John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“Well, I can think of something to say,” the scholastic said; he’d been politely waiting for Dr. Daruwalla to begin, but he hadn’t waited long.

“Very well—go ahead,” the doctor replied.

“I think that you shouldn’t go witch-hunting for homosexuals,” the Jesuit began. “Not these days. Not when there is understandable sensitivity toward anything remotely homophobic. What do you have against homosexuals, anyway?”

“I have nothing against homosexuals. I’m not homophobic,” Dr. Daruwalla snapped. “And you haven’t exactly changed the subject!”

“You’re not exactly keeping your voice down,” Martin said.

At the airport in Rajkot, the loudspeaker system had progressed to a new test; more advanced counting skills were being demonstrated. “Eleven, twenty-two, thirty-three, forty-four, fifty-five,” said the tireless voice. There was no telling where this would lead; it hinted at infinity. The voice was without emotion; the counting was so mechanical that Dr. Daruwalla thought he might go mad. Instead of listening to the numbers or enduring the Jesuitical provocations of Martin Mills, Farrokh chose to tell a story. Although it was a true story—and, as the doctor would soon discover, painful to tell—it suffered from the disadvantage that the storyteller had never told it before; even true stories are improved by revision. But the doctor hoped that his tale would illustrate how the missionary’s allegations of homophobia were false, for Dr. Daruwalla’s favorite colleague in Toronto was a homosexual. Gordon Macfarlane was also Farrokh’s best friend.

Unfortunately, the screenwriter began the story in the wrong place. Dr. Daruwalla should have started with his earliest acquaintance of Dr. Macfarlane, including how the two had concurred on the misuse of the word “gay”; that they’d generally agreed with the findings of Mac’s boyfriend, the gay geneticist—regarding the biology of homosexuality—was also interesting. Had Dr. Daruwalla started with a discussion of this subject, he might not have prejudiced Martin Mills against him. But, at the airport in Rajkot, he’d made the mistake of inserting Dr. Macfarlane in the form of a flashback—as if Mac were only a minor character and not a friend who was often foremost on Farrokh’s mind.

He’d begun with the wrong story, about the time he’d been abducted by a crazed cab driver, for Farrokh’s training as a writer of action films had preconditioned him to begin any story with the most violent action he could imagine (or, in this case, remember). But to begin with an episode of racial abuse was misleading to the missionary, who concluded that Farrokh’s friendship with Gordon Macfarlane was secondary to the doctor’s outrage at his own mistreatment as an Indian in Toronto. This was inept storytelling, for Farrokh had meant only to convey how his mistreatment as an obvious immigrant of color in Canada had further solidified his friendship with a homosexual, who was no stranger to discrimination of another kind.

It was a Friday in the spring; many of Farrokh’s colleagues left their offices early on Friday afternoons because they were cottagers, but the Daruwallas enjoyed their weekends in Toronto—their second home was in Bombay. Farrokh had had a cancellation; hence he was free to leave early—otherwise, he would have asked Macfarlane for a ride home or called a cab. Mac also spent his weekends in Toronto and kept late office hours on Friday.

Since it wasn’t yet rush hour, Farrokh thought he’d walk for a while and then hail a taxi from the street, probably in front of the museum. For some years he’d avoided the subway; an uncomfortable racial incident had happened there. Oh, there’d been shouts from the occasional passing car—no one had ever called him a Parsi; in Toronto, few people knew what a Parsi was. What they called out was “Paki bastard!” or “Wog!” or “Babu!” or “Go home!” His pale-brown coloring and jet-black hair made it difficult for them; he wasn’t as identifiable as many Indians. Sometimes they called him an Arab—twice he’d been called a Jew. It was his Persian ancestry; he could pass for a Middle Easterner. But whoever the shouters were, they knew he was foreign—racially different.

Once he’d even been called a Wop! At the time, he’d wondered what sort of idiot could mistake him for an Italian. Now he knew that it wasn’t what he was that bothered the shouters; it was only that he wasn’t one of them. But most often the theme of the slurs subscribed to that view of him which can only clumsily be expressed as “an immigrant of color.” In Canada, it seemed, the prejudice against the immigrant composition of his features was as strong as whatever prejudice existed of the of-color kind.

He stopped taking the subway after an episode with three teenage boys. At first, they hadn’t seemed so threatening—more mischievous. There was a hint of menace only because they sat so deliberately close to him; there were many other places for them to sit. One sat on either side of him, the third across the aisle. The boy to the doctor’s left nudged his arm. “We’ve got a bet going,” the boy said. “What are you?”

Dr. Daruwalla realized later that the only reason he’d found them unthreatening was that they wore their school blazers and ties. After the incident, he could have called their school; he never did.

“I said what are you?” the boy repeated. That was the first moment Farrokh felt threatened.

“I’m a doctor,” Dr. Daruwalla replied.

The boys on either side of him looked decidedly hostile; it was the boy across the aisle who saved him. “My dad’s a doctor,” the boy stupidly remarked.

“Are you going to be a doctor, too?” Farrokh asked him.

The other two got up; they pulled the third boy along with them.

“Fuck you,” the first boy said to Farrokh, but the doctor knew this was a harmless bomb—already defused.

He never took the subway again. But after his worst episode, the subway incident seemed mild. After his worst episode, Farrokh was so upset, he couldn’t remember whether the taxi driver had pulled over before or after the intersection of University and Gerrard; either way, he’d just left the hospital and he was daydreaming. What was odd, he remembered, was that the driver already had a passenger, and that the passenger was riding in the front seat. The driver said, “Don’t mind him. He’s just a friend with nothing to do.”

“I’m not a fare,” the driver’s friend said.

Later, Farrokh remembered only that it wasn’t one of Metro’s taxis or one of Beck’s—the two companies he most often called. It was probably what they call a gypsy cab.

“I said where are you going?” the driver asked Dr. Daruwalla.

“Home,” Farrokh replied. (It struck him as pointless to add that he’d intended to walk for a while. Here was a taxi. Why not take it?)

“Where’s ‘home’?” the friend in the front seat asked.

“Russell Hill Road, north of St. Clair—just north of Lonsdale,” the doctor answered; he’d stopped walking—the taxi had stopped, too. “Actually, I was going to stop at the beer store—and then go home,” Farrokh added.

“Get in, if you want,” the driver said.

Dr. Daruwalla didn’t feel anxious until he was settled in the back seat and the taxi began to move. The friend in the front seat belched once, sharply, and the driver laughed. The windshield visor in front of the driver’s friend was pushed flat against the windshield, and the glove-compartment door was missing. Farrokh couldn’t remember if these were the places where the driver’s certification was posted—or was it usually on the Plexiglas divider between the front and back seats? (The Plexiglas divider itself was unusual; in Toronto, most taxis didn’t have these dividers.) Anyway, there was no visible driver’s certification inside the cab, and the taxi was already moving too fast for Dr. Daruwalla to get out—maybe at a red light, the doctor thought. But there were no red lights for a while and the taxi ran the first red light it came to; that was when the driver’s friend in the front seat turned around and faced Farrokh.