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when they dined together; Mrs Dogar was inclined to speak sharply to her husband, who was considerably older than she was. Mr Sethna supposed this was a penalty to be expected, for he especially disapproved of men who married younger women. But the steward thought it best to put himself at the aggressive wife’s disposal lest she shatter her water glass with another blow from her fork; the fork itself looked surprisingly small in her large, sinewy hand.
    ‘My dear Mr Sethna,’ said the second Mrs Dogar.
    Mr Sethna answered: ‘How may I be of service to the beautiful Mrs Dogar?’
    ‘You may tell me what all the fuss is about,’ Mrs Dogar replied.
    Mr Sethna spoke as deliberately as he would pour hot tea. ‘It is most assuredly nothing to upset yourself about,’ the old Parsi said. ‘It is merely a dead golfer.’

2. THE UPSETTING NEWS
Still Tingling
    Thirty years ago, there were more than 50 circuses of some merit in India; today there aren’t more than 15 that are any good. Many of them are named the Great This or the Great That. Among Dr Daruwalla’s favorites were the Great Bombay, the Jumbo, the Great Golden, the Gemini, the Great Rayman, the Famous, the Great Oriental and the Raj Kamal; of them all, Farrokh felt most fond of the Great Royal Circus. Before Independence, it was called simply the Royal; in 1947 it became the ‘Great.’ It began as a two-pole tent; in ‘47 the Great Royal added two more poles. But it was the owner who’d made such a positive impression on Farrokh. Because Pratap Walawalkar was such a well-traveled man, he seemed the most sophisticated of the circus owners to Dr Daruwalla; or else Farrokh’s fondness for Pratap Walawalkar was simply because the Great Royal’s owner never teased the doctor about his interest in dwarf blood.
    In the 1960’s, the Great Royal traveled everywhere. Business was bad in Egypt, best in Iran; business was good in Beirut and Singapore, Pratap Walawalkar said – and of all the countries where the circus traveled, Bali was the most beautiful. Travel was too expensive now. With a half-dozen elephants and two dozen big cats, not to mention a dozen horses and almost a dozen chimpanzees, the Great Royal rarely traveled outside the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. With uncounted cockatoos and parrots, and dozens of dogs (not to mention 150 people, including almost a dozen dwarfs),The Great Royal never left India.
    Daruwalla had committed these details to that quality of memory which most of us reserve for our childhoods. Farrokh’s childhood had failed to make much of an impression on him; he vastly preferred the history and the memorabilia he’d absorbed as a behind-the-scenes observer of the circus. He remembered Pratap Walawalkar saying in an offhand manner: ‘Ethiopian lions have brown manes, but they’re just like other lions – they won’t listen to you if you don’t call them by their right names.’ Farrokh had retained this morsel of information as if it were part of a beloved bedtime story.
    In the early mornings, en route to his surgeries (even in Canada), the doctor often recalled the big basins steaming over the gas rings in the cook’s tent. In one pot was the water for tea, but in two of the basins the cook was heating milk; the first milk that came to a boil wasn’t for tea – it was to make oatmeal for the chimpanzees. As for tea, the chimps didn’t like it hot; they liked their tea tepid. Farrokh also remembered the extra flatbread; it was for the elephants – they enjoyed roti. And the tigers took vitamins, which turned their milk pink. As an orthopedic surgeon, Dr Daruwalla could make no medical use of these cherished details; nevertheless, he’d breathed them in as if they were his own background.
    Dr Daruwalla’s wife wore wonderful jewelry, some of which had belonged to his mother; none of it was at all memorable to the doctor, who (however) could describe in the most exact detail a tiger-claw necklace that belonged to