A Son Of The Circus (77 page)

Back in the Ambassador, the doctor instructed Vinod to drive them to the Asiatic Society Library, opposite Horniman Circle; this was one of those oases in the teeming city – not unlike the Duckworth Club or St Ignatius – where the doctor was hoping that Dhar’s twin would be safe. Dr Daruwalla was a member of the Asiatic Society Library; he’d often dozed in the cool, high-ceilinged reading rooms. The larger-than-life statues of literary geniuses had barely noticed the screenwriter’s quiet ascending and descending of the magnificent staircase.

‘I’m taking you to the grandest library in Bombay,’ Dr Daruwalla told Martin Mills. ‘Almost a million books! Almost as many bibliophiles!’

Meanwhile, the doctor told Vinod to drive the children ‘around and around.’ He also told the dwarf that it was important not to let the kids out of the car. They liked riding in the Ambassador, anyway – the anonymity of cruising the city, the secrecy of staring at the passing world. Madhu and Ganesh were unfamiliar with taxi riding; they stared at everyone as if they themselves were invisible – as if the dwarf’s crude Ambassador were equipped with one-way windows. Dr Daruwalla wondered if this was because they knew they were safe with Vinod; they’d never been safe before.

The doctor had caught just a departing glimpse of the children’s faces. At that moment, they’d looked frightened – frightened of what? It certainly wasn’t that they feared they were being abandoned with a dwarf; they weren’t afraid of Vinod. No; on their faces Farrokh had seen a greater anxiety – that the circus they were supposedly being delivered to was only a dream, that they would never get out of Bombay.

Escaping Maharashtra
: it suddenly struck him as a better title than
Limo Roulette
. But maybe not, Farrokh thought.

‘I’m quite fond of bibliophiles,’ Martin Mills was saying as they climbed the stairs. For the first time, Dr Daruwalla was aware of how loudly the scholastic spoke; the zealot was too loud for a library.

There are over eight hundred thousand volumes here,’ Farrokh whispered. This includes ten thousand manuscripts!’

‘I’m glad we’re alone for a moment,’ the missionary said in a voice that rattled the wrought iron of the loggia.

‘
Ssshhh
!’ the doctor hissed. The marble statues frowned down upon them; 80 or 90 of the library staffers had long ago assumed the frowning air of the statuary, and Dr Daruwalla foresaw that the zealot with his booming voice would soon be rebuked by one of the slipper-clad, scolding types who scurried through the musty recesses of the Asiatic Society Library. To avoid a confrontation, the doctor steered the scholastic into a reading room with no one in it.

The ceiling fan had snagged the string that turned the fan on and off, and only the slight ticking of the string against the blades disturbed the silence of the moldering air. The dusty books sagged on the carved teak shelves; numbered cartons of manuscripts were stacked against the bookcases; wide-bottomed, leather-padded chairs surrounded an oval table that was strewn with pencils and pads of notepaper. Only one of these chairs was on castors; it was tilted, for it was four-legged and had only three castors – the missing castor, like a paperweight, held down one of the pads of notepaper.

The American zealot, as if compelled by his countrymen’s irritating instinct to appear handy with all things, instantly undertook the task of repairing the broken chair. There were a half-dozen other chairs that the doctor and the missionary could have sat in, and Dr Daruwalla suspected that the chair with the detached castor had probably maintained its disabled condition, untouched, for the last 10 or 20 years; perhaps the chair had been partially destroyed in celebration of Independence – more than 40 years ago! Yet here was this fool, determined to make it right. Is there no place in town I can take this idiot? Farrokh wondered. Before the doctor could stop the zealot, Martin Mills had upended the chair on the oval table, where it made a loud thump.

‘Come on – you must tell me,’ the missionary said. ‘I’m dying to hear the story of your conversion. Naturally, the Father Rector has told me about it,’

Naturally, Dr Daruwalla thought; Father Julian had doubtless made the doctor come off as a deluded, false convert. Then, suddenly, to Farrokh’s surprise, the missionary produced a knife! It was one of those Swiss Army knives that Dhar liked so much – a kind of toolbox unto itself. With something that resembled a leather-punch, the Jesuit was boring a hole into the leg of the chair. The rotting wood fell on the table.

‘It just needs a new screw hole,’ Martin exclaimed. ‘I can’t believe no one knew how to fix it.’

‘I suppose people just sat in the other chairs,’ Dr Daruwalla suggested. While the scholastic wrestled with the chair leg, the nasty little tool on the knife suddenly snapped closed, neatly removing a hunk of Martin’s index finger. The Jesuit bled profusely onto a pad of notepaper.

‘Now, look, you’ve cut yourself …’ Dr Daruwalla began.

‘It’s nothing,’ the zealot said, but it was evident that the chair was beginning to make the man of God angry. ‘I want to hear your story. Come on. I know how it starts … you’re in Goa, aren’t you? You’ve just gone to visit the sainted remains of our Francis Xavier … what’s left of him. And you go to sleep thinking of that pilgrim who bit off St Francis’s toe.’

‘I went to sleep thinking of nothing at all!’ Farrokh insisted, his voice rising.

‘
Ssshhh
! This is a library,’ the missionary reminded Dr Daruwalla.

‘I
know
it’s a library!’ the doctor cried – too loudly, for they weren’t alone. At first unseen but now emerging from a pile of manuscripts was an old man who’d been sleeping in a corner chair; it was another chair on castors, for it wheeled their way. Its disagreeable rider, who’d been roused from the depths of whatever sleep his reading material had sunk him into, was wearing a Nehru jacket, which (like his hands) was gray from transmitted newsprint.

‘
Ssshhh
!’ the older reader said. Then he wheeled back into his corner of the room.

‘Maybe we should find another place to discuss my conversion,’ Farrokh whispered to Martin Mills.

‘I’m going to fix this chair,’ the Jesuit replied. Now bleeding onto the chair and the table and the pad of notepaper, Martin Mills jammed the rebellious castor into the inverted chair leg; with another dangerous-looking tool, a stubby screwdriver, he struggled to affix the castor to the chair. ‘So … you went to sleep … your mind an absolute blank, or so you’re telling me. And then what?’

‘I dreamt I was St Francis’s corpse …’ Dr Daruwalla began.

‘Body dreams, very common,’ the zealot whispered.

‘
Ssshhh
!’ said the old man in the Nehru jacket, from the corner.

‘I dreamt that the crazed pilgrim was biting off my toe!’ Farrokh hissed.

‘You/eft this?’ Martin asked.

‘Of course I felt it!’ hissed the doctor.

‘But corpses don’t feel, do they?’ the scholastic said. ‘Oh, well… so
you felt
the bite, and then?’

‘When I woke up, my toe was
throbbing. I
couldn’t stand on that foot, much less walk! And there were bite marks – not broken skin, mind you, but actual teeth marks! Those marks were
real!
The
bite
was real!’ Farrokh insisted.

‘Of course it was real,’ the missionary said. ‘Something real bit you. What could it have been?’

‘I was on a balcony – I was in the air!’ Farrokh whispered hoarsely.

Try to keep it down,’ the Jesuit whispered. ‘Are you telling me that this balcony was utterly unapproachable?’

Through locked doors … where my wife and children were asleep …’ Farrokh began.

‘Ah, the
children!’
Martin Mills cried out. ‘How old were they?’

‘I wasn’t bitten by my own children!’ Dr Daruwalla hissed.

‘Children
do
bite, from time to time – or as a prank,’ the missionary replied. ‘I’ve heard that children go through actual [_biting ages – _]when they’re especially prone to bite.’

‘I suppose my wife could have been hungry, too,’ Farrokh said sarcastically.

There were no trees around the balcony?’ Martin Mills asked; he was now both bleeding and sweating over the stubborn chair.

‘I see it coming,’ Dr Daruwalla said. ‘Father Julian’s monkey theory. Biting apes, swinging from vines — is that what you think?’

The point is, you were
really
bitten, weren’t you?’ the Jesuit asked him. ‘People get so confused about miracles. The miracle wasn’t that something bit you. The miracle is that you believe! Your
faith
is the miracle. It hardly matters that it was something … common that triggered it.’

‘What happened to my toe wasn’t common!’ the doctor cried.

The old reader in the Nehru jacket shot out of his corner on his chair on castors. ‘
Ssshhh
!’ the old man hissed.

‘Are you trying to read or trying to s/eep?’ the doctor shouted at the old gentleman.

‘Come on – you’re disturbing him. He was here first,’ Martin Mills told Dr Daruwalla. ‘Look!’ the scholastic said to the old man, as if the angry reader were a child.

‘See this chair? I’ve fixed it. Want to try it? The missionary set the chair on all four castors and rolled it back and forth. The gentleman in the Nehru jacket eyed the zealot warily.

‘He has his own chair, for God’s sake,’ Farrokh said.

‘Come on – give it a try!’ the missionary urged the old reader.

‘I have to find a telephone,’ Dr Daruwalla pleaded with the zealot. ‘I should make a reservation for lunch. And we should stay with the children – they’re probably bored.’ But, to his dismay, the doctor saw that Martin Mills was staring up at the ceiling fan; the tangled string had caught the handyman’s eye.

‘That string is annoying – if you’re trying to read,’ the scholastic said. He climbed up on the oval table, which accepted his weight reluctantly.

‘You’ll break the table,’ the doctor warned him.

‘I won’t break the table – I’m thinking of fixing the fan,’ Martin Mills replied. Slowly and awkwardly, the Jesuit went from kneeling to standing.

‘I can see what you’re thinking – you’re crazy!’ Dr Daruwalla said.

‘Come on – you’re just angry about your miracle,’ the missionary said. ‘I’m not trying to take your miracle away from you. I’m only trying to make you see the
real
miracle. It is simply that you believe – not the silly thing that made you believe. The biting was only a vehicle.’

‘The
biting
was the miracle!’ Dr Daruwalla cried.

‘No, no – that’s where you’re wrong,’ Martin Mills managed to say, just before the table collapsed under him. Falling, he reached for – and fortunately missed –the fan. The gentleman in the Nehru jacket was the most astonished; when Martin Mills fell, the old reader was cautiously trying out the newly repaired chair. The collapse of the table and the missionary’s cry of alarm sent the old man scrambling. The chair leg with the freshly bored hole rejected the castor. While both the old reader and the Jesuit lay on the floor, Dr Daruwalla was left to calm down the outraged library staffer who’d shuffled into the reading room in his slippers.

‘We were just leaving,’ Dr Daruwalla told the librarian. ‘It’s too noisy here to concentrate on anything at all!’

Sweating and bleeding and limping, the missionary followed Farrokh down the grand staircase, under the frowning statues. To relax himself, Dr Daruwalla was chanting, ‘Life imitates art. Life imitates art.’

‘What’s that you say?’ asked Martin Mills.

‘
Ssshhh
!’ the doctor told him. ‘This is a library.’

‘Don’t be angry about your miracle,’ the zealot said.

‘It was long ago. I don’t think I believe in anything anymore,’ Farrokh replied.

‘Don’t say that!’ the missionary cried.

‘
Ssshhh
!’ Farrokh whispered to him.

‘I know, I know,’ said Martin Mills. This is a library.’

It was almost noon. Outside, in the glaring sunlight, they stared into the street without seeing the taxi that was parked at the curb. Vinod had to walk up to them; the dwarf led them to the car as if they were blind. Inside the Ambassador, the children were crying. They were sure that the circus was a myth or a hoax.

‘No, no – it’s real,’ Dr Daruwalla assured them. ‘We’re going there, we really are – it’s just that the plane is delayed.’ But what did Madhu or Ganesh know about airplanes? The doctor assumed that they’d never flown; flying would be another terror for them. And when the children saw that Martin Mills was bleeding, they were worried that there’d been some violence. ‘Only to a chair,’ Farrokh said. He was angry at himself, for in the confusion he’d forgotten to reserve his favorite table in the Ladies’ Garden, He knew that Mr Sethna would find a way to abuse him for this oversight.

As punishment, Mr Sethna had given the doctor’s table to Mr and Mrs Kohinoor and Mrs Kohinoor’s noisy, unmarried sister. The latter woman was so shrill, not even the bower of flowers in the Ladies’ Garden could absorb her whinnies or brays. Probably on purpose, Mr Sethna had seated Dr Daruwalla’s party at a table in a neglected corner of the garden, where the waiters either ignored you or failed to see you from their stations in the dining room. A torn vine of the bougainvillea hung down from the bower and brushed the back of Dr Daruwalla’s neck like a claw. The good news was it wasn’t Chinese Day. Madhu and Ganesh ordered vegetarian kabobs; the vegetables were broiled or grilled on skewers. It was a dish that children sometimes ate with their fingers. While the doctor hoped that Madhu’s and Ganesh’s unfamiliarity with knives and forks would go unnoticed, Mr Sethna speculated on whose children they were.

The old steward observed that the cripple had kicked his one sandal off; the calluses on the sole of the boy’s good foot were as thick as a beggar’s. The foot the elephant had stepped on was still concealed by the sock, which was already gray-brown, and it didn’t fool Mr Sethna, who could tell that the hidden foot was oddly flattened – the boy had limped on his heel. On the ball of the bad foot, the sock was still mostly white.