John Irving - A Son of the Circus

It soothed him to think of the circus. Like a child who’s proud to recite the names of Santa’s reindeer or the Seven Dwarfs, Farrokh tested himself by remembering the names of the Great Royal’s lions: Ram, Raja, Wazir, Mother, Diamond, Shanker, Crown, Max, Hondo, Highness, Lillie Mol, Leo and Tex. And then there were the cubs: Sita, Gita, Julie, Devi, Bheem and Lucy. The lions were most dangerous between their first and second feedings of meat. The meat made their paws slippery; while they paced in their cages, in expectation of their second serving, they often slipped and fell down, or they slid sideways into the bars. After their second feeding, they calmed down and licked the grease off their paws. With lions, you could count on certain things. They were always themselves. Lions didn’t try to be what they couldn’t be, the way Dr. Daruwalla kept trying to be a writer—the way I keep trying to be an Indian! he thought.

And in 15 years, he’d not found a genetic marker for achondroplastic dwarfism, nor had anyone encouraged him to look. But he kept trying. The doctor’s dwarf-blood project wasn’t dead; he wouldn’t let it die—not yet.

By the time Dr. Daruwalla was in his late fifties, the exuberant details of the doctor’s conversion to Christianity were entirely absent from his conversation; it was as if he were slowly becoming unconverted. But 15 years ago—as the doctor drove to the circus grounds at Cross Maidan to assess what damage had been done to the dwarf—Farrokh’s faith was still new enough that he’d already imparted the miraculous particulars of his belief to Vinod. If the dwarf was truly dying, the doctor was at least slightly comforted by his memory of their religious discussion—for Vinod was a deeply religious man. In the coming years, Farrokh’s faith would comfort him less deeply, and he would one day flee from any religious discourse with Vinod. Over time, the dwarf would strike the doctor as a giant zealot.

But while the doctor was en route to discover whatever disaster had befallen the dwarf at the Great Blue Nile, he found it heartening to dwell on the dwarf’s expressed excitement over the parallels between Vinod’s version of Hinduism and Dr. Daruwalla’s Christianity.

“We are having a kind of Trinity, too!” the dwarf had exclaimed.

“Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu—is that what you mean?” the doctor asked.

“All creation is being in the hands of three gods,” Vinod said. “First is Brahma, the God of Creation—there is only one temple in all of India to him! Second is Vishnu, the God of Preservation or Existence. And third is Shiva, the God of Change.”

“Change?” Farrokh asked. “I thought Shiva was the Destroyer—the God of Destruction.”

“Why is everyone saying this?” the dwarf exclaimed. “All creation is being cyclic—there is no finality. I am liking it better to think of Shiva as the God of Change. Sometimes death is change, too.”

“I see,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “That’s a positive way of looking at it.”

“This is our Trinity,” the dwarf went on. “Creation, Preservation, Change.”

“I guess I don’t understand the female forms,” Farrokh boldly admitted.

“The power of the gods is being represented by the females,” Vinod explained. “Durga is the female form of Shiva—she is the Goddess of Death and Destruction.”

“But you just said Shiva was the God of Change,” the doctor interjected.

“His female form, Durga, is the Goddess of Death and Destruction,” the dwarf repeated.

“I see,” Dr. Daruwalla responded; it seemed best to say so.

“Durga is looking after me—I am praying to her,” Vinod added.

“The Goddess of Death and Destruction is looking after you?” Farrokh inquired.

“She is always protecting me,” the dwarf insisted.

“I see,” Dr. Daruwalla said; he guessed that being protected by the Goddess of Death and Destruction had a kind of karmic ring to it.

Finally, Farrokh found Vinod lying in the dirt under the bleachers; it appeared that the dwarf had fallen through the wooden planks, from perhaps the fourth or fifth row of seats. The roustabouts had cleared the crowd from only a small section of the audience area, below which Vinod lay, unmoving. But how and why the dwarf had landed there wasn’t immediately clear. Was there a clown act that required audience participation?

On the far side of the ring, a desultory gathering of dwarf clowns was bravely trying to keep the crowd’s attention; it was the familiar Farting Clown act—through a hole in the seat of his colorful pants, one dwarf kept “farting” talcum powder on the other dwarfs. They didn’t appear to be weakened or otherwise the worse for giving the doctor a Vacutainer of their blood, which Vinod had shamelessly entreated them to do; just as shamelessly, Dr. Daruwalla had lied to them—exactly as Vinod had advised him. The dwarfs’ blood would be used to give strength to a dying dwarf; Vinod had even compounded this fiction by telling his fellow clowns that he’d already been bled to the doctor’s satisfaction.

This time, mercifully, the ringmaster’s voice on the loudspeaker had not heralded the doctor’s arrival. Since Vinod lay under the bleacher seats, most of the crowd couldn’t see him. Farrokh knelt in the dirt, which was littered with the audience’s leavings: greasy paper cones, soft-drink bottles, peanut shells and discarded betel-nut pieces. On the underside of the bleachers, Farrokh could see the white stripes of lime paste that streaked the wooden planks; the paan users had wiped their fingers under their seats.

“I think I am not ending up here,” Vinod whispered to the doctor. “I think I am not dying—just changing.”

“Try not to move,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “Just tell me where you’re hurting.”

“I am not moving. I am not hurting,” the dwarf answered, “I am just not feeling my backside.”

Quite in character for a man of faith, the dwarf lay stoically suffering with his trident hands crossed upon his chest. He complained later that no one had dared to approach him, except a vendor—a channa-walla with his tray of nuts around his neck. Vinod had told the vendor about the numbness in his backside; hence the ringmaster assumed that the dwarf had broken his neck or his back. Vinod thought that someone should at least have talked to him or listened to the story of his life; someone should have held his head or offered him water until the stretcher bearers in their dirty-white dhotis came for him.

“This is Shiva—this is being his business,” the dwarf told Dr. Daruwalla. “This is change—not death, I think. If Durga is doing this, then okay—I am dying. But I think I am merely changing.”

“Let’s hope so,” Dr. Daruwalla replied; he made Vinod grip his fingers. Then the doctor touched the backs of Vinod’s legs.

“I am feeling you only a little,” the dwarf responded.

“I’m touching you only a little,” Farrokh explained.

“This is meaning I am not dying,” said the dwarf. “This is merely the gods advising me.”

“What are they telling you?” the doctor asked.

“They are saying I am ready to leave the circus,” Vinod answered. “At least this circus.”

Slowly, the faces from the Great Blue Nile gathered around them. The ringmaster, the boneless girls and the plastic ladies—even the lion tamer, who toyed with his whip. But the doctor wouldn’t allow the stretcher bearers to move the dwarf until someone explained how Vinod had been injured. Vinod believed that only the other dwarfs could describe the accident properly; for this reason, the Farting Clown act had to be halted. By now the act had deteriorated in the usual fashion: the offending dwarf was farting talcum powder into the front-row seats. Since the front row of the audience was chiefly populated with children, the farting was considered no great offense. However, the crowd was already dispersing; the Farting Clown act was never funny for very long. The Great Blue Nile had exhausted its entire repertoire in a half-successful effort to keep the audience seated until the doctor arrived.