John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Later, the doctor would think that this was probably what terrorists said to unsuspecting passengers to whom they’d handed a bomb; just then the metal detector sounded, and Dr. Daruwalla was quickly surrounded by frightened men with guns. They asked him what was wrapped up in the newspapers. What could he tell them? A present from a dwarf? They made the doctor unwrap the newspapers while they stood at some distance; they looked less ready to shoot than to flee—to “abscond,” as The Times of India would report the incident. But there was no incident.

Inside the newspapers was a brass plaque, a big brass sign; Dr. Daruwalla recognized it immediately. Vinod had removed the offensive message from the elevator of Farrokh’s apartment building on Marine Drive.

Julia told Farrokh that Vinod’s gift was “touching,” but although the security officers were relieved, they questioned the doctor about the source of the sign. They wanted to be sure that it hadn’t been stolen from an historically protected building—that it was stolen from somewhere else didn’t trouble them. Perhaps they didn’t like the message any better than Farrokh and Vinod had liked it.

“A souvenir,” Dr. Daruwalla assured them. To the doctor’s surprise, the security officers let him keep the sign. It was cumbersome to carry it on board the plane, and even in first class the flight attendants were bitchy about stowing it out of everyone’s way. First they made him unwrap it (again); then he was left with the unwanted newspapers.

“Remind me never to fly Air India,” the doctor complained to his wife; he announced this loudly enough for the nearest flight attendant to hear him.

“I remind you every time,” Julia replied, also loudly enough. To any fellow first-class passenger overhearing them, they might have seemed the epitome of a wealthy couple who commonly abuse those lesser people whose chore it is to wait on them. But this impression of the Daruwallas would be false; they were simply of a generation that reacted strongly to rudeness from anyone—they were well enough educated and old enough to be intolerant of intolerance. But what hadn’t occurred to Farrokh or Julia was that perhaps the flight attendants were ill mannered about stowing the elevator sign not because of the inconvenience but because of the message; possibly the flight attendants were also incensed that servants weren’t allowed to use the lift unless accompanied by children.

It was one of those little misunderstandings that no one would ever solve; it was a suitably sour note on which to leave one’s country for the last time, Farrokh thought. Nor was he pleased by The Times of India , with which Vinod had wrapped the stolen sign. Of great prominence in the news lately was the report of food poisoning in East Delhi. Two children had died and eight others were hospitalized after they’d consumed some “stale” food from a garbage dump in the Shakurpur area. Dr. Daruwalla had been following this report with the keenest attention; he knew that the children hadn’t died from eating “stale” food—the stupid newspaper meant “rotten” or “contaminated.”

As far as Farrokh was concerned, the airplane couldn’t take off fast enough. Like Dhar, the doctor preferred the aisle seat because he planned to drink beer and he would need to pee; Julia would sit by the window. It would be almost 10:00 in the morning, London time, before they landed in England. It would be dark all the way to Delhi. Literally, before he even left, the doctor thought he’d already seen the last of India.

Although Martin Mills might be tempted to say that it was God’s will (that Dr. Daruwalla was saying good-bye to Bombay), the doctor wouldn’t have agreed. It wasn’t God’s will; it was India, which wasn’t for everybody—as Father Julian, unbeknownst to Dr. Daruwalla, had said. It was not God’s will, Farrokh felt certain; it was just India, which was more than enough.

When Air India 185 lifted off the runway in Sahar, Dhar’s thug taxi driver was again cruising the streets of Bombay; the dwarf was still crying—he was too upset to sleep. Vinod had returned to town too late to catch the last show at the Wetness Cabaret, where he’d been hoping to get a glimpse of Madhu; he’d have to look for her another night. It depressed the dwarf to keep cruising the red-light district, although it was a night like any night—Vinod might have found and saved a stray. At 3:00 A.M., the dwarf felt that the brothels resembled a failed circus. The ex-clown imagined the cages of lifeless animals—the rows of tents, full of exhausted and injured acrobats. He drove on.

It was almost 4:00 in the morning when Vinod parked the Ambassador in the alley alongside the Daruwallas’ apartment building on Marine Drive. No one saw him slip into the building, but the dwarf roamed around the lobby, breathing heavily, until he had all the first-floor dogs barking. Then Vinod swaggered back to his taxi; he felt only mildly uplifted by the insults of the screaming residents, who’d earlier been disturbed by the report that their all-important elevator sign had been stolen.

Wherever the sad dwarf drove, the life of the city seemed to be eluding him; still, he wouldn’t go home. In the predawn light, Vinod stopped the Ambassador to joke with a traffic policeman in Mazagaon.

“Where is the traffic being?” Vinod asked the constable. The policeman had his baton out, as if there were a crowd or a riot to direct. No one was anywhere around: not another car, not a single bicycle, not one pedestrian. Of the sidewalk sleepers, the few who were awake hadn’t risen beyond a sitting position or from their knees. The constable recognized Dhar’s thug driver—every policeman knew Vinod. The constable said there’d been a disturbance—a religious procession streaming out of Sophia Zuber Road—but Vinod had missed it. The abandoned traffic policeman said he’d be obliged to the dwarf if Vinod would drive him the length of Sophia Zuber Road, just to prove that there was no more trouble. And so, with the lonely constable in the car, Vinod cautiously proceeded through one of Bombay’s better slums.

There wasn’t much to see; more sidewalk sleepers were waking up, but the slum dwellers were still sleeping. At that part of Sophia Zuber Road where Martin Mills, almost a month ago, had encountered the mortally wounded cow, Vinod and the traffic policeman saw the tail end of a procession—a few sadhus chanting, the usual flower flingers. There was a huge clotted bloodstain in the gutter of the road, where the cow had finally died; the earlier disturbance, the religious procession, had been merely the removal of the dead cow’s body. Some zealots had managed to keep the cow alive all this time.

This zeal was also not God’s will, Dr. Daruwalla would have said; this doomed effort was also “just India,” which was more than enough.

On a Friday in May, more than two years after the Daruwallas had returned to Toronto from Bombay, Farrokh felt an urge to show Little India to his friend Macfarlane. They took Mac’s car. It was their lunch hour, but the traffic on Gerrard was so congested, they soon realized they wouldn’t have much time for lunch; they might barely have time to get to Little India and back to the hospital.

They’d been spending their lunch hour together for the past 18 months, ever since Macfarlane had tested HIV-positive; Mac’s boyfriend—Dr. Duncan Frasier, the gay geneticist—had died of AIDS over a year ago. As for debating the merits of his dwarf-blood project, Farrokh had found no one to replace Frasier, and Mac hadn’t found a new boyfriend.