A Son Of The Circus (9 page)

As it happened, Vinod was flung into the fourth row of seats. He remembered hoping that he wouldn’t land on any children, but he needn’t have worried; the audience scattered before he arrived. He struck the empty wooden bleachers and fell through the space between the planks.

Created by spontaneous mutation, an achondroplastic dwarf lives in pain; his knees ache, his elbows ache – not to mention that they won’t extend. His ankles ache and his back aches, too – not to mention the degenerative arthritis. Of course there are worse types of dwarfism: pseudoachondroplastic dwarfs suffer so-called windswept deformities – bowleg on one limb, knock-knee on the other. Dr Daruwalla had seen dwarfs who couldn’t walk at all. Even so, given the pain that Vinod was accustomed to, the dwarf didn’t mind that his backside was numb; it was possibly the best that the dwarf had felt in years – in spite of being catapulted 40 feet by an elephant and landing on his coccyx on a wooden plank.

Thus did the injured dwarf become Dr Daruwalla’s patient. Vinod had suffered a slight fracture in the apex of his coccyx, and he’d bruised the tendon of his external sphincter muscle, which is attached to this apex; in short, he’d quite literally busted his ass. Vinod had also torn some of the sacrosciatic ligaments, which are attached to the narrow borders of the coccyx. The numbness of his backside, which soon abated – thence Vinod would return to the world of his routine aches and pains – was possibly the result of some pressure on one or more of the sacral nerves. His recovery would be complete, although slower than Deepa’s; yet Vinod insisted he’d been permanently disabled. What he meant was he’d lost his nerve.

Future flight experiments with the clowns of the Great Blue Nile would have to be conducted without Vinod’s participation – or so the dwarf claimed. If Shiva was the God of Change, and not merely the Destroyer, perhaps the change that Lord Shiva intended for Vinod was actually a career move. But the veteran clown would always be a dwarf, and Vinod struck Farrokh as lacking the qualifications for a job outside the circus.

Vinod and his wife were recovering from their respective surgeries when the Great Blue Nile completed its term of engagement in Bombay. While both Deepa and her dwarf husband were hospitalized, Dr Daruwalla and his wife took care of Shivaji; after all, someone had to look after the dwarf child – and the doctor still held himself accountable for the Kingfisher. It had been some years since the Daruwallas had struggled to manage a two-year-old, and they’d never before tried to manage a
dwarf
two-year-old, but this period of convalescence proved fruitful for Vinod.

The dwarf was a compulsive list maker, and he enjoyed showing his lists to Dr Daruwalla. There was quite a long list of Vinod’s acquired circus skills, and a sadly shorter list of the dwarfs other accomplishments. On the shorter list, Dr Daruwalla saw it written that the dwarf could drive a car. Farrokh felt certain that Vinod was lying; after all, hadn’t Vinod proposed that very lie which the doctor had used to bleed the dwarfs of the Great Blue Nile?

‘What sort of car can you drive, Vinod?’ the doctor asked the recuperating dwarf. ‘How can your feet reach the pedals?’

It was to another word on the short list that Vinod proudly pointed. The word was ‘mechanics’; Farrokh had at first ignored it – he’d skipped straight to ‘car driving.’ Dr Daruwalla assumed that ‘mechanics’ meant fixing unicycles or other toys of the circus, but Vinod had dabbled in auto mechanics
and
in unicycles; the dwarf had actually designed and installed hand controls for a car. Naturally, this was inspired by a dwarf item for the Great Blue Nile: ten clowns climb out of one small car. But first a dwarf had to be able to drive the car; that dwarf had been Vinod. The hand controls had been complicated, Vinod confessed. (‘Lots of experiments are failing,’ Vinod said philosophically.) The driving, the dwarf said, had been relatively easy.

‘You can drive a car,’ Dr Daruwalla said, as if to himself.

‘Both fast and slow!’ Vinod exclaimed.

‘The car must have an automatic transmission,’ Farrokh reasoned.

‘No clutching – just braking and speeding,’ the dwarf explained.

‘There are
two
hand controls?’ the doctor inquired.

‘Who is needing more than two?’ the dwarf asked.

‘So … when you slow down or speed up, you must have just one hand on the steering wheel,’ Farrokh inferred.

‘Who is needing both hands for steering?’ Vinod replied.

‘You can drive a car,’ Dr Daruwalla repeated.

Somehow, this seemed harder to believe than the Elephant on a Teeterboard or the Cricket-Playing Elephants – for Farrokh could imagine no other life for Vinod. The doctor believed that the dwarf was doomed to be a clown for the Great Blue Nile forever.

‘I am teaching Deepa to do car driving, too,’ Vinod added.

‘But Deepa doesn’t need hand controls,’ Farrokh observed.

The dwarf shrugged. ‘At the Blue Nile, we are naturally driving the same car,’ he explained.

Thus, it was there – in the dwarfs ward in the Hospital for Crippled Children – that a future hero of ‘car driving’ was first introduced to Dr Daruwalla. Farrokh simply couldn’t imagine that, 15 years later, a veritable limousine legend would have been born in Bombay. Not that Vinod would immediately escape the circus; all legends take time. Not that Deepa, the dwarf’s wife, would in the end entirely escape the circus. Not that Shivaji, the dwarf’s son, would ever dream of escaping it. But all this was truly happening because Dr Farrokh Daruwalla wanted blood from dwarfs.

For 15 years, Dr Daruwalla would indulge himself with his memory of Deepa in the safety net. Of course this is an exaggeration, of that kind which caused the doctor to often reflect on his surprise at Vinod becoming a veritable limousine legend in Bombay; in the heyday of the dwarf’s success at car driving, Vinod could never be credited with chauffering a
limo
, much less owning a limousine company. At best, Vinod owned a half-dozen cars; none of them was a Mercedes – including the two that the dwarf drove, with hand controls.

What Vinod would briefly manage to achieve was a modest profit in the private-taxi business, or ‘luxury taxis’ as they’re called in Bombay. Vinod’s cars were never luxurious – nor could the dwarf have managed private ownership of these thoroughly secondhand vehicles without accepting a loan from Dr Daruwalla. If the dwarf was even fleetingly a legend, neither the number nor the quality of Vinod’s automobiles was the reason — they were
not
limousines. The dwarf’s legendary status owed its existence to Vinod’s famous client, the aforementioned actor with the improbable name of Inspector Dhar. At most, Dhar lived part-time in Bombay.

And poor Vinod could never completely sever his ties to the circus. Shivaji, the dwarf’s dwarf son, was now a teenager; as such, he suffered from strong and contrary opinions. Had Vinod continued to be an active clown in the Great Blue Nile, Shivaji would doubtless have rejected the circus; the contentious boy would probably have chosen to drive a taxi in Bombay – purely out of hatred for the very idea of being a
comic
dwarf. But since his father had made such an effort to establish a taxi business, and since Vinod had struggled to free himself from the dangerous daily grind of the Great Blue Nile, Shivaji was determined to become a clown. Therefore, Deepa often traveled with her son; and while the Blue Nile was performing throughout Gujarat and Maharashtra, Vinod devoted himself to the car-driving business in Bombay.

For 15 years, the dwarf had been unable to teach his wife how to drive. Since her fall, Deepa had given up the trapeze, but the Blue Nile paid her to train the child contortionists; while Shivaji developed his skills as a clown, his mother put the plastic ladies through their boneless items. When the dwarf succumbed to missing his wife and son, he’d go back to the Blue Nile. There Vinod eschewed the riskier acts in the dwarf-clown repertoire, contenting himself with instructing the younger dwarfs, his own son among them. But whether clowns are shot off seesaws by elephants, or chased by chimps, or butted by bears, there’s only so much for them to learn. Beyond the demanding drills, which require practice – how to dismount the collapsing unicycle, and so forth — only makeup, timing and falling can be taught. At the Great Blue Nile, it seemed to Vinod that there was mainly falling.

In his absence from Bombay, Vinod’s taxi enterprise would suffer and the dwarf would feel compelled to return to the city. Since Dr Daruwalla was only periodically in India, the doctor couldn’t always keep track of where Vinod was; as if trapped in a ceaseless clown item, the dwarf was constantly moving.

What was also constant was Farrokh’s habit of letting his mind wander to that long-ago night when he had bashed his nose on Deepa’s pubic bone. Not that this was the only circus image that the doctor’s mind would wander to; those scratchy sequins on Deepa’s tight singlet, not to mention the conflicting scents of Deepa’s earthy aroma – these were understandably the most vivid circus images in Farrokh’s memory. And at no time did Dr Daruwalla daydream so vividly about the circus as he did when anything unpleasant was pending.

Currently, Farrokh found himself reflecting that, for 15 years, Vinod had steadfastly refused to give the doctor a single Vacutainer of blood. Dr Daruwalla had drawn the blood from almost every active dwarf clown, in almost every active circus in Gujarat and Maharashtra, but the doctor hadn’t drawn a drop from Vinod. As angry as this fact made him, Farrokh preferred to reflect on it rather than to concern himself with the more pressing problem, which was suddenly at hand.

Dr Daruwalla was a coward. That Mr Lai had fallen on the golf course, without a net, was no reason not to tell Inspector Dhar the upsetting news. Quite simply, the doctor didn’t dare tell Dhar.

It was characteristic of Dr Daruwalla to tell belabored jokes, especially when he’d made a disquieting self-discovery. Inspector Dhar was characteristically silent – ‘characteristically,’ depending on which rumors you believed. Dhar knew that Farrokh had been fond of Mr Lai, and that the doctor’s strident sense of humor was most often engaged when he sought to distract himself from any unhappiness. At the Duckworth Club, Dhar spent most of lunch listening to Dr Daruwalla go on and on about this new offense to the Parsis: how the recent Parsi dead had been overlooked by the vultures attending to Mr Lai on the golf course. Farrokh found a forced humor in imagining the more fervent Zoroastrians who’d be up in arms about the interference caused to the vulture community by the dead golfer. Dr Daruwalla thought they should ask Mr Sethna if
he
was offended; throughout lunch the old steward had managed to look most offended, although the source of the particular offense appeared to be the second Mrs Dogar. It was clear that Mr Sethna disapproved of her, whatever her intentions.

She’d deliberately positioned herself at her table so that she could stare at Inspector Dhar, who never once returned her gaze. Dr Daruwalla assumed it was just another case of an immodest woman seeking Dhar’s attention – in vain, the doctor knew. He wished he could prepare the second Mrs Dogar for how rejected she would soon feel from the actor’s obliviousness to her. For a while, she’d even pushed her chair away from the table so that her fetching navel was beautifully framed by the bold colors of her sari; her navel was pointed at Dhar like a single and very determined eye. Although Mrs Dogar’s advances appeared to go unnoticed by Inspector Dhar, Dr Daruwalla found it most difficult not to look at her.

In the doctor’s view, her behavior was shameless for a married, middle-aged lady – Dr Daruwalla calculated that she was in her early fifties. Yet Farrokh found the second Mrs Dogar attractive, in a threatening kind of way. He couldn’t locate exactly what it was that attracted him to the woman, whose arms were long and unflatteringly muscular, and whose lean, hard face was handsome and challenging in an almost masculine way. To be sure, her bosom was shapely (if not full) and her bottom was high and firm – especially for a woman her age – and there was no question that her long waist and aforementioned navel were enhancing contributions to the pleasurable impression she made in a sari. But she was too tall, her shoulders were too pronounced and her hands appeared absurdly large and restless; she; picked up her silverware and toyed with it as if she were a bored child.

Furthermore, Farrokh had caught a glimpse of Mrs Dogar’s feet – actually, just one of her feet, which was bare. She must have kicked her shoes off under her table, but all that Dr Daruwalla saw was a flash of her gnarled foot; a thin gold chain hung loosely around her surprisingly thick ankle and a wide gold ring gripped one of her clawlike toes.

Perhaps what attracted the doctor to Mrs Dogar was how she reminded him of someone else, but he couldn’t think of who it might be. A long-ago movie star, he suspected. Then, as a doctor whose patients were children, he realized that he might have known the new Mrs Dogar as a child; why this would make the woman attractive to him was yet another, exasperating unknown. Moreover, the second Mrs Dogar seemed not more than six or seven years younger than Dr Daruwalla; virtually, they’d been children together.

Dhar caught the doctor by surprise when he said, ‘If you could see yourself looking at that woman, Farrokh, I think you’d be embarrassed.’ When he was embarrassed, the doctor had an annoying habit of abruptly changing the subject.

‘And you! You should have seen
yourself
!’ Dr Daruwalla said to Inspector Dhar. ‘You looked like a bloody police inspector – I mean, you looked like the real bloody thing!’

It irritated Dhar when Dr Daruwalla spoke such absurdly unnatural English; it wasn’t even the English with a singsong Hindi lilt, which was also unnatural for Dr Daruwalla. This was worse; it was something wholly fake – the affected British flavor of that particularly Indian English, the inflections of which were common among young college graduates working as food-and-beverage consultants at the Taj, or as production managers for Britannia Biscuits. Dhar knew that this unsuitable accent was Farrokh’s self-consciousness talking – he was so out of it in Bombay.