John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Twins are “a whole family” unto themselves, as any fool knows, and thus the dilemma would sort itself out in the predictable fashion: Vera would take one home and the Daruwallas would keep the other. Simply put, Vera didn’t want to overwhelm Danny’s limited enthusiasm for fatherhood.

Among the host of surprises awaiting Lowji, not the least would be the advice given to him by his senile friend Dr. Tata: “When it comes to twins, put your money on the first one out.” The senior Dr. Daruwalla was shocked, but being an orthopedist, not an obstetrician, he sought to comply with Dr. Tata’s recommendation. However, such excitement and confusion attended the birth of the twins that none of the nurses kept track of which one came out first; old Dr. Tata himself couldn’t remember.

In this respect was Dr. Tata said to be “accident-prone”: he blamed the unprofessionalism of the house calls for his failure to hear the two heartbeats whenever he put his stethoscope to Vera’s big belly; he said that in his office, under appropriate conditions, he would surely have heard the two hearts. As it was—whether it was the music that Meher played or the constant sounds of housecleaning by the several servants—old Dr. Tata simply assumed that Vera’s baby had an unusually strong and active heartbeat. On more than one occasion, he said, “Your baby has just been exercising, I think.”

“I could have told you that,” Vera always replied.

And so it wasn’t until she was in labor that the monitoring of the fetal heartbeats told the tale. “What a lucky lady!” Dr. Tata told Vera Rose. “You have not one but two!”

In the summer of ’49, when the monsoon rains drenched Bombay, the aforementioned melodrama lay, heavy and unseen, in young Farrokh Daruwalla’s future—like a fog so far out in the Indian Ocean, it hadn’t yet reached the Arabian Sea. He would be back in Vienna, where he and Jamshed were continuing their lengthy and proper courtship of the Zilk sisters, when he heard the news.

“Not one but two!” And Vera took only one with her.

To Farrokh and Jamshed, their parents were already elderly. Even Lowji and Meher might have agreed that the most vigorous of their child-raising abilities were behind them; they’d do their best with the little boy, but after Jamshed married Josefine Zilk, it made sense for the younger couple to take over the responsibility. Theirs was a mixed marriage, anyway; and Zürich, where they would settle, was an international city—a dark-haired boy of strictly white parentage would easily fit in. By then he knew Hindi in addition to English; in Zürich he would learn German, although Jamshed and Josefine would start him in an English-speaking school. After a time, the senior Daruwallas became like grandparents to the boy; from the beginning, Lowji had legally adopted him.

And after Jamshed and Josefine had children of their own—and there came that inevitable passage through adolescence, wherein the orphaned twin expressed a disgruntled alienation from them all—it was only natural that Farrokh would emerge as a kind of big brother to the boy. The 20-year difference between them made Farrokh something of another father to the child, too. By then, Farrokh was married to the former Julia Zilk, and they’d started a family of their own. Wherever he went, the adopted boy appeared to belong, but Farrokh and Julia were his favorites.

One shouldn’t feel sorry for Vera’s abandoned child. He was always part of a large family, even if there was something dislocating in the geographical upheavals in the young man’s life—between Toronto, Zürich and Bombay—and even if, at an early age, there could be detected in him a certain detachment. And later there was in his language—in his German, in his English, in his Hindi—something decidedly odd, if not exactly a speech impediment. He spoke very slowly, as if he were composing a written sentence, complete with punctuation, in his mind’s eye. If he had an accent, it was nothing traceable; it was more a matter of his enunciation, which was so very deliberate, as if he were in the habit of speaking to children, or addressing crowds.

And the issue that naturally intrigued them all, which was whether he was the offspring of Neville Eden or of Danny Mills, would not be easily decided. In the medical records of One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling —which are, to this day, the only enduring records that the film was ever made—it was clearly noted that Neville and Danny were of the same common blood group, and the very same type that the twins would share.

Various Daruwallas argued that their twin was too good-looking, and too disinclined toward strong drink, to be a conceivable creation of Danny’s, Furthermore, the boy showed little interest in reading, much less in writing—he didn’t even keep a diary—whereas he was quite a gifted and highly disciplined young actor, even in grammar school. (This pointed the finger at the late Neville.) But, of course, the Daruwallas knew very little about the other twin. If one is determined to feel sorry for either of these twins, perhaps one should indulge such a feeling for the child Vera kept.

As for the little boy who was abandoned in India, his first days were marked by the necessity of giving him a name. He would be a Daruwalla, but in concession to his all-white appearance, it was agreed he should have an English first name. The family concurred that his name should be John, which was the Christian name of none other than Lord Duckworth himself; even Lowji conceded that the Duckworth Club was the source of the responsibility he bore for Veronica Rose’s cast-off child. Needless to say, no one would have been so stupid as to name a boy Duckworth Daruwalla. John Daruwalla, on the other hand, had a friendly Anglo-Indian ring.

Everyone could more or less pronounce this name. Indians are familiar with the letter J ; even German-speaking Swiss don’t badly maul the name John, although they tend to Frenchify the name as “Jean.” Daruwalla is as phonetic as most names come, although German-speaking Swiss pronounce the W as V , hence the young man was known in Zürich as Jean Daruvalla; this was close enough. His Swiss passport was issued in the name of John Daruwalla—plain but distinctive.

Not for 39 years did there awaken in Farrokh that first stirring of the creative process, which old Lowji would never experience. Now, nearly 40 years after the birth of Vera’s twins, Farrokh found himself wishing that he’d never experienced the creative process, either. For it was by the interference of Farrokh’s imagination that little John Daruwalla had become Inspector Dhar, the man Bombay most loved to hate—and Bombay was a city of many passionate hatreds.

Farrokh had conceived Inspector Dhar in the spirit of satire—of quality satire. Why were there so many easily offended people? Why had they reacted to Inspector Dhar so humorlessly? Had they no appreciation for comedy? Only now, when he was almost 60, did it occur to Farrokh that he was his father’s son in this respect: he’d uncovered a natural talent for pissing people off. If Lowji had long been perceived as an assassination-in-progress, why had Farrokh been blind to this possible result in the case of Inspector Dhar? And he’d thought he was being so careful!

He’d written that first screenplay slowly and with great attention to detail. This was the surgeon in him; he hadn’t learned such carefulness or authenticity from Danny Mills, and certainly not from his attendance at those three-hour spectacles in the shabby downtown cinema palaces of Bombay—those art-deco ruins where the air-conditioning was always “undergoing repair” and the urine frequently overflowed the lavatories.