A Son of the Circus

Exercises of St. Ignatius began with a vivid representation of hell in all its horror. The fear of God was purifying; it had long been so to Martin Mills. To see both the fires of hell and a union with God in mystical ecstasy, one needed only to follow the Spiritual Exercises and call upon “the eye of the imagination,” for the missionary had no doubt that this was the clearest eye of all.

“Toil and will,” Martin Mills said aloud. This was his creed.

“I said, fuck your Jesus, and fuck you!” the taxi-walla repeated.

“Bless you,” Martin said. “Even you, and whatever you do to me, is God’s will—though you know not what you do.”

Most of all, Martin admired Ignatius Loyola’s notable encounter with the Moor on a mule and their ensuing discussion of the Holy Virgin. The Moor said he could believe that Our Lady had conceived without a man, but he could not believe that she’d remained a virgin after giving birth. After the Moor rode on, young Ignatius thought that he should hurry after the Muslim and kill him. He felt obliged to defend Our Lady’s honor. The defaming of the Virgin’s postbirth vaginal condition was gross and unacceptable behavior. Ignatius, as always, sought God’s will on the matter. Where the road parted, he let his own mule’s reins go slack; if the animal followed the Moor, Ignatius would kill the infidel. But the mule chose the other road.

“And fuck your St. Ignatius!” the taxi-walla shouted.

“St. Ignatius is where I would like to go,” Martin replied calmly. “But take me where you will.” Where they went, the missionary believed, would be God’s will. Martin Mills was just the passenger.

He thought of the late Father de Mello’s renowned book Christian Exercises in Eastern Form; so many of these exercises had helped him in the past. For example, there was that exercise which concerned the “healing of hurtful memories.” Whenever Martin Mills was troubled by the shame his parents had caused him, or by his seeming inability to love and forgive and honor his parents, he followed Father de Mello’s exercise verbatim. “Return to some unpleasant event”; such events were never hard to recall, but the selection of which horror to revisit was always an arduous decision. “Now place yourself before Christ Crucified”—that always had a certain power. Even the depravities of Veronica Rose paled before such an agony; even the self-destruction of Danny Mills seemed a trifling pain. “Keep commuting between the unpleasant event and the scene of Jesus on the Cross”; for years, Martin Mills had engaged in such commuting. Father de Mello was a hero to him. He had been born in Bombay, and until his death was the director of the Sadhana Institute of Pastoral Counseling (near Poona); it had been Father de Mello who had inspired Martin Mills to come to India.

Now, as the embracing darkness gradually yielded to the lights of Bombay, the bodies of the sidewalk sleepers appeared in mounds. The moonlight glinted off Mahim Bay. Martin couldn’t smell the horses as the taxi rocketed past the Mahalaxmi Race Course, but he could see the dark silhouette of Haji Ali’s Tomb; the slender minarets stood out against the fish-scale glint of the Arabian Sea. Then the taxi veered away from the moonlit ocean, and the missionary saw the sleeping city come to life—if the eternal sexual activity of Kamathipura could fairly be called life. It wasn’t a life that Martin Mills had ever known—it was nothing he’d ever imagined—and he prayed that his brief glimpse of the Muslim mausoleum wouldn’t be the last holy edifice he’d see in his allotted time on this mortal earth.

He saw the brothels overflowing into the little lanes. He saw the sex-stoned faces of the men let loose from the Wetness Cabaret; the last show was over, and the men who couldn’t yet bear to go home were wandering. And just when Martin Mills thought he’d encountered a greater evil than St. Ignatius Loyola had met on the streets of Rome, the taxi-walla jostled and edged his way into a darker hell. There were suddenly those prostitutes in human cages on Falkland Road.

“Won’t the cage girls just love to get a look at you!” cried Bahadur, who saw himself as Inspector Dhar’s designated persecutor.

Martin Mills remembered how Ignatius had raised money among rich people and founded an asylum for fallen women. It was in Rome where the saint had announced that he would sacrifice his life if he could prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” the missionary said to the taxi-walla, who screeched to a halt in front of a compelling display of eunuch-transvestites in their cages. Bahadur assumed that the hijra prostitutes were by far the angriest at Inspector Dhar. But, to the taxi-walla’s surprise, Martin Mills cheerfully opened the rear door and stepped into Falkland Road with a look of eager anticipation. He took his heavy suitcase from the trunk; and when the taxi-walla hurled the money for the fare at the missionary’s feet and spat on it—for the trip from the airport had been prepaid—Martin retrieved the wet money and handed it back to Bahadur.

“No, no—you’ve done your job. I am where I should be,” the missionary said. A circle of pickpockets and street prostitutes with their pimps were slowly surrounding the scholastic, but Bahadur wanted the hijras to be certain to see their enemy, and so he pushed against the gathering crowd.

“Dhar—Inspector Dhar! Dhar! Dhar!” the taxi-walla cried. But this was entirely unnecessary, for the word that Dhar was on Falkland Road had traveled ahead of the taxi-walla’s cries. Martin Mills quite easily made his own way through the crowd; the degraded women in those cages were the ones he wished to address. (It never occurred to him, of course, that they weren’t really women.)

“Please, let me speak with you,” the missionary said to a transvestite in his cage. Most of the hijras were, at first, too stunned to attack the hated actor. “Surely you must know of the diseases—nowadays, of the certain death you are exposing yourselves to! But I tell you, if you want to be saved, that is all you need—to want to be.”

Two pickpockets and several pimps were fighting over the money that Martin had tried to give back to the taxi-walla. Bahadur had already been beaten to his knees, and several prostitutes continued to kick at him. But Martin Mills was oblivious to what was behind him. The apparent women in the cages faced him, and it was only to them that he spoke. “St. Ignatius,” he said. “In Mazagaon? You must know it. I can always be found there. You have only to come there.”

It is intriguing to imagine how Father Julian and Father Cecil might have responded to this generous invitation, for surely the mission’s 125th jubilee would be a much more colorful celebration with the added presence of several eunuch-transvestite prostitutes in search of salvation. Unfortunately, the Father Rector and the senior priest were not on hand to witness Martin Mills’s extraordinary proposition. Did Martin suppose that if the prostitutes arrived at St. Ignatius during school hours, the schoolchildren might benefit from the visible conversion of these fallen women?

“If you feel but the slightest remorse, you must take this as a sign that you can be saved,” the scholastic told them.

It wasn’t a hijra who struck the first blow, but one of the street prostitutes; probably she was feeling ignored. She shoved Martin in the small of his back and he stumbled forward on one knee; then the pimps and pickpockets pulled his suitcase away from him—that was when the hijras became involved. After all, Dhar had been speaking to them; they didn’t want their territory, or their vengeance, trespassed on— certainly not by this common rabble off the street. The transvestite prostitutes easily beat away the street prostitutes and their pimps, and not even the pickpockets could escape with the heavy suitcase, which the hijras opened for themselves.

They wouldn’t touch the wrinkled black suit and the black shirts or the clerical collars—these weren’t their style—but the Hawaiian shirts were appealing to them, and they quickly took these. Then one of them stripped the shirt off Martin Mills, being careful not to tear it, and when the missionary was naked above his waist, one of the hijras discovered the whip with the braided cords, which was too tempting to ignore. With the first of the stinging lashes from the whip, Martin lay on his stomach; then he curled himself into a ball. He wouldn’t cover his face, for it mattered too much to him that he clasped his hands together in prayer; thus he maintained the extreme conviction that even such a beating as this was ad majorem Dei Gloriam (“to the greater glory of God”).

The transvestite prostitutes were respectful of all the assembled evidence of education that was contained in the suitcase; even in their excitement to each take a turn with the whip, they wouldn’t tear or wrinkle a page of a single book. The leg iron, however, was misinterpreted by them, as were the culpa beads; a transvestite prostitute tried to eat the beads before he threw them away. As for the leg iron, the hijras didn’t know it went around the thigh—or else they simply thought it would be more suitable to attach the device around Inspector Dhar’s neck, which they did. It wasn’t too tight a fit, but the wire prongs had raked the