John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Perhaps there’s a Load Cycle in everyone’s life, thought Dr. Daruwalla. As he paused at the door of his apartment, Farrokh felt he’d been enduring a Load Cycle sort of day. Dr. Daruwalla could imagine the cancan music starting up again, as if he were about to be greeted by a dozen dark-skinned girls in pale-purple tutus—all of them white-faced and moving to the insane, incessant rhythm.

But the past is a labyrinth. Where’s the way out? In the front hall of his apartment, where there were no dark-skinned, white-faced women in tutus, the doctor was halted by the clear but distant sound of his wife’s voice. It reached him all the way from the balcony, where Julia was indulging Inspector Dhar with his favorite view of Marine Drive. On occasion, Dhar slept on that balcony, either when he stayed so late that he preferred to spend the night, or else when he’d just arrived in Bombay and needed to reacquaint himself with the city’s smell.

Dhar swore this was the secret to his successful, almost instant adjustment to India. He could arrive from Europe, straight from Switzerland’s fresh air—tainted, in Zürich, with restaurant fumes and diesel exhaust, with burning coal and hints of sewer gas—but after just two or three days in Bombay, Dhar claimed, he was unbothered by the smog, or by the two or three million small fires for cooking food in the slums, or by the sweet rot of garbage, or even by the excremental horror of the four or five million who squatted at the curb or at the water’s edge of the surrounding sea. For in a city of nine million, surely the shit of half of these was evident in the Bombay air. It took Dr. Daruwalla two or three weeks to adjust to that permeating odor.

In the front hall, where the prevailing smell was of mildew, the doctor quietly removed his sandals; he deposited his briefcase and his old dark-brown doctor’s bag. He noted that the umbrellas in the umbrella stand were dusty with disuse; it had been three months since the end of the monsoon rains. Even from the closed kitchen he could detect the mutton and the dhal—so that’s what we’re having, again, he thought—but the aroma of the evening meal couldn’t distract Dr. Daruwalla from the powerful nostalgia of his wife speaking German, which she always spoke whenever she and Dhar were alone.

Farrokh stood and listened to the Austrian rhythms of Julia’s German—always the ish sound, never the ick —and in his mind’s eye he could see her when she was 18 or 19, when he’d courted her in her mother’s old yellow-walled house in Grinzing. It was a house cluttered with Biedermeier culture. There was a bust of Franz Grillparzer by the coat tree in the foyer. The work of a portraitist obsessively committed to children’s innocent expressions dominated the tea room, which was crowded with more cutesiness in the form of porcelain birds and silver antelopes. Farrokh remembered the afternoon he’d made a nervous, sweeping gesture with the sugar bowl—he broke a painted-glass lamp shade.

There were two clocks in the room. One of them played a fragment of a waltz by Lanner on the half hour and a slightly longer fragment of a Strauss waltz on the hour; the second clock paid similar token acknowledgments to Beethoven and Schubert—understandably, it was set a full minute behind the other. Farrokh remembered that, while Julia and her mother cleaned up the mess he’d made of the lamp shade, first the Strauss and then the Schubert played.

Whenever he recalled their many afternoon teas together, he could visualize his wife as a teenager. She was always dressed in a fashion Lady Duckworth would have admired. Julia wore a cream-colored blouse with flounced sleeves and a high, ruffled collar. They spoke German because her mother’s English wasn’t as good as theirs. Nowadays, Farrokh and Julia spoke German only occasionally. It was still their lovemaking language, or what they spoke in the dark. It was the language in which Julia had told him, “I find you very attractive.” After two years of courting her, he’d nevertheless felt this was forward of her; he’d been speechless. He was struggling with how to phrase the question—whether or not she was troubled by his darker color—when she’d added, “Especially your skin. The picture of your skin against my skin is very attractive.” ( Das Bild —“the picture.”)

When people say that German or any other language is romantic, Dr. Daruwalla thought, all they really mean is that they’ve enjoyed a past in the language. There was even a certain intimacy in listening to Julia speak German to Dhar, whom she always called John D. This was the servants’ name for him, which Julia had adopted, much as she and Dr. Daruwalla had “adopted” the servants.

They were a feeble old couple, Nalin and Swaroop—Dr. Daruwalla’s children and John D. had always called her Roopa—but they’d outlived Lowji and Meher, whom they’d first served. It was a form of semiretirement to work for Farrokh and Julia; they were so infrequently in Bombay. The rest of the time, Nalin and Roopa were caretakers for the flat. If Dr. Daruwalla sold the apartment, where could the old couple go? He’d agreed with Julia that they would try to sell the place, but only after the old servants died. Even if Farrokh kept returning to India, he was rarely in Bombay so long that he couldn’t afford to stay in a decent hotel. Once, when one of the doctor’s Canadian colleagues had teased him for being so conservative about things, Julia had remarked, “Farrokh isn’t conservative—he’s absolutely extravagant. He maintains an apartment in Bombay so that his parents’ former servants will have a place to live!”

Just then the doctor overheard Julia say something about the Queen’s Necklace, which was the local name for the string of lights along Marine Drive. This name originated when the lamplights were white; the smog lights were yellow now. Julia was saying that yellow wasn’t a proper color for the necklace of a queen.

What a European she is! Dr. Daruwalla thought. He had the greatest affection for the way she’d managed to adapt to their life in Canada and to their sporadic visits to India without ever losing her old-world sensibility, which remained as distinctive in her voice as in her habit of “dressing” for dinner—even in Bombay. It wasn’t the content of Julia’s speech that Dr. Daruwalla was listening to—he wasn’t eavesdropping. It was only to hear the sound of her German, her soft accent in combination with such exact phrasing. But he realized that if Julia was talking about the Queen’s Necklace, she couldn’t possibly have told Dhar the upsetting news; the doctor’s heart sank because he realized how much he’d been hoping that his wife would have told the dear boy.

Then John D. spoke. If it soothed Farrokh to hear Julia’s German, it disturbed him to hear German from Inspector Dhar. In German, the doctor could barely recognize the John D. he knew, and it disquieted Dr. Daruwalla to hear how much more energetically Dhar spoke in German than he spoke in English. This emphasized to Dr. Daruwalla the distance that had grown between them. But Dhar’s university education had been in Zürich; he’d spent most of his life in Switzerland. And his serious (if not widely recognized) work as an actor in the theater, at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, was something that John Daruwalla took more pride in than he appeared to take in the commercial success of his role as Inspector Dhar. Why wouldn’t his German be perfect?

There was also not the slightest edge of sarcasm in Dhar’s voice when he spoke to Julia. Farrokh recognized a longstanding jealousy. John D, is more affectionate to Julia than he is to me, Dr. Daruwalla thought. And after all I’ve done for him! There was a fatherly bitterness to this idea, and it shamed him.