A Son Of The Circus (69 page)

It was after Mr Dogar had apologized to Mr Sethna and retrieved his car from the Duckworth Club parking lot that the old steward received the phone call from Mrs Dogar. ‘Is my husband still there? I suppose not. I’d meant to remind him of something to attend to – he’s so forgetful.’

‘He was here, but he’s gone,’ Mr Sethna informed her.

‘Did he remember to cancel our reservation for lunch? I suppose not. Anyway, we’re
not
coming,’ Rahul told the steward. Mr Sethna prided himself in his daily memorizing of the reservations for lunch and dinner; he knew that there’d been no reservation for the Dogars. But when he informed Mrs Dogar of this fact, she surprised him. ‘Oh, the poor man!’ she cried. ‘He forgot to cancel the reservation, but he was so drunk last night that he forgot to
make
the reservation in the first place. This would be comic if it weren’t also so tragic, I suppose.’

‘I suppose …’ Mr Sethna replied, but Rahul could tell that she’d achieved her goal. One day Mr Sethna would be an important witness to Mr Dogar’s utter frailty. Foreshadowing was simply necessary preparation. Rahul knew that Mr Sethna would be unsurprised when Mr Dogar became a victim – either of a murder in the locker room or of a swimming-pool mishap.

In some ways, this was the best part of a murder, Rahul believed. In the first draft of a work-in-progress, you had so many options – more options than you would end up with in the final act. It was only in the planning phase that you saw so many possibilities, so many variations on the outline. In the end, it was always over too quickly; that is, if you cared about neatness, you couldn’t prolong it.

‘The poor man!’ Mrs Dogar repeated to Mr Sethna. The poor man, indeed! Mr Sethna thought. With a wife like Mrs Dogar, Mr Sethna presumed it might even be a comfort to already have one foot in the grave, so to speak.

The old steward had just hung up the phone when Dr Daruwalla called the Duckworth Club to make a reservation. There would be four for lunch, the doctor informed Mr Sethna; he hoped no one had already taken his favourite table in the Ladies’ Garden. There was plenty of room, but Mr Sethna disapproved of making a reservation for lunch on the morning of the same day; people shouldn’t trust in plans that were so spur-of-the-moment.

‘You’re in luck – I’ve just had a cancellation,’ the steward told the doctor.

‘May I have the table at noon?’ Farrokh asked.

‘One o’clock would be better,’ Mr Sethna instructed him, for the steward also disapproved of the doctor’s inclination to eat his lunch early. Mr Sethna theorized that early lunch-eating contributed to the doctor’s being overweight. It was most unsightly for
small
men to be overweight, Mr Sethna thought.

Dr Daruwalla had just hung up the phone when Dr Tata returned his call. Farrokh remembered instantly what he’d wanted to ask Tata Two.

‘Do you remember Rahul Rai and his Aunt Fromila?’ Farrokh asked.

‘Doesn’t everybody remember them?’ Tata Two replied.

‘But this is a professional question,’ Dr Daruwalla said. ‘I believe your father examined Rahul when he was twelve or thirteen. That would have been in 1949.
My
father examined Rahul when he was only eight or ten. It was his Aunt Promila’s request – the matter of his hairlessness was bothering her.
My
father dismissed it, but I believe Promila took Rahul to see your father. I was wondering if the alleged hairlessness was still the issue.’

‘Why would anyone see your father or mine about hairlessness?’ asked Dr Tata.

‘A good question,’ Farrokh replied. ‘I believe that the real issue concerned Rahul’s sexual identity. Possibly a sex change would have been requested.’

‘My father didn’t do sex changes!’ said Tata Two. ‘He was a gynecologist, an obstetrician …’

‘I know what he was,’ said Dr Daruwalla. ‘But he might have been asked to make a diagnosis … I’m speaking of Rahul’s reproductive organs, whether there was anything peculiar about them that would have warranted a sex-change operation – at least in the boy’s mind, or in his aunt’s mind. If you’ve kept your father’s records –I have
my
father’s.’

‘Of course I’ve kept his records!’ Dr Tata cried. ‘Mr Subhash can have them on my desk in two minutes. I’ll call you back in five.’ So … even Tata Two called his medial secretary
Mister;
perhaps, like Ranjit, Mr Subhash was a medical secretary who’d remained in the family. Dr Daruwalla reflected that Mr Subhash had sounded (on the phone) like a man in his eighties!

Ten minutes later, when Dr Tata had not called him back, Farrokh also reflected on the presumed chaos of , Tata Two’s record keeping; apparently, old Dr Tata’s file on Rahul wasn’t exactly at Mr Subhash’s fingertips. Or maybe it was the diagnosis of Rahul that gave Tata Two pause? Regardless, Farrokh told Ranjit that he would take no calls except one he was expecting from Dr Tata.

Dr Daruwalla had one office appointment before his much-anticipated lunch at the Duckworth Club, and he told Ranjit to cancel it. Dr Desai, from London, was in town; in his spare time from his own surgical practice, Dr Desai was a designer of artificial joints. He was a man with a theme; joint replacement was his only topic of conversation. This made it hard on Julia whenever Farrokh tried to converse with Dr Desai at the Duckworth Club. It was easier to deal with Desai in the office. ‘Should the implant be fixated to the skeleton with bone cement or is biological fixation the method of choice?’ This was typical of Dr Desai’s initial conversation; it was what Dr Desai said instead of, ‘How are your wife and kids?’ For Dr Daruwalla to cancel an office appointment with Dr Desai was tantamount to his admitting a lack of interest in his chosen orthopedic field; but the doctor had his mind on his new screenplay – he wanted to write.

To this end, Farrokh sat on the opposite side of his desk, eliminating his usual view; the doctor found the exercise yard of the Hospital for Crippled Children distracting – the physical therapy for some of his postoperative patients was hard for him to ignore. Dr Daruwalla was more enticed by a make-believe world than he was drawn to confront the world he lived in.

For the most part, Inspector Dhar’s creator was unaware of the real-life dramas that teemed all around him. Poor Nancy, with her raccoon eyes, was dressing herself for Inspector Dhar. The famous actor, even offstage and off-camera, was still acting. Mr Sethna, who so strongly disapproved of everything, had discovered (to his deep distaste) that human urine was killing the bougainvillea. And that wasn’t the only murder-in-progress at the Duckworth Club, where Rahul was already envisioning herself as the widow Dogar. But Dr Daruwalla was still untouched by these realities. Instead, for his inspiration, the doctor chose to stare at the circus photograph on his desk.

There was the beautiful Suman – Suman the sky-walker. The last time Dr Daruwalla had seen her, she’d been unmarried – a 29-year-old star acrobat, the idol of all the child acrobats in training. The screenwriter was presuming that Suman was 29, and that it was high time for her to be wed; she should be engaged in more practical activities than walking upside down across the roof of the main tent, 80 feet from the ground, with no net. A woman as wonderful as Suman should definitely be married, the screenwriter thought. Suman was an acrobat, not an actress. The screenwriter intended to give his circus characters very little responsibility in the way of acting. The boy, Ganesh, would be an accomplished actor, but his sister, Pinky, would be the
real
Pinky – from the Great Royal Circus. Pinky would perform as an acrobat; it wouldn’t be necessary to have her talk.

(Keep her dialogue to a minimum, the screenwriter thought.)

Farrokh was getting ahead of himself; he was already casting the movie. In his screenplay, he still had to get the children to the circus. That was when Dr Daruwalla thought of the new missionary; in the screenplay, the doctor wouldn’t call him Martin Mills – the name Mills was too boring. The screenwriter would call him simply ‘Mr Martin.’ The Jesuit mission would take charge of these children because their mother was killed in St Ignatius Church by an unsafe statue of the Holy Virgin; St Ignatius would certainly bear some responsibility for that. And so the children would manage to be picked up by the
right
limousine, by Vinod; the so-called Good Samaritan dwarf would still need to get the Jesuits’ permission to take the kids to the circus. Oh, this is brilliant! thought Dr Daruwalla. That would be how Suman and Mr Martin meet. The morally meddlesome missionary takes the children to the circus, and the fool falls in love with the skywalker!

Why not? The Jesuit would soon find Suman preferable to chastity. The fictional Mr Martin would have to be a skilled actor, and the screenwriter would provide the character with a far more winning personality than that of Martin Mills. In the screenplay, the seduction of Mr Martin would be an unconversion story. There was no small measure of mischief in the screenwriter’s next idea: that John D. would play a perfect Mr Martin. How happy he’d be – to not be Inspector Dhar!

What a screenplay this was going to be — what an improvement on reality! That was when Dr Daruwalla realized that nothing was preventing him from putting himself in the movie. He wouldn’t presume to make himself a hero – perhaps a minor character with admirable intentions would suffice. But how should he describe himself? Farrokh wondered. The screenwriter didn’t know he was handsome, and to speak of himself as ‘highly intelligent’ sounded defensive; also, in movies, you could only describe how one
appeared
.

There was no mirror in the doctor’s office and so he saw himself as he often looked in the full-length mirror in the foyer of the Duckworth Club, which doubtless conveyed to Dr Daruwalla a Duckworthian sense of himself as an elegant gentleman. Such a gentlemanly doctor could play a small but pivotal role in the screenplay, for the character of the do-gooder missionary would naturally be obsessed with the idea that Ganesh’s limp could be fixed. Ideally, the character of Mr Martin would bring the boy to be examined by none other than Dr Daruwalla. The doctor would announce the hard truth: there were exercises that Ganesh could do – these would strengthen his legs, including the crippled leg – but the boy would always limp. (A few scenes of the crippled boy struggling bravely to perform these exercises would be excellent for audience sympathy, the screenwriter believed.)

Like Rahul, Dr Daruwalla enjoyed this phase of storytelling – namely, plot. The thrill of exploring one’s options! In the beginning, there were always so many.

But euphoria, in the case of murder and in the case of writing, is short-lived. Farrokh began to worry that his masterpiece had already been reduced to a romantic comedy. The two kids escape in the right limo; the circus is their salvation. Suman gives up skywalking to marry a missionary, who gives up being a missionary. Even Inspector Dhar’s creator suspected that this ending was too happy. Surely something bad should happen, the screenwriter thought.

Thus the doctor sat pondering in his office at the Hospital for Crippled Children, with his back to the exercise yard. In such a setting one might imagine that Dr Daruwalla must have felt ashamed of himself for trying to imagine some small tragedy.

Contrary to Rahul’s opinion, the police had not found the top half of the silver pen with
India
inscribed on it. Rahul’s money clip had no longer been in the bougainvillea when the deputy commissioner had examined Mr Lai’s body. The silver was so shiny in the morning sun, it had caught a crow’s sharp eyes. It was the half-pen that led the crow to discover the corpse. The crow had begun by pecking out one of Mr Lai’s eyes; the bird was busy at the open wound behind Mr Lai’s ear and at. the wound at Mr Lai’s temple when the first of the vultures settled on the ninth green. The crow had stood its ground until more vultures came; after all, it had found the body first. And before taking flight, the crow had stolen the silver half-pen. Crows were always stealing shiny objects. That this crow had promptly lost its prize in the ceiling fan in the Duckworth Club dining room was not necessarily a comment on the bird’s overall intelligence, but the blade of the fan (at that time of the morning) had moved in and out of the sunlight; the fan had also caught the crow’s sharp eyes. It was a silly place for a crow to land, and a waiter had rudely shooed the shitting bird away.

As for the shiny object that the crow had held so tenaciously in its beak, it had been left where it occasionally disturbed the mechanism of the ceiling fan. Dr Daruwalla had observed one such disturbance; the doctor had also observed the landing of the shitting crow upon the fan. And so the top half of the silver pen existed only in the crowded memory of Dr Daruwalla, and the doctor had already forgotten that the second Mrs Dogar had reminded him of someone else — an old movie star. Farrokh had also forgotten the pain of his collision with Mrs Dogar in the foyer of the Duckworth Club. That shiny something, which first Nancy and then Rahul and then the crow had lost, might now be lost forever, for its discovery lay within the limited abilities of Dr Daruwalla. Frankly, both the memory and the powers of observation of a closet screenwriter are not the best. One might more sensibly rely on the mechanism of the ceiling fan to spit out the half-pen and present it, as a miracle, to Detective Patel (or to Nancy).

An unlikely miracle of that coincidental kind was exactly what was needed to rescue Martin Mills, for the Mass had been celebrated too late to save the missionary from his worst memories. There were times when every church reminded Martin of Our Lady of Victories. When his mother was in Boston, Martin always went to Mass at Our Lady of Victories on Isabella Street; it was only an eight-minute walk from the Ritz. That Sunday morning of the long Thanksgiving weekend of his ninth-grade year, young Martin slipped out of the bedroom he shared with Arif Koma without waking the Turk up. In the living room of the two-bedroom suite at the hotel, M artin saw that the door to his mother’s bedroom was ajar; this struck the boy as indicative of Vera’s carelessness, and he was about to close the door – before he left the suite to go to Mass – when his mother spoke to him.