A Son of the Circus

It was only a haven compared to a brothel, Farrokh supposed. Whether one called Garg’s girls strippers or “exotic dancers,” most of them weren’t whores. But many of them were runaways from the Kamathipura brothels, or from the brothels on Falkland Road and on Grant Road. In the brothels, the virginity of these girls had been only briefly prized—until the madam supposed they were old enough, or until there was a high enough offer. But when many of these girls ran away to Mr. Garg, they were much too young for what the Wetness Cabaret offered; ironically, they were old enough for prostitution but far too young to be exotic dancers.

According to Vinod, most men who wanted to look at women wanted the women to look like women; apparently, these weren’t the same men who wanted to have sex with underage girls—and even those men, Vinod claimed, didn’t necessarily want to look at those young girls. Therefore, Mr. Garg couldn’t use them at the Wetness Cabaret, although Farrokh fantasized that Mr. Garg had used them in some private, unmentionable way.

Dr. Daruwalla’s Dickensian theory was that Mr. Garg was perverse because of his physical appearance. The man gave Farrokh the creeps. Mr. Garg had made an astonishingly vivid impression on Dr. Daruwalla, considering that they had met only once; Vinod had introduced them. The enterprising dwarf was also Garg’s driver.

Mr. Garg was tall and of military erectness, but with the sort of sallow complexion that Farrokh associated with a lack of exposure to daylight. The skin on Garg’s face had an unhealthy, waxy sheen, and it was unusually taut, like the skin of a corpse. Further enhancing Mr. Garg’s cadaverlike appearance was an unnatural slackness to his mouth; his lips were always parted, like the lips of someone who’d fallen asleep in a seated position, and his eye sockets were dark and bloated, as if full of stagnant blood. Worse, Mr. Garg’s eyes were as yellow and opaque as a lion’s—and as unreadable, Dr. Daruwalla thought. Worst of all was the burn scar. Acid had been flung in Mr. Garg’s face, which he’d managed to turn to the side; the acid had shriveled one ear and burned a swath along his jawline and down the side of his throat, where the raw pink smear disappeared under the collar of his shirt. Not even Vinod knew who’d thrown the acid, or why.

All Mr. Garg’s girls needed from Dr. Daruwalla was the trusted physician’s assurance to the circuses that these girls were in the pink of health. But what could Farrokh say about the health of those girls from the brothels? Some of them were born in brothels; certain indications of congenital syphilis were easy to spot. And nowadays, the doctor couldn’t recommend them to a circus without having them tested for AIDS; few circuses—not even the Great Blue Nile—would take a girl if she was HIV-positive. Most of them carried something venereal; at the very least, the girls always had to be de-wormed. So few of them were ever taken, even by the Great Blue Nile.

When the girls were rejected by the circus, what became of them? (“We are being good by trying,” Vinod would answer.) Did Mr. Garg sell them back to a brothel, or did he wait for them to grow old enough to be Wetness Cabaret material? It appalled Farrokh that, by the standards of Kamathipura, Mr. Garg was considered a benevolent presence; yet Dr. Daruwalla knew of no evidence against Mr. Garg—at least nothing beyond the common knowledge that he bribed the police, who only occasionally raided the Wetness Cabaret.

The doctor had once imagined Mr. Garg as a character in an Inspector Dhar movie; in a first draft of Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer, Dr. Daruwalla had written a cameo role for Mr. Garg—he was a child molester named Acid Man. Then Farrokh had thought better of it. Mr. Garg was too well known in Bombay. It might have become a legal matter, and there’d been the added risk of insulting Vinod and Deepa, which Dr. Daruwalla would never do. If Garg was no Good Samaritan, the doctor nevertheless believed that the dwarf and his wife were the real thing—they were saints to these children, or they tried to be. They were, as Vinod had said, “being good by trying.”

Vinod’s off-white Ambassador was approaching Marine Drive when the doctor gave in to the dwarf’s nagging. “All right, all right—I’ll examine her,” Dr. Daruwalla told Vinod. “Who is she this time, and what’s her story?”

“She is being a virgin,” the dwarf explained. “Deepa is saying that she is already an almost boneless girl—a future plastic lady!”

“Who is saying she’s a virgin?” the doctor asked.

“She is saying so,” Vinod said. “Garg is telling Deepa that the girl is running away from a brothel before anyone is touching her.”

“So Garg is saying she’s a virgin?” Farrokh asked Vinod.

“Maybe almost a virgin—maybe close,” the dwarf replied. “I am thinking she used to be a dwarf, too,” Vinod added. “Or maybe she is being part-dwarf. I am almost thinking so.”

“That’s not possible, Vinod,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

As the dwarf shrugged, the Ambassador surged into a rotary; the roundabout turn caused several tennis balls to roll across Farrokh’s feet, and the doctor heard the clunking of squash-racquet handles from under Vinod’s elevated seat. The dwarf had explained to Dr. Daruwalla that the handles of badminton racquets were too flimsy— they broke—and the handles of tennis racquets were too heavy to swing with sufficient quickness. The squash- racquet handles were just right.

Only because he already knew where it was, Farrokh could faintly make out the odd billboard that floated on the boat moored offshore in the Arabian Sea; the hoarding bobbed on the water. TIKTOK TISSUES were being advertised again tonight.

And tonight, and every night, the metal signs on the lampposts promised a good ride on APOLLO TYRES. The rush-hour traffic along Marine Drive had long ago subsided, and the doctor could tell by the lights from his own apartment that Dhar had already arrived; the balcony was lit up and Julia never sat on the balcony alone. They’d probably watched the sunset together, the doctor thought; he was aware, too, that the sun had set a long time ago. They’ll both be mad at me, Farrokh decided.

The doctor told Vinod that he’d examine the “almost boneless” girl in the morning—the almost-a-virgin, Dr. Daruwalla almost said. The half-dwarf or former dwarf, the doctor imagined. Mr. Garg’s girl! he thought grimly.

In the stark lobby of his apartment building, Farrokh felt for a moment that he could have been anywhere in the modern world. But when the elevator door opened, he was greeted by a familiar sign, which he detested.

SERVANTS ARE NOT ALLOWED

TO USE THE LIFT

UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY CHILDREN

The sign assaulted him with a numbing sense of inadequacy. It was a part of the pecking order of Indian life—not only the acceptance of discrimination, which was worldwide, but the deification of it, which Lowji Daruwalla had believed was so infuriatingly Indian, even though much of it was inherited from the Raj.

Farrokh had tried to convince the Residents’ Society to remove the offensive sign, but the rules about servants were inflexible. Dr. Daruwalla was the only resident of the building who wasn’t in favor of forcing servants to use the stairs. Also, the Residents’ Society discounted Farrokh’s opinion on the grounds that he was a Non- Resident Indian—“NRI” was the doctor’s official government category. If this dispute about the use of the lift was the kind of issue that old Lowji would have got himself killed over, the younger Dr. Daruwalla self-deprecatingly viewed his failure with the Residents’ Society as typical of his political ineffectualness and his general out-of- itness.

As he got off the elevator, he said to himself, I’m not a functioning Indian. The other day, someone at the Duckworth Club had been outraged that a political candidate in New Delhi was conducting a campaign “strictly on the cow issue”; Dr. Daruwalla had been unable to contribute an opinion because he was unsure what the cow issue was. He was aware of the rise of groups to protect cows, and he supposed they were a part of the Hindu-revivalist wave, like those Hindu-chauvinist holy men proclaiming themselves to be reincarnations of the gods themselves—and demanding to be worshiped as gods, too. He knew that there was still Hindu-Muslim rioting over the Mosque of Babar—the underlying subject of his first Inspector Dhar movie, which he’d found so funny at the time. Now thousands of bricks had been consecrated and stamped SHRI RAMA, which means “respected Rama,” and the foundation for a temple to Rama had been laid less than 200 feet from the Babri mosque. Not even Dr. Daruwalla imagined that the outcome of the 40-year feud over the Mosque of Babar would be “funny.”

Here he was again, with his pathetic sense of not belonging. He knew that there