John Irving - A Son of the Circus

The discussion of whether the chimp attack had been racially motivated or sexually inspired, or both, continued throughout the late-evening show. Martin Mills refused to allow Dr. Daruwalla to attend to his wounds until the performance was concluded; the Jesuit insisted that the children would learn a valuable lesson from his stoicism, which the doctor regarded as a stupid stoicism of the show-must-go-on variety. Both Madhu and Ganesh were distracted by the missionary’s missing earlobe and the other gory evidence of the savage biting that the zealot had suffered; Madhu hardly watched the circus at all. Farrokh, however, paid close attention. The doctor was content to let the missionary bleed. Dr. Daruwalla didn’t want to miss the performance.

The better acts had been borrowed from the Great Royal—in particular, an item called Bicycle Waltz, for which the band played “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” A thin, muscular woman of an obvious sinewy strength performed the Skywalk at a fast, mechanical pace. The audience was unfrightened for her; even without a safety net, there was no palpable fear that she could fall. While Suman looked beautiful and vulnerable—as could be expected of a young woman hanging upside down at 80 feet—the skywalker at the Great Blue Nile resembled a middle-aged robot. Her name was Mrs. Bhagwan, and Farrokh recognized her as the knife thrower’s assistant; she was also his wife.

In the knife-throwing item, Mrs. Bhagwan was spread-eagled on a wooden wheel; the wheel was painted as a target, with Mrs. Bhagwan’s belly covering the bull’s-eye. Throughout the act, the wheel revolved faster and faster, and Mr. Bhagwan hurled knives at his wife. When the wheel was stopped, the knives were stuck every which way in the wood; not even the crudest pattern could be discerned, except that there were no knives sticking in Mrs. Bhagwan’s spread-eagled body.

Mr. Bhagwan’s other specialty was the item called Elephant Passing, which almost every circus in India performs. Mr. Bhagwan lies in the arena, sandwiched between mattresses that are then covered with a plank; an elephant walks this plank, over Mr. Bhagwan’s chest. Farrokh observed that this was the only act that didn’t prompt Ganesh to say he could learn it, although being crippled wouldn’t have interfered with the boy’s ability to lie under a passing elephant.

Once, when Mr. Bhagwan had been stricken with acute diarrhea, Mrs. Bhagwan had replaced her husband in the Elephant Passing item. But the woman was too thin for Elephant Passing. There was a story that she’d bled internally for days and that, even after she’d recovered, she was never the same again; both her diet and her disposition had been ruined by the elephant.

Of Mrs. Bhagwan, Farrokh understood that her version of the Skywalk and her passive contribution to the knife-throwing act were one and the same; it was less a skill she had learned, or even a drama to be enacted, than a mechanical submission to her fate. Her husband’s errant knife or the fall from 80 feet—they were one and the same. Mrs. Bhagwan was a robot, Dr. Daruwalla believed. Possibly the Elephant Passing had done this to her.

Mr. Das confided this feeling to Farrokh. When the ringmaster briefly joined them in the audience—to apologize for Gautam’s rude attack, and to add his own ideas to the doctor’s and the Jesuit’s speculations regarding the ape’s racism and/or sexual jealousy—Mr. Das attributed Mrs. Bhagwan’s lackluster performance to her elephant episode.

“But in other ways it’s better since she’s been married,” Mr. Das admitted. Before Mrs. Bhagwan’s marriage, she’d complained bitterly about her menstrual cycle—how hanging upside down when she was bleeding was unusually uncomfortable. “And before she was married, of course it wasn’t proper for her to use a tampon,” Mr. Das added.

“No, of course not,” said Dr. Daruwalla, who was appalled.

When there were lulls in the acts, which there often were—or when the band was resting between items—they could hear the sounds of the chimp being beaten. Kunal was “disciplining” Gautam, Mr. Das explained. In some of the towns where the Great Blue Nile played, there might be other white males in the audience; they couldn’t allow Gautam to think that white males were fair game.

“No, of course not,” said Dr. Daruwalla. The big ape’s screams and the sounds of Kunal’s stick were carried to them in the still night air. When the band played, no matter how badly, the doctor and the missionary and the children were grateful.

If Gautam was rabid, the ape would die; better to beat him, in case he wasn’t rabid and he lived—this was Kunal’s philosophy. As for treating Martin Mills, Dr. Daruwalla knew it was wise to assume the chimp was rabid. But, for now, the children were laughing.

When one of the lions pissed violently on its stool and then stamped in the puddle, both Madhu and Ganesh laughed. Yet Farrokh felt obliged to remind the elephant boy that washing this same stool might be his first job.

There was a Peacock Dance, of course—two little girls played the peacocks, as always—and the screenwriter thought that his Pinky character should be in a peacock costume when the escaped lion kills her. Farrokh thought it would be best if the lion kills her because the lion thinks she is a peacock. More poignant that way… more sympathy for the lion. Thus would the screenwriter act out his old presentiment—that the restless lions in the holding tunnel were restless because their act was next and the peacock girls were temptingly in sight. When Acid Man applied his acid to the locked cage, the lion that got loose would be in an agitated, antipeacock mood. Poor Pinky!

There was an encore to the Skywalk item. Mrs. Bhagwan didn’t climb all the way to the top of the tent to repeat the Skywalk, which had left the audience largely unimpressed the first time. She climbed to the top of the tent only to repeat her descent on the dental trapeze. It was the dental trapeze that the audience had liked; more specifically, it was Mrs. Bhagwan’s neck that they had liked. She had an extremely muscular neck, overdeveloped from all her dental-trapezing, and when she descended—twirling, from the top of the tent, with the trapeze clamped tightly in her teeth—her neck muscles bulged, the spotlight turning from green to gold.

“I could do that,” Ganesh whispered to Dr. Daruwalla. “I have a strong neck. And strong teeth,” he added.

“And I suppose you could hang, and walk, upside down,” the doctor replied. “You have to hold both feet rigid, at right angles—your ankles support all your weight.” As soon as he spoke, Farrokh realized his error. The cripple’s crushed foot was permanently fused at his ankle—a perfect right angle. It would be no problem for him to keep that foot in a rigid right-angle position.

There was an idiotic finale in progress in the ring—chimps and dwarf clowns riding mopeds. The lead chimp was dressed as a Gujarati milkman, which the local crowd loved. The elephant-footed boy was smiling serenely in the semidarkness.

“So it would be only my good foot that I would have to make stronger—is this what you are telling me?” the cripple asked.

“What I’m telling you, Ganesh, is that your job is with the lion piss and the elephant shit. And maybe, if you’re lucky,” Farrokh told the boy, “you’ll get to work with the food.”

Now the ponies and the elephants entered the ring, as in the beginning, and the band played loudly; it was impossible to hear Gautam being beaten. Not once had Madhu said, “I could do that”—not about a single act—but here was the elephant-footed boy, already imagining that he could learn to walk on the sky.