John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“I am not a monk,” Martin Mills said aloud. The nearby taxi-wallas understood this as a summons; once again, they swarmed around him.

“Avoid worldliness,” Martin cautioned himself. He smiled tolerantly at the milling taxi-wallas. There had been an admonition in Latin above his bed at St. Aloysius; it was an indirect reminder that a man should make his own bed— etiam si sacerdotes sint (“even if they be priests”). Therefore, Martin Mills decided, he would get himself into Bombay.

Of the taxi-wallas, there was only one who looked strong enough to handle the suitcase. He was tall and bearded, with a swarthy complexion and an exceedingly sharp, aggressive thrust to his nose.

“St. Ignatius, Mazagaon,” Martin said to this taxi-walla, who struck the missionary as a university student with a demanding night job—an admirable young man, probably paying his way through school.

With a savage glare, the young man took the suitcase and hurled it into his waiting taxi. All the taxi-wallas had been waiting for the Ambassador with the thug dwarf driver, for none of them had really believed that Inspector Dhar would stoop to use any other cab. There’d been many depictions of taxi-wallas in Inspector Dhar films; they were always portrayed as reckless and crazy.

The particular taxi-walla who’d seized the missionary’s suitcase and now watched Martin Mills slide into the back seat was a violent-minded young man named Bahadur. He’d just been expelled from a hotel-management school for cheating on a food-services exam—he’d plagiarized the answer to a simple question about catering. (“Bahadur” means “brave.”) He’d also just driven to the airport from Bombay and had seen the posters advertising Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence , which had greatly offended his loyal sensibilities. Although taxi driving wasn’t his preferred profession, Bahadur was grateful to his present employer, Mr. Mirza. Mr. Mirza was a Parsi; doubtless Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence would be monstrously offensive to Mr. Mirza. Bahadur felt honor-bound to represent the feelings of his boss.

Not surprisingly, Bahadur had hated all the earlier Dhar films. Before the release of this new offense, Bahadur had been hoping that Inspector Dhar would be murdered by offended hijras or offended female prostitutes. Bahadur generally favored the notion of murdering famous people, for he found it offensive to unfamous people that only very few people were famous. Moreover, he felt that driving a taxi was beneath him; he was doing it only to prove to a rich uncle that he was capable of “mingling with the masses.” It was Bahadur’s expectation that this uncle would soon send him off to another school. The present interim was unfortunate, but one could do worse than work for Mr. Mirza; like Vinod, Mr. Mirza operated a privately owned taxi company. Meanwhile, in his spare time, Bahadur was seeking to improve his English by concentrating on vulgar and profane expressions. Should he ever encounter a famous person, Bahadur wished to have such expressions on the tip of his tongue.

The reputations of famous people were entirely inflated, Bahadur knew. He’d heard stories of how tough Inspector Dhar was supposed to be, also that Dhar was a weight lifter! One look at the missionary’s scrawny arms proved this to be a typical lie. Movie hype! Bahadur thought. He liked to drive by the film studios, hoping to give actresses a ride. But no one important ever chose his taxi, and at Asha Pictures—and at Rajkamal Studio and Famous Studio and Central Studio—he’d been accosted by the police for loitering. Fuck these film people! Bahadur thought.

“I suppose you know where St. Ignatius is,” Martin Mills said nervously, once they were under way. “It’s a Jesuit mission, a church, a school,” he added, looking for some sign of recognition in the glare of the taxi-walla. When the scholastic saw that the young man was watching him in the rearview mirror, Martin did the friendly thing—at least he presumed it was the native-behavior thing to do. He winked.

That does it! Bahadur thought. Whether the wink was condescending, or whether it was the lewd invitation of a homosexual, Bahadur had made up his mind. Inspector Dhar should not be allowed to get away with the violent farce he made of Bombay life. In the middle of the night, Dhar wanted to go to St. Ignatius! What was he going to do there? Pray?

In addition to everything else that was fake about Inspector Dhar, Bahadur decided that the man was a fake Hindu, too. Inspector Dhar was a bleeding Christian!

“You’re supposed to be a Hindu,” Bahadur told the Jesuit.

Martin Mills was thrilled. His first religious confrontation in the missionary kingdom—his first Hindu! He knew they were the majority religion here.

“Well… well,” Martin said cheerfully. “Men of all faiths must be brothers.”

“Fuck your Jesus, and fuck you,” Bahadur remarked coldly.

“Well… well,” Martin said. Possibly there was a time to wink and a time not to wink, the new missionary thought.

Through the smoldering, reeking darkness, the taxi careened, but darkness had never intimidated Martin Mills. In crowds, he could be anxious, but the black of night did not menace him. Nor did it concern the missionary that he was in danger of some violence. He meditated on the unfulfilled dream of the Middle Ages, which was to win back Jerusalem for Christ. He contemplated that St. Ignatius Loyola’s own pilgrimage to Jerusalem had been a journey fraught with endless dangers and accidents. Ignatius’s attempted conquest of the Holy Land was a failure, for he was sent back; yet the saint’s desire to rescue unsaved souls remained ardent. It was always the Ignatian purpose to conform to the will of God. It was no coincidence that, to this end, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius began with a vivid representation of hell in all its horror. The fear of God was purifying; it had long been so to Martin Mills. To see both the fires of hell and a union with God in mystical ecstasy, one needed only to follow the Spiritual Exercises and call upon “the eye of the imagination,” for the missionary had no doubt that this was the clearest eye of all.

“Toil and will,” Martin Mills said aloud. This was his creed.

“I said, fuck your Jesus, and fuck you! ” the taxi-walla repeated.

“Bless you,” Martin said. “Even you, and whatever you do to me, is God’s will—though you know not what you do.”

Most of all, Martin admired Ignatius Loyola’s notable encounter with the Moor on a mule and their ensuing discussion of the Holy Virgin. The Moor said he could believe that Our Lady had conceived without a man, but he could not believe that she’d remained a virgin after giving birth. After the Moor rode on, young Ignatius thought that he should hurry after the Muslim and kill him. He felt obliged to defend Our Lady’s honor. The defaming of the Virgin’s postbirth vaginal condition was gross and unacceptable behavior. Ignatius, as always, sought God’s will on the matter. Where the road parted, he let his own mule’s reins go slack; if the animal followed the Moor, Ignatius would kill the infidel. But the mule chose the other road.

“And fuck your St. Ignatius!” the taxi-walla shouted.

“St. Ignatius is where I would like to go,” Martin replied calmly. “But take me where you will.” Where they went, the missionary believed, would be God’s will. Martin Mills was just the passenger.

He thought of the late Father de Mello’s renowned book Christian Exercises in Eastern Form; so many of these exercises had helped him in the past. For example, there was that exercise which concerned the “healing of hurtful memories.” Whenever Martin Mills was troubled by the shame his parents had caused him, or by his seeming inability to love and forgive and honor his parents, he followed Father de Mello’s exercise verbatim. “Return to some unpleasant event”; such events were never hard to recall, but the selection of which horror to revisit was always an arduous decision. “Now place yourself before Christ Crucified”—that always had a certain power. Even the depravities of Veronica Rose paled before such an agony; even the self-destruction of Danny Mills seemed a trifling pain. “Keep commuting between the unpleasant event and the scene of Jesus on the Cross”; for years, Martin Mills had engaged in such commuting. Father de Mello was a hero to him. He had been born in Bombay, and until his death was the director of the Sadhana Institute of Pastoral Counseling (near Poona); it had been Father de Mello who had inspired Martin Mills to come to India.