I’ll always be a few beanbags short of juggling stardom

Hardeep Singh Kohli Satire

HOW do you kill a circus? Go for the juggler … That’s one of my all-time favourite jokes, despite my profound admiration for jugglers. Despite standing in front of walls for hours, counting and concentrating while tossing two bean bags, I could never command the art of the juggle. All those lank-haired, bearded hippy types who could maintain a figure of eight orbit with multi-coloured balls would always leave with the girl while I faced my failure head-on. Yesterday was World Juggling Day. Yes. There’s a day, a world day, for juggling. For one day and one day only the world is consumed by legions of people throwing and catching while co-ordinating hands and eyes and sticking their tongues out in a manifestation of pure cerebral/physical concentration. My love of juggling spans decades, continents, aeons of geopolitical change. It was mid-August, 1981. I was 12 and my dad had arranged to take his three sons from Glasgow (via Heathrow) to the beating heart of the Punjab. When it came to international travel, the communist bloc’s discounted rates made the Russian Federation’s Aeroflot the go-to airline for working-class Indian migrants. Somehow, dad had wangled a free three-day stopover in the beating heart of communist Russia, the nerve centre of all that was Soviet: Moscow. I owe my dad so much. His love of food, his tireless tenacity to taste a cornucopia of cuisines combined with his wanderlust, have made me the travelling food-lover that I am. Many hard-working, immigrant dads would have congratulated themselves on their wherewithal to show their weans Moscow in an age when Moscow was rarely witnessed by Westerners. But my dad wasn’t, isn’t, any old dad, and just being in the Russian capital wasn’t enough. He wanted us to truly experience Russia. So, with only a handful of Russian phrases, he gathered all his Glaswegian gallusness and Punjabi perseverance, until the hard-faced Russian woman at the hotel front desk was worn down and a soldout Moscow State Circus run had provided us four tickets with great views.

My dad was the most excited I remember seeing him. Me and my brothers were more than a little underwhelmed. I mean, we’d been to the circus – Billy Smart was fine but it hardly seemed worth all the cartwheels and clamour.

Oh, what little we knew ... It was the most incredible evening of my life. No language was needed other than the universal lexicon of laughter, the thesaurus of thrills.

This was nationalised art at a time when the USSR was at the height of its powers. Everything was 100 times bigger and better than any so-called circus I had seen in a muddy, soggy British town square. The acrobats flew further; the horses danced more delicately; the clowns clowned more comically.

Then came the jugglers. The somewhat clichéd clubs came out, followed by axes, followed by live chainsaws.

Without doubt, these were impressive and exhilarating endeavours. Then it happened …

The denouement involved a man juggling a dozen steel rings, precisely placing each in an ever-increasing arc yards above his head.

If that wasn’t achievement enough, the juggling genius then proceeded to leap through one of the aforementioned rings while keeping the others on a tight trajectory overhead.

There was a gasp of recognition in the audience; it was as if they knew what to expect next. The lithe, athletic juggler took a clutch of clubs that looked like over-sized cotton buds.

The smell of kerosene filled the ring. He lit each club and began tossing, with gay abandon, these massive, oversized fire hazards above him.

I knew immediately that I wanted to be able to do that.

I wanted to lob axes. I wanted to hurl fire.

Sadly, I will never be anything but that man who failed to toss two beanbags from hand to hand to air to hand.

So you’ll forgive me for not giving a “toss” about World Juggling Day.