John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“It’s very simple, really,” said Martin Mills. “I was going to buy clothes—I’ll buy half as many for me, and the rest for him. I presume that I will eat something sometime later today. I’ll eat half as much as I normally would have eaten …”

“And—don’t tell me!—the rest is for him ,” Dr. Daruwalla said angrily. “Oh, this is brilliant. I wonder why I didn’t think of it years ago!”

“Everything is just a start,” the Jesuit calmly replied. “Nothing is overwhelming if you take one step at a time.” Then he stood up with the child in his arms, leaving his suitcase for Dr. Daruwalla to deal with. He walked with the boy, circling Vinod’s taxi as the dwarf slept on and on. “Lifting… lifting… lifting,” Martin Mills said. “Moving… moving… moving,” he repeated. “Placing… placing… placing,” the missionary said. The boy thought this was a game—he laughed.

“You see? He’s happy,” Martin Mills announced. “First the clothes, then the food, then—if not the foot—you can at least do something about his eyes, can’t you?”

“I’m not an eye doctor,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “Eye diseases are common here. I could refer him to someone …”

“Well, that’s a start, isn’t it?” Martin said. “We’re just going to get you started ,” he told the cripple.

Dr. Daruwalla pounded on the driver’s-side window, startling Vinod awake; the dwarf’s stubby fingers were groping for his squash-racquet handles before he recognized the doctor. Vinod hurried to unlock the car. If, in the light of day, the dwarf saw that Martin Mills bore a less-than-exact resemblance to his famous twin, Vinod gave no indication of any suspicion. Not even the missionary’s clerical collar appeared to faze the dwarf. If Dhar looked different to Vinod, the dwarf assumed this was the result of being beaten by transvestite whores. Furiously, Farrokh threw the fool’s suitcase into the trunk.

There was no time to lose. The doctor realized that he had to get Martin Mills to St. Ignatius as soon as he could. Father Julian and the others would lock him up. Martin would have to obey them—after all, wasn’t that what a vow of obedience meant? The doctor’s advice to the Father Rector would be simple enough: keep Martin Mills in the mission, or keep him in school. Don’t let him loose in the rest of Bombay! The chaos he could cause was inconceivable!

As Vinod backed the Ambassador out of the alley, Dr. Daruwalla saw that both the scholastic and the crippled child were smiling. That was when Farrokh thought of the word that had escaped him; it floated to his lips, in belated answer to John D.’s question regarding what Martin Mills was like. The word was “dangerous.” The doctor couldn’t stop himself from saying it.

“You know what you are?” Dr. Daruwalla asked the missionary. “You’re dangerous .”

“Thank you,” the Jesuit said.

There was no further conversation until the dwarf was struggling to park the taxi on that busy stretch of Cross Maidan near the Bombay Gymkhana. Dr. Daruwalla was taking Martin Mills and the cripple to Fashion Street, where they could buy the cheapest cotton clothes—factory seconds, with small defects—when the doctor caught sight of the gob of fake bird shit that had hardened on the strap of his right sandal; Farrokh could feel that a bit of the stuff had also dried between his bare toes. The boy must have squirted Dr. Daruwalla while the doctor and the scholastic had been arguing, although the doctor supposed there was a slim possibility that the bird shit was authentic.

“What’s your name?” the missionary asked the beggar.

“Ganesh,” the boy replied.

“After the elephant-headed god—the most popular god in Maharashtra,” Dr. Daruwalla explained to Martin Mills. It was the name of every other boy on Chowpatty Beach.

“Ganesh—may I call you Bird-Shit Boy?” Farrokh asked the beggar. But there was no reading the deep-black eyes that flashed in the cripple’s feral face; either he didn’t understand or he thought it was politic to remain silent—a clever boy.

“You certainly shouldn’t call him Bird-Shit Boy!” the missionary protested.

“Ganesh?” said Dr. Daruwalla. “I think you are dangerous, too, Ganesh.” The black eyes moved quickly to Martin Mills; then they fixed once again on Farrokh.

“Thank you,” Ganesh said.

Vinod had the last word; unlike the missionary, the dwarf was not automatically moved to pity cripples.

“You, Bird-Shit Boy,” Vinod said. “You are definitely being dangerous,” the dwarf told him.

Deepa had taken the night train to Bombay; she’d traveled from somewhere in Gujarat—from wherever the Great Blue Nile was playing. She’d arranged to bring the runaway child prostitute to Dr. Daruwalla’s office at the Hospital for Crippled Children, intending to shepherd the girl through her examination—it was the child’s first doctor’s visit. Deepa didn’t expect there would be anything wrong; she planned to take the girl back to the Great Blue Nile with her. It was true that the child had run away from a brothel, but—according to Mr. Garg—she’d managed to run away when she was still a virgin. Dr. Daruwalla didn’t think so.

Her name was Madhu, which means “honey.” She had the floppy, oversized hands and feet and the disproportionately small body of a large-pawed puppy, of the kind one always assumes will become a big dog. But in Madhu’s case this was a sign of malnutrition; her body had failed to develop in proportion to her hands and feet. Also, Madhu’s head wasn’t as large as it appeared at first glance. Her long, oval face was simply unmatched to her petite body. Her protuberant eyes were the tawny yellow of a lion’s, but remote with distraction; her lips were full and womanly and entirely too grown-up for her unformed face, which was still the face of a child.

It was her child-woman appearance that must have been Madhu’s particular appeal in the brothel she’d run away from; her undersized body reflected this disquieting ambivalence. She had no hips—that is, she had the hips of a boy—but her breasts, which were absurdly small, were nonetheless as fully formed and womanly as her compelling mouth. Although Garg had told Deepa that the child was prepubescent, Dr. Daruwalla guessed that Madhu had not yet had her period because she’d never had enough to eat and she was overworked; furthermore, it was not that the girl hadn’t grown any underarm or pubic hair—someone had skillfully shaved her. Farrokh made Deepa feel the faint stubble that was growing in Madhu’s armpits.

The doctor’s memory of his accidental encounter with Deepa’s pudenda surfaced at the oddest times. The sight of the dwarf’s wife touching the hollow of the young girl’s armpit gave Farrokh the shivers. It was the wiry strength of the former flyer’s hand that the doctor remembered—how she’d grabbed his chin as he’d struggled to raise the bridge of his nose off her pubic bone, how she’d simply wrenched his head out of her crotch. And he was off balance, his forehead pressing into her belly and the scratchy sequins on her singlet, so that a good portion of his weight rested on her; yet Deepa had cranked on his chin with only one hand and had managed to lift him. Her hands were strong from the trapeze work. And now the sight of Deepa’s sinewy hand in the girl’s armpit was enough to make Farrokh turn away—not from the exposed girl but from Deepa.

Farrokh realized that probably there remained more innocence in Deepa than what innocence, if any, remained in Madhu; the dwarf’s wife had never been a prostitute. The indifference with which Madhu had undressed for Dr. Daruwalla’s cursory examination made the doctor feel that the girl was probably an experienced prostitute. Farrokh knew how awkwardly most children Madhu’s age undressed. After all, it wasn’t only that he was a doctor; he had daughters.