A Son Of The Circus (51 page)

Finally, the actor whispered, ‘Well, okay, I see who it is, but what’s he doing here? Is he going to die?’

‘He’s trying to be a priest,’ Farrokh whispered.

‘Jesus Christ!’ John D. said. Either he should have whispered or else the particular name he spoke was one that Martin Mills was prone to hear; a smile of such immense gratitude crossed the missionary’s sleeping face that Dhar and the Daruwallas felt suddenly ashamed. Without a word to one another, they tiptoed into the kitchen, as if they were unanimously embarrassed that they’d been spying on a sleeping man; what truly had disturbed them, and had made them feel as if they didn’t belong where they were, was the utter contentment of a man momentarily at peace with his soul – although none of them could have identified what it was that so upset them.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Dhar asked.

‘Nothing’s wrong with him!’ Dr Daruwalla said; then he wondered why he’d said that about a man who’d been whipped and beaten while he was proselytizing among transvestite prostitutes. ‘I should have told you he was coming,’ the doctor added sheepishly, to which John D. merely rolled his eyes; his anger was often understated. Julia rolled her eyes, too.

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Farrokh said to John D., ‘it’s entirely your decision as to whether or not you want to let him know that you exist. Although I don’t know
if now
would be the right time to tell him.’

‘Forget about now,’ Dhar said. ‘Tell me what he’s like.’

Dr Daruwalla could not utter the first word that came to his lips – the word was ‘crazy.’ On second thought, he almost said, Like
you
, except that
he
talks. But this was such a contradictory concept – the very idea of a Dhar who talked might be insulting to Dhar.

‘I said, what’s he like?’ John D. repeated.

‘I saw him only when he was asleep,’ Julia told John D. Both of them were staring at Farrokh, whose mind –on the matter of what Martin Mills was ‘like’ – was truly blank. Not a single picture came to his mind, although the missionary had managed to argue with him, lecture to him and even educate him — and most of this had transpired while the zealot was naked.

‘He’s somewhat zealous,’ the doctor offered cautiously.

‘Zealous?’ said Dhar.

‘
Liebchen, is
that all you can say?’ Julia asked Farrokh. ‘I heard him talking and talking in the bathroom. He must have been saying something!’

‘In the bathroom?’ John D. asked.

‘He’s very determined,’ Farrokh blurted.

‘I guess that would follow from being “zealous,”’ said Inspector Dhar; he was at his most sarcastic.

It was exasperating to Dr Daruwalla that they expected him to be able to summarize the Jesuit’s character on the basis of this one peculiar meeting.

The doctor didn’t know the history of that other zealot – the greatest zealot of the 16th century, St Ignatius Loyola — who had so inspired Martin Mills. When Ignatius died without ever having permitted a portrait of himself to be painted, the brothers of the order sought to have a portrait made of the dead man. A famous painter tried and failed. The disciples declared that the death mask, which was the work of an unknown, was also not the true face of the father of the Jesuits. Three other artists tried and failed to capture him, but they had only the death mask for their model. It was finally decided that God did not wish for Ignatius Loyola, His servant, to be painted. Dr Daruwalla couldn’t have known how greatly Martin Mills loved this story, but it doubtless would have pleased the new missionary to see how the doctor struggled to describe even such a fledgling servant of God as this mere scholastic. Farrokh felt the right word come to his lips, but then it escaped him.

‘He’s well educated,’ Farrokh managed to say. Both John D. and Julia groaned. ‘Well, damn it, he’s
complicated,’
Dr Daruwalla shouted. ‘It’s too soon to know what he’s like!’

‘
Ssshhh
! You’ll wake him up,’ Julia told Farrokh.

‘If it’s too soon to know what he’s like,’ John D. said, ‘then it’s too soon for me to know if I want to meet him.’

Dr Daruwalla was irritated; he felt that this was a typical Inspector Dhar thing to say.

Julia knew what her husband was thinking, ‘Hold your tongue,’ she told him. She made coffee for herself and John D. – for Farrokh, she made a pot of tea. Together, the Daruwallas watched their beloved movie star leave by the kitchen door. Dhar liked to use the back stairs so that he wouldn’t be seen; the early morning – it wasn’t quite 6:00 – was one of the few times he could walk from Marine Drive to the Taj without being recognized and surrounded. At that hour, only the beggars would hassle him; they hassled everyone equally. It simply didn’t matter to the beggars that he was Inspector Dhar; many beggars went to the cinema, but what did a movie star matter to them?

At exactly 6:00 in the morning, when Farrokh and Julia were sharing a bath together – she soaped his back, he soaped her breasts, but there was no more extensive hanky-panky than that – Martin Mills awoke to the soothing sounds of Dr Aziz, the praying urologist. ‘Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation’ – Dr Aziz’s incantations to Allah drifted upward from his fifth-floor balcony and brought the new missionary instantly to his feet. Although he’d been asleep for less than an hour, the Jesuit felt as refreshed as a normal man who had slept the whole night through; thus invigorated, he bounded to Dr Daruwalla’s balcony, where he could oversee the morning ritual that Urology Aziz enacted on his prayer rug. From the vantage point of the Daruwallas’ sixth-floor apartment, the view of Back Bay was stunning. Martin Mills could see Malabar Hill and Nariman Point; in the distance, a small city of people had already congregated on Chowpatty Beach. But the Jesuit had not come to Bombay for the view. He followed the prayers of Dr Aziz with the keenest concentration. There was always something one could learn from the holiness of others.

Martin Mills did not take prayer for granted. He knew that prayer wasn’t the same as thinking, nor was it an escape from thinking. It was never as simple as mere asking. Instead, it was the seeking of instruction; for to know God’s will was Martin’s heart’s desire, and to attain such a state of perfection – a union with God in mystical ecstasy – required the patience of a corpse.

Watching Urology Aziz roll up his prayer rug, Martin Mills knew it was the perfect time for him to practice another exercise of Father de Mello’s [_Christian Exercises in Eastern Form – _]namely, ‘stillness.’ Most people didn’t appreciate how impossible it was to stand absolutely still; it could be painful, too, but Martin was good at it. He stood so still that, 10 minutes later, a passing fork-tailed kite almost landed on his head. It wasn’t because the missionary so much as blinked that the bird suddenly veered away from him; the light that was reflected in the brightness of the missionary’s eyes frightened the bird away.

Meanwhile, Dr Daruwalla was tearing through his hate mail, wherein he found a troubling two-rupee note. The envelope was addressed to Inspector Dhar in care of the film studio; typed on the serial-number side of the money, in capital letters, was this warning:
YOU’RE
AS
DEAD
AS
LAL
. The doctor would show this to Deputy Commissioner Patel, of course, but Farrokh felt he didn’t need the detective’s confirmation in order to know that the typist was the same lunatic who’d typed the message on the money found in Mr Lai’s mouth.

Then Julia burst into the bedroom. She’d peeked into the living room to see if Martin Mills was still sleeping, but he wasn’t on the couch. The siding-glass doors to the balcony were open, but she’d not seen the missionary on the balcony – he was standing so still, she’d missed him. Dr Daruwalla stuffed the two-rupee note into his pocket and rushed to the balcony.

By the time the doctor got there, the missionary had moved ahead to a new prayer tactic – this one being one of Father de Mello’s exercises in the area of ‘body sensations’ and ‘thought control.’ Martin would lift his right foot, move it forward, then put it down. As he did this, he would chant, ‘Lifting … lifting … lifting,’ and then (naturally) ‘Moving … moving … moving,’ and (finally) ‘Placing … placing … placing.’ In short, he was merely walking across the balcony, but with an exaggerated slowness – all the while exclaiming aloud his exact movements. To Dr Daruwalla, Martin Mills resembled a patient in physical therapy – someone recovering from a recent stroke — for the missionary appeared to be teaching himself how to speak and walk at the same time, with only modest success.

Farrokh tiptoed back to the bedroom and Julia.

‘Perhaps I’ve underestimated his injuries,’ the doctor said. ‘I’ll have to take him to the office with me. At least for a while, it’s best to keep an eye on him.’

But when the Daruwallas cautiously approached the Jesuit, he was dressed in clerical garb. He was looking through his suitcase.

‘They took only my
culpa
beads and my casual clothes,’ Martin remarked. ‘I’ll have to buy some cheap local wear – it would be ostentatious to show up at St Ignatius looking like this!’ Whereupon he laughed and plucked at his startlingly white collar.

It certainly won’t do to have him walking around Bombay like this, Dr Daruwalla thought. What was required was the sort of clothing that would allow the madman somehow to fit in. Possibly I could arrange to shave his head, the doctor thought. Julia simply gaped at Martin Mills, but as soon as he began to relate (again!) the tale of his introduction to the city, he completely charmed her, and she became as alternately flirtatious and shy as a schoolgirl. For a man who’d taken a vow of chastity, the Jesuit was remarkably at ease with women – at least with an older woman, Dr Daruwalla thought.

The complexities of the day ahead for Dr Daruwalla were almost as frightening to the doctor as the thought of spending the next 12 hours in the missionary’s discarded leg iron – or being followed around by Vinod, with the angry dwarf wielding the missionary’s whip.

There was no time to lose. While Julia fixed a cup of coffee for Martin, Farrokh glanced hurriedly at the library collected in the Jesuit’s suitcase. Father de Mello’s
Sadhana: A Way to God
drew a particularly covert look, for in it Farrokh found a dog-eared page and an assertively underlined sentence: ‘One of the biggest enemies to prayer is nervous tension.’ I guess that’s why I can’t do it, Dr Daruwalla thought.

In the lobby, the doctor and the missionary didn’t escape the notice of that first-floor member of the Residents’ Society, the murderous Mr Munim.

‘So! There is your movie star! Where is your dwarf?’ Mr Munim shouted.

‘Pay no attention to this man,’ Farrokh told Martin. ‘He’s completely crazy.’

‘The dwarf is in the suitcase!’ Mr Munim cried. Thereupon he kicked the scholastic’s suitcase, which was ill considered, because he was wearing only a floppy pair of the most insubstantial sandals; from the instant expression of pain on Mr Munim’s face, it was clear that he’d made contact with one of the more solid tomes in Martin Mills’s library – maybe the
Compact Dictionary of the Bible
, which was compact but not soft.

‘I assure you, sir, there is no dwarf in this suitcase,’ Martin Mills began to say, but Dr Daruwalla pulled him on. The doctor was beginning to realize that it was the new missionary’s most basic inclination to talk to anyone.

In the alley, they found Vinod asleep in the Ambassador; the dwarf had locked the car. Leaning against the driver’s-side door was the exact ‘anyone’ whom Dr Daruwalla most feared, for the doctor imagined there was no one more inspiring of missionary zeal than a crippled child … unless there’d been a child missing both arms and both legs. By the shine of excitement in the scholastic’s eyes, Farrokh could tell that the boy with the mangled foot was sufficiently inspiring to Martin Mills.

It was the beggar from the day before — the boy who stood on his head at Chowpatty Beach, the cripple who slept in the sand. The crushed right foot was once again an offense to the doctor’s standard of surgical neatness, but Martin Mills was fatally drawn to the rheumy discharge about the beggar’s eyes; to his missionary mind, it was as if the stricken child already clutched a crucifix. The scholastic only momentarily took his eyes off the boy – to glance heavenward – but that was long enough for the little beggar to fool Martin with the infamous Bombay bird-shit trick.

In Dr Daruwalla’s experience, it was a filthy trick, usually performed in the following fashion: while one hand pointed to the sky – to the nonexistent passing bird – the other hand of the little villain squirted your shoe or your pants. The instrument that applied the presumed ‘bird shit’ was similar to a turkey baster, but any kind of bulb with a syringelike nozzle would suffice. The fluid it contained was some whitish stuff — often curdled milk or flour and water — but on your shoe or your pants, it appeared to be bird shit. When you looked down from the sky, having failed to see the bird, there was the shit – it had already hit you – and the sneaky little beggar was wiping it off your shoe or your pants with a handy rag. You then rewarded him with at least a rupee or two.

But in this instance Martin Mills didn’t comprehend that a reward was expected. He’d looked in a heavenly direction without the boy needing to point; thereupon the beggar had drawn out the syringe and squirted the Jesuit’s scuffed black shoe. The cripple was so quick on the draw and so smooth at concealing the syringe under his shirt that Dr Daruwalla had seen neither the quick draw nor the shot – only the slick return to the shirt. Martin Mills believed that a bird had unceremoniously shat on his shoe, and that the tragically mutilated boy was wiping off this bird shit with the tattered leg of his baggy shorts. To the missionary, this maimed child was definitely heaven-sent.

With that in mind, there in the alley, the scholastic dropped to his knees, which wasn’t the usual response that was made to the outstretched hand of the beggar. The boy was frightened by the missionary’s embrace. ‘O God – thank you!’ Martin Mills cried, while the cripple looked to Dr Daruwalla for help. ‘This is your lucky day,’ the missionary told the greatly bewildered beggar. That man is a
doctor
,’ Martin Mills told the lame boy. That man can fix your foot.’