Free A Son Of The Circus by John Irving Page B

Indian! he thought.
    And in 15 years, he’d not found a genetic marker for achondroplastic dwarfism, nor had anyone encouraged him to look. But he kept trying. The doctor’s dwarf-blood project wasn’t dead; he wouldn’t let it die – not yet.

Because an Elephant Stepped on a Seesaw

    By the time Dr Daruwalla was in his late fifties, the exuberant details of the doctor’s conversion to Christianity were entirely absent from his conversation; it was as if he were slowly becoming converted. But 15 years ago – as the doctor drove to the circus grounds at Cross Maidan to assess what damage had been done to the dwarf – Farrokh’s faith was still new enough that he’d already imparted the miraculous particulars of his belief to Vinod. If the dwarf was truly dying, the doctor was at least slightly comforted by his memory of their religious discussion – for Vinod was a deeply religious man. In the coming years, Farrokh’s faith would comfort him less deeply, and he would one day flee from any religious discourse with Vinod. Over time, the dwarf would strike the doctor as a giant zealot.
    But while the doctor was en route to discover whatever disaster had befallen the dwarf at the Great Blue Nile, he found it heartening to dwell on the dwarf’s expressed excitement over the parallels between Vinod’s version of Hinduism and Dr Daruwalla’s Christianity.
    ‘We are having a kind of Trinity, too!’ the dwarf had exclaimed.
    ‘Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu – is that what you mean?’ the doctor asked.
    ‘All creation is being in the hands of three gods,’ Vinod said. ‘First is Brahma, the God of Creation –there is only one temple in all of India to him! Second is Vishnu, the God of Preservation or Existence. And third is Shiva, the God of Change.’
    ‘Change?’ Farrokh asked. ‘I thought Shiva was the Destroyer – the God of Destruction.’
    ‘Why is everyone saying this?’ the dwarf exclaimed. ‘All creation is being cyclic – there is no finality. I am liking it better to think of Shiva as the God of Change. Sometimes death is change, too.’
    ‘I see,’ Dr Daruwalla replied. ‘That’s a positive way of looking at it.’
    ‘This is our Trinity,’ the dwarf went on. ‘Creation, Preservation, Change.’
    ‘I guess I don’t understand the
female
forms,’ Farrokh boldly admitted.
    ‘The power of the gods is being represented by the females,’ Vinod explained. ‘Durga is the female form of Shiva – she is the Goddess of Death and Destruction.’
    ‘But you just said Shiva was the God of Change,’ the doctor interjected.
    ‘His female form, Durga, is the Goddess of Death and Destruction,’ the dwarf repeated.
    ‘I see,’ Dr Daruwalla responded; it seemed best to say so.
    ‘Durga is looking after me – I am praying to her,’ Vinod added.
    ‘The Goddess of Death and Destruction is looking after you?’ Farrokh inquired.
    ‘She is always protecting me,’ the dwarf insisted.
    ‘I see,’ Dr Daruwalla said; he guessed that being protected by the Goddess of Death and Destruction had a kind of karmic ring to it.
    Finally, Farrokh found Vinod lying in the dirt under the bleachers; it appeared that the dwarf had fallen through the wooden planks, from perhaps the fourth or fifth row of seats. The roustabouts had cleared the crowd from only a small section of the audience area, below which Vinod lay, unmoving. But how and why the dwarf had landed there wasn’t immediately clear. Was there a clown act that required audience participation?
    On the far side of the ring, a desultory gathering of dwarf clowns was bravely trying to keep the crowd’s attention; it was the familiar Farting Clown act –through a hole in the seat of his colorful pants, one dwarf kept ‘farting’ talcum powder on the other dwarfs. They didn’t appear to be weakened or otherwise the worse for giving the doctor a Vacutainer of their blood, which Vinod had shamelessly entreated them to do; just as shamelessly, Dr