John Irving - A Son of the Circus

This novel isn’t about India. I don’t know India. I was there only once, for less than a month. When I was there, I was struck by the country’s foreignness; it remains obdurately foreign to me. But long before I went to India, I began to imagine a man who has been born there and has moved away; I imagined a character who keeps coming back again and again. He’s compelled to keep returning; yet, with each return trip, his sense of India’s foreignness only deepens. India remains unyieldingly foreign, even to him.

My Indian friends said, “Make him an Indian—definitely an Indian but not an Indian.” They told me that everywhere he goes—including where he lives, outside India—should also strike him as foreign; the point is, he’s always the foreigner. “You just have to get the details right,” they said.

I went to India at the request of Martin Bell and his wife, Mary Ellen Mark. Martin and Mary Ellen asked me to write a screenplay for them, about the child performers in an Indian circus. I’ve been working on that screenplay and this novel, simultaneously, for more than four years; as of this writing, I’m revising the screenplay, which is also titled A Son of the Circus , although it isn’t the same story as the novel. Probably I’ll continue to rewrite the screenplay until the film is produced— if the film is produced. Martin and Mary Ellen took me to India; in a sense, they began A Son of the Circus .

I also owe a great deal to those Indian friends who were with me in Bombay in January of 1990—I’m thinking of Ananda Jaisingh, particularly—and to those members of the Great Royal Circus who gave me so much of their time when I was living with the circus in Junagadh. Most of all, I’m indebted to four Indian friends who’ve read and reread the manuscript; their efforts to overcome my ignorance and a multitude of errors made my writing possible. I want to acknowledge them by name; their importance to A Son of the Circus is immeasurable.

My thanks to Dayanita Singh in New Delhi; to Farrokh Chothia in Bombay; to Dr. Abraham Verghese in El Paso, Texas; and to Rita Mathur in Toronto. I would also like to thank my friend Michael Ondaatje, who introduced me to Rohinton Mistry—it was Rohinton who introduced me to Rita. And my friend James Salter has been extremely tolerant and good-humored in allowing me to make mischievous use of several passages from his elegant novel A Sport and a Pastime . Thanks, Jim.

As always, I have other writers to thank: my friend Peter Matthiessen, who read the earliest draft and wisely suggested surgery; my friends David Calicchio, Craig Nova, Gail Godwin and Ron Hansen (not to mention his twin brother, Rob) also suffered through earlier drafts. And I’m indebted to Ved Mehta for his advice, through correspondence.

As usual, I have more than one doctor to thank, too. For his careful reading of the penultimate draft, my thanks to Dr. Martin Schwartz in Toronto. In addition, I’m grateful to Dr. Sherwin Nuland in Hamden, Connecticut, and to Dr. Burton Berson in New York; they provided me with the clinical studies of achondroplasia. (Since this novel was completed, the gene for achondroplasia was found; the chief research biologist of the University of California at Irvine, Dr. John J. Wasmuth, wrote to me that he wished he had read A Son of the Circus before he wrote the article describing identification of the gene for achondroplastic dwarfism—“because I would have plagiarized some of your statements.” I can only guess that my main character, the fictional Dr. Daruwalla, would have been pleased.)

The generosity of June Callwood, and of John Flannery—the director of nursing at Casey House in Toronto—is also much appreciated. And over the four years I’ve been writing A Son of the Circus , the work of three assistants has been outstanding: Heather Cochran, Alison Rivers and Allan Reeder. But there’s only one reader who’s read, or heard aloud, every draft of this story: my wife, Janet. For, literally, the thousands of pages she’s endured—not to mention her tolerance of enforced travel—I thank her, with all my love.

Lastly, I want to express my affection for my editor, Harvey Ginsberg, who officially retired before I handed him the 1,094-page manuscript; retired or not, Harvey edited me.

I repeat: I don’t “know” India, and A Son of the Circus isn’t “about” India. It is, however, a novel set in India—a story about an Indian (but not an Indian), for whom India will always remain an unknown and unknowable country. If I’ve managed to get the details right, my Indian friends deserve the credit.

—J. I.

Usually, the dwarfs kept bringing him back—back to the circus and back to India. The doctor was familiar with the feeling of leaving Bombay “for the last time”; almost every time he left India, he vowed that he’d never come back. Then the years would pass—as a rule, not more than four or five—and once again he’d be taking the long flight from Toronto. That he was born in Bombay was not the reason; at least this was what the doctor claimed. Both his mother and father were dead; his sister lived in London, his brother in Zürich. The doctor’s wife was Austrian, and their children and grandchildren lived in England and in Canada; none of them wanted to live in India—they rarely visited the country—nor had a single one of them been born there. But the doctor was fated to go back to Bombay; he would keep returning again and again—if not forever, at least for as long as there were dwarfs in the circus.

Achondroplastic dwarfs comprise the majority of circus clowns in India; they are the so-called circus midgets, but they’re not midgets—they’re dwarfs. Achondroplasia is the most common type of short-limbed dwarfism. An achondroplastic dwarf can be born of normal parents, but the dwarf’s children have a 50 percent chance of being dwarfs. This type of dwarfism is most often the result of a rare genetic event, a spontaneous mutation, which then becomes a dominant characteristic in the dwarf’s children. No one has discovered a genetic marker for this characteristic—and none of the best minds in genetics are bothering to search for such a marker.

Quite possibly, only Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla had the far-fetched idea of finding a genetic marker for this type of dwarfism. By the passion of such a wishful discovery, the doctor was driven to gather samples of dwarf blood. The whimsy of his idea was plain: his dwarf-blood project was of no orthopedic interest, and he was an orthopedic surgeon; genetics was only one of his hobbies. Yet, although Farrokh’s visits to Bombay were infrequent and the duration of his stay was always short, no one in India had ever drawn blood from so many dwarfs; no one had bled as many dwarfs as Dr. Daruwalla had bled. In those Indian circuses that passed through Bombay, or in such circuses as frequented the smaller towns in Gujarat and Maharashtra, it was with affection that Farrokh was called “the vampire.”

This is not to suggest that a physician in Dr. Daruwalla’s field in India wouldn’t stumble across a fair number of dwarfs; they suffer from chronic orthopedic problems—aching knees and ankles, not to mention low back pain. Their symptoms are progressive, according to their age and weight; as dwarfs grow older and heavier, their pain gradually radiates into the buttocks, posterior thighs and calves.

At the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Dr. Daruwalla saw very few dwarfs; however, at the Hospital for Crippled Children in Bombay—where, from time to time, upon his return visits, Farrokh enjoyed the title of Honorary Consultant Surgeon—the doctor examined many dwarf patients. But these dwarfs, although they would provide Dr. Daruwalla with their family histories, would not readily give him their blood. It would have been unethical of him to draw the dwarfs’ blood against their will; the majority of orthopedic ailments afflicting achondroplastic dwarfs don’t necessitate testing their blood. Therefore, it was only fair that Farrokh would explain the scientific nature of his research project and that he would ask these dwarfs for their blood. Almost always, the dwarfs said no.