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Photo: R. Eswarraj

Smile away The circus is in town!

Chewing popcorn, waiting for the show to begin, my mind goes for a walk. I can see myself as a little kid, wearing my navy blue and white school uniform, sitting in our family living room, shoving my face into our little Black and White Dyanora TV, waiting for “Circus Ki Duniya” to start.

It is all hazy now. But in flashes, I see a much younger Shah Rukh Khan. I see Raj Kapoor too, dressed as a clown, making Chaplinesque gestures. Suddenly, I see a gorgeous Russian ballerina. I am not dreaming any more. She is right in front of me, within arm’s length. The show has begun. The porcelain beauty is wrapped in Hula Hoops, dozens of them. As she gyrates inside, the hoops swirl around her like the rings of Saturn. The next couple of hours are a ruthless assault on the laws of science – physics and biology in particular. Everything is out of character. Elephants mimic men and play doctors and priests; dogs play football. Men and women tear entire chapters from the chimpanzee’s stunt manual. It is a wild orgy of jumping, balancing, bending, contorting the body into weird shapes and impossible positions. But everything is done oh! so gracefully.

There is an element of grace even in the way the support staff fold the carpets after a certain item. Like an army of elves they swoop in with precise, perfectly coordinated actions to fold the carpet and load it onto a waiting trolley. With some brightly coloured clothes and a few spotlights this could become an item in itself. It is not that everything goes just as planned here, though. There are spills too but you will never notice them, not if you look really close. You would expect anybody to wince a little when they make a mistake. Not these circus artistes. And that’s what makes the blunders so hard to spot.

Their smiles just win you over. For a few fleeting moments you feel a certain oneness with them. You want their stunts to go just as planned because you begin to like these guys.

While the stunt merchants are hogging all the glory, the clowns are left to scavenge for left over bits of attention. There is an occasional peal of laughter. But they are usually greeted with taunts, jeers and boos. Once the lights go on it is all hyperbole, overstatement. What the glitz hides though is the toil that goes on behind it.

As the crowd collectively raises its head to follow the human projectiles in mid air, the boys pulling the ropes and setting up the props become indistinct behind the bright lights.

Musicians, veterinarians, tutors, doctors, electricians, mechanics, carpenters, cooks, mothers, fathers and their children. One big family travelling all over the country.

For the 100 performers you see in coloured clothes there are 250 people behind the curtains, slogging it out. And somebody said, “Life is a circus, circus is life.”

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