John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“That’s what the witness said, mate,” the interpreter replied. He added, “I don’t care to have my English corrected by a bloody wog.”

“It isn’t your English that I’m correcting, sir,” Farrokh said. “It’s your German.”

“It’s the same word in German, mate,” the British interpreter said. “The Hausfrau called her a bloody giraffe! ”

“Nur Umgangssprache,” Farrokh Daruwalla said. “It’s merely colloquial speech; giraffe is Berliner slang—for a prostitute. The witness mistook Fräulein Hellein for a whore.”

Farrokh was almost relieved that his assailant was British and that the term “wog”—at least the correct racial slur—was used. Doubtless it would have unnerved him to have been mistaken for a Hungarian Gypsy twice . And by his bold interference, young Daruwalla had saved the Allied Council from committing an embarrassing error; it was, therefore, never entered into the official minutes that a witness to Fräulein Hellein’s rape and murder and decapitation had mistaken the victim for a giraffe. On top of everything else that the deceased had suffered, she was spared this further outrage.

But when young Farrokh Daruwalla returned to India in the fall of 1955, this episode was as much a part of history as he felt himself to be; he didn’t come home a confident young man. Granted, he had not spent the entire eight years outside of India, but a brief visit in the middle of his undergraduate studies (in the summer of 1949) hardly prepared him for the confusion he would encounter six years later—when he came “home” to an India that would forever make him feel like a foreigner.

He was used to feeling like a foreigner; Vienna had prepared him for that. And his several pleasant visits to London to see his sister were marred by his one trip to London that coincided with his father’s invitation to address the Royal College of Surgeons—a great honor. It was the obsession of Indians, and of former British colonies in general, to become Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons—old Lowji was extremely proud of his “F,” as it was called. The “F” would mean less to the younger Dr. Daruwalla, who would also become an F.R.C.S.—of Canada. But on the occasion of Farrokh attending his father’s lecture in London, old Lowji chose to pay tribute to the American founder of the British Orthopedic Association—the celebrated Dr. Robert Bayley Osgood, one of the few Americans to captivate this British institution—and it was during Lowji’s speech (which would go on to emphasize the problems of infantile paralysis in India) that young Farrokh overheard a most disparaging remark. It would keep him from ever considering a life in London.

“What monkeys they are,” said a florid orthopedist to a fellow Brit. “They are the most presumptuous imitators. They observe us for all of five minutes, then they think they can do it, too.”

Young Farrokh sat paralyzed in a room of men fascinated by the diseases of bones and joints; he couldn’t move, he couldn’t speak. This wasn’t a simple matter of mistaking a prostitute for a giraffe. His own medical studies had just begun; he wasn’t sure if he understood what the “it” referred to. Farrokh was so unsure of himself, he first supposed that the “it” was something medical—some actual knowledge—but before his father’s speech had ended, Farrokh understood. “It” was only Englishness, “it” was merely being them . Even in a gathering of what his father boastfully called “fellow professionals,” the “it” was all they’d noticed—simply what of their Englishness had been successfully or unsuccessfully copied. And for the remainder of old Lowji’s exploration of infantile paralysis, young Farrokh was ashamed that he saw his ambitious father as the British saw him: a smug ape who’d succeeded in imitating them . It was the first time Farrokh realized how it was possible to love Englishness and yet loathe the British.

And so, before he ruled out India as a country where he could live, he’d already ruled out England. It was the summer of ’49, during an at-home stay in Bombay, when young Farrokh Daruwalla suffered the experience that would (for him) rule out living in the United States, too. It was the same summer that another of his father’s more embarrassing weaknesses was revealed to him. Farrokh discounted the continuous discomfort of his father’s spinal deformity; this was not in the category of a weakness of any kind—on the contrary, Lowji’s hump was a source of inspiration. But now, in addition to Lowji’s overstatements of a political and religious nature, the senior Daruwalla unveiled a taste for romantic movies. Farrokh was already familiar with his father’s unbridled passion for Waterloo Bridge; tears sprang to his father’s eyes at the mere mention of Vivien Leigh, and no concept in storytelling struck old Lowji with such tragic force as those twists of fate that could cause a woman, both good and pure, to fall to the lowly rank of prostitute.

But in the summer of ’49, young Farrokh was quite unprepared to find his father so infatuated with the commonplace hysteria of a film-in-progress. To make matters worse, it was a Hollywood film—of no special distinction beyond that endless capacity for compromise which was the principal gift of the film’s participants. Farrokh was appalled to witness his father’s slavishness before everyone who was even marginally involved.

One shouldn’t be surprised that Lowji was vulnerable to movie people, or that the presumed glamour of postwar Hollywood was magnified by its considerable distance from Bombay. These particular lowlifes who’d invaded Maharashtra for the purpose of moviemaking had sizably damaged reputations—even in Hollywood, where shame is seldom suffered for long—but how could the senior Daruwalla have known this? Like many physicians the world over, Lowji imagined that he could have been a great writer—if medicine hadn’t attracted him first—and he further deluded himself that a second career opportunity lay ahead of him, perhaps in his retirement. He supposed that, with more time on his hands, it would take no great effort to write a novel—and surely less to write a screenplay. Although the latter assumption is quite true, even the effort of a screenplay would prove too great for old Lowji; it was never necessarily the power of his imagination that gave him great technique and foresight as a surgeon.

Sadly, a natural arrogance often attends the ability to heal and cure. Renowned in Bombay—even recognized abroad for his accomplishments in India—Dr. Lowji Daruwalla nevertheless craved intimate contact with the so-called creative process. In the summer of 1949, with his highly principled younger son as a witness, the senior Daruwalla got what he desired.

Often when a man of vision and character falls among the unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity, there is an intermediary, a petty villain in the guise of a matchmaker—one skilled in currying favor for small but gratifying gain. In this instance, she was a Malabar Hill lady of imposing wealth and only slightly less imposing presence; although she wouldn’t have categorized herself as a maiden aunt, she played this role in the lives of her undeserving nephews—the two scoundrel sons of her impoverished brother. She’d also suffered the tragic history of having been jilted by the same man on two different wedding days, a condition that prompted Dr. Lowji Daruwalla to privately refer to her as “the Miss Havisham of Bombay—times two.”

Her name was Promila Rai, and prior to her insidious role of introducing Lowji to the movie vermin, her communications with the Daruwalla family had been merely rude. She’d once sought the senior Daruwalla’s advice regarding the inexplicable hairlessness of the younger of her loathsome two nephews—an odd boy named Rahul Rai. At the time of the doctor’s examination, which Lowji had at first resisted conducting on the grounds that he was an orthopedist, Rahul was only 8 or 10. The doctor found nothing “inexplicable” about his hairlessness. The absence of body hair wasn’t that unusual; the lad had bushy eyebrows and a thick head of hair. Yet Miss Promila Rai found old Lowji’s analysis lacking. “Well, after all, you’re only a joint doctor,” she said dismissively, to the orthopedist’s considerable irritation.