A Son of the Circus

lower jaw were permanently dropped. There was a deadpan, don’t-give-a-damn quality to her voice, and her accent was plain and flat—North American, surely, but Dr. Daruwalla (who was good at accents) guessed more specifically that she was from the American Midwest or the Canadian prairies. Omaha or Sioux City, Regina or Saskatoon.

“Is that the doctor?” she asked. “I know who you really are, I know what you really do,” the woman went on. “Tell the deputy commissioner—the real policeman. Tell him who you are. Tell him what you do.” The hang-up was a little out of control, as if she’d meant to slam the phone into its cradle but, in her restrained anger, had missed the mark.

Farrokh sat trembling in his bedroom. From the dining room of his apartment, he could now hear Roopa laying out their supper on the glass-topped table. She would any minute announce to Dhar and Julia that the doctor was home and that their extraordinarily late meal was finally served. Julia would wonder why he’d snuck into the bedroom like a thief. In truth, Farrokh felt like a thief—but one unsure of what he’d stolen, and from whom.

Dr. Daruwalla rewound the tape and replayed the last message. This was a brand-new threat; and because he was concentrating so hard upon the meaning of the call, the doctor almost missed the most important clue, which was the caller. Farrokh had always known that someone would discover him as Inspector Dhar’s creator; that part of the message was not unexpected. But why was this any business of the real policeman? Why did someone think that Deputy Commissioner Patel should know?

“I know who you really are, I know what you really do.” But so what? the screenwriter thought. “Tell him who you are. Tell him what you do.” But why? Farrokh wondered. Then, by accident, the doctor found himself listening repeatedly to the woman’s opening line, the part he’d almost missed. “Is that the doctor?” He played it again and again, until his hands were shaking so badly that he rewound the tape all the way into Balraj Gupta’s list of reasons for releasing the new Inspector Dhar film now.

“Is that the doctor?”

Dr. Daruwalla’s heart had never seemed to stand so still before. It can’t be her! he thought. But it was her—Farrokh was sure of it. After all these years—it couldn’t be! But of course, he realized, if it was her, she would know; with an intelligent guess, she could have figured it out.

That was when his wife burst into the bedroom. “Farrokh!” Julia said. “I never knew you were home!”

But I’m not “home,” the doctor thought; I’m in a very, very foreign country.

“Liebchen,” he said softly to his wife. Whenever he used the German endearment, Julia knew he was feeling tender—or else he was in trouble.

“What is it, Liebchen?” she asked him. He held out his hand and she went to him; she sat close enough beside him to feel that he was shivering. She put her arms around him.

“Please listen to this,” Farrokh said to her. “Bitte.”

The first time Julia listened, Farrokh could see by her face that she was making his mistake; she was concentrating too hard on the content of the message.

“Never mind what she says,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “Think about who she is.”

It was the third time before Farrokh saw Julia’s expression change.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” he asked his wife.

“But this is a much older woman,” Julia said quickly.

“It’s been twenty years, Julia!” Dr. Daruwalla said. “She would be a much older woman now! She is a much older woman!”

They listened together a few more times. At last Julia said, “Yes, I think it is her, but what’s her connection with what’s happening now?”

In the cold bedroom—in his funereal navy-blue suit, which was comically offset by the bright-green parrot on his necktie—Dr. Daruwalla was afraid that he knew what the connection was.

The Skywalk

The past surrounded him like faces in a crowd. Among them, there was one he knew, but whose face was it? As always, something from the Great Royal Circus offered itself as a beacon. The ringmaster, Pratap Singh, was married to a lovely woman named Sumitra—everyone called her Sumi. She was in her thirties, possibly her forties; and she not only played the role of mother to many of the child performers, she was also a gifted acrobat. Sumi performed in the item called Double-Wheel Cycle, a bicycle act, with her sister-in-law Suman. Suman was Pratap’s unmarried, adopted sister; she must have been in her late twenties, possibly her thirties, when Dr. Daruwalla last saw her—a petite and muscular beauty, and the best acrobat in Pratap’s troupe. Her name meant “rose flower”—or was it “scent of the rose flower,” or merely the scent of flowers in general? Farrokh had never actually known, no more than he knew the story concerning when Suman had been adopted, or by whom.

It didn’t matter. Suman and Sumi’s bicycle duet was much loved. They could ride their bicycles backward, or lie down on them and pedal them with their hands; they could ride them on one wheel, like unicycles, or pedal them while sitting on the handlebars. Perhaps it was a special softness in Farrokh that he took such pleasure from seeing two pretty women do something so graceful together. But Suman was the star, and her Skywalk item was the best act in the Great Royal Circus.

Pratap Singh had taught Suman how to “skywalk” after he’d seen it performed on television; Farrokh supposed that the act had originated with one of the European circuses. (The ringmaster couldn’t resist training everyone, not just the lions.) He’d installed a ladderlike device on the roof of the family troupe tent; the rungs of the ladder were loops of rope and the ladder was bracketed to extend horizontally across the tent roof. Suman hung upside down with her feet in the loops. She swung herself back and forth, the loops chafing the tops of her feet, which she kept rigid—at right angles to her ankles. When she’d gathered the necessary momentum, she “walked” upside down—from one end of the ladder to the other—simply by stepping her feet in and out of the loops as she swung. When she practiced this across the roof of the family troupe tent, her head was only inches above the dirt floor. Pratap Singh stood next to her, to catch her if she fell.

But when Suman performed the Skywalk from the top of the main tent, she was 80 feet from the dirt floor and she refused to use a net. If Pratap Singh had tried to catch her—if Suman fell—they both would have been killed. If the ringmaster threw his body under her, trying to guess where she’d land, Pratap might break Suman’s fall; then only he would be killed.

There were 18 loops in the ladder. The audience silently counted Suman’s steps. But Suman never counted her steps; it was better, she said, to “just walk.” Pratap told her it wasn’t a good idea to look down. Between the top of the tent and the faraway floor, there were only the upside-down faces of the audience, staring back at her —waiting for her to fall.

That was what the past was like, thought Dr. Daruwalla—all those swaying, upside-down faces. It wasn’t a good idea to look at them, he knew.

9. SECOND HONEYMOON

Before His Conversion, Farrokh Mocks the Faithful

Twenty years ago, when he was drawn to Goa by his epicurean nostalgia for pork—scarce in the rest of India, but a staple of Goan cuisine—Dr. Daruwalla was converted to Christianity by the big toe of his right foot. He spoke of his religious conversion with the sincerest humility. That the doctor had recently visited the miraculously preserved mummy of St. Francis Xavier was not the cause of his conversion; previous to