John Irving - A Son of the Circus

It was unthinkable to Dr. Daruwalla that an extortionist and a murderer could so swiftly and concretely disrupt the most cherished aspect of the character of the Duckworth Club, which (in his view) was a deep, almost remote sense of privacy, as if Duckworthians were afforded the luxury of not actually living in Bombay.

“Dear boy,” said the doctor, “what will you do?”

Dhar’s answer shouldn’t have surprised Dr. Daruwalla as forcefully as it did; the doctor had heard the response many times, in every Inspector Dhar movie. After all, Farrokh had written the response. “What will I do?” Dhar asked himself aloud. “Find out who it is and get them.”

“Don’t speak to me in character!” Dr. Daruwalla said sharply. “You’re not in a movie now!”

“I’m always in a movie,” Dhar snapped. “I was born in a movie! Then I was almost immediately put into another movie, wasn’t I?”

Since Dr. Daruwalla and his wife thought they were the only people in Bombay who knew exactly where the younger man had come from and everything about who he was, it was the doctor’s turn to keep quiet. In our hearts, Dr. Daruwalla thought, there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners—even in their native lands. In our hearts, Farrokh knew, there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate their loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity—Dr. Daruwalla felt certain of that. However, the doctor was unsure if he’d been thinking of Dhar or of himself.

Then Farrokh realized he was alone at the table; Dhar had departed as eerily as he’d arrived. The glint of Mr. Sethna’s silver serving tray caught Dr. Daruwalla’s eye, reminding him of that shiny something which the crow had held so briefly in its beak.

The old steward reacted to Dr. Daruwalla’s recognition as if summoned. “I’ll have a Kingfisher, please,” the doctor said.

The late-afternoon light cast longer and longer shadows in the Ladies’ Garden, and Dr. Daruwalla gloomily observed that the bright pink of the bougainvillea had turned a darker shade; it seemed to him that the flowers had a blood-red hue, although this was an exaggeration—quite characteristic of the creator of Inspector Dhar. In reality, the bougainvillea was as pink ( and as white) as before.

Later, Mr. Sethna grew alarmed that the doctor hadn’t touched his favorite beer.

“Is there something wrong?” the old steward asked, his long finger indicating the Kingfisher lager.

“No, no—it’s not the beer!” Farrokh said; he took a swallow that gave him little comfort. “The beer is fine,” he said.

Old Mr. Sethna nodded as if he knew everything that was troubling Dr. Daruwalla; Mr. Sethna presumed to know such things routinely.

“I know, I know,” muttered the old Parsi. “The old days are gone—it’s not like the old days.”

Insipid truths were an area of Mr. Sethna’s expertise that Dr. Daruwalla found most irritating. The next thing you know, Farrokh thought, the tedious old fool will tell me that I’m not my esteemed late father. Truly, the steward seemed on the verge of making another observation when an unpleasant sound came from the dining room; it reached Mr. Sethna and Dr. Daruwalla in the Ladies’ Garden with the crass, attention-getting quality of a man cracking his knuckles.

Mr. Sethna went to investigate. Without moving from his chair, Farrokh already knew what was making the sound. It was the ceiling fan, the one the crow had landed on and used as a shitting platform. Perhaps the crow had bent the blade of the fan, or else the bird had knocked a screw loose; maybe the fan was operated by ball bearings running in a groove, and one of these was out of position, or if there was a ball-and-socket joint, it needed grease. The ceiling fan appeared to catch on something; it clicked as it turned. It faltered; it almost stopped but it kept turning. With each revolution, there was a snapping sound, as if the mechanism were about to grind to a halt.

Mr. Sethna stood under the fan, staring stupidly up at it. He probably doesn’t remember the shitting crow, Dr. Daruwalla thought. The doctor was readying himself to take charge of the situation when the unpleasant noise simply stopped. The ceiling fan turned freely, as before. Mr. Sethna looked all around, as if he weren’t sure how he’d arrived at this spot in the dining room. Then the steward’s gaze fixed upon the Ladies’ Garden, where Farrokh was still sitting. He’s not the man his father was, the old Parsi thought.

Dr. Lowji Daruwalla took a personal interest in the crippling conditions affecting children. As a child, he’d developed tuberculosis of the spine. Although he recovered sufficiently to become India’s most famous pioneer in orthopedic surgery, he always said it was his own experience with spinal deformity—the fatigue and the pain imposed on him—that made his commitment to the care of cripples so steadfast and long-enduring. “A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy,” Lowji said. He tended to speak in statements. As an adult, he would forever be recognized by the telltale gibbousness of Pott’s disease. All his life, Lowji was as humpbacked as a small, upright camel.

Is it any wonder that his son Farrokh felt inferior to such a commitment? He would enter his father’s field, but only as a follower; he would continue to pay his respects to India, but he’d always feel he was a mere visitor. Education and travel can be humbling; the younger Dr. Daruwalla took naturally to feelings of intellectual inferiority. Possibly Farrokh too simplistically attributed his alienation to the one conviction in his life that was as paralyzing as his conversion to Christianity: that he was utterly without a sense of place, that he was a man without a country, that there was nowhere he could go where he felt he belonged—except the circus and the Duckworth Club.

But what can be said about a man who keeps his needs and his obsessions largely to himself? When a man expresses what he’s afraid of, his fears and longings undergo revision in the telling and retelling—friends and family have their own ways of altering the material—and soon the so-called fears and longings become almost comfortable with overuse. But Dr. Daruwalla held his feelings inside himself. Not even his wife knew how out of it the doctor felt in Bombay—and how could she, if he wouldn’t tell her? Since Julia was Viennese, however little Dr. Daruwalla knew about India, he knew more than she did. And “at home” in Toronto, Farrokh allowed Julia to be the authority; she was the boss there. This was an easy privilege for the doctor to extend to his wife because she believed that he was in charge in Bombay. For so many years now, he’d got away with this.

Of course his wife knew about the screenplays—but only that he wrote them, not what he truly felt about them. Farrokh was careful to speak lightly of them to Julia. He was quite good at mocking them; after all, they were a joke to everyone else—it was easy for Farrokh to convince his wife that the Inspector Dhar movies were just a joke to him. More important, Julia knew how much Dhar (the dear boy) meant to him. So what if she had no idea how much the screenplays meant to Farrokh, too? And so these things, because they were so deeply concealed, were more important to Dr. Daruwalla than they should have been.