John Irving - A Son of the Circus

There was no time to lose. While Julia fixed a cup of coffee for Martin, Farrokh glanced hurriedly at the library collected in the Jesuit’s suitcase. Father de Mello’s Sadhana: A Way to God drew a particularly covert look, for in it Farrokh found a dog-eared page and an assertively underlined sentence: “One of the biggest enemies to prayer is nervous tension.” I guess that’s why I can’t do it, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

In the lobby, the doctor and the missionary didn’t escape the notice of that first-floor member of the Residents’ Society, the murderous Mr. Munim.

“So! There is your movie star! Where is your dwarf?” Mr. Munim shouted.

“Pay no attention to this man,” Farrokh told Martin. “He’s completely crazy.”

“The dwarf is in the suitcase!” Mr. Munim cried. Thereupon he kicked the scholastic’s suitcase, which was ill considered, because he was wearing only a floppy pair of the most insubstantial sandals; from the instant expression of pain on Mr. Munim’s face, it was clear that he’d made contact with one of the more solid tomes in Martin Mills’s library—maybe the Compact Dictionary of the Bible , which was compact but not soft.

“I assure you, sir, there is no dwarf in this suitcase,” Martin Mills began to say, but Dr. Daruwalla pulled him on. The doctor was beginning to realize that it was the new missionary’s most basic inclination to talk to anyone.

In the alley, they found Vinod asleep in the Ambassador; the dwarf had locked the car. Leaning against the driver’s-side door was the exact “anyone” whom Dr. Daruwalla most feared, for the doctor imagined there was no one more inspiring of missionary zeal than a crippled child… unless there’d been a child missing both arms and both legs. By the shine of excitement in the scholastic’s eyes, Farrokh could tell that the boy with the mangled foot was sufficiently inspiring to Martin Mills.

It was the beggar from the day before—the boy who stood on his head at Chowpatty Beach, the cripple who slept in the sand. The crushed right foot was once again an offense to the doctor’s standard of surgical neatness, but Martin Mills was fatally drawn to the rheumy discharge about the beggar’s eyes; to his missionary mind, it was as if the stricken child already clutched a crucifix. The scholastic only momentarily took his eyes off the boy—to glance heavenward—but that was long enough for the little beggar to fool Martin with the infamous Bombay bird-shit trick.

In Dr. Daruwalla’s experience, it was a filthy trick, usually performed in the following fashion: while one hand pointed to the sky—to the nonexistent passing bird—the other hand of the little villain squirted your shoe or your pants. The instrument that applied the presumed “bird shit” was similar to a turkey baster, but any kind of bulb with a syringelike nozzle would suffice. The fluid it contained was some whitish stuff—often curdled milk or flour and water—but on your shoe or your pants, it appeared to be bird shit. When you looked down from the sky, having failed to see the bird, there was the shit—it had already hit you—and the sneaky little beggar was wiping it off your shoe or your pants with a handy rag. You then rewarded him with at least a rupee or two.

But in this instance Martin Mills didn’t comprehend that a reward was expected. He’d looked in a heavenly direction without the boy needing to point; thereupon the beggar had drawn out the syringe and squirted the Jesuit’s scuffed black shoe. The cripple was so quick on the draw and so smooth at concealing the syringe under his shirt that Dr. Daruwalla had seen neither the quick draw nor the shot—only the slick return to the shirt. Martin Mills believed that a bird had unceremoniously shat on his shoe, and that the tragically mutilated boy was wiping off this bird shit with the tattered leg of his baggy shorts. To the missionary, this maimed child was definitely heaven-sent.

With that in mind, there in the alley, the scholastic dropped to his knees, which wasn’t the usual response that was made to the outstretched hand of the beggar. The boy was frightened by the missionary’s embrace. “O God—thank you!” Martin Mills cried, while the cripple looked to Dr. Daruwalla for help. “This is your lucky day,” the missionary told the greatly bewildered beggar. “That man is a doctor ,” Martin Mills told the lame boy. “That man can fix your foot.”

“I can’t fix his foot!” Dr. Daruwalla cried. “Don’t tell him that!”

“Well, certainly you can make it look better than this!” Martin replied. The cripple crouched like a cornered animal, his eyes darting back and forth between the two men.

“It’s not as if I haven’t already thought of it,” Farrokh said defensively. “But I’m sure I can’t give him a foot that works. And what do you think a boy like this cares for the appearance of the thing? He’ll still limp!”

“Wouldn’t you like your foot to be cleaner-looking? ” Martin Mills asked the cripple. “Wouldn’t you like it to look less like a hoe or a club? ” As he spoke, he cupped his hand near the bony fusion of ankle and foot, which the beggar awkwardly rested on the heel. Close up, the doctor could confirm his earlier suspicion: he would have to saw through bone. There would be little chance of success, a greater chance of risk.

“Primum non nocere,” Farrokh said to Martin Mills. “I presume you know Latin.”

“‘Above all, do no harm,’” the Jesuit replied.

“He was stepped on by an elephant,” Dr. Daruwalla explained. Then Farrokh remembered what the cripple had said. Dr. Daruwalla repeated this to the missionary, but the doctor looked at the boy when he spoke: “You can’t fix what elephants do.” The boy nodded, albeit cautiously.

“Do you have a mother or a father?” the Jesuit asked. The beggar shook his head. “Does anyone look after you?” Martin asked. The cripple shook his head again. Dr. Daruwalla knew it was impossible to understand how much the boy understood, but the doctor remembered that the boy’s English was better than he was letting on—a clever boy.

“There’s a gang of them at Chowpatty,” the doctor said. “There’s a kind of pecking order to their begging.” But Martin Mills wasn’t listening to him; although the zealot manifested a certain “modesty of the eyes,” which was encouraged among the Jesuits, there was nonetheless an intensity to his gazing into the rheumy eyes of the crippled child. Dr. Daruwalla realized that the boy was mesmerized.

“But there is someone looking after you,” the missionary said to the beggar. Slowly, the cripple nodded.

“Do you have any other clothes but these?” the missionary asked.

“No clothes,” the boy instantly said. He was undersized, but hardened by the street life. Maybe he was 8, or 10.

“And how long has it been since you’ve had any food—since you’ve had a lot of food?” Martin asked him.

“Long time,” the beggar said. At the most, he might have been 12.

“You can’t do this, Martin,” Farrokh said. “In Bombay, there are more boys like this than would fit into all of St. Ignatius. They wouldn’t fit in the school or in the church or in the cloister—they wouldn’t fit in the schoolyard, or in the parking lot! There are too many boys like this—you can’t begin your first day here by adopting them!”

“Not ‘them’—just this one,” the missionary replied. “St. Ignatius said that he would sacrifice his life if he could prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.”

“Oh, I see,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “I understand you’ve already tried that!”