A Son of the Circus

“If you tell him yours, I’m sure he’ll tell you his,” Father Julian said to Farrokh.

“Maybe another time,” Dr. Daruwalla said. Never had he so much desired to flee. He had to promise that he’d attend Martin’s lecture at the YWCA, although he had no intentions of attending; he would rather die than attend. He’d heard quite enough lecturing from Martin Mills!

“It’s the YWCA at Cooperage, you know,” Father Cecil informed him. Since Dr. Daruwalla was sensitive to those Bombayites who assumed that he barely knew his way around the city, the doctor was snappish in his reply.

“I know where it is!” Farrokh said.

Then a little girl appeared, out of nowhere. She was crying because she’d come to St. Ignatius with her mother, to pick up her brother after school, and somehow they’d left without her. There’d been other children in the car. It wasn’t a crisis, the Jesuits decided. The mother would realize what had happened and return to the school. It was merely necessary to comfort the child, and someone should call the mother so that she’d not drive recklessly in fear that her daughter was lost. But there was another problem: the little girl confided to them that she needed to pee. Brother Gabriel declared to Dr. Daruwalla that there was “no official peeing place for girls” at St. Ignatius.

“But where does Miss Tanuja pee?” Martin Mills asked.

Good for him! Dr. Daruwalla thought. He’s going to drive them all crazy.

“And I saw several women among the sweepers,” Martin added.

“There must be three or four women teachers, aren’t there?” Dr. Daruwalla asked innocently.

Of course there was a peeing place for girls! These old men simply didn’t know where it was.

“Someone could see if a men’s room is unoccupied,” Father Cecil suggested.

“Then one of us could guard the door,” Father Julian advised.

When Farrokh finally left them all, they were still discussing this awkward necessity to bend the rules. The doctor presumed that the little girl still needed to pee.

Tetracycline

Dr. Daruwalla was on his way back to the Hospital for Crippled Children when he realized that he’d started another screenplay; he knew that this one would not be starring Inspector Dhar. In his mind’s eye, he saw a beggar working the Arab hotels along Marine Drive; he saw the Queen’s Necklace at night… that string of yellow smog lights… and he heard Julia saying that yellow wasn’t the proper color for the necklace of a queen. For the first time, Farrokh felt that he understood the start of a story—the characters were set in motion by the fates that awaited them. Something of the authority of an ending was already contained in the beginning scene.

He was exhausted; he had much to talk about with Julia, and he had to talk to John D. Dr. Daruwalla and his wife were having an early dinner at the Ripon Club. Then the doctor had planned to write a first draft of a little speech he would be giving soon; he’d been invited to say something to the Society for the Rehabilitation of Crippled Children—they were such faithful sponsors of the hospital. But now he knew he would write all night—and not his speech. At last, he thought, he had a screenplay in him that justified the telling. In his mind’s eye, he saw the characters arriving at Victoria Terminus, but this time he knew where they were going; he wondered if he’d ever been so excited.

The familiar figure in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room distracted the doctor from the story he’d imagined; among the waiting children, the tall man indeed stood out. Even seated, his military erectness immediately captured Farrokh’s attention. The taut sallow skin and the slack mouth; the lion-yellow eyes; the acid-shriveled ear and the raw pink smear that had burned a swath along his jawline and down the side of his throat, where it disappeared under the collar of Mr. Garg’s shirt—all this captured Dr. Daruwalla’s attention, too.

One look at the nervously wriggling fingers of Mr. Garg’s locked hands confirmed Farrokh’s suspicions. It was clear tc the doctor that Garg was itching to know the specific nature of Madhu’s “sexually transmitted disease”; Dr. Daruwalla felt only an empty triumph. To see Garg—guilty and ready to grovel, and reduced to waiting his turn among the crippled children—would be the full extent of the doctor’s slight victory, for Dr. Daruwalla knew, even at this very moment, that something more than professional confidentiality would prevent him from disclosing Mr. Garg’s guilt to Deepa and Vinod. Besides, how could the dwarf and his wife not already know that Garg diddled young girls? It may have been Garg’s guilt that compelled him to allow Deepa and Vinod to attempt their circus rescues of so many of these children. Surely the dwarf and his wife already knew what Farrokh was only beginning to guess: that many of these little prostitutes would have preferred to stay with Mr. Garg. Like the circus, even the Great Blue Nile, maybe Garg was better than a brothel.

Mr. Garg stood and faced Farrokh. The eyes of every crippled child in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room were fixed on the acid scar, but the doctor looked only at the whites of Garg’s eyes, which were a jaundice-yellow—and at the deeper, tawny lion-yellow of Garg’s irises, which offset his black pupils. Garg had the same eyes as Madhu. The doctor passingly wondered if they might be related.

“I was here first—before any of them,” Mr. Garg whispered.

“I’ll bet you were,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

If it was guilt that had flickered in Garg’s lion eyes, it seemed to be fading; a shy smile tightened his usually slack lips, and something conspiratorial crept into his voice. “So… I guess you know about Madhu and me,” Mr. Garg said.

What can one say to such a man? Dr. Daruwalla thought. The doctor realized that Deepa and Vinod and even Martin Mills were right: let every girl-child be an acrobat in the circus, even in the Great Blue Nile—even if they fall and die. Let them be eaten by lions! For it was true that Madhu was both a child and a prostitute—worse, she was Mr. Garg’s girl. There was truly nothing to say to such a man. Only a strictly professional question came to Dr. Daruwalla’s mind, and he put it to Garg as bluntly as he could.

“Are you allergic to tetracycline?” the doctor asked him.

17. STRANGE CUSTOMS

Southern California

Because he had a history of suffering in unfamiliar bedrooms, Martin Mills lay awake in his cubicle at the mission of St. Ignatius. At first he followed the advice of St. Teresa of Avila—her favorite spiritual exercise, which allowed her to experience the love of Christ—but not even this remedy would permit the new missionary to fall asleep. The idea was to imagine that Christ saw you. “Mira que te mira,” St. Teresa said. “Notice him looking at you.” But try as he might to notice such a thing, Martin Mills wasn’t comforted; he couldn’t sleep.

He loathed his memory of the many bedrooms that his awful mother and pathetic father had exposed him to. This was the result of Danny Mills overpaying for a house in Westwood, which was near the U.C.L.A. campus but which the family could rarely afford to live in; it was perpetually rented so that Danny and Vera could live off the rent. This also provided their decaying marriage with frequent opportunities for them not to live with each other. As a child, Martin Mills was always missing clothes and toys that had somehow become the temporary possessions of the tenants of the Westwood house, which he only vaguely could remember.

He remembered better the U.C.L.A. student who was his babysitter, for she used to drag him by his arm across Wilshire Boulevard at high speed, and usually not at the proper crosswalks. She had a boyfriend who ran