A Son of the Circus

“I want you to be a child, because you are a child,” Farrokh told the girl. “Please, won’t you try to be a child?” There was such an eagerness in Madhu’s smile that, for a moment, the doctor believed the girl had understood him. Quite like a child, she walked her fingers over his thigh; then, unlike a child, Madhu pressed her small palm firmly on Dr. Daruwalla’s penis. There’d been no groping for it; she’d known exactly where it was. Through the summer-weight material of his pants, the doctor felt the heat of Madhu’s hand.

“I’ll try what you want—anything you want,” the child prostitute told him. Instantly, Dr. Daruwalla pulled her hand away.

“Stop that!” Farrokh cried.

“I want to sit with Ganesh,” the girl told him. Farrokh let her change seats with Martin Mills.

“There’s a matter I’ve been pondering,” the missionary whispered to the doctor. “You said we had two rooms for the night. Only two?”

“I suppose we could get more …” the doctor began. His legs were shaking.

“No, no—that’s not what I’m getting at,” Martin said. “I mean, were you thinking the children would share one room, and we’d share the other?”

“Yes,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. He couldn’t stop his legs from shaking.

“But—well, I know you’ll think this is silly, but—it would seem prudent to me to not allow them to sleep together. I mean, not in the same room,” the missionary added. “After all, there is the matter of what we can only guess has been the girl’s orientation.”

“Her what?” the doctor asked. He could stop one leg from shaking, but not the other.

“Her sexual experience, I mean,” said Martin Mills. “We must assume she’s had some … sexual contact. What I mean is, what if Madhu is inclined to seduce Ganesh? Do you know what I mean?”

Dr. Daruwalla knew very well what Martin Mills meant. “You have a point,” was all the doctor said in reply.

“Well, then, suppose the boy and I take one room, and you and Madhu take the other? You see, I don’t think the Father Rector would approve of someone in my position sharing a room with the girl,” Martin explained. “It might seem contradictory to my vows.”

“Yes … your vows,” Farrokh replied. Finally, his other leg stopped shaking.

“Do you think I’m being totally silly?” the Jesuit asked the doctor. “I suppose you think it’s idiotic of me to suggest that Madhu might be so inclined—just because the poor child was … what she was.” But Farrokh could feel that he still had an erection, and Madhu had touched him so briefly.

“No, I think you’re wise to be a little worried about her … inclination,” Dr. Daruwalla answered. He spoke slowly because he was trying to remember the popular psalm. “How does it go—the twenty-third psalm?” the doctor asked the scholastic. “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …’ ”

“ ‘I will fear no evil …’ ” said Martin Mills.

“Yes—that’s it. ‘I will fear no evil,’ ” Farrokh repeated.

Dr. Daruwalla assumed that the plane had left Maharashtra; he guessed they were already flying over Gujarat. Below them, the land was flat and dry-looking in the late-afternoon haze. The sky was as brown as the ground. Limo Roulette or Escaping Maharashtra—the screenwriter couldn’t make up his mind between the two titles. Farrokh thought: It depends on what happens—it depends on how the story ends.

22

THE TEMPTATION OF DR. DARUWALLA

On the Road to Junagadh

At the airport in Rajkot, they were testing the loudspeaker system. It was a test without urgency, as if the loudspeaker were of no real importance—as if no one believed there could be an emergency.

“One, two, three, four, five,” said a voice. “Five, four, three, two, one.” Then the message was repeated. Maybe they weren’t testing the loudspeaker system, thought Dr. Daruwalla; possibly they were testing their counting skills.

While the doctor and Martin Mills were gathering the bags, their pilot appeared and handed the Swiss Army knife to the missionary. At first Martin was embarrassed—he’d forgotten that he’d been forced to relinquish the weapon in Bombay. Then he was ashamed, for he’d assumed the pilot was a thief. While this demonstration of social awkwardness was unfolding, Madhu and Ganesh each ordered and drank two glasses of tea; Dr. Daruwalla was left to haggle with the chai vendor.

“We’ll have to be stopping all the way to Junagadh, so you can pee,” Farrokh told the children. Then they waited nearly an hour in Rajkot for their driver to arrive. All the while, the loudspeaker system went on counting up to five and down to one. It was an annoying airport, but Madhu and Ganesh had plenty of time to pee.

Their driver’s name was Ramu. He was a roustabout who’d joined the Great Blue Nile Circus in Maharashtra, and this was his second round trip between Junagadh and Rajkot today. He’d been on time to meet the plane in the morning; when he learned that the flight was delayed, he drove back to the circus in Junagadh—only because he liked to drive. It was nearly a three-hour trip one way, but Ramu proudly told them that he usually covered the distance in under two hours. They soon saw why.

Ramu drove a battered Land Rover, spattered with mud (or the dried blood of unlucky pedestrians and animals). He was a slight young man, perhaps 18 or 20, and he wore a baggy pair of shorts and a begrimed T-shirt. Most notably, Ramu drove barefoot. The padding had worn off the clutch and brake pedals—their smooth metal surfaces looked slippery—and the doubtlessly overused accelerator pedal had been replaced by a piece of wood; it looked as flimsy as a shingle, but Ramu never took his right foot off it. He preferred to operate both the clutch and the brake with his left foot, although the latter pedal received little attention.

Through Rajkot, they roared into the twilight. They passed a water tower, a women’s hospital, a bus station, a bank, a fruit market, a statue of Gandhi, a telegraph office, a library, a cemetery, the Havmore Restaurant and the Hotel Intimate. When they raced through the bazaar area, Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t look anymore. There were too many children—not to mention the elderly, who weren’t as quick to get out of the way as the children; not to mention the bullock carts and the camel wagons, and the cows and donkeys and goats; not to mention the mopeds and the bicycles and the bicycle rickshaws and the three-wheeled rickshaws, and of course there were cars and trucks and buses, too. At the edge of town, off the side of the road, Farrokh was sure that he spotted a dead man—another “nonperson,” as Ganesh would say—but at the speed they were traveling, there was no time for Dr. Daruwalla to ask Martin Mills to verify the shape of death with the frozen face that the doctor saw.

Once they were out of town, Ramu drove faster. The roustabout subscribed to the open-road school of driving. There were no rules about passing; in the lane of oncoming traffic, Ramu yielded only to those vehicles that were bigger. In Ramu’s mind, the Land Rover was bigger than anything on the road—except for buses and a highly selective category of