A Son of the Circus

To this end, Farrokh sat on the opposite side of his desk, eliminating his usual view; the doctor found the exercise yard of the Hospital for Crippled Children distracting—the physical therapy for some of his postoperative patients was hard for him to ignore. Dr. Daruwalla was more enticed by a make-believe world than he was drawn to confront the world he lived in.

For the most part, Inspector Dhar’s creator was unaware of the real-life dramas that teemed all around him. Poor Nancy, with her raccoon eyes, was dressing herself for Inspector Dhar. The famous actor, even offstage and off-camera, was still acting. Mr. Sethna, who so strongly disapproved of everything, had discovered (to his deep distaste) that human urine was killing the bougainvillea. And that wasn’t the only murder-in-progress at the Duckworth Club, where Rahul was already envisioning herself as the widow Dogar. But Dr. Daruwalla was still untouched by these realities. Instead, for his inspiration, the doctor chose to stare at the circus photograph on his desk.

There was the beautiful Suman—Suman the skywalker. The last time Dr. Daruwalla had seen her, she’d been unmarried—a 29-year-old star acrobat, the idol of all the child acrobats in training. The screenwriter was presuming that Suman was 29, and that it was high time for her to be wed; she should be engaged in more practical activities than walking upside down across the roof

of the main tent, 80 feet from the ground, with no net. A woman as wonderful as Suman should definitely be married, the screenwriter thought. Suman was an acrobat, not an actress. The screenwriter intended to give his circus characters very little responsibility in the way of acting. The boy, Ganesh, would be an accomplished actor, but his sister, Pinky, would be the real Pinky—from the Great Royal Circus. Pinky would perform as an acrobat; it wouldn’t be necessary to have her talk. (Keep her dialogue to a minimum, the screenwriter thought.)

Farrokh was getting ahead of himself; he was already casting the movie. In his screenplay, he still had to get the children to the circus. That was when Dr. Daruwalla thought of the new missionary; in the screenplay, the doctor wouldn’t call him Martin Mills—the name Mills was too boring. The screenwriter would call him simply “Mr. Martin.” The Jesuit mission would take charge of these children because their mother was killed in St. Ignatius Church by an unsafe statue of the Holy Virgin; St. Ignatius would certainly bear some responsibility for that. And so the children would manage to be picked up by the right limousine, by Vinod; the so-called Good Samaritan dwarf would still need to get the Jesuits’ permission to take the kids to the circus. Oh, this is brilliant! thought Dr. Daruwalla. That would be how Suman and Mr. Martin meet. The morally meddlesome missionary takes the children to the circus, and the fool falls in love with the skywalker!

Why not? The Jesuit would soon find Suman preferable to chastity. The fictional Mr. Martin would have to be a skilled actor, and the screenwriter would provide the character with a far more winning personality than that of Martin Mills. In the screenplay, the seduction of Mr. Martin would be an unconversion story. There was no small measure of mischief in the screenwriter’s next idea: that John D. would play a perfect Mr. Martin. How happy he’d be—to not be Inspector Dhar!

What a screenplay this was going to be—what an improvement on reality! That was when Dr. Daruwalla realized that nothing was preventing him from putting himself in the movie. He wouldn’t presume to make himself a hero—perhaps a minor character with admirable intentions would suffice. But how should he describe himself? Farrokh wondered. The screenwriter didn’t know he was handsome, and to speak of himself as “highly intelligent” sounded defensive; also, in movies, you could only describe how one appeared.

There was no mirror in the doctor’s office and so he saw himself as he often looked in the full-length mirror in the foyer of the Duckworth Club, which doubtless conveyed to Dr. Daruwalla a Duckworthian sense of himself as an elegant gentleman. Such a gentlemanly doctor could play a small but pivotal role in the screenplay, for the character of the do-gooder missionary would naturally be obsessed with the idea that Ganesh’s limp could be fixed. Ideally, the character of Mr. Martin would bring the boy to be examined by none other than Dr. Daruwalla. The doctor would announce the hard truth: there were exercises that Ganesh could do—these would strengthen his legs, including the crippled leg—but the boy would always limp. (A few scenes of the crippled boy struggling bravely to perform these exercises would be excellent for audience sympathy, the screenwriter believed.)

Like Rahul, Dr. Daruwalla enjoyed this phase of storytelling—namely, plot. The thrill of exploring one’s options! In the beginning, there were always so many.

But euphoria, in the case of murder and in the case of writing, is short-lived. Farrokh began to worry that his masterpiece had already been reduced to a romantic comedy. The two kids escape in the right limo; the circus is their salvation. Suman gives up skywalking to marry a missionary, who gives up being a missionary. Even Inspector Dhar’s creator suspected that this ending was too happy. Surely something bad should happen, the screenwriter thought.

Thus the doctor sat pondering in his office at the Hospital for Crippled Children, with his back to the exercise yard. In such a setting, one might imagine that Dr. Daruwalla must have felt ashamed of himself for trying to imagine some small tragedy.

Not a Romantic Comedy

Contrary to Rahul’s opinion, the police had not found the top half of the silver pen with India inscribed on it. Rahul’s money clip had no longer been in the bougainvillea when the deputy commissioner had examined Mr. Lal’s body. The silver was so shiny in the morning sun, it had caught a crow’s sharp eyes. It was the half-pen that led the crow to discover the corpse. The crow had begun by pecking out one of Mr. Lal’s eyes; the bird was busy at the open wound behind Mr. Lal’s ear and at the wound at Mr. Lal’s temple when the first of the vultures settled on the ninth green. The crow had stood its ground until more vultures came; after all, it had found the body first. And before taking flight, the crow had stolen the silver half-pen. Crows were always stealing shiny objects. That this crow had promptly lost its prize in the ceiling fan in the Duckworth Club dining room was not necessarily a comment on the bird’s overall intelligence, but the blade of the fan (at that time of the morning) had moved in and out of the sunlight; the fan had also caught the crow’s sharp eyes. It was a silly place for a crow to land, and a waiter had rudely shooed the shitting bird away.

As for the shiny object that the crow had held so tenaciously in its beak, it had been left where it occasionally disturbed the mechanism of the ceiling fan. Dr. Daruwalla had observed one such disturbance; the doctor had also observed the landing of the shitting crow upon the fan. And so the top half of the silver pen existed only in the crowded memory of Dr. Daruwalla, and the doctor had already forgotten that the second Mrs. Dogar had reminded him of someone else—an old movie star. Farrokh had also forgotten the pain of his collision with Mrs. Dogar in the foyer of the Duckworth Club. That shiny something, which first Nancy and then Rahul and then the crow had lost, might now be lost forever, for its discovery lay within the limited abilities of Dr. Daruwalla. Frankly, both the memory and the powers of observation of a closet screenwriter are not the best. One might more sensibly rely on the mechanism of the ceiling fan to spit out the half-pen and present it, as a miracle, to Detective Patel (or to Nancy).

An unlikely miracle of that coincidental kind was exactly what was needed to rescue Martin Mills, for the Mass had been celebrated too late to save the missionary from his worst memories. There were times when every church reminded Martin of Our Lady of Victories. When his mother was in Boston, Martin always went to Mass at Our Lady of Victories on Isabella Street; it was only an eight-minute walk from the Ritz. That Sunday morning of the long Thanksgiving weekend of his ninth-grade year, young Martin slipped out of the bedroom he shared with Arif Koma without waking the Turk up. In the living room of the two-bedroom suite at the hotel, Martin saw that the door to his mother’s bedroom was ajar; this struck the boy as indicative of Vera’s carelessness, and he was about to close the door—before he left the suite to go to Mass—when his mother spoke to him.

“Is that you, Martin?” Vera asked. “Come kiss me good-morning.”

Dutifully, although he was loath to see his mother in the strongly scented disarray of her boudoir, Martin went to her. To his surprise, both Vera and her bed were unrumpled; he had the impression that his mother had already bathed and brushed her teeth and combed her hair. The sheets weren’t in their usual knot of apparent bad dreams. Also, Vera’s nightgown was a pretty, almost girlish thing; it was revealing of her dramatic bosom but not sluttishly revealing, as was often the case. Martin cautiously kissed her cheek.

“Off to church?” his mother asked him.

“To Mass—yes,” Martin told her.

“Is Arif still sleeping?” Vera inquired.

“Yes, I think so,” Martin replied. Arif’s name on his mother’s lips reminded Martin of the painful embarrassment of the night before. “I don’t think you should ask Arif about such … personal things,” Martin said suddenly.

“Personal? Do you mean sexual?” Vera asked her son. “Honestly, Martin, the poor boy has probably been dying to talk to someone about his terrible circumcision. Don’t be such a prude!”

“I think Arif is a very private person,” Martin said. “Also,” he added stubbornly, “I think he might be a bit … disturbed.”

Vera sat up in her bed with new interest. “Sexually disturbed?” she asked her son. “What gives you that idea?”

It didn’t seem a betrayal, not at the time; Martin thought he was speaking to his mother in order to protect Arif. “He masturbates,” Martin said quietly.

“Goodness, I should hope so!” Vera exclaimed. “I certainly hope that you do!”

Martin wouldn’t take this bait, but he replied, “I mean that he masturbates a lot—almost every night.”

“The poor boy!” Vera remarked. “But you sound so disapproving, Martin.”

“I think it’s … excessive,” her son told her.

“I think masturbation is quite healthy for boys your age. Have you discussed masturbation with your father?” Vera asked him.