John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Well, the doctor thought, Dhar knew everything except that his twin was coming to Bombay and that his mother had begged Dr. Daruwalla to be sure that the twins didn’t meet!

In such circumstances Dr. Daruwalla felt briefly grateful for the distraction of old Mr. Lal’s apparent heart attack. Except when eating, Farrokh embraced procrastination as one greets an unexpected virtue. The belch of exhaust from the head gardener’s truck blew a wave of flower petals from the wrecked bougainvillea over Dr. Daruwalla’s feet; he stared in surprise at his light-brown toes in his dark-brown sandals, which were almost buried in the vivid pink petals.

That was when the head mali, who’d left the truck running, sidled over to the ninth green and stood smirking beside Dr. Daruwalla. The mali was clearly more excited by the sight of Inspector Dhar in action than he appeared to be disturbed by the death of poor Mr. Lal. With a nod toward the scene unfolding in the bougainvillea, the gardener whispered to Farrokh, “It looks just like a movie!” This observation quickly returned Dr. Daruwalla to the crisis at hand, namely the impossibility of shielding Dhar’s twin from the existence of his famous brother, who, even in a city of movie stars, was indubitably the most recognizable star in Bombay.

Even if the famous actor agreed to keep himself in hiding, his identical twin brother would constantly be mistaken for Inspector Dhar. Dr. Daruwalla admired the mental toughness of the Jesuits, but the twin—who was what the Jesuits call a scholastic (in training to be a priest)—would have to be more than mentally tough in order to endure a recurring mistaken identity of this magnitude. And from what Farrokh had been told of Dhar’s twin, self-confidence was not high on the man’s listed features. After all, who is almost 40 and only “in training” to be a priest? the doctor wondered. Given Bombay’s feelings for Dhar, Dhar’s Jesuit twin might be killed! Despite his conversion to Christianity, Dr. Daruwalla had little faith in the powers of a presumably naïve American missionary to survive—or even comprehend—the depth of resentment that Bombay harbored for Inspector Dhar.

For example, it was common in Bombay to deface all the advertisements for all the Inspector Dhar movies. Only on the higher-placed hoardings—those larger-than-life billboards that were everywhere in the city—was the giant likeness of Inspector Dhar’s cruel, handsome face spared the abundant filth that was flung at it from street level. But even above human reach, the familiar face of the detested antihero couldn’t escape creative defilement from Bombay’s most expressive birds. The crows and the fork-tailed kites appeared to be drawn, as to a target, to the dark, piercing eyes—and to that sneer which the famous actor had perfected. All over town, Dhar’s movie-poster face was spotted with bird shit. But even his many detractors admitted that Inspector Dhar achieved a kind of perfection with his sneer. It was the look of a lover who was leaving you, while thoroughly relishing your misery. All of Bombay felt the sting of it.

The rest of the world, even most of the rest of India, didn’t suffer the sneer with which Inspector Dhar constantly looked down upon Bombay. The box-office success of the Inspector Dhar movies was inexplicably limited to Maharashtra and stood in violent contradiction to how unanimously Dhar himself was loathed; not only the character, but also the actor who brought him to life, was one of those luminaries in popular culture whom the public loves to hate. As for the actor who took responsibility for the role, he appeared to so enjoy the passionate hostility he inspired that he undertook no other roles; he used no other name—he had become Inspector Dhar. It was even the name on his passport.

It was the name on his Indian passport, which was a fake. India doesn’t permit dual citizenship. Dr. Daruwalla knew that Dhar had a Swiss passport, which was genuine; he was a Swiss citizen. In truth, the crafty actor had a Swiss life , for which he would always be grateful to Farrokh. The success of the Inspector Dhar movies was based, at least in part, on how closely Dhar had guarded his privacy, and how well hidden he’d kept his past. No amount of public scrutiny, which was considerable, could unearth more biographical information on the mystery man than he permitted—and, like his movies, Dhar’s autobiography was highly far-fetched and contrived, wholly lacking in credible detail. That Inspector Dhar had invented himself, and that he appeared to have got away with his preposterous and unexaminable fiction, was surely a contributing reason for the virulence with which he was despised.

But the fury of the film press only fed Dhar’s stardom. Since he refused to give these gossip journalists the facts, they wrote completely fabricated stories about him; Dhar being Dhar, this suited him perfectly—lies merely served to heighten his mystery and the general hysteria he inspired. Inspector Dhar movies were so popular, Dhar must have had fans, probably a multitude of admirers; but the film audience swore that they despised him. Dhar’s indifference to his audience was also a reason to hate him. The actor himself suggested that even his fans were largely motivated to watch his films because they longed to see him fail; their faithful attendance, even if they hoped to witness a flop, assured Dhar of one hit after another. In the Bombay cinema, demigods were common; hero worship was the norm. What was uncommon was that Inspector Dhar was loathed but that he was nonetheless a star.

As for twins separated at birth, the irony was that this is an extremely popular theme with Hindi screenwriters. Such a separation frequently happens at the hospital—or during a storm, or in a railway accident. Typically, one twin takes a virtuous path while the other wallows in evil. Usually, there is some key that links them—maybe a torn two-rupee note (each twin keeps a half). And often, at the moment they are about to kill each other, the telltale half of the two-rupee note flutters out from one twin’s pocket. Thus reunited, the twins vent their always-justifiable anger on a real villain, an inconceivable scoundrel (conveniently introduced to the audience at an earlier stage in the preposterous story).

How Bombay hated Inspector Dhar! But Dhar was a real twin, truly separated at birth, and Dhar’s actual story was more unbelievable than any story concocted in the imagination of a Hindi screenwriter. Moreover, almost no one in Bombay, or in all of Maharashtra, knew Dhar’s true story.

On the ninth green, with the pink petals of the bougainvillea caressing his feet, Dr. Daruwalla could detect the hatred that the moronic head mali felt for Inspector Dhar. The lout still lurked at Farrokh’s side, clearly relishing the irony that Dhar, who only pretended to be a police inspector, found himself playing the role in close proximity to an actual corpse. Dr. Daruwalla then remembered his own first response to the awareness that poor Mr. Lal had fallen prey to vultures; he recalled how he’d relished the irony, too! What had he whispered to Dhar? “This is your line of work, Inspector.” Farrokh was mortified that he’d said this.

If Dr. Daruwalla felt vaguely guilty that he knew very little about either his native or his adopted country, and if his self-confidence was a mild casualty of his general out-of-itness in both Bombay and Toronto, the doctor was more clearly and acutely agonized by anything in himself that identified him with the lowly masses—the poor slob on the street, the mere commoner: in short, his fellow man. If it embarrassed him to be a passive resident of both Canada and India, which was a passivity born of insufficient knowledge and experience, it shamed him hugely to catch himself thinking like anyone else. He may have been alienated but he was also a snob. And here, in the presence of death itself, Dr. Daruwalla was humiliated by his apparent lack of originality—namely, he discovered he was on the same wavelength as an entirely stupid and disagreeable gardener.