A Son of the Circus

the acrobats and the animal trainers—most of all, he enjoyed observing the practice sessions and the tent life. These intimate views from the wing of the main tent, these close-ups of the troupe tents and the cages—they were the privileges that made Farrokh feel he’d been adopted. At times, he wished he were a real son of the circus; instead, Farrokh supposed, he was merely a guest of honor. Nevertheless, this wasn’t a fleeting honor—not to him.

Ironically, Dr. Daruwalla’s children and grandchildren were unimpressed by the Indian circuses. These two generations had been born and raised in London or Toronto; they’d not only seen bigger and fancier circuses—they’d seen cleaner. The doctor was disappointed that his children and grandchildren were so dirt-obsessed; they considered the tent life of the acrobats and the animal trainers to be shabby, even “underprivileged.” Although the dirt floors of the tents were swept several times daily, Dr. Daruwalla’s children and grandchildren believed that the tents were filthy.

To the doctor, however, the circus was an orderly, well-kept oasis surrounded by a world of disease and chaos. His children and grandchildren saw the dwarf clowns as merely grotesque; in the circus, they existed solely to be laughed at. But Farrokh felt that the dwarf clowns were appreciated—maybe even loved, not to mention gainfully employed. The doctor’s children and grandchildren thought that the risks taken by the child performers were especially “harsh”; yet Farrokh felt that these acrobatic children were the lucky ones—they’d been rescued.

Dr. Daruwalla knew that the majority of these child acrobats were (like Deepa) sold to the circus by their parents, who’d been unable to support them; others were orphans—they’d been truly adopted. If they hadn’t been performing in the circus, where they were well fed and protected, they’d have been begging. They would be the street children you saw doing handstands and other stunts for a few rupees in Bombay, or in the smaller towns throughout Gujarat and Maharashtra, where even the Great Royal Circus more frequently performed—these days, fewer circuses came to Bombay. During Diwali and the winter holidays, there were still two or three circuses performing in or around the city, but TV and the videocassette recorder had hurt the circus business; too many people rented movies and stayed at home.

To hear the Daruwalla children and grandchildren discuss it, the child acrobats who were sold to the circus were long-suffering child laborers in a high-risk profession; their hardworking, no-escape existence was tantamount to slavery. Untrained children were paid nothing for six months; thereafter, they started with a salary of 3 rupees a day—only 90 rupees a month, less than 4 dollars! But Dr. Daruwalla argued that safe food and a safe place to sleep were better than nothing; what these children were given was a chance.

Circus people boiled their water and their milk. They bought and cooked their own food; they dug and cleaned their own latrines. And a well-trained acrobat was often paid 500 or 600 rupees a month, even if it was only 25 dollars. Granted, although the Great Royal took good care of its children, Farrokh couldn’t say with certainty that the child performers were as well treated in all the Indian circuses; the performances in several of these circuses were so abject—not to mention unskilled and careless—that the doctor surmised that the tent life in such places was shabbier, too.

Life was surely shabby in the Great Blue Nile; indeed, among the Great This and Great That circuses of India, the Great Blue Nile was the shabbiest—or at least the least great. Deepa would agree. A former child contortionist, the dwarf’s wife, reincarnated as a trapeze artist, was lacking both in polish and in common sense; it wasn’t merely the beer that had made her let go of the bar too soon.

Deepa’s injuries were complicated but not severe; in addition to the dislocation of her hip joint, she’d suffered a tear in the transverse ligament. Not only would Dr. Daruwalla brand Deepa’s hip with a memorable scar, but, in prepping the area, he would be confronted by the irrefutable blackness of Deepa’s pubic hair; this would be a dark reminder of the disturbing contact between her pubis and the bridge of his nose.

Farrokh’s nose was still tingling when he helped Deepa be admitted to the hospital; out of guilt, he’d left the circus grounds with her. But the admitting process had barely begun when the doctor was summoned by one of the hospital secretaries; there’d been a phone call for him while he was en route from the Blue Nile.

“Do you know any clowns?” the secretary asked him.

“Well, as a matter of fact, yes,” Farrokh admitted.

“Dwarf clowns?” asked the secretary.

“Yes—several! I just met them,” the doctor added. Farrokh was too ashamed to admit that he’d also just bled them.

“Apparently, one of them has been injured at that circus at Cross Maidan,” the secretary said.

“Not Vinod!” Dr. Daruwalla exclaimed.

“Yes, that’s him,” she said. “That’s why they want you back at the circus.”

“What happened to Vinod?” Dr. Daruwalla asked the somewhat disdainful secretary; she was one of many medical secretaries who embraced sarcasm.

“I couldn’t ascertain the clown’s condition from a phone message,” she replied. “The description was hysterical. I gather he was trampled by elephants or shot from a cannon, or both. And now that this dwarf lies dying, he is declaring you to be his doctor.”

And so to the circus grounds at Cross Maidan did Dr. Daruwalla go. All the way back to the deeply flawed performance of the Great Blue Nile, the doctor’s nose tingled.

For 15 years, merely remembering the dwarf’s wife would activate Farrokh’s nose. And now, the fact that Mr. Lal had fallen without a net (for the body on the golf course was indeed dead)—even this evidence of death reminded Dr. Daruwalla that Deepa had survived her fall and her unwelcome and painful contact with the clumsy doctor.

The Famous Twin

Upon Inspector Dhar’s intrusion, the vultures had risen but they’d not departed. Dr. Daruwalla knew that the carrion eaters still floated overhead because their putrescence lingered in the air and their shadows drifted back and forth across the ninth green and the bougainvillea, where Dhar—a mere movie-star detective—knelt beside poor Mr. Lal.

“Don’t touch the body!” Dr. Daruwalla said.

“I know,” the veteran actor replied coldly.

Oh, he’s not in a good mood, Farrokh thought; it would be unwise to tell him the upsetting news now. The doctor doubted that Dhar’s mood would ever be good enough to make him magnanimous upon receiving such news—and who could blame him? An overwhelming sense of unfairness lay at the heart of it, for Dhar was an identical twin who’d been separated from his brother at birth. Although Dhar had been told the story of his birth, Dhar’s twin knew nothing of the story; Dhar’s twin didn’t even know he was a twin. And now Dhar’s twin was coming to Bombay.

Dr. Daruwalla had always believed that nothing good could come from such deception. Although Dhar had accepted the willful arbitrariness of the situation, a certain aloofness had been the cost; he was a man who, as far as Farrokh knew, withheld affection and resolutely withstood any display of affection from others. Who could blame him? the doctor thought. Dhar had accepted the existence of a mother and father and identical twin brother he’d never seen; Dhar had abided by that tiresome adage, which is still popularly evoked—to let sleeping dogs lie. But now: this most upsetting news was surely in that category of another tiresome adage which is still popularly evoked—this was the last straw.

In Dr. Daruwalla’s opinion, Dhar’s mother had always been too selfish for motherhood; and 40 years after the accident of conception, the woman was demonstrating her selfishness again. That she’d arbitrarily decided to take one twin and abandon the other was sufficient selfishness for a normal lifetime; that she’d chosen to protect herself from her husband’s potentially harsh opinion of her by keeping from him the fact that there’d ever been a twin was selfishness of a heightened, even of a monstrous, kind; and that she’d so sheltered the twin whom she’d kept from any knowledge of his identical brother was yet again as selfish as it was deeply insensitive to the feelings of the twin she’d left behind… the twin who knew everything.

Well, the doctor thought, Dhar knew everything except that his twin was coming to Bombay and that his mother had begged Dr. Daruwalla to be sure that the twins didn’t meet!