A Son of the Circus

“I was sitting in my seat when this man came out of the lavatory, and I thought I recognized him,” Martin said.

“You were looking out the window,” John D. declared. “You didn’t turn to look at me until I’d sat down beside you and had spoken your name.”

“You spoke his name?” Dr. Daruwalla always asked.

“Of course. I knew who he was instantly,” the ex-Inspector Dhar would reply. “I thought to myself: Farrokh must imagine he’s awfully clever—writing a script for everyone.”

“He never spoke my name,” Martin told the doctor. “I remember thinking that he was Satan, and that Satan had chosen to look like me, to take my own form—what a horror! I thought you were my dark side, my evil half.”

“Your smarter half, you mean,” John D. would invariably reply.

“He was just like the Devil. He was frighteningly arrogant,” Martin told Farrokh.

“I simply told him that I knew who he was,” John D. argued.

“You said nothing of the kind,” Martin interjected. “You said, ‘Fasten your fucking seat belt, pal, because are you ever in for a surprise!’ ”

“That sounds like what you’d say,” Farrokh told the former Dhar.

“I couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” John D. complained. “Here I knew all about him, but he was the one who wouldn’t stop talking. All the way to Zürich, he never shut up.”

Dr. Daruwalla had to admit that this sounded like what Martin Mills would do.

“I kept thinking: This is Satan. I give up the idea of the priesthood and I meet the Devil—in first class! He had this constant sneer,” Martin said. “It was a Satanic sneer—or so I thought.”

“He started right out about Vera, our sainted mother,” John D. related. “We were still crossing the Arabian Sea—utter darkness above and below us—when he got to the part about the roommate’s suicide. I hadn’t said a word!”

“That’s not true—he kept interrupting me,” Martin told Farrokh. “He kept asking me, ‘Are you gay, or do you just not know it yet?’ Honestly, I thought he was the rudest man I’d ever met!”

“Listen to me,” the actor said. “You meet your twin brother on an airplane and you start right out with a list of everyone your mother’s slept with. And you think I’m rude.”

“You called me a ‘quitter’ before we’d even reached our cruising altitude,” Martin said.

“But you must have started by telling him that you were his twin,” Farrokh said to John D.

“He did nothing of the kind,” said Martin Mills. “He said, ‘You already know the bad news: your father died. Now here’s the good news: he wasn’t your father.’ ”

“You didn’t!” Dr. Daruwalla said to John D.

“I can’t remember,” the actor would say.

“The word ‘twin’—just tell me, who said it first?” the doctor asked.

“I asked the flight attendant if she saw any resemblance between us—she was the first to say the word ‘twin,’ ” John D. replied.

“That’s not exactly how it happened,” Martin argued. “What he said to the flight attendant was, ‘We were separated at birth. Try to guess which one of us has had the better time.’ ”

“He simply exhibited all the common symptoms of denial,” John D. would respond. “He kept asking me if I had proof that we were related.”

“He was utterly shameless,” Martin told Farrokh. “He said, ‘You can’t deny that you’ve had at least one homosexual infatuation—there’s your proof.’ ”

“That was bold of you,” the doctor told John D. “Actually, there’s only a fifty-two percent chance …”

“I knew he was gay the second I saw him,” the retired movie star said.

“But when did you realize how much … else you had in common?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. “When did you begin to recognize the traits you shared? When did your obvious similarities emerge?”

“Oh, long before we got to Zürich,” Martin answered quickly.