A Son of the Circus

The Bottommost Drawer

After Dr. Daruwalla left Bombay, there were other departures; in one case, there was a departure and a return. Suman, the skywalker par excellence, left the Great Royal Circus. She married a man in the milk business. Then, after various discussions with Pratap Walawalkar, the owner, Suman came back to the Great Royal, bringing her milk-business husband with her. Only recently, the doctor had heard that Suman’s husband had become one of the managers of the Great Royal Circus, and that Suman was once again walking on the sky; she was still very much the star.

Farrokh also learned that Pratap Singh had quit the Great Royal; the ringmaster and wild-animal trainer had left with his wife, Sumi, and their troupe of child acrobats—the real Pinky among them—to join the New Grand Circus. Unlike the Pinky character in Limo Roulette, the real Pinky wasn’t killed by a lion who mistook her for a peacock; the real Pinky was still performing, in one town after another. She would be 11 or 12, Farrokh guessed.

Dr. Daruwalla had heard that a girl named Ratna was performing the Skywalk at the New Grand; remarkably, Ratna could skywalk backward! The doctor was further informed that, by the time the New Grand Circus performed in Changanacheri, Pinky’s name had been changed to Choti Rani, which means Little Queen. Possibly Pratap had chosen the new name not only because Choti Rani was suitably theatrical, but also because Pinky was so special to him; Pratap always said she was absolutely the best. Just plain Pinky was a little queen now.

As for Deepa and Shivaji, the dwarf’s dwarf son, they had escaped the Great Blue Nile. Shivaji was very much Vinod’s son, in respect to the dwarf’s determination; as for Shivaji’s talent, the young man was a better acrobat than his father—and, at worst, Vinod’s equal as a clown. On the strength of Shivaji’s abilities, he and his mother had moved to the Great Royal Circus, which was unquestionably a move up from the Great Blue Nile—and one that Deepa never could have made on the strength of her own or Vinod’s talents. Farrokh had heard that the subtleties of Shivaji’s Farting Clown act—not to mention the dwarf’s signature item, which was called Elephant Dodging—put India’s other farting clowns to shame.

The fate of those lesser performers who toiled for the Great Blue Nile was altogether less kind; there would be no escape for them. The elephant-footed boy had never been content to be a cook’s helper; a higher aspiration afflicted him. The knife thrower’s wife, Mrs. Bhagwan—the most mechanical of skywalkers—had failed to dissuade Ganesh from his delusions of athleticism. Despite falling many times from that model of the ladderlike device which hung from the roof of the Bhagwans’ troupe tent, the cripple would never let go of the idea that he could learn to skywalk.

The perfect ending to Farrokh’s screenplay is that the cripple learns to walk without a limp by walking on the sky; such an ending would not conclude the real Ganesh’s story. The real Ganesh wouldn’t rest until he’d tried the real thing. It was almost as Dr. Daruwalla had imagined it, almost as it was written. But it’s unlikely that the real Ganesh was as eloquent; there would have been no voice-over. The elephant boy must have looked down at least once—enough to know that he shouldn’t look down again. From the apex of the main tent, the ground was 80 feet below him. With his feet in the loops, it’s doubtful that he even thought as poetically as Farrokh’s fictional character.

(“There is a moment when you must let go with your hands. At that moment, you are in no one’s hands. At that moment, everyone walks on the sky.”) Not likely—not a sentiment that would spontaneously leap to the mind of a cook’s helper. The elephant-footed boy would probably have made the mistake of counting the loops, too. Whether counting or not counting, it’s far-fetched to imagine him coaching himself across the ladder.

(“What I tell myself is, I am walking without a limp.”) That would be the day! Dr. Daruwalla thought. Judging from where they found the cripple’s body, the real Ganesh fell when he was less than halfway across the top of the tent. There were 18 loops in the ladder; the Skywalk was 16 steps. It was Mrs. Bhagwan’s expert opinion that the elephant boy had fallen after only four or five steps; he’d never managed more than four or five steps across the roof of her tent, the skywalker said.

This news came slowly to Toronto. Mr. and Mrs. Das conveyed their regrets, by letter, to Dr. Daruwalla; the letter was late—it was misaddressed. The ringmaster and his wife added that Mrs. Bhagwan blamed herself for the accident, but she also felt certain that the cripple could never have been taught to skywalk. Doubtless her distress distracted her. The next news from Mr. and Mrs. Das was that Mrs. Bhagwan had been cut by her knife-throwing husband as she lay spread-eagled on the revolving bull’s-eye; it wasn’t a serious wound, but she gave herself no time to heal. The following night, she fell from the Skywalk. She was only as far across the top of the tent as Ganesh had been, and she fell without a cry. Her husband said that she’d been having trouble with the fourth and fifth steps ever since the elephant boy had fallen.

Mr. Bhagwan wouldn’t throw another knife, not even when they offered him a choice of targets, all of whom were small girls. The widower went into semiretirement, performing only the Elephant Passing item. There seemed to be some self-punishment about this elephant act—or so the ringmaster confided to Dr. Daruwalla. Mr. Bhagwan would lie down under the elephant—at first with fewer and fewer mattresses between his body and the elephant- walking plank, and between his body and the ground. Then he did it with no mattresses at all. There were internal injuries, the ringmaster and his wife implied. Mr. Bhagwan became ill; he was sent home. Later, Mr. and Mrs. Das heard that Mr. Bhagwan had died.

Then Dr. Daruwalla heard that they’d all become ill. There were no more letters from Mr. and Mrs. Das. The Great Blue Nile Circus had vanished. Their last place of performance was Poona, where the prevailing story about the Blue Nile was that they were brought down by a flood; it was a small flood, not a major disaster, except that the hygiene at the circus became lax. An unidentified disease killed several of the big cats, and bouts of diarrhea and gastroenteritis were rampant among the acrobats. Just that quickly, the Great Blue Nile was gone.

Had Gautam’s death been a harbinger? The old chimpanzee had died of rabies not two weeks after he’d bitten Martin Mills; Kunal’s efforts to discipline the ape by beating him had been wasted. But, among them all, Dr. Daruwalla mainly remembered Mrs. Bhagwan—her tough feet and her long black shiny hair.

The death of the elephant boy (a cripple no more) destroyed a small but important part of Farrokh. What happened to the real Ganesh had an immediate and diminishing effect on the screenwriter’s already waning confidence in his powers of creation. The screenplay of Limo Roulette had suffered from comparisons to real life. In the end, the real Ganesh’s remark rang truest. “You can’t fix what elephants do,” the cripple had said.

Like Mr. Bhagwan, who had retreated into Elephant Passing, which led to his death, the screenplay of Limo Roulette went into radical retirement. It occupied the bottommost drawer in Dr. Daruwalla’s desk at home; he wouldn’t keep a copy in his office at the hospital. If he were to die suddenly, he wouldn’t have wanted anyone but Julia to discover the unproduced screenplay. The single copy was in a folder marked

PROPERTY OF INSPECTOR DHAR

for it was Farrokh’s conviction that only John D. would one day know what to do with it.

Doubtless there would be compromises required in order for Limo Roulette to be produced; there were always compromises in the movie business. Someone would say that the voice-over was “emotionally distancing”—that was the fashionable opinion of voice-over. Someone would complain about the little girl being killed by the lion. (Couldn’t Pinky be confined to a wheelchair, but happy, for the rest of the movie?) And despite what had happened to the real Ganesh, the screenwriter loved the ending as it was written; someone would want to tamper with that ending, which Dr. Daruwalla could never allow. The doctor knew that Limo Roulette would never be as perfect as it was in those days when he was writing it and he imagined that he was a better writer than he was.

It was a deep drawer for a mere 118 pages. As if to keep the abandoned screenplay company, Farrokh filled the drawer with photographs of chromosomes; ever since Duncan Frasier had died, Dr. Daruwalla’s dwarf-blood