John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“Take me to Mazagaon,” he said to them. “Take me to St. Ignatius, and you shall also be welcome there.” To those few of them who understood what he said, the concept was preposterous. To their surprise, the man before them was a physical weakling, but his courage seemed unsurpassed; it wasn’t the kind of toughness they’d anticipated. Suddenly, no one wanted to hurt him. They hated him; yet he made them feel ashamed.

But the street prostitutes and their pimps, and the pickpockets—they would have made short work of him, just as soon as the hijras left him. This was precisely when that familiar off-white Ambassador, which all night had cruised between Kamathipura and Grant Road and Falkland Road, cruised by them again. In the driver’s-side window, soberly looking them over, was the driver they all thought of as Dhar’s thug dwarf.

One can imagine Vinod’s surprise upon seeing his famous client stripped of half his clothes and bloodied. The wretched villains had even shaved off Inspector Dhar’s mustache! This was a humiliation beyond the obvious pain that the beloved movie star had suffered. And what ghastly instrument of torture had the filthy prostitutes fitted around the actor’s neck? It looked like a dog’s collar, only the spikes were on the inside. Furthermore, poor Dhar was as pale and scrawny as a cadaver. It looked like Vinod’s famous client had lost 20 pounds!

A pimp with a big brass ring of keys scratched a key against the driver’s-side door of the Ambassador—all the while meeting Vinod’s eyes, straight on. He didn’t see Vinod reach under his specially constructed car seat, where the dwarf driver kept a ready supply of squash-racquet handles. There was confusion regarding what happened next. Some claimed that the dwarf’s taxi swerved and deliberately ran over the pimp’s foot; others explained that the Ambassador jumped the curb and that it was the panicked crowd that pushed the pimp—either way, his foot was run over by the car. All agreed that Vinod was hard to see in the crowd; he was so much shorter than everyone else. His presence could be detected by the wary, however, for everywhere people were dropping from sight, clutching their knees or their wrists and writhing on the garbage-strewn pavement. Vinod swung the squash-racquet handles at a level equal to most people’s knees. Their cries commingled with the cries of the cage girls on Falkland Road continuously hawking their wares.

When Martin Mills saw the grim face of the dwarf who was whacking his way toward him, the scholastic thought that his time had come. He repeated what Jesus said to Pilate [John 18:36], “My kingdom is not of this world.” Then he turned to face the oncoming dwarf. “I forgive you,” Martin said; he bowed his head, as if awaiting the executioner’s blow. It didn’t occur to him that if he hadn’t bowed his head, Vinod never could have reached his head with the racquet handles.

But Vinod simply grabbed the missionary by the rear pocket of his pants and steered him to the taxi. When Martin was rescued—pinned under the weight of his suitcase in the back seat of the car—the scholastic foolishly struggled, albeit briefly, to return to Falkland Road.

“Wait!” he cried. “I want my whip—that’s my whip!”

Vinod had already swung a racquet handle and cracked the wrist of the unfortunate hijra who was the last to hold the whip. The dwarf easily retrieved Martin Mills’s mortification toy and handed it to him. “Bless you!” the scholastic said. The doors of the Ambassador slammed solidly around him; the sudden acceleration pressed him against the seat. “St. Ignatius,” he told the brutal driver. Vinod thought that Dhar was praying, which was dismaying to the dwarf because he’d never thought of Dhar as a religious man.

At the intersection of Falkland Road and Grant Road, a boy who was a tea-server for one of the brothels threw a glass of tea at the passing taxi. Vinod just kept going, although his stubby fingers reached under the car seat to reassure himself that the squash-racquet handles were properly in place.

Before the taxi turned onto Marine Drive, Vinod stopped the car and lowered the rear windows; he knew how Dhar enjoyed the smell of the sea. “You sure are fooling me,” Vinod said to his battered client. “I am thinking you are sleeping the whole night on Daruwalla’s balcony!” But the missionary was asleep. In the rearview mirror, the sight of him took Vinod’s breath away. It wasn’t the lash marks on his swollen face, or even his bare, bloodied torso; it was the spiked leg iron around his neck, for the dwarf had seen the terrible depictions that the Christians worshiped—their gory versions of Christ on the Cross—and to Vinod it appeared that Inspector Dhar had undertaken the role of Christ. However, his crown of thorns had slipped; the cruel device gripped the famous actor by his throat.

As for Dhar, the real Dhar, a smog the consistency and color of egg whites had rolled over Dr. Daruwalla’s balcony, where the actor was still sleeping. Had he looked, he couldn’t have seen through this soup—at least not six floors below him to the predawn sidewalk, where Vinod struggled with the movie star’s semiconscious twin. Nor did Dhar hear the predictable eruption from the first-floor dogs. Vinod allowed the missionary to lean heavily on him, while the dwarf dragged the suitcase carrying Martin Mills’s education across the lobby to the forbidden lift. A first-floor apartment owner, a member of the Residents’ Society, got a glimpse of the thug driver and his mangled companion before the elevator door closed.

Martin Mills, even as mauled and mindless of his surroundings as he was, was surprised by the elevator and the modernity of the apartment building, for he knew that the mission school and its venerable church were 125 years old. The sound of savage dogs seemed out of place.

“St. Ignatius?” the missionary asked the Good Samaritan midget.

“You are not needing a saint—you are needing a doctor!” the dwarf told him.

“Actually, I know a doctor in Bombay. He’s a friend of my mother and father—a certain Dr. Daruwalla,” Martin Mills said.

Vinod was truly alarmed. The lashes from the whip and even the bleeding from the leg iron around the poor man’s neck seemed superficial; but this incomprehensible muttering about Dr. Daruwalla was an indication to Vinod that the movie star was suffering from some sort of amnesia. A serious head injury, perhaps!

“Of course you are knowing Dr. Daruwalla!” Vinod shouted. “We are going to see Dr. Daruwalla!”

“Ah, so you know him, too? ” said the astonished scholastic.

“Try to not be moving your head,” the worried dwarf replied.

In a reference to the echoing dogs, which Vinod completely failed to grasp, Martin Mills said, “It sounds like a veterinarian’s—I thought he was an orthopedist.”

“Of course he is being an orthopedist!” Vinod cried. Standing on tiptoe, the dwarf tried to peer into Martin’s ears, as if he were expecting to see some stray brain matter there. But Vinod wasn’t tall enough.

Dr. Daruwalla woke to the distant orchestra of the dogs. From the sixth floor, their barks and howls were muted but nonetheless identifiable; the doctor had no doubt as to the cause of their cacophony.

“That damn dwarf !” he said aloud, to which Julia didn’t respond; she was familiar with the many things her husband said in his sleep. But when Farrokh got out of bed and put on his robe, Julia was instantly awake.

“Is it Vinod again?” she asked him.

“I assume so,” Dr. Daruwalla replied.

It was a little before 5:00 in the morning when the doctor crept past the closed sliding-glass doors that led to the balcony, which was completely enveloped in a mournful-looking mist. The smog had mingled with a dense sea fog. The doctor couldn’t see Dhar’s cot or the Tortoise mosquito coils with which the actor surrounded himself whenever he slept on the balcony. In the foyer, Farrokh seized a dusty umbrella; he was hoping to give Vinod a good scare. Then the doctor opened his apartment door. The dwarf and the missionary had just exited from the lift; when Dr. Daruwalla first saw Martin Mills, the doctor feared that Dhar had violently shaved off his mustache in the smog—thus inflicting on himself a multitude of razor cuts—and then, doubtless depressed, the much-reviled actor had jumped off the sixth-floor balcony.