the traffic. The doctor could see Madhu’s face reflected in the rearview mirror; she’d not responded—she’d not even glanced in the mirror at the mention of her name.
“What concerns me, about the
“My arms are the best—very strong. I could ride a pony—no legs necessary with hands as strong as mine,” Ganesh suggested. “I could do lots of tricks—hang by my arms from an elephant’s trunk, maybe ride a lion.”
“But what concerns me is that they won’t
“I’ll have to show them,” Ganesh said. “But what do you do to the lions to make them stand on those little stools?”
“
“And what do you do with tigers?” Ganesh asked.
“What
“I’ll have to show them,” the boy repeated. “Maybe something with their tails—tigers have long tails.”
The dwarf entered the roundabout that the doctor hated. There were too many easily distracted drivers who stared at the sea and at the worshipers milling in the mudflats around Haji Ali’s Tomb; the rotary was near Tardeo, where Farrokh’s father had been blown to smithereens. Now, in the midst of this roundabout, the traffic swerved to avoid a lunatic cripple; a legless man in one of those makeshift wheelchairs powered by a hand crank was navigating the rotary against the flow of other vehicles. The doctor could follow Ganesh’s roaming gaze; the boy’s black eyes either ignored or avoided the wheelchair madman. The little beggar was probably still thinking about the tigers.
Dr. Daruwalla didn’t know the exact ending of his screenplay; he had only a general idea of what would happen to
In the rearview mirror, Dr. Daruwalla could see that Madhu’s lion-yellow eyes were following the movements of the legless maniac. Then the dwarf needed to brake sharply; he brought his taxi to a full stop in order to avoid the crazed cripple in the wrong-way wheelchair. The wheelchair sported a bumper sticker opposed to horn blowing.
A battered oil truck loomed over the wheelchair lunatic; in a fury, the oil-truck driver repeatedly blew his horn. The great cylindrical body of the truck was covered with foot-high lettering the color of flame,
The oil truck also sported a bumper sticker, which was almost illegible behind flecks of tar and splattered insects.
Dr. Daruwalla knew that Vinod didn’t have one.
As if it wasn’t irritating enough to be obstructing traffic, the cripple was begging among the stopped cars. The clumsy wheelchair bumped against the Ambassador’s rear door. Farrokh was incensed when Ganesh rolled down the rear window, toward which the wheelchair madman extended his arm.
“Don’t give that idiot anything!” the doctor cried, but Farrokh had underestimated the speed of Bird-Shit Boy. Dr. Daruwalla never saw the bird-shit syringe, only the look of surprise on the face of the crazed cripple in the wheelchair; he quickly withdrew his arm—his palm, his wrist, his whole forearm dripping bird shit. Vinod cheered.
“Got him,” Ganesh said.
A passing paint truck nearly obliterated the wheelchair lunatic. Vinod cheered for the paint truck, too.
When the paint truck was gone from view, the traffic moved again—the dwarf’s taxi taking the lead. The doctor remembered the bumper sticker on Vinod’s Ambassador.
“I said no more bird-shit tricks, Ganesh,” Farrokh told the boy. In the rearview mirror, Dr. Daruwalla could see Madhu watching him; when he met her eyes, she looked away. Through the open window, the air was hot and dry, but the pleasure of a moving car was new to the boy, if not to the child prostitute. Maybe nothing was new to her, the doctor feared. But for the beggar, if not for Madhu, this was the start of an adventure.
“Where
Farrokh knew that the Great Blue Nile might be anywhere in Gujarat. The question that concerned Dr. Daruwalla was not
Ahead, the traffic slowed again; probably pedestrians, Dr. Daruwalla thought—shoppers from the nearby chowk, crowding into the street. Then the doctor saw the body of a man in the gutter; his legs extended into the road. The traffic was squeezed into one lane because the oncoming drivers didn’t want to drive over the dead man’s feet or ankles. A crowd was quickly forming; soon there would be the usual chaos. For the moment, the only concession made to the dead man was that no one drove over him.
“Is the circus
“Yes, it’s far—it’s a world apart,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “A world apart” was what he hoped for the boy, whose bright black eyes spotted the body in the road. Ganesh quickly looked away. The dwarf’s taxi inched past the dead man; once more, Vinod moved ahead of the traffic.
“Did you see that?” Farrokh asked Ganesh.
“See what?” the cripple said.
“There is a man being dead,” Vinod said.
“They are nonpersons,” Ganesh replied. “You think you seem them but they are not really being there.”
O God, keep this boy from becoming a nonperson! Dr. Daruwalla thought. His fear surprised him; he couldn’t bring himself to seek the cripple’s hopeful face. In the rearview mirror, Madhu was watching the doctor again. Her indifference was chilling. It had been quite a while since Dr. Daruwalla had prayed, but he began.
India wasn’t limo roulette. There were no good scouts or bad scouts for the circus; there was no freak circus, either. There were no right-limo, wrong-limo choices. For these children, the real roulette would begin after they got to the circus—
In the new missionary’s cubicle, the last mosquito coil had burned out just before dawn. The mosquitoes had come with the early gray light and had departed with the first heat of the day—all but the mosquito that Martin Mills
