John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Instead, the little beggars begin to play a game called “limo roulette.” All the street children in Bombay know there are two special limousines that cruise the city. In one is a scout for the circus—a dwarf named Vinod, of course. The dwarf is a former circus clown; his job is looking for gifted acrobats. Pinky is so gifted, the crippled Ganesh believes that Vinod would let him go to the circus with Pinky—so that he could look after her. The problem is, there’s another scout. He’s a man who steals children for the freak circus. He’s called Acid Man because he pours acid on your face. The acid is so disfiguring that your own family wouldn’t recognize you. Only the circus for freaks will take care of you.

So Farrokh was after Mr. Garg again, Julia thought. What an appalling story! Even without Inspector Dhar, good and evil were once more plainly in position. Which scout would find the children first? Would it be the Good Samaritan dwarf, or would it be Acid Man?

The limos move around at night. We see a sleek car pass the children, who run after it. We see the brake lights flicker, but then the dark car drives on; other children are chasing after it. We see a limousine stopped at the curb, motor running; the children approach it cautiously. The driver’s-side window opens a crack; we see the stubby fingers on the edge of the glass, like claws. When the window is rolled down, there is the dwarf’s big head. This is the right limo—this is Vinod.

Or else it’s the wrong limo. The back door opens, a kind of frost escapes; it’s as if the car’s air-conditioning is too cold—the car is like a freezer or a meat locker. Possibly the acid must be preserved at such a temperature; maybe Acid Man himself must be kept this cold, or else he’ll rot.

Apparently, the poor children wouldn’t be forced to play “limo roulette” if the Virgin Mary hadn’t toppled off a pedestal and murdered their mother. What was her husband thinking? Julia wondered. She was used to reading Farrokh’s first drafts, his raw beginnings. Normally, she felt she wasn’t invading her husband’s privacy; he always shared with her his work-in-progress. But Julia was worried that this screenplay was something he’d never share with her. There was something desperate about it. Probably it suffered from the potential disappointment of attempted art—a vulnerability that had certainly been lacking in the doctor’s Inspector Dhar scripts. It occurred to Julia that Farrokh might care too much about this one.

It was this reasoning that led her to return the manuscript to its previous position on the glass-topped table, more or less between the typewriter and her husband’s head. Farrokh was still asleep, although a smile of drooling-idiot proportions indicated that he was dreaming, and he emitted a nasal humming—an unfollowable tune. The awkward position of the doctor’s head on the glass-topped table allowed him to imagine that he was a child again, napping at St. Ignatius School with his head on his desk in I-3.

Suddenly, Farrokh snorted in his sleep. Julia could tell that her husband was about to wake up, but she was startled when he woke up screaming. She thought he’d had a nightmare but it turned out to be a cramp in the arch of his right foot. He looked so disheveled, she was embarrassed for him. Then her anger with him returned… that he’d thought it “inappropriate” for her to attend the interesting lunch with the deputy commissioner and the limping hippie from 20 years ago. Worse, Farrokh drank his tea without mentioning his screenplay-in-progress; he even attempted to conceal the pages in his doctor’s bag.

Julia remained aloof when he kissed her good-bye, but she stood in the open doorway of the apartment and watched him push the button for the lift. If the doctor was demonstrating the early symptoms of an artistic temperament, Julia thought she should nip such an ailment in the bud. She waited until the elevator door opened before she called to him.

“If that ever was a movie,” Julia said, “Mr. Garg would sue you.”

Dr. Daruwalla stood dumbfounded while the elevator door closed on his doctor’s bag, and then opened; the door kept opening and closing on his bag as he stared indignantly at his wife. Julia blew him a kiss, just to make him cross. The elevator door grew more aggressive; Farrokh was forced to fight his way inside. He hadn’t time to retort to Julia before the door closed and he was descending; he’d never successfully kept a secret from her. Besides, Julia was right: Garg would sue him! Dr. Daruwalla wondered if the creative process had eclipsed his common sense.

In the alley, another blow to his common sense awaited him. When Vinod opened the door of the Ambassador for him, the doctor saw the elephant-footed beggar asleep in the back seat. Madhu had chosen to sit up front, beside the dwarf driver. Except for the crusty exudation on his eyelashes, the sleeping boy looked angelic. His crushed foot was covered with one of the rags he carried for wiping off the fake bird shit; even in his sleep, Ganesh had managed to conceal his deformity. This wasn’t a make-believe Ganesh, but a real boy; nevertheless, Farrokh found himself looking at the cripple as he might stand back and take pride in one of his fictional creations. The doctor was still thinking about his story; he was thinking that what would happen next to Ganesh was entirely a matter of the screenwriter’s imagination. But the real beggar had found a benefactor; until the circus took him, the back seat of Vinod’s Ambassador would do—it was already better than what he was used to.

“Good morning, Ganesh,” the doctor said. The boy was instantly awake, as alert as a squirrel.

“What are we doing today?” the beggar asked.

“No more bird-shit tricks,” the doctor said.

The beggar registered his understanding with a tight-lipped smile. “But what are we doing?” the boy repeated.

“We’re going to my office,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “We’re waiting for some test results for Madhu, before we make our plans. And this morning you will be kind enough not to practice the bird-shit trick on those postoperative children in the exercise yard.” The boy’s black eyes kept darting with the movements of the traffic. The doctor could see Madhu’s face reflected in the rearview mirror; she’d not responded—she’d not even glanced in the mirror at the mention of her name.

“What concerns me, about the circus …” Dr. Daruwalla said; he paused deliberately. The emphasis he’d given to the word had gained Ganesh’s full attention, but not Madhu’s.

“My arms are the best—very strong. I could ride a pony—no legs necessary with hands as strong as mine,” Ganesh suggested. “I could do lots of tricks—hang by my arms from an elephant’s trunk, maybe ride a lion.”

“But what concerns me is that they won’t let you do tricks—no tricks,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “They’ll give you all the bad jobs, all the hard work. Scooping up the elephant shit, for example—not hanging from their trunks.”

“I’ll have to show them,” Ganesh said. “But what do you do to the lions to make them stand on those little stools?”

“ Your job would be to wash the lion piss off the stools,” Farrokh told him.

“And what do you do with tigers?” Ganesh asked.

“What you would do with tigers is clean their cages—tiger shit!” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“I’ll have to show them,” the boy repeated. “Maybe something with their tails—tigers have long tails.”

The dwarf entered the roundabout that the doctor hated. There were too many easily distracted drivers who stared at the sea and at the worshipers milling in the mudflats around Haji Ali’s Tomb; the rotary was near Tardeo, where Farrokh’s father had been blown to smithereens. Now, in the midst of this roundabout, the traffic swerved to avoid a lunatic cripple; a legless man in one of those makeshift wheelchairs powered by a hand crank was navigating the rotary against the flow of other vehicles. The doctor could follow Ganesh’s roaming gaze; the boy’s black eyes either ignored or avoided the wheelchair madman. The little beggar was probably still thinking about the tigers.