A Son of the Circus

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 paan 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.

As it happened, Vinod was flung into the fourth row of seats. He remembered hoping that he wouldn’t land on any children, but he needn’t have worried; the audience scattered before he arrived. He struck the empty wooden bleachers and fell through the space between the planks.

Created by spontaneous mutation, an achondroplastic dwarf lives in pain; his knees ache, his elbows ache —not to mention that they won’t extend. His ankles ache and his back aches, too—not to mention the degenerative arthritis. Of course there are worse types of dwarfism: pseudoachondroplastic dwarfs suffer so-called windswept deformities—bowleg on one limb, knock-knee on the other. Dr. Daruwalla had seen dwarfs who couldn’t walk at all. Even so, given the pain that Vinod was accustomed to, the dwarf didn’t mind that his backside was numb; it was possibly the best that the dwarf had felt in years—in spite of being catapulted 40 feet by an elephant and landing on his coccyx on a wooden plank.

Thus did the injured dwarf become Dr. Daruwalla’s patient. Vinod had suffered a slight fracture in the apex of his coccyx, and he’d bruised the tendon of his external sphincter muscle, which is attached to this apex; in short, he’d quite literally busted his ass. Vinod had also torn some of the sacrosciatic ligaments, which are attached to the narrow borders of the coccyx. The numbness of his backside, which soon abated—thence Vinod would return to the world of his routine aches and pains—was possibly the result of some pressure on one or more of the sacral nerves.