John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Junagadh! It would take a day to get there, another day to get back. They would have to fly to Rajkot and then endure a car ride of two or three hours to the smaller town; a driver from the circus would meet their plane—doubtless a reckless roustabout. But the train would be worse. Farrokh knew that Julia hated him to be away overnight, and in Junagadh there would probably be nowhere to stay but the Government Circuit House; lice were likely, bedbugs a certainty. There would be 48 hours of conversation with Martin Mills, and no time to keep writing the screenplay. It had also occurred to the screenwriter that the real Dr. Daruwalla was part of a parallel story-in-progress.

When Dr. Daruwalla phoned St. Ignatius School to alert the new missionary to their upcoming journey, the doctor wondered if his writing was prophetic. He’d already described the fictional Mr. Martin as “the most popular teacher at the school”; now here was Father Cecil telling the screenwriter that Martin Mills, on the evidence of his first morning of visiting the classrooms, had instantly made “a most popular impression.” Young Martin, as Father Cecil still called him, had even persuaded the Father Rector to permit the teaching of Graham Greene to the upper-school boys; although controversial, Graham Greene was one of Martin Mills’s Catholic heroes. “After all, the novelist popularized Catholic issues,” Father Cecil said.

Farrokh, who considered himself an old fan of Graham Greene, asked suspiciously, “Catholic issues?”

“Suicide as a mortal sin, for example,” Father Cecil replied. (Apparently, Father Julian was allowing Martin Mills to teach The Heart of the Matter to the upper school.) Dr. Daruwalla felt briefly uplifted; on the long trip to Junagadh and back, perhaps the doctor would be able to steer the missionary’s conversation to Graham Greene. Who were some of the zealot’s other heroes? the doctor wondered.

Farrokh hadn’t had a good discussion of Graham Greene in quite a while. Julia and her literary friends were happier discussing more contemporary authors; they found it old-fashioned of Farrokh to prefer rereading those books he regarded as classics. Dr. Daruwalla was intimidated by Martin Mills’s education, but possibly the doctor and the scholastic would discover a common ground in the novels of Graham Greene.

Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t have known that the subject of suicide was of more interest to Martin Mills than the craft of Graham Greene as a writer. For a Catholic, suicide was a violation of God’s dominion over human life. In the case of Arif Koma, Martin reasoned, the Muslim hadn’t been in full possession of his faculties; falling in love with Vera surely suggested a loss of faculties, or a vastly different set of faculties altogether.

The denial of ecclesiastical burial was a horror to Martin Mills; however, the Church permitted suicides among those who’d lost their senses or were unaware that they were killing themselves. The missionary hoped that God would judge the Turk’s suicide as an out-of-his-head kind. After all, Martin’s mother had fucked the boy’s brains out. How could Arif have made a sane decision after that?

But if Dr. Daruwalla would be unprepared for Martin Mills’s Catholic interpretation of the doctor’s much-admired author, Farrokh was also in the dark regarding the unwelcome disturbance that had shaken St. Ignatius School in the late morning, to which Father Cecil made incoherent references. The mission had been disrupted by an unruly intruder; the police had been forced to subdue the violent individual, whose violence Father Cecil attributed to “raging hormones.”

Farrokh liked the phrase so much that he wrote it down.

“It was a transvestite prostitute, of all things,” Father Cecil whispered into the phone.

“Why are you whispering?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“The Father Rector is still upset about the episode,” Father Cecil confided to Farrokh. “Can you imagine? A hijra coming here—and during school hours!”

Dr. Daruwalla was amused at the presumed spectacle. “Perhaps he, or she, wanted to be better educated,” the doctor suggested to Father Cecil.

“It claimed it had been invited,” Father Cecil replied.

“It!” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

“Well, he or she—whatever it was, it was big and strong. A rampaging prostitute, a crazed cross-dresser!” Father Cecil whispered. “They give themselves hormones, don’t they?”

“Not hijras,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “They don’t take estrogens; they have their balls and their penises removed—with a single cut. The wound is then cauterized with hot oil. It resembles a vagina.”

“Goodness—don’t tell me!” Father Cecil said.

“Sometimes, but not usually, their breasts are surgically implanted,” Dr. Daruwalla informed the priest.

“This one was implanted with iron! ” Father Cecil said enthusiastically. “And young Martin was busy teaching. The Father Rector and I, and poor Brother Gabriel, had to deal with the creature by ourselves—until the police came.”

“It sounds exciting,” Farrokh remarked.

“Fortunately, none of the children saw it,” Father Cecil said.

“Aren’t transvestite prostitutes allowed to convert?” asked Dr. Daruwalla, who enjoyed teasing any priest.

“Raging hormones,” Father Cecil repeated. “It must have just given itself an overdose.”

“I told you—they don’t usually take estrogens,” the doctor said.

“This one was taking something,” Father Cecil insisted.

“May I speak with Martin now?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. “Or is he still busy teaching?”

“He’s eating his lunch with the midgets, or maybe he’s with the submidgets today,” Father Cecil replied.

It was almost time for the doctor’s lunch at the Duckworth Club. Dr. Daruwalla left a message for Martin Mills, but Father Cecil struggled with the message to such a degree that the doctor knew he’d have to call again. “Just tell him I’ll call him back,” Farrokh finally said. “And tell him we’re definitely going to the circus.”

“Oh, won’t that be fun!” Father Cecil said.

Detective Patel had wanted to compose himself before his lunch at the Duckworth Club; however, there was the interruption of this incident at St. Ignatius. It was merely a misdemeanor, but the episode had been brought to the deputy commissioner’s attention because it fell into the category of Dhar-related crimes. The perpetrator was one of the transvestite prostitutes who’d been injured by Dhar’s dwarf driver in the fracas on Falkland Road; it was the hijra whose wrist had been broken by a blow from one of Vinod’s squash-racquet handles. The eunuch-transvestite had shown up at St. Ignatius, clubbing the old priests with his cast; his story was that Inspector Dhar had told all the transvestite prostitutes that they’d be welcome at the mission. Also, Dhar had told the hijras that they could always find him there.

“But it wasn’t Dhar,” the hijra told Detective Patel in Hindi. “It was someone being a Dhar imposter.” It would have been laughable to Patel, to hear a transvestite complaining that someone else was an “imposter,” if the detective had been in a laughing mood; instead, the deputy commissioner looked at the hijra with impatience and scorn. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, bony-faced hooker whose small breasts were showing because the top two buttons of his Hawaiian shirt were unbuttoned and the shirt was too loose for him; the looseness of his shirt and the tightness of his scarlet miniskirt were an absurd combination—hijra prostitutes usually wore saris. Also, they generally made more of an effort to be feminine than this one was making; his breasts (what the deputy commissioner could see of them) were shapely—in fact, they were very well formed—but there were whiskers on his chin and the noticeable shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. Possibly the hijra had thought that the colors of the Hawaiian shirt were feminine, not to mention the parrots and flowers; yet the shirt did little for his figure.