A Son of the Circus

On the Road to Junagadh

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clutch and brake pedals—their smooth metal surfaces looked slippery—and the doubtlessly overused accelerator pedal had been replaced by a piece of wood; it looked as flimsy as a shingle, but Ramu never took his right foot off it.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 up-shifting 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.

“All right, if that’s what you want. I’m going to tell you a little story about my mother,” said Martin Mills. Somehow, Dr. Daruwalla knew that the story wouldn’t be “little.” The missionary wasn’t a minimalist; he favored description. In fact, Martin left out no detail; he told Farrokh absolutely everything he could remember. The exquisiteness of Arif Koma’s complexion, the different odors of masturbation—not only Arif’s, but also the smell that lingered on the U.C.L.A. babysitter’s fingers.

Thus they hurtled through the darkened countryside and the dimly lit towns, where the reek of cooking and excrement assailed them—together with the squabbling of chickens, the barking of dogs and the savage threats of the shouting, almostrunover pedestrians. Ramu apologized that his driver’s-side window was missing; not only did the rushing night air grow cooler, but the back-seat passengers were struck by flying insects. Once, something the size of a hummingbird smacked against Martin’s forehead; it must have stung, and for five minutes or more it lay buzzing and whirring on the floor before it died—whatever it was. But the missionary’s story was unstoppable; nothing could deter him.

It took him all the way to Junagadh to finish. As they entered the brightly lit town, the streets were teeming; two crowds were surging against each other. A loudspeaker on a parked truck played circus music. One crowd was coming from the early-evening show, the other hurrying to line up for the show that was to start later on.

I should tell the poor bastard everything, Dr. Daruwalla was thinking. That he has a twin, that his mother was always a slut, that Neville Eden was probably his real father. Danny was too dumb to be the father; both John D. and Martin Mills were smart. Neville, although Farrokh had never liked him, had been smart. But Martin’s story had struck Farrokh speechless. Moreover, the doctor believed that these revelations should be John D.’s decision. And although Dr. Daruwalla wanted to punish Vera in almost any way that he could, the one thing that Martin had said about Danny contributed further to the doctor’s silence: “I love my father—I just wish I didn’t pity him.”

The rest of the story was all about Vera; Martin hadn’t said another word about Danny. The doctor decided that it wasn’t a good time for the Jesuit to hear that his probable father was a two-timing, bisexual shit named Neville Eden. This news would not help Martin to pity Danny any less.

Besides, they were almost at the circus. The elephant-footed boy was so excited, he was kneeling on the front seat and waving out the window at the mob. The circus music, which was blaring at them over the loudspeaker, had managed to wake up Madhu.

“Here’s your new life,” Dr. Daruwalla told the child prostitute. “Wake up and see it.”

A Racist Chimpanzee

Although Ramu never stopped blowing the horn, the Land Rover barely crawled through the crowd. Several small boys clung to the door handles and the rear bumper, allowing themselves to be dragged along the road. Everyone stared into the back seat. Madhu was mistaken to be anxious; the crowd wasn’t staring at her. It was Martin Mills who drew their attention; they were unused to white men. Junagadh wasn’t a tourist town. The missionary’s skin was as pale as dough in the glare from the streetlights. Because they were forced to move ahead so slowly, it grew hot in the car, but when Martin rolled his rear window down, people reached inside the Land Rover just to touch him.

Far ahead of them, a dwarf clown on stilts was leading the throng. It was even more congested at the circus because it was too early to let the crowd in; the Land Rover had to inch its way through the well-guarded gate. Once inside the compound, Dr. Daruwalla appreciated a familiar sensation: the circus was a cloister, a protected place; it was as exempt from the mayhem of Junagadh as St. Ignatius stood, like a fort, within the chaos of Bombay. The children would be safe here, provided that they gave the place a chance—provided that the circus gave them a chance.

But the first omen was inhospitable: Deepa didn’t meet them; the dwarf’s wife and son were sick—confined to their tent. And, almost immediately, Dr. Daruwalla could sense how the Great Blue Nile compared unfavorably to the Great Royal. There was no owner of the charm and dignity of Pratap Walawalkar; in fact, the owner of the Great Blue Nile was away. No dinner was waiting for them in the owner’s tent, which they never saw. The ringmaster was a Bengali named Das; there was no food in Mr. Das’s tent, and the sleeping cots were all in a row, as in a spartan barracks; a minimum of ornamentation was draped on the walls. The dirt floor was completely covered with rugs; bolts of brightly colored fabric, for costumes, were hung high in the apex of the tent, out of everyone’s way, and the trappings of a temple were prominently displayed alongside the TV and VCR.

A cot like all the others was identified as Madhu’s; Mr. Das was putting her between two older girls, who (he said) would mind her. Mrs. Das, the ringmaster assured them, would “mind” Madhu, too. As for Mrs. Das, she didn’t get off her cot to greet them. She sat sewing sequins on a costume, and only as they were leaving the tent did she speak to Madhu.

“I am meeting you tomorrow,” she told the girl.

“What time shall we come in the morning?” Dr. Daruwalla asked, but Mrs. Das—who manifested something of the victimized severity of an unexpectedly divorced aunt—didn’t answer him. Her head remained lowered, her eyes on her sewing.

“Don’t come too early, because we’ll be watching television,” Mr. Das told the doctor.

Well, naturally… Dr. Daruwalla thought.

Ganesh’s cot would be set up in the cook’s tent, where Mr. Das escorted them—and where he left them. He said he had to prepare for the 9:30 show. The cook, whose name was Chandra, assumed that Ganesh had been sent to help him; Chandra began to identify his utensils to the cripple, who listened indifferently—Dr. Daruwalla knew that the boy wanted to see the lions.

“Kadhai,” a wok. “Jhara,” a slotted spoon. “Kisni,” a coconut grater. From outside the cook’s tent, in the darkness, they also listened to the regular coughs of the lions. The crowd still hadn’t been admitted to the main tent but they were present in the darkness, like the lions, as a kind of background murmur.

Dr. Daruwalla didn’t notice the mosquitoes until he began to eat. The doctor and the others ate standing up, off stainless-steel plates—curried potatoes and eggplant with too much cumin. Then they were offered a plate of raw vegetables—carrots and radishes, onions and tomatoes—which they washed down with warm orange soda. Good old Gold Spot. Gujarat was a dry state, because Gandhi was born there—the tedious teetotaler. Farrokh reflected that he would probably be awake all night. He’d been counting on beer to keep him away from his screenplay, to help him sleep. Then he remembered that he’d be sharing a room with Madhu; in that case, it would be best to stay awake all night and to not have any beer.

Throughout their hasty, unsatisfying meal, Chandra progressed to naming vegetables to Ganesh, as if the cook assumed the boy had lost his language in the same accident that had mangled his foot. (“Aloo,” potato. “Chawli,” a white pea. “Baingan,” eggplant.) As for Madhu, she appeared neglected, and she was shivering. Surely she had a shawl or a sweater in her small bag, but all their bags were still in the Land Rover, which was parked God knew where; Ramu, their driver, was God knew where, too. Besides, it was almost time for the late show.

When they stepped into the avenue of troupe tents, they saw that the performers were already in costume; the elephants were being led down the aisle. In the wing of the main tent, the horses were standing in line. A roustabout had already saddled the first horse. Then a trainer prodded a big chimpanzee with a stick, launching the animal into what appeared to be a vertical leap of at least five feet. The horse had started forward, just a nervous step or two, when the chimpanzee landed on the saddle. There the chimp squatted on all fours; when the trainer touched the saddle with his stick, the chimpanzee performed a front flip on the horse’s back—and then another.

The band was already on the platform stage above the arena, which was still filling with the crowd. The visitors would be in the way if they stood in the wing, but Mr. Das, the ringmaster, hadn’t appeared; there was no one to show them to their seats. Martin Mills suggested that they find seats for themselves before the tent was full; Dr. Daruwalla resented such informality. While the doctor and the missionary were arguing about what to do, the chimp doing front flips on the horse grew distracted. Martin Mills was the distraction.

The chimpanzee was an old male named Gautam, because even as a baby he’d demonstrated a remarkable similarity to Buddha; he could sit in the same position and stare at the same thing for hours. As he’d aged, Gautam had extended his capacity for meditation to include certain repetitive exercises; the front flips on the horse’s back were but one example. Gautam could repeat the move tirelessly; whether the horse was galloping or standing still, the chimpanzee always landed on the saddle. There was, however, a diminished enthusiasm to Gautam’s front flips, and to his other activities as well. His trainer, Kunal, attributed Gautam’s emotional decline to the big chimp’s infatuation with Mira, a young female chimpanzee. Mira was new to the Great Blue Nile, and Gautam could be observed pining for her—often at inappropriate times.

If he saw Mira when he was doing front flips, Gautam would miss not only the saddle but the whole horse. Hence Mira rode a horse far back in the procession of animals that paraded around the main tent during the Grand Entry. It was only when Gautam was warming up in the wing that the old chimpanzee could spot Mira; she was kept near the elephants, because Gautam was afraid of elephants. At some trancelike distance in Gautam’s mind, this view of Mira—as the big chimp waited for the curtains to open and the Grand Entry music to begin—satisfied him. He kept doing front flips, mechanically, almost as if the jumps were triggered by a mild electrical shock, at about five-second intervals. In the corner of Gautam’s eye, Mira was a faraway presence; nevertheless, she was enough of a presence to soothe him.

Gautam became extremely unhappy if his view of Mira was blocked. Only Kunal was allowed to pass between the chimp and his view of Mira. Kunal never stood anywhere near Gautam without a stick in his hand. Gautam was big for a chimp; according to Kunal, the ape weighed 145 pounds and was almost five feet tall.

Simply put, Martin Mills was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. After the attack, Kunal speculated that Gautam might have imagined that the missionary was another male chimpanzee; not only had Martin blocked Gautam’s view of Mira, but Gautam might have assumed that the missionary was seeking Mira’s affection—for Mira was a very affectionate female, and her friendliness (to male chimpanzees) was something that regularly drove Gautam insane. As for why Gautam might have mistaken Martin Mills for an ape, Kunal suggested that the paleness of the scholastic’s skin would surely have struck Gautam as unnatural for a human being. If Martin’s skin color was a novelty to the people of Junagadh—who, after all, had gawked at him and pawed him over in the passing Land Rover—Martin’s skin was only slightly less foreign to Gautam’s experience. Since, to Gautam, Martin Mills didn’t look like a human being, the ape probably thought that the missionary was a male chim

It was with a logic of this kind that Gautam interrupted his front flips on the horse’s back. The chimpanzee screamed once and bared his fangs; then he vaulted from the rump of the horse and over the back of another horse, landing on Martin’s shoulders and chest and driving the missionary to his back on the ground. There Gautam sunk his teeth into the side of the surprised Jesuit’s neck. Martin was fortunate to have protected his throat with his hand, but this meant that his hand was bitten, too. When it was over, there was a deep puncture wound in Martin’s neck and a slash wound from the heel of his hand to the ball of his thumb; and a small piece of the missionary’s right earlobe was missing. Gautam was too strong to be pulled off the struggling scholastic, but Kunal was able to beat the ape away with his stick. The whole time Mira was shrieking; it was hard to tell if her cries signified requited love or disapproval.

The discussion of whether the chimp attack had been racially motivated or sexually inspired, or both, continued throughout the late-evening show. Martin Mills refused to allow Dr. Daruwalla to attend to his wounds until the performance was concluded; the Jesuit insisted that the children would learn a valuable lesson from his stoicism, which the doctor regarded as a stupid stoicism of the show-must-go-on variety. Both Madhu and Ganesh were distracted by the missionary’s missing earlobe and the other gory evidence of the savage biting that the zealot had suffered; Madhu hardly watched the circus at all. Farrokh, however, paid close attention. The doctor was content to let the missionary bleed. Dr. Daruwalla didn’t want to miss the performance.

A Perfect Ending

The better acts had been borrowed from the Great Royal—in particular, an item called Bicycle Waltz, for which the band played “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” A thin, muscular woman of an obvious sinewy strength performed the Skywalk at a fast, mechanical pace. The audience was unfrightened for her; even without a safety net, there was no palpable fear that she could fall. While Suman looked beautiful and vulnerable—as could be expected of a young woman hanging upside down at 80 feet—the skywalker at the Great Blue Nile resembled a middle-aged robot. Her name was Mrs. Bhagwan, and Farrokh recognized her as the knife thrower’s assistant; she was also his wife.

In the knife-throwing item, Mrs. Bhagwan was spread-eagled on a wooden wheel; the wheel was painted as a target, with Mrs. Bhagwan’s belly covering the bull’s-eye. Throughout the act, the wheel revolved faster and faster, and Mr. Bhagwan hurled knives at his wife. When the wheel was stopped, the knives were stuck every which way in the wood; not even the crudest pattern could be discerned, except that there were no knives sticking in Mrs. Bhagwan’s spread-eagled body.

Mr. Bhagwan’s other specialty was the item called Elephant Passing, which almost every circus in India performs. Mr. Bhagwan lies in the arena, sandwiched between mattresses that are then covered with a plank; an elephant walks this plank, over Mr. Bhagwan’s chest. Farrokh observed that this was the only act that didn’t prompt Ganesh to say he could learn it, although being crippled wouldn’t have interfered with the boy’s ability to lie under a passing elephant.

Once, when Mr. Bhagwan had been stricken with acute diarrhea, Mrs. Bhagwan had replaced her husband in the Elephant Passing item. But the woman was too thin for Elephant Passing. There was a story that she’d bled internally for days and that, even after she’d recovered, she was never the same again; both her diet and her disposition had been ruined by the elephant.

Of Mrs. Bhagwan, Farrokh understood that her version of the Skywalk and her passive contribution to the knife-throwing act were one and the same; it was less a skill she had learned, or even a drama to be enacted, than a mechanical submission to her fate. Her husband’s errant knife or the fall from 80 feet—they were one and the same. Mrs. Bhagwan was a robot, Dr. Daruwalla believed. Possibly the Elephant Passing had done this to her.

Mr. Das confided this feeling to Farrokh. When the ringmaster briefly joined them in the audience—to apologize for Gautam’s rude attack, and to add his own ideas to the doctor’s and the Jesuit’s speculations regarding the ape’s racism and/or sexual jealousy—Mr. Das attributed Mrs. Bhagwan’s lackluster performance to her elephant episode.

“But in other ways it’s better since she’s been married,” Mr. Das admitted. Before Mrs. Bhagwan’s marriage, she’d complained bitterly about her menstrual cycle—how hanging upside down when she was bleeding was unusually uncomfortable. “And before she was married, of course it wasn’t proper for her to use a tampon,” Mr. Das added.

“No, of course not,” said Dr. Daruwalla, who was appalled.

When there were lulls in the acts, which there often were—or when the band was resting between items—they could hear the sounds of the chimp being beaten. Kunal was “disciplining” Gautam, Mr. Das explained. In some of the towns where the Great Blue Nile played, there might be other white males in the audience; they couldn’t allow Gautam to think that white males were fair game.

“No, of course not,” said Dr. Daruwalla. The big ape’s screams and the sounds of Kunal’s stick were carried to them in the still night air. When the band played, no matter how badly, the doctor and the missionary and the children were grateful.

If Gautam was rabid, the ape would die; better to beat him, in case he wasn’t rabid and he lived—this was Kunal’s philosophy. As for treating Martin Mills, Dr. Daruwalla knew it was wise to assume the chimp was rabid. But, for now, the children were laughing.

When one of the lions pissed violently on its stool and then stamped in the puddle, both Madhu and Ganesh laughed. Yet Farrokh felt obliged to remind the elephant boy that washing this same stool might be his first job.

There was a Peacock Dance, of course—two little girls played the peacocks, as always—and the screenwriter thought that his Pinky character should be in a peacock costume when the escaped lion kills her. Farrokh thought it would be best if the lion kills her because the lion thinks she is a peacock. More poignant that way… more sympathy for the lion. Thus would the screenwriter act out his old presentiment—that the restless lions in the holding tunnel were restless because their act was next and the peacock girls were temptingly in sight. When Acid Man applied his acid to the locked cage, the lion that got loose would be in an agitated, antipeacock mood. Poor Pinky!

There was an encore to the Skywalk item. Mrs. Bhagwan didn’t climb all the way to the top of the tent to repeat the Skywalk, which had left the audience largely unimpressed the first time. She climbed to the top of the tent only to repeat her descent on the dental trapeze. It was the dental trapeze that the audience had liked; more specifically, it was Mrs. Bhagwan’s neck that they had liked. She had an extremely muscular neck, overdeveloped from all her dental-trapezing, and when she descended—twirling, from the top of the tent, with the trapeze clamped tightly in her teeth—her neck muscles bulged, the spotlight turning from green to gold.

“I could do that,” Ganesh whispered to Dr. Daruwalla. “I have a strong neck. And strong teeth,” he added.

“And I suppose you could hang, and walk, upside down,” the doctor replied. “You have to hold both feet rigid, at right angles—your ankles support all your weight.” As soon as he spoke, Farrokh realized his error. The cripple’s crushed foot was permanently fused at his ankle—a perfect right angle. It would be no problem for him to keep that foot in a rigid right-angle position.

There was an idiotic finale in progress in the ring—chimps and dwarf clowns riding mopeds. The lead chimp was dressed as a Gujarati milkman, which the local crowd loved. The elephant-footed boy was smiling serenely in the semidarkness.

“So it would be only my good foot that I would have to make stronger—is this what you are telling me?” the cripple asked.

“What I’m telling you, Ganesh, is that your job is with the lion piss and the elephant shit. And maybe, if you’re lucky,” Farrokh told the boy, “you’ll get to work with the food.”

Now the ponies and the elephants entered the ring, as in the beginning, and the band played loudly; it was impossible to hear Gautam being beaten. Not once had Madhu said, “I could do that”—not about a single act—but here was the elephant-footed boy, already imagining that he could learn to walk on the sky.

“Up there,” Ganesh told Dr. Daruwalla, pointing to the top of the tent, “I wouldn’t walk with a limp.”

“Don’t even think about it,” the doctor said.

But the screenwriter couldn’t stop thinking about it, for it would be the perfect ending to his movie. After the lion kills Pinky—and justice is done to Acid Man (perhaps acid could accidentally be spilled in the villain’s crotch)—Ganesh knows that the circus won’t keep him unless he can make a contribution. No one believes he can be a skywalker—Suman won’t give the crippled boy lessons, and Pratap won’t let him practice on the ladder in the troupe tent. There is nowhere he can learn to skywalk, except in the main tent; if he’s going to try it, he must climb up to the real device and do the real thing—at 80 feet, with no net.

What a great scene! the screenwriter thought. The boy slips out of the cook’s tent in the predawn light. There’s no one in the main tent to see him climb the trapeze rope to the top. “If I fall, death happens,” his voice-over says. “If no one sees you die, no one says any prayers for you.” Good line! Dr. Daruwalla thought; he wondered if it was true.

The camera is 80 feet below the boy when he hangs upside down from the ladder; he holds the sides of the ladder with both hands as he puts his good foot and then his bad one into the first two loops. There are 18 loops of rope running the length of the ladder; the Skywalk requires 16 steps. “There is a moment when you must let go with your hands,” Ganesh’s voice-over says. “I do not know whose hands I am in then.”

The boy lets go of the ladder with both hands; he hangs by his feet. (The trick is, you have to start swinging your body; it’s the momentum you gather, from swinging, that allows you to step forward—one foot at a time, out of the first loop and into the next one, still swinging. Never stop the momentum… keep the forward motion constant.) “I think there is a moment when you must decide where you belong,” the boy’s voice-over says. Now the camera approaches him, from 80 feet away; the camera closes in on his feet. “At that moment, you are in no one’s hands,” the voice-over says. “At that moment, everyone walks on the sky.”

From another angle, we see that the cook has discovered what Ganesh is doing; the cook stands very still, looking up—he’s counting. Other performers have come into the tent—Pratap Singh, Suman, the dwarf clowns (one of them still brushing his teeth). They follow the crippled boy with their eyes; they’re all counting—they all know how many steps there are in the Skywalk.

“Let other people do the counting,” Ganesh’s voice-over says. “What I tell myself is, I am just walking—I don’t think skywalking, I think just walking. That’s my little secret. Nobody else would be much impressed by the thought of just walking. Nobody else could concentrate very hard on that. But for me the thought of just walking is very special. What I tell myself is, I am walking without a limp.”

Not bad, Dr. Daruwalla thought. And there should be a scene later, with the boy in full costume—a singlet sewn with blue-green sequins. As he descends on the dental trapeze, spinning in the spotlight, the gleaming sequins throw back the light. Ganesh should never quite touch the ground; instead, he descends into Pratap’s waiting arms. Pratap lifts the boy up to the cheering crowd. Then Pratap runs out of the ring with Ganesh in his arms—because after a cripple has walked on the sky, no one should see him limp.

It could work, the screenwriter thought.

After the performance, they managed to find where Ramu had parked the Land Rover, but they couldn’t find Ramu. The four of them required two rickshaws for the trip across town to the Government Circuit House; Madhu and Farrokh followed the rickshaw carrying Ganesh and Martin Mills. These were the three-wheeled rickshaws that Dr. Daruwalla hated; old Lowji had once declared that a three-wheeled rickshaw made as much sense as a moped towing a lawn chair. But Madhu and Ganesh were enjoying the ride. As their rickshaw bounced along, Madhu tightly gripped Farrokh’s knee with one hand. It was a child’s grip—not sexual groping, Dr. Daruwalla assured himself. With her other hand, Madhu waved to Ganesh. Looking at her, the doctor kept thinking: Maybe the girl will be all right—maybe she’ll make it.

On the mud flaps of the rickshaw ahead of them, Farrokh saw the face of a movie star; he thought it might be a poor likeness of either Madhuri Dixit or Jaya Prada—in any case, it wasn’t Inspector Dhar. In the cheap plastic window of the rickshaw, there was Ganesh’s face—the real Ganesh, the screenwriter reminded himself. It was such a perfect ending, Farrokh was thinking—all the more remarkable because the real cripple had given him the idea.

In the window of the bouncing rickshaw, the boy’s dark eyes were shining. The headlight from the following rickshaw kept crossing the cripple’s smiling face. Given the distance between the two rickshaws and the fact that it was night, Dr. Daruwalla observed that the boy’s eyes looked healthy; you couldn’t see the slight discharge or the cloudiness from the tetracycline ointment. From such a partial view, you couldn’t tell that Ganesh was crippled; he looked like a happy, normal boy.

How the doctor wished it were true.

The Night of 10,000 Steps

There was nothing to do about the missing piece of Martin’s earlobe. Altogether, Dr. Daruwalla used two 10mL vials of the human rabies immune globulin; he injected a half-vial directly into each of the three wound areas—the earlobe, the neck, the hand—and he administered the remaining half-vial by a deep intramuscular injection in Martin’s buttocks.

The hand was the worst—a slash wound, which the doctor packed with iodophor gauze, A bite should drain, and heal from the inside, so Dr. Daruwalla wouldn’t stitch the wound—nor did the doctor offer anything for the pain. Dr. Daruwalla had observed that the missionary was enjoying his pain. However, the zealot’s limited sense of humor didn’t permit him to appreciate Dr. Daruwalla’s joke—that the Jesuit appeared to suffer from “chimpanzee stigmata.” The doctor also couldn’t resist pointing out to Martin Mills that, on the evidence of the scholastic’s wounds, whatever had bitten Farrokh (and converted him) in Goa was certainly not a chimp; such an ape would have consumed the whole toe—maybe half the foot.

“Still angry about your miracle, I see,” Martin replied.

On that testy note, the two men said their good-nights. Farrokh didn’t envy the Jesuit the task of calming Ganesh down, for the elephant boy was in no mood to sleep; the cripple couldn’t wait for his first full day at the circus to begin. Madhu, on the other hand, seemed bored and listless, if not exactly sleepy.

Their rooms at the Government Circuit House were adjacent to each other on the third floor. Off Farrokh and Madhu’s bedroom, two glass doors opened onto a small balcony covered with bird droppings. They had their own bathroom with a sink and a toilet, but no door; there was just a rug hung from a curtain rod—it didn’t quite touch the floor. The toilet could be flushed only with a bucket, which was conveniently positioned under a faucet that dripped. There was also a shower, of sorts; an open-ended pipe, without a showerhead, poked out of the bathroom wall. There was no curtain for the shower, but there was a sloped floor leading to an open drain, which (upon closer inspection) appeared to be the temporary residence of a rat; Farrokh saw its tail disappearing down the hole. Very close to the drain was a diminished bar of soap, the edges nibbled.

In the bedroom, the two beds were too close together—and doubtless infested. Both mosquito nets were yellowed and stiff, and one was torn. The one window that opened had no screen, and little air was inclined to move through it. Dr. Daruwalla thought they might as well open the glass doors to the balcony, but Madhu said she was afraid that a monkey would come inside.

The ceiling fan had only two speeds: one was so slow that the fan had no effect at all, and the other was so fast that the mosquito nets were blown away from the beds. Even in the main tent at the circus, the night air had felt cool, but the third floor of the Government Circuit House was hot and airless. Madhu solved this problem by using the bathroom first; she wet a towel and wrung it out, and then she lay naked under the towel—on the better bed, the one with the untorn mosquito net. Madhu was small, but so was the towel; it scarcely covered her breasts and left her thighs exposed. A deliberate girl, the doctor thought.

Lying there, she said, “I’m still hungry. There was nothing sweet.”

“You want a dessert?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“If it’s sweet,” she said.

The doctor carried the thermos with the rest of the rabies vaccine and the immune globulin down to the lobby; he hoped there was a refrigerator, for the thermos was already tepid. What if Gautam bit someone else tomorrow? Kunal had informed the doctor that the chimpanzee was “almost definitely” rabid. Rabid or not, the chimp shouldn’t be beaten; in the doctor’s opinion, only a second-rate circus beat its animals.

In the lobby, a Muslim boy was tending the desk, listening to the Qawwali on the radio; he appeared to be eating ice cream to the religious verses—his head nodding while he ate, the spoon conducting the air between the container and his mouth. But it wasn’t ice cream, the boy told Dr. Daruwalla; he offered the doctor a spoon and invited him to take a taste. The texture differed from that of ice cream—a cardamom-scented, saffron-colored yogurt, sweetened with sugar. There was a refrigerator full of the stuff, and Farrokh took a container and spoon for Madhu. He left the vaccine and the immune globulin in the refrigerator, after assuring himself that the boy knew better than to eat it.

When the doctor returned to his room, Madhu had discarded the towel. He tried to give her the Gujarati dessert without looking at her; probably on purpose, she made it awkward for him to hand her the spoon and container—he was sure she was pretending that she didn’t know where the mosquito net opened. She sat naked in bed, eating the sweetened yogurt and watching him while he arranged his writing materials.

There was an unsteady table, a thick candle affixed by wax to a dirty ashtray, a packet of matches alongside a mosquito coil. When Farrokh had spread out his pages and smoothed his hand over the pad of fresh paper, he lit the candle and the mosquito coil and turned off the overhead light. At high speed, the ceiling fan would have disturbed his work and Madhu’s mosquito net, so the doctor kept the fan on low; although this was ineffectual, he hoped that the movement of the blade might make Madhu sleepy.

“What are you doing?” the child prostitute asked him.

“Writing,” he told her.

“Read it to me,” Madhu asked him.

“You wouldn’t understand it,” Farrokh replied.

“Are you going to be sleeping?” the girl asked.

“Maybe later,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

He tried to block her out of his mind, but this was difficult. She kept watching him; the sound of her spoon in the container of yogurt was as regular as the drone of the fan. Her purposeful nakedness was oppressive, but not because he was actually tempted by her; it was more that the pure evil of having sex with her (the very idea of it) was suddenly his obsession. He didn’t want to have sex with her—he felt only the most passing desire for her—but the sheer obviousness of her availability was numbing to his other senses. It struck him that an evil this pure, something so clearly wrong, wasn’t often presented without consequence; the horror was that it seemed there could be no harmful result of sex between them. If he permitted her to seduce him, nothing would come of it—nothing beyond what he would remember and feel guilty for, forever.

The lucky girl was not HIV-positive; besides, he happened to be traveling in India, as usual—with condoms. And Madhu wasn’t a girl who would ever tell anyone; she wasn’t a talker. In her present situation, she might never have the occasion to tell anyone. It was not only the child’s tarnished innocence that convinced him of the purity of this evil, like almost no other evil he’d ever imagined; it was also her strident amorality—whether this had been acquired in the brothel or, hideously, taught to her by Mr. Garg. Whatever one did to her, one wouldn’t pay for it—not in this life, or only in the torments of one’s soul. These were the darkest thoughts that Dr. Daruwalla had ever had, but he nevertheless thought his way through them; soon he was writing again.

By the movement of his pen (for she’d never stopped watching him), Madhu seemed to sense that she’d lost him. Also, her dessert was gone. She got out of the bed and walked naked to him; she peered over his shoulder, as if she knew how to read what he was writing. The screenwriter could feel her hair against his cheek and neck.

“Read it to me—just that part,” Madhu said. She leaned more firmly against him as she reached and touched the paper with her hand; she touched his last sentence. The cardamom-scented yogurt smelled sickly on her breath, and there was something like the smell of dead flowers—possibly the saffron.

The screenwriter read aloud to her: “‘Two stretcher bearers in white dhotis are running with the body of Acid Man, who is curled in a fetal position on the stretcher—his face glazed in pain, smoke still drifting from the area of his crotch.’”

Madhu made him read it again; then she said, “In what position?”

“Fetal,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “Like a baby inside its mother.”

“Who is Acid Man?” the child prostitute asked him.

“A man who’s been scarred by acid—like Mr. Garg,” Farrokh told her. At the mention of Garg’s name, there wasn’t even a flicker of recognition in the girl’s face. The doctor refused to look at her naked body, although Madhu still clung to his shoulder; where she pressed against him, he felt himself begin to sweat.

“The smoke is coming from what area?” Madhu asked.

“From his crotch,” the screenwriter replied.

“Where’s that?” the child prostitute asked him.

“You know where that is, Madhu—go back to bed,” he told her.

She raised one arm to show him her armpit. “The hair is growing back,” she said. “You can feel it.”

“I can see that it’s growing back—I don’t need to feel it,” Farrokh replied.

“It’s growing back everywhere,” Madhu said.

“Go back to bed,” the doctor told her.

He could tell from the change in her breathing; he knew the moment when she finally fell asleep. Then he thought it was safe to lie down on the other bed. Although he was exhausted, he’d not yet fallen asleep when he felt the first of the fleas or the bedbugs. They didn’t seem to jump like fleas, and they were invisible; probably they were bedbugs. Evidently, Madhu was used to them—she hadn’t noticed.

Farrokh decided that he would rather try to sleep among the bird droppings on the balcony; possibly it was cool enough outside so there wouldn’t be any mosquitoes. But when the doctor stepped out on his balcony, there on the adjacent balcony was a wide-awake Martin Mills.

“There are a million things in my bed!” the missionary whispered.

“In mine, too,” Farrokh replied.

“I don’t know how the boy manages to sleep through all the biting and crawling!” the scholastic said.

“There are probably a million fewer things here than he’s used to in Bombay,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

The night sky was yielding to the dawn; soon the sky would be the same milky-tea color as the ground. Against such gray-brown tones, the white of the missionary’s new bandages was startling—his mittened hand, his wrapped neck, his patched ear.

“You’re quite a sight,” the doctor told him.

“You should see yourself,” the missionary replied. “Have you slept at all?”

Since the children were sleeping so soundly—and they’d only recently fallen asleep—the two men decided to take a tour of the town. After all, Mr. Das had warned them not to come to the circus too early, or else they’d interrupt the television watching. It being a Sunday, the doctor presumed that the televisions in all the troupe tents would be tuned to the Mahabharata; the popular Hindu epic had been broadcast every Sunday morning for more than a year—altogether, there were 93 episodes, each an hour long, and the great journey to the gates of heaven (where the epic ends) wouldn’t be over until the coming summer. It was the world’s most successful soap opera, depicting religion as heroic action; it was a legend with countless homilies, not to mention blindness and illegitimate births, battles and women-stealing. A record number of robberies had occurred during the broadcasts because the thieves knew that almost everyone in India would be glued to the TV. The missionary would be consumed with Christian envy, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

In the lobby, the Muslim boy was no longer eating to the Qawwali on the radio; the religious verses had put him to sleep. There was no need to wake him. In the driveway of the Government Circuit House, a half-dozen three-wheeled rickshaws were parked for the night; their drivers, all but one, were asleep in the passenger seats. The one driver who was awake was finishing his prayers when the doctor and the missionary hired his services. Through the sleeping town, they rode in the rickshaw; such peacefulness was improbable in Bombay.

By the Junagadh railroad station, they saw a yellow shack where several early risers were renting bicycles. They passed a coconut plantation. They saw a sign to the zoo, with a leopard on it. They passed a mosque, a hospital, the Hotel Relief, a vegetable market and an old fort; they saw two temples, two water tanks, some mango groves and what Dr. Daruwalla said was a baobab tree—Martin Mills said it wasn’t. Their driver took them to a teak forest. This was the start of the climb up Girnar Hill, the driver told them; from this point on, they would have to proceed on foot. It was a 600-meter ascent up 10,000 stone steps; it would take them about two hours, their driver said.

“Why on earth does he think we want to climb ten thousand steps for two hours?” Martin asked Farrokh. But when the doctor explained that the hill was sacred to the Jains, the Jesuit wanted to climb it.

“It’s just a bunch of temples!” Dr. Daruwalla cried. The place would probably be crawling with sadhus, practicing yoga. There would be unappetizing refreshment stalls and scavenging monkeys and the repugnant evidence of human feces along the way. (There would be eagles soaring overhead, their rickshaw driver informed them.)

There was no stopping the Jesuit from his holy climb; the doctor wondered if the arduous trek was a substitute for Mass. The climb took them barely an hour and a half, largely because the scholastic walked so fast. There were monkeys nearby, and these doubtless made the missionary walk faster; after his chimp experience, Martin was wary of ape-related animals—even small ones. They saw only one eagle. They passed several sadhus, who were climbing up the holy hill as the doctor and the Jesuit were walking down. It was too early for most of the refreshment stalls to be open; at one stall, they split an orange soda between them. The doctor had to agree that the marble temples near the summit were impressive, especially the largest and the oldest, which was a Jain temple from the 12th century.

By the time they descended, they were both panting, and Dr. Daruwalla remarked that his knees were killing him; no religion was worth 10,000 steps, Farrokh said. The occasional encounters with human feces had depressed him, and during the entire hike he’d worried that their driver would abandon them and they’d be forced to walk back to town. If Farrokh had tipped the driver too much before their climb, there would be no incentive for the driver to stay; if Farrokh had tipped him too little, the driver would be too insulted to wait for them.

“It will be a miracle if our driver hasn’t absconded,” Farrokh told Martin. But their driver was not only waiting for them; as they came upon him, they saw that the faithful man was cleaning his rickshaw.

“You really should restrict your use of this word ‘miracle,’” the missionary said; his neck bandage was beginning to unravel because the hike had made him sweat.

It was time to wake the children and take them to the circus. It vexed Farrokh that Martin Mills had waited until now to say the obvious. The scholastic would say it only once. “Dear God,” the Jesuit said, “I hope we’re doing the right thing.”