John Irving - A Son of the Circus

That was when his wife burst into the bedroom. “Farrokh!” Julia said. “I never knew you were home!”

But I’m not “home,” the doctor thought; I’m in a very, very foreign country.

“Liebchen,” he said softly to his wife. Whenever he used the German endearment, Julia knew he was feeling tender—or else he was in trouble.

“What is it, Liebchen? ” she asked him. He held out his hand and she went to him; she sat close enough beside him to feel that he was shivering. She put her arms around him.

“Please listen to this,” Farrokh said to her. “Bitte.”

The first time Julia listened, Farrokh could see by her face that she was making his mistake; she was concentrating too hard on the content of the message.

“Never mind what she says,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “Think about who she is.”

It was the third time before Farrokh saw Julia’s expression change.

“It’s her , isn’t it?” he asked his wife.

“But this is a much older woman,” Julia said quickly.

“It’s been twenty years, Julia!” Dr. Daruwalla said. “She would be a much older woman now! She is a much older woman!”

They listened together a few more times. At last Julia said, “Yes, I think it is her, but what’s her connection with what’s happening now?”

In the cold bedroom—in his funereal navy-blue suit, which was comically offset by the bright-green parrot on his necktie—Dr. Daruwalla was afraid that he knew what the connection was.

The past surrounded him like faces in a crowd. Among them, there was one he knew, but whose face was it? As always, something from the Great Royal Circus offered itself as a beacon. The ringmaster, Pratap Singh, was married to a lovely woman named Sumitra—everyone called her Sumi. She was in her thirties, possibly her forties; and she not only played the role of mother to many of the child performers, she was also a gifted acrobat. Sumi performed in the item called Double-Wheel Cycle, a bicycle act, with her sister-in-law Suman. Suman was Pratap’s unmarried, adopted sister; she must have been in her late twenties, possibly her thirties, when Dr. Daruwalla last saw her—a petite and muscular beauty, and the best acrobat in Pratap’s troupe. Her name meant “rose flower”—or was it “scent of the rose flower,” or merely the scent of flowers in general? Farrokh had never actually known, no more than he knew the story concerning when Suman had been adopted, or by whom.

It didn’t matter. Suman and Sumi’s bicycle duet was much loved. They could ride their bicycles backward, or lie down on them and pedal them with their hands; they could ride them on one wheel, like unicycles, or pedal them while sitting on the handlebars. Perhaps it was a special softness in Farrokh that he took such pleasure from seeing two pretty women do something so graceful together. But Suman was the star, and her Skywalk item was the best act in the Great Royal Circus.

Pratap Singh had taught Suman how to “skywalk” after he’d seen it performed on television; Farrokh supposed that the act had originated with one of the European circuses. (The ringmaster couldn’t resist training everyone, not just the lions.) He’d installed a ladderlike device on the roof of the family troupe tent; the rungs of the ladder were loops of rope and the ladder was bracketed to extend horizontally across the tent roof. Suman hung upside down with her feet in the loops. She swung herself back and forth, the loops chafing the tops of her feet, which she kept rigid—at right angles to her ankles. When she’d gathered the necessary momentum, she “walked” upside down—from one end of the ladder to the other—simply by stepping her feet in and out of the loops as she swung. When she practiced this across the roof of the family troupe tent, her head was only inches above the dirt floor. Pratap Singh stood next to her, to catch her if she fell.

But when Suman performed the Skywalk from the top of the main tent, she was 80 feet from the dirt floor and she refused to use a net. If Pratap Singh had tried to catch her— if Suman fell—they both would have been killed. If the ringmaster threw his body under her, trying to guess where she’d land, Pratap might break Suman’s fall; then only he would be killed.

There were 18 loops in the ladder. The audience silently counted Suman’s steps. But Suman never counted her steps; it was better, she said, to “just walk.” Pratap told her it wasn’t a good idea to look down. Between the top of the tent and the faraway floor, there were only the upside-down faces of the audience, staring back at her—waiting for her to fall.

That was what the past was like, thought Dr. Daruwalla—all those swaying, upside-down faces. It wasn’t a good idea to look at them, he knew.

Twenty years ago, when he was drawn to Goa by his epicurean nostalgia for pork—scarce in the rest of India, but a staple of Goan cuisine—Dr. Daruwalla was converted to Christianity by the big toe of his right foot. He spoke of his religious conversion with the sincerest humility. That the doctor had recently visited the miraculously preserved mummy of St. Francis Xavier was not the cause of his conversion; previous to his personal experience with divine intervention, Dr. Daruwalla had even mocked the saint’s relics, which were kept under glass in the Basilica de Bom Jesus in Old Goa.

Farrokh supposed that he’d made fun of the missionary’s remains because he enjoyed teasing his wife about her religion, although Julia was never a practicing Catholic and she often expressed how it pleased her to have left the Roman trappings of her childhood in Vienna. Nevertheless, prior to their marriage, Farrokh had submitted to some tedious religious instruction from a Viennese priest. The doctor had understood that he was demonstrating a kind of theological passivity only to satisfy Julia’s mother; but—again, to tease Julia—Farrokh insisted on referring to the ring-blessing ceremony as the “ring-washing ritual,” and he pretended to be more offended by this Catholic charade than he was. In truth, he’d enjoyed telling the priest that, although he was unbaptized and had never been a practicing Zoroastrian, he nonetheless had always believed in “something”; at the time, he’d believed in nothing at all. And he’d calmly lied to both the priest and Julia’s mother—that he had no objections to his children being baptized and raised as Roman Catholics. He and Julia had privately agreed that this was a worthwhile, if not entirely innocent deception—again, to put Julia’s mother at ease.

It hadn’t hurt his daughters to have them baptized, Farrokh supposed. When Julia’s mother was still alive, and only when she’d visited the Daruwallas and their children in Toronto, or when the Daruwallas had visited her in Vienna, it had never been too painful to attend Mass. Farrokh and Julia had told their little girls that they were making their grandmother happy. This was an acceptable, even an honorable, tradition in the history of Christian churchgoing: to go through the motions of worship as a favor to a family member who appeared to be that most intractable personage, a true believer. No one had objected to this occasional enactment of a faith that was frankly quite foreign to them all, maybe even to Julia’s mother. Farrokh sometimes wondered if she had been going through the motions of worship only to please them .

It was exactly as the Daruwallas had anticipated: when Julia’s mother died, the family’s intermittent Catholicism more than lapsed—their churchgoing virtually stopped. In retrospect, Dr. Daruwalla concluded that his daughters had been preconditioned to accept that all religion was nothing more than going through the motions of worship to make someone else happy. It had been to please the doctor, after his conversion, that his daughters were administered the sacrament of marriage and other rites and ceremonies according to the Anglican Church of Canada. Maybe this was why Father Julian was so dismissive of the miracle by which Farrokh had been converted to Christianity. In the Father Rector’s opinion, it must have been only a minor miracle, if the experience managed merely to make Dr. Daruwalla an Anglican. In other words, it hadn’t been enough of a miracle to make the doctor a Roman Catholic.