John Irving - A Son of the Circus

He slipped quietly into the kitchen, where the racket of the apparently never-ending preparation of the evening meal kept him from hearing the actor’s well-trained voice. Besides, Farrokh had at first (and falsely) assumed that Dhar was merely contributing to the conversation about the Queen’s Necklace. Then Dr. Daruwalla had heard the sudden mention of his own name—it was that old story about “the time Farrokh took me to watch the elephants in the sea.” The doctor hadn’t wanted to hear more, because he was afraid of the detectable tone of complaint he heard emerging in John D.’s memory. The dear boy was recalling that time he’d been frightened during the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi; it seemed that half the city had flocked to Chowpatty Beach, where they’d immersed their idols of the elephant-headed god, Ganesh. Farrokh hadn’t prepared the child for the orgiastic frenzy of the crowd—not to mention the size of the elephant heads, many of which were larger than the heads of real elephants. Farrokh remembered the outing as the first and only time he’d seen John D. become hysterical. The dear boy was crying, “They’re drowning the elephants! Now the elephants will be angry!”

And to think that Farrokh had criticized old Lowji for keeping the boy so sheltered. “If you take him only to the Duckworth Club,” Farrokh had told his father, “what’s he ever going to know about India?” What a hypocrite I’ve turned out to be! Dr. Daruwalla thought, for he knew of no one in Bombay who’d hidden from India as successfully as he’d concealed himself at the Duckworth Club—for years.

He’d taken an eight-year-old to Chowpatty Beach to watch a mob; there were hundreds of thousands dunking their idols of the elephant-headed god in the sea. What had he thought the child would make of this? It wasn’t the time to explain the British ban on “gathering,” their infuriating anti-assembly strictures; the hysterical eight-year-old was too young to appreciate this symbolic demonstration for freedom of expression. Farrokh tried to carry the crying boy against the grain of the crowd, but more and more the giant idols of Lord Ganesha were pressed against them; they were herded back to the sea. “It’s just a celebration,” he’d whispered in the child’s ear. “It’s not a riot.” In his arms, Farrokh felt the little boy trembling. Thus had the doctor realized the full weight of his ignorance, not only of India but of the fragility of children.

Now he wondered if John D. was telling Julia, “This is my first memory of Farrokh.” And I’m still getting the dear boy in trouble! Dr. Daruwalla thought.

The doctor distracted himself by poking his nose into the big pot of dhal. Roopa had long ago added the mutton, and she reminded him that he was late by remarking how fortunate it was that mutton usually defied overcooking. “The rice has dried out,” she added sadly.

Old Nalin, ever the optimist, tried to make Dr. Daruwalla feel better. In his fragmentary English, Nalin said, “But plenty of beer!”

Dr. Daruwalla felt guilty that there was always so much beer around; the doctor’s capacity for beer alarmed him, and Dhar’s fondness for the brew seemed limitless. Since Nalin and Roopa did the shopping, the thought of the old couple struggling with those heavy bottles also made Dr. Daruwalla feel guilty. And there was the elevator issue: because they were servants, Nalin and Roopa weren’t permitted to ride in the lift. Even with all those beer bottles, the elderly servants trudged up the stairs.

“And plenty of messages!” Nalin told the doctor. The old man was very fond of the new answering machine. Julia had insisted on it because Nalin and Roopa were terrible at taking messages; they couldn’t transcribe a phone number or spell anyone’s name. When the machine answered, the old man was thrilled to listen to it because he was absolved of any responsibility for the messages.

Farrokh took a beer with him. The apartment seemed so small. In Toronto, the Daruwallas owned a huge house. In Bombay, the doctor had to sneak through the living room, which was also the dining room, in order to get to the bedroom and the bathroom. But Dhar and Julia were still talking on the balcony; they didn’t see him. John D. was reciting the most famous part of the story; it always made Julia laugh.

“They’re drowning the elephants!” John D. was crying. “Now the elephants will be angry!” Dr. Daruwalla never thought that this sounded quite right in German.

If I run a bath, Farrokh speculated, they’ll hear it and know I’m home. I’ll have a quick wash in the sink instead, the doctor thought. He spread out a clean white shirt on the bed. He chose an uncharacteristically loud necktie with a bright-green parrot on it; it was an old Christmas present from John D.—not a tie that the doctor would ever wear in public. Farrokh was unaware how the tie would at least enliven his navy-blue suit. These were absurd clothes for Bombay, especially when dining at home, but Julia was Julia.

After he’d washed, the doctor took a quick look at his answering machine; the message light was flickering. He didn’t bother to count the number of messages. Don’t listen to them now, he warned himself. Yet the spirit of procrastination was deeply ingrained in him; to join in John D. and Julia’s conversation would lead to the inevitable confrontation concerning John D.’s twin. As Farrokh was deliberating, he saw the bundle of mail on his writing desk. Dhar must have gone out to the film studio and collected the fan mail, which was mostly hate mail.

It had long been their understanding that Dr. Daruwalla deserved the task of opening and reading the mail. Although the letters were addressed to Inspector Dhar, the content of these letters only rarely concerned Dhar’s acting or lip-syncing skills; instead, the letters were invariably about the creation of Dhar’s character or about a particular script. Because it was presumed that Dhar was the author of the screenplays, and thus the creator of his own character, the author himself was the source of the letter writers’ principal outrage; their attacks were leveled at the man who’d made it all up.

Before the death threats, especially before the real-life murders of actual prostitutes, Dr. Daruwalla had been in no great hurry to read his mail. But the serial killings of the cage girls had become so publicly acknowledged as imitations of the movie murders that Inspector Dhar’s mail had taken a turn for the worse. And in the light of Mr. Lal’s murder, Dr. Daruwalla felt compelled to search the mail for threats of any kind. He looked at the sizable bundle of new letters and wondered if, under these circumstances, he should ask Dhar and Julia to help him read through them. As if their evening together didn’t promise to be difficult enough! Maybe later, Farrokh thought—if the conversation comes around to it.

But, as he dressed, the doctor couldn’t ignore the insistent flickering of the message light on his answering machine. Well, he needn’t take the time to call anyone back, he thought, as he knotted his tie. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to hear what these messages were about—he could just jot them down and return the calls later. And so Farrokh searched for a pad of paper and a pen, which wasn’t easy to do without being heard, because the tiny bedroom was crammed full of the fragile, tinkling Victoriana he’d inherited from Lowji’s mansion on Ridge Road. Although he’d taken only what he couldn’t bear to auction, even his writing desk was crowded with the bric-a-brac of his childhood, not to mention the photographs of his three daughters; they were married, and therefore Dr. Daruwalla’s writing desk also exhibited their wedding pictures—and the pictures of his several grandchildren. Then there were his favorite photographs of John D.—downhill-skiing at Wengen and at Klosters, cross-country skiing in Pontresina and hiking in Zermatt—and several framed playbills from the Schauspielhaus Zürich, with John Daruwalla in both supporting and leading roles. He was Jean in Strindberg’s Fräulein Julie , he was Christopher Mahon in John Millington Synge’s Ein wahrer Held , he was Achilles in Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea , he was Fernando in Goethe’s Stella , he was Ivan in Chekhov’s Onkel Vanja , he was Antonio in Shakespeare’s Der Kaufmann von Venedig —once he’d been Bassanio. Shakespeare in German sounded so foreign to Farrokh. It depressed the doctor that he’d lost touch with the language of his romantic years.