A Son of the Circus

This time, Julia found him in the morning with his face pressing a pencil against the glass-topped table in the dining room. An ongoing title search was evident from Farrokh’s last jottings. There was Lion Piss (crossed out, blessedly) and Raging Hormones (also crossed out, she was happy to see), but the one that appeared to have pleased the screenwriter before he fell asleep was circled. As a movie title, Julia had her doubts about it. It was Limo Roulette, which reminded Julia of one of those French films that defy common sense—even when one manages to read every word of the subtitles.

But this was far too busy a morning for Julia to take the time to read the new pages. She woke up Farrokh by blowing in his ear; while he was in the bathtub, she made his tea. She’d already packed his toilet articles and a change of clothes, and she’d teased her husband about his habit of taking with him a medical-emergency kit of an elaborately paranoid nature; after all, he was going to be away only one night.

But Dr. Daruwalla never traveled anywhere in India without bringing with him certain precautionary items: erythromycin, the preferred antibiotic for bronchitis; Lomotil, for diarrhea.

He even carried a kit of surgical instruments, including sutures and iodophor gauze—and both an antibiotic powder and an ointment. In the usual weather, infection thrived in the simplest selection of condoms, which he freely dispensed without invitation. Indian men were renowned for not using condoms. All Dr. Daruwalla had to do was meet a man who so much as joked about prostitutes; in the doctor’s mind, this amounted to a confession. “Here—next time try one of these,” Dr. Daruwalla would say.

The doctor also toted with him a half-dozen sterile disposable needles and syringes—just in case anyone needed any kind of shot. At a circus, people were always being bitten by dogs and monkeys. Someone had told Dr. Daruwalla that rabies was endemic among chimpanzees. For this trip, especially, Farrokh brought along three starter-doses of rabies vaccine, together with three 10mL vials of human rabies immune globulin. Both the vaccine and the immune globulin required refrigeration, but for a journey of less than 48 hours a thermos with ice would be sufficient.

“Are you expecting to be bitten by something?” Julia had asked him.

“I was thinking of the new missionary,” Farrokh had replied; for he believed that, if he were a rabid chimpanzee at the Great Blue Nile, he would certainly be inclined to bite Martin Mills. Yet Julia knew that he’d packed enough vaccine and immune globulin to treat himself and the missionary and both children—just in case a rabid chimpanzee attacked them all.

Lucky Day

In the morning, the doctor longed to read and revise the new pages of his screenplay, but there was too much to do. The elephant boy had sold all the clothes that Martin Mills had bought for him on Fashion Street. Julia had anticipated this; she’d bought the ungrateful little wretch more clothes. It was a struggle to get Ganesh to take a bath—at first because he wanted to do nothing but ride in the elevator, and then because he’d never been in a building with a balcony overlooking Marine Drive; all he wanted to do was stare at the view. Ganesh also objected to wearing a sandal on his good foot, and even Julia doubted the wisdom of concealing the mangled foot in a clean white sock; the sock wouldn’t stay clean or white for long. As for the lone sandal, Ganesh complained that the strap across the top of his foot hurt him so much, he could scarcely walk.

When the doctor had kissed Julia good-bye, he steered the disgruntled boy to Vinod’s waiting taxi; there, in the front seat beside the dwarf, was the sullen Madhu. She was irritated by Dr. Daruwalla’s difficulty in understanding her languages. She had to try both Marathi and Hindi before the doctor understood that Madhu was displeased with the way Vinod had dressed her; Deepa had told the dwarf how to dress the girl.

“I’m not a child,” the former child prostitute said, although it was clear that it had been Deepa’s intention to make the little whore look like a child.

“The circus wants you to look like a child,” Dr. Daruwalla told Madhu, but the girl pouted; nor did she respond to Ganesh in a sisterly fashion.

Madhu glanced briefly, and with disgust, at the boy’s viscid eyes; there was a film of tetracycline ointment, which had been recently applied—it tended to give Ganesh’s eyes a glazed quality. The boy would need to continue the medication for a week or more before his eyes looked normal. “I thought they were fixing your eyes,” Madhu said cruelly; she spoke in Hindi. It had been Farrokh’s impression, when he’d been alone with Madhu or alone with Ganesh, that both children endeavored to speak English; now that the kids were together, they lapsed into Hindi and Marathi. At best, the doctor spoke Hindi tentatively—and Marathi hardly at all.

“It’s important that you behave like a brother and sister,” Farrokh reminded them, but the cripple’s mood was as sulky as Madhu’s.

“If she were my sister, I’d beat her up,” Ganesh said.

“Not with that foot, you wouldn’t,” Madhu told him.

“Now, now,” said Dr. Daruwalla; he’d decided to speak English because he was almost certain that Madhu, as well as Ganesh, could understand him, and he presumed that in English he commanded more authority. “This is your lucky day,” he told them.

“What’s a lucky day?” Madhu asked the doctor.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Ganesh said.

“It’s just an expression,” Dr. Daruwalla admitted, “but it does mean something. It means that today it is your good fortune to be leaving Bombay, to be going to the circus.”

“So you mean that we’re lucky—not the day,” the elephant-footed boy replied.

“It’s too soon to say if we’re lucky,” said the child prostitute.

On that note, they arrived at St. Ignatius, where the single-minded missionary had been waiting for them. Martin Mills climbed into the back seat of the Ambassador, an air of boundless enthusiasm surrounding him. “This is your lucky day!” the zealot announced to the children.

“We’ve been through that,” said Dr. Daruwalla. It was only 7:30 on a Saturday morning.

Out of Place at the Taj

It was 8:30 when they arrived at the terminal for domestic flights in Santa Cruz, where they were told that their flight to Rajkot would be delayed until the end of the day.

“Indian Airlines!” Dr. Daruwalla exclaimed.

“At least they are admitting it,” Vinod said.

Dr. Daruwalla decided that they could wait somewhere more comfortable than the Santa Cruz terminal. But before Farrokh could usher them all back inside the dwarf’s taxi, Martin Mills had wandered off and bought the morning newspaper; on their way back to Bombay, in rush-hour traffic, the missionary treated them to snippets from The Times of India. It would be 10:30 before they arrived at the Taj. (It was Dr. Daruwalla’s eccentric decision that they should wait for their flight to Rajkot in the lobby of the Taj Mahal Hotel.)

“Listen to this,” Martin began. “ ‘Two brothers stabbed.… The police have arrested one assailant while two other accused are absconding on a scooter in a rash manner.’ An unexpected use of the present tense, not to mention ‘rash,’ ” the English teacher observed. “Not to mention ‘absconding.’ ”