A Son of the Circus

mustache, while they’re still boarding the plane.”

This much was true. It was what John D. did to un-Dhar himself. This was an established fact, one of the few that Farrokh could cling to: both twins were mustacheless when they met.

“I was sitting in my seat when this man came out of the lavatory, and I thought I recognized him,” Martin said.

“You were looking out the window,” John D. declared. “You didn’t turn to look at me until I’d sat down beside you and had spoken your name.”

“You spoke his name?” Dr. Daruwalla always asked.

“Of course. I knew who he was instantly,” the ex-Inspector Dhar would reply. “I thought to myself: Farrokh must imagine he’s awfully clever—writing a script for everyone.”

“He never spoke my name,” Martin told the doctor. “I remember thinking that he was Satan, and that Satan had chosen to look like me, to take my own form—what a horror! I thought you were my dark side, my evil half.”

“Your smarter half, you mean,” John D. would invariably reply.

“He was just like the Devil. He was frighteningly arrogant,” Martin told Farrokh.

“I simply told him that I knew who he was,” John D. argued.

“You said nothing of the kind,” Martin interjected. “You said, ‘Fasten your fucking seat belt, pal, because are you ever in for a surprise!’”

“That sounds like what you’d say,” Farrokh told the former Dhar.

“I couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” John D. complained. “Here I knew all about him, but he was the one who wouldn’t stop talking. All the way to Zurich, he never shut up.”

Dr. Daruwalla had to admit that this sounded like what Martin Mills would do.

“I kept thinking: This is Satan. I give up the idea of the priesthood and I meet the Devil—in first class! He had this constant sneer,” Martin said. “It was a Satanic sneer—or so I thought.”

“He started right out about Vera, our sainted mother,” John D. related. “We were still crossing the Arabian Sea—utter darkness above and below us—when he got to the part about the roommate’s suicide. I hadn’t said a word!”

“That’s not true—he kept interrupting me,” Martin told Farrokh. “He kept asking me, ‘Are you gay, or do you just not know it yet?’ Honestly, I thought he was the rudest man I’d ever met!”

“Listen to me,” the actor said. “You meet your twin brother on an airplane and you start right out with a list of everyone your mother’s slept with. And you think I’m rude.”

“You called me a ‘quitter’ before we’d even reached our cruising altitude,” Martin said.

“But you must have started by telling him that you were his twin,” Farrokh said to John D.

“He did nothing of the kind,” said Martin Mills. “He said, ‘You already know the bad news: your father died. Now here’s the good news: he wasn’t your father.’”

“You didn’t!” Dr. Daruwalla said to John D.

“I can’t remember,” the actor would say.

“The word ‘twin’—just tell me, who said it first?” the doctor asked.

“I asked the flight attendant if she saw any resemblance between us—she was the first to say the word ‘twin,’” John D. replied.

“That’s not exactly how it happened,” Martin argued. “What he said to the flight attendant was, ‘We were separated at birth. Try to guess which one of us has had the better time.’”

“He simply exhibited all the common symptoms of denial,” John D. would respond. “He kept asking me if I had proof that we were related.”

“He was utterly shameless,” Martin told Farrokh. “He said, ‘You can’t deny that you’ve had at least one homosexual infatuation—there’s your proof.’”

“That was bold of you,” the doctor told John D. “Actually, there’s only a fifty-two percent chance …”

“I knew he was gay the second I saw him,” the retired movie star said.

“But when did you realize how much… else you had in common?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. “When did you begin to recognize the traits you shared? When did your obvious similarities emerge?”

“Oh, long before we got to Zurich,” Martin answered quickly.

“What similarities?” John D. asked.

“That’s what I mean by arrogant—he’s arrogant and rude,” Martin told Farrokh.

“And when did you decide not to go to New York?” the doctor asked the ex- missionary. Dr. Daruwalla was especially interested in the part of the story where the twins told Vera off.

“We were working on our telegram to the bitch before we landed,” John D. replied.

“But what did the telegram say?” Farrokh asked.

“I don’t remember,” John D. would always answer.

“Of course you remember!” cried Martin Mills. “You wrote it! He wouldn’t let me write a word of the telegram,” Martin told Dr. Daruwalla. “He said he was in the business of one-liners—he insisted on doing it himself.”

“What you wanted to say to her wouldn’t have fit in a telegram,” John D. reminded his twin.

“What he said to her was unspeakably cruel. I couldn’t believe how cruel he could be. And he didn’t even know her!” Martin Mills told the doctor.

“He asked me to send the telegram. He had no second thoughts,” John D. told Farrokh.

“But what was it that you said? What did the damn telegram say?” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

“It was unspeakably cruel,” Martin repeated.

“She had it coming, and you know it,” said the ex-Inspector Dhar.

Whatever the telegram said, Dr. Daruwalla knew that Vera didn’t live very long after she received it. There was only her hysterical phone call to Farrokh, who was still in Bombay; Vera called the doctor’s office and left a message with Ranjit.

“This is Veronica Rose—the actress,” she told Dr. Daruwalla’s secretary. Ranjit knew who she was; he would never forget typing the report on the problem Vera had with her knees, which turned out to be gynecological—“vaginal itching,” Dr. Lowji Daruwalla had said.

“Tell the fucking doctor I know that he betrayed me!” Vera said to Ranjit.

“Is it your… knees again?” the old secretary had asked her.

Dr. Daruwalla never returned her call. Vera never made it back to California before she died; her death was related to the sleeping pills she regularly took, which she’d irregularly mixed with vodka.

Martin would stay in Europe. Switzerland suited him, he said. And the outings in the Alps—although the former scholastic had never been athletically inclined, these outings with John D. were wonderful for Martin Mills. He couldn’t be taught to downhill-ski (he was too uncoordinated), but he liked cross-country skiing and hiking; he loved being with his brother. Even John D. admitted, albeit belatedly, that they loved being with each other.

The ex-missionary kept himself busy; he taught at City University (in the general-studies program) and at the American International School of Zurich—he was active at the Swiss Jesuit Centre, too. Occasionally, he would travel to other Jesuit institutions; there were youth centers and students’ homes in Basel and Bern, and adult- education centers in Fribourg and Bad Schonbrunn—Martin Mills was doubtless effective as an inspirational speaker. Farrokh could only imagine that this meant more Christ-in-the-parking-lot sermonizing; the former zealot hadn’t lost his energy for improving the attitudes of others.

As for John D., he continued in his craft; the journeyman actor was content with his roles at the Schauspielhaus Zurich. His friends were in the theater, or affiliated with the university, or with a publishing firm of excellent reputation—and of course he saw a great deal of Farrokh’s brother, Jamshed, and Jamshed’s wife (and Julia’s sister), Josefine.

It was to this social circle that John D. would introduce his twin. An oddity at first—everyone is interested in a twins-separated-at-birth story—Martin made many friends in this community; in three years, the ex-missionary probably had more friends than the actor. In fact, Martin’s first lover was an ex-boyfriend of John D.’s, which Dr. Daruwalla found strange; the twins made a joke of it—probably to exasperate him, the doctor thought.