by Anosh Irani
“Joker Babu,” he greeted Raju. “Want one?”
“No,” said Raju.
He hated being called a joker. He was a clown. Jokers were dumb duplicates, the equivalent of “Made in China” electronics, trying-to-be clowns who had no self-respect. They lacked inner sadness.
“Are you sure?” Ghulam Ali asked. “The sun is making a tomato of your face. This will cool you down.”
“Not today,” said Raju. “Not today.”
Instead, he offered Ghulam Ali his sheet of paper. But the moment Ghulam Ali reached out to take it, Raju pulled the paper away.
“Wipe your hands first,” he said. “They’re wet.”
Ghulam Ali brushed his hands against his blue trousers. He dressed in a Western manner—pants and a white vest. In winter, the vest would be replaced by a white shirt. Rarely was he seen in anything else. Of course, there was also the skullcap that he always wore, a sign of his devotion to Allah—although, he would always clarify, he was not a fanatic.
His hands dry, Ghulam Ali took the sheet from Raju.
The difference in height between the two men was comical. Ali was a giant and Raju far from tall. In fact, he was a midget—but call him that and he would erupt into a spitting, frothing ball. “Amongst small people, I am the tallest,” he would say.
Ghulam Ali squinted to read Raju’s handwriting. His friend’s Hindi was almost illegible, but Ghulam Ali had practice: he had read all the love letters Raju had written to Sheila, the young woman who performed in Arjun the elephant trainer’s act.
May 11, 2016. 12.30 p.m. Byculla (Mumbai).
I, Raju of Johnny’s Circus, feel threatened by the four people whose names I have written below. If I die, they all should be held responsible. In no particular order:
Arjun the elephant
Tariq the trapezist
Mohan Drummer
Mr. Patil
Regards, Raju Madan. Born August 17, a long time ago.
Ghulam Ali looked at Raju.
Raju was squinting in the sunlight, his lips stretched out into a long eeeeeeeee, exposing one chipped tooth and gums brown as puddle water thanks to an incessant stream of Shivaji beedies. “I want you to safekeep this,” Raju said.
Ghulam Ali was used to Raju’s shenanigans. Ever since Sheila had come into his life, Raju had lost his already precarious balance. He was unreasonable and always seemed drunk, even though he never touched liquor. And there was no point arguing with him. Once his mind was made up, he was cement.
“You’ve called Arjun an elephant,” said Ghulam Ali. “You mean to say elephant trainer.”
“He’s just as fat, isn’t he?” asked Raju. “And hasn’t the idiot named his elephant Arjun as well?”
“And why does Mohan Drummer want you dead?”
“Every evening when he bangs the cymbals, he looks at me.”
“And who is Mr. Patil?” asked Ghulam Ali, hurt that he did not know. He and Raju were best friends. He knew about Raju’s chicken pox, his polio, his mother’s death, everything—or so he had thought.
“He was my school principal,” replied Raju. “But he’s dead now.”
“Dead? Then why is his name here?”
“He hated me,” said Raju. “Look, will you keep this for me or not?”
Ghulam Ali nodded. He put the ridiculous piece of paper in his pocket. Two or three days later Raju would ask for it again, just to make sure it was not lost. Ghulam Ali kept up with Raju’s eccentric behaviour because he knew that deep down the joker was honest. What he lacked in height, he made up for in integrity. Raju treated stray dogs and children with respect, and circus owners with disdain. Only lately had his wisdom been replaced with a rabid passion for Sheila, but that too would pass. Ghulam Ali thought Sheila was too showy for Raju, her hips too curved, her powder too heavy, as though she was trying to hide something. But Raju couldn’t see any of that; in fact, these were the very things he liked about her. Raju would talk about Sheila’s hips all day long. He would tell Ghulam Ali that she was a real star and that when she put powder on her face, she looked like a gori.
Ghulam Ali wanted to tell Raju that Sheila did not look like a foreigner at all; she was as dark as the shade under a tree. But who was he to break his friend’s heart?
“I’m off to meet Sheila for a movie,” said Raju. “How do I look?” He adjusted his red shirt, pulling the hem down as far as it would go.
He had probably gone to the costume man, reflected Ghulam Ali, and used the man’s iron. The shirt looked so stiff it almost crackled when Raju moved.
“You look fine,” said Ghulam Ali.
“Just fine?”
“Like a red rose,” he replied, pointing to his friend’s shirt.
In truth, the dark hue reminded Ghulam Ali of congealed blood, but he knew that would be of little help to Raju’s ego.
“You look fine,” he repeated.
Raju nodded. How he looked would hardly matter in the darkened cinema. During the interval, when he would buy Sheila ice cream, all eyes would be on her anyway. At first. Then the odd glances would start. But Raju would revel in the jealous stares of men, feel their envy on his skin like the gentle lather of soap, which made the wisecracks less hurtful.
He left Ghulam Ali with a bounce in his step—you could call it a limp if you liked, but he preferred to think of it as a bounce—and the love in his heart and the tingling in his loins made him feel as if he had never been sick a day in his life, as if no chicken pox or polio had ever claimed him. If he could only rent Sheila a small room somewhere, a room for him and her, she would leave the circus forever. This was what she had promised him when he’d told her of his plan, his dream, and that he was close to having enough money to make it more than just a dream. She’d caressed his hand then, but it might as well have been his heart.
And when Raju took Sheila away from the circus at last, Tariq the trapezist, that gonorrhea-infested shit of a man, would never lay eyes on her again.
* * *
—
THE MOVIE WAS A DISASTER. Raju should have known better—matinees were always a mistake. A movie should be watched in darkness—darkness both inside and outside the cinema. But Raju knew that timing wasn’t the real issue. Sheila had looked better than ever, and this made Raju sink into his own ugliness. The psychological descent had been rapid as he’d travelled in his mind from the cool air-conditioned seat of the theatre to the muggy floor of the small room he’d once shared with his mother in a Bombay slum. When other kids his age had gone to school, only too glad to escape the flies and river of sewage that trickled through the narrow lanes of their neighbourhood like some undesired gift from the rest of the city, Raju had wished to have bones so malleable he could curl into a ball and hide in his mother’s lap until darkness came. She’d come to the corner of the room, where he shook and shivered in spite of the heat, and whisper to him, “Don’t worry, you are loved. You are my son.” But that only made him feel worse, made her kindness turn to nails, and when she combed his hair to get him ready for school, he always closed his eyes because he could not bear to see his own face in the mirror. His face was not deformed, but his state of being showed in his eyes—the terror of never being able to defend himself, or catch a bus, or run fast, or even walk without drawing attention—and his burden only became heavier when he found his father dead on the railway tracks after a drunken binge. Raju, at ten, held his father’s head in his hands and called out for help, but the only response was a sideways glance from a man squatting on the tracks, releasing the previous night’s meal. With his father gone, Raju had become the man of the house. And what a man he turned out to be—falling short on all counts.
“Why are you in such a bad mood?” Sheila asked him after the movie.
“Let’s get some chai,” Raju said, ignoring her question.
They walked to a nearby hole in the wall. An old poster of Raju’s favourite actor brought the only hint of colour to the place. Johnny Lever was Raju’s role model because he was sh
ort, and when he delivered his comic monologues, he soared.
Raju sipped his tea and stared at Johnny.
“So are you going to tell me or not?” Sheila asked.
“Tell you what?”
“Why your face is like a donkey’s arse.”
“It’s Tariq,” he said, and bit his lip the moment he blurted the trapezist’s name. When jealousy stirred within him, it took a long time to settle. Even his tea was tasting bitter.
“I thought we were not going to talk about him,” Sheila said.
“We weren’t. It’s just that you mentioned the donkey’s arse…”
“Why are you so obsessed with him? You do trust me, don’t you? Why can’t you just let it go?”
Let it go? Let it go? Let it go? He wanted to repeat her words endlessly so she could understand how ludicrous they were. Even Johnny’s expression on the wall had turned sceptical. His right eyebrow arched an inch higher.
“Never mind,” Raju said, and flicked a fly away from the rim of his glass. Never mind that he had once seen Sheila kissing that spandex-wearing freak and it had made his heart shatter into a thousand pieces. “I promise never to speak about Tariq again,” he said. “If I can ask you one last question about him.”
“Look, I’ve already told you, I don’t love him. And I kissed him before you and I were together. So I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“That’s not what I want to ask. I want to know something of a more serious nature.”
“Okay, fine.”
“But I want you to think about your answer. Don’t just say the first thing that comes into your mind.”
“What’s the question?”
“When Tariq wears that body-hugging spandex unitard of his, how does he manage to divide each ball so perfectly? I mean, neither an inch here nor there, each testicle in perfect harmony?”
This made Sheila laugh, and she looked at him in a way Raju had never seen before, as if from a new angle. Her eyelids crinkled, her lips spontaneously erupted like a pink flower trying to blow a kiss at a passerby, and now there was a scent in the air that made their little chai stall smell like a perfumery. Even the rat that scurried past Raju could not dampen his success. This, he knew, was why she loved him—he made her laugh. And he had laughed all the way into her bed, and he intended to stay there until he died. And if she died first, well, he would just lie on her body until it stank, and her putrid flesh became one with his. Of course, he would never tell her that because it was kind of extreme—but love does that to you, he told himself. Love had also made him spend no little part of his savings on a wedding ring. Each time he looked at the ring, it was not the shiny stone that caught his eye, but the hole that the finger would go through; when you bought a ring, you were simply buying a hole, an opening for a new wound. For a month he had stared into that hole and thought of returning it. But today, as Johnny in the poster looked over him, Raju realized that there was no such thing as the perfect day, the perfect moment. He would think of the hole as a hoop, and he would jump through it, into a new life.
He held Sheila’s hand and walked out of the chai stall.
* * *
—
THAT EVENING, AS SHEILA got ready for the show, as she stared into her large mirror and powdered her face for the third time, Raju stood beside her, in costume, grinning at the thought of being married to her. When she bent down and adjusted his purple bow, he licked a drop of sweat off her neck, making her squeal.
When it was time for Sheila’s entry, the band sent out a spectacular drum roll that rose above the crazy whirring and hum of the giant fans spread throughout the tent. Raju stood backstage and watched Arjun lower his trunk for Sheila. It was so loving and natural, like a tree branch moving towards a human being, offering comfort and support. Sheila lay on his trunk, sparkling and precious. Raju knew she was so much more than a showpiece; she could sing, she could dance. But the circus owners didn’t want her to. She was Nepali, after all. Her orientalfeatures meant some people looked down on her, thought of her as cheap, as flesh to be bought and sold at night after the circus lights went down.
As Arjun and three other elephants circled the circumference of the ring, close to the audience, the children started clapping and tried to touch elephant skin. Raju wanted children of his own someday, although he worried they would come out like him and stay small forever. This was not a fate he would wish upon any child, least of all his own, and he feared his guilt would course through him with greater intensity than the jealousy he felt when Sheila waved and winked at the crowd. Why did she have to wink? A queen simply waved. A wink gave people the wrong impression. He understood that she was a performer, it was all an act, but to have men breathe upon her, to feel their hunger and have a dirty film running through their minds…The wink could be avoided, in his opinion. But it didn’t matter. A ring on her finger would give her respect, and would once and for all change the way people looked at her.
He slunk away from the bright lights and decided to warm up for his act with a few strong puffs of a beedi. He went in search of Ghulam Ali. Raju hated smoking alone. To him, one shared a beedi; it was a communal act, a communion with nature. The tobacco, the rough paper, the fire of the match, these were all elements of the Earth, and because he felt that way, he never coughed, his lungs were always clear.
“Ali,” he said, offering a beedi to his friend. He always called Ali by his last name just as Ghulam Ali always called him Joker Babu. “I’m going to propose to her tonight.”
“Oh,” said Ghulam Ali.
“Oh?” Raju said. “Is that how you greet good news?”
“I’m surprised, that’s all,” said Ghulam Ali. He was speaking the truth, but he did not want to tell Raju exactly what kind of surprise he felt.
“You don’t seem too happy about it,” said Raju.
“No, no, it’s just…”
“Why don’t you like her?”
The honesty with which Raju asked that question made Ghulam Ali shrink even more from the truth. He could see that when Raju lit his beedi, his hands were shaking. Perhaps they were shaking with disappointment in his friend.
“I just don’t want her to hurt you,” said Ghulam Ali.
“I’m hurting anyway,” said Raju. “When I am with her, I hurt because I feel I do not deserve her. When I am without her, I hurt because I long to be with her. Love is a screwed-up thing.”
Ghulam Ali took a large dum, keeping the tobacco smoke inside him for longer than usual. Then he coughed out the truth. “I just hope she stays with you.”
Raju understood what his friend meant. Anyone could see that he and Sheila were a mismatch. But was Raju doomed to spend his life only with someone his own size? Did the size of the heart not matter? Was the expanse of love he felt for Sheila not as wide and deep as any sea? She could feel that, she could sense it, which was why he could pleasure her during their lovemaking. All the love he had never received from his father, all the longing that he still had for his mother, all the rejection he’d faced as a child, all the taunts he continued to bear as an adult—all this he converted into something good when he kissed her. No other man, no matter how tall and strong, could give her that.
“She’ll never leave me,” said Raju. “I have a plan.”
“A plan?”
“I’m going to get her pregnant. That will make her fat and large for a while. Then the next year she’ll be breastfeeding, so she’ll be busy. After that, I’ll get her pregnant again. So the same cycle will repeat. Then I’ll get her pregnant a third time. By then, there’s a good chance she’ll go into a depression. So she’ll need me even more.”
“That’s…romantic.”
“I’ll do anything to keep her.”
“Joker Babu, I hope you have not told her this.”
“Just be happy for me, Ali. That’s all I ask. Give her a chance. Give us a chance.”
“Who is Ghulam Ali to not give love a chance?”
Perhaps, thought Ghulam A
li, he was being unkind about Sheila. After all, she had stayed with Raju for more than three months now; maybe she genuinely cared about him. Except that there was something about her, about her and Tariq, that Ghulam Ali did not trust. Whenever he saw Tariq on the trapeze, he was reminded of a long lizard, hanging upside down, its beady eyes scanning the entire tent from up above. It was a cold gaze, the way one felt when a fridge door suddenly opened and sent a warning through the body. He just hoped he was wrong.
* * *
—
THE BEEDI WAS BITTER, but life was sweet. There was a lilt in Raju’s walk as he entered his tent. He still had a few minutes left before he was on. He went to his steel trunk and removed the red velvet pouch that he had placed at the bottom, underneath his clothes. When he drew open the strings of the pouch, he could feel a new life opening along with it. The ring tucked inside would help him fulfill his dreams of having a family. Everything that he had saved up so far, all the money earned from somersaults and slapstick stunts performed in front of an audience, was stored in this ring; hours spent perfecting falling through the cane web of a chair, then walking with the rim of the chair around his waist, seemingly unaware—that was the trick of the clown, to be an acrobat who was a total nincompoop, and to be a nincompoop, one had to feign a lack of awareness. While the acrobat concentrated on every move, the clown had to go one step further: he had to forget everything so that his actions looked natural. In this sense he, Raju, was far more gifted than Tariq, even if the local public did not understand his talent. But now, this no longer mattered—all that hard work had paid off, all that hard work rested in this ring. It was all Raju could afford, but his intention was pure. And that was why the ring sparkled so intensely. That and the special woman it sparkled for.
The day had started badly, with the list of names of those who were gunning for him, but tomorrow Raju would ask Ghulam Ali to return that note. He would tear it up, or even burn it. Or perhaps he would write a new note, listing the names of people who had given him life: his mother, Ghulam Ali, and now Sheila. Sheila had made his insides change; if a doctor were to cut him open this very second, he would be astounded to find, in the place of Raju’s intestine, a long garland of marigolds and lilies, such was the hope flowering within. Raju put the velvet pouch in his pocket and went towards the tent. It was time.
