John Irving - A Son of the Circus

In his office, Patel was painstakingly returning the photographs to his top drawer; he always returned them one by one, just as he reviewed them faithfully and in the exact order in which the crimes had been discovered. “I love you, too , sweetie,” the detective said into the phone. He always waited for Nancy to hang up first. Then he slammed shut the top drawer of his desk and rushed to the balcony. He caught his fellow policemen and their secretaries by surprise; not one of them was fast enough to start typing before the deputy commissioner started shouting.

“Have you run out of things to describe?” he hollered. “Have your fingers all fallen off?” he screamed. “Are there no more murders? Is crime a thing of the past? Have you all gone on holiday? Have you nothing better to do than listen to me? ”

The typing began again, although Detective Patel knew that most of these first words would be meaningless. Below him, in the courtyard, the Doberman pinschers started barking witlessly; he could see them lunging in their kennel. Also below him, the police mechanic had mounted the nearest motorcycle and was jumping again and again, but without success, on the kick starter. The engine made a dry, gasping sound, like the catching of a pawl against a rachet wheel.

“Bleed the carburetor—there’s too much air!” Patel shouted to the mechanic, who quickly fussed with the carburetor; his tireless leg continued to flail the kick starter. When the engine caught and the mechanic revved the throttle so loudly that the barking Dobermans were drowned out of hearing, the deputy commissioner returned to his office and sat at his desk with his eyes closed. Gradually, his head began to bob, as if he’d found a followable rhythm, if not a melody, among the staccato outbursts from the police secretaries’ typewriters.

He’d not exactly neglected to tell Nancy that they would have lunch tomorrow at the Duckworth Club with Dr. Daruwalla—probably with Inspector Dhar, too. He’d purposefully withheld this information from his wife. He knew it would worry her, or bring her to tears—or at least cause her another long night of sleeplessness and helpless sorrowing. Nancy hated to go out in public. Moreover, she’d developed a pointless dislike of both Inspector Dhar’s creator and Dhar himself. Detective Patel understood that his wife’s dislike was no more logical than her blaming both men for failing to comprehend how savagely she’d been traumatized in Goa. With equal illogic, the detective anticipated, Nancy would be ashamed of herself in both Daruwalla and Dhar’s company, for she couldn’t bear the thought of encountering anyone who’d known her then .

He would tell her about lunch at the Duckworth Club in the morning, the detective thought; that way, his wife might have a fair night’s sleep. Also, once he’d read over the names of the new members at the club, the deputy commissioner hoped he might know who Rahul was—or who he or she was pretending to be nowadays.

Patel’s fellow policemen and their secretaries didn’t relax until they heard the sound of his typewriter contributing its tedious music to their own. This was a welcome boredom, they knew, for with the flat clacking of the deputy commissioner’s keys, Patel’s colleagues were relieved to know that the deputy commissioner had returned to sanity—if not to peace of mind. It even comforted his junior officers to know that Patel was rewriting their own botched reports. They also knew they could expect that sometime in the afternoon Detective Patel would have their original reports back on their desks; the revised reports would be prefaced by a creative array of insults directed to their myriad inabilities—for none of them, in Detective Patel’s opinion, knew how to write a proper report. And the secretaries would be taken to task for their typing errors. He was so disdainful of the secretaries, the deputy commissioner did his own typing.

Trachoma, which is one of the leading causes of blindness in the world, is easily treatable at its earliest phase—a chlamydial infection of the conjunctiva. In Ganesh’s case, there was no scarring of the cornea. Double E-NT Jeejeebhoy had prescribed three weeks of tetracycline orally, together with a tetracycline ointment. Sometimes, multiple courses of treatment were needed, Dr. Jeejeebhoy had said; the elephant boy’s weepy eyes would likely clear up.

“You see?” Martin Mills asked Dr. Daruwalla. “We’ve already done the boy some good. It wasn’t hard, was it?”

It seemed disloyal of the doctor that they were riding in a taxi not driven by Vinod; it wasn’t even a taxi from the dwarf’s company. It also seemed dangerous, for the decrepit driver had warned them that he was unfamiliar with Bombay. Before they proceeded to the mission in Mazagaon, they dropped the beggar at Chowpatty Beach, where he said he wanted to go. Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t resist saying to Martin Mills that the little cripple was doubtless eager to sell his Fashion Street clothes.

“You’re so cynical,” the scholastic said.

“He’ll probably sell the tetracycline, too,” Farrokh replied. “He’ll probably be blind before he gets to see the circus.”

As he escorted the missionary to St. Ignatius, Farrokh felt sufficiently overwhelmed to have reached the stage of making bitter resolutions to himself. Dr. Daruwalla had resolved that he would never write another Inspector Dhar movie; the doctor had resolved that he would call a press conference, at which he would take the full blame for Dhar’s creation upon himself.

Thus distracted, and always a nervous passenger in Bombay—even when Vinod was at the wheel, and the dwarf was a decent driver—Dr. Daruwalla was frightened to see that their taxi had nearly mowed down a pedestrian. The near-accident had no effect on Martin Mills’s impromptu lecture on Jainism. “A pre-Buddhist offshoot of Hinduism,” Martin declared. The Jains were absolutely pure, the missionary explained… not just no meat, but no eggs; kill nothing, not even flies; bathe every morning. He would love to meet a Jain, Martin said. Just that quickly was the chaos of the morning behind him, if not entirely forgotten.

Apropos of nothing, the missionary then moved on to the well-worn subject of Gandhi. Farrokh reflected on how he might derail this conversation; possibly the doctor could say he preferred the warrior Shivaji to Gandhi—none of this turn-the-other-cheek shit for Shivaji! But before the doctor could deflate so much as a sentence of the scholastic’s zeal for Gandhi, Martin Mills once more changed the subject.

“Personally, I’m more interested in Shirdi Sai Baba,” the missionary said.

“Ah, yes—the Jesus of Maharashtra,” Farrokh replied facetiously. Sai Baba was a patron saint of many circus performers; the acrobats wore little Shirdi Sai Baba medallions around their necks—the Hindu equivalents of St. Christopher medals. There were Shirdi Sai Baba calendars hanging in the troupe tents of the Great Royal and the Great Blue Nile. The saint’s shrine was in Maharashtra.

“The parallels to Jesus are understandable,” Martin Mills began, “although Sai Baba was a teenager before he gained attention and he was an old man, in his eighties, when he died… I believe in 1918.”

“From his pictures, I always thought he looked a little like Lee Marvin… the Lee Marvin of Maharashtra,” Farrokh said.

“Lee Marvin! Not Shirdi Sai Baba …” the missionary protested.

And here, in an effort to interrupt the zealot’s upcoming lecture on the parallels between Christianity and the cult of Sai Baba worship, the doctor launched into a description of the terrible teeterboard item that bore responsibility for Vinod’s aerial assault of the surprised audience at the less-than-great Blue Nile Circus. Dr. Daruwalla made it clear that such careless elephant-stamping acts would likely be in store for the less-than-innocent Madhu and the elephant-footed Ganesh. But the doctor’s calculated pessimism failed to bait the missionary into repeating his claim that the perils of the circus—of any circus—paled in comparison to the hardships facing a prostitute or a beggar in Bombay. As swiftly as he’d dropped Gandhi for Sai Baba, Martin Mills now abandoned the Jesus of Maharashtra, too.