A Son Of The Circus (79 page)

‘Something will get me,’ Madhu replied. With her hot, shallow breathing against his neck, Farrokh instantly knew why Martin Mills’s admission of homosexual desire had distressed him. If Dhar’s twin was fighting against his sexual inclination, what was John D. doing?

Dr Duncan Frasier had convinced Dr Daruwalla that homosexuality was more a matter of biology than of conditioning. Frasier had once told Farrokh that there was a 52 percent chance that the identical twin of a gay male would also be gay. Furthermore, Farrokh’s friend and colleague Dr Macfarlane had convinced him that homosexuality was immutable. (‘If homosexuality is a learned behavior, how come it can’t be unlearned? Mac had said.)

But what upset Dr Daruwalla was
not
the doctor’s sudden conviction that John D. must also be a homosexual; rather, it was all the years of John D.’s aloofness and the remoteness of his Swiss life. Neville, not Danny, must have been the twins’ father, after all! And what does it say about me that John D. wouldn’t tell me? the doctor wondered.

Instinctively (as if she were his beloved John D.), Farrokh hugged the girl. Later, he supposed that Madhu only did as she’d been taught to do; she hugged him back, but in an inappropriately wriggling fashion.

It shocked him; he pulled away from her when she began to kiss his throat.

‘No, please …’ he began to say.

Then the missionary spoke to him. Clearly, the elephant boy’s delight with flying had delighted Martin Mills. ‘Look at him! I’ll bet he’d try to walk on the wing, if we told him it was safe!’ the zealot said.

‘Yes, I’ll bet he would,’ said Dr Daruwalla, whose gaze never left Madhu’s face. The fear and confusion of the child prostitute were a mirror of Farrokh’s feelings.

‘What do you want?’ the girl whispered to him.

‘No, it’s not what you think … I want you to
escape
,’ the doctor told her. The concept meant nothing to her; she didn’t respond. She continued to stare at him; in her eyes, trust still lingered with her confusion. At the blood-red edge of her lips, the unnatural redness once more overflowed her mouth; Madhu was eating paan again. Where she’d kissed Farrokh, his throat was marked with the lurid stain, as if a vampire had bitten him. He touched the mark and his fingertips came away with the color on them. The Jesuit saw him staring at his hand.

‘Did you cut yourself?’ Martin Mills asked.

‘No, I’m fine,’ Dr Daruwalla replied, but he wasn’t. Farrokh was admitting to himself that he knew even less about desire than the would-be priest did.

Probably sensing his confusion, Madhu once more pressed herself against the doctor’s chest. Once again, in a whisper, she asked him, ‘What do yovi want?’ It horrified the doctor to realize that Madhu was asking him a sexual question.

‘I want you to be a child, because you
are
a child,’ Farrokh told the girl. ‘Please, won’t you try to be a child?’ There was such an eagerness in Madhu’s smile that, for a moment, the doctor believed the girl had understood him. Quite like a child, she walked her fingers over his thigh; then, unlike a child, Madhu pressed her small palm firmly on Dr Daruwalla’s penis. There’d been no groping for it; she’d known exactly where it was. Through the summer-weight material of his pants, the doctor felt the heat of Madhu’s hand.

‘I’ll try what you want – anything you want,’ the child prostitute told him. Instantly, Dr Daruwalla pulled her hand away.

‘Stop that!’ Farrokh cried.

‘I want to sit with Ganesh,’ the girl told him. Farrokh let her change seats with Martin Mills.

There’s a matter
I’ve
been pondering,’ the missionary whispered to the doctor. ‘You said we had two rooms for the night. Only two?’

‘I suppose we could get more …’ the doctor began. His legs were shaking.

‘No, no – that’s not what I’m getting at,’ Martin said. ‘I mean, were you thinking the children would share one room, and we’d share the other?’

‘Yes,’ Dr Daruwalla replied. He couldn’t stop his legs from shaking.

‘But – well, I know you’ll think this is silly, [_but – _]it would seem prudent to me to not allow them to sleep together. I mean, not in the same room,’ the missionary added. ‘After all, there is the matter of what we can only guess has been the girl’s orientation.’

‘Her
what
?’ the doctor asked. He could stop one leg from shaking, but not the other.

‘Her sexual experience, I mean,’ said Martin Mills. ‘We must assume she’s had some … sexual contact. What I mean is, what if Madhu is inclined to
seduce
Ganesh? Do you know what I mean?’

Dr Daruwalla knew very well what Martin Mills meant. ‘You have a point,’ was all the doctor said in reply.

‘Well, then, suppose the boy and I take one room, and you and Madhu take the other? You see, I don’t think the Father Rector would approve of someone in my position sharing a room with the girl,’ Martin explained. ‘It might seem contradictory to my vows.’

‘Yes … your vows,’ Farrokh replied. Finally, his other leg stopped shaking.

‘Do you think I’m being totally silly?’ the Jesuit asked the doctor. ‘I suppose you think it’s idiotic of me to suggest that Madhu might be so
inclined —
just because the poor child was … what she was.’ But Farrokh could feel that he still had an erection, and Madhu had touched him so briefly.

‘No, I think you’re wise to be a little worried about her … inclination,’ Dr Daruwalla answered. He spoke slowly because he was trying to remember the popular psalm. ‘How does it go — the twenty-third psalm?’ the doctor asked the scholastic. ‘ “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …” ‘

‘ “I will fear no evil…”’ said Martin Mills.

‘Yes – that’s it. “I will fear no evil,’” Farrokh repeated.

Dr Daruwalla assumed that the plane had left Maharashtra; he guessed they were already flying over Gujarat. Below them, the land was flat and dry-looking in the late-afternoon haze. The sky was as brown as the ground.
Limo Roulette
or [_Escaping Maharashtra – _]the screenwriter couldn’t make up his mind between the two titles. Farrokh thought: It depends on what happens — it depends on how the story ends.

At the airport in Rajkot, they were testing the loudspeaker system. It was a test without urgency, as if the loudspeaker were of no real importance – as if no one believed there could be an emergency.

‘One, two, three, four, five,’ said a voice. ‘Five, four, three, two, one.’ Then the message was repeated. Maybe they
weren’t
testing the loudspeaker system, thought Dr Daruwalla; possibly they were testing their counting skills.

While the doctor and Martin Mills were gathering the bags, their pilot appeared and handed the Swiss Army knife to the missionary. At first Martin was embarrassed – he’d forgotten that he’d been forced to relinquish the weapon in Bombay. Then he was ashamed, for he’d assumed the pilot was a thief. While this demonstration of social awkwardness was unfolding, Madhu and Ganesh each ordered and drank two glasses of tea; Dr Daruwalla was left to haggle with the chai vendor.

‘We’ll have to be stopping all the way to Junagadh, so you can pee,’ Farrokh told the children. Then they waited nearly an hour in Rajkot for their driver to arrive. All the while, the loudspeaker system went on counting up to five and down to one. It was an annoying airport, but Madhu and Ganesh had plenty of time to pee.

Their driver’s name was Ramu. He was a roustabout who’d joined the Great Blue Nile Circus in Maharashtra, and this was his second round trip between Junagadh and Rajkot today. He’d been on time to meet the plane in the morning; when he learned that the flight was delayed, he drove back to the circus in Junagadh — only because he liked to drive. It was nearly a three-hour trip one way, but Ramu proudly told them that he usually covered the distance in under two hours. They soon saw why.

Ramu drove a battered Land Rover, spattered with mud (or the dried blood of unlucky pedestrians and animals). He was a slight young man, perhaps 18 or 20, and he wore a baggy pair of shorts and a begrimed T-shirt. Most notably, Ramu drove barefoot. The padding had worn off the clutch and brake pedals — their smooth metal surfaces looked slippery – and the doubtlessly overused accelerator pedal had been replaced by a piece of wood; it looked as flimsy as a shingle, but Ramu never took his right foot off it. He preferred to operate both the clutch and the brake with his left foot, although the latter pedal received little attention.

Through Rajkot, they roared into the twilight. They passed a water tower, a women’s hospital, a bus station, a bank, a fruit market, a statue of Gandhi, a telegraph office, a library, a cemetery, the Havmore Restaurant and the Hotel Intimate. When they raced through the bazaar area, Dr Daruwalla couldn’t look anymore. There were too many children – not to mention the elderly, who weren’t as quick to get out of the way as the children; not to mention the bullock carts and the camel wagons, and the cows and donkeys and goats; not to mention the mopeds and the bicycles and the bicycle rickshaws and the three-wheeled rickshaws, and of course there were cars and trucks and buses, too. At the edge of town, off the side of the road, Farrokh was sure that he spotted a dead man — another ‘nonperson,’ as Ganesh would say – but at the speed they were traveling, there was no time for Dr Daruwalla to ask Martin Mills to verify the shape of death with the frozen face that the doctor saw.

Once they were out of town, Ramu drove faster. The roustabout subscribed to the open-road school of driving. There were no rules about passing; in the lane of oncoming traffic, Ramu yielded only to those vehicles that were bigger. In Ramu’s mind, the Land Rover was bigger than anything on the road – except for buses and a highly selective category of heavy-duty trucks. Dr Daruwalla was grateful that Ganesh sat in the passenger seat; both the boy and Madhu had wanted that seat, but the doctor was afraid that Madhu would distract the driver – a high-speed seduction. So the girl sulked in the back with the doctor and the missionary while the elephant boy chatted nonstop with Ramu.

Ganesh had probably expected that the driver would speak only Gujarati; to discover that Ramu was a fellow Maharashtrian who spoke Marathi and Hindi inspired the beggar. Although Farrokh found their conversation difficult to follow, it seemed that Ganesh wanted to list all the possible circus-related activities that a cripple with one good foot might do. For his part, Ramu was discouraging; he preferred to talk about driving while demonstrating his violent technique of upshifting and downshifting (instead of using the brakes), assuring Ganesh that it would be impossible to match his skill as a driver without a functioning right foot.

To Ramu’s credit, he didn’t look at Ganesh when he talked; thankfully, the driver was transfixed by the developing madness on the road. Soon it would be dark; perhaps then the doctor could relax, for it would be better not to see one’s own death approaching. After nightfall, there would be only the sudden nearness of a blaring horn and the blinding, onrushing headlights. Farrokh imagined the entanglement of bodies in the rolling Land Rover; a foot here, a hand there, the back of someone’s head, a flailing elbow – and not knowing who was who, or in which direction the ground was, or the black sky (for the headlights would surely be shattered, and in one’s hair there would be fragments of glass, as fine as sand). They would smell the gasoline; it would be soaking their clothes. At last, they would see the ball of flame.

‘Distract me,’ Dr Daruwalla said to Martin Mills. ‘Start talking. Tell me anything at all.’ The Jesuit, who’d spent his childhood on the Los Angeles freeways, seemed at ease in the careening Land Rover. The burned-out wrecks off the side of the road were of no interest to him – not even the occasional upside-down car that was still on fire – and the carnage of animals that dotted the highway interested him only when he couldn’t identify their remains.

‘What was that? Did you see that?’ the missionary asked, his head whipping around.

‘A dead bullock,’ answered Dr Daruwalla. ‘Please talk to me, Martin.’

‘I know it was dead,’ said Martin Mills. ‘What’s a bullock?’

‘A castrated bull – a steer,’ Farrokh replied.

‘There’s another one!’ the scholastic cried, his head turning again.

‘No, that was a cow,’ the doctor said.

‘I saw a camel earlier,’ Martin remarked. ‘Did you see the camel?’

‘Yes, I saw it,’ Farrokh answered him. ‘Now tell me a story. It will be dark soon.’

‘A pity – there’s so much to see!’ said Martin Mills.

‘
Distract
me, for God’s sake!’ Dr Daruwalla cried. ‘I know you like to talk – tell me anything at all.’

‘Well… what do you want me to tell you about?’ the missionary asked. Farrokh wanted to kill him.

The girl had fallen asleep. They’d made her sit between them because they were afraid she’d lean against one of the rear doors; now she could lean only against them. Asleep, Madhu seemed as frail as a rag doll; they had to press against her and hold her shoulders to keep her from flopping around.

Her scented hair brushed against Dr Daruwalla’s throat at the open collar of his shirt; her hair smelled like clove. Then the Land Rover would swerve and Madhu would slump against the Jesuit, who took no notice of her. But Farrokh felt her hip against his. As the Land Rover again pulled out to pass, Madhu’s shoulder ground against the doctor’s ribs; her hand, which was limp, dragged across his thigh. Sometimes, when Farrokh could feel Madhu breathe, he held his breath. The doctor wasn’t looking forward to the awkwardness of spending the night in the same room with her. It was not only from Ramu’s reckless driving that Farrokh sought some distraction.

Tell me about your mother,’ Dr Daruwalla said to Martin Mills. ‘How
is
she?’ In the failing but lingering light, the doctor could see the missionary’s neck tighten; his eyes narrowed. ‘And your father – how’s Danny doing?’ the doctor added, but the damage had already been done. Farrokh could tell that Martin hadn’t heard him the second time; the Jesuit was searching the past. The landscape of hideously slain animals flew by, but the zealot no longer noticed.