A Son Of The Circus (20 page)

What no one had imagined was that there wouldn’t be just one dark-haired baby boy, there would be
two –
identical twin boys with the most gorgeous, almond-shaped faces and jet-black hair! Promila Rai wouldn’t want them, and not only because they were dark-haired boys; she would claim that any woman who had twins was clearly taking drugs.

But the most unexpected turn of events would be engineered by the persistent love letters of Danny Mills to Veronica Rose, and by the death of Neville Eden –the victim of a car crash in Italy, an accident that also ended the flamboyant life of Subodh Rai. Until the news of the car crash, Vera had been illogically hoping that Neville might come back to her; now she determined that the fatal accident was divine retribution for Neville’s preferring Subodh to her. She would carry this thought still further in her elder years, believing that
AIDS
was God’s well-intentioned effort to restore
a
natural order to the universe; like many morons, Vera would believe the scourge was a godsent plague in judgment of homosexuals. This was remarkable thinking, really, for a woman who wasn’t imaginative enough to believe in God.

It had been clear to Vera that if Neville ever would have wanted her, he wouldn’t have wanted her cluttered up with a baby. But upon Neville’s abrupt departure, Vera turned her thoughts to Danny. Would Danny
still
want to marry her if she brought him home a little surprise? Vera was sure he would.

‘Darling,’ Vera wrote to Danny. ‘I’ve not wanted to test how much you love me, but all this while I’ve been carrying our child.’ (Her months with Lowji and Meher had markedly improved Vera’s English.) Naturally, when she first saw the twins, Vera immediately pronounced them to be Neville’s; in her view, they were far too pretty to be Danny’s.

Danny Mills, for his odd part, hadn’t considered having a child before. He was descended from weary but pleasant parents who’d had too many children before Danny had been born and who’d treated Danny with cordial indifference bordering on neglect. Danny wrote cautiously to his beloved Vera that he was thrilled she was carrying
their
child; a child was a fine idea – he hoped only that she didn’t desire to start a whole family.

Twins are ‘a whole family’ unto themselves, as any fool knows, and thus the dilemma would sort itself out in the predictable fashion: Vera would take one home and the Daruwallas would keep the other. Simply put, Vera didn’t want to overwhelm Danny’s limited enthusiasm for fatherhood.

Among the host of surprises awaiting Lowji, not the least would be the advice given to him by his senile friend Dr Tata: ‘When it comes to twins, put your money on the first one out.’ The senior Dr Daruwalla was shocked, but being an orthopedist, not an obstetrician, he sought to comply with Dr Tata’s recommendation. However, such excitement and confusion attended the birth of the twins that none of the nurses kept track of which one came out first; old Dr Tata himself couldn’t remember.

In this respect was Dr Tata said to be ‘accident-prone’; he blamed the unprofessionalism of the house calls for his failure to hear the two heartbeats whenever he put his stethoscope to Vera’s big belly; he said that in his office, under appropriate conditions, he would surely have heard the two hearts. As it was –whether it was the music that Meher played or the constant sounds of housecleaning by the several servants – old Dr Tata simply assumed that Vera’s baby had an unusually strong and active heartbeat. On more than one occasion, he said, ‘Your baby has just been exercising, I think.’

‘I could have told you that,’ Vera always replied.

And so it wasn’t until she was in labor that the monitoring of the fetal heartbeats told the tale. ‘What a lucky lady!’ Dr Tata told Vera Rose. ‘You have not one but two!’

In the summer of ‘49, when the monsoon rains drenched Bombay, the aforementioned melodrama lay, heavy and unseen, in young Farrokh Daruwalla’s future – like a fog so far out in the Indian Ocean, it hadn’t yet reached the Arabian Sea. He would be back in Vienna, where he and Jamshed were continuing their lengthy and proper courtship of the Zilk sisters, when he heard the news.

‘Not one but two!’ And Vera took only one with her.

To Farrokh and Jamshed, their parents were already elderly. Even Lowji and Meher might have agreed that the most vigorous of their child-raising abilities were behind them; they’d do their best with the little boy, but after Jamshed married Josefine Zilk, it made sense for the younger couple to take over the responsibility. Theirs was a mixed marriage, anyway; and Zurich, where they would settle, was an international city – a dark-haired boy of strictly white parentage would easily fit in. By then he knew Hindi in addition to English; in Zurich he would learn German, although Jamshed and Josefine would start him in an English-speaking school. After a time, the senior Daruwallas became like grandparents to the boy; from the beginning, Lowji had legally adopted him.

And after Jamshed and Josefine had children of their own – and there came that inevitable passage through adolescence, wherein the orphaned twin expressed a disgruntled alienation from them all — it was only natural that Farrokh would emerge as a kind of big brother to the boy. The 20-year difference between them made Farrokh something of another father to the child, too. By then, Farrokh was married to the former Julia Zilk, and they’d started a family of their own. Wherever he went, the adopted boy appeared to belong, but Farrokh and Julia were his favorites.

One shouldn’t feel sorry for Vera’s abandoned child. He was always part of a large family, even if there was something dislocating in the geographical upheavals in the young man’s life – between Toronto, Zurich and Bombay – and even if, at an early age, there could be detected in him a certain detachment. And later there was in his language – in his German, in his English, in his Hindi – something decidedly odd, if not exactly a speech impediment. He spoke very slowly, as if he were composing a written sentence, complete with punctuation, in his mind’s eye. If he had an accent, it was nothing traceable; it was more a matter of his enunciation, which was so very deliberate, as if he were in the habit of speaking to children, or addressing crowds.

And the issue that naturally intrigued them all, which was whether he was the offspring of Neville Eden or of Danny Mills, would not be easily decided. In the medical records of [_One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling – _]which are, to this day, the only enduring records that the film was ever made – it was clearly noted that Neville and Danny were of the same common blood group, and the very same type that the twins would share.

Various Daruwallas argued that
their
twin was too good-looking, and too disinclined toward strong drink, to be a conceivable creation of Danny’s. Furthermore, the boy showed little interest in reading, much less in writing – he didn’t even keep a diary – whereas he was quite a gifted and highly disciplined young actor, even in grammar school. (This pointed the finger at the late Neville.) But, of course, the Daruwallas knew very little about the other twin. If one is determined to feel sorry for either of these twins, perhaps one should indulge such a feeling for the child Vera kept.

As for the little boy who was abandoned in India, his first days were marked by the necessity of giving him a name. He would be a Daruwalla, but in concession to his all-white appearance, it was agreed he should have an English first name. The family concurred that his name should be John, which was the Christian name of none other than Lord Duckworth himself; even Lowji conceded that the Duckworth Club was the source of the responsibility he bore for Veronica Rose’s cast-off child. Needless to say, no one would have been so stupid as to name a boy
Duckworth
Daruwalla.
John
Daruwalla, on the other hand, had a friendly Anglo-Indian ring.

Everyone could more or less pronounce this name. Indians are familiar with the letter
J
; even German-speaking Swiss don’t badly maul the name John, although they tend to Frenchify the name as ‘Jean.’ Daruwalla is as phonetic as most names come, although German-speaking Swiss pronounce the
W
as
V
, hence the young man was known in Zurich as Jean Daruvalla; this was close enough. His Swiss passport was issued in the name of John Daruwalla – plain but distinctive.

Not for 39 years did there awaken in Farrokh that first stirring of the creative process, which old Lowji would never experience. Now, nearly 40 years after the birth of Vera’s twins, Farrokh found himself wishing that he’d never experienced the creative process, either. For it was by the interference of Farrokh’s imagination that little John Daruwalla had become Inspector Dhar, the man Bombay most loved to hate — and Bombay was a city of many passionate hatreds.

Farrokh had conceived Inspector Dhar in the spirit of satire — of
quality
satire. Why were there so many easily offended people? Why had they reacted to Inspector Dhar so humorlessly? Had they no appreciation for comedy? Only now, when he was almost 60, did it occur to Farrokh that he was his father’s son in this respect: he’d uncovered a natural talent for pissing people off. If Lowji had long been perceived as an assassination-in-progress, why had Farrokh been blind to this possible result in the case of Inspector Dhar? And he’d thought he was being so careful!

He’d written that first screenplay slowly and with great attention to detail. This was the surgeon in him; he hadn’t learned such carefulness or authenticity from Danny Mills, and certainly not from his attendance at those three-hour spectacles in the shabby downtown cinema palaces of Bombay — those art-deco ruins where the air-conditioning was always ‘undergoing repair’ and the urine frequently overflowed the lavatories.

More than the movies, he’d watched the audience eating their snacks. In the 1950’s and ‘60’s, the masala recipe was working – not only in Bombay but throughout South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and even in the Soviet Union. There was music mixed with murder, sob stories intercut with slapstick, mayhem in tandem with the most maudlin sentimentality – and, above all, the satisfying violence that occurs whenever the forces of good confront and punish the forces of evil. There were gods, too; they helped the heroes. But Dr Daruwalla didn’t believe in the usual gods; when he started writing, he’d just recently become a convert to Christianity. To that Hindi hodgepodge which was the Bombay cinema, the doctor added his tough-guy voice-over and Dhar’s antiheroic sneer. Farrokh would wisely leave his newfound Christianity out of the picture.

He’d followed Danny Mills’s recommendations to the letter. He selected a director
he
liked. Balraj Gupta was a young man with a less heavy hand than most –he had an almost self-mocking manner – and more important, he was not such a well-known director that Dr Daruwalla couldn’t bully him a little. The deal was as Danny Mills had said a deal should be, including the doctor’s choice of the young, unknown actor who would play Inspector Dhar. John Daruwalla was 22.

Farrokh’s first effort to pass off the young man as an Anglo-Indian wasn’t at all convincing to Balraj Gupta. ‘He looks like some kind of European to me,’ the director complained, ‘but his Hindi is the real thing, I guess.’ And after the success of the first Inspector Dhar movie, Balraj Gupta would never dream of interfering with the orthopedist (from Canada!) who’d given Bombay its most hated antihero.

The first movie was called
Inspector Dhar and the Hanging Mali
. This was more than 20 years after a
real
gardener had been found hanging from a neem tree on old Ridge Road in Malabar Hill, a posh part of town for anyone to be hanged in. The mali was a Muslim who’d just been dismissed from tending the gardens of several Malabar Hill residents; he’d been accused of stealing, but the charge had never been proven and there were those who claimed that the real-life gardener had been fired because of his extremist views. The mali was said to be furious about the closing of the Mosque of Babar.

Although Farrokh fictionalized the mali’s story 20 years after the little-known facts of the case,
Inspector Dhar and the Hanging Mali
wasn’t viewed as a period piece. For one thing, the 16th-century Babri mosque was still in dispute. The Hindus still wanted their idols to remain in the mosque in honor of the birthplace of Rama. The Muslims still wanted the idols removed.

In the late 1960’s, very much in keeping with the language of that time, the Muslims said they wanted to ‘liberate’ the Mosque of Babar — whereas it was the birthplace of Rama that the Hindus said
they
wanted to liberate.

In the movie, Inspector Dhar sought to keep the peace. And, of course, this was impossible. The essence of an Inspector Dhar movie was that violence could be relied upon to erupt around him. Among the earliest of the victims was Inspector Dhar’s wife! Yes, he was married in the first movie, albeit briefly; the car-bomb death of his wife apparently justified his sexual licentiousness for the rest of the movie – and for all the other Inspector Dhar movies to come. And everyone was supposed to believe that this all-white Dhar was a Hindu. He’s seen lighting his wife’s cremation fire, he’s seen wearing the traditional dhoti, with his head traditionally shaved. All during the course of the first movie, his hair is growing back. Other women rub the stubble, as if in the most profound respect for his late wife. His status as a widower gains him great sympathy and lots of women – a very Western idea, and very offensive.

To begin with, both Hindus and Muslims were offended. Widowers were offended, not to mention widows and gardeners. And from the very first Inspector Dhar movie, policemen were offended. The misfortune of the real-life hanging mali had never been explained. The crime — that is, if it
was
a crime, if the gardener hadn’t hanged himself— was never solved.

In the movie, the audience is offered three versions of the hanging, each one a perfect solution. Thus the unfortunate mali is hanged three times, and each hanging offended some group. Muslims were angry that Muslim fanatics were blamed for hanging the gardener. Hindus were outraged that Hindu fundamentalists were blamed for hanging the gardener; and Sikhs were incensed that Sikh extremists were blamed for hanging the gardener, as a means of setting Muslims and Hindus against each other. The Sikhs were also offended because every time there’s a taxi in the movie, it’s driven wildly and aggressively by someone who’s perceived to be a crazed Sikh.