A Son of the Circus

“Yes! Sometimes a cancer can just sort of go away!” old Lowji shouted.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought—I knew that!” Gordon Hathaway said.

In his embarrassment for his father, Farrokh sought to turn the conversation toward India itself. Surely the gravity of the Partition and Independence—when a million Hindus and Muslims were killed, and 12 million became refugees—interested the foreigners a little.

“Listen, kid,” Gordon Hathaway said, “when you’re makin’ a fuckin’ movie, nothin’ else interests you.” There was hearty consent to this at the dinner table; Farrokh felt that even the silence of his usually opinionated father served to rebuke him. Only Danny Mills appeared to be interested in the subject of local color; Danny also appeared to be drunk.

Although Danny Mills considered religion and politics as tedious forms of “local color,” Danny was nevertheless disappointed that One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling had very little to do with India. Danny had already suggested that the climate of religious violence in the days of the Partition might at least make a brief appearance in the background of the story.

“Politics is just fuckin’ exposition,” Gordon Hathaway had said, dismissing the idea. “I’d end up cutting the shit out of it later.”

In response to the present debate between the director and Farrokh, Danny Mills once more expressed his desire that the movie reflect at least a hint of Muslim-Hindu tensions, but Gordon Hathaway bluntly challenged Farrokh to tell him just one “sore point” between Muslims and Hindus that wouldn’t be boring on film. And since this was the year that Hindus had snuck into the Mosque of Babar with idols of their god- prince Rama, Farrokh imagined that he knew a good story. The Hindus had claimed that the site of the mosque was the birthplace of Rama, but the placing of Hindu idols in an historic mosque wasn’t well received by Muslims—they hate idols of any kind. Muslims don’t believe in representations of God, not to mention lots of gods, while Hindus pray to idols (and to lots of gods) all the time. To avoid more Hindu-Muslim bloodshed, the state had locked up the Mosque of Babar. “Perhaps they should have removed the idols of Rama first,” Farrokh explained. Muslims were enraged that these Hindu idols were occupying their mosque. Hindus not only wanted the idols to remain—they wanted to build a temple to Rama at the site.

At this point, Gordon Hathaway interrupted Farrokh’s story to express anew his dislike of exposition. “You’ll never write for the movies, kid,” Gordon said. “You wanna write for the movies, you gotta get to the point quicker than this.”

“I don’t think we can use it,” said Danny Mills thoughtfully, “but I thought it was a nice story.”

“Thank you,” Farrokh said.

Poor Meher, the oft-neglected Mrs. Daruwalla, was sufficiently provoked to change the subject. She offered a comment on the pleasure of a sudden evening breeze. She noted the rustling of a neem tree in the Ladies’ Garden. Meher would have elaborated on the merits of the neem tree, but she saw that the foreigners’ interest—which was never great—had already waned.

Gordon Hathaway was holding the violet-colored cotton balls he’d taken from his ears, shaking them in the closed palm of one hand, like dice. “What’s a fuckin’ neem tree?” he asked, as if the tree itself had annoyed him.

“They’re all around town,” said Danny Mills. “They’re a tropical kind of tree, I think.”

“I’m sure you’ve seen them,” Farrokh said to the director.

“Listen, kid,” said Gordon Hathaway, “when you’re makin’ a movie, you don’t have time to look at the fuckin’ trees.”

It must have hurt Meher to see by her husband’s expression that Lowji had found this remark most sage. Meanwhile, Gordon Hathaway indicated that the conversation was over by turning his attention to a pretty, underage girl at an adjacent table. This left Farrokh with a view of the director’s arrogant profile, and an especially alarming glimpse of the deep and permanent purple of Hathaway’s inner ear. The ear was actually a rainbow of colors, from raw red to violet, as unsuitably iridescent as the face of a mandrill baboon.

Later, after the colorful director had returned to the Taj—presumably to wash more food in his bathtub before retiring to bed—Farrokh was forced to observe his father fawning over the drunken Danny Mills.

“It must be difficult to revise a screenplay under these conditions,” Lowji ventured.

“You mean at night? Over food? After I’ve been drinking?” Danny asked.

“I mean so spur-of-the-moment,” Lowji said. “It would seem more prudent to shoot the story you’ve already written.”

“Yes, it would,” poor Danny agreed. “But they never do it that way.”

“They like the spontaneity, I suppose,” Lowji said.

“They don’t think the writing is very important,” said Danny Mills.

“They don’t?” Lowji exclaimed.

“They never do,” Danny told him. Poor Lowji had never considered the unimportance of the writer of a movie. Even Farrokh looked with compassion on Danny Mills, who was an affectionate, sentimental man with a gentle manner and a face that women liked—until they knew him better. Then they either disliked his central weakness or exploited it. Alcohol was certainly a problem for him, but his drinking was more a symptom of his failure than a cause of it. He was always out of money and, as a consequence, he rarely finished a piece of writing and sold it from any position of strength; usually, he would sell only an idea for a piece of writing, or a piece of writing that was very much a fragment—a story barely in progress—and as a result he lost all control of the outcome of whatever the piece of writing was.

He’d never finished a novel, although he’d begun several; when he needed money, he would put the novel aside and write a screenplay—selling the screenplay before he finished it. That was always the pattern. By the time he went back to the novel, he had enough distance from it to see how bad it was.

But Farrokh couldn’t dislike Danny the way he disliked Gordon Hathaway; Farrokh could see that Danny liked Lowji, too. Danny also made an effort to protect Farrokh’s father from further embarrassing himself.

“Here’s the way it is,” Danny told Lowji. He swirled the melting ice in the bottom of his glass; in the kilnlike heat before the monsoon, the ice melted quickly—but never as quickly as Danny drank the gin. “You’re screwed if you sell something before you finish it,” Danny Mills told the senior Daruwalla. “Never even show anybody what you’re writing until you finish it. Just do the work. When you know it’s good, show it to someone who’s made a movie you like.”

“Like a director, you mean?” asked Lowji, who was still writing everything down.

“Definitely a director,” said Danny Mills. “I don’t mean a studio.”

“And so you show it to someone you like, a director, and then you get paid?” asked the senior Daruwalla.

“No,” said Danny Mills. “You take no money until the whole deal is in place. The minute you take any money, you’re screwed.”

“But when do you take the money?” Lowji asked.

“When they’ve signed the actors you want, when they’ve signed the director—and given him the final cut of the picture. When everyone likes the screenplay so much, you know they wouldn’t dare change a word of it—and if you doubt this, demand final script approval. Then be prepared to walk away.”

“This is what you do?” Lowji asked.

“Not me,” Danny said. “I take the money up front, as much as I can get. Then they screw me.”

“But who does it the way you suggest?” Lowji asked; he was so confused, he’d stopped writing.

“Nobody I know,” said Danny Mills. “Everyone I know gets screwed.”

“So you didn’t go to Gordon Hathaway—you didn’t choose him?” Lowji asked.

“Only a studio would choose Gordon,” Danny said.

He had that uncommon smoothness of skin which appears so confounding on the faces of some alcoholics; it was as if Danny’s baby-faced complexion were the direct result of the pickling process—as if the growth of his beard were as arrested as his speech. Danny looked like he needed to shave only once a week, although he was almost 35.

“I’ll tell you about Gordon,” Danny said. “It was Gordon’s idea to expand the role of the snake guru in the story—Gordon’s idea of the epitome of evil is an ashram with snakes. I’ll tell you about Gordon,” Danny Mills went on, when neither Lowji nor Farrokh had interrupted him. “Gordon’s never met a guru, with or without snakes. Gordon’s never seen an ashram, not even in California.”