A Son Of The Circus (8 page)

Recently, in the light of certain death threats that Inspector Dhar had received, Dr Daruwalla had even considered retiring; the doctor had meant to sound out the actor in regard to this notion. If I stop, Farrokh wondered, what will Dhar do? If I stop, what will
I
do? he’d also wondered, for he’d long suspected that Dhar wouldn’t be opposed to the idea of getting out of the business of being Dhar – especially now. To suffer the verbal abuse of
The Times of India
was one thing, death threats were something altogether different.

And now this unlikely association to Mr Lai’s golf game, this unveiled reek of sun-rotted garbage, this ancient smell from a clogged drain – or had someone been peeing in the bougainvillea? These thoughts were most unwelcome. Dr Daruwalla suddenly saw himself as the poor, doomed Mr Lai; he thought he was as bad but as compulsive a writer as Mr Lai had been a golfer. For example, he’d not only written another screenplay; they’d already finished the final cut of the picture. Coincidentally, the new movie would be released shortly before or after the arrival in Bombay of Dhar’s twin. Dhar himself was just hanging around – he was under contract for a very limited number of interviews and photo opportunities to publicize the new release. (This forced intimacy with the film press could never be limited enough to suit Dhar.) Also, there was every reason to believe that the new film might make as much trouble as the last. And so the time to stop is
now
, thought Dr Daruwalla, before I begin another one!

But how could he stop? It was something he loved. And how could he hope to improve? Farrokh was doing the best that he could; like poor Mr Lai, he was hopelessly returning to the ninth green. Each time, the flowers would fly but the golf ball would remain more or less unresponsive; each time, he would be knee-deep in the blighted bougainvillea, slashing wildly at the little white ball. Then, one day, the vultures would be overhead and descending.

There was just one choice: either hit the ball and
not
the flowers, or stop the game. Dr Daruwalla understood this, yet he couldn’t decide – no more than he could bring himself to tell Inspector Dhar the upsetting news. After all, the doctor thought, how can I hope to be any better than my proven abilities? And how can I stop it, when ‘it’ is merely what I do?

It soothed him to think of the circus. Like a child who’s proud to recite the names of Santa’s reindeer or the Seven Dwarfs, Farrokh tested himself by remembering the names of the Great Royal’s lions: Ram, Raja, Wazir, Mother, Diamond, Shanker, Crown, Max, Hondo, Highness, Lillie Mol, Leo and Tex. And then there were the cubs: Sita, Gita, Julie, Devi, Bheem and Lucy. The lions were most dangerous between their first and second feedings of meat. The meat made their paws slippery; while they paced in their cages, in expectation of their second serving, they often slipped and fell down, or they slid sideways into the bars. After their second feeding, they calmed down and licked the grease off their paws. With lions, you could count on certain things. They were always themselves. Lions didn’t try to be what they couldn’t be, the way Dr Daruwalla kept trying to be a writer – the way I keep trying to be an Indian! he thought.

And in 15 years, he’d not found a genetic marker for achondroplastic dwarfism, nor had anyone encouraged him to look. But he kept trying. The doctor’s dwarf-blood project wasn’t dead; he wouldn’t let it die – not yet.

By the time Dr Daruwalla was in his late fifties, the exuberant details of the doctor’s conversion to Christianity were entirely absent from his conversation; it was as if he were slowly becoming converted. But 15 years ago – as the doctor drove to the circus grounds at Cross Maidan to assess what damage had been done to the dwarf – Farrokh’s faith was still new enough that he’d already imparted the miraculous particulars of his belief to Vinod. If the dwarf was truly dying, the doctor was at least slightly comforted by his memory of their religious discussion – for Vinod was a deeply religious man. In the coming years, Farrokh’s faith would comfort him less deeply, and he would one day flee from any religious discourse with Vinod. Over time, the dwarf would strike the doctor as a giant zealot.

But while the doctor was en route to discover whatever disaster had befallen the dwarf at the Great Blue Nile, he found it heartening to dwell on the dwarf’s expressed excitement over the parallels between Vinod’s version of Hinduism and Dr Daruwalla’s Christianity.

‘We are having a kind of Trinity, too!’ the dwarf had exclaimed.

‘Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu – is that what you mean?’ the doctor asked.

‘All creation is being in the hands of three gods,’ Vinod said. ‘First is Brahma, the God of Creation –there is only one temple in all of India to him! Second is Vishnu, the God of Preservation or Existence. And third is Shiva, the God of Change.’

‘Change?’ Farrokh asked. ‘I thought Shiva was the Destroyer – the God of Destruction.’

‘Why is everyone saying this?’ the dwarf exclaimed. ‘All creation is being cyclic – there is no finality. I am liking it better to think of Shiva as the God of Change. Sometimes death is change, too.’

‘I see,’ Dr Daruwalla replied. ‘That’s a positive way of looking at it.’

‘This is our Trinity,’ the dwarf went on. ‘Creation, Preservation, Change.’

‘I guess I don’t understand the
female
forms,’ Farrokh boldly admitted.

‘The power of the gods is being represented by the females,’ Vinod explained. ‘Durga is the female form of Shiva – she is the Goddess of Death and Destruction.’

‘But you just said Shiva was the God of Change,’ the doctor interjected.

‘His female form, Durga, is the Goddess of Death and Destruction,’ the dwarf repeated.

‘I see,’ Dr Daruwalla responded; it seemed best to say so.

‘Durga is looking after me – I am praying to her,’ Vinod added.

‘The Goddess of Death and Destruction is looking after you?’ Farrokh inquired.

‘She is always protecting me,’ the dwarf insisted.

‘I see,’ Dr Daruwalla said; he guessed that being protected by the Goddess of Death and Destruction had a kind of karmic ring to it.

Finally, Farrokh found Vinod lying in the dirt under the bleachers; it appeared that the dwarf had fallen through the wooden planks, from perhaps the fourth or fifth row of seats. The roustabouts had cleared the crowd from only a small section of the audience area, below which Vinod lay, unmoving. But how and why the dwarf had landed there wasn’t immediately clear. Was there a clown act that required audience participation?

On the far side of the ring, a desultory gathering of dwarf clowns was bravely trying to keep the crowd’s attention; it was the familiar Farting Clown act –through a hole in the seat of his colorful pants, one dwarf kept ‘farting’ talcum powder on the other dwarfs. They didn’t appear to be weakened or otherwise the worse for giving the doctor a Vacutainer of their blood, which Vinod had shamelessly entreated them to do; just as shamelessly, Dr Daruwalla had lied to them — exactly as Vinod had advised him. The dwarfs’ blood would be used to give strength to a dying dwarf; Vinod had even compounded this fiction by telling his fellow clowns that he’d already been bled to the doctor’s satisfaction.

This time, mercifully, the ringmaster’s voice on the loudspeaker had not heralded the doctor’s arrival. Since Vinod lay under the bleacher seats, most of the crowd couldn’t see him. Farrokh knelt in the dirt, which was littered with the audience’s leavings: greasy paper cones, soft-drink bottles, peanut shells and discarded betel-nut pieces. On the underside of the bleachers, Farrokh could see the white stripes of lime paste that streaked the wooden planks; the paein users had wiped their fingers under their seats.

‘I think I am not ending up here,’ Vinod whispered to the doctor. ‘I think I am not dying –just changing.’

‘Try not to move,’ Dr Daruwalla replied. ‘Just tell me where you’re hurting.’

‘I am not moving. I am not hurting,’ the dwarf answered. ‘I am just not feeling my backside.’

Quite in character for a man of faith, the dwarf lay stoically suffering with his trident hands crossed upon his chest. He complained later that no one had dared to approach him, except a vendor – a channa-walla with his tray of nuts around his neck. Vinod had told the vendor about the numbness in his backside; hence the ringmaster assumed that the dwarf had broken his neck or his back. Vinod thought that someone should at least have talked to him or listened to the story of his life; someone should have held his head or offered him water until the stretcher bearers in their dirty-white dhotis came for him.

‘This is Shiva – this is being his business,’ the dwarf told Dr Daruwalla. ‘This is change – not death, I think. If Durga is doing this, then okay – I am dying. But I think I am merely changing.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Dr Daruwalla replied; he made Vinod grip his fingers. Then the doctor touched the backs of Vinod’s legs.

‘I am feeling you only a little,’ the dwarf responded.

‘I’m touching you only a little,’ Farrokh explained.

‘This is meaning I am not dying,’ said the dwarf. This is merely the gods advising me.’

‘What are they telling you?’ the doctor asked.

‘They are saying I am ready to leave the circus,’ Vinod answered. ‘At least
this
circus.’

Slowly, the faces from the Great Blue Nile gathered around them. The ringmaster, the boneless girls and the plastic ladies – even the lion tamer, who toyed with his whip. But the doctor wouldn’t allow the stretcher bearers to move the dwarf until someone explained how Vinod had been injured. Vinod believed that only the other dwarfs could describe the accident properly; for this reason, the Farting Clown act had to be halted. By now the act had deteriorated in the usual fashion: the offending dwarf was farting talcum powder into the front-row seats. Since the front row of the audience was chiefly populated with children, the farting was considered no great offense. However, the crowd was already dispersing; the Farting Clown act was never funny for very long. The Great Blue Nile had exhausted its entire repertoire in a half-successful effort to keep the audience seated until the doctor arrived.

Now the gathering clowns confessed to the doctor that Vinod had been injured in other acts, before. Once he’d fallen off a horse; once he’d been chased and bitten by a chimpanzee. Once, when the Blue Nile had a female bear, the bear had butted Vinod into a bucket of diluted shaving lather; this was a scripted part of the act, but the bear had butted Vinod too hard – he’d had his breath knocked out, and (as a consequence) the dwarf had then inhaled and swallowed the soapy water. Vinod’s fellow clowns had also seen him hurt in the Cricket-Playing Elephants act. Apparently, to the degree that Dr Daruwalla could understand the stunt at all, one elephant was the bowler and a second elephant was the batsman; it held and swung the bat with its trunk. Vinod was the cricket ball. It
hurt
to be bowled by one elephant and batted by another, even though the bat was made of rubber.

As Farrokh would learn later, the Great Royal Circus never put
their
dwarf clowns at such risk, but this was the Great Blue Nile. The terrible teeterboard accident, which was responsible for Vinod’s pained position under the bleacher seats, was simply another elephant act of ill repute. The acts in an Indian circus are called ‘items’; in terms of accuracy, the Elephant on a Teeterboard item wasn’t as precise as the Cricket-Playing Elephants but it was a favorite with children, who were more familiar with a seesaw or a teeter-totter than with cricket.

In the Elephant on a Teeterboard item, Vinod acted the part of a crabby clown, a spoilsport who wouldn’t play with his fellow dwarfs on the seesaw. Whenever they balanced the teeter-totter, Vinod jumped on one end and knocked them all off. Then he sat on the teeterboard with his back to them. One by one, they crept onto the other end of the board, until Vinod was up in the air; whereupon, he turned around and slid down the board into the other dwarfs, knocking them all off again. It was thus established for the audience that Vinod was guilty of antisocial behavior. His fellow dwarfs left him sitting on one end of the seesaw, with his back to them, while they fetched an elephant.

The only part of this act that is of possible interest to grownups is the demonstration that elephants can count – at least as high as three. The dwarfs tried to coax the elephant to stamp on the raised end of the teeterboard while Vinod was sitting on the other end, but the elephant was taught to delay stamping on the teeterboard until the third time. The first two times that the elephant raised its huge foot above the teeterboard, it
didn’t
stamp on the board; twice, at the last second, it flapped its ears and turned away. The idea was planted with the audience that the elephant wouldn’t really do it. The third time, when the elephant stamped down on the seesaw and Vinod was propelled into the air, the crowd was properly surprised.

Vinod was supposed to be launched upward into the rolled nets that were lowered only for the trapeze performance. He would cling to the underside of this netting like a bat, screaming at his fellow dwarfs to get him down. Naturally, they couldn’t reach him without the help of the elephant, of which Vinod was demonstrably afraid. Typical circus slapstick; yet it was important that the teeterboard was aimed
exactly
at the rolled-up safety nets. That fateful night his life changed, Vinod realized (as he sat on the seesaw) that the teeterboard was pointed into the audience.

This could be blamed on the Kingfisher lager; such big bottles of beer had an unsteadying effect on dwarfs. Dr Daruwalla would never again bribe dwarfs with beer. Sadly, the seesaw was pointed in the wrong direction and Vinod had neglected to count the number of times that the elephant had raised its foot, which the dwarf had previously managed to do without seeing the elephant; Vinod always counted the times the elephant raised its foot by the gasps of anticipation in the audience. Of course, Vinod could have turned his head and looked at the elephant to see where the beast’s great foot was. But Vinod held himself accountable for certain standards: if he’d turned to look at the elephant, it would have spoiled the act completely.