A Son Of The Circus (17 page)

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.

For this reason, Farrokh preferred the early-evening performance. Whole families came – young working-men and -women, and children who were old enough to pay attention – and the scant, dying sunlight seemed distant, even gentle; the dust motes weren’t visible. It was the time of the evening when the flies appeared to have departed with the glare, and it was still too early for the mosquitoes. For the 6:30 performance, the place was always packed.

The first item was the Plastic Lady, a ‘boneless’ girl named Laxmi (the Goddess of Wealth). She was a beautiful contortionist – no sign of rickets. Laxmi was only 14, but the sharp definition of the bones in her face made her seem older. She wore a bright-orange bikini with yellow and red sequins that glittered in the strobe light; she looked like a fish with its scales reflecting a light that shone from underwater. It was dark enough in the main tent so that the changing colors of the stroboscope were effective, but enough of the late sunlight still illuminated the tent so that you could make out the faces of the children in the audience. Dr Daruwalla thought that whoever said circuses were for children was only half right; the circus was also for grownups who enjoyed seeing children so enthralled.

Why can’t I do that? the doctor wondered, thinking about the simple brilliance of the boneless girl named Laxmi – thinking of the crippled boy abandoned in Victoria Terminus, where Dr Daruwalla’s imagination had stalled as soon as it had begun. Instead of creating something as pure and riveting as the circus, he’d turned his mind to mayhem and murder — personified by Inspector Dhar.

What old Mr Sethna mistook in Dr Daruwalla’s miserable expression was simply the doctor’s deep disappointment with himself. With a sympathetic nod to the doctor, who sat forlornly in the Ladies’ Garden, the Parsi steward allowed himself a rare moment of familiarity with a passing waiter.

‘I’m glad
I’m
not the rat he’s thinking of,’ Mr Sethna said.

Of course there was more wrong with
One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling
that Danny Mills’s alcoholism or his unsubtle plagiarism of
Dark Victory;
much more was amiss than Gordon Hathaway’s crass alterations of Danny’s ‘original’ screenplay, or the director’s attendant hemorrhoids and fungus. To make matters worse, the actress who was playing the dying but saved wife was that talentless beauty and denizen of the gossip columns Veronica Rose. Her friends and colleagues called her Vera, but she was born in Brooklyn with the name Hermione Rosen and she was Gordon Hathaway’s niece (the C. of M.’s daughter). Small world, Farrokh would learn.

The producer, Harold Rosen, would one day find his daughter as tiresomely tasteless as the rest of the world judged her to be upon the merest introduction; however, Harold was as easily bullied by his wife (the C. of M. sister of Gordon Hathaway) as Gordon was. Harold was operating on his wife’s assumption that Hermione Rosen, by her transformation to Veronica Rose, would one day be a star. Vera’s lack of talent and intelligence would prove too great an obstacle for such a goal – this in tandem with a compulsion to expose her breasts that even Lady Duckworth would have scorned.

But at the Duckworth Club in the summer of ‘49, a rumor was in circulation that Vera was soon to have a huge success. Concerning Hollywood, what did Bombay know? That Vera had been cast in the role of the dying but saved wife was all that Lowji Daruwalla knew. It would take a while for Farrokh to find out that Danny Mills had objected to Vera having the part –until she seduced him and made him imagine that he was in love with her. Then he trotted at her heels like a dog. Danny believed it was the intense pressure of the role that had cooled Vera’s brief ardor for him – Vera had her own room at the Taj, and she’d refused to sleep with Danny since the commencement of principal photography – but, in truth, she was having an obvious affair with her leading man. It wasn’t obvious to Danny, who usually drank himself to sleep and got up late.

As for the leading man, he was a bisexual named Neville Eden. Neville was an uprooted Englishman and a properly trained actor, if not exactly brimming with natural ability, but his move to Los Angeles had turned sour when a certain predictability in the parts he was offered grew clear to him. He’d become too easy to cast as any number of stereotypical Brits. There was the Brit-twit role – the; kind of instant Brit whom more rowdy and less educated Americans deplore – and then there was the sophisticated English gentleman who becomes the love interest of an impressionable American girl before she realizes her mistake and chooses the more substantial (if duller) American male. There was also the role of the visiting British cousin – sometimes this was a war buddy – who would comically display his inability to ride a horse, or to drive a car on the right-hand side of the road, or to successfully engage in fisticuffs in low bars. In all these roles, Neville felt he was supplying moronic reassurance to an audience that equated manliness with qualities only to be found in American men. This discovery tended to irritate him; doubtless it also fueled what he called his ‘homosexual self.’

About
One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling
Neville was philosophic: at least it was a leading role, and the part wasn’t quite in the vein of the dimly perceived British types he was usually asked to portray — after all, in this story he was a happily married Englishman with a dying American wife. But even for Neville Eden the loser combination of Danny Mills, Gordon Hathaway and Veronica Rose was a trifle daunting. Neville knew from past experience that contact with a compromised script, a second-rate director and a floozy for a co-star tended to make him churlish. And Neville cared nothing for Vera, who was beginning to imagine that she was in love with him; yet he found fornicating with her altogether more inspiring, and amusing, than
acting
with her – and he was mightily bored.

He was also married, which Vera knew; it caused her great anguish, or at least virulent insomnia. Of course she did
not
know that Neville was bisexual; this revelation was often the means by which Neville broke off such passing affairs. He’d found it instantly effective – to tell whichever floozy it was that she was the first
woman
to capture his heart and his attention to such a degree, but that his homosexual self was simply stronger than both of them. That usually worked; that got rid of them, in a hurry. All but the wife.

As for Gordon Hathaway, he had his hands full; his hemorrhoids and his fungus were trifling in comparison to the certain catastrophe he was facing. Veronica Rose wanted Danny Mills to go home so she could lavish even more obvious attention on Neville Eden. Gordon Hathaway complied with Vera’s request only to the degree that he forbade Danny’s presence on the set. The writer’s presence, Gordon claimed, ‘fuckin’ confused’ the cast. But Gordon could hardly comply with his niece’s request to send Danny home; he needed Danny every night, to revise the ever-changing script. Understandably, Danny Mills wanted to reinstate his original script, which Neville Eden had agreed was better than the picture they were making. Danny thought Neville was a good chap, though it would have destroyed him to learn that Neville was fornicating with Vera. Vera, above all, dearly desired to
sleep
, and Dr Lowji Daruwalla was alarmed by the sleeping pills she requested; yet he was such a fool for movies – he found her ‘charming,’ too.

His son Farrokh wasn’t exactly charmed by Veronica Rose; neither was he altogether immune to her attractions. Soon a conflict of emotions engulfed the tender 19-year-old. Vera was clearly a coarse young woman, which is not without allure to 19-year-olds, especially when the woman in question is intriguingly older –Vera was 25. Furthermore, while he knew nothing of the random pleasure Vera took in exposing her breasts, Farrokh found that the actress bore a remarkable resemblance to the old photographs he so relished of Lady Duckworth.

It had been an evening in the empty dance hall when not even that depth of stone and the constant stirring of the ceiling fans could cool the stifling and humid night air, which had entered the Duckworth Club as heavily as a fog from the Arabian Sea, Even atheists, like Lowji, were praying for the monsoon rains. After dinner, Farrokh had escorted Vera from the table to the dance hall, not to dance with her but to show her Lady Duckworth’s photographs.

‘There is someone you resemble,’ the young man told the actress. ‘Please come and see.’ Then he’d smiled at his mother, Meher, who didn’t appear to be very happily entertained by the surly arrogance of Neville Eden, who sat to her left, or by the drunken Danny Mills, who sat to her right with his head upon his folded arms, which rested in his plate.

‘Yeah!’ Gordon Hathaway said to his niece. ‘You oughta see the pictures of this broad, Vera. She showed her tits to everybody, too!’ By this word ‘too,’ Farrokh should have been forewarned, but he supposed Gordon meant only that Lady Duckworth exposed herself ‘in addition to’ her other traits.

Veronica Rose wore a sleeveless muslin dress that clung to her back where she’d sweated against her chair; her bare upper arms caused excruciating offense to the Duckworthians, and especially to the recently acquired Parsi steward, Mr Sethna, who thought that for a woman to bare her upper arms in public was a violation of scandalous proportion – the slut might as well show her breasts, too!

When Vera saw Lady Duckworth’s pictures, she was flattered; she lifted her damp blond hair off the back of her slender wet neck and she turned to young Farrokh, who felt an erotic flush at the sight of a rivulet of sweat that coursed from Vera’s near armpit. ‘Maybe I oughta wear my hair like hers,’ Vera said; then she let her hair fall back in place. As Farrokh followed her to the dining room, he couldn’t help but notice – through the drenched back of her dress — that she wore no bra.

‘So how’d ya like the fuckin’ exhibitionist?’ her uncle asked her upon her return to the table.

Vera unbuttoned the front of her white muslin dress, showing her breasts to them all – Dr Lowji Daruwalla and Mrs Daruwalla, too. And the Lais, dining with the Bannerjees at a nearby table, certainly saw Veronica Rose’s breasts very clearly. And Mr Sethna, so recently dismissed from the Ripon Club for attacking a crass member there with hot tea – Mr Sethna clutched his silver serving tray, as if he thought of striking the Hollywood wench dead with it.

‘Well, whatta ya think?’ Vera asked her audience. ‘I don’t know if she was an exhibitionist – I think she was just too fuckin’
hot!’
She added that she wanted to return to the Taj, where at least there was a sea breeze. In truth, she looked forward to feeding the rats that gathered at the water’s edge beneath the Gateway of India; the rats were unafraid of people, and Vera enjoyed teasing them with expensive table scraps – the way some people enjoy feeding ducks or pigeons. Thereafter, she would go to Neville’s room and straddle him until his cock was sore.

But in the morning, in addition to suffering the tribulation of her insomnia, Vera was sick; she was sick every morning for a week before she consulted Dr Lowji Daruwalla, who, even though he was an orthopedist, had no trouble ascertaining that the actress was pregnant.

‘Shit,’ Vera said. ‘I thought it was the fuckin’ curry.’

But no; it was just the fucking. Either Danny Mills or Neville Eden was the father. Vera hoped it was Neville, because he was better-looking. She also theorized that alcoholism like Danny’s was genetic.

‘Christ, it
must
be Neville!’ said Vera Rose. ‘Danny’s so pickled, I think he’s sterile.’

Dr Lowji Daruwalla was understandably taken aback by the crudeness of the lovely movie star, who wasn’t really a movie star and who was suddenly terrified that her uncle, the director, would discover that she was pregnant and fire her from the picture. Old Lowji pointed out to Miss Rose that she had fewer than three weeks remaining on the shooting schedule; she wouldn’t begin to
look
pregnant for another three months or more.

Miss Rose then became obsessed with the question of whether or not Neville Eden would leave his wife and marry her. Dr Lowji Daruwalla thought not, but he chose to soften the blow with an indirect remark.