A Son of the Circus Read online

  “EXOTIC AND ENGROSSING.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “His new book is his boldest novel yet.… The reader is swept along by a torrent of vigorously dramatized incidents, jostled by a crowd of instantly vivid characters.… The language has an energy that keeps pace with the fecundity of invention.”

  —The New York Times Book Review (front page)

  “There’s a lot going on in Irving’s expertly dovetailed and foreshadowed story.… A Son of the Circus offers a satisfying mix of evil and goodness pursued in different ways.… It debunks both easy hope and easy cynicism. Unlike most popular novelists, Irving knows how much—and how little—to make of a serial killer.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “John Irving is never content with giving us something as meager as a novel.… He wants us to know the whole story, everything, not just the thin slice of the world usually known as fiction.… A writer with the courage to follow this difficult journey while also exploring issues of poverty, racism and disease in a novel so full of humor is a writer to be treasured.”

  —The Times (London)

  “[A] LUSH, LABYRINTHINE TALE.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “The miracle of A Son of the Circus is that all the twists and elaborations make sense, that in the whirl of improbable characters and unlikely events Irving makes us believe these are real people trying to live decent lives.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “There is an old fashioned charm about John Irving. His style is clear, intelligent and undemanding, his narratives discursive and lively. With a wholesome relish for grotesquerie and eccentricity, he produces solid, ambitious fables you actually do read when you take them on holiday.”

  —The Daily Telegraph (London)

  “A heroic attempt at creating an imaginative order, with multiple plots, numerous characters and complex manipulations of time … large doses of suspense, intriguing detail … finely honed comic characterizations … and a prose style that never loses momentum.”

  —The Toronto Star

  “OUTRAGEOUS … JOHN IRVING’S MOST AMBITIOUS WORK.” —US Magazine

  “A mercurial writer, he produces a comic strip of effects: bleak, effervescent, sentimental, philosophical.… Irving handles this incarnadine combination of farce and horror with high-speed skill, creating a compulsively readable book.… He can seduce or repel.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  “In this marvelously entertaining novel, Irving has given us a version [of India] that is simple only in the timeless literary pleasures it offers. And in the process, he has invented a world that all his readers can both comprehend and love.… [A] glorious book … A Son of the Circus gives us a breadth of vision, variety of characters and range of concerns that evoke his immortal The World According to Garp.”

  —Shashi Tharoor

  San Jose Mercury News

  “FUNNY AND FASCINATING…

  Irving is at the height of his considerable literary powers in this comic tour de force.… If you liked The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, or A Prayer for Owen Meany, you’re going to be happy. Irving’s novels burst with stories, characters, arguments, oddities and images that help us define the world we live in.”

  —Playboy

  “Irving’s subplots reproduce themselves as if by magic. A host of them—the meeting of twins separated at birth, circus dwarfs bent on rescuing street urchins, the murder of a drug dealer twenty years before in 1969, mistaken paternity, and the search for Christian belief—swirl around the main story line: the capture of a serial killer murdering prostitutes along Bombay’s Falkland Road.”

  —New York Newsday

  “A page-turner that leaves the satisfied reader happily exhausted … Set against a backdrop as astonishing as the dazzling diversity of India itself, John Irving’s vast new novel is at heart the poignant tale of a good man displaced by circumstances and yearning for home.”

  —The Anniston Star

  “BREATHTAKING …

  A SON OF THE CIRCUS is a wild ride.… Farrokh Daruwalla is one of Irving’s most charming creations to date.”

  —Vogue

  “A practitioner of the nineteenth-century form of novel, Irving manages to keep his plot moving briskly as he navigates his characters through the teeming, fly-ridden, cloying landscape of India. Along the way, he stops to meditate on the accidental nature of life, the oft-times fragile nature of religion and the incidental nature of nationalism. There is more, of course, much more. And like a true son of the circus, John Irving manages to juggle all of these elements with sure hands, putting on a show worthy of the craftiest ringmaster.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  “Bigger and more fantastic than any of his previous books … Irving combines Indian circuses, dwarfs, twins separated at birth, a transsexual serial killer, and questions of cultural identity, ideology and religious faith with the storytelling skill of a twentieth-century American Dickens.”

  —Modern Maturity

  Also by John Irving

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  BOOKS

  Until I Find You

  The Fourth Hand

  My Movie Business

  A Widow for One Year

  Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

  A Son of the Circus

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

  The Cider House Rules

  The Hotel New Hampshire

  The World According to Garp

  The 158-Pound Marriage

  The Water-Method Man

  Setting Free the Bears

  SCREENPLAYS

  The Cider House Rules

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1994 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an inprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, for permission to reprint excerpts from A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter. Copyright © 1967 by James Salter. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-44750

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42393-1

  This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

  v3.1_r1

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  This novel isn’t about India. I don’t know India. I was there only once, for less than a month. When I was there, I was struck by the country’s foreignness; it remains obdurately foreign to me. But long before I went to India, I began to imagine a man who has been born there and has moved away; I imagined a character who keeps coming back again and again. He’s compelled to keep returning; yet, with each return trip, his sense of India’s foreignness only deepens. India remains unyieldingly foreign, even to him.

  My Indian friends said, “Make him an Indian—definitely an Indian but not an Indian.” They told me that everywhere he goes—including where he lives, outside India—should also strike him as foreign; the point is, he’s always the foreigner. “You just have to get the details right,” they said.

  I went to India at the request of Martin Bell and his wife, Mary Ellen Mark. Martin and Mary Ellen asked me to write a screenplay for them, about the child performers in an Indian circus. I’ve been working on that screenplay and this novel, simultaneously, for more than four years; as of this writing, I’m revising the scr
eenplay, which is also titled A Son of the Circus, although it isn’t the same story as the novel. Probably I’ll continue to rewrite the screenplay until the film is produced—if the film is produced. Martin and Mary Ellen took me to India; in a sense, they began A Son of the Circus.

  I also owe a great deal to those Indian friends who were with me in Bombay in January of 1990—I’m thinking of Ananda Jaisingh, particularly—and to those members of the Great Royal Circus who gave me so much of their time when I was living with the circus in Junagadh. Most of all, I’m indebted to four Indian friends who’ve read and reread the manuscript; their efforts to overcome my ignorance and a multitude of errors made my writing possible. I want to acknowledge them by name; their importance to A Son of the Circus is immeasurable.

  My thanks to Dayanita Singh in New Delhi; to Farrokh Chothia in Bombay; to Dr. Abraham Verghese in El Paso, Texas; and to Rita Mathur in Toronto. I would also like to thank my friend Michael Ondaatje, who introduced me to Rohinton Mistry—it was Rohinton who introduced me to Rita. And my friend James Salter has been extremely tolerant and good-humored in allowing me to make mischievous use of several passages from his elegant novel A Sport and a Pastime. Thanks, Jim.

  As always, I have other writers to thank: my friend Peter Matthiessen, who read the earliest draft and wisely suggested surgery; my friends David Calicchio, Craig Nova, Gail Godwin and Ron Hansen (not to mention his twin brother, Rob) also suffered through earlier drafts. And I’m indebted to Ved Mehta for his advice, through correspondence.

  As usual, I have more than one doctor to thank, too. For his careful reading of the penultimate draft, my thanks to Dr. Martin Schwartz in Toronto. In addition, I’m grateful to Dr. Sherwin Nuland in Hamden, Connecticut, and to Dr. Burton Berson in New York; they provided me with the clinical studies of achondroplasia. (Since this novel was completed, the gene for achondroplasia was found; the chief research biologist of the University of California at Irvine, Dr. John J. Wasmuth, wrote to me that he wished he had read A Son of the Circus before he wrote the article describing identification of the gene for achondroplastic dwarfism—“because I would have plagiarized some of your statements.” I can only guess that my main character, the fictional Dr. Daruwalla, would have been pleased.)

  The generosity of June Callwood, and of John Flannery—the director of nursing at Casey House in Toronto—is also much appreciated. And over the four years I’ve been writing A Son of the Circus, the work of three assistants has been outstanding: Heather Cochran, Alison Rivers and Allan Reeder. But there’s only one reader who’s read, or heard aloud, every draft of this story: my wife, Janet. For, literally, the thousands of pages she’s endured—not to mention her tolerance of enforced travel—I thank her, with all my love.

  Lastly, I want to express my affection for my editor, Harvey Ginsberg, who officially retired before I handed him the 1,094-page manuscript; retired or not, Harvey edited me.

  I repeat: I don’t “know” India, and A Son of the Circus isn’t “about” India. It is, however, a novel set in India—a story about an Indian (but not an Indian), for whom India will always remain an unknown and unknowable country. If I’ve managed to get the details right, my Indian friends deserve the credit.

  —J. I.

  For Salman

  CONTENTS

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Notes

  Dedication

  1. THE CROW ON THE CEILING FAN

  Blood from Dwarfs

  The Doctor Dwells on Lady Duckworth’s Breasts

  Mr. Lal Has Missed the Net

  2. THE UPSETTING NEWS

  Still Tingling

  The Famous Twin

  The Doctor as Closet Screenwriter

  Dr. Daruwalla Is Stricken with Self-Doubt

  Because an Elephant Stepped on a Seesaw

  3. THE REAL POLICEMAN

  Mrs. Dogar Reminds Farrokh of Someone Else

  Not a Wise Choice of People to Offend

  A Real Detective at Work

  How the Doctor’s Mind Will Wander

  4. THE OLD DAYS

  The Bully

  Austrian Interlude

  Inexplicable Hairlessness

  Stuck in the Past

  5. THE VERMIN

  Learning the Movie Business

  But Had He Learned Anything Worth Knowing?

  Not the Curry

  A Slum Is Born

  The Camphor Man

  6. THE FIRST ONE OUT

  Separated at Birth

  A Knack for Offending People

  What if Mrs. Dogar Was a Hijra?

  Load Cycle

  7. DR. DARUWALLA HIDES IN HIS BEDROOM

  Now the Elephants Will Be Angry

  The First-Floor Dogs

  Inoperable

  8. TOO MANY MESSAGES

  For Once, the Jesuits Don’t Know Everything

  The Same Old Scare; a Brand-New Threat

  The Skywalk

  9. SECOND HONEYMOON

  Before His Conversion, Farrokh Mocks the Faithful

  The Doctor Is Turned On

  The Doctor Encounters a Sex-Change-in-Progress

  10. CROSSED PATHS

  Testing for Syphilis

  A Literary Seduction Scene

  Lunch Is Followed by Depression

  A Dirty Hippie

  11. THE DILDO

  Behind Every Journey Is a Reason

  A Memorable Arrival

  Our Friend, the Real Policeman

  The Unwitting Courier

  12. THE RATS

  Four Baths

  With Dieter

  Nancy Gets Sick

  13. NOT A DREAM

  A Beautiful Stranger

  Nancy Is a Witness

  The Getaway

  The Wrong Toe

  Farrokh Is Converted

  The Doctor and His Patient Are Reunited

  14. TWENTY YEARS

  A Complete Woman, but One Who Hates Women

  Remembering Aunt Promila

  A Childless Couple Searches for Rahul

  The Police Know the Movie Is Innocent

  A View of Two Marriages at a Vulnerable Hour

  What the Dwarf Sees

  15. DHAR’S TWIN

  Three Old Missionaries Fall Asleep

  Early Indications of Mistaken Identity

  The Wrong Taxi-Walla

  Proselyte-Hunting Among the Prostitutes

  All Together—in One Small Apartment

  Free Will

  Standing Still: An Exercise

  Bird-Shit Boy

  16. MR. GARG’S GIRL

  A Little Something Venereal

  Martin Luther Is Put to Dubious Use

  Another Warning

  Madhu Uses Her Tongue

  A Meeting at Crime Branch Headquarters

  No Motive

  Martin’s Mother Makes Him Sick

  A Half-Dozen Cobras

  At the Mission, Farrokh Is Inspired

  Tetracycline

  17. STRANGE CUSTOMS

  Southern California

  Turkey (Bird and Country)

  Two Different Men, Both Wide-Awake

  18. A STORY SET IN MOTION BY THE VIRGIN MARY

  Limo Roulette

  Mother Mary

  Is There a Gene for It, Whatever It Is?

  The Enigmatic Actor

  Something Rather Odd

  19. OUR LADY OF VICTORIES

  Another Author in Search of an Ending

  The Way It Happened to Mr. Lal

  Some Small Tragedy

  Not a Romantic Comedy

  A Make-Believe Death; the Real Children

  20. THE BRIBE

  Time to Slip Away

  Bedbugs Ahead

  Raging Hormones

  The Hawaiian Shirt

  The Actor Guesses Right

  Farrokh Remembers the Crow

  A Three-Dollar Bill?

  Just
Some Old Attraction-Repulsion Kind of Thing

  21. ESCAPING MAHARASHTRA

  Ready for Rabies

  Lucky Day

  Out of Place at the Taj

  Too Loud for a Library

  A Misunderstanding at the Urinal

  Fear No Evil

  22. THE TEMPTATION OF DR. DARUWALLA

  On the Road to Junagadh

  A Racist Chimpanzee

  A Perfect Ending

  The Night of 10,000 Steps

  23. LEAVING THE CHILDREN

  Not Charlton Heston

  Jesus in the Parking Lot

  Little India

  24. THE DEVIL HERSELF

  Getting Ready for Rahul

  Just Dancing

  Happy New Year

  “Auld Lang Syne”

  25. JUBILEE DAY

  No Monkey

  The Wrong Madhu

  Take Me Home

  26. GOOD-BYE, BOMBAY

  Well, Then

  Not a Word

  Dr. Daruwalla Decides

  Just Close Your Eyes

  Just India

  27. EPILOGUE

  The Volunteer

  The Bottommost Drawer

  Sort of Fading Now

  Allowed to Use the Lift at Last

  Not the Dwarfs

  1

  THE CROW ON THE CEILING FAN

  Blood from Dwarfs

  Usually, the dwarfs kept bringing him back—back to the circus and back to India. The doctor was familiar with the feeling of leaving Bombay “for the last time”; almost every time he left India, he vowed that he’d never come back. Then the years would pass—as a rule, not more than four or five—and once again he’d be taking the long flight from Toronto. That he was born in Bombay was not the reason; at least this was what the doctor claimed. Both his mother and father were dead; his sister lived in London, his brother in Zürich. The doctor’s wife was Austrian, and their children and grandchildren lived in England and in Canada; none of them wanted to live in India—they rarely visited the country—nor had a single one of them been born there. But the doctor was fated to go back to Bombay; he would keep returning again and again—if not forever, at least for as long as there were dwarfs in the circus.