A Son Of The Circus (64 page)

‘Good morning, Ganesh,’ the doctor said. The boy was instantly awake, as alert as a squirrel.

‘What are we doing today?’ the beggar asked.

‘No more bird-shit tricks,’ the doctor said.

The beggar registered his understanding with a tight-lipped smile. ‘But what are we doing?’ the boy repeated.

‘We’re going to my office,’ Dr Daruwalla said. ‘We’re waiting for some test results for Madhu, before we make our plans. And this morning you will be kind enough
not
to practice the bird-shit trick on those postoperative children in the exercise yard.’ The boy’s black eyes kept darting with the movements of the traffic. The doctor could see Madhu’s face reflected in the rearview mirror; she’d not responded – she’d not even glanced in the mirror at the mention of her name.

‘What concerns me, about the
circus
…’ Dr Daruwalla said; he paused deliberately. The emphasis he’d given to the word had gained Ganesh’s full attention, but not Madhu’s.

‘My arms are the best – very strong. I could ride a no legs necessary with hands as strong as mine,’ Ganesh suggested. ‘I could do lots of tricks –hang by my arms from an elephant’s trunk, maybe ride a lion.’

‘But what concerns me is that they won’t
let
you do tricks – no tricks,’ Dr Daruwalla replied. ‘They’ll give you all the bad jobs, all the hard work. Scooping up the elephant shit, for example – not hanging from their trunks.’

‘I’ll have to show them’, Ganesh said. ‘But what do you do to the lions to make them stand on those little stools?’

‘Your job would be to wash the lion piss off the stools,’ Farrokh told him.

‘And what do you do with tigers?’ Ganesh asked.

‘What you would do with tigers is clean their cages –tiger shit!’ said Dr Daruwalla.

‘I’ll have to show them,’ the boy repeated, ‘Maybe something with their tails – tigers have long tails.’

The dwarf entered the roundabout that the doctor hated. There were too many easily distracted drivers who stared at the sea and at the worshipers milling in the mudflats around Haji Ali’s Tomb; the rotary was near Tardeo, where Farrokh’s father had been blown to smithereens. Now, in the midst of this roundabout, the traffic swerved to avoid a lunatic cripple; a legless man in one of those makeshift wheelchairs powered by a hand crank was navigating the rotary against the flow of other vehicles. The doctor could follow Ganesh’s roaming gaze; the boy’s black eyes either ignored or avoided the wheelchair madman. The little beggar was probably still thinking about the tigers.

Dr Daruwalla didn’t know the exact ending of his screenplay; he had only a general idea of what would happen to
his
Pinky, to
his
Ganesh. Caught in the roundabout, the doctor realized that the fate of the real Ganesh – in addition to Madhu’s fate – was out of his hands. But Farrokh felt responsible for beginning
their
stories, just as surely as he’d begun the story he was making up.

In the rearview mirror, Dr Daruwalla could see that Madhu’s lion-yellow eyes were following the movements of the legless maniac. Then the dwarf needed to brake sharply; he brought his taxi to a full stop in order to avoid the crazed cripple in the wrong-way wheelchair. The wheelchair sported a bumper sticker opposed to horn blowing.

PRACTICE
THE
VIRTUE
OF
PATIENCE

A battered oil truck loomed over the wheelchair lunatic; in a fury, the oil-truck driver repeatedly blew his horn. The great cylindrical body of the truck was covered with foot-high lettering the color of flame.

WORLD’S
FIRST
CHOICE
–
GULF
ENGINE
OILS

The oil truck also sported a bumper sticker, which was almost illegible behind flecks of tar and splattered insects.

KEEP
A
FIRE
EXTINGUISHER
IN
YOUR
GLOVE
COMPARTMENT

Dr Daruwalla knew that Vinod didn’t have one.

As if it wasn’t irritating enough to be obstructing traffic, the cripple was begging among the stopped cars. The clumsy wheelchair bumped against the Ambassador’s rear door. Farrokh was incensed when Ganesh rolled down the rear window, toward which the wheelchair madman extended his arm.

‘Don’t give that idiot anything!’ the doctor cried, but Farrokh had underestimated the speed of Bird-Shit Boy. Dr Daruwalla never saw the bird-shit syringe, only the look of surprise on the face of the crazed cripple in the wheelchair; he quickly withdrew his arm – his palm, his wrist, his whole forearm dripping bird shit. Vinod cheered.

‘Got him,’ Ganesh said.

A passing paint truck nearly obliterated the wheelchair lunatic. Vinod cheered for the paint truck, too.

CELEBRATE
WITH
ASIAN
PAINTS

When the paint truck was gone from view, the traffic moved again – the dwarf’s taxi taking the lead. The doctor remembered the bumper sticker on Vinod’s Ambassador.

HEY
YOU
WITH
THE
EVIL
EYE
,
MAY
YOUR
FACE
TURN
BLACK!

‘I said no more bird-shit tricks, Ganesh,,’ Farrokh told the boy. In the rearview mirror, Dr Daruwalla could see Madhu watching him; when he met her eyes, she looked away. Through the open window, the air was hot and dry, but the pleasure of a moving car was new to the boy, if not to the child prostitute, Maybe nothing was new to her, the doctor feared. But for the beggar, if not for Madhu, this was the start of an adventure.

‘Where is the circus?’ Ganesh asked. ‘Is it far?’

Farrokh knew that the Great Blue Nile might be anywhere in Gujarat. The question that concerned Dr Daruwalla was not where the circus was, but whether it would be safe.

Ahead, the traffic slowed again; probably pedestrians, Dr Daruwalla thought – shoppers from the nearby chowk, crowding into the street. Then the doctor saw the body of a man in the gutter; his legs extended into the road. The traffic was squeezed into one lane because the oncoming drivers didn’t want to drive over the dead man’s feet or ankles. A crowd was quickly forming; soon there would be the usual chaos. For the moment, the only concession made to the dead man was that no one drove over him.

‘Is the circus
far
?’ Ganesh asked again.

‘Yes, it’s far – it’s a world apart,’ said Dr Daruwalla. ‘A world apart’ was what he hoped for the boy, whose bright black eyes spotted the body in the road. Ganesh quickly looked away. The dwarf’s taxi inched past the dead man; once more, Vinod moved ahead of the traffic.

‘Did you see that?’ Farrokh asked Ganesh.

‘See what?’ the cripple said.

There is a man being dead,’ Vinod said.

‘They are nonpersons,’ Ganesh replied. ‘You think you see them but they are not really being there.’

O God, keep this boy from becoming a nonperson! Dr Daruwalla thought. His fear surprised him; he couldn’t bring himself to seek the cripple’s hopeful face. In the rearview mirror, Madhu was watching the doctor again. Her indifference was chilling. It had been quite a while since Dr Daruwalla had prayed, but he began.

India wasn’t limo roulette. There were no good scouts or bad scouts for the circus; there was no freak circus, either. There were no right-limo, wrong-limo choices. For these children, the real roulette would begin after they got to the circus – if they got there. At the circus, no Good Samaritan dwarf could save them. At the Great Blue Nile, Acid Man – a comic-book villain – wasn’t the danger.

In the new missionary’s cubicle, the last mosquito coil had burned out just before dawn. The mosquitoes had come with the early gray light and had departed with the first heat of the day – all but the mosquito that Martin Mills had mashed against the white wall above his cot. He’d killed it with the rolled-up issue of
The Times of India
after the mosquito was full of blood; the bloodstain on the wall was conspicuous and only a few inches below the crucifix that hung there, which gave Martin the gruesome impression that a sizable drop of Christ’s blood had spotted the wail.

In his inexperience, Martin had lit the last mosquito coil too close to his cot. When his hand trailed on the floor, his fingers must have groped through the dead ashes. Then, in his brief and troubled sleep, he’d touched his face. This was the only explanation for the surprising view of himself that he saw in the pitted mirror above the sink; his face was dotted with fingerprints of ash, as if he’d meant to mock Ash Wednesday – or as if a ghost had passed through his cubicle and fingered him. The marks struck him as a sarcastic blessing, or else they made him look like an insincere penitent.

When he’d filled the sink and wet his face to shave, he held the razor in his right hand and reached for the small sliver of soap with his left. It was a jagged-shaped piece of such an iridescent blue-green color that it was reflected in the silver soap dish; it turned out to be a lizard, which leaped into his hair before he could touch it. The missionary was frightened to feel the reptile race across his scalp. The lizard launched itself from the top of Martin’s head to the crucifix on the wall above the cot; then it jumped from Christ’s face to the partially open slats of the window blind, through which the light from the low sun slanted across the floor of the cubicle.

Martin Mills had been startled; in an effort to brush the lizard out of his hair, he’d slashed his nose with the razor. An imperceptible breeze stirred the ashes from the mosquito coils, and the missionary watched himself bleed into the water in the sink. He’d long ago given up shaving lather; plain soap was good enough. In the absence of soap, he shaved himself in the cold, bloody water.

It was only 6:00 in the morning. Martin Mills had to survive another hour before Mass. He thought it would be a good idea to go to St Ignatius Church early; if the church wasn’t locked, he could sit quietly in one of the pews – that usually helped. But his stupid nose kept bleeding; he didn’t want to bleed all over the church. He’d neglected to pack any handkerchiefs –he’d have to buy some – and so for now he chose a pair of black socks; although they were of a thin material, not very absorbent, at least they wouldn’t show the bloodstains. He soaked the socks in fresh cold water in the sink; he wrung them out until they were merely damp. He balled up a sock in each hand and, first with one hand and then the other, he restlessly dabbed at the wound on his nose.

Someone watching Martin Mills dress himself might have suspected the missionary of being in a deep trance; a less kind observer might have concluded that the zealot was semiretarded, for he wouldn’t put down the socks. The awkward pulling on of his trousers – when he tied his shoes, he held the socks in his teeth – and the buttoning of his short-sleeved shirt … these normally simple tasks were turned arduous, almost athletic; these clumsy feats were punctuated by the ceaseless dabbing at his nose. In the second buttonhole of his shirt, Martin Mills affixed a silver cross like a lapel pin, and together with this adornment he left a thumbprint of blood on his shirt, for the socks had already stained his hands.

St Ignatius Church was unlocked. The Father Rector unlocked the church at 6:00 every morning, and so Martin Mills had a safe place to sit and wait for Mass. For a while, he watched the altar boys setting up the candles. He sat in a center-aisle pew, alternately praying and dabbing at his bleeding nose. He saw that the kneeling pad was hinged. Martin didn’t like hinged kneelers because they reminded him of the Protestant school where Danny and Vera had sent him after Fessenden.

St Luke’s was an Episcopalian place; as such, in Martin’s view, it was barely a religious school at all. The morning service was only a hymn and a prayer and a virtuous thought for the day, which was followed by a curiously secular benediction – hardly a blessing, but some sage advice about studying relentlessly and never plagiarizing. Sunday church attendance was required, but in St Luke’s Chapel the service was of such a
low
Episcopalian nature that no one knelt for prayers. Instead, the students slumped in their pews; probably they weren’t sincere Episcopalians. And whenever Martin Mills would attempt to lower the hinged kneeling pad – so that he could properly kneel to pray – his fellow students in the pew would firmly hold the hinged kneeler in the upright, nonpraying position. They insisted on using the kneeling pad as a footrest. When Martin complained to the school’s headmaster, the Reverend Rick Utley informed the underclassman that only
senior
Catholics and
senior
Jews were permitted to attend worship services in their churches and synagogues of choice; until Martin was a senior, St Luke’s would have to do – in other words, no kneeling.

In St Ignatius Church, Martin Mills lowered the kneeling pad and knelt in prayer. In the pew was a rack that held the hymnals and prayer books; whenever Martin bled on the binding of the nearest hymnal, he dabbed at his nose with one sock and wiped the hymnal with the other. He prayed for the strength to love his father, for merely pitying him seemed insufficient. Although Martin knew that the task of loving his mother was an insurmountable one, he prayed for the charity to forgive her. And he prayed for the soul of Arif Koma. Martin had long ago forgiven Arif, but every morning he prayed that the Holy Virgin would forgive Arif, too. The missionary always began this prayer in the same way.

‘O Mother Mary, it was
my
fault!’ Martin prayed. In a way, the new missionary’s story had also been set in motion by the Virgin Mary – in the sense that Martin held her in higher esteem than he held his own Mother. Had Vera been killed by a falling statue of the Blessed Virgin – especially if such good riddance had occurred when the zealot was of a tender, unformed age – Martin might never have become a Jesuit at all.

His nose was still bleeding. A drop of his blood dripped on the hymnal; once more the missionary dabbed at his wound. Arbitrarily, he decided
not
to wipe the song book; perhaps he thought that bloodstains would give the hymnal character. After all, it was a religion steeped in blood – Christ’s blood and the blood of saints and martyrs. It would be glorious to be a martyr, Martin thought. He looked at his watch. In just half an hour, if he could make it, the missionary knew he would be saved by the Mass.