A Son of the Circus

by John Winslow Irving

  “Let’s just keep talking,” Patel told them cheerfully.

  “Fuck you, fuck Rahul, fuck Dhar,” Nancy told Patel. “Fuck you, too,” she said to Farrokh. “Not you—I like you,” she told Julia.

  “Thank you, dear,” Julia replied.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Nancy said.

  “Your poor lip,” Mrs. Dogar was saying to John D. This much Mr. Sethna understood; they would understand this much from the Ladies’ Garden, too, because they saw Rahul touch Dhar’s lower lip with her long index finger—it was just a brief, feather-light touch. Dhar’s lower lip was a luminous navy blue.

  “I hope you’re not in a biting mood today,” John D. told her.

  “I’m in a very good mood today,” Mrs. Dogar replied. “I want to know where you’re going to take me, and what you’re going to do to me,” she said coquettishly. It was embarrassing how young and cute she seemed to think she was. Her lips were pursed, which exaggerated the deep wrinkles at the corners of her savage mouth; her smile was small and coy, as if she were blotting lipstick in a mirror. Although her makeup mostly concealed the mark, there was a tiny inflamed cut across the green-tinted eyelid of one of her eyes; it caused her to blink, as if the eye itself were sore. But it was only a small irritation, the tiniest scratch; it was all that the prostitute named Asha had been able to do to her—to flick back one hand, to poke at Rahul’s eye—maybe a second or two before Rahul broke her neck.

  “You’ve scratched your eye, haven’t you?” Inspector Dhar observed, but he felt no stiffening in Mrs. Dogar’s thighs; under the table, she gently pressed her thighs together on his hand.

  “I must have been thinking of you in my sleep,” she said dreamily. When she closed her eyes, her eyelids had the silver-green iridescence of a lizard; when she parted her lips, her long teeth were wet and shiny—her warm gums were the color of strong tea.

  It made John D.’s lip throb to look at her, but he continued to press his palm against the inside of her thigh. He hated this part of the script. Dhar suddenly said, “Did you draw me a picture of what you want?” He felt the muscles in both her thighs grip his hand tightly—her mouth was also tightly closed—and her eyes opened wide and fixed on his lip.

  “You can’t expect me to show you here,” Mrs. Dogar said.

  “Just a peek,” John D. begged her. “Otherwise, I’ll be in too much of a hurry to eat.”

  Had he not been so easily offended by vulgarity, Mr. Sethna would have been in eavesdropper heaven; yet the steward was trembling with disapproval and responsibility. It struck the old Parsi as an awkward moment to bring them the menus, but he knew he needed to be near her purse.

  “It’s disgusting how much people eat—I loathe eating,” Mrs. Dogar said. Dhar felt her thighs go slack; it was as if her concentration span were shorter than a child’s—as if she were losing her sexual interest, and for no better reason than the merest mention of food.

  “We don’t have to eat at all—we haven’t ordered,” Dhar reminded her. “We could just go—now,” he suggested, but even as he spoke he was prepared to hold her in her chair (if need be) with his left hand. The thought of being alone with her, in a suite at either the Oberoi or the Taj, would have frightened John D., except that he knew Detective Patel would never allow Rahul to leave the Duckworth Club. But Mrs. Dogar was almost strong enough to stand up, despite the downward pressure of Dhar’s hand. “Just one picture,” the actor pleaded with her. “Just show me something.”

  Rahul exhaled thinly through her nose. “I’m in too good a mood to be exasperated with you,” she told him. “But you’re a very naughty boy.”

  “Show me,” Dhar said. In her thighs, he thought he felt those seemingly involuntary shivers that are visible on the flanks of a horse. When she turned to her purse, John D. raised his eyes to Mr. Sethna, but the old Parsi appeared to be suffering from stage fright; the steward clutched the menus in one hand, his silver serving tray in the other. How could the old fool upend Mrs. Dogar’s purse if he didn’t have a free hand? John D. wondered.

  Rahul took the purse into her lap; Dhar could feel the bottom of it, for it briefly rested on his wrist. There was more than one drawing, and Mrs. Dogar appeared to hesitate before she withdrew all three; but she still didn’t show him any of them. She held the drawings protectively in her right hand; with her left hand, she returned her purse to the empty chair—that was when Mr. Sethna sprang into erratic action. He dropped the serving tray; there was a resounding silvery clatter upon the dining room’s stone floor. Then the steward stepped on the tray—he actually appeared to trip over it—and the menus flew from his hand into Mrs. Dogar’s lap. Instinctively, she caught them, while the old Parsi staggered past her and collided with the all-important chair. There went her purse, upside down on the floor, but nothing spilled out of it until Mr. Sethna clumsily attempted to pick the purse up; then everything was everywhere. Of the three drawings, which Rahul had left unattended on the table, John D. could see only the one on top. It was enough.

  The woman in the picture bore a striking resemblance to what Mrs. Dogar might have looked like as a young girl. Rahul had never exactly been a young girl, but this portrait reminded John D. of how she had looked in Goa 20 years ago. An elephant was mounting her, but this elephant had two trunks. The first trunk—it was in the usual place for an elephant’s trunk—was deeply inside the young woman’s mouth; in fact, it had emerged through the back of her head. The second trunk, which was the elephant’s preposterous penis, had penetrated the woman’s vagina; it was this trunk that had burst between the woman’s shoulder blades. Approximately at the back of the woman’s neck, John D. could see that the elephant’s two trunks were touching each other; the actor could also see that the elephant was winking. Dhar would never see the other two drawings; he wouldn’t want to. The movie star stepped quickly behind Mrs. Dogar’s chair and pushed the fumbling Mr. Sethna out of the way.

  “Allow me,” Dhar said, bending to the spilled contents of her purse. Mrs. Dogar’s mood had been so improved by her recent killing, she was remarkably unprovoked by the apparent accident.

  “Oh, purses! They’re such a nuisance!” Rahul said. Flirtatiously, she allowed her hand to touch the back of Inspector Dhar’s neck. He was kneeling between her chair and the empty chair; he was gathering the contents of her purse, which he then put on the table. Quite casually, the actor pointed to the top half of the silver ballpoint pen, which he’d placed between a mirror and a jar of moisturizer.

  “I don’t see the bottom half of this,” the actor said. “Maybe it’s still in your purse.” Then he handed her the purse, which was easily half full, and he pretended to look under the table for the bottom half of the silver ballpoint pen—that part which Nancy had kept so well polished these 20 years.

  When John D. lifted his face to her, he was still kneeling; as such, his face was level with her small, well-shaped breasts. Mrs. Dogar was holding the top half of the pen. “A rupee for your thoughts,” said Inspector Dhar; it was something he said in all his movies.

  Rahul’s lips were parted; she looked quizzically down at Dhar—her scratched eye blinking once, and then again. Her lips softly closed and she once more exhaled thinly through her nose, as if such controlled breathing helped her to think.

  “I thought I’d lost this,” Mrs. Dogar said slowly.

  “It appears you’ve lost the other half,” John D. replied; he stayed on his knees because he imagined that she liked looking down on him.

  “This is the only half I ever had,” Rahul explained.

  Dhar stood up and walked behind her chair; he didn’t want her to grab the drawings. When John D. returned to his seat, Rahul was staring at the half-pen.

  “You might as well have lost that half,” John D. told her. “You can’t use it for anything.”

  “But you’re wrong!” Mrs. Dogar cried. “It’s really marvelous as a money clip.”

  “A money clip,” the actor repeated.

  “Look he
re,” Rahul began. There was no money among the spilled contents of her purse, which John D. had spread on the table; she had to search in her purse. “The problem with money clips,” Mrs. Dogar told him, “is that they’re conceived for a big wad of money… the sort of wad of money that men are always flashing out of their pockets, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Inspector Dhar. He watched her fishing in her purse for some smaller bills. She pulled out a 10-rupee note, and two 5s, and when the actor saw the two 2-rupee notes with the unnatural typing on them, he raised his eyes to Mr. Sethna and the old steward began his hurried shuffle across the dining room to the Ladies’ Garden.

  “Look here,” Rahul repeated. “When you have just a few small notes, which most women must carry—for tipping, for the odd beggar—this is the perfect money clip. It holds just a few notes, but quite snugly …” Her voice trailed away because she saw that Dhar had covered the drawings with his hand; he was sliding the three drawings across the tablecloth when Rahul reached out and grabbed his pinky finger, which she sharply lifted, breaking it. John D. still managed to pull the drawings into his lap. The pinky finger of his right hand pointed straight up, as if it grew out of the back of his hand; it was dislocated at the big knuckle joint. With his left hand, Dhar was able to protect the drawings from Mrs. Dogar’s grasp. She was still struggling with him—she was trying to get the drawings away from him with her right hand—when Detective Patel hooked her neck in the crook of his elbow and pinned her left arm behind her chair.

  “You’re under arrest,” the deputy commissioner told her.

  “The top half of the pen is a money clip,” said Inspector Dhar. “She uses it for small notes. When she put the note in Mr. Lal’s mouth, the makeshift money clip must have fallen by the body—you know the rest. There’s some typing on those two-rupee notes,” Dhar told the real policeman.

  “Read it to me,” Patel said. Mrs. Dogar held herself very still; her free right hand, which had ceased struggling with John D. for the drawings, floated just above the tablecloth, as if she were about to give them all her blessing.

  “‘A member no more,’” Dhar read aloud.

  “That one was for you,” the deputy commissioner told him.

  “‘…because Dhar is still a member,’” Dhar read.

  “Who was that one for?” the policeman asked Rahul, but Mrs. Dogar was frozen in her chair, her hand still conducting an imaginary orchestra above the tablecloth; her eyes had never left Inspector Dhar. The top drawing had become wrinkled in the tussle, but John D. smoothed all three drawings against the tablecloth. He was careful not to look at them.

  “You’re quite an artist,” the deputy commissioner told Rahul, but Mrs. Dogar just kept staring at Inspector Dhar.

  Dr. Daruwalla regretted that he looked at the drawings; the second was worse than the first, and the third was the worst of all. He knew he would go to his grave still thinking of them. Julia alone had the sense to remain in the Ladies’ Garden; she knew there was no good reason to come any closer. But Nancy must have felt compelled to confront the Devil herself; it would be uncomfortable for her later to recall the last words between Dhar and Rahul.

  “I really wanted you—I wasn’t kidding,” Mrs. Dogar said to the actor.

  To Dr. Daruwalla’s surprise, John D. said to Mrs. Dogar, “I wasn’t kidding, either.”

  It must have been hard for Nancy to feel that the focus of her victimization had shifted so far from herself; it still galled her that Rahul didn’t remember who she was.

  “I was in Goa,” Nancy announced to the killer.

  “Don’t say anything, sweetie,” her husband told her.

  “Say anything you feel like saying, sweetie,” Rahul said.

  “I had a fever and you crawled into bed with me,” Nancy said.

  Mrs. Dogar appeared to be thoughtfully surprised. She stared at Nancy as she had previously stared at the top half of the pen, her recognition traveling over time. “Why, is it really you, dear?” Rahul asked Nancy. “But what on earth has happened to you?”

  “You should have killed me when you had the chance,” Nancy told her.

  “You look already dead to me,” Mrs. Dogar said.

  “Please kill her, Vijay,” Nancy said to her husband.

  “I told you this wouldn’t be very satisfying, sweetie.” That was all the deputy commissioner would say to her.

  When the uniformed constables and the subinspectors came, Detective Patel told them to put away their weapons. Rahul was not resisting arrest. The deep and unknown satisfactions of the previous night’s murder seemed to radiate from Mrs. Dogar; she was no more violent on this New Year’s Monday than whatever brief impulse had urged her to break John D.’s pinky finger. The serial killer’s smile was serene.

  Understandably, the deputy commissioner was worried about his wife. He told her he’d have to go directly to Crime Branch Headquarters, but surely she could get a ride home. Dhar’s dwarf driver had already made his presence known; Vinod was prowling the foyer of the Duckworth Club. Detective Patel suggested that perhaps Dhar wouldn’t mind taking Nancy home in his private taxi.

  “Not a good idea.” That was all Nancy would say to her husband.

  Julia said that she and Dr. Daruwalla would bring Nancy home. Dhar offered to have Vinod drive Nancy home—just the dwarf, alone. That way, she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.

  Nancy preferred this plan. “I’m safe around dwarfs,” she said. “I like dwarfs.”

  When she’d gone with Vinod, Detective Patel asked Inspector Dhar how he liked being a real policeman. “It’s better in the movies,” the actor replied. “In the movies, things happen the way they should happen.”

  After the deputy commissioner had departed with Rahul, John D. let Dr. Daruwalla snap his pinky finger into place. “Just look away—look at Julia,” the doctor recommended. Then he popped the dislocated finger back where it belonged. “We’ll take an X ray tomorrow,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “Maybe we’ll splint it, but not until it’s stopped swelling. For now, keep putting it in ice.”

  At the table in the Ladies’ Garden, John D. responded to this advice by submersing his pinky in his water glass; most of the ice in the glass had melted, so Dr. Daruwalla summoned Mr. Sethna for more. Because the old Parsi seemed deeply disappointed that no one had congratulated him on his performance, Dhar said, “Mr. Sethna, that was really brilliant—how you fell over your own tray, for example. The distracting sound of the tray itself, your particularly purposeful but graceful awkwardness… truly brilliant.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Sethna replied. “I wasn’t sure what to do with the menus.”

  “That was brilliant, too—the menus in her lap. Perfect!” said Inspector Dhar.

  “Thank you,” the steward repeated; he went away—he was so pleased with himself that he forgot to bring the ice.

  No one had eaten any lunch. Dr. Daruwalla was the first to confess to a great hunger; Julia was so relieved that Mrs. Dogar was gone, she admitted to having a considerable appetite herself. John D. ate with them, although he seemed indifferent to the food.

  Farrokh reminded Mr. Sethna that he’d forgotten to bring the ice, which the steward finally delivered to the table in a silver bowl; it was a bowl that was normally reserved for chilling tiger prawns, and the movie star stuck his swollen pinky finger in it with a vaguely mortified expression. Although the finger was still swelling, especially at the joint of the big knuckle, Dhar’s pinky was not nearly as discolored as his lip.

  The actor drank more beer than he usually permitted himself at midday, and his conversation was entirely concerned with when he would leave India. Certainly before the end of the month, he thought. He questioned whether or not he’d bother to do his fair share of publicity for Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence; now that the real-life version of the cage-girl killer was captured, Dhar commented that there might (for once) be some favorable publicity attached to his brief presence in Bombay. The more he mused out loud a
bout it, the closer Dhar came to deciding that there was really nothing keeping him in India; from John D.’s point of view, the sooner he went back to Switzerland, the better.

  The doctor remarked that he thought he and Julia would return to Canada earlier than they’d planned; Dr. Daruwalla also asserted that he couldn’t imagine coming back to Bombay in the near future, and the longer one stayed away… well, the harder it would be to ever come back. Julia let them talk. She knew how men hated to feel overwhelmed; they were really such babies whenever they weren’t in control of their surroundings—whenever they felt that they didn’t belong where they were. Also, Julia had often heard Farrokh say that he was never coming back to India; she knew he always came back.

  The late-afternoon sun was slanting sideways through the trellis in the Ladies’ Garden; the light fell in long slashes across the tablecloth, where the most famous male movie star in Bombay entertained himself by flicking stray crumbs with his fork. The ice in the prawn bowl had melted. It was time for Dr. and Mrs. Daruwalla to make an appearance at the celebration at St. Ignatius; Julia had to remind the doctor that she’d promised Martin Mills an early arrival. Understandably, the scholastic wanted to wear clean bandages to the high-tea jubilee, his introduction to the Catholic community.

  “Why does he need bandages?” John D. asked. “What’s the matter with him now?”

  “Your twin was bitten by a chimpanzee,” Farrokh informed the actor. “Probably rabid.”

  There was certainly a lot of biting going around, Dhar thought, but the events of the day had sharply curtailed his inclination toward sarcasm. His finger throbbed and he knew his lip was ugly. Inspector Dhar didn’t say a word.

  When the Daruwallas left him sitting in the Ladies’ Garden, the movie star closed his eyes; he looked asleep. Too much beer, the ever-watchful Mr. Sethna surmised; then the steward reminded himself of his conviction that Dhar was stricken with a sexually transmitted disease. The old Parsi revised his opinion—he determined that Dhar was suffering from both the beer and the disease—and he ordered the busboys to leave the actor undisturbed at his table in the Ladies’ Garden. Mr. Sethna’s disapproval of Dhar had softened considerably; the steward felt bloated with pride—to have had his small supporting role called “brilliant” and “perfect” by such a celebrity of the Hindi cinema!