John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“In mine, too,” Farrokh replied.

“I don’t know how the boy manages to sleep through all the biting and crawling!” the scholastic said.

“There are probably a million fewer things here than he’s used to in Bombay,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

The night sky was yielding to the dawn; soon the sky would be the same milky-tea color as the ground. Against such gray-brown tones, the white of the missionary’s new bandages was startling—his mittened hand, his wrapped neck, his patched ear.

“You’re quite a sight,” the doctor told him.

“You should see yourself,” the missionary replied. “Have you slept at all?”

Since the children were sleeping so soundly—and they’d only recently fallen asleep—the two men decided to take a tour of the town. After all, Mr. Das had warned them not to come to the circus too early, or else they’d interrupt the television watching. It being a Sunday, the doctor presumed that the televisions in all the troupe tents would be tuned to the Mahabharata; the popular Hindu epic had been broadcast every Sunday morning for more than a year—altogether, there were 93 episodes, each an hour long, and the great journey to the gates of heaven (where the epic ends) wouldn’t be over until the coming summer. It was the world’s most successful soap opera, depicting religion as heroic action; it was a legend with countless homilies, not to mention blindness and illegitimate births, battles and women-stealing. A record number of robberies had occurred during the broadcasts because the thieves knew that almost everyone in India would be glued to the TV. The missionary would be consumed with Christian envy, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

In the lobby, the Muslim boy was no longer eating to the Qawwali on the radio; the religious verses had put him to sleep. There was no need to wake him. In the driveway of the Government Circuit House, a half-dozen three-wheeled rickshaws were parked for the night; their drivers, all but one, were asleep in the passenger seats. The one driver who was awake was finishing his prayers when the doctor and the missionary hired his services. Through the sleeping town, they rode in the rickshaw; such peacefulness was improbable in Bombay.

By the Junagadh railroad station, they saw a yellow shack where several early risers were renting bicycles. They passed a coconut plantation. They saw a sign to the zoo, with a leopard on it. They passed a mosque, a hospital, the Hotel Relief, a vegetable market and an old fort; they saw two temples, two water tanks, some mango groves and what Dr. Daruwalla said was a baobab tree—Martin Mills said it wasn’t. Their driver took them to a teak forest. This was the start of the climb up Girnar Hill, the driver told them; from this point on, they would have to proceed on foot. It was a 600-meter ascent up 10,000 stone steps; it would take them about two hours, their driver said.

“Why on earth does he think we want to climb ten thousand steps for two hours?” Martin asked Farrokh. But when the doctor explained that the hill was sacred to the Jains, the Jesuit wanted to climb it.

“It’s just a bunch of temples!” Dr. Daruwalla cried. The place would probably be crawling with sadhus, practicing yoga. There would be unappetizing refreshment stalls and scavenging monkeys and the repugnant evidence of human feces along the way. (There would be eagles soaring overhead, their rickshaw driver informed them.)

There was no stopping the Jesuit from his holy climb; the doctor wondered if the arduous trek was a substitute for Mass. The climb took them barely an hour and a half, largely because the scholastic walked so fast. There were monkeys nearby, and these doubtless made the missionary walk faster; after his chimp experience, Martin was wary of ape-related animals—even small ones. They saw only one eagle. They passed several sadhus, who were climbing up the holy hill as the doctor and the Jesuit were walking down. It was too early for most of the refreshment stalls to be open; at one stall, they split an orange soda between them. The doctor had to agree that the marble temples near the summit were impressive, especially the largest and the oldest, which was a Jain temple from the 12th century.

By the time they descended, they were both panting, and Dr. Daruwalla remarked that his knees were killing him; no religion was worth 10,000 steps, Farrokh said. The occasional encounters with human feces had depressed him, and during the entire hike he’d worried that their driver would abandon them and they’d be forced to walk back to town. If Farrokh had tipped the driver too much before their climb, there would be no incentive for the driver to stay; if Farrokh had tipped him too little, the driver would be too insulted to wait for them.

“It will be a miracle if our driver hasn’t absconded,” Farrokh told Martin. But their driver was not only waiting for them; as they came upon him, they saw that the faithful man was cleaning his rickshaw.

“You really should restrict your use of this word ‘miracle,’” the missionary said; his neck bandage was beginning to unravel because the hike had made him sweat.

It was time to wake the children and take them to the circus. It vexed Farrokh that Martin Mills had waited until now to say the obvious. The scholastic would say it only once. “Dear God,” the Jesuit said, “I hope we’re doing the right thing.”

For weeks after the unusual foursome had departed from the Government Circuit House in Junagadh, the rabies vaccine and the vial of immune globulin, which Dr. Daruwalla had forgotten, remained in the lobby refrigerator. One night, the Muslim boy who regularly ate the saffron-colored yogurt remembered that the unclaimed package was the doctor’s medicine; everyone was afraid to touch it, but someone mustered the courage and threw it out. As for the one sock and the lone left-footed sandal, which the elephant boy had intentionally left behind, these were donated to the town hospital, although it was improbable that anyone there could use them. At the circus, Ganesh knew, neither the sock nor the sandal would be of any value to him; they weren’t necessary for a cook’s helper, or for a skywalker.

The cripple was a barefoot boy when he limped into the ringmaster’s troupe tent on Sunday morning; it was still before 10:00, and Mr. and Mrs. Das (and at least a dozen child acrobats) were sitting cross-legged on the rugs, watching the Mahabharata on TV. Despite their hike up Girnar Hill, the doctor and the missionary had brought the children to the circus too early. No one greeted them, which made Madhu instantly awkward; she bumped into a bigger girl, who still paid no attention to her. Mrs. Das, without taking her eyes from the television, waved both her arms—a confusing signal. Did she mean for them to go away or should they sit down? The ringmaster cleared up the matter. “Sit—anywhere!” Mr. Das commanded.

Ganesh and Madhu were immediately riveted to the TV; the seriousness of the Mahabharata was obvious to them. Even beggars knew the Sunday-morning routine; they often watched the program through storefront windows. Sometimes people without televisions assembled quietly outside the open windows of those apartments where the TV was on; it didn’t matter if they couldn’t see the screen—they could still hear the battles and the singing. Child prostitutes, too, the doctor assumed, were familiar with the famous show. Only Martin Mills was perplexed by the visible reverence in the troupe tent; the zealot failed to recognize that everyone’s attention had been captured by a religious epic.

“Is this a popular musical?” the Jesuit whispered to Dr. Daruwalla.