken. All she wanted to do was whisper in his ear. Take me home,’ Madhu whispered. But what was ‘home’ — what could she mean? the doctor wondered. Before he could ask her, she told him. ‘I want to be with Acid Man,’ she whispered. Just that simply, Madhu had adopted Dr Daruwalla’s name for Mr Garg. All the screenwriter could do was take her arms from his neck and give her a worried look. Then the older girl distracted Madhu with a brightly sequined singlet – the front was red, the back orange – and Farrokh was able to slip away.

Chandra had built a bed for the elephant boy in a wing of the cook’s tent; Ganesh would sleep surrounded by sacks of onions and rice – a wall of tea tins was the makeshift headboard for his bed. So that the boy wouldn’t be homesick, the cook had given him a Maharashtrian calendar; there was Parvati with her elephant-headed son, Ganesh – Lord Ganesha, ‘the lord of hosts,’ the one-tusked deity.

It was hard for Farrokh to say good-bye. He asked the cook’s permission to take a walk with the elephant-footed boy. They went to look at the lions and tigers, but it was well before meat-feeding time; the big cats were either asleep or cranky. Then the doctor and the cripple strolled in the avenue of troupe tents. A dwarf clown was washing his hair in a bucket, another was shaving; Farrokh was relieved that none of the clowns had tried to imitate Ganesh’s limp, although Vinod had warned the boy that this was sure to happen. They paused at Mr and Mrs Bhagwan’s tent; in front was a display of the knife thrower’s knives – apparently it was knife-sharpening day for Mr Bhagwan – and in the doorway Mrs Bhagwan was unbraiding her long black hair, which reached nearly to her waist.

When the skywalker saw the cripple, she called him to her. Dr Daruwalla followed shyly. Everyone who limps needs extra protection, Mrs Bhagwan was telling the elephant boy; therefore, she wanted him to have a Shirdi Sai Baba medallion – Sai Baba, she said, was the patron saint of all people who were afraid of falling. ‘Now he won’t be afraid,’ Mrs Bhagwan explained to Dr Daruwalla. She tied the trinket around the boy’s neck; it was a very thin piece of silver on a rawhide thong. Watching her, the doctor could only marvel at how, as an unmarried woman, she’d once suffered the Skywalk while bleeding from her period •– before it was proper for her to use a tampon. Now she mechanically submitted to the Skywalk, and to her husband’s knives.

Although Mrs Bhagwan wasn’t pretty, her hair was shiny and beautiful; yet Ganesh wasn’t looking at her hair – he was staring into her tent. Along the roof was the practice model for the Skywalk, the ladderlike device, complete with exactly 18 loops. Not even Mrs Bhagwan could skywalk without practice. Also hanging from the roof of the troupe tent was a dental trapeze; it was as shiny as Mrs Bhagwan’s hair –
(he
doctor imagined that it might still be wet from her mouth.

Mrs Bhagwan saw where the boy was looking.

‘He’s got this foolish idea that he wants to be a skywalker,’ Farrokh explained.

Mrs Bhagwan looked sternly at Ganesh. That
is
a foolish idea,’ she said to the cripple. She took hold of her gift, the boy’s Sai Baba medallion, and tugged it gently in her gnarled hand. Dr Daruwalla realized that Mrs Bhagwan’s hands were as large and powerful-looking as a man’s; the doctor was unpleasantly reminded of his last glimpse of the second Mrs Dogar’s hands – how they’d restlessly plucked at the tablecloth, how they’d looked like paws. ‘Not even Shirdi Sai Baba can save a skywalker from falling,’ Mrs Bhagwan told Ganesh.

‘What saves you then?’ the boy asked her.

The skywalker showed him her feet; they were bare under the long skirt of her sari, and they were oddly graceful, even delicate, in comparison to her hands. But the tops of her feet and the fronts of her ankles were so roughly chafed that the normal skin was gone; in its place was hardened scar tissue, wrinkled and cracked.

‘Feel them,’ Mrs Bhagwan told the boy. ‘You, too,’ she said to the doctor, who obeyed. He’d never touched the skin of an elephant or a rhino before; he’d only imagined their tough, leathery hides. The doctor couldn’t help speculating that there must be an ointment or a lotion that Mrs Bhagwan could put on her poor feet to help heal the cracks in her hardened skin; then it occurred to him that if the cracks were healed, her skin would be too callused to allow her to feel the loops chafing against her feet. If her cracked skin gave her pain, the pain was also her guide to knowing that her feet were securely in the loops – the right way. Without pain, Mrs Bhagwan would have to rely on her sense of sight alone; when it came to putting her feet in the loops, two senses (pain
and
sight) were probably better than one.

Ganesh didn’t appear to be discouraged by the look and feel of Mrs Bhagwan’s feet. His eyes were healing – they looked clearer every day – and in the cripple’s alert face there was that radiance which reflected his unchanged belief in the future. He knew he could master the Skywalk. One foot was ready to begin; it was merely a matter of bringing the other foot along.

Meanwhile, the missionary had provoked mayhem in the area of the chimp cages. Gautam was infuriated to see him – the bandages being even whiter than the scholastic’s skin. On the other hand, the flirtatious Mira reached her long arms through the bars of her cage as if she were beseeching Martin for an embrace. Gautam responded by forcefully urinating in the missionary’s direction. Martin believed he should remove himself from the chimpanzees’ view rather than stand there and encourage their apery, but Kunal wanted the missionary to stay. It would be a valuable lesson to Gautam, Kunal reasoned: the more violently the ape reacted to the Jesuit’s presence, the more Kunal beat the ape. To Martin’s mind, the psychology of disciplining Gautam in this fashion seemed flawed; yet the Jesuit obeyed the trainer’s instructions.

In Gautam’s cage, there was an old tire; the tread was bald and the tire swung from a frayed rope. In his anger, Gautam hurled the tire against the bars of his cage; then he seized the tire and sank his teeth into the rubber. Kunal responded by reaching through the bars and jabbing Gautam with a bamboo pole. Mira rolled onto her back.

When Dr Daruwalla finally found the missionary, Martin Mills was standing helplessly before this apish drama, looking as guilty and as compromised as a prisoner.

‘For God’s sake – why are you standing here?’ the doctor asked him. ‘If you just walked away, all this would stop!’

‘That’s what
I
think,’ the Jesuit replied. ‘But the trainer told me to stay.’

‘Is he your trainer or the chimps’ trainer?’ Farrokh asked Martin.

Thus the missionary’s good-byes to Ganesh were conducted with the racist ape’s shrieks and howls in the background; it was hard to imagine this as a learning experience for Gautam. The two men followed Ramu to the Land Rover. The last cages they passed were those of the sleepy, disgruntled lions; the tigers looked equally listless and out of humor. The reckless driver ran his fingers along the bars of the big cats’ cages; occasionally a paw (claws extended) flicked out, but Ramu confidently withdrew his hand in time.

‘One more hour until meat-feeding time,’ Ramu sang to the lions and tigers. ‘One whole hour.’

It was unfortunate that such a note of mockery, if not an underlying cruelty, described their departure from the Great Blue Nile. Dr Daruwalla looked only once at the elephant boy’s retreating figure. Ganesh was limping back to the cook’s tent. In the cripple’s unsteady gait, his right heel appeared to bear the weight of two or three boys; like a dewclaw on a dog or a cat, the ball of the boy’s right foot (and his toes) never touched the ground. No wonder he wanted to walk on the sky.

As for Farrokh and Martin, their lives were once again in Ramu’s hands. Their drive to the airport in Rajkot was in daylight. Both the highway’s carnage and the Land Rover’s near misses could be clearly seen. Once again, Dr Daruwalla sought to be distracted from Ramu’s driving, but the doctor found himself up front in the passenger seat this time, and there was no seat belt. Martin clung to the back of the front seat, his head over Farrokh’s shoulder, which probably blocked whatever view Ramu might have had in the rearview mirror – not that Ramu would even glance at what might be coming up behind him, or that, anything could be last enough to be coming up from behind.

Because Junagadh was the jumping-off point for visits to the Gir Forest, which was the last habitat of the Asian lion, Ramu wanted to know if they’d seen the forest – they hadn’t – and Martin Mills wanted to know what Ramu had said. This would be a long trip, the doctor imagined – Ramu speaking Marathi and Hindi, Farrokh struggling to translate. The missionary was sorry that they hadn’t seen the Gir lions. Maybe when they returned to visit the children, they could see the forest. By then, the doctor suspected, the Great Blue Nile would be playing in another town. There were a few Asian lions in the town zoo, Ramu told them; they could have a quick look at the lions and still manage to catch their plane in Rajkot. But Farrokh wisely vetoed this idea; he knew that any delay in their departure from Junagadh would make Ramu drive to Rajkot all the faster.

Nor was a discussion of Graham Greene as distracting as Farrokh had hoped. The Jesuit’s ‘Catholic interpretation’ of
The Heart of the Matter
wasn’t at all what the doctor was looking for; it was infuriating. Not even a novel as profoundly about faith as
The Power and the Glory
could or should be discussed in strictly ‘Catholic’ terms, Dr Daruwalla argued; the doctor quoted, from memory, that passage which he loved. ‘“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”’

‘Perhaps you’ll tell me what is especially Catholic about that,’ the doctor challenged the scholastic, but Martin skillfully changed the subject.

‘Let us pray that this door opens and lets the future in for our children at the circus,’ the Jesuit said. What a sneaky mind he had!

Farrokh didn’t dare ask him anything more about his mother; not even Ramu’s driving was as daunting as the possibility of another story about Vera. What Farrokh desired to hear was more about the homosexual inclinations of Dhar’s twin; the doctor was chiefly curious to learn whether or not John D. was so inclined, but Dr Daruwalla felt uncertain of how to inspire such a subject of conversation with John D.’s twin. However, it would be an easier subject to broach with Martin than with John D.