A Son of the Circus

“All the time,” Farrokh repeated. He felt grateful for what a good friend Mac was.

It had been Dr. Macfarlane who’d persuaded Dr. Daruwalla to volunteer his time at the AIDS hospice in Toronto; Duncan Frasier had died there. Farrokh had worked at the hospice for over a year. At first, he suspected his own motives, which he’d confessed to Mac; on Mac’s advice, Farrokh had also discussed his special interest in the hospice with the director of nursing.

It had been awkward for Farrokh to tell a stranger the story of his relationship with John D.—how this young man, who was like an adopted son to Dr. Daruwalla, had always been a homosexual, but the doctor hadn’t known it until John D. was almost 40; how, even now, when John D.’s sexual orientation was plainly clear, Farrokh and the not-so-young “young” man still didn’t speak of the matter (at least not in depth). Dr. Daruwalla told Dr. Macfarlane and the hospice’s director of nursing that he wanted to be involved with AIDS patients because he wanted to know more about the elusive John D. Farrokh admitted that he was terrified for John D.; that his beloved almost-like-a-son might die of AIDS was Farrokh’s greatest fear. (Yes, he was afraid for Martin, too.)

Emotional restraint, which was repeatedly demonstrated in Dr. Daruwalla’s friendship with Dr. Macfarlane—their understated conversation regarding the status of Macfarlane’s HIV-positive condition was but one example—prevented Farrokh from admitting to his friend that he was also afraid of watching Mac die of AIDS. But it was perfectly well understood, by both doctors and by the hospice’s director of nursing, that this was another motive underlying Farrokh’s desire to familiarize himself with the functions of an AIDS hospice.

Dr. Daruwalla believed that the more naturally he could learn to behave in the presence of AIDS patients, not to mention gay men, the closer his relationship with John D. might become. They’d already grown closer together, ever since John D. had told Farrokh that he’d always been gay. Doubtless, Dr. Daruwalla’s friendship with Dr. Macfarlane had helped. But what “father” can ever feel close enough to his “son”—that was the issue, wasn’t it? Farrokh had asked Mac.

“Don’t try to get too close to John D.,” Macfarlane had advised. “Remember, you’re not his father—and you’re not gay.”

It had been awkward—how Dr. Daruwalla had first tried to fit in at the hospice. As Mac had warned him, he had to learn that he wasn’t their doctor—he was just a volunteer. He asked lots of doctor-type questions and generally drove the nurses crazy; taking orders from nurses was something Dr. Daruwalla had to get used to. It was an effort for him to limit his expert

ise to the issue of bedsores; he still couldn’t be stopped from prescribing little exercises to combat the muscular wasting of the patients. He so freely dispensed tennis balls for squeezing that one of the nurses nicknamed him “Dr. Balls.” After a while, the name pleased him.

He was good at taking care of the catheters, and he was capable of giving morphine injections when one of the hospice doctors or nurses asked him to. He grew familiar with the feeding tubes; he hated seeing the seizures. He hoped that he would never watch John D. die with fulminant diarrhea … with an uncontrolled infection … with a spiking fever.

“I hope not, too,” Mac told him. “But if you’re not prepared to watch me die, you’ll be worthless to me when the time comes.”

Dr. Daruwalla wanted to be prepared. Usually, his voluntary time was spent in ordinary chores. One night, he did the laundry, just as Macfarlane had proudly bragged about doing it years earlier—all the bed linens and the towels. He also read aloud to patients who couldn’t read. He wrote letters for them, too.

One night, when Farrokh was working the switchboard, an angry woman called; she was indignant because she’d just learned that her only son was dying in the hospice and no one had officially informed her—not even her son. She was outraged, she said. She wanted to speak to someone in charge; she didn’t ask to speak to her son.

Dr. Daruwalla supposed that, although he wasn’t “in charge,” the woman might as well speak to him; he knew the hospice and its rules well enough to advise her how to visit—when to come, how to show respect for privacy and so forth. But the woman wouldn’t hear of it.

“You’re not in charge!” she kept shouting. “I want to speak to a doctor!” she cried. “I want to talk to the head of the place!”

Dr. Daruwalla was about to tell her his full name, his profession, his age—even the number of his children and his grandchildren, if she liked. But before he could speak, she screamed at him. “Who are you, anyway? What are you?”

Dr. Daruwalla answered her with such conviction and pride that he surprised himself. “I’m a volunteer,” the doctor said. The concept pleased him. Farrokh wondered if it felt as good to be assimilated as it did to be a volunteer.

The Bottommost Drawer

After Dr. Daruwalla left Bombay, there were other departures; in one case, there was a departure and a return. Suman, the skywalker par excellence, left the Great Royal Circus. She married a man in the milk business. Then, after various discussions with Pratap Walawalkar, the owner, Suman came back to the Great Royal, bringing her milk-business husband with her. Only recently, the doctor had heard that Suman’s husband had become one of the managers of the Great Royal Circus, and that Suman was once again walking on the sky; she was still very much the star.

Farrokh also learned that Pratap Singh had quit the Great Royal; the ringmaster and wild-animal trainer had left with his wife, Sumi, and their troupe of child acrobats—the real Pinky among them—to join the New Grand Circus. Unlike the Pinky character in Limo Roulette, the real Pinky wasn’t killed by a lion who mistook her for a peacock; the real Pinky was still performing, in one town after another. She would be 11 or 12, Farrokh guessed.

Dr. Daruwalla had heard that a girl named Ratna was performing the Skywalk at the New Grand; remarkably, Ratna could skywalk backward! The doctor was further informed that, by the time the New Grand Circus performed in Changanacheri, Pinky’s name had been changed to Choti Rani, which means Little Queen. Possibly Pratap had chosen the new name not only because Choti Rani was suitably theatrical, but also because Pinky was so special to him; Pratap always said she was absolutely the best. Just plain Pinky was a little queen now.

As for Deepa and Shivaji, the dwarf’s dwarf son, they had escaped the Great Blue Nile. Shivaji was very much Vinod’s son, in respect to the dwarf’s determination; as for Shivaji’s talent, the young man was a better acrobat than his father—and, at worst, Vinod’s equal as a clown. On the strength of Shivaji’s abilities, he and his mother had moved to the Great Royal Circus, which was unquestionably a move up from the Great Blue Nile—and one that Deepa never could have made on the strength of her own or Vinod’s talents. Farrokh had heard that the subtleties of Shivaji’s Farting Clown act—not to mention the dwarf’s signature item, which was called Elephant Dodging—put India’s other farting clowns to shame.

The fate of those lesser performers who toiled for the Great Blue Nile was altogether less kind; there would be no escape for them. The elephant-footed boy had never been content to be a cook’s helper; a higher aspiration afflicted him. The knife thrower’s wife, Mrs. Bhagwan—the most mechanical of skywalkers—had failed to dissuade Ganesh from his delusions of athleticism. Despite falling many times from that model of the ladderlike device which hung from the roof of the Bhagwans’ troupe tent, the cripple would never let go of the idea that he could learn to skywalk.

The perfect ending to Farrokh’s screenplay is that the cripple learns to walk without a limp by walking on the sky; such an ending would not conclude the real Ganesh’s story. The real Ganesh wouldn’t rest until he’d tried the real thing. It was almost as Dr. Daruwalla had imagined it, almost as it was written. But it’s unlikely that the real Ganesh was as eloquent; there would have been no voice-over. The elephant boy must have looked down at least once—enough to know that he shouldn’t look down again. From the apex of the main tent, the ground was 80 feet below him. With his feet in the loops, it’s doubtful that he even thought as poetically as Farrokh’s fictional character.

(“There is a moment when you must let go with your hands. At that moment, you are in no one’s hands. At that moment, everyone walks on the sky.”) Not likely—not a sentiment that would spontaneously leap to the mind of a cook’s helper. The elephant-footed boy would probably have made the mistake of counting the loops, too. Whether counting or not counting, it’s far-fetched to imagine him coaching himself across the ladder.

(“What I tell myself is, I am walking without a limp.”) That would be the day! Dr. Daruwalla thought. Judging from where they found the cripple’s body, the real Ganesh fell when he was less than halfway across the top of the tent. There were 18 loops in the ladder; the Skywalk was 16 steps. It was Mrs. Bhagwan’s expert opinion that the elephant boy had fallen after only four or five steps; he’d never managed more than four or five steps across the roof of her tent, the skywalker said.

This news came slowly to Toronto. Mr. and Mrs. Das conveyed their regrets, by letter, to Dr. Daruwalla; the letter was late—it was misaddressed. The ringmaster and his wife added that Mrs. Bhagwan blamed herself for the accident, but she also felt certain that the cripple could never have been taught to skywalk. Doubtless her distress distracted her. The next news from Mr. and Mrs. Das was that Mrs. Bhagwan had been cut by her knife-throwing husband as she lay spread-eagled on the revolving bull’s-eye; it wasn’t a serious wound, but she gave herself no time to heal. The following night, she fell from the Skywalk. She was only as far across the top of the tent as Ganesh had been, and she fell without a cry. Her husband said that she’d been having trouble with the fourth and fifth steps ever since the elephant boy had fallen.

Mr. Bhagwan wouldn’t throw another knife, not even when they offered him a choice of targets, all of whom were small girls. The widower went into semiretirement, performing only the Elephant Passing item. There seemed to be some self-punishment about this elephant act—or so the ringmaster confided to Dr. Daruwalla. Mr. Bhagwan would lie down under the elephant—at first with fewer and fewer mattresses between his body and the elephant-walking plank, and between his body and the ground. Then he did it with no mattresses at all. There were internal injuries, the ringmaster and his wife implied. Mr. Bhagwan became ill; he was sent home. Later, Mr. and Mrs. Das heard that Mr. Bhagwan had died.

Then Dr. Daruwalla heard that they’d all become ill. There were no more letters from Mr. and Mrs. Das. The Great Blue Nile Circus had vanished. Their last place of performance was Poona, where the prevailing story about the Blue Nile was that they were brought down by a flood; it was a small flood, not a major disaster, except that the hygiene at the circus became lax. An unidentified disease killed several of the big cats, and bouts of diarrhea and gastroenteritis were rampant among the acrobats. Just that quickly, the Great Blue Nile was gone.

Had Gautam’s death been a harbinger? The old chimpanzee had died of rabies not two weeks after he’d bitten Martin Mills; Kunal’s efforts to discipline the ape by beating him had been wasted. But, among them all, Dr. Daruwalla mainly remembered Mrs. Bhagwan—her tough feet and her long black shiny hair.

The death of the elephant boy (a cripple no more) destroyed a small but important part of Farrokh. What happened to the real Ganesh had an immediate and diminishing effect on the screenwriter’s already waning confidence in his powers of creation. The screenplay of Limo Roulette had suffered from comparisons to real life. In the end, the real Ganesh’s remark rang truest. “You can’t fix what elephants do,” the cripple had said.