A Son of the Circus

“Only a studio would choose Gordon,” Danny said.

He had that uncommon smoothness of skin which appears so confounding on the faces of some alcoholics; it was as if Danny’s baby-faced complexion were the direct result of the pickling process—as if the growth of his beard were as arrested as his speech. Danny looked like he needed to shave only once a week, although he was almost 35.

“I’ll tell you about Gordon,” Danny said. “It was Gordon’s idea to expand the role of the snake guru in the story—Gordon’s idea of the epitome of evil is an ashram with snakes. I’ll tell you about Gordon,” Danny Mills went on, when neither Lowji nor Farrokh had interrupted him. “Gordon’s never met a guru, with or without snakes. Gordon’s never seen an ashram, not even in California.”

“It would be easy to arrange a meeting with a guru,” Lowji said. “It would be easy to visit an ashram.”

“I’m sure you know what Gordon would say to that idea,” said Danny Mills, but the drunken screenwriter was looking at Farrokh.

Farrokh attempted the best imitation of Gordon Hathaway that he could manage. “I’m makin’ a fuckin’ movie,” Farrokh said. “Do I got the time to meet a fuckin’ guru or go to a fuckin’ ashram when I’m in the middle of makin’ a fuckin’ movie?”

“Smart boy,” said Danny Mills. It was to old Lowji that Danny confided: “Your son understands the movie business.”

Although Danny Mills appeared to be a destroyed man, it was hard not to like him, Farrokh thought. Then he looked down in his beer and saw the two vivid violet cotton balls from Gordon Hathaway’s ears. How did they end up in my beer? Farrokh wondered. He needed to use a parfait spoon to extract them, dripping, from his beer glass. He put Gordon Hathaway’s soggy ear-cottons on a tea saucer, wondering how long they’d been soaking in his beer—and how much beer he’d drunk while Gordon Hathaway’s ear-cottons were sponging up the beer at the bottom of his glass. Danny Mills was laughing so hard, he couldn’t speak. Lowji could see what his critical son was thinking.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Farrokh!” his father told him. “Surely it was an accident.” This made Danny Mills laugh harder and harder, drawing Mr. Sethna to their table—where the steward stared in disapproval at the tea saucer containing the beer-soaked, still-purple cotton balls. Farrokh’s remaining beer was purple, too. Mr. Sethna was thinking that it was at least fortunate that Mrs. Daruwalla had already gone home for the evening.

Farrokh helped his father arrange Danny Mills in the back seat of the car. Danny would be sound asleep before they’d traveled the length of the driveway of the Duckworth Club, or at least by the time they’d left Mahalaxmi. The screenwriter was always asleep by that time, if he didn’t go home earlier; when they dropped him at the Taj, Farrokh’s father would tip one of the tall Sikh doormen, who would transport Danny to his room on a luggage cart.

This night—Farrokh in the passenger seat, his father driving, and Danny Mills asleep in the back seat—they had just entered Tardeo when his father said, “In your nearly constant expression, you might be wise not to display such obvious distaste for these people. I know you think you’re very sophisticated—and that they are vermin, beneath your contempt—but I’ll tell you what is most unsophisticated, and that is to wear your feelings so frankly on your face.”

Farrokh would remember this, for he took the sting of such a rebuke very much to heart, while at the same time he sat silently seething in anger at his father, who wasn’t as entirely stupid as his young son had presumed him to be. Farrokh would remember this, too, because the car was exactly at that location in Tardeo where, 20 years later, his father would be blown to smithereens.

“You should listen to these people, Farrokh,” his father was telling him. “It isn’t necessary for them to be your moral equals in order for you to learn something from them.”

Farrokh would remember the irony, too. Although this was his father’s idea, Farrokh would be the one who actually learned something from the wretched foreigners; he’d be the one who took Danny’s advice.

But Had He Learned Anything Worth Knowing?

Farrokh wasn’t 19 now; he was 59. It was already past dusk at the Duckworth Club, but the doctor still sat slumped in his chair in the Ladies’ Garden. The younger Dr. Daruwalla wore an expression generally associated with failure; although he’d maintained absolute control of his Inspector Dhar screenplays—Farrokh was always granted “final script approval”—what did it matter? Everything he’d written was crap. The irony was, he’d been very successful writing movies that were no better than One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling.

Dr. Daruwalla wondered if other screenwriters who’d written crap nevertheless dreamed, as he did, of writing a “quality” picture. In Farrokh’s case, his quality story always began in the same way; he just couldn’t get past the beginning.

There was an opening shot of Victoria Terminus, the Gothic station with its stained-glass windows, its friezes, its flying buttresses, its ornate dome with the watchful gargoyles—in Farrokh’s opinion, it was the heart of Bombay. Inside the echoing station were a half-million commuters and the ever-arriving migrants; these latter travelers had brought everything with them, from their children to their chickens.

Outside the huge depot was the vast display of produce in Crawford Market, not to mention the pet stalls, where you could buy parrots or piranhas or monkeys. And among the porters and the vendors, the beggars and the newcomers and the pickpocket

s, the camera (somehow) would single out his hero, although he was just a child and crippled. What other hero would an orthopedic surgeon imagine? And with the magical simultaneity that movies can occasionally manage, the boy’s face (a close-up) would let us know that his story had been chosen—among millions—while at that exact moment the boy’s voice-over would tell us his name.

Farrokh was overly fond of the old-fashioned technique of voice-over; he’d used it to excess in every Inspector Dhar movie. There’s one that begins with camera following a pretty young woman through Crawford Market. She’s anxious, as if she knows she’s being followed, and this causes her to topple a heaped-up pile of pineapples at a fruit stand, which makes her run; this causes her to slip on the rotting compost underfoot, which makes her bump into a pet stall, where a vicious cockatoo pecks her hand. That’s when we see Inspector Dhar. As the young woman runs on, Dhar calmly follows her. He pauses by the stand of exotic birds only long enough to give the cockatoo a cuff with the back of his hand.

His voice-over says, “It was the third time I’d tailed her, but she was still crazy enough to think she could shake me.”

Dhar pauses again as the pretty girl, in her haste, collides with a heaped-up pile of mangoes. Dhar is enough of a gentleman to wait for the vendor to clear a path through the fallen fruit, but the next time he catches up with the woman, she’s dead. A bullet hole is smack between her wide-open eyes, which Dhar politely closes for her.

His voice-over says, “It’s a pity I wasn’t the only one tailing her. She had trouble shaking someone else, too.”

From his view of the younger Dr. Daruwalla in the Ladies’ Garden, old Mr. Sethna was sure he knew the source of the hatred he saw in the doctor’s eyes; the steward thought he knew the particular, long-ago vermin that the doctor was thinking of. But Mr. Sethna was unfamiliar with self-doubt and self-loathing. The old Parsi would never have imagined that Dr. Daruwalla was thinking about himself.

Farrokh was taking himself to task for leaving that crippled boy at Victoria Terminus, where he’d arrived; so many Bombay stories began at Victoria Terminus, but Dr. Daruwalla had been unable to imagine any story for that abandoned child. The doctor was still wondering what could happen to the boy after he came to Bombay. Anything and everything could happen, Farrokh knew; instead, the screenwriter had settled for Inspector Dhar, whose tough-guy talk was as unoriginal as the rest of him.

Dr. Daruwalla tried to save himself by thinking of a story with the innocence and purity of his favorite acts from the Great Royal Circus, but Farrokh couldn’t imagine a story as good as even the simplest of the so-called items that he loved. He couldn’t even think of a story as good as the daily routine of the circus. There were no wasted efforts in the course of the long day, which began with tea at 6:00 in the morning. The child performers and other acrobats did their strength and flexibility exercises and practiced their new items until 9:00 or 10:00, when they ate a light breakfast and cleaned their tents; in the rising heat, they sewed sequins on their costumes or they attended to other, almost motionless chores. There was no animal training from midmorning on; it was too hot for the big cats, and the horses and the elephants stirred up too much dust.

Through the middle of the day, the tigers and lions lolled in their cages with their tails and paws and even their ears sticking out between the bars, as if they hoped that these extremities might attract a breeze; only their tails moved, among an orchestra of flies. The horses remained standing—it was cooler than lying down—and two boys took turns dusting the elephants with a torn cloth sack that had once held onions or potatoes. Another boy watered the floor of the main tent with a hose; in the midday heat, this didn’t dampen the dust for long. The overall torpor affected even the chimpanzees, who stopped swinging from their cages; they still screamed occasionally—and they jumped up and down, as always. But if a dog so much as whined, not to mention barked, someone kicked it.

At noon, the animal trainers and the acrobats ate a big lunch; then they slept until midafternoon—their first performance always began after 3:00. The heat was still stultifying, and the motes of dust rose and sparkled like stars in the sunlight, which slanted through the vents in the main tent; in these harsh slashes of light, the dust appeared to swarm as intensely as the flies. In the breaks between their musical numbers, the band members passed a wet rag with which they wiped their brass instruments and, more often, their heads.

There was usually a sparse audience in attendance at the 3:30 performance. They were an odd mix of people too old for a full day’s work and preschool children; in both cases, their alertness to the performances of the acrobats and the animals was below average, as if their limited powers of concentration were further impaired by the lingering heat and dust. Over the years, Dr. Daruwalla had never sensed that the 3:30 performance itself was ever a diminished effort; the acrobats and the animal trainers, and even the animals, were as steady as they had to be. It was the audience that was a little off.