John Irving - A Son of the Circus

When he heard the bell signifying the end of school, Farrokh realized that it was already 3:00 in the afternoon. He stood on the second-floor balcony and watched the schoolboys racing through the dusty courtyard. Cars and buses were taking them away; either their mothers or their ayahs were coming to fetch them home. From the perspective of the balcony, Dr. Daruwalla determined that they were the fattest children he’d ever seen in India. This was uncharitable; not half the children at St. Ignatius were half as plump as Farrokh. Nevertheless, the doctor knew that he would no more interfere with the new missionary’s zeal than he would choose to leap from the balcony and kill himself in front of these blameless children.

Farrokh also knew that almost no one of rank at the mission would mistake Martin Mills for Inspector Dhar. The Jesuits weren’t known for their appreciation of so-called Bollywood, the trashy Hindi film scene; young women in soaking-wet saris weren’t their thing. Superheroes and fiendish villains, violence and vulgarity, tawdriness and corniness—and the occasional descending god, intervening in pathetic, merely human affairs… Inspector Dhar was not famous at St. Ignatius. Among the schoolboys, however, more than one student of Martin Mills might note the resemblance. Inspector Dhar was popular with schoolboys.

Dr. Daruwalla still lingered; he had things to do, but he couldn’t make himself leave. He didn’t know that he was writing; it had never begun quite like this before. When the children were gone, he went inside St. Ignatius Church—but not to pray. A huge wheel of unlit candles hung above the center table, which resembled a refectory table only in its shape; in fact, it was a folding table of a household kind—better suited, say, for sorting laundry. The pulpit, to the right of this table (as Farrokh faced the altar), was equipped with an inappropriately shiny microphone; upon this pulpit a Lectionary lay open, from which the doctor assumed that the lector would be reading—possibly at the evening Mass. Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t resist snooping. The Lectionary was open to the Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians.

“Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we do not lose heart,” wrote the converted one. [II Corinthians 4:1] Skipping ahead, the doctor read: “ We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.” [4:8–10]

Dr. Daruwalla felt small. He ventured into a pew in one of the side aisles—as if he wasn’t significant enough, in his lack of faith, to sit in a center-aisle seat. His own conversion seemed trifling, and very far behind him; in his daily thoughts, he barely honored it—perhaps he had been bitten by a monkey, he concluded. He noted that the church was without an organ; another, probably tuneless piano stood to the left of the folding table—another inappropriately shiny microphone stood on it.

From far outside the church, the doctor was aware of the constantly passing mopeds—the snarling of their low-powered engines, the ducklike quacking of their infernal horns. The highly staged altarpiece drew the doctor’s eye: there was Christ on the Cross and those two familiar women forlornly flanking him. Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, Dr. Daruwalla presumed. The life-sized figures of the saints, all in stone, were mounted on the columns that defined the aisles; these massive pillars each supported a saint, and at the saints’ feet were tilted oscillating fans—pointed down, in order to cool the congregation.

Blasphemously, Dr. Daruwalla noticed that one of the stone saints had worked herself loose from her pillar; a thick chain had been secured around the saint’s neck, and this chain was attached to the pillar by a sizable steel grommet. The doctor wished he knew which saint she was; he thought that all the female saints too closely resembled the Virgin Mary—at least as statues. Whoever this saint was, she appeared to have been hung in effigy; but without the chain around her neck, she might have toppled into a pew. Dr. Daruwalla judged that the stone saint was big enough to kill a pew of worshipers.

Finally, Farrokh said his good-byes to Martin Mills and the other Jesuits. The scholastic suddenly begged to hear the details of Dr. Daruwalla’s conversion. The doctor supposed that Father Julian had given Martin a cunning and sarcastic rendition of the story.

“Oh, it was nothing,” Farrokh replied modestly. This probably concurred with the Father Rector’s version.

“But I should love to hear about it!” Martin said.

“If you tell him yours, I’m sure he’ll tell you his ,” Father Julian said to Farrokh.

“Maybe another time,” Dr. Daruwalla said. Never had he so much desired to flee. He had to promise that he’d attend Martin’s lecture at the YWCA, although he had no intentions of attending; he would rather die than attend. He’d heard quite enough lecturing from Martin Mills!

“It’s the YWCA at Cooperage, you know,” Father Cecil informed him. Since Dr. Daruwalla was sensitive to those Bombayites who assumed that he barely knew his way around the city, the doctor was snappish in his reply.

“I know where it is!” Farrokh said.

Then a little girl appeared, out of nowhere. She was crying because she’d come to St. Ignatius with her mother, to pick up her brother after school, and somehow they’d left without her. There’d been other children in the car. It wasn’t a crisis, the Jesuits decided. The mother would realize what had happened and return to the school. It was merely necessary to comfort the child, and someone should call the mother so that she’d not drive recklessly in fear that her daughter was lost. But there was another problem: the little girl confided to them that she needed to pee. Brother Gabriel declared to Dr. Daruwalla that there was “no official peeing place for girls” at St. Ignatius.

“But where does Miss Tanuja pee?” Martin Mills asked.

Good for him! Dr. Daruwalla thought. He’s going to drive them all crazy.

“And I saw several women among the sweepers,” Martin added.

“There must be three or four women teachers, aren’t there?” Dr. Daruwalla asked innocently.

Of course there was a peeing place for girls! These old men simply didn’t know where it was.

“Someone could see if a men’s room is unoccupied,” Father Cecil suggested.

“Then one of us could guard the door,” Father Julian advised.

When Farrokh finally left them all, they were still discussing this awkward necessity to bend the rules. The doctor presumed that the little girl still needed to pee.

Dr. Daruwalla was on his way back to the Hospital for Crippled Children when he realized that he’d started another screenplay; he knew that this one would not be starring Inspector Dhar. In his mind’s eye, he saw a beggar working the Arab hotels along Marine Drive; he saw the Queen’s Necklace at night… that string of yellow smog lights… and he heard Julia saying that yellow wasn’t the proper color for the necklace of a queen. For the first time, Farrokh felt that he understood the start of a story—the characters were set in motion by the fates that awaited them. Something of the authority of an ending was already contained in the beginning scene.

He was exhausted; he had much to talk about with Julia, and he had to talk to John D. Dr. Daruwalla and his wife were having an early dinner at the Ripon Club. Then the doctor had planned to write a first draft of a little speech he would be giving soon; he’d been invited to say something to the Society for the Rehabilitation of Crippled Children—they were such faithful sponsors of the hospital. But now he knew he would write all night—and not his speech. At last, he thought, he had a screenplay in him that justified the telling. In his mind’s eye, he saw the characters arriving at Victoria Terminus, but this time he knew where they were going; he wondered if he’d ever been so excited.