A Son Of The Circus (5 page)

Furthermore, it was generally admitted among the members of the club that Mrs Dogar’s beauty was coarse in nature and had faded over time. No amount of
Mr
Dogar’s money could improve his new wife’s garish tastes. No degree of physical fitness, which the second Mrs Dogar was reputed to worship to excess, could conceal from even the most casual observer that she was at least 42. To Mr Sethna’s critical eye, she was already pushing (if not past) 50; he also thought she was much too tall. And there was many a golf-loving Duckworthian who took offense at her outspoken, insensitive opinion that golf was insufficient exercise for anyone in pursuit of good health.

This day, Mrs Dogar was lunching alone – a habit of which Mr Sethna also disapproved. At a proper club, the steward believed, women wouldn’t be allowed to eat alone.

The marriage was still new enough that Mr Dogar often joined his wife for lunch; the marriage was also old enough that Mr Dogar felt free to cancel these luncheon dates, should some matter of more important business intervene. And lately he’d taken to canceling at the last minute, which left his wife no time to make plans of her own. Mr Sethna had observed that being left alone made the new Mrs Dogar restless and cross.

On the other hand, the steward had also observed a certain tension between the newlyweds when they dined together; Mrs Dogar was inclined to speak sharply to her husband, who was considerably older than she was. Mr Sethna supposed this was a penalty to be expected, for he especially disapproved of men who married younger women. But the steward thought it best to put himself at the aggressive wife’s disposal lest she shatter her water glass with another blow from her fork; the fork itself looked surprisingly small in her large, sinewy hand.

‘My dear Mr Sethna,’ said the second Mrs Dogar.

Mr Sethna answered: ‘How may I be of service to the beautiful Mrs Dogar?’

‘You may tell me what all the fuss is about,’ Mrs Dogar replied.

Mr Sethna spoke as deliberately as he would pour hot tea. ‘It is most assuredly nothing to upset yourself about,’ the old Parsi said. ‘It is merely a dead golfer.’

Thirty years ago, there were more than 50 circuses of some merit in India; today there aren’t more than 15 that are any good. Many of them are named the Great This or the Great That. Among Dr Daruwalla’s favorites were the Great Bombay, the Jumbo, the Great Golden, the Gemini, the Great Rayman, the Famous, the Great Oriental and the Raj Kamal; of them all, Farrokh felt most fond of the Great Royal Circus. Before Independence, it was called simply the Royal; in 1947 it became the ‘Great.’ It began as a two-pole tent; in ‘47 the Great Royal added two more poles. But it was the owner who’d made such a positive impression on Farrokh. Because Pratap Walawalkar was such a well-traveled man, he seemed the most sophisticated of the circus owners to Dr Daruwalla; or else Farrokh’s fondness for Pratap Walawalkar was simply because the Great Royal’s owner never teased the doctor about his interest in dwarf blood.

In the 1960’s, the Great Royal traveled everywhere. Business was bad in Egypt, best in Iran; business was good in Beirut and Singapore, Pratap Walawalkar said – and of all the countries where the circus traveled, Bali was the most beautiful. Travel was too expensive now. With a half-dozen elephants and two dozen big cats, not to mention a dozen horses and almost a dozen chimpanzees, the Great Royal rarely traveled outside the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. With uncounted cockatoos and parrots, and dozens of dogs (not to mention 150 people, including almost a dozen dwarfs),The Great Royal never left India.

Daruwalla had committed these details to that quality of memory which most of us reserve for our childhoods. Farrokh’s childhood had failed to make much of an impression on him; he vastly preferred the history and the memorabilia he’d absorbed as a behind-the-scenes observer of the circus. He remembered Pratap Walawalkar saying in an offhand manner: ‘Ethiopian lions have brown manes, but they’re just like other lions – they won’t listen to you if you don’t call them by their right names.’ Farrokh had retained this morsel of information as if it were part of a beloved bedtime story.

In the early mornings, en route to his surgeries (even in Canada), the doctor often recalled the big basins steaming over the gas rings in the cook’s tent. In one pot was the water for tea, but in two of the basins the cook was heating milk; the first milk that came to a boil wasn’t for tea – it was to make oatmeal for the chimpanzees. As for tea, the chimps didn’t like it hot; they liked their tea tepid. Farrokh also remembered the extra flatbread; it was for the elephants – they enjoyed roti. And the tigers took vitamins, which turned their milk pink. As an orthopedic surgeon, Dr Daruwalla could make no medical use of these cherished details; nevertheless, he’d breathed them in as if they were his own background.

Dr Daruwalla’s wife wore wonderful jewelry, some of which had belonged to his mother; none of it was at all memorable to the doctor, who (however) could describe in the most exact detail a tiger-claw necklace that belonged to Pratap Singh, the ringmaster and wild-animal trainer for the Great Royal Circus — a man much admired by Farrokh. Pratap Singh had once shared his remedy for dizziness with the doctor: a potion of red chili and burned human hair. For asthma, the ringmaster recommended a clove soaked in tiger urine; you allow the clove to dry, then you grind it up and inhale the powder. Moreover, the animal trainer warned the doctor, you should never swallow a tiger’s whiskers; swallowing tiger whiskers will kill you.

Had Farrokh read of these remedies in some crackpot’s column in
The Times of India
, he’d have written a scathing letter for publication in the Opinion section. In the name of real medicine, Dr Daruwalla would have denounced such ‘holistic folly,’ which was his phrase of choice whenever he addressed the issue of so-called unscientific or magical thinking. But the source of the human-hair-and-red-chili recipe, as well as of the tiger-urine cure (not to mention the tiger-whiskers warning), was the great Pratap Singh. In Dr Daruwalla’s view, the ringmaster and wild-animal trainer was undeniably a man who knew his business.

This kind of lore, and blood from dwarfs, enhanced Farrokh’s abiding feeling that, as a result of flopping around in a safety net and falling on a poor dwarf’s wife, he had become an adopted son of the circus. For Farrokh, the honor of clumsily coming to Deepa’s rescue was lasting. Whenever
any
circus was performing in Bombay, Dr Daruwalla could be found in a front-row seat; he could also be detected mingling with the acrobats and the animal trainers – most of all, he enjoyed observing the practice sessions and the tent life. These intimate views from the wing of the main tent, these close-ups of the troupe tents and the cages –they were the privileges that made Farrokh feel he’d been adopted. At times, he wished he were a
real
son of the circus; instead, Farrokh supposed, he was merely a guest of honor. Nevertheless, this wasn’t a fleeting honor – not to him.

Ironically, Dr Daruwalla’s children and grandchildren were unimpressed by the Indian circuses. These two generations had been born and raised in London or Toronto; they’d not only seen bigger and fancier circuses – they’d seen cleaner. The doctor was disappointed that his children and grandchildren were so dirt-obsessed; they considered the tent life of the acrobats and the animal trainers to be shabby, even ‘underprivileged.’ Although the dirt floors of the tents were swept several times daily, Dr Daruwalla’s children and grandchildren believed that the tents were filthy.

To the doctor, however, the circus was an orderly, well-kept oasis surrounded by a world of disease and chaos. His children and grandchildren saw the dwarf clowns as merely grotesque; in the circus, they existed solely to be laughed at. But Farrokh felt that the dwarf clowns were appreciated – maybe even loved, not to mention gainfully employed. The doctor’s children and grandchildren thought that the risks taken by the child performers were especially ‘harsh’; yet Farrokh felt that these acrobatic children were the lucky ones –they’d been rescued.

Dr Daruwalla knew that the majority of these child acrobats were (like Deepa) sold to the circus by their parents, who’d been unable to support them; others were orphans – they’d been truly adopted. If they hadn’t been performing in the circus, where they were well fed and protected, they’d have been begging. They would be the street children you saw doing handstands and other stunts for a few rupees in Bombay, or in the smaller towns throughout Gujarat and Maharashtra, where even the Great Royal Circus more frequently performed – these days, fewer circuses came to Bombay. During Diwali and the winter holidays, there were still two or three circuses performing in or around the city, but TV and the videocassette recorder had hurt the circus business; too many people rented movies and stayed at home.

To hear the Daruwalla children and grandchildren discuss it, the child acrobats who were sold to the circus were long-suffering child laborers in a high-risk profession; their hardworking, no-escape existence was tantamount to slavery. Untrained children were paid nothing for six months; thereafter, they started with a salary of 3 rupees a day – only 90 rupees a month, less than 4 dollars! But Dr Daruwalla argued that safe food and a safe place to sleep were better than nothing; what these children were given was a chance.

Circus people boiled their water and their milk. They bought and cooked their own food; they dug and cleaned their own latrines. And a well-trained acrobat was often paid 500 or 600 rupees a month, even if it was only 25 dollars. Granted, although the Great Royal took good care of its children, Farrokh couldn’t say with certainty that the child performers were as well treated in
all
the Indian circuses; the performances in several of these circuses
were
so abject — not to mention unskilled and careless – that the doctor surmised that the tent life in such places was shabbier, too.

Life was surely shabby in the Great Blue Nile; indeed, among the Great This and Great That circuses of India, the Great Blue Nile was the shabbiest – or at least the least great. Deepa would agree. A former child contortionist, the dwarf’s wife, reincarnated as a trapeze artist, was lacking both in polish and in common sense; it wasn’t merely the beer that had made her let go of the bar too soon.

Deepa’s injuries were complicated but not severe; in addition to the dislocation of her hip joint, she’d suffered a tear in the transverse ligament. Not only would Dr Daruwalla brand Deepa’s hip with a memorable scar, but, in prepping the area, he would be confronted by the irrefutable blackness of Deepa’s pubic hair; this would be a dark reminder of the disturbing contact between her pubis and the bridge of his nose.

Farrokh’s nose was still tingling when he helped Deepa be admitted to the hospital; out of guilt, he’d left the circus grounds with her. But the admitting process had barely begun when the doctor was summoned by one of the hospital secretaries; there’d been a phone call for him while he was en route from the Blue Nile.

‘Do you know any clowns?’ the secretary asked him.

‘Well, as a matter of fact, yes,’ Farrokh admitted.

‘Dwarf clowns?’ asked the secretary.

‘Yes – several! I just met them,’ the doctor added. Farrokh was too ashamed to admit that he’d also just bled them.

‘Apparently, one of them has been injured at that circus at Cross Maidan,’ the secretary said.

‘Not Vinod!’ Dr Daruwalla exclaimed.

‘Yes, that’s him,’ she said. ‘That’s why they want you back at the circus.’

‘What happened to Vinod?’ Dr Daruwalla asked the somewhat disdainful secretary; she was one of many medical secretaries who embraced sarcasm.

‘I couldn’t ascertain the clown’s condition from a phone message,’ she replied. The description was hysterical. I gather he was trampled by elephants or shot from a cannon, or both. And now that this dwarf lies dying, he is declaring you to be his doctor.’

And so to the circus grounds at Cross Maidan did Dr Daruwalla go. All the way back to the deeply flawed performance of the Great Blue Nile, the doctor’s nose tingled.

For 15 years, merely remembering the dwarf’s wife would activate Farrokh’s nose. And now, the fact that Mr Lai had fallen without a net (for the body on the golf course was indeed dead) – even this evidence of death reminded Dr Daruwalla that Deepa had survived her fall and her unwelcome and painful contact with the clumsy doctor.

Upon Inspector Dhar’s intrusion, the vultures had risen but they’d not departed. Dr Daruwalla knew that the carrion eaters still floated overhead because their putrescence lingered in the air and their shadows drifted back and forth across the ninth green and the bougainvillea, where Dhar – a mere movie-star detective — knelt beside poor Mr Lai.

‘Don’t touch the body!’ Dr Daruwalla said.

‘I know,’ the veteran actor replied coldly.

Oh, he’s not in a good mood, Farrokh thought; it would be unwise to tell him the upsetting news now. The doctor doubted that Dhar’s mood would
ever
be good enough to make him magnanimous upon receiving such news – and who could blame him? An overwhelming sense of unfairness lay at the heart of it, for Dhar was an identical twin who’d been separated from his brother at birth. Although Dhar had been told the story of his birth, Dhar’s twin knew nothing of the story; Dhar’s twin didn’t even know he was a twin. And now Dhar’s twin was coming to Bombay.

Dr Daruwalla had always believed that nothing good could come from such deception. Although Dhar had accepted the willful arbitrariness of the situation, a certain aloofness had been the cost; he was a man who, as far as Farrokh knew, withheld affection and resolutely withstood any display of affection from others. Who could blame him? the doctor thought. Dhar had accepted the existence of a mother and father and identical twin brother he’d never seen; Dhar had abided by that tiresome adage, which is still popularly evoked – to let sleeping dogs lie. But now: this most upsetting news was surely in that category of another tiresome adage which is still popularly evoked – this was the last straw.