John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Mr. Sethna couldn’t see Inspector Dhar, who was deep in the bougainvillea, but he had no doubt that the crude movie star was in the thick of this crisis; the steward sighed in disapproval at the very idea of Inspector Dhar.

Then there came a high-pitched ringing of a fork against a water glass—a vulgar means by which to summon a waiter. Mr. Sethna turned to the offending table and realized that he , not the waiter, was being summoned by the second Mrs. Dogar. She was called the beautiful Mrs. Dogar to her face and the second Mrs. Dogar behind her back. Mr. Sethna didn’t find her especially beautiful, and he most adamantly disapproved of second marriages.

Furthermore, it was generally admitted among the members of the club that Mrs. Dogar’s beauty was coarse in nature and had faded over time. No amount of Mr . Dogar’s money could improve his new wife’s garish tastes. No degree of physical fitness, which the second Mrs. Dogar was reputed to worship to excess, could conceal from even the most casual observer that she was at least 42. To Mr. Sethna’s critical eye, she was already pushing (if not past) 50; he also thought she was much too tall. And there was many a golf-loving Duckworthian who took offense at her outspoken, insensitive opinion that golf was insufficient exercise for anyone in pursuit of good health.

This day, Mrs. Dogar was lunching alone—a habit of which Mr. Sethna also disapproved. At a proper club, the steward believed, women wouldn’t be allowed to eat alone.

The marriage was still new enough that Mr. Dogar often joined his wife for lunch; the marriage was also old enough that Mr. Dogar felt free to cancel these luncheon dates, should some matter of more important business intervene. And lately he’d taken to canceling at the last minute, which left his wife no time to make plans of her own. Mr. Sethna had observed that being left alone made the new Mrs. Dogar restless and cross.

On the other hand, the steward had also observed a certain tension between the newlyweds when they dined together; Mrs. Dogar was inclined to speak sharply to her husband, who was considerably older than she was. Mr. Sethna supposed this was a penalty to be expected, for he especially disapproved of men who married younger women. But the steward thought it best to put himself at the aggressive wife’s disposal lest she shatter her water glass with another blow from her fork; the fork itself looked surprisingly small in her large, sinewy hand.

“My dear Mr. Sethna,” said the second Mrs. Dogar.

Mr. Sethna answered: “How may I be of service to the beautiful Mrs. Dogar?”

“You may tell me what all the fuss is about,” Mrs. Dogar replied.

Mr. Sethna spoke as deliberately as he would pour hot tea. “It is most assuredly nothing to upset yourself about,” the old Parsi said. “It is merely a dead golfer.”

Thirty years ago, there were more than 50 circuses of some merit in India; today there aren’t more than 15 that are any good. Many of them are named the Great This or the Great That. Among Dr. Daruwalla’s favorites were the Great Bombay, the Jumbo, the Great Golden, the Gemini, the Great Rayman, the Famous, the Great Oriental and the Raj Kamal; of them all, Farrokh felt most fond of the Great Royal Circus. Before Independence, it was called simply the Royal; in 1947 it became the “Great.” It began as a two-pole tent; in ’47 the Great Royal added two more poles. But it was the owner who’d made such a positive impression on Farrokh. Because Pratap Walawalkar was such a well-traveled man, he seemed the most sophisticated of the circus owners to Dr. Daruwalla; or else Farrokh’s fondness for Pratap Walawalkar was simply because the Great Royal’s owner never teased the doctor about his interest in dwarf blood.

In the 1960s, the Great Royal traveled everywhere. Business was bad in Egypt, best in Iran; business was good in Beirut and Singapore, Pratap Walawalkar said—and of all the countries where the circus traveled, Bali was the most beautiful. Travel was too expensive now. With a half-dozen elephants and two dozen big cats, not to mention a dozen horses and almost a dozen chimpanzees, the Great Royal rarely traveled outside the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. With uncounted cockatoos and parrots, and dozens of dogs (not to mention 150 people, including almost a dozen dwarfs), the Great Royal never left India.

This was the real history of a real circus, but Dr. Daruwalla had committed these details to that quality of memory which most of us reserve for our childhoods. Farrokh’s childhood had failed to make much of an impression on him; he vastly preferred the history and the memorabilia he’d absorbed as a behind-the-scenes observer of the circus. He remembered Pratap Walawalkar saying in an offhand manner: “Ethiopian lions have brown manes, but they’re just like other lions—they won’t listen to you if you don’t call them by their right names.” Farrokh had retained this morsel of information as if it were part of a beloved bedtime story.

In the early mornings, en route to his surgeries (even in Canada), the doctor often recalled the big basins steaming over the gas rings in the cook’s tent. In one pot was the water for tea, but in two of the basins the cook was heating milk; the first milk that came to a boil wasn’t for tea—it was to make oatmeal for the chimpanzees. As for tea, the chimps didn’t like it hot; they liked their tea tepid. Farrokh also remembered the extra flatbread; it was for the elephants—they enjoyed roti. And the tigers took vitamins, which turned their milk pink. As an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Daruwalla could make no medical use of these cherished details; nevertheless, he’d breathed them in as if they were his own background.

Dr. Daruwalla’s wife wore wonderful jewelry, some of which had belonged to his mother; none of it was at all memorable to the doctor, who (however) could describe in the most exact detail a tiger-claw necklace that belonged to Pratap Singh, the ringmaster and wild-animal trainer for the Great Royal Circus—a man much admired by Farrokh. Pratap Singh had once shared his remedy for dizziness with the doctor: a potion of red chili and burned human hair. For asthma, the ringmaster recommended a clove soaked in tiger urine; you allow the clove to dry, then you grind it up and inhale the powder. Moreover, the animal trainer warned the doctor, you should never swallow a tiger’s whiskers; swallowing tiger whiskers will kill you.

Had Farrokh read of these remedies in some crackpot’s column in The Times of India , he’d have written a scathing letter for publication in the Opinion section. In the name of real medicine, Dr. Daruwalla would have denounced such “holistic folly,” which was his phrase of choice whenever he addressed the issue of so-called unscientific or magical thinking. But the source of the human-hair-and-red-chili recipe, as well as of the tiger-urine cure (not to mention the tiger-whiskers warning), was the great Pratap Singh. In Dr. Daruwalla’s view, the ringmaster and wild-animal trainer was undeniably a man who knew his business.

This kind of lore, and blood from dwarfs, enhanced Farrokh’s abiding feeling that, as a result of flopping around in a safety net and falling on a poor dwarf’s wife, he had become an adopted son of the circus. For Farrokh, the honor of clumsily coming to Deepa’s rescue was lasting. Whenever any circus was performing in Bombay, Dr. Daruwalla could be found in a front-row seat; he could also be detected mingling with the acrobats and the animal trainers—most of all, he enjoyed observing the practice sessions and the tent life. These intimate views from the wing of the main tent, these close-ups of the troupe tents and the cages—they were the privileges that made Farrokh feel he’d been adopted. At times, he wished he were a real son of the circus; instead, Farrokh supposed, he was merely a guest of honor. Nevertheless, this wasn’t a fleeting honor—not to him.