A Son of the Circus

Learning the Movie Business

The director, Gordon Hathaway, would meet his end on the Santa Monica Freeway, but in the summer of ’49 he was riding the fading success of a private-investigator movie. Perversely, it had inflamed his long-dormant desire to make what movie people call a “quality” picture. This picture wouldn’t be it. Although the director would manage to shoot the film, overcoming considerable adversity, the movie would never be released. Having had his fling with “quality,” Hathaway would return with a modest vengeance, and more modest success, to the so-called P.I. genre. In the 1960s, he would make the downward move to television, where he awaited the unnoticed conclusion of his career.

Few aspects of Gordon Hathaway’s personality were unique. He called all actors and actresses by their first names, including the ones he’d never met, which was the case with most of them, and he wetly kissed on both cheeks both the men and women he was saying adieu to, which included those he’d met for only the first or second time. He would marry four times, in each marriage goatishly siring children who would revile him before they were teenagers. In each account, Gordon would be unsurprisingly cast as the villain, while the four respective mothers (his ex-wives) emerged as highly compromised yet sainted. Hathaway said he’d had the misfortune to sire only daughters. Sons, he claimed, would have taken his side—to quote him, “At least one out of four fuckin’ times.”

As for his dress, he was a marginal eccentric; as he aged—and as he more peaceably embraced a directorial career of complete compromise—he grew more outlandish in his attire, as if his clothes had become his foremost creative act. Sometimes he wore a woman’s blouse, open to the waist, and he arranged his hair in a long white ponytail, which became his trademark; in his many films and TV crime dramas, there could be found no such identifying features. And all the while, he decried the “suits”—which was his word for the producers—“the fuckin’ three-piece mentalities,” who, Hathaway said, had “a fuckin’ stranglehold on all the talent in Hollywood.”

This was an odd accusation, in that Gordon Hathaway had spent a long and modestly profitable career in close cahoots with these same “suits.” Producers, in truth, loved him. But none of these details is original, or even memorable.

In Bombay, however, the first truly distinctive element of Gordon Hathaway’s character was brought to light: namely, he was so frightened of the food in India—and so hysterically conscious of those diseases that, he was certain, would destroy his intestinal tract—that he ate nothing but room-service food, which he personally washed in his bathtub. The Taj Mahal Hotel was not unused to such habits among the foreign, but by this extremely selective diet Hathaway had severely constipated himself and suffered from hemorrhoids.

In addition, the hot, damp weather of Bombay had excited his chronic proneness to fungal infections. Hathaway stuck cotton balls between his toes—he had the most persistent case of athlete’s foot that Dr. Lowji Daruwalla had ever seen—and a fungus as unstoppable as bread mold had invaded his ears. Old Lowji believed that the director was capable of producing his own mushrooms. Gordon Hathaway’s ears itched to the point of madness, and he was so deaf from both the fungus and the fungicidal ear drops—not to mention the cotton balls that he stuck in his ears—that his communication on the film set was comedic with misunderstanding.

As for the ear drops, they were a solution of gentian violet, an indelible purple dye. Therefore, the collars and shoulders of Hathaway’s shirts were dotted with violet stains, for the cotton balls frequently fell out of his ears—or else Hathaway, in his frustration at being deaf, plucked out the cotton balls himself. The director was a born litterer; everywhere he went, the world was colorfully marked by his violet ear-cottons. Sometimes the purple solution streaked Hathaway’s face, giving him the appearance of someone who’d been deliberately painted; he looked like a member of a religious cult, or of an unknown tribe. Gordon Hathaway’s fingertips were similarly stained with gentian violet; he was always poking his fingers in his ears.

But Lowji was nevertheless impressed by the fabled artistic temperament of the first (and only) Hollywood director he’d ever met. The senior Daruwalla told Meher (she told Farrokh) that it was “charming” how Hathaway had blamed his hemorrhoids and his fungus neither on his bathtub diet nor on the Bombay climate. Instead, the director faulted “the fuckin’ stress” of the compromising relationship he was compelled to conduct with the film’s philistine producer, a much defamed “suit,” who (coincidentally) was married to Gordon’s ambitious sister.

“That cunt of misery!” Gordon would often exclaim. Failing originality in all his cinematic pursuits, Gordon Hathaway was nevertheless rumored to be the first to coin this vulgar phrase. “Fuckin’ ahead of my time” was a way he often spoke of himself; in this coarse instance, he may have been correct.

It was a great source of frustration to Meher and Farrokh to hear Lowji defend the grossness of Gordon Hathaway on grounds of the man’s “artistic temperament.” It was never clear if the philistine producer’s success in exerting certain pressures on Gordon was because of Gordon’s desire to please the suit himself, or whether the true force of the exertion emanated from Gordon’s sister—the so-called C. of M. herself. It was never clear who had whom “by the balls,” as Gordon put it; it was unclear who “jerked” whose “wire,” as he otherwise put it.

As an admitted newcomer to the creative process, Lowji was undeterred by such talk; he sought to draw out of Gordon Hathaway the presumed aesthetic principles that guided the director through the frenzy with which this particular movie was being made. Even a novice could sense the hectic pace at which the film was being shot; even Lowji’s untested artistic sensibilities could detect the aura of tension with which the screenplay underwent revision every evening in the dining room of the Duckworth Club.

“I trust my fuckin’ instinct for storytellin’, pal,” Gordon Hathaway confided to the senior Daruwalla, who was in such earnest search of a retirement career. “That’s the fuckin’ key.”

How it shamed Farrokh and his poor mother: to observe, throughout dinner, that Lowji was taking notes.

As for the screenwriter, whose shared dream of a “quality” picture was nightly and disastrously changing before his eyes, he was an alcoholic whose bar bill at the Duckworth Club threatened to exceed the Daruwalla family’s resources; it was a tab that pinched even the seemingly bottomless purse of the well-heeled Promila Rai. His name was Danny Mills, and he’d started out with a story about a married couple who come to India because the wife is dying of cancer; they’d promised themselves that they would go to India “one day.” It was originally titled, with the utmost sincerity, One Day We’ll Go to India; then Gordon Hathaway retitled it One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling. That small change initiated a major revision of the story, and sank Danny Mills all the deeper into his alcoholic gloom.

It was actually a step up for Danny Mills—to have begun this screenplay from scratch. It was, if only in the beginning, his original story. He’d started out as the lowliest of studio contract writers; his first job, at Universal, was for 100 dollars a week, and all he did was tamper with existing scripts. Danny Mills still had more screen credits for “additional dialogue” than for “co-script,” and his solo screenplay credits (there were only two) were for flops—utter bombs. At the moment, he prided himself for being an “independent,” which is to say he was under no studio contract; however, this was because the studios thought he was unreliable, not only for his drinking but for his reputation as a loner. Danny wasn’t content to be a team player, and he became especially cantankerous in the cases of those screenplays that had already engaged the creative genius of a half-dozen or more writers. Although it clearly depressed Danny to revise on demand, which he was doing as a result of the nightly whims of Gordon Hathaway, it was entirely rare for Danny to be working on a story that had at least originated with him. For this reason, Gordon Hathaway thought that Danny shouldn’t complain.

It wasn’t as if Danny had contributed a word to The Big Sleep or even Cobra Woman, and he’d had nothing to do with Woman of the Year or even Hot Cargo; he’d written neither Rope nor Gaslight—he hadn’t added so much as a comma to Son of Dracula, or taken one away from Frisco Sal—and although for a while he’d been identified as the uncredited screenwriter for When Strangers Marry, this proved to be false. In Hollywood, he simply hadn’t been playing in the big leagues; the general feeling was that “additional dialogue” was the very zenith of his ability, and so he came to Bombay with more experience in fixing other people’s messes than with creating his own. Doubtless it hurt Danny that Gordon Hathaway didn’t refer to him as “the writer” at all. Gordon called Danny Mills “the fixer,” but in truth there was more that needed fixing in One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling after Hathaway started changing it.

Danny had envisioned the movie as a love story with a twist; the “twist” was the wife dying. In the original screenplay, the couple—in her dying days—succumbs to the fakery of a snake guru; they are rescued from this charlatan and his gang of demonic snake-worshipers by a true guru. Instead of pretending to cure the wife, the true guru teaches her how to die with dignity. According to the philistine producer, or else to his wife—Gordon Hathaway’s interfering C. of M. sister—this last part was lacking in both action and suspense.

“Despite how happy the wife is, she still fuckin’ dies, doesn’t she?” Gordon said.

Therefore, against the slightly better instincts of Danny Mills, Gordon Hathaway altered the story. Gordon believed that the snake guru wasn’t villainous enough; hence the snake-worshipers were revised. The snake guru actually abducts the wife from the Taj and keeps her a prisoner in his harem of drugged women, while he instructs them in a method of meditation that concludes with having sex—either with the snakes or with him. This is an ashram of evil, surely. The distraught husband, in the company of a Jesuit missionary—a none-too-subtle replacement for the true guru—tracks the wife down and saves her from a fate presumed worse than her anticipated death by cancer. It is Christianity that the dying wife embraces at the end, and—no surprise!—she doesn’t die after all.

Gordon Hathaway explained it to a surprised Lowji Daruwalla: “The cancer just sort of goes away—it just fuckin’ dries up and goes away. That happens sometimes, doesn’t it?”

“Well, it doesn’t exactly ‘dry up,’ but there are cases of remission,” the senior Dr. Daruwalla answered uncertainly, while Farrokh and Meher suffered enormous embarrassment for him.

“What’s that?” Gordon Hathaway asked. He knew what a remission was; he just hadn’t heard the doctor because his ears were crammed full of fungus and gentian violet and cotton balls.

“Yes! Sometimes a cancer can just sort of go away!” old Lowji shouted.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought—I knew that!” Gordon Hathaway said.

In his embarrassment for his father, Farrokh sought to turn the conversation toward India itself. Surely the gravity of the Partition and Independence—when a million Hindus and Muslims were killed, and 12 million became refugees—interested the foreigners a little.

“Listen, kid,” Gordon Hathaway said, “when you’re makin’ a fuckin’ movie, nothin’ else interests you.” There was hearty consent to this at the dinner table; Farrokh felt that even the silence of his usually opinionated father served to rebuke him. Only Danny Mills appeared to be interested in the subject of local color; Danny also appeared to be drunk.

Although Danny Mills considered religion and politics as tedious forms of “local color,” Danny was nevertheless disappointed that One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling had very little to do with India. Danny had already suggested that the climate of religious violence in the days of the Partition might at least make a brief appearance in the background of the story.

“Politics is just fuckin’ exposition,” Gordon Hathaway had said, dismissing the idea. “I’d end up cutting the shit out of it later.”

In response to the present debate between the director and Farrokh, Danny Mills once more expressed his desire that the movie reflect at least a hint of Muslim-Hindu tensions, but Gordon Hathaway bluntly challenged Farrokh to tell him just one “sore point” between Muslims and Hindus that wouldn’t be boring on film. And since this was the year that Hindus had snuck into the Mosque of Babar with idols of their god-prince Rama, Farrokh imagined that he knew a good story. The Hindus had claimed that the site of the mosque was the birthplace of Rama, but the placing of Hindu idols in an historic mosque wasn’t well received by Muslims—they hate idols of any kind. Muslims don’t believe in representations of God, not to mention lots of gods, while Hindus pray to idols (and to lots of gods) all the time. To avoid more Hindu-Muslim bloodshed, the state had locked up the Mosque of Babar. “Perhaps they should have removed the idols of Rama first,” Farrokh explained. Muslims were enraged that these Hindu idols were occupying their mosque. Hindus not only wanted the idols to remain—they wanted to build a temple to Rama at the site.

At this point, Gordon Hathaway interrupted Farrokh’s story to express anew his dislike of exposition. “You’ll never write for the movies, kid,” Gordon said. “You wanna write for the movies, you gotta get to the point quicker than this.”

“I don’t think we can use it,” said Danny Mills thoughtfully, “but I thought it was a nice story.”

“Thank you,” Farrokh said.

Poor Meher, the oft-neglected Mrs. Daruwalla, was sufficiently provoked to change the subject. She offered a comment on the pleasure of a sudden evening breeze. She noted the rustling of a neem tree in the Ladies’ Garden. Meher would have elaborated on the merits of the neem tree, but she saw that the foreigners’ interest—which was never great—had already waned.

Gordon Hathaway was holding the violet-colored cotton balls he’d taken from his ears, shaking them in the closed palm of one hand, like dice. “What’s a fuckin’ neem tree?” he asked, as if the tree itself had annoyed him.

“They’re all around town,” said Danny Mills. “They’re a tropical kind of tree, I think.”

“I’m sure you’ve seen them,” Farrokh said to the director.

“Listen, kid,” said Gordon Hathaway, “when you’re makin’ a movie, you don’t have time to look at the fuckin’ trees.”

It must have hurt Meher to see by her husband’s expression that Lowji had found this remark most sage. Meanwhile, Gordon Hathaway indicated that the conversation was over by turning his attention to a pretty, underage girl at an adjacent table. This left Farrokh with a view of the director’s arrogant profile, and an especially alarming glimpse of the deep and permanent purple of Hathaway’s inner ear. The ear was actually a rainbow of colors, from raw red to violet, as unsuitably iridescent as the face of a mandrill baboon.

Later, after the colorful director had returned to the Taj—presumably to wash more food in his bathtub before retiring to bed—Farrokh was forced to observe his father fawning over the drunken Danny Mills.

“It must be difficult to revise a screenplay under these conditions,” Lowji ventured.

“You mean at night? Over food? After I’ve been drinking?” Danny asked.

“I mean so spur-of-the-moment,” Lowji said. “It would seem more prudent to shoot the story you’ve already written.”

“Yes, it would,” poor Danny agreed. “But they never do it that way.”

“They like the spontaneity, I suppose,” Lowji said.

“They don’t think the writing is very important,” said Danny Mills.

“They don’t?” Lowji exclaimed.

“They never do,” Danny told him. Poor Lowji had never considered the unimportance of the writer of a movie. Even Farrokh looked with compassion on Danny Mills, who was an affectionate, sentimental man with a gentle manner and a face that women liked—until they knew him better. Then they either disliked his central weakness or exploited it. Alcohol was certainly a problem for him, but his drinking was more a symptom of his failure than a cause of it. He was always out of money and, as a consequence, he rarely finished a piece of writing and sold it from any position of strength; usually, he would sell only an idea for a piece of writing, or a piece of writing that was very much a fragment—a story barely in progress—and as a result he lost all control of the outcome of whatever the piece of writing was.

He’d never finished a novel, although he’d begun several; when he needed money, he would put the novel aside and write a screenplay—selling the screenplay before he finished it. That was always the pattern. By the time he went back to the novel, he had enough distance from it to see how bad it was.

But Farrokh couldn’t dislike Danny the way he disliked Gordon Hathaway; Farrokh could see that Danny liked Lowji, too. Danny also made an effort to protect Farrokh’s father from further embarrassing himself.

“Here’s the way it is,” Danny told Lowji. He swirled the melting ice in the bottom of his glass; in the kilnlike heat before the monsoon, the ice melted quickly—but never as quickly as Danny drank the gin. “You’re screwed if you sell something before you finish it,” Danny Mills told the senior Daruwalla. “Never even show anybody what you’re writing until you finish it. Just do the work. When you know it’s good, show it to someone who’s made a movie you like.”

“Like a director, you mean?” asked Lowji, who was still writing everything down.

“Definitely a director,” said Danny Mills. “I don’t mean a studio.”

“And so you show it to someone you like, a director, and then you get paid?” asked the senior Daruwalla.

“No,” said Danny Mills. “You take no money until the whole deal is in place. The minute you take any money, you’re screwed.”

“But when do you take the money?” Lowji asked.

“When they’ve signed the actors you want, when they’ve signed the director—and given him the final cut of the picture. When everyone likes the screenplay so much, you know they wouldn’t dare change a word of it—and if you doubt this, demand final script approval. Then be prepared to walk away.”

“This is what you do?” Lowji asked.

“Not me,” Danny said. “I take the money up front, as much as I can get. Then they screw me.”

“But who does it the way you suggest?” Lowji asked; he was so confused, he’d stopped writing.

“Nobody I know,” said Danny Mills. “Everyone I know gets screwed.”

“So you didn’t go to Gordon Hathaway—you didn’t choose him?” Lowji asked.

“Only a studio would choose Gordon,” Danny said.

He had that uncommon smoothness of skin which appears so confounding on the faces of some alcoholics; it was as if Danny’s baby-faced complexion were the direct result of the pickling process—as if the growth of his beard were as arrested as his speech. Danny looked like he needed to shave only once a week, although he was almost 35.

“I’ll tell you about Gordon,” Danny said. “It was Gordon’s idea to expand the role of the snake guru in the story—Gordon’s idea of the epitome of evil is an ashram with snakes. I’ll tell you about Gordon,” Danny Mills went on, when neither Lowji nor Farrokh had interrupted him. “Gordon’s never met a guru, with or without snakes. Gordon’s never seen an ashram, not even in California.”

“It would be easy to arrange a meeting with a guru,” Lowji said. “It would be easy to visit an ashram.”

“I’m sure you know what Gordon would say to that idea,” said Danny Mills, but the drunken screenwriter was looking at Farrokh.

Farrokh attempted the best imitation of Gordon Hathaway that he could manage. “I’m makin’ a fuckin’ movie,” Farrokh said. “Do I got the time to meet a fuckin’ guru or go to a fuckin’ ashram when I’m in the middle of makin’ a fuckin’ movie?”

“Smart boy,” said Danny Mills. It was to old Lowji that Danny confided: “Your son understands the movie business.”

Although Danny Mills appeared to be a destroyed man, it was hard not to like him, Farrokh thought. Then he looked down in his beer and saw the two vivid violet cotton balls from Gordon Hathaway’s ears. How did they end up in my beer? Farrokh wondered. He needed to use a parfait spoon to extract them, dripping, from his beer glass. He put Gordon Hathaway’s soggy ear-cottons on a tea saucer, wondering how long they’d been soaking in his beer—and how much beer he’d drunk while Gordon Hathaway’s ear-cottons were sponging up the beer at the bottom of his glass. Danny Mills was laughing so hard, he couldn’t speak. Lowji could see what his critical son was thinking.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Farrokh!” his father told him. “Surely it was an accident.” This made Danny Mills laugh harder and harder, drawing Mr. Sethna to their table—where the steward stared in disapproval at the tea saucer containing the beer-soaked, still-purple cotton balls. Farrokh’s remaining beer was purple, too. Mr. Sethna was thinking that it was at least fortunate that Mrs. Daruwalla had already gone home for the evening.

Farrokh helped his father arrange Danny Mills in the back seat of the car. Danny would be sound asleep before they’d traveled the length of the driveway of the Duckworth Club, or at least by the time they’d left Mahalaxmi. The screenwriter was always asleep by that time, if he didn’t go home earlier; when they dropped him at the Taj, Farrokh’s father would tip one of the tall Sikh doormen, who would transport Danny to his room on a luggage cart.

This night—Farrokh in the passenger seat, his father driving, and Danny Mills asleep in the back seat—they had just entered Tardeo when his father said, “In your nearly constant expression, you might be wise not to display such obvious distaste for these people. I know you think you’re very sophisticated—and that they are vermin, beneath your contempt—but I’ll tell you what is most unsophisticated, and that is to wear your feelings so frankly on your face.”

Farrokh would remember this, for he took the sting of such a rebuke very much to heart, while at the same time he sat silently seething in anger at his father, who wasn’t as entirely stupid as his young son had presumed him to be. Farrokh would remember this, too, because the car was exactly at that location in Tardeo where, 20 years later, his father would be blown to smithereens.

“You should listen to these people, Farrokh,” his father was telling him. “It isn’t necessary for them to be your moral equals in order for you to learn something from them.”

Farrokh would remember the irony, too. Although this was his father’s idea, Farrokh would be the one who actually learned something from the wretched foreigners; he’d be the one who took Danny’s advice.

But Had He Learned Anything Worth Knowing?

Farrokh wasn’t 19 now; he was 59. It was already past dusk at the Duckworth Club, but the doctor still sat slumped in his chair in the Ladies’ Garden. The younger Dr. Daruwalla wore an expression generally associated with failure; although he’d maintained absolute control of his Inspector Dhar screenplays—Farrokh was always granted “final script approval”—what did it matter? Everything he’d written was crap. The irony was, he’d been very successful writing movies that were no better than One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling.

Dr. Daruwalla wondered if other screenwriters who’d written crap nevertheless dreamed, as he did, of writing a “quality” picture. In Farrokh’s case, his quality story always began in the same way; he just couldn’t get past the beginning.

There was an opening shot of Victoria Terminus, the Gothic station with its stained-glass windows, its friezes, its flying buttresses, its ornate dome with the watchful gargoyles—in Farrokh’s opinion, it was the heart of Bombay. Inside the echoing station were a half-million commuters and the ever-arriving migrants; these latter travelers had brought everything with them, from their children to their chickens.

Outside the huge depot was the vast display of produce in Crawford Market, not to mention the pet stalls, where you could buy parrots or piranhas or monkeys. And among the porters and the vendors, the beggars and the newcomers and the pickpockets, the camera (somehow) would single out his hero, although he was just a child and crippled. What other hero would an orthopedic surgeon imagine? And with the magical simultaneity that movies can occasionally manage, the boy’s face (a close-up) would let us know that his story had been chosen—among millions—while at that exact moment the boy’s voice-over would tell us his name.

Farrokh was overly fond of the old-fashioned technique of voice-over; he’d used it to excess in every Inspector Dhar movie. There’s one that begins with camera following a pretty young woman through Crawford Market. She’s anxious, as if she knows she’s being followed, and this causes her to topple a heaped-up pile of pineapples at a fruit stand, which makes her run; this causes her to slip on the rotting compost underfoot, which makes her bump into a pet stall, where a vicious cockatoo pecks her hand. That’s when we see Inspector Dhar. As the young woman runs on, Dhar calmly follows her. He pauses by the stand of exotic birds only long enough to give the cockatoo a cuff with the back of his hand.

His voice-over says, “It was the third time I’d tailed her, but she was still crazy enough to think she could shake me.”

Dhar pauses again as the pretty girl, in her haste, collides with a heaped-up pile of mangoes. Dhar is enough of a gentleman to wait for the vendor to clear a path through the fallen fruit, but the next time he catches up with the woman, she’s dead. A bullet hole is smack between her wide-open eyes, which Dhar politely closes for her.

His voice-over says, “It’s a pity I wasn’t the only one tailing her. She had trouble shaking someone else, too.”

From his view of the younger Dr. Daruwalla in the Ladies’ Garden, old Mr. Sethna was sure he knew the source of the hatred he saw in the doctor’s eyes; the steward thought he knew the particular, long-ago vermin that the doctor was thinking of. But Mr. Sethna was unfamiliar with self-doubt and self-loathing. The old Parsi would never have imagined that Dr. Daruwalla was thinking about himself.

Farrokh was taking himself to task for leaving that crippled boy at Victoria Terminus, where he’d arrived; so many Bombay stories began at Victoria Terminus, but Dr. Daruwalla had been unable to imagine any story for that abandoned child. The doctor was still wondering what could happen to the boy after he came to Bombay. Anything and everything could happen, Farrokh knew; instead, the screenwriter had settled for Inspector Dhar, whose tough-guy talk was as unoriginal as the rest of him.

Dr. Daruwalla tried to save himself by thinking of a story with the innocence and purity of his favorite acts from the Great Royal Circus, but Farrokh couldn’t imagine a story as good as even the simplest of the so-called items that he loved. He couldn’t even think of a story as good as the daily routine of the circus. There were no wasted efforts in the course of the long day, which began with tea at 6:00 in the morning. The child performers and other acrobats did their strength and flexibility exercises and practiced their new items until 9:00 or 10:00, when they ate a light breakfast and cleaned their tents; in the rising heat, they sewed sequins on their costumes or they attended to other, almost motionless chores. There was no animal training from midmorning on; it was too hot for the big cats, and the horses and the elephants stirred up too much dust.

Through the middle of the day, the tigers and lions lolled in their cages with their tails and paws and even their ears sticking out between the bars, as if they hoped that these extremities might attract a breeze; only their tails moved, among an orchestra of flies. The horses remained standing—it was cooler than lying down—and two boys took turns dusting the elephants with a torn cloth sack that had once held onions or potatoes. Another boy watered the floor of the main tent with a hose; in the midday heat, this didn’t dampen the dust for long. The overall torpor affected even the chimpanzees, who stopped swinging from their cages; they still screamed occasionally—and they jumped up and down, as always. But if a dog so much as whined, not to mention barked, someone kicked it.

At noon, the animal trainers and the acrobats ate a big lunch; then they slept until midafternoon—their first performance always began after 3:00. The heat was still stultifying, and the motes of dust rose and sparkled like stars in the sunlight, which slanted through the vents in the main tent; in these harsh slashes of light, the dust appeared to swarm as intensely as the flies. In the breaks between their musical numbers, the band members passed a wet rag with which they wiped their brass instruments and, more often, their heads.

There was usually a sparse audience in attendance at the 3:30 performance. They were an odd mix of people too old for a full day’s work and preschool children; in both cases, their alertness to the performances of the acrobats and the animals was below average, as if their limited powers of concentration were further impaired by the lingering heat and dust. Over the years, Dr. Daruwalla had never sensed that the 3:30 performance itself was ever a diminished effort; the acrobats and the animal trainers, and even the animals, were as steady as they had to be. It was the audience that was a little off.

For this reason, Farrokh preferred the early-evening performance. Whole families came—young workingmen and -women, and children who were old enough to pay attention—and the scant, dying sunlight seemed distant, even gentle; the dust motes weren’t visible. It was the time of the evening when the flies appeared to have departed with the glare, and it was still too early for the mosquitoes. For the 6:30 performance, the place was always packed.

The first item was the Plastic Lady, a “boneless” girl named Laxmi (the Goddess of Wealth). She was a beautiful contortionist—no sign of rickets. Laxmi was only 14, but the sharp definition of the bones in her face made her seem older. She wore a bright-orange bikini with yellow and red sequins that glittered in the strobe light; she looked like a fish with its scales reflecting a light that shone from underwater. It was dark enough in the main tent so that the changing colors of the stroboscope were effective, but enough of the late sunlight still illuminated the tent so that you could make out the faces of the children in the audience. Dr. Daruwalla thought that whoever said circuses were for children was only half right; the circus was also for grownups who enjoyed seeing children so enthralled.

Why can’t I do that? the doctor wondered, thinking about the simple brilliance of the boneless girl named Laxmi—thinking of the crippled boy abandoned in Victoria Terminus, where Dr. Daruwalla’s imagination had stalled as soon as it had begun. Instead of creating something as pure and riveting as the circus, he’d turned his mind to mayhem and murder—personified by Inspector Dhar.

What old Mr. Sethna mistook in Dr. Daruwalla’s miserable expression was simply the doctor’s deep disappointment with himself. With a sympathetic nod to the doctor, who sat forlornly in the Ladies’ Garden, the Parsi steward allowed himself a rare moment of familiarity with a passing waiter.

“I’m glad I’m not the rat he’s thinking of,” Mr. Sethna said.

Not the Curry

Of course there was more wrong with One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling than Danny Mills’s alcoholism or his unsubtle plagiarism of Dark Victory; much more was amiss than Gordon Hathaway’s crass alterations of Danny’s “original” screenplay, or the director’s attendant hemorrhoids and fungus. To make matters worse, the actress who was playing the dying but saved wife was that talentless beauty and denizen of the gossip columns Veronica Rose. Her friends and colleagues called her Vera, but she was born in Brooklyn with the name Hermione Rosen and she was Gordon Hathaway’s niece (the C. of M.’s daughter). Small world, Farrokh would learn.

The producer, Harold Rosen, would one day find his daughter as tiresomely tasteless as the rest of the world judged her to be upon the merest introduction; however, Harold was as easily bullied by his wife (the C. of M. sister of Gordon Hathaway) as Gordon was. Harold was operating on his wife’s assumption that Hermione Rosen, by her transformation to Veronica Rose, would one day be a star. Vera’s lack of talent and intelligence would prove too great an obstacle for such a goal—this in tandem with a compulsion to expose her breasts that even Lady Duckworth would have scorned.

But at the Duckworth Club in the summer of ’49, a rumor was in circulation that Vera was soon to have a huge success. Concerning Hollywood, what did Bombay know? That Vera had been cast in the role of the dying but saved wife was all that Lowji Daruwalla knew. It would take a while for Farrokh to find out that Danny Mills had objected to Vera having the part—until she seduced him and made him imagine that he was in love with her. Then he trotted at her heels like a dog. Danny believed it was the intense pressure of the role that had cooled Vera’s brief ardor for him—Vera had her own room at the Taj, and she’d refused to sleep with Danny since the commencement of principal photography—but, in truth, she was having an obvious affair with her leading man. It wasn’t obvious to Danny, who usually drank himself to sleep and got up late.

As for the leading man, he was a bisexual named Neville Eden. Neville was an uprooted Englishman and a properly trained actor, if not exactly brimming with natural ability, but his move to Los Angeles had turned sour when a certain predictability in the parts he was offered grew clear to him. He’d become too easy to cast as any number of stereotypical Brits. There was the Brit-twit role—the kind of instant Brit whom more rowdy and less educated Americans deplore—and then there was the sophisticated English gentleman who becomes the love interest of an impressionable American girl before she realizes her mistake and chooses the more substantial (if duller) American male. There was also the role of the visiting British cousin—sometimes this was a war buddy—who would comically display his inability to ride a horse, or to drive a car on the right-hand side of the road, or to successfully engage in fisticuffs in low bars. In all these roles, Neville felt he was supplying moronic reassurance to an audience that equated manliness with qualities only to be found in American men. This discovery tended to irritate him; doubtless it also fueled what he called his “homosexual self.”

About One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling Neville was philosophic: at least it was a leading role, and the part wasn’t quite in the vein of the dimly perceived British types he was usually asked to portray—after all, in this story he was a happily married Englishman with a dying American wife. But even for Neville Eden the loser combination of Danny Mills, Gordon Hathaway and Veronica Rose was a trifle daunting. Neville knew from past experience that contact with a compromised script, a second-rate director and a floozy for a co-star tended to make him churlish. And Neville cared nothing for Vera, who was beginning to imagine that she was in love with him; yet he found fornicating with her altogether more inspiring, and amusing, than acting with her—and he was mightily bored.

He was also married, which Vera knew; it caused her great anguish, or at least virulent insomnia. Of course she did not know that Neville was bisexual; this revelation was often the means by which Neville broke off such passing affairs. He’d found it instantly effective—to tell whichever floozy it was that she was the first woman to capture his heart and his attention to such a degree, but that his homosexual self was simply stronger than both of them. That usually worked; that got rid of them, in a hurry. All but the wife.

As for Gordon Hathaway, he had his hands full; his hemorrhoids and his fungus were trifling in comparison to the certain catastrophe he was facing. Veronica Rose wanted Danny Mills to go home so she could lavish even more obvious attention on Neville Eden. Gordon Hathaway complied with Vera’s request only to the degree that he forbade Danny’s presence on the set. The writer’s presence, Gordon claimed, “fuckin’ confused” the cast. But Gordon could hardly comply with his niece’s request to send Danny home; he needed Danny every night, to revise the ever-changing script. Understandably, Danny Mills wanted to reinstate his original script, which Neville Eden had agreed was better than the picture they were making. Danny thought Neville was a good chap, though it would have destroyed him to learn that Neville was fornicating with Vera. Vera, above all, dearly desired to sleep, and Dr. Lowji Daruwalla was alarmed by the sleeping pills she requested; yet he was such a fool for movies—he found her “charming,” too.

His son Farrokh wasn’t exactly charmed by Veronica Rose; neither was he altogether immune to her attractions. Soon a conflict of emotions engulfed the tender 19-year-old. Vera was clearly a coarse young woman, which is not without allure to 19-year-olds, especially when the woman in question is intriguingly older—Vera was 25. Furthermore, while he knew nothing of the random pleasure Vera took in exposing her breasts, Farrokh found that the actress bore a remarkable resemblance to the old photographs he so relished of Lady Duckworth.

It had been an evening in the empty dance hall when not even that depth of stone and the constant stirring of the ceiling fans could cool the stifling and humid night air, which had entered the Duckworth Club as heavily as a fog from the Arabian Sea. Even atheists, like Lowji, were praying for the monsoon rains. After dinner, Farrokh had escorted Vera from the table to the dance hall, not to dance with her but to show her Lady Duckworth’s photographs.

“There is someone you resemble,” the young man told the actress. “Please come and see.” Then he’d smiled at his mother, Meher, who didn’t appear to be very happily entertained by the surly arrogance of Neville Eden, who sat to her left, or by the drunken Danny Mills, who sat to her right with his head upon his folded arms, which rested in his plate.

“Yeah!” Gordon Hathaway said to his niece. “You oughta see the pictures of this broad, Vera. She showed her tits to everybody, too!” By this word “too,” Farrokh should have been forewarned, but he supposed Gordon meant only that Lady Duckworth exposed herself “in addition to” her other traits.

Veronica Rose wore a sleeveless muslin dress that clung to her back where she’d sweated against her chair; her bare upper arms caused excruciating offense to the Duckworthians, and especially to the recently acquired Parsi steward, Mr. Sethna, who thought that for a woman to bare her upper arms in public was a violation of scandalous proportion—the slut might as well show her breasts, too!

When Vera saw Lady Duckworth’s pictures, she was flattered; she lifted her damp blond hair off the back of her slender wet neck and she turned to young Farrokh, who felt an erotic flush at the sight of a rivulet of sweat that coursed from Vera’s near armpit. “Maybe I oughta wear my hair like hers,” Vera said; then she let her hair fall back in place. As Farrokh followed her to the dining room, he couldn’t help but notice—through the drenched back of her dress—that she wore no bra.

“So how’d ya like the fuckin’ exhibitionist?” her uncle asked her upon her return to the table.

Vera unbuttoned the front of her white muslin dress, showing her breasts to them all—Dr. Lowji Daruwalla and Mrs. Daruwalla, too. And the Lals, dining with the Bannerjees at a nearby table, certainly saw Veronica Rose’s breasts very clearly. And Mr. Sethna, so recently dismissed from the Ripon Club for attacking a crass member there with hot tea—Mr. Sethna clutched his silver serving tray, as if he thought of striking the Hollywood wench dead with it.

“Well, whatta ya think?” Vera asked her audience. “I don’t know if she was an exhibitionist—I think she was just too fuckin’ hot!” She added that she wanted to return to the Taj, where at least there was a sea breeze. In truth, she looked forward to feeding the rats that gathered at the water’s edge beneath the Gateway of India; the rats were unafraid of people, and Vera enjoyed teasing them with expensive table scraps—the way some people enjoy feeding ducks or pigeons. Thereafter, she would go to Neville’s room and straddle him until his cock was sore.

But in the morning, in addition to suffering the tribulation of her insomnia, Vera was sick; she was sick every morning for a week before she consulted Dr. Lowji Daruwalla, who, even though he was an orthopedist, had no trouble ascertaining that the actress was pregnant.

“Shit,” Vera said. “I thought it was the fuckin’ curry.”

But no; it was just the fucking. Either Danny Mills or Neville Eden was the father. Vera hoped it was Neville, because he was better-looking. She also theorized that alcoholism like Danny’s was genetic.

“Christ, it must be Neville!” said Vera Rose. “Danny’s so pickled, I think he’s sterile.”

Dr. Lowji Daruwalla was understandably taken aback by the crudeness of the lovely movie star, who wasn’t really a movie star and who was suddenly terrified that her uncle, the director, would discover that she was pregnant and fire her from the picture. Old Lowji pointed out to Miss Rose that she had fewer than three weeks remaining on the shooting schedule; she wouldn’t begin to look pregnant for another three months or more.

Miss Rose then became obsessed with the question of whether or not Neville Eden would leave his wife and marry her. Dr. Lowji Daruwalla thought not, but he chose to soften the blow with an indirect remark.

“I believe that Mr. Danny Mills would marry you,” the senior Daruwalla offered tactfully, but this truth only depressed Veronica Rose, who commenced to weep. As for weeping, it wasn’t as commonplace at the Hospital for Crippled Children as one might suppose. Dr. Lowji Daruwalla led the sobbing actress out of his office and through the waiting room, which was full of injured and crippled and deformed children; they all looked pityingly upon the crying fair-haired lady, imagining that she’d just received some awful news regarding a child of her own. In a sense, she had.

A Slum Is Born

At first, the news that Vera was pregnant didn’t spread far. Lowji told Meher, and Meher told Farrokh. No one else knew, and a special effort was made to keep this news from Lowji’s South Indian secretary, a brilliant young man from Madras. His name was Ranjit and he, too, had high hopes of becoming a screenwriter. Ranjit was only a few years older than Farrokh, his spoken English was impeccable, but thus far his writing had been limited to the excellent case histories of the senior Dr. Daruwalla’s patients that he composed, and to his lengthy memos to Lowji concerning what recent articles he’d read in the doctor’s orthopedic journals. These memos were written not to gain favor with old Lowji but as a means of giving the busy doctor some shorthand information regarding what he might like to read himself.

Although he came from a Hindu family of strictly vegetarian Brahmins, Ranjit had told Lowji—in his job interview—that he was wholly without religion and that he considered caste as “largely a means to hold everyone down.” Lowji had hired the young man in an instant.

But that had been five years ago. Although Ranjit totally pleased the senior Daruwalla as a secretary and Lowji had made every effort to further brainwash the young man in an atheistic direction, Ranjit was finding it exceedingly difficult to attract a prospective bride—or, more important, a prospective father-in-law—by the matrimonial advertisements he regularly submitted to The Times of India. He wouldn’t advertise that he was a Brahmin and a strict vegetarian, and although these things might not have mattered to him, they were of great concern to prospective fathers-in-law; it was usually the fathers-in-law, not the would-be brides, who responded to the advertisements—if anyone responded.

And now there was bickering between old Lowji and Ranjit because Ranjit had given in. His most recent advertisement in The Times of India had drawn over 100 responses; this was because he’d presented himself as someone who cared about caste and followed a strict vegetarian diet. After all, he told Lowji, he’d been made to observe these things as a child and they hadn’t killed him. “If it helps me to get married,” Ranjit said, “sporting a fresh puja mark, so to speak, will not kill me now.”

Lowji was crushed by this traitorousness; he’d considered Ranjit like a third son, and a cohort in atheism. Furthermore, the interviews (with over 100 prospective fathers-in-law) were having a deleterious influence on Ranjit’s efficiency; he was exhausted all the time, and no wonder—his mind was reeling with comparisons among 100 future wives.

But even in this state of mind, Ranjit was very attentive to the office visit of the Hollywood film goddess Veronica Rose. And since it was Ranjit’s job to formally compose old Lowji’s scribbles into a proper Orthopedic Report, the young man was surprised—after Vera’s teary departure—to see that Lowji had scrawled no more than “joint problem” in the sex symbol’s file. It was highly unusual for the senior Daruwalla to escort any of his patients home, particularly following a mere office visit—and especially when there were other patients waiting to see him. Furthermore, old Dr. Daruwalla had called his own home and told his wife that he was bringing Miss Rose there. All this for a joint problem? Ranjit thought it was most irregular.

Fortunately, the rigorous interviews that were the result of his highly successful matrimonial ads didn’t allow Ranjit much time or energy for speculation on Vera’s “joint problem.” His interest was provoked no further than to ask the senior Daruwalla what sort of joint problem the actress was suffering; Ranjit wasn’t used to typing up an incomplete Orthopedic Report.

“Well, actually,” Lowji said, “I have referred her to another physician.”

“Not a joint problem then?” Ranjit inquired. All he cared about was correctly typing the report.

“Possibly gynecological,” Lowji answered warily.

“What sort of joint problem did she think she had?” Ranjit asked in surprise.

“Her knees,” Lowji said vaguely, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “But I judged this to be psychosomatic.”

“The gynecological problem is psychosomatic, too?” Ranjit inquired. He foresaw difficult typing ahead.

“Possibly,” Lowji said.

“What sort of gynecological problem is it?” Ranjit persisted. At his age, and with his ambition to be a screenwriter, he was thinking that the problem was venereal.

“Itching,” said the senior Daruwalla—and to halt the inquisition at this juncture, he wisely added, “Vaginal itching.” No young man, he knew, cared to contemplate this. The matter was closed. Ranjit’s Orthopedic Report on Veronica Rose was the closest he would ever come to writing a screenplay (many years later, the younger Dr. Daruwalla would read this report with consistent pleasure—whenever he desired to make some contact with the old days).

The patient is confused by her knees. She imagines that she has no vaginal itching, which indeed she has, while at the same time she feels some pain in her knees, which in fact she does not have. Most naturally, a gynecologist is recommended.

And what a gynecologist was selected for the task! Few patients would ever claim that their confidence soared when they placed themselves in the hands of the ancient, accident-prone Dr. Tata. Lowji chose him because he was so senile, he was certain to be discreet; his powers of memory were too depleted for gossip. Sadly, the selection of Dr. Tata was lacking in obstetrical merit.

At least Lowji had the good sense to entrust his wife with the psychological care of Veronica Rose. Meher tucked the pregnant bombshell into a guest bed in the Daruwalla family mansion on old Ridge Road. Meher treated Vera like a little girl who’d just suffered a tonsillectomy. Although doubtless soothing, this mothering wouldn’t solve Vera’s problem; nor was Vera much comforted by Meher’s claim that, in her own case, she hadn’t really remembered the agony and the gore of childbirth. Over time, Meher told the knocked-up actress, only the positive parts of the experience stood out in her mind.

To Lowji, Meher was less optimistic. “Here is a bizarre and thankless situation that you have gotten us into,” she informed her husband. Then the situation worsened.

The next day, Gordon Hathaway called the senior Dr. Daruwalla from the slum set with the bothersome news that Veronica Rose had collapsed between takes. Actually, that was not what had happened. Vera’s so-called collapse had had nothing whatsoever to do with her unwanted pregnancy; she’d simply fainted because a cow had licked her and then sneezed on her. Not that this wasn’t disturbing to Vera, but the incident—like so many day-to-day occurrences in an actual slum—had been poorly observed and fervently misinterpreted by the horde of onlookers who reported the confused event.

Farrokh couldn’t remember if the rudiments for a real slum existed in the area of Sophia Zuber Road in the summer of ’49; he recalled only that there was both a Muslim and a Hindu population in that vicinity, for it wasn’t far from where he’d attended school—at St. Ignatius in Mazagaon. Probably, some kind of slum was already there. And certainly today there is a slum of good size and modest respectability on Sophia Zuber Road.

It’s fair to say that Gordon Hathaway’s movie set at least contributed to what now passes for acceptable housing in the slum on Sophia Zuber Road, for it was there that the slum set was hastily constructed. Naturally, among those hired as extras—to act the part of the slum residents—were actual citizens of Bombay who were looking for an actual slum to move into. And once they’d moved in, they objected to these movie people, who were constantly invading their privacy. Rather quickly, it had become their slum.

Also, there was the matter of the latrine. An army of movie-crew coolies—thugs with entrenching tools—had dug the latrine. But one cannot create a new place to shit without expecting people to shit there. A universal code of defecation applies: if some people are shitting somewhere, others will shit there, too. This is only fair. Defecation in India is endlessly creative. Here was a new latrine; quickly it wasn’t new. And one mustn’t forget the intense heat before the monsoon breaks, and the ensuing floods that attend the onset of the monsoon; these factors, in addition to the sudden plenitude of human excrement, doubtless exacerbated Vera’s morning sickness—not to mention her proneness to fainting on that particular day when she was both licked and sneezed on by a cow.

Gordon Hathaway and the film crew were shooting the scene where the abductors of the dying wife (Vera) are carrying her through the slum en route to the ashram of the snake guru. This is the moment when the idealistic Jesuit missionary, who just happens to be performing various labors of selflessness in the slum, sees the beautiful and unmistakably blond woman whisked along Sophia Zuber Road by a band of raffians unsuitable for her company. There later follows the distraught husband (Neville) and a stereotypically stupid policeman who has clumsily lost the trail. This is the first meeting between the husband and the Jesuit, but it was not the first meeting between Neville and the arrogant Indian actor Subodh Rai, who played the missionary with inappropriately secular handsomeness and cunning.

Meanwhile, many of the new slum’s residents had been forced to move out of “their” slum in order for Gordon Hathaway to shoot this scene. Many more future residents of this new slum were crowding around, desirous to move in. Had any of these onlookers not been so transfixed by Veronica Rose, Neville and Subodh could have been observed flirting with each other off-camera; they were playfully pinching and tickling each other when Vera unaccountably found herself face-to-face with the cow.

Cows, Vera had heard, were holy—although not to the majority of beef-eating bystanders, who were Muslims—but Vera was so shocked to see this cow, first standing in her path and then approaching her, that she took rather a long time to determine what course of action she should choose. By then, the cow’s moist breath was detectable in her cleavage; since she’d been abducted from the Taj (in the movie) in her nightgown, Vera’s cleavage was quite considerable and exposed. The cow was garlanded with flowers; brightly colored beads were strung on thongs tied around its ears. Neither the cow nor Vera seemed to know what to make of this confrontation, although Vera was certain that she didn’t want to cause some religious offense by being in the least aggressive toward the cow.

“Oh, what pretty flowers!” she remarked. “Oh, what a nice cow!” she said to it. (Veronica Rose’s repertoire of friendly, inoffensive responses was exceedingly small.) She didn’t think she should throw her arms around the cow’s neck and kiss its long, sad face; she wasn’t sure if she should touch the cow at all. But the cow made the first move. It was simply on its way somewhere, and suddenly a film crew in general and a silly woman in particular stood in its way; therefore, it stepped slowly forward—it trod on Vera’s bare foot. Since she’d just been abducted (in the movie), her foot was bare.

Even in great pain, Vera had such a fear of religious zealotry that she didn’t dare scream in the cow’s face, the wet muzzle of which was now pressed against her chest. Not only because of the humid weather but also because of her fear and pain, Vera was soaked with sweat; whether it was merely the salt on her fair skin, or her inviting fragrance—for doubtless Vera smelled vastly better than the other residents of Sophia Zuber Road—the cow at this moment licked her. Both the length and feel of the cow’s tongue was a new experience for Vera, who fainted when the cow violently sneezed in her face. Then the cow bent over her and licked her chest and shoulders.

Thereafter, no one saw clearly what happened. There was demonstrable consternation for Miss Rose’s welfare, and some rioting by those onlookers who were outraged by what they’d seen; the rioters themselves were uncertain of what they’d seen. Only Vera would later conclude that the rioters had rioted on behalf of a sacred cow. Neville Eden and Subodh Rai vaguely wondered if Vera had fainted in response to their observed sexual interest in each other.

By the time the Daruwallas found their way to the van, which served as Miss Rose’s makeup room and a first-aid station, the Muslim owner of a bidi shop had spread the word all along Sophia Zuber Road that a blond American movie star, naked to her waist, had licked a cow and thereby caused widespread rioting among the sensitive Hindu population. Such mischief was unnecessary; riots didn’t need reasons. If there was a reason for this one, it was probably that too many people wanted to move into the movie-set slum and they were impatient that they had to wait for the movie; they wanted to start living there immediately. But Vera, of course, would always imagine that everything had happened because of her and the cow.

It was into the midst of this bedlam that the Daruwalla family arrived to rescue the indelicately pregnant Miss Rose. Her state of mind hadn’t been improved by the cow, but the senior Dr. Daruwalla could conclude only that Vera had a bruised and swollen right foot—and that she was still pregnant. “If Neville won’t have me, I’ll put the baby up for adoption,” Vera said. “But you’ve got to arrange it all here,” she told Lowji and Meher and Farrokh. She felt certain that her “American audience” wouldn’t sympathize with her for a child born out of wedlock; more to the point, her uncle wouldn’t use her in another picture (if he knew); worse, Danny Mills, out of a drunk’s special sentimentality, would insist on adopting the baby himself (if he knew). “This has gotta be strictly between us!” Miss Rose told the helpless Daruwallas. “Find me some fuckin’ rich people who want a white baby!”

The interior of the van was a virtual sauna; the Daruwallas wondered if Vera was suffering from dehydration. Admittedly, Lowji and Meher felt unfamiliar with the moral logic of Westerners; they turned to their European-educated son for some guidance on this subject. But even to Farrokh it seemed an odd, questionable gift—to present India with another baby. Young Farrokh politely suggested that a baby might be more welcome for adoption in Europe or America, but Miss Rose sought secrecy at all cost—as if, morally, whatever she did in India, and whomever she left behind here, would somehow remain unrecorded, or at least never be counted against her.

“You could have an abortion,” the senior Dr. Daruwalla suggested.

“Don’t you dare mention that word to me,” said Veronica Rose. “I’m not that kind of person—I was brought up with certain moral values!”

While the Daruwallas puzzled over Vera’s “moral values,” the van was rocked violently from side to side by a rowdy mob of men and boys. Lipstick and eyeliner rolled off the shelves of the van—and powders, and moisturizers, and rouge. A jar of sterile water crashed, and one of alcohol; Farrokh caught a falling box of gauze pads, and another of Band-Aids, as his father made his way to the sliding panel door. Veronica Rose screamed so loudly that she didn’t hear what old Lowji shouted to the men outside; nor did she hear the sound of the several beatings, as various thugs among the film-crew coolies fell upon the mob with the entrenching tools they’d used to dig the not-so-new latrine. Miss Rose lay on her back, clutching the sides of her trembling cot, as small, colorful jars of this and that dropped harmlessly on her.

“Oh, I hate this country!” she yelled.

“It is merely a passing riot,” Meher assured her.

“I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!” Vera cried. “It is the most awful country in the world—I simply hate it!”

It occurred to young Farrokh to ask the actress why, then, she would ever want to leave her own baby here in Bombay, but he felt he was too ignorant of the cultural differences between Miss Rose and himself to be critical. Farrokh wished to remain forever ignorant of the differences between these movie people and himself. At 19, young men are given to moral generalizations of a sweeping kind. To hold the rest of the United States responsible for the behavior of the former Hermione Rosen was a tad severe; nevertheless, Farrokh felt himself edging away from a future residence in the United States.

In short, Veronica Rose made Farrokh feel physically ill. Surely the woman should take some responsibility for her own pregnancy. And she’d tarnished Farrokh’s sacred memory of Lady Duckworth’s exhibitionism! In legend, Lady Duckworth’s self-exposure had seemed elegant but not greatly tempting. In Farrokh’s mind, Lady Duckworth’s breasts were only a symbolic display. But, forever after, Farrokh was left with the more tangible memory of Vera’s raw tits—they were such a sincerely carnal offering.

The Camphor Man

With all this trash in his past, it’s little wonder that Farrokh was still sitting at his table in the darkening Ladies’ Garden of the Duckworth Club. In the time it had taken the younger Dr. Daruwalla to recall such a past, Mr. Sethna had provided him with another cold Kingfisher. Farrokh hadn’t touched his new beer. The faraway look in Dr. Daruwalla’s eyes was almost as distant as that gaze of death which the doctor had recently seen in the eyes of Mr. Lal, although (it’s already been said) the vultures had spoiled a clear impression.

At the Great Royal Circus, about an hour before the early-evening performance, a stooped man carrying a burning brazier would walk along the avenue of troupe tents; live coals were glowing in the brazier, and the aromatic camphor smoke drifted into the tents of the acrobats and the animal trainers. The camphor man would pause by each tent to be sure that enough smoke wafted inside. In addition to the medicinal properties attributed to camphor—it was often used as a counter-irritant for infections and in the treatment of itching—the smoke was of superstitious importance to the circus performers. They believed that inhaling camphor smoke protected them from the evil eye and the dangers of their profession—animal attacks, falling.

When Mr. Sethna saw Dr. Daruwalla close his eyes and throw back his head and draw a deep breath of the flowery air in the Ladies’ Garden, the old Parsi steward mistook the reason. Mr. Sethna wrongly assumed that Farrokh had felt an evening breeze and therefore was enjoying a sudden infusion of the scent from the surrounding bougainvillea. But Dr. Daruwalla was sniffing for the camphor man, as if the doctor’s memories of the past were in need of both a disinfectant and a blessing.