A Son of the Circus

competition. They walked up and down and across Gerrard, with no purpose. Farrokh kept repeating the names of the places. The Kohinoor supermarket, the Madras Durbar, the Apollo Video (promising ASIAN MOVIES), the India Theater—NOW PLAYING, TAMIL MOVIES! At the Chaat Hut, Farrokh explained to Mac what was meant by “all kinds of chaats.” At the Bombay Bhel, they barely had time to eat their aloo tikki and drink their Thunderbolt beer.

Before they went back to the hospital, the doctors stopped at J. S. Addison Plumbing, at the corner of Woodfield. Dr. Daruwalla was looking for that splendid copper bathtub with the ornate faucets; the handles were tiger heads, the tigers roaring—it was exactly like the tub he’d bathed in as a boy on old Ridge Road, Malabar Hill. He’d had that bathtub on his mind ever since his last, unplanned visit to Little India. But the tub had been sold. What Farrokh found, instead, was another marvel of Victorian ornamentation. It was that same sink spout, with tusks for faucets, which had captured Rahul’s imagination in the ladies’ room of the Duckworth Club; it was that elephant-headed spigot, with the water spraying from the elephant’s trunk. Farrokh touched the two tusks, one for hot water and the other for cold. Macfarlane thought it was ghastly, but Dr. Daruwalla didn’t hesitate to buy it; it was the product of a recognizably British imagination, but it was made in India.

“Does it have a sentimental value?” Mac asked.

“Not exactly,” Farrokh replied. Dr. Daruwalla wondered what he’d do with the ugly thing; he knew Julia would absolutely hate it.

“Those men who drove you here, and left you …” Mac suddenly said.

“What about them?”

“Do you imagine that they bring other people here—like they brought you?”

“All the time,” Farrokh said. “I imagine that they’re bringing people here all the time.”

Mac thought Farrokh looked mortally depressed and told him so.

How can I ever feel assimiliated? Dr. Daruwalla wondered. “How am I supposed to feel like a Canadian?” Farrokh asked Mac.

Indeed, if one could believe the newspapers, there was a growing resistance to immigration; demographers were predicting a “racist backlash.” The resistance to immigration was racist, Dr. Daruwalla believed; the doctor had become very sensitive to the phrase “visible minorities.” He knew this didn’t mean the Italians or the Germans or the Portuguese; they’d come to Canada in the 1950s. Until the last decade, by far the greatest proportion of immigrants came from Britain.

But not now; the new immigrants came from Hong Kong and China and India—half the immigrants who’d come to Canada in this decade were Asians. In Toronto, almost 40 percent of the population was immigrant—more than a million people.

Macfarlane suffered to see Farrokh so despondent. “Believe me, Farrokh,” Mac said. “I know it’s no circus to be an immigrant in this country, and although I trust that those thugs who dumped you in Little India have assaulted other immigrants in the city, I don’t believe that they’re transporting people all over town ‘all the time,’ as you say.”

“Don’t you mean it’s no picnic? You said ‘no circus,’” Farrokh told Mac.

“It’s the same expression,” Macfarlane replied.

“Do you know what my father said to me?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“Could it be, ‘Immigrants are immigrants all their lives’?” Macfarlane inquired.

“Oh—I’ve already told you,” Farrokh said.

“Too many times to count,” Mac replied. “But I suppose you go around thinking of it all the time.”

“All the time,” Farrokh repeated. He felt grateful for what a good friend Mac was.

It had been Dr. Macfarlane who’d persuaded Dr. Daruwalla to volunteer his time at the AIDS hospice in Toronto; Duncan Frasier had died there. Farrokh had worked at the hospice for over a year. At first, he suspected his own motives, which he’d confessed to Mac; on Mac’s advice, Farrokh had also discussed his special interest in the hospice with the director of nursing.

It had been awkward for Farrokh to tell a stranger the story of his relationship with John D.—how this young man, who was like an adopted son to Dr. Daruwalla, had always been a homosexual, but the doctor hadn’t known it until John D. was almost 40; how, even now, when John D.’s sexual orientation was plainly clear, Farrokh and the not-so-young “young” man still didn’t speak of the matter (at least not in depth). Dr. Daruwalla told Dr. Macfarlane and the hospice’s director of nursing that he wanted to be involved with AIDS patients because he wanted to know more about the elusive John D. Farrokh admitted that he was terrified for John D.; that his beloved almost-like-a-son might die of AIDS was Farrokh’s greatest fear. (Yes, he was afraid for Martin, too.)

Emotional restraint, which was repeatedly demonstrated in Dr. Daruwalla’s friendship with Dr. Macfarlane— their understated conversation regarding the status of Macfarlane’s HIV-positive condition was but one example— prevented Farrokh from admitting to his friend that he was also afraid of watching Mac die of AIDS. But it was perfectly well understood, by both doctors and by the hospice’s director of nursing, that this was another motive underlying Farrokh’s desire to familiarize himself with the functions of an AIDS hospice.

Dr. Daruwalla believed that the more naturally he could learn to behave in the presence of AIDS patients, not to mention gay men, the closer his relationship with John D. might become. They’d already grown closer together, ever since John D. had told Farrokh that he’d always been gay. Doubtless, Dr. Daruwalla’s friendship with Dr. Macfarlane had helped. But what “father” can ever feel close enough to his “son”—that was the issue, wasn’t it? Farrokh had asked Mac.

“Don’t try to get too close to John D.,” Macfarlane had advised. “Remember, you’re not his father—and you’re not gay.”

It had been awkward—how Dr. Daruwalla had first tried to fit in at the hospice. As Mac had warned him, he had to learn that he wasn’t their doctor—he was just a volunteer. He asked lots of doctor-type questions and generally drove the nurses crazy; taking orders from nurses was something Dr. Daruwalla had to get used to. It was an effort for him to limit his expertise to the issue of bedsores; he still couldn’t be stopped from prescribing little exercises to combat the muscular wasting of the patients. He so freely dispensed tennis balls for squeezing that one of the nurses nicknamed him “Dr. Balls.” After a while, the name pleased him.

He was good at taking care of the catheters, and he was capable of giving morphine injections when one of the hospice doctors or nurses asked him to. He grew familiar with the feeding tubes; he hated seeing the seizures. He hoped that he would never watch John D. die with fulminant diarrhea… with an uncontrolled infection… with a spiking fever.

“I hope not, too,” Mac told him. “But if you’re not prepared to watch me die, you’ll be worthless to me when the time comes.”

Dr. Daruwalla wanted to be prepared. Usually, his voluntary time was spent in ordinary chores. One night, he did the laundry, just as Macfarlane had proudly bragged about doing it years earlier—all the bed linens and the towels. He also read aloud to patients who couldn’t read. He wrote letters for them, too.

One night, when Farrokh was working the switchboard, an angry woman called; she was indignant because she’d just learned that her only son was dying in the hospice and no one had officially informed her—not even her son. She was outraged, she said. She wanted to speak to someone in charge; she didn’t ask to speak to her son.

Dr. Daruwalla supposed that, although he wasn’t “in charge,” the woman might as well speak to him; he knew the hospice and its rules well enough to advise her how to visit—when to come, how to show respect for privacy and so forth. But the woman wouldn’t hear of it.

“You’re not in charge!” she kept shouting. “I want to speak to a doctor!” she cried. “I want to talk to the head of the place!”

Dr. Daruwalla was about to tell her his full name, his profession, his age—even the number of his children and his grandchildren, if she liked. But before he could speak, she screamed at him. “Who are you, anyway? What are you?”

Dr. Daruwalla answered her with such conviction and pride that he surprised himself. “I’m a volunteer,” the doctor said. The concept pleased him. Farrokh wondered if it felt as good to be assimilated as it did to be a volunteer.