A Son of the Circus

In the card room, the committeemen sat in silence, satisfied with the conclusion of their business; the ceiling fans only slightly ruffled the trim decks of cards that stood perfectly in place at the appropriate tables, which were topped with tightly stretched green felt. A waiter, removing an empty Thums Up bottle from the table where the committeemen sat, paused to straighten one errant deck of cards before leaving the room, although only the top two cards of the deck had been edged out of alignment by the nearest ceiling fan.

That was when Mr. Bannerjee walked into the card room, looking for his golfing opponent, Mr. Lal. Old Mr. Lal was late for their regular nine holes, and Mr. Bannerjee told the committee the amusing results of their competition together the day before. Mr. Lal had lost a one-stroke lead in a spectacular blunder on the ninth hole: he’d chipped a shot entirely over the green and into a profusion of the blighted bougainvillea, where he’d hacked away in misery and in vain.

Rather than return to the clubhouse, Mr. Lal had shaken Mr. Bannerjee’s hand and marched in a fury to the bougainvillea; there Mr. Bannerjee had left him. Mr. Lal was intent on practicing ho

w to escape from this trap should he ever blunder into it again. Petals were flying when Mr. Bannerjee parted from his friend; that evening, the gardener (the head mali, no less) was dismayed to observe the damage to the vines and to the flowers. But old Mr. Lal was among the more venerable of the Duckworth’s members—if he insisted on learning how to escape the bougainvillea, no one would be so bold as to prevent him. And now Mr. Lal was late. Dr. Daruwalla suggested to Mr. Bannerjee that quite possibly his opponent was still practicing, and that he should search for him in the rained bougainvillea.

Thus the committee meeting disbanded in characteristic and desultory laughter. Mr. Bannerjee went seeking Mr. Lal in the men’s dressing room; Dr. Sorabjee went off to the hospital for office calls; Mr. Dua, whose deafness somehow suited his retirement from the percussiveness of the tire business, wandered into the snooker room to have a crack at some innocent balls, which he would barely hear. Others stayed where they were, turning to the ready decks of cards, or else they found comfort in the cool leather chairs in the reading room, where they ordered Kingfisher lagers or London Diet beers. It was getting on toward late morning, but it was generally thought to be too early for gin and tonics or adding a shot of rum to the Thums Up colas.

In the men’s dressing room and the clubhouse bar, the younger members and actual athletes were returning from their sets of tennis or their badminton or their squash. For the most part, they were tea drinkers at this time of the morning. Those returning from the golf course heartily complained about the mess of flower petals that by now had drifted over the ninth green. (These golfers wrongly assumed that the bougainvillea blight had taken a new and nasty turn.) Mr. Bannerjee told his story several more times; each time, the efforts of Mr. Lal to defeat the bougainvillea were described in more reckless and damaging terms. A generous good humor pervaded the clubhouse and the dressing room. Mr. Bannerjee didn’t seem to mind that it was now too late in the morning to play golf.

The unexpected cool weather could not change the habits of the Duckworthians; they were used to playing their golf and tennis before 11:00 in the morning or after 4:00 in the afternoon. During the midday hours, the members drank or lunched or simply sat under the ceiling fans or in the deep shade of the Ladies’ Garden, which was never exclusively used by (or especially full of) ladies—not nowadays. Yet the garden’s name was unchanged from purdah times, when the seclusion of women from the sight of men or strangers was practiced by some Muslims and Hindus. Farrokh found this odd, for the founding members of the Duckworth Sports Club were the British, who were still welcome there and even comprised a small proportion of the membership. To Dr. Daruwalla’s knowledge, the British had never practiced purdah. The Duckworth’s founders had intended the club for any and all citizens of Bombay, provided that they’d distinguished themselves in community leadership. As Farrokh and the other members of the Membership Committee would attest, the definition of “community leadership” could be argued for the length of the monsoon, and beyond.

By tradition, the chairman of the Duckworth Club was the governor of Maharashtra; yet Lord Duckworth himself, for whom the club was named, had never been governor. Lord D. (as he was called) had long sought the office, but the eccentricities of his wife were too notorious. Lady Duckworth was afflicted with exhibitionism in general—and with the astonishing wild habit of exposing her breasts in particular. Although this affliction endeared both Lord and Lady Duckworth to many members of the club, it was a gesture thought lacking in gubernatorial merit.

Dr. Daruwalla stood in the penetrating cool of the empty dance hall, viewing—as he often did—the splendid and abundant trophies and the spellbinding old photographs of Members Past. Farrokh enjoyed such controlled sightings of his father, and of his grandfather, and of the countless avuncular gentlemen among his father’s and grandfather’s friends. He imagined that he could remember every man who’d ever laid a hand on his shoulder or touched the top of his head. Dr. Daruwalla’s familiarity with these photographs belied the fact that the doctor himself had spent very few of his 59 years in India. When he was visiting Bombay, Dr. Daruwalla was sensitive to anyone or anything that reminded him of how little he knew or understood the country of his birthplace. The more time he spent in the haven of the Duckworth Club, the more the doctor could sustain the illusion that he was comfortable being in India.

At home, in Toronto, where he’d spent most of his adult life, the doctor enjoyed the reputation—especially among Indians who’d never been to India, or who’d never gone back—of being a genuine “old India hand”; he was even considered quite brave. After all, it was every few years that Farrokh returned to his native land under what were presumed to be primitive conditions—practicing medicine in a country of such claustrophobic overpopulation. And where were the amenities that could live up to a Canadian standard of comfort?

Weren’t there water shortages and bread strikes, and the rationing of oil or rice, not to mention food adulteration and those gas cylinders that always ran out of gas in the midst of a dinner party? And one often heard about the shoddy construction of buildings, the falling plaster and so on. But only rarely did Dr. Daruwalla return to India during the monsoon months, which were the most “primitive” in Bombay. Furthermore, to his fellow Torontonians, Farrokh tended to downplay the fact that he never stayed in India for long.

In Toronto, the doctor spoke of his childhood (as a Bombayite) as if it had been both more colorful and more authentically Indian than it truly had been. Educated by the Jesuits, Dr. Daruwalla had attended St. Ignatius School in Mazagaon; for recreation, he’d enjoyed the privileges of organized sports and dances at the Duckworth Club. When he reached university age, he was sent to Austria; even his eight years in Vienna, where he completed medical school, were tame and controlled—he’d lived the whole time with his elder brother.

But in the Duckworth’s dance hall, in the sacred presence of those portraits of Members Past, Dr. Daruwalla could momentarily imagine that he truly came from somewhere, and that he belonged somewhere. Increasingly, as he approached 60, the doctor acknowledged (only to himself) that in Toronto he often acted far more Indian than he was; he could instantly acquire a Hindi accent, or drop it, depending on the company he kept. Only a fellow Parsi would know that English had been his veritable mother tongue, and that the doctor would have learned his Hindi in school. During Farrokh’s visits to India, he was similarly ashamed of himself for how completely European or North American he pretended to be. In Bombay, his Hindi accent disappeared; one had only to hear the doctor’s English to be convinced that he’d been totally assimilated in Canada. In truth, it was only when he was surrounded by the old photographs in the dance hall of the Duckworth Club that Dr. Daruwalla felt at home.

Of Lady Duckworth, Dr. Daruwalla had only heard her story. In each of her stunning photographs, her breasts were properly if not modestly covered. Yes, a highly elevated and sizable bosom could be detected in her pictures, even when Lady Duckworth was well advanced in years; and yes, her habit of exposing herself supposedly increased as she grew older—her breasts were reported to be well formed (and well worth revealing) into her seventies.

She’d been 75 when she revealed herself in the club’s circular driveway to a horde of young people arriving for the Sons and Daughters of Members’ Ball. This incident resulted in a multivehicle collision that was reputed to bear responsibility for the enlargement of the speed bumps, which were implanted the entire length of the access road. In Farrokh’s opinion, the Duckworth Club was permanently fixed at the speed indicated by those signs posted at both ends of the drive: DEAD SLOW. But this, for the most part, contented him; the admonition to go dead slow didn’t strike Dr. Daruwalla as an imposition, although the doctor did regret not being alive for at least one glimpse of Lady Duckworth’s long-ago breasts. The club couldn’t have been dead slow in her day.

As he had sighed aloud in the empty dance hall perhaps a hundred times, Dr. Daruwalla sighed again and softly said to himself,

“Those were the good old days.” But it was only a joke; he didn’t really mean it. Those “good old days” were as unknowable to him as Canada—his cold, adopted country—or as the India he only pretended to be comfortable in. Furthermore, Farrokh never spoke or sighed loudly enough to be heard by anyone else.

In the vast, cool hall, he listened: he could hear the waiters and the busboys in the dining room, setting the tables for lunch; he could hear the clicks and thumps of the snooker balls and the flat, authoritative snap of a card turned faceup on a table. And although it was now past 11:00, two die-hards were still playing tennis; by the soft, slowly paced pops of the ball, Dr. Daruwalla concluded that it wasn’t a very spirited match.

It was unmistakably the head gardener’s truck that sped along the access road, hitting each of the speed bumps with abandon; there followed the resounding clatter of hoes and rakes and spades, and then an abstract cursing—the head mali was a moron.

There was a photograph that Farrokh was particularly fond of, and he looked intently at it, then he closed his eyes so that he might see the picture better. In Lord Duckworth’s expression there was much charity and tolerance and patience; yet there was something stupefied in his faraway gaze, as if he’d only recently recognized and accepted his own futility. Although Lord Duckworth was broad-shouldered and had a deep chest and he firmly held a sword, there was also a kind of gentle idiot’s resignation at the turned-down corners of his eyes and the drooping ends of his mustache. He was perpetually almost the governor of Maharashtra, but never the governor. And the hand that he placed around Lady Duckworth’s girlish waist was clearly a hand that touched her without weight, that held her without strength—if it held her at all.

Lord D. committed suicide on New Year’s Eve, precisely at the turn of the century. For many more years Lady Duckworth would reveal her breasts, but it was agreed that, as a widow, although she exposed herself more often, she did so halfheartedly. Cynics said that had she lived, and continued to show India her gifts, Lady D. might have thwarted Independence.

In the photograph that so appealed to Dr. Daruwalla, Lady Duckworth’s chin was tilted down, her eyes mischievously gazing up, as if she’d just been caught peering into her own thrilling cleavage and had instantly looked away. Her bosom was a broad, strong shelf supporting her pretty face. Even fully clothed, there was something unrestrained about the woman; her arms hung straight down at her sides, but her fingers were spread wide apart—with her palms presented to the camera, as if for crucifixion—and a wild strand of her allegedly blond hair, which was otherwise held high off her graceful neck, was childishly twisted and coiled like a snake around one of the world’s perfect little ears.

In future years, her hair turned from blond to gray without losing its thick body or its deep luster; her breasts, despite being so often and so long exposed, never sagged. Dr. Daruwalla was a happily married man; however, he would have admitted—even to his dear wife—that he was in love with Lady Duckworth, for he’d fallen in love with her photographs and with her story when he was a child.

But it could have a lugubrious effect on the doctor—if he spent too much time in the dance hall, reviewing the photographs of Members Past. Most of the Members Past were deceased; as the circus people said of their dead, they had fallen without a net. (Of the living, the expression was reversed. Whenever Dr. Daruwalla inquired after Vinod’s health—the doctor never failed to ask about the dwarf’s wife, too—Vinod would always reply, “We are still falling in the net.”)

Of Lady Duckworth—at least, from her photographs—Farrokh would say that her breasts were still falling in the net; possibly they were immortal.

Mr. Lal Has Missed the Net

And then, suddenly, a small and seemingly unimportant incident distracted Dr. Daruwalla from his entrancement with Lady Duckworth’s bosom. The doctor would need to be in touch with his subconscious to remember this, for it was only a slight disturbance from the dining room that drew his attention. A crow, with something shiny seized in its beak, had swept in from the open veranda and had landed rakishly on the broad, oar-shaped blade of one of the ceiling fans. The bird precariously tilted the fan, but it continued to ride the blade around and around, shitting in a consistently circular form—on the floor, on a portion of one tablecloth and on a salad plate, just missing a fork. A waiter flapped a napkin and the crow took flight again, raucously cawing as it escaped through the veranda and rose above the golf course that stood shimmering in the noon sun. Whatever had been in its beak was gone, perhaps swallowed. First the waiters and busboys rushed to change the befouled tablecloth and place setting, although it was still early for lunch; then a sweeper was summoned to mop the floor.

Owing to his early-morning surgeries, Dr. Daruwalla lunched earlier than most Duckworthians. Farrokh’s appointment for lunch with Inspector Dhar was at half past noon. The doctor strolled into the Ladies’ Garden, where he located a break in the dense bower that afforded him a view of the expanse of sky above the golf course; there he seated himself in a rose-colored wicker chair. His little pot belly seemed to get his attention, especially when he sat down; Farrokh ordered a London Diet beer, although he wanted a Kingfisher lager.

To Dr. Daruwalla’s surprise, he saw a vulture (possibly the same vulture) above the golf course again; the bird was lower in the sky, as if it was not en route to or from the Towers of Silence but as if it was descending. Knowing how ferociously the Parsis defended their burial rites, it amused Farrokh to imagine that they might be offended by any distraction caused to any vulture. Perhaps a horse had dropped dead on the Mahalaxmi race course; maybe a dog had been killed in Tardeo or a body had washed ashore at Haji Ali’s Tomb. Whatever the reason, here was one vulture that was not performing the sacred chore at the Towers of Silence.

Dr. Daruwalla looked at his watch. He expected his luncheon companion at any moment; he sipped his London Diet beer, trying to pretend it was a Kingfisher lager—he was imagining that he was slim again. (Farrokh had never been slim.) While he watched the vulture carve its descending spirals, another vulture joined it, and then another; this gave him an unexpected chill. Farrokh quite forgot to prepare himself for the news he had to deliver to Inspector Dhar—not that there was any good way to do it. The doctor grew so entranced by the birds that he didn’t notice the typically smooth, eerily graceful arrival of his handsome younger friend.