A Son of the Circus

In the bedroom, the two beds were too close together—and doubtless infested. Both mosquito nets were yellowed and stiff, and one was torn. The one window that opened had no screen, and little air was inclined to move through it. Dr. Daruwalla thought they might as well open the glass doors to the balcony, but Madhu said she was afraid that a monkey would come inside.

The ceiling fan had only two speeds: one was so slow that the fan had no effect at all, and the other was so fast that the mosquito nets were blown away from the beds. Even in the main tent at the circus, the night air had felt cool, but the third floor of the Government Circuit House was hot and airless. Madhu solved this problem by using the bathroom first; she wet a towel and wrung it out, and then she lay naked under the towel—on the better bed, the one with the untorn mosquito net. Madhu was small, but so was the towel; it scarcely covered her breasts and left her thighs exposed. A deliberate girl, the doctor thought.

Lying there, she said, “I’m still hungry. There was nothing sweet.”

“You want a dessert?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“If it’s sweet,” she said.

The doctor carried the thermos with the rest of the rabies vaccine and the immune globulin down to the lobby; he hoped there was a refrigerator, for the thermos was already tepid. What if Gautam bit someone else tomorrow? Kunal had informed the doctor that the chimpanzee was “almost definitely” rabid. Rabid or not, the chimp shouldn’t be beaten; in the doctor’s opinion, only a second-rate circus beat its animals.

In the lobby, a Muslim boy was tending the desk, listening to the Qawwali on the radio; he appeared to be eating ice cream to the religious verses—his head nodding while he ate, the spoon conducting the air between the container and his mouth. But it wasn’t ice cream, the boy told Dr. Daruwalla; he offered the doctor a spoon and invited him to take a taste. The texture differed from that of ice cream—a cardamom-scented, saffron-colored yogurt, sweetened with sugar. There was a refrigerator full of the stuff, and Farrokh took a container and spoon for Madhu. He left the vaccine and the immune globulin in the refrigerator, after assuring himself that the boy knew better than to eat it.

When the doctor returned to his room, Madhu had discarded the towel. He tried to give her the Gujarati dessert without looking at her; probably on purpose, she made it awkward for him to hand her the spoon and container—he was sure she was pretending that she didn’t know where the mosquito net opened. She sat naked in bed, eating the sweetened yogurt and watching him while he arranged his writing materials.

There was an unsteady table, a thick candle affixed by wax to a dirty ashtray, a packet of matches alongside a mosquito coil. When Farrokh had spread out his pages and smoothed his hand over the pad of fresh paper, he lit the candle and the mosquito coil and turned off the overhead light. At high speed, the ceiling fan would have disturbed his work and Madhu’s mosquito net, so the doctor kept the fan on low; although this was ineffectual, he hoped that the movement of the blade might make Madhu sleepy.

“What are you doing?” the child prostitute asked him.

“Writing,” he told her.

“Read it to me,” Madhu asked him.

“You wouldn’t understand it,” Farrokh replied.

“Are you going to be sleeping?” the girl asked.

“Maybe later,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

He tried to block her out of his mind, but this was difficult. She kept watching him; the sound of her spoon in the container of yogurt was as regular as the drone of the fan. Her purposeful nakedness was oppressive, but not because he was actually tempted by her; it was more that the pure evil of having sex with her (the very idea of it) was suddenly his obsession. He didn’t want to have sex with her—he felt only the most passing desire for her—but the sheer obviousness of her availability was numbing to his other senses. It struck him that an evil this pure, something so clearly wrong, wasn’t often presented without consequence; the horror was that it seemed there could be no harmful result of sex between them. If he permitted her to seduce him, nothing would come of it—nothing beyond what he would remember and feel guilty for, forever.

The lucky girl was not HIV-positive; besides, he happened to be traveling in India, as usual—with condoms. And Madhu wasn’t a girl who would ever tell anyone; she wasn’t a talker. In her present situation, she might never have the occasion to tell anyone. It was not only the child’s tarnished innocence that convinced him of the purity of this evil, like almost no other evil he’d ever imagined; it was also her strident amorality—whether this had been acquired in the brothel or, hideously, taught to her by Mr. Garg. Whatever one did to her, one wouldn’t pay for it—not in this life, or only in the torments of one’s soul. These were the darkest thoughts that Dr. Daruwalla had ever had, but he nevertheless thought his way through them; soon he was writing again.

By the movement of his pen (for she’d never stopped watching him), Madhu seemed to sense that she’d lost him. Also, her dessert was gone. She got out of the bed and walked naked to him; s

he peered over his shoulder, as if she knew how to read what he was writing. The screenwriter could feel her hair against his cheek and neck.

“Read it to me—just that part,” Madhu said. She leaned more firmly against him as she reached and touched the paper with her hand; she touched his last sentence. The cardamom-scented yogurt smelled sickly on her breath, and there was something like the smell of dead flowers—possibly the saffron.

The screenwriter read aloud to her: “ ‘Two stretcher bearers in white dhotis are running with the body of Acid Man, who is curled in a fetal position on the stretcher—his face glazed in pain, smoke still drifting from the area of his crotch.’ ”

Madhu made him read it again; then she said, “In what position?”

“Fetal,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “Like a baby inside its mother.”

“Who is Acid Man?” the child prostitute asked him.

“A man who’s been scarred by acid—like Mr. Garg,” Farrokh told her. At the mention of Garg’s name, there wasn’t even a flicker of recognition in the girl’s face. The doctor refused to look at her naked body, although Madhu still clung to his shoulder; where she pressed against him, he felt himself begin to sweat.

“The smoke is coming from what area?” Madhu asked.

“From his crotch,” the screenwriter replied.

“Where’s that?” the child prostitute asked him.

“You know where that is, Madhu—go back to bed,” he told her.

She raised one arm to show him her armpit. “The hair is growing back,” she said. “You can feel it.”