6
He buries his face in her arm and cries. His aunts surround him, fuss over him, ask him what the matter is. But he can only shake his head.
"Poor dear, he must have got lost," they say.
Finally, he gets himself under control. "Nothing, nothing.”
But Prayank, his teenage cousin, regards him with a cool, questioning gaze. He alone seems to sense that something is amiss.
They fuss over him some more and when they ascertain that he is ok, they make their way once again to the exit. He does not dare look back, but in the end he cannot help it; he throws a terrified glance over his shoulder… and there is no one by the tent. The clown has disappeared.
As he walks, he holds his right hand away from his body as if it is a loathsome thing, a sullied, tarnished part of him that will never be clean again.
When Prayank later sidles up to him and asks him what really happened, Manoj only shakes his head. He has already sworn to himself that he will never tell anyone about the shameful thing that happened behind the tent.
* * *
"Manoj! Manoj!" Shilpa's screams broke into his thoughts. “What are you doing?!"
He came back to the present, and he saw a vast cluster of balloons floating up into the night sky. People around him were stopping to watch, but they were not looking at the balloons. They were looking at him.
He looked down in a daze and saw Arun standing by his side, crying, gazing up at him with an expression of horror. Lying on the ground before Manoj, flat on his back, was the clown. Except this clown's get-up was silken and clean. The red on his lips had intermingled with blood gushing out of his nose and his mouth.
"Why did you hit me?” the clown said in a thin voice, his eyes stricken.
Manoj realized that his hands were clenched into fists. He could not remember striking the clown, but the knuckles of his right hand ached.
Two burly men wearing white shirts and black trousers appeared out of nowhere. They laid thickset hands on his shoulders. “Come with us, sir."
"Please," Shilpa said, "He didn't mean-"
But Manoj went quietly. They took him to an air-conditioned office in a trailer. A bespectacled man with a great belly and a harried expression, and who introduced himself as the 'circus manager', questioned him irately. He threatened to call the police and file an FIR. Manoj apologized and told the man that he’d gotten confused and mistaken the clown for someone else.
"How can you mistake a clown for someone else?" the man grunted.
"I was only giving the boy a balloon," the clown, who was standing beside the manager with a bloody rag pressed to his nose, said mournfully.
Finally the manager asked him to pay a hefty 'fine' for the damage done and to apologize to the clown.
Manoj did both meekly enough.
He emerged from the trailer and found Shilpa sitting on a bench outside waiting anxiously. Arun was lying curled up in her lap, fast asleep.
"What happened?" she said, her voice breaking, "Why did you beat the poor man like that? Arun was so distraught. He kept asking why you beat up the clown."
Manoj sat beside her. He put an arm around her, leaned in, and kissed her cheek. He smiled broadly, softened his voice, "I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me. I... though he was going to hurt Arun."
She regarded him coldly, "Why would you think that?" She paused. "I'm not stupid you know. I know you're not telling me something."
He studied her, and for one brief moment he considered spilling out the putrid truth, telling her everything.
Who am I really? Who am I?
Then he shook his head, "I.. I just got confused."
He plucked Arun off her lap and helped Shilpa to her feet. As they walked back to the car, he carried Arun in his arms. Shilpa was stiff, but that was ok; she would warm up in a while. He would go back to being the man she had always known, and they would go on with their lives.
As they drove away, he glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the circus — the lights, the tents, the giant wheel, the great colorful hoardings — all of it a facade.
The End
