When the Circus Came to Town

by Deepti Nalavade Mahule

My birth mother ran away to join a circus when I was around six months old. Daddy told me this and added that even though I’d always known that she’d gone away, now that I’d turned fifteen, I was old enough to handle the details of her leaving us all those years ago.

Perhaps recent happenings in his life — his cousin’s recent fatal road accident, getting laid off from work, taking up drinking but then turning sober — had hastened Daddy’s decision to tell me this new information now.

Many years ago, Daddy had sat me down and told me for the first time that my birth mother had left us when I was a baby. I’d scrunched up my five-year-old face in confusion. “What do you mean by ‘gone away’? I’d pointed to Mumma, my stepmother. “But she’s right here with us!”

As the years went by, I had more questions which Mumma, my stepmother, said she couldn’t answer, and that Daddy only partly managed to. Daddy said that she’d left one day when he was at work, and he didn’t know why. Then he’d end the conversation with, “Meera, you have both of us parents who love you and that’s all that matters now.”

Still, my questions kept piling up. As the years passed and my quizzing became complex, his face would turn red, and he’d avoid my eyes as he mumbled his answers. Her name was Mohini. She’d left one day leaving a message saying only that she was never coming back. No, he hadn’t kept that note. And he had no idea why she’d left. Did I resemble her? He couldn’t say because he thought he wasn’t good at identifying such things. What did she look like? He couldn’t really describe her, and he hadn’t kept any of her photographs. Her own family had cut her off and he’d never kept in touch with those people. Now, could I stop with the questions? There was really nothing more to say.

One time, when I approached him with yet another question about my birth mother while he was catching up on office work at home, he cut me off with a snarl. “Not now Meera. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

I persisted and that’s when he erupted, screaming at me to leave him alone, almost smacking me before I jumped out of his way. On hearing his raised voice, Mumma came running and took me aside.

“Your Daddy is a sensitive man,” she said. “Please don’t make him upset by asking about her. Especially when he’s stressed about his work.”

Lips quivering, I nodded and gave in to Mumma’s embrace. Her hand stroked my back and little by little, my questions didn’t feel as pressing as they did before. Although we talked about my birth mother occasionally, over the past few years, there was less and less to say about her. And so, Daddy’s disclosure about her running away to join the circus felt as though a claw had ripped a tear in my life with one sudden swipe.

It can’t be true, I thought. But his grim face told me that it was.

We were sitting in my room, and outside the window, the sun made its descent behind the trees in front of our apartment building. Patches of light and shadow moved across Daddy’s forehead. The severity of his frown made his mustache droop, giving his face a sad yet clownish look.

“It was like a trick being played on us when the family elders forced our arranged match. Although your birth mother and I had a big age gap and didn’t have anything in common, she thought we could make our marriage work, even though cracks had started to appear, which only I seemed to notice at first. She got pregnant with you, after which she finally saw how we were failing each other. Then, nothing I said or did would agree with her. My appearance, manners, clerical desk job, salary — everything irked her. In her eyes, I became a loser.”

He looked out at the darkening shapes of the trees and continued in a strained voice. “I learned that she’d been good at sports during her growing years and would sneak out to ride horses belonging to a rich family. Whenever the circus was in town, she never missed seeing it and sometimes went twice or thrice in a single week. During the few months before she ran away, she had begun to leave you with our neighbor who ran a daycare to spend time in the afternoons at the circus that camped on the outskirts of our town. After your birth, she’d sunk into depression and that was the only thing that seemed to give her any joy. At home, she tried to copy what she’d seen there.”

“One evening, I came home early from work to find all the clothes taken down from the clothesline and her trying to tightrope walk on it, falling often but giggling to herself as she got back up. Another time, in the middle of the night, when I went into the kitchen to get milk for our crying baby — for you — there she was, juggling three oranges in the light of the moon coming through the window.”

“And then one day, she ran away to join the circus,” I repeated, as if in a trance.

Daddy raised his shoulders and dropped them in a defeated shrug.

“Even her name — Mohini — was so theatrical. Suited her just fine.”

He sighed and continued speaking. “One day while I was at work and the neighbor had taken you out for a stroll along with the other children under her care, she went away with the circus as it left our town. The note she left behind said that she was sorry, but the circus was her life, and being part of it was in her blood.”

He shook his head as if still in disbelief. Then, his face softened.

“Not long after I signed the divorce papers and handed them to someone who she’d sent to collect them, something wonderful happened.” He gestured toward Mumma, my stepmother, sitting silently beside us all this while, and he smiled. “This lady took one look at you and said that she wanted to marry me.”

Mumma took my hand in hers and stroked it. Her smooth skin was a few brown shades darker than mine, and her black hair was silky in contrast to my curls. She had thin arms and delicate wrists, very unlike mine. I withdrew my hand from her grasp. Mumma winced but I pretended not to notice. The bitterness that had stayed with me after our fight a week ago over buying me a cell phone chafed against my heart even as all that I’d learned about my birth mother sunk in.

That night I lay curled up in bed in the dark with a picture of one-year-old me in a flowery dress, chubby-cheeked, and chunky-thighed, sitting up and looking at the camera with questioning eyes.

‘Baby rabbit’ — Mumma called this version of me, and as I closed my eyes, I saw a little animal alone in the forest at night, twitching its nose, trying to catch its mother’s scent after she’d left it behind in their burrow. Tears dripped onto my pillow into a growing patch, wet against my cheeks. A circus, of all things! Mumma had known all this time and hadn’t told me.

I stopped crying only when I heard muffled voices outside my closed bedroom door. Then the door opened. Mumma’s breaths filled the quiet of my room while I pretended to be asleep. Her nightgown rustled as she went out, but the scent of her freshly applied almond hair oil lingered in the air. I scrunched up my nose. I decided that I’d never really liked that smell.

“I told you, Sujata. Meera will be ok. She’s tough. Like me,” I heard Daddy say.

I scoffed at his words. He calls himself tough. Even after how he’d almost given up after being fired from his job.

“Yes, she’s asleep. I had to make sure she was ok before I went to bed,” Mumma said softly to Daddy, closing the door behind her.

If she cares about me so much, I thought, then why did she refuse when I requested a cell phone for my birthday?

My anger boiled up, releasing itself into a scream that I stifled into my pillow. Mumma had said that Daddy and she would think about getting a cell phone for me next year, after my current school year — an important academic one that would decide junior college admissions — was over. It was maddening that I’d have to wait that long when all my close friends already had one. I bristled every time they looked up from their lit-up phone screens, chuckling together at some joke from shared messages. The other day, I stupidly waited alone for a whole hour at a café and nearly wept in public because they’d changed plans at the last moment but couldn’t find a way to notify me. No amount of my cajoling and crying would budge Mumma’s decision. And if she said no, Daddy would never say yes.

I woke up the next day, adamant about remaining closed off from the people in my house. Before all of us left home — me, for school, Daddy, for a job interview, and Mumma, for the dental clinic where she worked as a receptionist, as she hovered around me, my eyes fell on her black and gold necklace symbolizing her marital status. I imagined her fifteen years ago entering my father’s life, a guest stepping into a home and taking up residence in it forever.

“Meera, talk to me,” Mumma said but the words seemed to be stuck in a maze inside my head, unwilling to come out.

You refused to give me what I want, so stop asking me if I need anything else, I felt like saying to her, but I bit my lip and shook my head.

In the evening Daddy prepared to leave for Mumbai where he had to stay for two days for interviews. He put down his suitcase at the apartment door and came toward me with outstretched arms. I leaned awkwardly into his embrace and turned my forehead away from his spiky mustache hairs.

“Are you ok?” He asked.

How could you let her run away to join a circus? I wanted to shout.

“Yes, I’m ok,” I mumbled instead.

He released me from the hug and nodded as if convincing himself of something. Then he went into the kitchen, and I watched him through the gap in the doorway and the kitchen wall as he pulled Mumma close to him. My face grew hot. They never showed physical affection in front of me. I looked away, a thought blooming in my mind, had Daddy ever tried to ask my birth mother to come back for me?

Daddy and Mumma had met when she started a job at the office where he worked. Mumma had lost her parents when she was a little girl and was taken in by poor relatives belonging to a low caste. When they couldn’t afford to keep her, she grew up in an orphanage. She later spent the rest of her student years at a boarding school on a scholarship.

Even after years had passed, Daddy’s relatives whispered among themselves. “Sujata — that sly darkie! She never had to worry about money or anyone having to arrange a match for her after she got our vulnerable Vivek properly ensnared.”

Those words lurked in the shadows of my mind, and now, parts of them stepped into the light. Perhaps Daddy had been so enamored with Mumma that he’d never bothered to look for my birth mother and to ask her if she wanted to see me.

I went into my room and tried to do my algebra homework, but nothing made sense. Despite my questions in the past, Mumma hadn’t told me about my birth mother running away to join the circus. If asked, she would have said that it wasn’t her place to tell me and repeated what she always said about Daddy being a sensitive man. I sat staring at my notebook, tapping my pen against my desk, listening to the sounds of Mumma working in the kitchen, feeling as though a stranger were moving about in our house. If Mumma hadn’t been there, would Daddy have tried to find my birth mother for me?

Soon, Mumma called out, “Meera, dinner’s ready.”

As soon as I went into the kitchen, she said, “You haven’t said much after what Daddy told you about your, uh, birth mother.”

When I didn’t say anything, her face fell. She took a deep breath. “This might bring you peace.”

She handed me a piece of paper, which looked like a ticket. In big black curling letters at the top were the words “Golden Circus” and below it, “Admission for 1” with the next day’s date and time for the 1.30 p.m. show.

“It’s leaving next week. Your mother works there.”

I stared at the ticket in disbelief. 

“Don’t tell Daddy,” Mumma said.

That night, I dreamed about the baby rabbit moving through a leafy forest. Branches shot out in all directions, forming a spiraling green tunnel. I reached out to pick up the rabbit and soothe her but the closer I moved, the farther she leaped away, sniffing the air for her mother’s scent. Finally, I turned around and began to run in another direction, a path I was certain about taking, only to wake up with beads of sweat on my forehead. I put a hand on my heaving chest.

I lay awake for a long time and when it was morning, I told Mumma that I would try to meet my birth mother after the show got over. Sitting through the performance would be too nerve-wracking, and I was afraid that I would run away even before it got over.

Mumma’s eyes lit up when I told her that I’d decided to go. “A patient at our dental clinic said that the star circus performers meet with audience members outside the main tent after the show. Your mother, part of a troupe of popular acrobats, will be there. Ask around by her name.”

It seemed to me as though she had purposely not said my birth mother’s name. She spoke briskly, the way she did when she oversaw anything we did in our household.

“I’ll drop you off near the main tent and go to Anita’s house to wait for you there. You can take a bus back to her house.”

Anita was Mumma’s best friend who lived near the circus grounds. I was relieved that I would be meeting my birth mother alone. But what was I going to say to her? A million ideas crowded my mind — from simple greetings to direct questions about why she left me. I sat down on the edge of my bed with my head in my hands. Finally, I decided that I would state who I was and wait for her reaction. When it was time to leave, I slipped the picture of baby me into my handbag and went into the living room with a low ache thrumming steadily at the sides of my head.

Mumma was waiting for me by the door, wearing a plain outfit and with her hair in a simple braid. Always well-dressed and wearing makeup, I’d rarely seen her ready to go out with such minimal effort on her appearance. Noticing her slow movements, I wondered if she, too, had poorly slept the night before. As she zipped up her purse, her fingers shook.

“Ready?” She said, handing me my wallet.

Her eyes fell on my t-shirt and her lips curled into a tiny smile. I realized that I had put on the green shirt that she’d gifted me on my recent birthday.

“Don’t worry. Everything will be ok,” she said and squeezed my shoulder. Her hand was clammy with sweat.

We set off, Mumma weaving her scooter through traffic, me in the backseat, digging my nails into the leather. The few morsels from that day’s lunch that Mumma had insisted I eat felt as though they were churning inside me. When we stopped at the traffic lights, I almost jumped off and ran home.

My birth mother had left me once long ago. She was going to leave me again, wasn’t she? In all this time, had she ever attempted to look for me? I thought. It was foolish to go looking for her. And yet, I couldn’t fight against it.

As we drew closer to the venue, the striped, red conical top of the circus tent came into view above the tree line that ran around the circumference of Laxmi Maidaan — a wide expanse of ground, which hosted sports matches, exhibitions, fairs, and now, Golden Circus.

Mumma parked her scooter outside the gate, and I got down, my eyes on the cavernous opening of the circus tent, inside which flashed bright lights. The accompanying music reached a crescendo and was followed by applause. A booming voice on the microphone began to announce something. The show was about to end.

“I’ll be at Anita Aunty’s house. You know which bus to take from here,” Mumma said.

“Yes, I’ll be there,” I said and willed myself to walk in the direction of the tent. My headache had become a swinging hammer around my temples.

“Meera, wait.”

I turned around. Mumma came toward me, wearily rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands. Her face looked worn. The furrows on her brow and the lines around her mouth stood out in the bright afternoon light.

“If there’s a problem, you know my phone number, and you know Anita Aunty’s number. You’ll manage to contact us somehow, right?” She said, trying to put her hand on my shoulder.

I shrugged her off, seized by a spike of irritation jabbing my aching head, a culmination of the anger that was gnawing at me over the last few days.

My words came out loud and fast. “So, I must worry about how to contact you? If you’d got me a damn phone, this could have been taken care of easily.” I paused to catch my breath before delivering a final stinger. “I bet my real mother would have been better at giving me what I want.”

I sensed Mumma recoil as I hurried away without looking at her. Blinking away tears, I made my way through the crowd that was spilling out of the tent opening and stopped behind a wooden partition next to the ticketing booth near the main entrance. The wind rose and brought with it a raw, earthy smell, perhaps belonging to dogs, horses, and a camel or two. I felt like a nervous creature myself, crouching behind a clump of bushes in the forest. After a few minutes, the circus troupe began to come out to stand by the entrance to shake hands with spectators and pose for photos. Heart pounding, I scanned everyone’s faces.

“Mohini!” Someone called out just then and a woman in a full-length shimmering lavender and silver costume came out. My knees turned to jelly. I grasped the partition to steady myself.

She was tall and had broad shoulders. The makeup exaggerated her features, but I could make out fleshy lips, a wide forehead, and a prominent nose. I touched the similarly protruding bridge of my own nose and felt something break inside me.

I would have stumbled toward her had it not been for a small boy, about five years of age, who ran out of the tent and almost collided with her in his eagerness. The boy wore the same shiny uniform as her and had put on a red clown nose. Shaggy yellow strands of a wig fell onto his wide forehead. He was followed by a mustachioed man in a jeweled turban, clearly the ringmaster. The man laughed at the boy and reached out to hold him close, while his other arm slipped around my birth mother’s shoulder.

“Smile, please!” Someone said and the three of them grinned at whoever was clicking their picture.

My birth mother then turned to the little boy with a delighted look on her face and picked him up. She nuzzled her nose into his neck as the boy beamed and put his arms around her. Then, they moved their faces closer, and — as if they did this all the time — they bumped their noses on one another and laughed.

“Mohini,” I called out her name to myself in a whisper. I felt emptied out, with nothing more to say.

I stood there like someone gazing into a fishbowl containing a family of fish, afraid to put my hand in and pollute the water. The way the boy snuggled into my birth mother’s neck reminded me of how, when I was little, I would do the same to Mumma when I was hurt, howling every time she tried to put me down. She would carry me even though her back hurt as she walked to and fro, trying to distract me from my pain. All I could think of was Mumma. Mumma kissing my forehead before leaving for work, even though I was fifteen years old. Her face appearing in the doorway as soon as she came home from work in the evening, her tiredness dissolving into a smile as she sat down in my room and listened to everything that I told her even before she drank a much-needed cup of tea.

What a relief it had been to have her there, especially after Daddy lost his job and after being unable to find a new one for almost six months, spent all his time at home in front of the television, going for days without showering or speaking more than a few words. Previously, he would have a drink or two on special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries and at times like when Mumma got a salary raise, or I got good grades, or when India won a cricket match against Pakistan, but his increasingly frequent drinking episodes had started to make me wonder each time what the occasion was.

One evening, after it had been almost seven months since Daddy was laid off, I returned late from a friend’s place. Mumma wouldn’t be home yet, and I’d hoped to sneak past Daddy who would be in front of the television, engrossed in watching a show. However, as soon as I noiselessly opened the front door, I paused in the doorway. In the darkening living room, there he was, slumped on the floor against the sofa like a drunk beggar, legs splayed out. He raised a glass clinking with ice cubes to his lips, babbling to himself. After downing it all, he banged it on the wooden table, almost breaking the glass. A bowl tipped over and roasted peanuts scattered all over the floor. On the table were an empty bottle and two halves of a cut lemon. Daddy picked up the knife that was lying there and studied its blade glinting in the light of the streetlamps coming from outside.

“What a loser,” he said in a thick voice and gave a snort.

In a flash, he swiped the knife over his left palm and watched as a jagged line blossomed in red across it.

I screamed. His bloodshot eyes widened and turned to me. When he spoke, his speech, albeit slurred, was savage enough to send a chill up my spine. “You sneaky rat! You’ll be a failure, wasting time with your good-for-nothing friends instead of studying. Do you want to end up like me?”

The hand holding the knife jerked backward and I was certain that he was going to hurl it at me. Daddy was only throwing it back onto the table but icy tendrils under my skin were already crawling up my arms and feet. Before I could stop myself, a warm trickle ran down my leg.

Someone gasped behind me. Mumma had come home. She dropped the bag of groceries she was carrying and hurried up to Daddy. Whispering urgently under her breath, she got him to his feet and guided him into their bedroom. After I’d cleaned up, she didn’t say anything to me about me wetting myself but fed me a hot dinner and kept checking on me until I had completed my assignment, which I don’t know how I managed to do considering the frozen state my mind was in.

The next day, after I woke up, I found a note from her. She’d taken Daddy out for a stroll in the hills outside our town. After they came back, he apologized profusely to me, his tearful hugs thawing out my numbness until I cried with him. He got back to job-hunting soon after and I hadn’t seen him touch a bottle since that day.

Out there in front of the circus tent, my head full of thoughts about Mumma, I turned back and became one with the flow of people heading out of the gates. At the bus stop, I was struck by panic when I reached into my wallet and realized I’d forgotten to check if I had enough for the bus fare. But my fingers pulled out plenty of notes of cash. Mumma, who’d handed me my wallet before we left, had put in the money.

If I had a cell phone, I’d have texted her a thank you this instant, I thought, and my eyes filled with tears remembering how I’d lashed out at her. On the bus, my hands shook as I paid for the ticket. When I found a seat, I peeked into my handbag at the photo I had put inside. The infant’s dark eyes shone up at me. 

“Baby rabbit,” I whispered to her, “you don’t have to search around anymore.”

After the bus dropped me off, I ran all the way to Anita Aunty’s home and leaped over the cracked tiled steps of her old apartment building two at a time. When I rang the doorbell, my ears picked out Mumma’s faint voice coming from inside the living room.

“Meera, is that you?” She asked even as her footsteps approached to open the door.

My nose twitched, as I imagined taking in the fragrance of her hair oil, and my heart lifted. Words pushed past the lump in my throat, and my voice came out in a squeak. “Yes, it’s me, Mumma, I’m home.”

BIO

Deepti Nalavade Mahule is a writer of color living in California. Her website, with links to her selected published work, is: https://deeptiwriting.wordpress.com. A piece in *82 Review was nominated for Best of the Net 2024 and another was shortlisted in Flash Fiction Magazine’s contest in July 2022.