A Son of the Circus

Three Old Missionaries Fall Asleep

That week between Christmas and New Year’s, when the first American missionary was due to arrive at St. Ignatius in Mazagaon, the Jesuit mission prepared a celebration in honor of 1990. St. Ignatius was a Bombay landmark; it would soon be 125 years old—in all these years, it had faithfully managed its holy and secular tasks without the assistance of an American. The management of St. Ignatius was a threesome of responsibility, and these three had been almost as successful as the Blessed Trinity. The Father Rector (Father Julian, who was 68 years old and English), the senior priest (Father Cecil, who was 72 and Indian), and Brother Gabriel (who was around 75 and had fled Spain after the Civil War) were a triumvirate of authority that was seldom questioned and never overruled; they were also unanimous in their opinion that St. Ignatius could continue to serve mankind and the heavenly kingdom without the aid of any American—yet one had been offered. To be sure, they would have preferred another Indian, or at least a European, but since these three wise men were of an average age of 71 years and eight months, they were attracted to one aspect of the “young” scholastic, as they called him. At 39, Martin Mills was no kid. Only Dr. Daruwalla would have judged “young” Martin to be unsuitably old for a man who was still in training to be a priest. That the so-called scholastic was almost 40 was at least mildly comforting to Father Julian and Father Cecil and Brother Gabriel, although they shared the conviction that the mission’s 125th jubilee was diminished by their obligation to welcome the former Californian, who was allegedly fond of Hawaiian shirts.

They knew of this laughable eccentricity from the otherwise impressive dossier of Martin Mills, whose letters of recommendation were glowing. However, the Father Rector said that when it came to Americans, one must read between the lines. For example, Father Julian pointed out, Martin Mills had evidently eschewed his native California, although nowhere in his dossier did it say so. He’d been schooled elsewhere in the United States and had taken a teaching job in Boston, which was about as far away from California as one could get. Clearly, said Father Julian, this indicated that Martin Mills had come from a troubled family. Perhaps it was his own mother or father whom he’d “eschewed.”

And along with young Martin’s unexplained attraction to the garish, which Father Julian concluded was the root cause of the scholastic’s reported fondness for Hawaiian shirts, there was mention in the dossier of Martin Mills’s success with apostolic work—even as a novice, and especially with young people. Bombay’s St. Ignatius was a good school, and Martin Mills was expected to be a good teacher; most of the students weren’t Catholics—many weren’t even Christians. “It won’t do to have a crazed American proselyte-hunting among our pupils,” the Father Rector warned, although there was no mention in the dossier of Martin Mills being either “crazed” or a proselyte-hunter.

The dossier did say that he’d undertaken a six-week pilgrimage as part of his novitiate, and that during this pilgrimage he’d spent no money—not a penny. He’d managed to find places to live and work in return for humanitarian services; these included soup kitchens for the homeless, hospitals for handicapped children, homes for the elderly, shelters for AIDS patients and a clinic for babies suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome—this was on a Native American reservation.

Brother Gabriel and Father Cecil were inclined to view Martin Mills’s dossier in a positive light. Father Julian, on the other hand, quoted from Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ: “Be rarely with young people and strangers.” The Father Rector had read through Martin Mills’s dossier as if it were a code to be deciphered. The task of teaching at St. Ignatius, and otherwise serving the mission, was a part of the typical three-year service in preparation for the priesthood; it was called regency, and it was followed by another three years of theological study. Ordination followed theology; Martin Mills would complete a fourth year of theological study after his ordination.

He’d completed the two-year Jesuit novitiate at St. Aloysius in Massachusetts, which Father Julian said was an extremist’s choice because of the reputed harshness of its winters. This suggested a proneness to self-flagellation and other chastisements of the flesh—even an inclination to fasting, which the Jesuits discouraged; they encouraged fasting only in moderation. But, once again, the Father Rector seemed to be searching through Martin Mills’s dossier for some hidden evidence of the scholastic’s flawed character. Brother Gabriel and Father Cecil pointed out to Father Julian that Martin had joined the New England Province of the Society of Jesus while he was teaching in Boston. The province’s novitiate was in Massachusetts; it was only natural for Martin Mills to have been a novice at St. Aloysius—it hadn’t really been a “choice.”

But why had he taught 10 years in a dismal parochial school in Boston? His dossier didn’t say that the school was “dismal”; however, it was admitted that the school was not accredited. Actually, it was a kind of reform school, where young criminals were encouraged to give up their delinquent behavior; as far as the Father Rector could tell, the means by which this was accomplished was theatrical. Martin Mills had directed plays wherein all the roles were acted by former felons and miscreants and thugs! In such an environment Martin Mills had first felt his vocation—namely, he’d felt Christ’s presence and had been drawn to the priesthood. But why did it take 10 years? Father Julian questioned. After completing his novitiate, Martin Mills was sent to Boston College to study philosophy; that met with the Father Rector’s approval. But then, in the midst of his regency, young Martin had requested a three-month “experiment” in India. Did this mean that the scholastic had suffered doubts about his vocation? Father Julian asked.

“Well, we’ll soon see,” Father Cecil said. “He seems perfectly all right to me.” Father Cecil had almost said that Martin Mills seemed perfectly “Loyola-like,” but he’d thought better of it because he knew how the Father Rector distrusted those Jesuits who too consciously patterned their behavior on the life of St. Ignatius Loyola—the founder of the Jesuit order, the Society of Jesus.

Even a pilgrimage could be a fool’s errand when undertaken by a fool. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola is a handbook for the retreat master, not for the retreatant; it was never intended to be published, much less memorized by would-be priests—not that Martin Mills’s dossier suggested that the missionary had followed the Spiritual Exercises to such an excess. Once again, the Father Rector’s suspicion of Martin Mills’s extreme piety was intuitive. Father Julian suspected all Americans of an unflagging fanaticism, which the Father Rector believed was emboldened by a frightening reliance on self-education—or “reading on a deserted island,” as Father Julian called an American education. Father Cecil, on the other hand, was a kindly man—of that school which said Martin Mills should be given a chance to prove himself.

The senior priest chided the Father Rector for his cynicism: “You don’t know for a fact that our Martin wanted to be a novice at St. Aloysius because he sought the harshness of a New England winter.” Father Cecil further implied that Father Julian was only guessing that Martin Mills had hoped to attend St. Aloysius as a form of penitential practice, to chastise his flesh. Indeed, Father Julian was wrong. Had he known the real reason why Martin Mills wanted St. Aloysius for his novitiate, the Father Rector really would have been worried, for Martin Mills had desired to be a novice at St. Aloysius solely because of his identification with St. Aloysius Gonzaga, that avid Italian whose chastity was so fervent that he refused to look upon his own mother after taking his permanent vows.

This was Martin Mills’s favorite example of that “custody of the senses” which every Jesuit sought to attain. To Martin’s thinking, there was much to admire in the very notion of never again seeing one’s own mother. His mother, after all, was Veronica Rose, and to deny himself even a farewell glimpse of her would certainly be enhancing to his Jesuitical goal of keeping his voice, his body and his curiosity in check. Martin Mills was very much held in check, and both his pious intentions and the life that had fueled them were more fanatically shot through and through with zeal than Father Julian could have guessed.

And now Brother Gabriel—that 75-year-old icon collector—had lost the scholastic’s letter. If they didn’t know when the new missionary was arriving, how could they meet his plane?

“After all,” Father Julian said, “it seems that our Martin likes challenges.”

Father Cecil thought that this was cruel of the Father Rector. For Martin Mills to arrive in Bombay at that dead-of-night hour when the international flights landed in Sahar, and then to have to find his own way to the mission, which would be locked up and virtually impenetrable until early-morning Mass… this was worse than any pilgrimage the missionary had previously undertaken.

“After all,” Father Julian said with characteristic sarcasm, “St. Ignatius Loyola managed to find his way to Jerusalem. No one met his plane.”

It was unfair, Father Cecil thought. And so he’d called Dr. Daruwalla to ask the doctor if he knew when Martin Mills was arriving. But the senior priest had reached only the doctor’s answering machine, and Dr. Daruwalla hadn’t returned his call. And so Father Cecil prayed for Martin Mills in general. In particular, Father Cecil prayed that the missionary would not have too traumatic a first encounter upon his arrival in Bombay.

Brother Gabriel also prayed for Martin Mills in general. In particular, Brother Gabriel prayed that he might yet find the scholastic’s lost letter. But the letter was never found. Long before Dr. Daruwalla drifted into sleep, in the midst of his efforts to locate a movie star who resembled the second Mrs. Dogar, Brother Gabriel gave up looking for the letter and went to bed, where he also fell asleep. When Vinod drove Muriel home—it was while the dwarf and the exotic dancer were considering the vileness of the clientele at the Wetness Cabaret—Father Cecil stopped praying, and then fell asleep, too. And shortly after Vinod noticed that Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence was about to be launched upon the sleeping city, Father Julian locked the cloister gate and the school-bus gate and the gate that admitted entrance to St. Ignatius Church. And shortly after that, the Father Rector was sound asleep as well.

Early Indications of Mistaken Identity

At approximately 2:00 in the morning—that very same hour when the poster-wallas were plastering the advertisements for the new Inspector Dhar movie all over Bombay, and when Vinod was cruising by the brothels in Kamathipura—the airplane carrying Dhar’s twin landed safely in Sahar. Dhar himself was at that moment sleeping on Dr. Daruwalla’s balcony.

However, the customs official who looked back and forth from the intense expression of the new missionary to the utterly bland passport photograph of Martin Mills was convinced that he stood face-to-face with Inspector Dhar. The Hawaiian shirt was a mild surprise, for the customs official couldn’t imagine why Dhar would attempt to conceal himself as a tourist; similarly, shaving off the identifying Dhar mustache was a lame disguise—with the upper lip exposed, something of the inimitable Dhar sneer was even more pronounced.

It was a U.S. passport—that was clever! thought the customs official—but the passport admitted that this so-called Martin Mills had been born in Bombay. The customs official pointed to this evidence in the passport; then he winked at the missionary, as a way of indicating to Inspector Dhar that this customs official was nobody’s fool.

Martin Mills was very tired; it had been a long flight, which he’d spent studying Hindi and otherwise informing himself of the particulars of “native behavior.” He knew all about the salaam, for example, but the customs official had distinctly winked at him—he had not salaamed—and Martin Mills hadn’t encountered any information regarding the wink in his reading about native behavior. The missionary didn’t wish to be impolite; therefore, he winked back, and he salaamed a little, too, just to be sure.

The customs official was very pleased with himself. He’d seen the wink in a recent Charles Bronson movie, but he was uncertain if it would be a cool thing to do to Inspector Dhar; above all, in dealing with Dhar, the customs official wanted to be perceived as cool. Unlike most Bombayites and all policemen, the customs official loved Inspector Dhar movies. So far, no customs officials had been portrayed in the films; therefore, none had been offended. And prior to his service as a customs official, he’d been rejected for police work; therefore, the constant mockery of the police—the prevalence of bribe taking, which was basic to every Inspector Dhar movie—was adored by the customs official.

Nevertheless, it was most irregular for someone to be entering the country under a false identity, and the customs official wanted Dhar to know that he was hip to Dhar’s disguise, while at the same time he would do nothing to interfere with the creative genius who stood before him. Besides, Dhar didn’t look well. His color was poor—he was mostly pale and blotchy—and he appeared to have lost a lot of weight.

“Is this your first time in Bombay since your birth?” the customs official asked Martin Mills. Thereupon the official winked again and smiled.

Martin Mills smiled and winked back. “Yes,” he said. “But I’m going to stay here for at least three months.”

This was an absurdity to the customs official, but he insisted on being cool about it. He saw that the missionary’s visa was “conditional”; it was possible to extend it for three months. The examination of the visa elicited more winking. It was also expected of the customs official that he look through the missionary’s belongings. For a visit of three months, the scholastic had brought only a single suitcase, albeit a large and heavy one, and in his ungainly luggage were some surprises: the black shirts with the white detachable collars—for although Martin Mills wasn’t an ordained priest, he was permitted to wear such clerical garb. There was also a wrinkled black suit and a half-dozen more Hawaiian shirts, and then came the culpa beads and the foot-long whip with the braided cords, not to mention the leg iron that was worn around the thigh; the wire prongs pointed inward, toward the flesh. But the customs official remained calm; he just kept smiling and winking, despite his horror at these instruments of self-torture.

The Father Rector, Father Julian, would also have been horrified to see such antiquities of mortification as these; they were artifacts of an earlier time—even Father Cecil would have been horrified, or else much amused. Whips and leg irons had never been notable parts of the Jesuit “way of perfection.” Even the culpa beads were an indication that Martin Mills might not have a true Jesuit vocation.

As for the customs official, the scholastic’s books contributed further to the authenticity of Inspector Dhar’s “disguise,” which is what the customs official took all of this to be—an actor’s elaborate props. Doubtless Dhar was preparing himself for yet another challenging role. This time he plays a priest? the customs official wondered. He looked over the books—all the while winking and smiling in ceaseless approval, while the baffled missionary kept winking and smiling back. There was the 1988 edition of the Catholic Almanac and many pamphlets of something called Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits; there was a Pocket Catholic Catechism and a Compact Dictionary of the Bible; there was both a Bible and a Lectionary, and a thin book called Sadhana: A Way to God by Anthony de Mello, S.J.; there was The Autobiography of St. Ignatius Loyola and a copy of the Spiritual Exercises—there were many other books, too. Altogether, there were more books than there were Hawaiian shirts and clerical collars combined.

“And where will you be staying—for three months?” the customs official asked Martin Mills, whose left eye was growing tired from all the winking.

“At St. Ignatius in Mazagaon,” the Jesuit replied.

“Oh, of course!” said the customs official. “I greatly admire your work!” he whispered. Then he gave the surprised Jesuit one more wink for the road.

A fellow Christian where one least expected to meet one! the new missionary thought.

All this winking would leave poor Martin Mills ill prepared for the “native behavior” of most Bombayites, who find winking an exceptionally aggressive, suggestive and rude thing to do. But thus did the scholastic pass through customs and into the shit-smelling night air—all the while expecting a friendly greeting from one of his brother Jesuits.

Where were they? the new missionary wondered. Delayed in traffic? Outside the airport there was much confusion; at the same time, there was little traffic. There were many standing taxis, all parked at the edge of an immense darkness, as if the airport were not huge and teeming (as Martin Mills had first thought), but a fragile wilderness outpost in a vast desert, where unseen fires were dying out and unseen squatters were defecating, without interruption, throughout the night.

Then, like flies, the taxi-wallas lighted on him; they pecked at his clothes, they tugged at his suitcase, which—although it was extremely heavy—he would not relinquish.

“No, thank you, I’m being met,” he said. He realized that his Hindi had abandoned him, which was just as well; he spoke it very poorly, anyway. The weary missionary suspected himself of suffering from that paranoia which is commonplace to first-time travelers to the East, for he grew increasingly apprehensive of the way the taxi-wallas looked at him. Some were in utter awe; others appeared to want to kill him. They assumed he was Inspector Dhar, and although they flitted near to him like flies, and darted away from him like flies, they seemed entirely too dangerous for flies.

After an hour, Martin Mills was still standing there, warding off newly arrived flies; the old flies hovered at a distance, still watching him but not bothering to approach him again. The missionary was so tired, he got the idea that the taxi-wallas were of the hyena class of animal, and that they were waiting for him to exhibit a loss of vital signs before they swarmed over him en masse. A prayer fluttered to his lips, but he was too exhausted to utter it. He was thinking that the other missionaries were perhaps too old to have met his plane, for he’d been informed of their advanced ages. He also knew about the jubilee celebration that was pending; surely the proper recognition of 125 years of service to God and to humanity was more worthwhile than meeting a newcomer’s plane. This was Martin Mills in a nutshell: he practiced self-deprecation to such a degree that it had become a vanity with him.

He shifted the suitcase from one hand to the other; he wouldn’t allow it to rest on the pavement, not only because this sign of weakness would invite the lingering taxi-wallas to approach him but also because the weight of the suitcase was steadily becoming a welcome chastisement of his flesh. Martin Mills found a certain focus, a pleasing purpose, to the specificity of such pain. It was neither as exquisite nor as unending a pain as the leg iron when properly tightened around the thigh; it wasn’t as sudden or breathtaking a pain as the whip on his bare back. Yet he greeted the pain of the suitcase warmly, and the suitcase itself bore a reminder of the ongoing task of Martin’s formation, of his search for God’s will and the strength of his self-denial. Inscribed in the old leather was the Latin Nostris (“Ours”)—meaning us Jesuits, meaning “the Life” (as it was called) in the Society of Jesus.

The suitcase itself called to memory Martin’s two years in the novitiate at St. Aloysius; his room had only a table, a straight-backed chair, a bed and a two-inch-high wooden kneeler. As his lips formed the word Nostris, he could summon to his memory the little bell that signaled flagellatio; he recalled the 30 days of his first silent retreat. He still took strength from these two years: pray, shave, work, be silent, study, pray. His was no fit of devotion but an orderly submission to rules: perpetual poverty, chastity, obedience. Obedience to a religious superior, yes; but, more important, obedience to a community life. Such rules made him feel free. Yet, on the matter of obedience, it haunted him that his previous superior had once criticized him on the grounds that Martin Mills seemed more suited to a monastic order—a stricter order, such as the Carthusians. Jesuits are meant to go out into the world; if not on our terms “worldly,” they are also not monks.

“I am not a monk,” Martin Mills said aloud. The nearby taxi-wallas understood this as a summons; once again, they swarmed around him.

“Avoid worldliness,” Martin cautioned himself. He smiled tolerantly at the milling taxi-wallas. There had been an admonition in Latin above his bed at St. Aloysius; it was an indirect reminder that a man should make his own bed—etiam si sacerdotes sint (“even if they be priests”). Therefore, Martin Mills decided, he would get himself into Bombay.

The Wrong Taxi-Walla

Of the taxi-wallas, there was only one who looked strong enough to handle the suitcase. He was tall and bearded, with a swarthy complexion and an exceedingly sharp, aggressive thrust to his nose.

“St. Ignatius, Mazagaon,” Martin said to this taxi-walla, who struck the missionary as a university student with a demanding night job—an admirable young man, probably paying his way through school.

With a savage glare, the young man took the suitcase and hurled it into his waiting taxi. All the taxi-wallas had been waiting for the Ambassador with the thug dwarf driver, for none of them had really believed that Inspector Dhar would stoop to use any other cab. There’d been many depictions of taxi-wallas in Inspector Dhar films; they were always portrayed as reckless and crazy.

The particular taxi-walla who’d seized the missionary’s suitcase and now watched Martin Mills slide into the back seat was a violent-minded young man named Bahadur. He’d just been expelled from a hotel-management school for cheating on a food-services exam—he’d plagiarized the answer to a simple question about catering. (“Bahadur” means “brave.”) He’d also just driven to the airport from Bombay and had seen the posters advertising Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence, which had greatly offended his loyal sensibilities. Although taxi driving wasn’t his preferred profession, Bahadur was grateful to his present employer, Mr. Mirza. Mr. Mirza was a Parsi; doubtless Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence would be monstrously offensive to Mr. Mirza. Bahadur felt honor-bound to represent the feelings of his boss.

Not surprisingly, Bahadur had hated all the earlier Dhar films. Before the release of this new offense, Bahadur had been hoping that Inspector Dhar would be murdered by offended hijras or offended female prostitutes. Bahadur generally favored the notion of murdering famous people, for he found it offensive to unfamous people that only very few people were famous. Moreover, he felt that driving a taxi was beneath him; he was doing it only to prove to a rich uncle that he was capable of “mingling with the masses.” It was Bahadur’s expectation that this uncle would soon send him off to another school. The present interim was unfortunate, but one could do worse than work for Mr. Mirza; like Vinod, Mr. Mirza operated a privately owned taxi company. Meanwhile, in his spare time, Bahadur was seeking to improve his English by concentrating on vulgar and profane expressions. Should he ever encounter a famous person, Bahadur wished to have such expressions on the tip of his tongue.

The reputations of famous people were entirely inflated, Bahadur knew. He’d heard stories of how tough Inspector Dhar was supposed to be, also that Dhar was a weight lifter! One look at the missionary’s scrawny arms proved this to be a typical lie. Movie hype! Bahadur thought. He liked to drive by the film studios, hoping to give actresses a ride. But no one important ever chose his taxi, and at Asha Pictures—and at Rajkamal Studio and Famous Studio and Central Studio—he’d been accosted by the police for loitering. Fuck these film people! Bahadur thought.

“I suppose you know where St. Ignatius is,” Martin Mills said nervously, once they were under way. “It’s a Jesuit mission, a church, a school,” he added, looking for some sign of recognition in the glare of the taxi-walla. When the scholastic saw that the young man was watching him in the rearview mirror, Martin did the friendly thing—at least he presumed it was the native-behavior thing to do. He winked.

That does it! Bahadur thought. Whether the wink was condescending, or whether it was the lewd invitation of a homosexual, Bahadur had made up his mind. Inspector Dhar should not be allowed to get away with the violent farce he made of Bombay life. In the middle of the night, Dhar wanted to go to St. Ignatius! What was he going to do there? Pray?

In addition to everything else that was fake about Inspector Dhar, Bahadur decided that the man was a fake Hindu, too. Inspector Dhar was a bleeding Christian!

“You’re supposed to be a Hindu,” Bahadur told the Jesuit.

Martin Mills was thrilled. His first religious confrontation in the missionary kingdom—his first Hindu! He knew they were the majority religion here.

“Well… well,” Martin said cheerfully. “Men of all faiths must be brothers.”

“Fuck your Jesus, and fuck you,” Bahadur remarked coldly.

“Well… well,” Martin said. Possibly there was a time to wink and a time not to wink, the new missionary thought.

Proselyte-Hunting Among the Prostitutes

Through the smoldering, reeking darkness, the taxi careened, but darkness had never intimidated Martin Mills. In crowds, he could be anxious, but the black of night did not menace him. Nor did it concern the missionary that he was in danger of some violence. He meditated on the unfulfilled dream of the Middle Ages, which was to win back Jerusalem for Christ. He contemplated that St. Ignatius Loyola’s own pilgrimage to Jerusalem had been a journey fraught with endless dangers and accidents. Ignatius’s attempted conquest of the Holy Land was a failure, for he was sent back; yet the saint’s desire to rescue unsaved souls remained ardent. It was always the Ignatian purpose to conform to the will of God. It was no coincidence that, to this end, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius began with a vivid representation of hell in all its horror. The fear of God was purifying; it had long been so to Martin Mills. To see both the fires of hell and a union with God in mystical ecstasy, one needed only to follow the Spiritual Exercises and call upon “the eye of the imagination,” for the missionary had no doubt that this was the clearest eye of all.

“Toil and will,” Martin Mills said aloud. This was his creed.

“I said, fuck your Jesus, and fuck you!” the taxi-walla repeated.

“Bless you,” Martin said. “Even you, and whatever you do to me, is God’s will—though you know not what you do.”

Most of all, Martin admired Ignatius Loyola’s notable encounter with the Moor on a mule and their ensuing discussion of the Holy Virgin. The Moor said he could believe that Our Lady had conceived without a man, but he could not believe that she’d remained a virgin after giving birth. After the Moor rode on, young Ignatius thought that he should hurry after the Muslim and kill him. He felt obliged to defend Our Lady’s honor. The defaming of the Virgin’s postbirth vaginal condition was gross and unacceptable behavior. Ignatius, as always, sought God’s will on the matter. Where the road parted, he let his own mule’s reins go slack; if the animal followed the Moor, Ignatius would kill the infidel. But the mule chose the other road.

“And fuck your St. Ignatius!” the taxi-walla shouted.

“St. Ignatius is where I would like to go,” Martin replied calmly. “But take me where you will.” Where they went, the missionary believed, would be God’s will. Martin Mills was just the passenger.

He thought of the late Father de Mello’s renowned book Christian Exercises in Eastern Form; so many of these exercises had helped him in the past. For example, there was that exercise which concerned the “healing of hurtful memories.” Whenever Martin Mills was troubled by the shame his parents had caused him, or by his seeming inability to love and forgive and honor his parents, he followed Father de Mello’s exercise verbatim. “Return to some unpleasant event”; such events were never hard to recall, but the selection of which horror to revisit was always an arduous decision. “Now place yourself before Christ Crucified”—that always had a certain power. Even the depravities of Veronica Rose paled before such an agony; even the self-destruction of Danny Mills seemed a trifling pain. “Keep commuting between the unpleasant event and the scene of Jesus on the Cross”; for years, Martin Mills had engaged in such commuting. Father de Mello was a hero to him. He had been born in Bombay, and until his death was the director of the Sadhana Institute of Pastoral Counseling (near Poona); it had been Father de Mello who had inspired Martin Mills to come to India.

Now, as the embracing darkness gradually yielded to the lights of Bombay, the bodies of the sidewalk sleepers appeared in mounds. The moonlight glinted off Mahim Bay. Martin couldn’t smell the horses as the taxi rocketed past the Mahalaxmi Race Course, but he could see the dark silhouette of Haji Ali’s Tomb; the slender minarets stood out against the fish-scale glint of the Arabian Sea. Then the taxi veered away from the moonlit ocean, and the missionary saw the sleeping city come to life—if the eternal sexual activity of Kamathipura could fairly be called life. It wasn’t a life that Martin Mills had ever known—it was nothing he’d ever imagined—and he prayed that his brief glimpse of the Muslim mausoleum wouldn’t be the last holy edifice he’d see in his allotted time on this mortal earth.

He saw the brothels overflowing into the little lanes. He saw the sex-stoned faces of the men let loose from the Wetness Cabaret; the last show was over, and the men who couldn’t yet bear to go home were wandering. And just when Martin Mills thought he’d encountered a greater evil than St. Ignatius Loyola had met on the streets of Rome, the taxi-walla jostled and edged his way into a darker hell. There were suddenly those prostitutes in human cages on Falkland Road.

“Won’t the cage girls just love to get a look at you!” cried Bahadur, who saw himself as Inspector Dhar’s designated persecutor.

Martin Mills remembered how Ignatius had raised money among rich people and founded an asylum for fallen women. It was in Rome where the saint had announced that he would sacrifice his life if he could prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” the missionary said to the taxi-walla, who screeched to a halt in front of a compelling display of eunuch-transvestites in their cages. Bahadur assumed that the hijra prostitutes were by far the angriest at Inspector Dhar. But, to the taxi-walla’s surprise, Martin Mills cheerfully opened the rear door and stepped into Falkland Road with a look of eager anticipation. He took his heavy suitcase from the trunk; and when the taxi-walla hurled the money for the fare at the missionary’s feet and spat on it—for the trip from the airport had been prepaid—Martin retrieved the wet money and handed it back to Bahadur.

“No, no—you’ve done your job. I am where I should be,” the missionary said. A circle of pickpockets and street prostitutes with their pimps were slowly surrounding the scholastic, but Bahadur wanted the hijras to be certain to see their enemy, and so he pushed against the gathering crowd.

“Dhar—Inspector Dhar! Dhar! Dhar!” the taxi-walla cried. But this was entirely unnecessary, for the word that Dhar was on Falkland Road had traveled ahead of the taxi-walla’s cries. Martin Mills quite easily made his own way through the crowd; the degraded women in those cages were the ones he wished to address. (It never occurred to him, of course, that they weren’t really women.)

“Please, let me speak with you,” the missionary said to a transvestite in his cage. Most of the hijras were, at first, too stunned to attack the hated actor. “Surely you must know of the diseases—nowadays, of the certain death you are exposing yourselves to! But I tell you, if you want to be saved, that is all you need—to want to be.”

Two pickpockets and several pimps were fighting over the money that Martin had tried to give back to the taxi-walla. Bahadur had already been beaten to his knees, and several prostitutes continued to kick at him. But Martin Mills was oblivious to what was behind him. The apparent women in the cages faced him, and it was only to them that he spoke. “St. Ignatius,” he said. “In Mazagaon? You must know it. I can always be found there. You have only to come there.”

It is intriguing to imagine how Father Julian and Father Cecil might have responded to this generous invitation, for surely the mission’s 125th jubilee would be a much more colorful celebration with the added presence of several eunuch-transvestite prostitutes in search of salvation. Unfortunately, the Father Rector and the senior priest were not on hand to witness Martin Mills’s extraordinary proposition. Did Martin suppose that if the prostitutes arrived at St. Ignatius during school hours, the schoolchildren might benefit from the visible conversion of these fallen women?

“If you feel but the slightest remorse, you must take this as a sign that you can be saved,” the scholastic told them.

It wasn’t a hijra who struck the first blow, but one of the street prostitutes; probably she was feeling ignored. She shoved Martin in the small of his back and he stumbled forward on one knee; then the pimps and pickpockets pulled his suitcase away from him—that was when the hijras became involved. After all, Dhar had been speaking to them; they didn’t want their territory, or their vengeance, trespassed on—certainly not by this common rabble off the street. The transvestite prostitutes easily beat away the street prostitutes and their pimps, and not even the pickpockets could escape with the heavy suitcase, which the hijras opened for themselves.

They wouldn’t touch the wrinkled black suit and the black shirts or the clerical collars—these weren’t their style—but the Hawaiian shirts were appealing to them, and they quickly took these. Then one of them stripped the shirt off Martin Mills, being careful not to tear it, and when the missionary was naked above his waist, one of the hijras discovered the whip with the braided cords, which was too tempting to ignore. With the first of the stinging lashes from the whip, Martin lay on his stomach; then he curled himself into a ball. He wouldn’t cover his face, for it mattered too much to him that he clasped his hands together in prayer; thus he maintained the extreme conviction that even such a beating as this was ad majorem Dei Gloriam (“to the greater glory of God”).

The transvestite prostitutes were respectful of all the assembled evidence of education that was contained in the suitcase; even in their excitement to each take a turn with the whip, they wouldn’t tear or wrinkle a page of a single book. The leg iron, however, was misinterpreted by them, as were the culpa beads; a transvestite prostitute tried to eat the beads before he threw them away. As for the leg iron, the hijras didn’t know it went around the thigh—or else they simply thought it would be more suitable to attach the device around Inspector Dhar’s neck, which they did. It wasn’t too tight a fit, but the wire prongs had raked the missionary’s face—the hijras were so impatient that they’d scraped the leg iron over their victim’s head—and now the prongs dug into Martin’s throat, which caused a multitude of minor cuts. The missionary’s torso was striped with blood.

Gamely, he tried to stand. As he kept trying, he faced the whip. The transvestites stepped away from him, for he wasn’t behaving as they’d expected. He didn’t fight back; he didn’t beg for his life, either. “It is you, and everything that happens to you, that I care for!” Martin Mills called to them. “Though you revile me, and I am nothing, I want only for you to save yourselves. I can show you how, but only if you let me.”

The hijras passed the whip, but there was noticeably less enthusiasm among them. When one would hold it, he would quickly pass it on, without taking a whack. The raised red welts covered Martin’s exposed flesh—they were especially startling on his face—and the blood from the wrongly placed leg iron streaked his chest. He protected not himself but his books! He closed the suitcase safely around these treasures of his learning, and still he beseeched the prostitutes to join him.

“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.

All Together—in One Small Apartment

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.

As for the missionary, he was taken aback to see a man in a black kimono holding a black umbrella—an ominous image. But the umbrella was undaunting to Vinod, who slipped close to Dr. Daruwalla and whispered, “I am finding him preaching to transvestite prostitutes—the hijras are almost killing him!”

Farrokh knew who Martin Mills was as soon as the missionary spoke: “I believe you’ve met my mother and father—my name is Martin, Martin Mills.”

“Please come in—I’ve been expecting you,” Dr. Daruwalla said, taking the beaten man’s arm.

“You have?” said Martin Mills.

“There is being brain damage!” Vinod whispered to the doctor, who supported the wobbly missionary into the bathroom, where he told Martin to strip. Then the doctor prepared an Epsom-salts bath. While the bath was filling, Farrokh got Julia out of bed and told her to get rid of Vinod.

“Who’s taking a bath at this hour?” she asked her husband.

“It’s John D.’s twin,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

Free Will

Julia had managed to coax Vinod no farther than the foyer when the phone rang. She answered quickly. Vinod could hear the entire conversation because the man on the other end of the phone was screaming. It was Mr. Munim, the first-floor member of the Residents’ Society.

“I saw him getting on the lift! He woke all the dogs! I saw him—your dwarf!” Mr. Munim shouted.

Julia said, “I beg your pardon—we don’t own a dwarf.”

“You don’t fool me!” Mr. Munim hollered. “That movie star’s dwarf—that’s who I mean!”

“We don’t own a movie star, either,” Julia told him.

“You are violating a stated rule!” Mr. Munim screamed.

“I don’t know what you mean—you must be out of your mind,” Julia replied.

“The taxi-walla used the lift—that midget thug!” Mr. Munim cried.

“Don’t make me call the police,” Julia said; then she hung up.

“I am using the stairs, but they are making me limp—the whole six floors,” Vinod said. Martyrdom strangely suited him, Julia thought, but she realized that Vinod was lingering in the foyer for a purpose. “There are being five umbrellas in your umbrella stand,” the dwarf observed.

“Would you like to borrow one, Vinod?” Julia asked him.

“Only for helping me on the stairs,” Vinod replied. “I am needing a cane.” He’d left the squash-racquet handles in his taxi; were he to encounter either a first-floor dog or Mr. Munim, Vinod wanted a weapon. Therefore, he took an umbrella with him; Julia let him out the kitchen door, which led to the back stairs.

“Maybe you are never seeing me again,” Vinod told her. As the dwarf peered down the stairwell, Julia noticed that he was slightly shorter than the umbrella that he’d chosen; Vinod had taken the biggest umbrella.

In the bathtub, Martin Mills looked as if he welcomed the stings from his raised red welts, and he never flinched while Dr. Daruwalla sponged off the multitude of minor wounds caused by the gruesome leg iron; the doctor thought that the missionary appeared to miss the leg iron after it had been removed, and Martin twice expressed concern that he’d left his whip in the heroic dwarf’s car.

“Vinod will surely return it to you,” Dr. Daruwalla said. The doctor was not as amazed by the missionary’s story as the missionary himself was amazed; given the magnitude of the mistaken identity, Dr. Daruwalla was astonished that Martin Mills was still alive—not to mention that his wounds were minor. And the more the missionary babbled on and on about his experience, the less he bore any resemblance, in Farrokh’s eyes, to his taciturn twin. Dhar didn’t babble.

“Well, I mean I knew I wasn’t among Christians,” Martin Mills said, “but still I hardly expected the violent hostility toward Christianity that I encountered.”

“Now, now—I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion,” Dr. Daruwalla cautioned the agitated scholastic. “There is some sensitivity, however, toward proselytizing… of any kind.”

“Saving souls is not proselytizing,” Martin Mills said defensively.

“Well, as you say, you were not exactly in Christian territory,” Dr. Daruwalla replied.

“How many of those prostitutes are carrying the AIDS virus?” Martin asked.

“I’m an orthopedist,” the doctor reminded the scholastic, “but people who know say forty percent—some say sixty.”

“Either way,” said Martin Mills, “that’s Christian territory.”

For the first time, Farrokh considered that the madman before him posed a threat to himself that might exceed the danger presented by his striking resemblance to Inspector Dhar.

“But I thought you were an English teacher,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “As a former student of the place, I can assure you, St. Ignatius is first and foremost a school.” The doctor knew the Father Rector; Dr. Daruwalla could well anticipate that this was precisely what Father Julian would have to say about the matter of saving prostitutes’ souls. But as Farrokh watched Martin step naked from the bath—whereupon, unmindful of his wounds, the missionary began to vigorously towel himself dry—the doctor further anticipated that the Father Rector and all the aged defenders of the faith at St. Ignatius would have a hard time convincing such a zealous scholastic as this that his duties were restricted to improving the English of the upper classes. For as he rubbed and rubbed the towel against the lash marks until his face and torso were striped as bright red as when the whip had only just struck him, Martin Mills was all the while thinking of a reply. Like the crafty Jesuit that he was, he began his answer with a question.

“Aren’t you a Christian?” the missionary asked the doctor. “I believe my father said you were converted, but that you’re not a Roman Catholic.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Dr. Daruwalla replied cautiously. He gave Martin Mills a clean pair of his best silk pajamas, but the scholastic preferred to stand naked.

“Are you familiar with the Calvinist, Jansenist position in regard to free will?” Martin asked Farrokh. “I’m greatly oversimplifying, but this was that dispute born of Luther and those Protestant divines of the Reformation—namely, the idea that we’re doomed by original sin and can expect salvation only through divine grace. Luther denied that good works could contribute to our salvation. Calvin further denied that our faith could save us. According to Calvin, we are all predestined to be saved—or not. Do you believe that?”

By the way the logic of the Jesuit was leaning, Farrokh guessed that he should not believe that, and so he said, “No—not exactly.”

“Well, good—then you’re not a Jansenist,” the scholastic said. “They were very discouraging—their doctrine of grace over that of free will was quite defeatist, really. They made us all feel that there was absolutely nothing we could do to be saved—in short, why bother with good works? And so what if we sin?”

“Are you still oversimplifying?” asked Dr. Daruwalla. The Jesuit regarded the doctor with sly respect; he also took this interruption as a useful time in which to put on the doctor’s silk pajamas.

“If you’re suggesting that it’s almost impossible to reconcile the concept of free will with our belief in an omnipotent and omniscient God, I agree with you—it’s difficult,” Martin said. “The question of the relationship between human will and divine omnipotence… is that your question?”

Dr. Daruwalla guessed that this should be his question, and so he said, “Yes—something like that.”

“Well, that really is an interesting question,” the Jesuit said. “I just hate it when people try to reduce the spiritual world with purely mechanical theories—those behaviorists, for example. Who cares about Loeb’s plant-lice theories or Pavlov’s dog?” Dr. Daruwalla nodded, but he didn’t dare speak; he’d never heard of plant lice. He’d heard of Pavlov’s dog, of course; he could even recall what made the dog salivate and what the saliva meant.

“We must seem excessively strict to you—we Catholics to you Protestants, I mean,” Martin said. Dr. Daruwalla shook his head. “Oh, yes we do!” the missionary said. “We are a theology of rewards and punishments, which are meted out in the life after death. Compared to you, we make much of sin. We Jesuits, however, tend to minimize those sins of thought.”

“As opposed to those of deed,” interjected Dr. Daruwalla, for although this was obvious and totally unnecessary to say, the doctor felt that only a fool would have nothing to say, and he’d been saying nothing.

“To us—to us Catholics, I mean—you Protestants appear, at times, to overemphasize the human propensity toward evil …” And here the missionary paused; but Dr. Daruwalla, unsure whether he should nod or shake his head, just stared stupidly at the bathwater spiraling down the drain, as if the water were his own thoughts, escaping him.

“Do you know Leibniz?” the Jesuit suddenly asked him.

“Well, in university… but that was years ago,” the doctor said.

“The Leibniz assumption is that man’s freedom was not taken from him by his fall, which makes Leibniz quite a friend of ours—of us Jesuits, I mean,” Martin said. “There is some Leibniz I can never forget, such as, ‘Although the impulse and the help come from God, they are at all times accompanied by a certain co-operation of man himself; if not, we could not say that we had acted’—but you agree, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“Well, you see, that’s why I can’t be just an English teacher,” the Jesuit replied. “Naturally, I shall endeavor to improve the children’s English—and to the most perfect degree possible. But, given that I am free to act—‘although the impulse and the help come from God,’ of course—I must do what I can, not only to save my soul but to rescue the souls of others.”

“I see,” said Dr. Daruwalla, who was also beginning to understand why the enraged transvestite prostitutes had failed to make much of a dent in the flesh or the indomitable will of Martin Mills.

Furthermore, the doctor found that he was standing in his own living room and watching Martin lie down on the couch, without the slightest recollection of having left the bathroom. That was when the missionary handed the leg iron to the doctor, who received the instrument reluctantly.

“I can see I will not be needing this here,” the scholastic said. “There will be sufficient adversity without it. St. Ignatius Loyola also changed his mind in regard to these weapons of mortification.”

“He did?” said Farrokh.

“I think he overused them—but only out of a positive abhorrence of his earlier sins,” the Jesuit said. “In fact, in the later version of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius urges against such scourges of the flesh—he is also opposed to heavy fasting.”

“So am I,” said Dr. Daruwalla, who didn’t know what to do with the cruel leg iron.

“Please throw it away,” Martin said to him. “And perhaps you’d be so kind as to tell the dwarf to keep the whip—I don’t want it.”

Dr. Daruwalla knew all about Vinod’s racquet handles; the prospect of what use the dwarf might make of the whip was chilling. Then the doctor noticed that Martin Mills had fallen asleep. With his fingers interlocked on his chest, and with an utterly beatific expression, the missionary resembled a martyr en route to the heavenly kingdom.

Farrokh brought Julia into the living room to see him. At first, she wouldn’t approach past the glass-topped table—she viewed him as one might view a contaminated corpse—but the doctor encouraged her to take a closer look. The nearer Julia drew to Martin Mills, the more relaxed she became. It was as if—at least, when he was asleep—Martin had a pacifying effect on everyone around him. Eventually, Julia sat on the floor beside the couch. She would say later that he reminded her of John D. as a much younger, more carefree man, although Farrokh maintained that Martin Mills was simply the result of no weight lifting and no beer—meaning that he had no muscles but that he had no belly, either.

Without remembering when he sat down, the doctor found himself on the floor beside his wife. They were both sitting beside the couch, as if transfixed by the sleeping body, when Dhar came in from the balcony to have a shower and to brush his teeth; from Dhar’s perspective, Farrokh and Julia appeared to be praying. Then the movie star saw the dead person—at least, the person looked dead to Dhar—and without taking too close a look, he said, “Who’s that?”

Farrokh and Julia were shocked that John D. didn’t immediately recognize his twin; after all, an actor is especially familiar with his own facial features—and under a variety of makeup, including the radical altering of his age—but Dhar had never seen such an expression on his own face. It’s doubtful that Dhar’s face ever reflected beatification, for not even in his sleep had Inspector Dhar imagined the happiness of heaven. Dhar had many expressions, but none of them was saintly.

Finally, the actor whispered, “Well, okay, I see who it is, but what’s he doing here? Is he going to die?”

“He’s trying to be a priest,” Farrokh whispered.

“Jesus Christ!” John D. said. Either he should have whispered or else the particular name he spoke was one that Martin Mills was prone to hear; a smile of such immense gratitude crossed the missionary’s sleeping face that Dhar and the Daruwallas felt suddenly ashamed. Without a word to one another, they tiptoed into the kitchen, as if they were unanimously embarrassed that they’d been spying on a sleeping man; what truly had disturbed them, and had made them feel as if they didn’t belong where they were, was the utter contentment of a man momentarily at peace with his soul—although none of them could have identified what it was that so upset them.

“What’s wrong with him?” Dhar asked.

“Nothing’s wrong with him!” Dr. Daruwalla said; then he wondered why he’d said that about a man who’d been whipped and beaten while he was proselytizing among transvestite prostitutes. “I should have told you he was coming,” the doctor added sheepishly, to which John D. merely rolled his eyes; his anger was often understated. Julia rolled her eyes, too.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Farrokh said to John D., “it’s entirely your decision as to whether or not you want to let him know that you exist. Although I don’t know if now would be the right time to tell him.”

“Forget about now,” Dhar said. “Tell me what he’s like.”

Dr. Daruwalla could not utter the first word that came to his lips—the word was “crazy.” On second thought, he almost said, Like you, except that he talks. But this was such a contradictory concept—the very idea of a Dhar who talked might be insulting to Dhar.

“I said, what’s he like?” John D. repeated.

“I saw him only when he was asleep,” Julia told John D. Both of them were staring at Farrokh, whose mind—on the matter of what Martin Mills was “like”—was truly blank. Not a single picture came to his mind, although the missionary had managed to argue with him, lecture to him and even educate him—and most of this had transpired while the zealot was naked.

“He’s somewhat zealous,” the doctor offered cautiously.

“Zealous?” said Dhar.

“Liebchen, is that all you can say?” Julia asked Farrokh. “I heard him talking and talking in the bathroom. He must have been saying something!”

“In the bathroom?” John D. asked.

“He’s very determined,” Farrokh blurted.

“I guess that would follow from being ‘zealous,’” said Inspector Dhar; he was at his most sarcastic.

It was exasperating to Dr. Daruwalla that they expected him to be able to summarize the Jesuit’s character on the basis of this one peculiar meeting.

The doctor didn’t know the history of that other zealot—the greatest zealot of the 16th century, St. Ignatius Loyola—who had so inspired Martin Mills. When Ignatius died without ever having permitted a portrait of himself to be painted, the brothers of the order sought to have a portrait made of the dead man. A famous painter tried and failed. The disciples declared that the death mask, which was the work of an unknown, was also not the true face of the father of the Jesuits. Three other artists tried and failed to capture him, but they had only the death mask for their model. It was finally decided that God did not wish for Ignatius Loyola, His servant, to be painted. Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t have known how greatly Martin Mills loved this story, but it doubtless would have pleased the new missionary to see how the doctor struggled to describe even such a fledgling servant of God as this mere scholastic. Farrokh felt the right word come to his lips, but then it escaped him.

“He’s well educated,” Farrokh managed to say. Both John D. and Julia groaned. “Well, damn it, he’s complicated!” Dr. Daruwalla shouted. “It’s too soon to know what he’s like!”

“Ssshhh! You’ll wake him up,” Julia told Farrokh.

“If it’s too soon to know what he’s like,” John D. said, “then it’s too soon for me to know if I want to meet him.”

Dr. Daruwalla was irritated; he felt that this was a typical Inspector Dhar thing to say.

Julia knew what her husband was thinking. “Hold your tongue,” she told him. She made coffee for herself and John D.—for Farrokh, she made a pot of tea. Together, the Daruwallas watched their beloved movie star leave by the kitchen door. Dhar liked to use the back stairs so that he wouldn’t be seen; the early morning—it wasn’t quite 6:00—was one of the few times he could walk from Marine Drive to the Taj without being recognized and surrounded. At that hour, only the beggars would hassle him; they hassled everyone equally. It simply didn’t matter to the beggars that he was Inspector Dhar; many beggars went to the cinema, but what did a movie star matter to them?

Standing Still: An Exercise

At exactly 6:00 in the morning, when Farrokh and Julia were sharing a bath together—she soaped his back, he soaped her breasts, but there was no more extensive hanky-panky than that—Martin Mills awoke to the soothing sounds of Dr. Aziz, the praying urologist. “Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation”—Dr. Aziz’s incantations to Allah drifted upward from his fifth-floor balcony and brought the new missionary instantly to his feet. Although he’d been asleep for less than an hour, the Jesuit felt as refreshed as a normal man who had slept the whole night through; thus invigorated, he bounded to Dr. Daruwalla’s balcony, where he could oversee the morning ritual that Urology Aziz enacted on his prayer rug. From the vantage point of the Daruwallas’ sixth-floor apartment, the view of Back Bay was stunning. Martin Mills could see Malabar Hill and Nariman Point; in the distance, a small city of people had already congregated on Chowpatty Beach. But the Jesuit had not come to Bombay for the view. He followed the prayers of Dr. Aziz with the keenest concentration. There was always something one could learn from the holiness of others.

Martin Mills did not take prayer for granted. He knew that prayer wasn’t the same as thinking, nor was it an escape from thinking. It was never as simple as mere asking. Instead, it was the seeking of instruction; for to know God’s will was Martin’s heart’s desire, and to attain such a state of perfection—a union with God in mystical ecstasy—required the patience of a corpse.

Watching Urology Aziz roll up his prayer rug, Martin Mills knew it was the perfect time for him to practice another exercise of Father de Mello’s Christian Exercises in Eastern Form—namely, “stillness.” Most people didn’t appreciate how impossible it was to stand absolutely still; it could be painful, too, but Martin was good at it. He stood so still that, 10 minutes later, a passing fork-tailed kite almost landed on his head. It wasn’t because the missionary so much as blinked that the bird suddenly veered away from him; the light that was reflected in the brightness of the missionary’s eyes frightened the bird away.

Meanwhile, Dr. Daruwalla was tearing through his hate mail, wherein he found a troubling two-rupee note. The envelope was addressed to Inspector Dhar in care of the film studio; typed on the serial-number side of the money, in capital letters, was this warning: YOU’RE AS DEAD AS LAL. The doctor would show this to Deputy Commissioner Patel, of course, but Farrokh felt he didn’t need the detective’s confirmation in order to know that the typist was the same lunatic who’d typed the message on the money found in Mr. Lal’s mouth.

Then Julia burst into the bedroom. She’d peeked into the living room to see if Martin Mills was still sleeping, but he wasn’t on the couch. The sliding-glass doors to the balcony were open, but she’d not seen the missionary on the balcony—he was standing so still, she’d missed him. Dr. Daruwalla stuffed the two-rupee note into his pocket and rushed to the balcony.

By the time the doctor got there, the missionary had moved ahead to a new prayer tactic—this one being one of Father de Mello’s exercises in the area of “body sensations” and “thought control.” Martin would lift his right foot, move it forward, then put it down. As he did this, he would chant, “Lifting… lifting… lifting,” and then (naturally) “Moving… moving… moving,” and (finally) “Placing… placing… placing.” In short, he was merely walking across the balcony, but with an exaggerated slowness—all the while exclaiming aloud his exact movements. To Dr. Daruwalla, Martin Mills resembled a patient in physical therapy—someone recovering from a recent stroke—for the missionary appeared to be teaching himself how to speak and walk at the same time, with only modest success.

Farrokh tiptoed back to the bedroom and Julia.

“Perhaps I’ve underestimated his injuries,” the doctor said. “I’ll have to take him to the office with me. At least for a while, it’s best to keep an eye on him.”

But when the Daruwallas cautiously approached the Jesuit, he was dressed in clerical garb. He was looking through his suitcase.

“They took only my culpa beads and my casual clothes,” Martin remarked. “I’ll have to buy some cheap local wear—it would be ostentatious to show up at St. Ignatius looking like this!” Whereupon he laughed and plucked at his startlingly white collar.

It certainly won’t do to have him walking around Bombay like this, Dr. Daruwalla thought. What was required was the sort of clothing that would allow the madman somehow to fit in. Possibly I could arrange to shave his head, the doctor thought. Julia simply gaped at Martin Mills, but as soon as he began to relate (again!) the tale of his introduction to the city, he completely charmed her, and she became as alternately flirtatious and shy as a schoolgirl. For a man who’d taken a vow of chastity, the Jesuit was remarkably at ease with women—at least with an older woman, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

The complexities of the day ahead for Dr. Daruwalla were almost as frightening to the doctor as the thought of spending the next 12 hours in the missionary’s discarded leg iron—or being followed around by Vinod, with the angry dwarf wielding the missionary’s whip.

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.

Bird-Shit Boy

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!”

“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.