John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Nancy woke up about 8:00; she had a hangover, but Detective Patel didn’t hesitate to tell her what had happened. He could hear her being sick in the bathroom; he called the actor first, then the screenwriter. He told Dhar about the lip, but not the doctor; with Dr. Daruwalla, the deputy commissioner wanted to emphasize the importance of a good script for Dhar’s lunch with Mrs. Dogar. Patel told them both that he would have to arrest Rahul today; he hoped he had enough circumstantial evidence to arrest her. Whether or not he had enough evidence to keep her—that was another story. That was what he was counting on the actor and the screenwriter for: they had to make something happen over lunch.

Deputy Commissioner Patel was encouraged by one thing that the gullible surveillance officer had told him. After the disguised Mrs. Dogar had shuffled out of the taxi and into her house, the lights were turned on in a ground-floor room—not a bedroom—and these lights remained on well after daybreak. The deputy commissioner hoped that Rahul had been drawing.

As for Dr. Daruwalla, his first good night’s sleep—for five nights, and counting—had been interrupted rather early. He had no surgeries scheduled for New Year’s Day, and no office appointments, either; he’d been planning to sleep in. But upon hearing from Detective Patel, the screenwriter called John D. immediately. There was a lot to do before Dhar’s lunch at the Duckworth Club; there would be much rehearsing—some of it would be awkward, because Mr. Sethna would have to be involved. The deputy commissioner had already notified the old steward.

It was from John D. that Farrokh heard about Asha’s lower lip.

“Rahul must have been thinking of you!” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

“Well, we know she has a thing about biting,” Dhar told the doctor. “In all likelihood, it started with you.”

“What do you mean?” Dr. Daruwalla asked, for John D. hadn’t told him that Mrs. Dogar had confessed to gnawing on the doctor’s toe.

“It all started with the big toe of your right foot, in Goa,” John D. began. “That was Rahul who bit you. You were right all along—it was no monkey.”

That Monday, well before meat-feeding time at the Great Blue Nile Circus in Junagadh, the elephant-footed boy would wake up to the steady coughs of the lions; their low roars rose and fell as regularly as breathing. It was a cold morning in that part of Gujarat. For the first time in his life, Ganesh could see his own breath; the huffs of breath from the lions were like blasts of steam escaping from their cages.

The Muslims delivered the meat in a wooden wagon, dotted with flies; the entire floor of the wagon was lifted from the cart and placed on the ground between the cook’s tent and the big cats’ cages—the raw beef was piled on this slab of rough wood, which was the approximate size of a double door. Even in the cold morning air, the flies hovered over the meat, which Chandra sorted. Sometimes there was mutton mixed in with the beef, and the cook wanted to rescue it; mutton was too expensive for lions and tigers.

The big cats were bellowing now; they could smell the meat, and some of them could see the cook separating the choicer pieces of mutton. If the elephant boy was frightened by how savagely the lions and tigers devoured the raw beef, Dr. Daruwalla would never learn of it; nor would the doctor ever know if the sight of the lions slipping in the meat grease upset the cripple. At the circus, it was one of the few things that always upset the doctor.

That same Monday, someone proposed to marry Madhu. The proposal, as was only proper, was first offered to Mr. and Mrs. Das; the ringmaster and his wife were surprised. Not only had they not begun to train the girl, but, because Madhu was untrained, she wasn’t in evidence among the performers; yet the marriage proposal was offered by a gentleman who claimed to have been in the audience for the late-evening show on Sunday. Here he was, the following morning, professing his instant devotion!

The Bengali ringmaster and his wife had children of their own; their kids had rejected the circus life. But Mr. and Mrs. Das had trained many other children to be circus acrobats; they were kind to these adopted kids and especially protective of the girls. After all, when these girls were properly trained, they were of some value—not only to the circus. They had acquired a little glamour; they’d even earned some money, which they’d had no occasion to spend—hence the ringmaster and his wife were used to keeping dowries for them.

Mr. and Mrs. Das conscientiously advised the girls whether or not a marriage proposal was worthy of acceptance or negotiation, and they routinely gave up these adopted daughters—always to decent marriages, and often making their own contributions to the girls’ dowries. In many cases, the ringmaster and his wife had grown so fond of these children that it broke their hearts to see them go. Almost all the girls would eventually leave the circus; the few who stayed became trainers.

Madhu was very young and totally unproven, and she had no dowry. Yet here was a gentleman of means, well dressed, clearly a city person—he owned property and managed an entertainment business in Bombay—and he was offering Madhu a marriage proposal that Mr. and Mrs. Das found extremely generous; he would take the poor girl without a dowry. Doubtless, in these premarital negotiations, there would have been some substantive discussion of the remuneration that the ringmaster and his wife deserved, for (who knows?) Madhu might have become a star of the Great Blue Nile. From Mr. and Mrs. Das’s point of view, they were offered a sizable payment for a sullen girl who might never prove herself to be any kind of acrobat at all. It wasn’t as if they were being asked to part with a young woman they’d grown fond of; they’d barely had time to talk with Madhu.

It may have crossed the Bengalis’ minds to consult the doctor or the missionary; Mr. and Mrs. Das at least should have discussed the would-be marriage with Deepa, but the dwarf’s wife was still sick. So what if Deepa was the one who’d spotted Madhu as a future boneless girl? The dwarf’s wife was still confined to her tent. Moreover, the ringmaster held a grudge against Vinod. Mr. Das was envious of the dwarf’s car-driving business; since Vinod had left the Great Blue Nile, the dwarf hadn’t hesitated to exaggerate his success. And the ringmaster’s wife felt herself to be vastly superior to the dwarf’s wife; to consult with Deepa was beneath Mrs. Das—even if Deepa were healthy. Besides, Mrs. Das quickly persuaded her husband that Madhu’s marriage proposal was a good deal. (It was certainly a good deal for them.)

If Madhu wasn’t interested, they’d keep the silly child in the circus; but if the unworthy girl had the wisdom to recognize her good fortune, the ringmaster and his wife would let her go, with their blessings. As for the crippled brother, the gentleman from Bombay appeared to know nothing about him. Mr. and Mrs. Das felt some responsibility for the fact that the elephant-footed boy would be left on his own; they had considered it prudent to promise Dr. Daruwalla and Martin Mills that Ganesh would be given every chance to succeed. The ringmaster and his wife saw no reason to discuss Ganesh with Deepa; the cripple hadn’t been a discovery of hers—she’d only claimed to discover the boneless girl. And what if the dwarf’s wife had something contagious?

A phone call to the doctor or the missionary would have been an appreciated courtesy—if nothing more. But there were no telephones at the circus; a trip to either the post office or the telegraph office would have been required, and Madhu surprised the ringmaster and his wife by her immediate and unrestrained acceptance of the marriage proposal. She didn’t feel that the gentleman was too old for her, as Mr. Das had feared; nor was Madhu repelled by the gentleman’s physical appearance, which had been the primary concern of Mrs. Das. The ringmaster’s wife was repulsed by the gentleman’s disfiguring scar—some sort of burn, she supposed—but Madhu made no mention of it, nor did she otherwise seem to mind such a hideous flaw.