John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Dr. Daruwalla didn’t know the exact ending of his screenplay; he had only a general idea of what would happen to his Pinky, to his Ganesh. Caught in the roundabout, the doctor realized that the fate of the real Ganesh—in addition to Madhu’s fate—was out of his hands. But Farrokh felt responsible for beginning their stories, just as surely as he’d begun the story he was making up.

In the rearview mirror, Dr. Daruwalla could see that Madhu’s lion-yellow eyes were following the movements of the legless maniac. Then the dwarf needed to brake sharply; he brought his taxi to a full stop in order to avoid the crazed cripple in the wrong-way wheelchair. The wheelchair sported a bumper sticker opposed to horn blowing.

A battered oil truck loomed over the wheelchair lunatic; in a fury, the oil-truck driver repeatedly blew his horn. The great cylindrical body of the truck was covered with foot-high lettering the color of flame,

The oil truck also sported a bumper sticker, which was almost illegible behind flecks of tar and splattered insects.

Dr. Daruwalla knew that Vinod didn’t have one.

As if it wasn’t irritating enough to be obstructing traffic, the cripple was begging among the stopped cars. The clumsy wheelchair bumped against the Ambassador’s rear door. Farrokh was incensed when Ganesh rolled down the rear window, toward which the wheelchair madman extended his arm.

“Don’t give that idiot anything!” the doctor cried, but Farrokh had underestimated the speed of Bird-Shit Boy. Dr. Daruwalla never saw the bird-shit syringe, only the look of surprise on the face of the crazed cripple in the wheelchair; he quickly withdrew his arm—his palm, his wrist, his whole forearm dripping bird shit. Vinod cheered.

“Got him,” Ganesh said.

A passing paint truck nearly obliterated the wheelchair lunatic. Vinod cheered for the paint truck, too.

When the paint truck was gone from view, the traffic moved again—the dwarf’s taxi taking the lead. The doctor remembered the bumper sticker on Vinod’s Ambassador.

“I said no more bird-shit tricks, Ganesh,” Farrokh told the boy. In the rearview mirror, Dr. Daruwalla could see Madhu watching him; when he met her eyes, she looked away. Through the open window, the air was hot and dry, but the pleasure of a moving car was new to the boy, if not to the child prostitute. Maybe nothing was new to her, the doctor feared. But for the beggar, if not for Madhu, this was the start of an adventure.

“Where is the circus?” Ganesh asked. “Is it far?”

Farrokh knew that the Great Blue Nile might be anywhere in Gujarat. The question that concerned Dr. Daruwalla was not where the circus was, but whether it would be safe.

Ahead, the traffic slowed again; probably pedestrians, Dr. Daruwalla thought—shoppers from the nearby chowk, crowding into the street. Then the doctor saw the body of a man in the gutter; his legs extended into the road. The traffic was squeezed into one lane because the oncoming drivers didn’t want to drive over the dead man’s feet or ankles. A crowd was quickly forming; soon there would be the usual chaos. For the moment, the only concession made to the dead man was that no one drove over him.

“Is the circus far? ” Ganesh asked again.

“Yes, it’s far—it’s a world apart,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “A world apart” was what he hoped for the boy, whose bright black eyes spotted the body in the road. Ganesh quickly looked away. The dwarf’s taxi inched past the dead man; once more, Vinod moved ahead of the traffic.

“Did you see that?” Farrokh asked Ganesh.

“See what?” the cripple said.

“There is a man being dead,” Vinod said.

“They are nonpersons,” Ganesh replied. “You think you seem them but they are not really being there.”

O God, keep this boy from becoming a nonperson! Dr. Daruwalla thought. His fear surprised him; he couldn’t bring himself to seek the cripple’s hopeful face. In the rearview mirror, Madhu was watching the doctor again. Her indifference was chilling. It had been quite a while since Dr. Daruwalla had prayed, but he began.

India wasn’t limo roulette. There were no good scouts or bad scouts for the circus; there was no freak circus, either. There were no right-limo, wrong-limo choices. For these children, the real roulette would begin after they got to the circus— if they got there. At the circus, no Good Samaritan dwarf could save them. At the Great Blue Nile, Acid Man—a comic-book villain—wasn’t the danger.

In the new missionary’s cubicle, the last mosquito coil had burned out just before dawn. The mosquitoes had come with the early gray light and had departed with the first heat of the day—all but the mosquito that Martin Mills had mashed against the white wall above his cot. He’d killed it with the rolled-up issue of The Times of India after the mosquito was full of blood; the bloodstain on the wall was conspicuous and only a few inches below the crucifix that hung there, which gave Martin the gruesome impression that a sizable drop of Christ’s blood had spotted the wall.

In his inexperience, Martin had lit the last mosquito coil too close to his cot. When his hand trailed on the floor, his fingers must have groped through the dead ashes. Then, in his brief and troubled sleep, he’d touched his face. This was the only explanation for the surprising view of himself that he saw in the pitted mirror above the sink; his face was dotted with fingerprints of ash, as if he’d meant to mock Ash Wednesday—or as if a ghost had passed through his cubicle and fingered him. The marks struck him as a sarcastic blessing, or else they made him look like an insincere penitent.

When he’d filled the sink and wet his face to shave, he held the razor in his right hand and reached for the small sliver of soap with his left. It was a jagged-shaped piece of such an iridescent blue-green color that it was reflected in the silver soap dish; it turned out to be a lizard, which leaped into his hair before he could touch it. The missionary was frightened to feel the reptile race across his scalp. The lizard launched itself from the top of Martin’s head to the crucifix on the wall above the cot; then it jumped from Christ’s face to the partially open slats of the window blind, through which the light from the low sun slanted across the floor of the cubicle.

Martin Mills had been startled; in an effort to brush the lizard out of his hair, he’d slashed his nose with the razor. An imperceptible breeze stirred the ashes from the mosquito coils, and the missionary watched himself bleed into the water in the sink. He’d long ago given up shaving lather; plain soap was good enough. In the absence of soap, he shaved himself in the cold, bloody water.

It was only 6:00 in the morning. Martin Mills had to survive another hour before Mass. He thought it would be a good idea to go to St. Ignatius Church early; if the church wasn’t locked, he could sit quietly in one of the pews—that usually helped. But his stupid nose kept bleeding; he didn’t want to bleed all over the church. He’d neglected to pack any handkerchiefs—he’d have to buy some—and so for now he chose a pair of black socks; although they were of a thin material, not very absorbent, at least they wouldn’t show the bloodstains. He soaked the socks in fresh cold water in the sink; he wrung them out until they were merely damp. He balled up a sock in each hand and, first with one hand and then the other, he restlessly dabbed at the wound on his nose.