A Son Of The Circus Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bombayite) as if it had been both more colorful and more authentically Indian than it truly had been. Educated by the Jesuits, Dr Daruwalla had attended St Ignatius School in Mazagaon; for recreation, he’d enjoyed the privileges of organized sports and dances at the Duckworth Club. When he reached university age, he was sent to Austria; even his eight years in Vienna, where he completed medical school, were tame and controlled – he’d lived the whole time with his elder brother.
    But in the Duckworth’s dance hall, in the sacred presence of those portraits of Members Past, Dr Daruwalla could momentarily imagine that he truly came from somewhere, and that he belonged somewhere. Increasingly, as he approached 60, the doctor acknowledged (only to himself) that in Toronto he often
acted
far more Indian than he was; he could instantly acquire a Hindi accent, or drop it, depending on the company he kept. Only a fellow Parsi would know that English had been his veritable mother tongue, and that the doctor would have learned his Hindi in school. During Farrokh’s visits to India, he was similarly ashamed of himself for how completely European or North American he pretended to be. In Bombay, his Hindi accent disappeared; one had only to hear the doctor’s English to be convinced that he’d been totally assimilated in Canada. In truth, it was only when he was surrounded by the old photographs in the dance hall of the Duckworth Club that Dr Daruwalla felt at home.
    Of Lady Duckworth, Dr Daruwalla had only heard her story. In each of her stunning photographs, her breasts were properly if not modestly covered. Yes, a highly elevated and sizable bosom could be detected in her pictures, even when Lady Duckworth was well advanced in years; and yes, her habit of exposing herself supposedly increased as she grew older – her breasts were reported to be well formed (and well worth revealing) into her seventies.
    She’d been 75 when she revealed herself in the club’s circular driveway to a horde of young people arriving for the Sons and Daughters of Members’ Ball. This incident resulted in a multivehicle collision that was reputed to bear responsibility for the enlargement of the speed bumps, which were implanted the entire length of the access road. In Farrokh’s opinion, the Duckworth Club was permanently fixed at the speed indicated by those signs posted at both ends of the drive: DEAD SLOW . But this, for the most part, contented him; the admonition to go dead slow didn’t strike Dr Daruwalla as an imposition, although the doctor did regret not being alive for at least one glimpse of Lady Duckworth’s long-ago breasts. The club couldn’t have been dead slow in her day.
    As he had sighed aloud in the empty dance hall perhaps a hundred times. Dr Daruwalla sighed again and softly said to himself, ‘Those were the good old days.’ But it was only a joke; he didn’t really mean it. Those ‘good old days’ were as unknowable to him as Canada – his cold, adopted country – or as the India he only pretended to be comfortable in. Furthermore, Farrokh never spoke or sighed loudly enough to be heard by anyone else.
    In the vast cool hall, he listened: he could hear the waiters and the busboys in the dining room, setting the tables for lunch; he could hear the clicks and thumps of the snooker balls and the flat, authoritative snap of a card turned faceup on a table. And although it was now past 11:00, two die-hards were still playing tennis; by the soft, slowly paced pops of the ball, Dr Daruwalla concluded that it wasn’t a very spirited match.
    It was unmistakably the head gardener’s truck that sped along the access road, hitting each of the speed bumps with abandon; there followed the resounding clatter of hoes and rakes and spades, and then an abstract cursing – the head niali was a moron.
    There was a photograph that Farrokh was particularly fond of, and he looked intently at it; then he closed his eyes so that he