John Irving - A Son of the Circus

His voice-over says, “It was the third time I’d tailed her, but she was still crazy enough to think she could shake me.”

Dhar pauses again as the pretty girl, in her haste, collides with a heaped-up pile of mangoes. Dhar is enough of a gentleman to wait for the vendor to clear a path through the fallen fruit, but the next time he catches up with the woman, she’s dead. A bullet hole is smack between her wide-open eyes, which Dhar politely closes for her.

His voice-over says, “It’s a pity I wasn’t the only one tailing her. She had trouble shaking someone else, too.”

From his view of the younger Dr. Daruwalla in the Ladies’ Garden, old Mr. Sethna was sure he knew the source of the hatred he saw in the doctor’s eyes; the steward thought he knew the particular, long-ago vermin that the doctor was thinking of. But Mr. Sethna was unfamiliar with self-doubt and self-loathing. The old Parsi would never have imagined that Dr. Daruwalla was thinking about himself.

Farrokh was taking himself to task for leaving that crippled boy at Victoria Terminus, where he’d arrived; so many Bombay stories began at Victoria Terminus, but Dr. Daruwalla had been unable to imagine any story for that abandoned child. The doctor was still wondering what could happen to the boy after he came to Bombay. Anything and everything could happen, Farrokh knew; instead, the screenwriter had settled for Inspector Dhar, whose tough-guy talk was as unoriginal as the rest of him.

Dr. Daruwalla tried to save himself by thinking of a story with the innocence and purity of his favorite acts from the Great Royal Circus, but Farrokh couldn’t imagine a story as good as even the simplest of the so-called items that he loved. He couldn’t even think of a story as good as the daily routine of the circus. There were no wasted efforts in the course of the long day, which began with tea at 6:00 in the morning. The child performers and other acrobats did their strength and flexibility exercises and practiced their new items until 9:00 or 10:00, when they ate a light breakfast and cleaned their tents; in the rising heat, they sewed sequins on their costumes or they attended to other, almost motionless chores. There was no animal training from midmorning on; it was too hot for the big cats, and the horses and the elephants stirred up too much dust.

Through the middle of the day, the tigers and lions lolled in their cages with their tails and paws and even their ears sticking out between the bars, as if they hoped that these extremities might attract a breeze; only their tails moved, among an orchestra of flies. The horses remained standing—it was cooler than lying down—and two boys took turns dusting the elephants with a torn cloth sack that had once held onions or potatoes. Another boy watered the floor of the main tent with a hose; in the midday heat, this didn’t dampen the dust for long. The overall torpor affected even the chimpanzees, who stopped swinging from their cages; they still screamed occasionally—and they jumped up and down, as always. But if a dog so much as whined, not to mention barked, someone kicked it.

At noon, the animal trainers and the acrobats ate a big lunch; then they slept until midafternoon—their first performance always began after 3:00. The heat was still stultifying, and the motes of dust rose and sparkled like stars in the sunlight, which slanted through the vents in the main tent; in these harsh slashes of light, the dust appeared to swarm as intensely as the flies. In the breaks between their musical numbers, the band members passed a wet rag with which they wiped their brass instruments and, more often, their heads.

There was usually a sparse audience in attendance at the 3:30 performance. They were an odd mix of people too old for a full day’s work and preschool children; in both cases, their alertness to the performances of the acrobats and the animals was below average, as if their limited powers of concentration were further impaired by the lingering heat and dust. Over the years, Dr. Daruwalla had never sensed that the 3:30 performance itself was ever a diminished effort; the acrobats and the animal trainers, and even the animals, were as steady as they had to be. It was the audience that was a little off.

For this reason, Farrokh preferred the early-evening performance. Whole families came—young workingmen and -women, and children who were old enough to pay attention—and the scant, dying sunlight seemed distant, even gentle; the dust motes weren’t visible. It was the time of the evening when the flies appeared to have departed with the glare, and it was still too early for the mosquitoes. For the 6:30 performance, the place was always packed.

The first item was the Plastic Lady, a “boneless” girl named Laxmi (the Goddess of Wealth). She was a beautiful contortionist—no sign of rickets. Laxmi was only 14, but the sharp definition of the bones in her face made her seem older. She wore a bright-orange bikini with yellow and red sequins that glittered in the strobe light; she looked like a fish with its scales reflecting a light that shone from underwater. It was dark enough in the main tent so that the changing colors of the stroboscope were effective, but enough of the late sunlight still illuminated the tent so that you could make out the faces of the children in the audience. Dr. Daruwalla thought that whoever said circuses were for children was only half right; the circus was also for grownups who enjoyed seeing children so enthralled.

Why can’t I do that? the doctor wondered, thinking about the simple brilliance of the boneless girl named Laxmi—thinking of the crippled boy abandoned in Victoria Terminus, where Dr. Daruwalla’s imagination had stalled as soon as it had begun. Instead of creating something as pure and riveting as the circus, he’d turned his mind to mayhem and murder—personified by Inspector Dhar.

What old Mr. Sethna mistook in Dr. Daruwalla’s miserable expression was simply the doctor’s deep disappointment with himself. With a sympathetic nod to the doctor, who sat forlornly in the Ladies’ Garden, the Parsi steward allowed himself a rare moment of familiarity with a passing waiter.

“I’m glad I’m not the rat he’s thinking of,” Mr. Sethna said.

Of course there was more wrong with One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling than Danny Mills’s alcoholism or his unsubtle plagiarism of Dark Victory; much more was amiss than Gordon Hathaway’s crass alterations of Danny’s “original” screenplay, or the director’s attendant hemorrhoids and fungus. To make matters worse, the actress who was playing the dying but saved wife was that talentless beauty and denizen of the gossip columns Veronica Rose. Her friends and colleagues called her Vera, but she was born in Brooklyn with the name Hermione Rosen and she was Gordon Hathaway’s niece (the C. of M.’s daughter). Small world, Farrokh would learn.

The producer, Harold Rosen, would one day find his daughter as tiresomely tasteless as the rest of the world judged her to be upon the merest introduction; however, Harold was as easily bullied by his wife (the C. of M. sister of Gordon Hathaway) as Gordon was. Harold was operating on his wife’s assumption that Hermione Rosen, by her transformation to Veronica Rose, would one day be a star. Vera’s lack of talent and intelligence would prove too great an obstacle for such a goal—this in tandem with a compulsion to expose her breasts that even Lady Duckworth would have scorned.

But at the Duckworth Club in the summer of ’49, a rumor was in circulation that Vera was soon to have a huge success. Concerning Hollywood, what did Bombay know? That Vera had been cast in the role of the dying but saved wife was all that Lowji Daruwalla knew. It would take a while for Farrokh to find out that Danny Mills had objected to Vera having the part—until she seduced him and made him imagine that he was in love with her. Then he trotted at her heels like a dog. Danny believed it was the intense pressure of the role that had cooled Vera’s brief ardor for him—Vera had her own room at the Taj, and she’d refused to sleep with Danny since the commencement of principal photography—but, in truth, she was having an obvious affair with her leading man. It wasn’t obvious to Danny, who usually drank himself to sleep and got up late.