A Son Of The Circus by John Irving Read Free Book Online Page A

movies and stayed at home.
    To hear the Daruwalla children and grandchildren discuss it, the child acrobats who were sold to the circus were long-suffering child laborers in a high-risk profession; their hardworking, no-escape existence was tantamount to slavery. Untrained children were paid nothing for six months; thereafter, they started with a salary of 3 rupees a day – only 90 rupees a month, less than 4 dollars! But Dr Daruwalla argued that safe food and a safe place to sleep were better than nothing; what these children were given was a chance.
    Circus people boiled their water and their milk. They bought and cooked their own food; they dug and cleaned their own latrines. And a well-trained acrobat was often paid 500 or 600 rupees a month, even if it was only 25 dollars. Granted, although the Great Royal took good care of its children, Farrokh couldn’t say with certainty that the child performers were as well treated in
all
the Indian circuses; the performances in several of these circuses
were
so abject — not to mention unskilled and careless – that the doctor surmised that the tent life in such places was shabbier, too.
    Life was surely shabby in the Great Blue Nile; indeed, among the Great This and Great That circuses of India, the Great Blue Nile was the shabbiest – or at least the least great. Deepa would agree. A former child contortionist, the dwarf’s wife, reincarnated as a trapeze artist, was lacking both in polish and in common sense; it wasn’t merely the beer that had made her let go of the bar too soon.
    Deepa’s injuries were complicated but not severe; in addition to the dislocation of her hip joint, she’d suffered a tear in the transverse ligament. Not only would Dr Daruwalla brand Deepa’s hip with a memorable scar, but, in prepping the area, he would be confronted by the irrefutable blackness of Deepa’s pubic hair; this would be a dark reminder of the disturbing contact between her pubis and the bridge of his nose.
    Farrokh’s nose was still tingling when he helped Deepa be admitted to the hospital; out of guilt, he’d left the circus grounds with her. But the admitting process had barely begun when the doctor was summoned by one of the hospital secretaries; there’d been a phone call for him while he was en route from the Blue Nile.
    ‘Do you know any clowns?’ the secretary asked him.
    ‘Well, as a matter of fact, yes,’ Farrokh admitted.
    ‘Dwarf clowns?’ asked the secretary.
    ‘Yes – several! I just met them,’ the doctor added. Farrokh was too ashamed to admit that he’d also just bled them.
    ‘Apparently, one of them has been injured at that circus at Cross Maidan,’ the secretary said.
    ‘Not Vinod!’ Dr Daruwalla exclaimed.
    ‘Yes, that’s him,’ she said. ‘That’s why they want you back at the circus.’
    ‘What happened to Vinod?’ Dr Daruwalla asked the somewhat disdainful secretary; she was one of many medical secretaries who embraced sarcasm.
    ‘I couldn’t ascertain the clown’s condition from a phone message,’ she replied. The description was hysterical. I gather he was trampled by elephants or shot from a cannon, or both. And now that this dwarf lies dying, he is declaring you to be his doctor.’
    And so to the circus grounds at Cross Maidan did Dr Daruwalla go. All the way back to the deeply flawed performance of the Great Blue Nile, the doctor’s nose tingled.
    For 15 years, merely remembering the dwarf’s wife would activate Farrokh’s nose. And now, the fact that Mr Lai had fallen without a net (for the body on the golf course was indeed dead) – even this evidence of death reminded Dr Daruwalla that Deepa had survived her fall and her unwelcome and painful contact with the clumsy doctor.

The Famous Twin

    Upon Inspector Dhar’s intrusion, the vultures had risen but they’d not departed. Dr Daruwalla knew that the carrion eaters still floated overhead because their putrescence lingered in the air and their shadows drifted