A Son Of The Circus (28 page)

That was what the past was like, thought Dr Daruwalla – all those swaying, upside-down faces. It wasn’t a good idea to look at them, he knew.

Twenty years ago, when he was drawn to Goa by his epicurean nostalgia for pork – scarce in the rest of India, but a staple of Goan cuisine — Dr Daruwalla was converted to Christianity by the big toe of his right foot. He spoke of his religious conversion with the sincerest humility. That the doctor had recently visited the miraculously preserved mummy of St Francis Xavier was
not
the cause of his conversion; previous to his personal experience with divine intervention, Dr Daruwalla had even mocked the saint’s relics, which were kept under glass in the Basilica de Bon Jesus in Old Goa.

Farrokh supposed that he’d made fun of the missionary’s remains because he enjoyed teasing his wife about her religion, although Julia was never a practicing Catholic and she often expressed how it pleased her to have left the Roman trappings of her childhood in Vienna. Nevertheless, prior to their marriage, Farrokh had submitted to some tedious religious instruction from a Viennese priest. The doctor had understood that he was demonstrating a kind of theological passivity only to satisfy Julia’s mother; but – again, to tease Julia – Farrokh insisted on referring to the ring-blessing ceremony as the ‘ring-washing ritual,’ and he pretended to be more offended by this Catholic charade than he was. In truth, he’d enjoyed telling the priest that, although he was unbaptized and had never been a practicing Zoroastrian, he nonetheless had always believed in ‘something’; at the time, he’d believed in nothing at all. And he’d calmly lied to both the priest and Julia’s mother – that he had no objections to his children being baptized and raised as Roman Catholics. He and Julia had privately agreed that this was a worthwhile, if not entirely innocent deception – again, to put Julia’s mother at ease.

It hadn’t hurt his daughters to have them baptized, Farrokh supposed. When Julia’s mother was still alive, and only when she’d visited the Daruwallas and their children in Toronto, or when the Daruwallas had visited her in Vienna, it had never been too painful to attend Mass. Farrokh and Julia had told their little girls that they were making their grandmother happy. This was an acceptable, even an honorable, tradition in the history of Christian churchgoing: to go through the motions of worship as a favor to a family member who appeared to be that most intractable personage, a true believer. No one had objected to this occasional enactment of a faith that was frankly quite foreign to them all, maybe even to Julia’s mother. Farrokh sometimes wondered if
she
had been going through the motions of worship only to please
them
.

It was exactly as the Daruwallas had anticipated: when Julia’s mother died, the family’s intermittent Catholicism more than lapsed – their churchgoing virtually stopped. In retrospect, Dr Daruwalla concluded that his daughters had been preconditioned to accept that a/7 religion was nothing more than going through the motions of worship to make someone else happy. It had been to please the doctor, after his conversion, that his daughters were administered the sacrament of marriage and other rites and ceremonies according to the Anglican Church of Canada. Maybe this was why Father Julian was so dismissive of the miracle by which Farrokh had been converted to Christianity. In the Father Rector’s opinion, it must have been only a minor miracle, if the experience managed merely to make Dr Daruwalla an Anglican. In other words, it hadn’t been enough of a miracle to make the doctor a Roman Catholic.

It was a good time to go to Goa, Farrokh had thought. The trip is a kind of second honeymoon for Julia,’ he’d told his father.

‘What kind of honeymoon is it when you take the children?’ Lowji had asked; he and Meher resented that their three granddaughters weren’t being left with them. Farrokh knew that the girls, who were 11, 13, and 15, would not have stood for being left behind; the reputation of the Goa beaches was far more exciting to them than the prospect of staying with their grandparents. And the girls were determinedly committed to this vacation because John D. was going to be there. No other babysitter could command such authority over them; they were decidedly in love with their adopted elder brother.

In June of 1969, John D. was 19, and — especially to Dr Daruwalla’s daughters – an extremely handsome European. Julia and Farrokh certainly admired the beautiful boy, but less for his good looks than for his tolerant disposition toward their children; not every 19-year-old boy could stomach so much giddy affection from three underage girls, but John D. was patient, even charming, with them. And having been schooled in Switzerland, John D. would probably be undaunted by the freaks who overran Goa – or so Farrokh had thought. In 1969, the European and American hippies were called ‘freaks’ – especially in India.

‘This is some second honeymoon, my dear,’ old Lowji had said to Julia. ‘He is taking you and the children to the dirty beaches where the freaks debauch themselves, and it is all because of his love of
pork!’
.

With this blessing did the younger Daruwallas depart for the former Portuguese enclave. Farrokh told Julia and John D. and his indifferent daughters that the churches and cathedrals of Goa was among the gaudier landmarks of Indian Christendom. Dr Daruwalla was a connoisseur of Goan architecture: monumentality and massiveness he enjoyed; excessiveness, which was also reflected in the doctor’s diet, he found thrilling.

He preferred the Cathedral of St Catherine da Se and the facade of the Franciscan Church to the unimpressive Church of the Miraculous Cross, but his overall preference for the Basilica de Born Jesus wasn’t rooted in his architectural snobbery; rather, he was wildly amused by the silliness of the pilgrims – even Hindus! – who flocked to the basilica to view the mummified remains of St Francis.

It is suspected, especially among non-Christians in India, that St Francis Xavier contributed more to the Christianization of Goa
after
his death than the Jesuit had managed – in his short stay of only a few months –while he was alive. He died and was buried on an island off the Cantonese coast; but when he suffered the further indignity of disinterment, it was discovered that he’d hardly decomposed at all. The miracle of his intact body was shipped back to Goa, where his remarkable remains drew crowds of frenzied pilgrims. Farrokh’s favorite part of the story concerned a woman who, with the worshipful intensity of the most devout, bit off a toe of the splendid corpse. Xavier would lose more of himself, too: the Vatican required that his right arm be shipped to Rome, without which evidence St Francis’s canonization might never have occurred.

How Dr Daruwalla loved this story! How hungrily he viewed the shriveled relic, which was richly swaddled in vestments and brandished a staff of gold; the staff itself was encrusted with emeralds. The doctor assumed that the saint was kept under glass and elevated on a gabled monument in order to discourage other pilgrims from demonstrating their devotion with more zealous biting. Chuckling to himself while remaining outwardly most respectful, Dr Daruwalla had surveyed the mausoleum with restrained glee. All around him, even on the casket, were numerous depictions of Xavier’s missionary heroics; but none of the saint’s adventures – not to mention the surrounding silver, or the crystal, or the alabaster, or the jasper, or even the purple marble – was as impressive to Farrokh as St Francis’s gobbled toe.

‘Now
that’s
what I call a miracle!’ the doctor would say. ‘To have seen that might even have made a Christian out of me!’

When he was in a less playful temper, Farrokh harangued Julia with tales of the Holy Inquisition in Goa, for the missionary zeal that followed the Portuguese was marked by conversions under threat of death, confiscation of Hindu property and the burning of Hindu temples – not to mention the burning of heretics and grandly staged acts of faith. How it would have pleased old Lowji to hear his son carrying on in this irreverent fashion. As for Julia, she found it irritating that Farrokh so resembled his father in this respect. When it came to baiting anyone who was even remotely religious, Julia was superstitious and opposed.

‘I don’t mock your lack of belief,’ the doctor’s wife told him. ‘Don’t blame me for the Inquisition or laugh about St Francis’s poor toe.’

Farrokh and Julia rarely argued with any venom, but they enjoyed teasing each other. An exaggerated, dramatic banter, which they weren’t inclined to suppress in public places, made the couple appear quarrelsome to the usual eavesdroppers – hotel staff, waiters or the sad couple with nothing to say to each other at an adjacent table. In those days, in the ‘60’s, when the Daruwallas traveled en
famille
, the girlish hysteria of their daughters added to the general rumpus. Therefore, when they undertook their outing in June of ‘69, the Daruwallas declined several invitations to lodge themselves in some of the better villas in Old Goa. Because they were such a loud mob, and because Dr Daruwalla enjoyed eating at all times of the day and night, they thought it wiser and more diplomatic – at least until the children were older –
not
to stay in another family’s mansion, with all the breakable Portuguese pottery and the polished rosewood furniture. Instead, the Daruwallas occupied one of those beach hotels that even then had seen better days, but could neither be destroyed by the children nor offended by Dr Daruwalla’s unceasing appetite. The spirited teasing between Farrokh and Julia was entirely overlooked by the ragged staff and the world-weary clientele of the Hotel Bardez, where the food was plentiful and fresh if not altogether appetizing, and where the rooms were almost clean. After all, it was the beach that mattered.

The Bardez had been recommended to Dr Daruwalla by one of the younger members of the Duckworth Club. The doctor wished he could remember exactly who had praised the hotel, and why, but only snippets of the recommendation had remained in his memory. The guests were mostly Europeans, and Farrokh had thought that this would appeal to Julia and put young John D. at ease. Julia had teased her husband regarding the concept of putting John D. ‘at ease’; it was absurd, she pointed out, to imagine that the young man could be more at ease than he already was. As for the European clientele, they weren’t the sort of people Julia would ever want to know; they were trashy, even by John D.’s standards. In his university days in Zurich, John D. was probably as morally relaxed as other young; men – or so Dr Daruwalla supposed.

As for the Daruwalla contingent, John D. certainly stood out among them; he was as serenely composed, as ethereally calm, as the Daruwalla daughters were frenetic. The daughters were fascinated by the more unlikable European guests at the Hotel Bardez, although they clung to John D.; he was their protector whenever the young women or the young men, both in their string bikinis, would come too close. In truth, it appeared that these young women and young men approached the Daruwalla family solely to have a better view of John D., whose sublime beauty surpassed that of other young men in general and other 19-year-olds in particular.

Even Farrokh tended to gape at John I)., although he knew from Jamshed and Josefine that only the dramatic arts interested the young man and that, especially for these thespian pursuits, he seemed inappropriately shy. But to see the boy, Farrokh thought, belied all the worries he’d heard expressed by his brother and sister-in-law. It was Julia who first said that John I), looked like a movie star; she said she meant by this that you were drawn to watch him even when he appeared to be doing nothing or thinking of nothing. In addition, his wife pointed out to Dr Daruwalla, John D. projected an indeterminate age. When he was closely shaven, his skin was so perfectly smooth that he seemed much younger than 19 — almost prepubescent. But when he allowed his beard to grow, even only as much as one day’s stubble, he became a grown man – at least in his late twenties – and he looked savvy and cocksure and dangerous.

‘This is what you mean by a movie star?’ Farrokh asked his wife.

‘This is what’s attractive to women,’ Julia said frankly. ‘That boy is a man and a boy.’

But for the first few days of his vacation, Dr Daruwalla was too distracted to think about John D.’s potential as a movie star. Julia had made Farrokh nervous about the Duckworthian source of the recommendation for the Hotel Bardez. It was amusing to observe the European trash and the interesting Goans, but what if other
Duckworthians
were guests of the Hotel Bardez? It would be as if they’d never left Bombay, Julia said.

And so the doctor nervously examined the Hotel Bardez for stray Duckworthians, fearing that the Sorabjees would mysteriously materialize in the cafe-restaurant, or the Bannerjees would float ashore from out of the Arabian Sea, or the Lais would leap out and surprise him from behind the areca palms. Meanwhile, all Farrokh wanted was the peace of mind to reflect on his growing impulse to be more creative.

Dr Daruwalla was disappointed that he was no longer the reader he’d once been. Watching movies was easier; he felt he’d been seduced by the sheer laziness of absorbing images on film. He was proud that he’d at least held himself above the masala movies – those junk films of the Bombay cinema, those Hindi hodgepodges of song and violence. But Farrokh was enthralled by any sleazy offering from Europe or America in the hard-boiled-detective genre; it was all-white, tough-guy trash that attracted him.

The doctor’s taste in films was in sharp contrast to what his wife liked to read. For this particular holiday Julia had brought along the autobiography of Anthony Trollope, which Farrokh was not looking forward to hearing. Julia enjoyed reading aloud to him from passages of a book she found especially well written or amusing or moving, but Farrokh’s prejudice against Dickens extended to Trollope, whose novels he’d never finished and whose autobiography he couldn’t imagine even beginning. Julia generally preferred to read fiction, but Farrokh supposed that the autobiography of a novelist almost qualified as fiction — surely novelists wouldn’t resist the impulse to make up their autobiographies.