by John Irving
There was also not the slightest edge of sarcasm in Dhar’s voice when he spoke to Julia. Farrokh recognized a longstanding jealousy. John D, is more affectionate to Julia than he is to me, Dr. Daruwalla thought. And after all I’ve done for him! There was a fatherly bitterness to this idea, and it shamed him.
He slipped quietly into the kitchen, where the racket of the apparently never-ending preparation of the evening meal kept him from hearing the actor’s well-trained voice. Besides, Farrokh had at first (and falsely) assumed that Dhar was merely contributing to the conversation about the Queen’s Necklace. Then Dr. Daruwalla had heard the sudden mention of his own name—it was that old story about “the time Farrokh took me to watch the elephants in the sea.” The doctor hadn’t wanted to hear more, because he was afraid of the detectable tone of complaint he heard emerging in John D.’s memory. The dear boy was recalling that time he’d been frightened during the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi; it seemed that half the city had flocked to Chowpatty Beach, where they’d immersed their idols of the elephant-headed god, Ganesh. Farrokh hadn’t prepared the child for the orgiastic frenzy of the crowd—not to mention the size of the elephant heads, many of which were larger than the heads of real elephants. Farrokh remembered the outing as the first and only time he’d seen John D. become hysterical. The dear boy was crying, “They’re drowning the elephants! Now the elephants will be angry!”
And to think that Farrokh had criticized old Lowji for keeping the boy so sheltered. “If you take him only to the Duckworth Club,” Farrokh had told his father, “what’s he ever going to know about India?” What a hypocrite I’ve turned out to be! Dr. Daruwalla thought, for he knew of no one in Bombay who’d hidden from India as successfully as he’d concealed himself at the Duckworth Club—for years.
He’d taken an eight-year-old to Chowpatty Beach to watch a mob; there were hundreds of thousands dunking their idols of the elephant-headed god in the sea. What had he thought the child would make of this? It wasn’t the time to explain the British ban on “gathering,” their infuriating anti-assembly strictures; the hysterical eight-year-old was too young to appreciate this symbolic demonstration for freedom of expression. Farrokh tried to carry the crying boy against the grain of the crowd, but more and more the giant idols of Lord Ganesha were pressed against them; they were herded back to the sea. “It’s just a celebration,” he’d whispered in the child’s ear. “It’s not a riot.” In his arms, Farrokh felt the little boy trembling. Thus had the doctor realized the full weight of his ignorance, not only of India but of the fragility of children.
Now he wondered if John D. was telling Julia, “This is my first memory of Farrokh.” And I’m still getting the dear boy in trouble! Dr. Daruwalla thought.
The doctor distracted himself by poking his nose into the big pot of dhal. Roopa had long ago added the mutton, and she reminded him that he was late by remarking how fortunate it was that mutton usually defied overcooking. “The rice has dried out,” she added sadly.
Old Nalin, ever the optimist, tried to make Dr. Daruwalla feel better. In his fragmentary English, Nalin said, “But plenty of beer!”
Dr. Daruwalla felt guilty that there was always so much beer around; the doctor’s capacity for beer alarmed him, and Dhar’s fondness for the brew seemed limitless. Since Nalin and Roopa did the shopping, the thought of the old couple struggling with those heavy bottles also made Dr. Daruwalla feel guilty. And there was the elevator issue: because they were servants, Nalin and Roopa weren’t permitted to ride in the lift. Even with all those beer bottles, the elderly servants trudged up the stairs.
“And plenty of messages!” Nalin told the doctor. The old man was very fond of the new answering machine. Julia had insisted on it because Nalin and Roopa were terrible at taking messages; they couldn’t transcribe a phone number or spell anyone’s name. When the machine answered, the old man was thrilled to listen to it because he was absolved of any responsibility for the messages.
Farrokh took a beer with him. The apartment seemed so small. In Toronto, the Daruwallas owned a huge house. In Bombay, the doctor had to sneak through the living room, which was also the dining room, in order to get to the bedroom and the bathroom. But Dhar and Julia were still talking on the balcony; they didn’t see him. John D. was reciting the most famous part of the story; it always made Julia laugh.
“They’re drowning the elephants!” John D. was crying. “Now the elephants will be angry!” Dr. Daruwalla never thought that this sounded quite right in German.
If I run a bath, Farrokh speculated, they’ll hear it and know I’m home. I’ll have a quick wash in the sink instead, the doctor thought. He spread out a clean white shirt on the bed. He chose an uncharacteristically loud necktie with a bright-green parrot on it; it was an old Christmas present from John D.—not a tie that the doctor would ever wear in public. Farrokh was unaware how the tie would at least enliven his navy-blue suit. These were absurd clothes for Bombay, especially when dining at home, but Julia was Julia.
After he’d washed, the doctor took a quick look at his answering machine; the message light was flickering. He didn’t bother to count the number of messages. Don’t listen to them now, he warned himself. Yet the spirit of procrastination was deeply ingrained in him; to join in John D. and Julia’s conversation would lead to the inevitable confrontation concerning John D.’s twin. As Farrokh was deliberating, he saw the bundle of mail on his writing desk. Dhar must have gone out to the film studio and collected the fan mail, which was mostly hate mail.
It had long been their understanding that Dr. Daruwalla deserved the task of opening and reading the mail. Although the letters were addressed to Inspector Dhar, the content of these letters only rarely concerned Dhar’s acting or lip-syncing skills; instead, the letters were invariably about the creation of Dhar’s character or about a particular script. Because it was presumed that Dhar was the author of the screenplays, and thus the creator of his own character, the author himself was the source of the letter writers’ principal outrage; their attacks were leveled at the man who’d made it all up.
Before the death threats, especially before the real-life murders of actual prostitutes, Dr. Daruwalla had been in no great hurry to read his mail. But the serial killings of the cage girls had become so publicly acknowledged as imitations of the movie murders that Inspector Dhar’s mail had taken a turn for the worse. And in the light of Mr. Lal’s murder, Dr. Daruwalla felt compelled to search the mail for threats of any kind. He looked at the sizable bundle of new letters and wondered if, under these circumstances, he should ask Dhar and Julia to help him read through them. As if their evening together didn’t promise to be difficult enough! Maybe later, Farrokh thought—if the conversation comes around to it.
But, as he dressed, the doctor couldn’t ignore the insistent flickering of the message light on his answering machine. Well, he needn’t take the time to call anyone back, he thought, as he knotted his tie. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to hear what these messages were about—he could just jot them down and return the calls later. And so Farrokh searched for a pad of paper and a pen, which wasn’t easy to do without being heard, because the tiny bedroom was crammed full of the fragile, tinkling Victoriana he’d inherited from Lowji’s mansion on Ridge Road. Although he’d taken only what he couldn’t bear to auction, even his writing desk was crowded with the bric-a-brac of his childhood, not to mention the photographs of his three daughters; they were married, and therefore Dr. Daruwalla’s writing desk also exhibited their wedding pictures—and the pictures of his several grandchildren. Then there were his favorite photographs of John D.—downhill-skiing at Wengen and at Klosters, cross-country skiing in Pontresina and hiking in Zermatt—and several framed playbills from the Schauspielhaus Zürich, with John Daruwalla in both supporting and leading roles. He was Jean in Strindberg’s Fräulein Julie, he was Christopher Mahon in John Millington Synge’s Ein wahrer Held, he was Achilles in Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea, he was Fernando in Goeth
e’s Stella, he was Ivan in Chekhov’s Onkel Vanja, he was Antonio in Shakespeare’s Der Kaufmann von Venedig—once he’d been Bassanio. Shakespeare in German sounded so foreign to Farrokh. It depressed the doctor that he’d lost touch with the language of his romantic years.
At last he found a pen. Then he spotted a pad of paper under the silver statuette of Ganesh as a baby; the little elephant-headed god was sitting on the lap of his human mother, Parvati—a cute pose. Unfortunately, the grotesque reaction to Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer had sickened Farrokh with elephants. This was unfair, for Ganesh was merely elephant-headed; the god had four human arms with human hands, and two human feet. Also, Lord Ganesha sported only one whole tusk—although sometimes the god held his broken tusk in one of his four hands.
Ganesh truly bore no resemblance to the drawing of that inappropriately mirthful elephant which, in the most recent Inspector Dhar film, was the signature of a serial killer—that unsuitable cartoon which the movie murderer drew on the bellies of slain prostitutes. That elephant was no god. Besides, that elephant had both tusks intact. Even so, Dr. Daruwalla was off elephants—in any form. The doctor wished he’d asked Deputy Commissioner Patel about those drawings that the real murderer was making, for the police had said no more to the press than that the artwork of the real-life killer and serial cartoonist was “an obvious variation on the movie theme.” What did that mean?
The question deeply disturbed Dr. Daruwalla, who shuddered to recall the origin of his idea for the cartoon-drawing killer; the source of the doctor’s inspiration had been nothing less than an actual drawing on the belly of an actual murder victim. Twenty years ago, Dr. Daruwalla had been the examining physician at the scene of a crime that was never solved. Now the police were claiming that a killer-cartoonist had stolen the mocking elephant from a movie, but the screenwriter knew where the original idea had come from. Farrokh had stolen it from a murderer—maybe from the same murderer. Wouldn’t the killer know that the most recent Inspector Dhar movie was imitating him?
I’m over my head, as usual, Dr. Daruwalla decided. He also decided that he should give this information to Detective Patel—in case, somehow, the deputy commissioner didn’t already know it. But how would Patel already know it? Farrokh wondered. Second-guessing himself was the doctor’s second nature. At the Duckworth Club, Dr. Daruwalla had been impressed by the composure of the deputy commissioner; moreover, the doctor couldn’t rid himself of the impression that Detective Patel had been hiding something.
Farrokh interrupted these unwelcome thoughts as quickly as they’d come to him. Sitting next to his answering machine, he turned the volume down before he pushed the button. Still in hiding, the secret screenwriter listened to the messages.
The First-Floor Dogs
Upon hearing Ranjit’s complaining voice, Dr. Daruwalla instantly regretted his decision to forsake even one minute of Dhar and Julia’s company for as much as one phone message. A few years older than the doctor, Ranjit had nevertheless maintained both unsuitable expectations and youthful indignation; the former involved his ongoing matrimonial advertisements, which Dr. Daruwalla found inappropriate for a medical secretary in his sixties. Ranjit’s “youthful indignation” was most apparent in his responses to those women who, upon meeting him, turned him down. Naturally, Ranjit hadn’t all this time been conducting nonstop matrimonial advertisements, dating back to his earliest employment as old Lowji’s secretary. After exhaustive interviews, Ranjit had been successfully married—and long enough before Lowji’s death so that the senior Dr. Daruwalla had once more enjoyed the secretary’s pre-matrimonial industriousness.
But Ranjit’s wife had recently died, and he was only a few years away from retirement. He still worked for the surgical associates at the Hospital for Crippled Children, and he always served as Farrokh’s secretary whenever the Canadian was an Honorary Consultant Surgeon in Bombay. And Ranjit had decided that the time for remarrying was ripe. He thought he should do it without delay, for it made him sound younger to describe himself as a working medical secretary than to confess he was retired; just to be sure, in his more recent matrimonial advertisements, he’d attempted to capitalize on both his position and his pending retirement, citing that he was “rewardingly employed” and “anticipating a v. active, early retirement.”
It was things like “v. active” that Dr. Daruwalla found unseemly about Ranjit’s present matrimonials, and the fact that Ranjit was a shameless liar. Because of a standard policy at The Times of India—the advertising brides and grooms eschewed revealing their names, preferring the confidentiality of a number—it was possible for Ranjit to publish a half-dozen ads in the same Sunday’s matrimonial pages. Ranjit had discovered it was popular to claim that caste was “no bar,” while it was also still popular to declare himself a Hindu Brahmin—“caste-conscious and religion-minded, matching horoscopes a must.” Therefore, Ranjit advertised several versions of himself simultaneously. He told Farrokh that he was seeking the very best wife, with or without caste-consciousness or religion. Why not give himself the benefit of meeting everyone who was available?
Dr. Daruwalla was embarrassed that he’d been inexorably drawn into the world of Ranjit’s matrimonials. Every Sunday, Farrokh and Julia read through the marriage advertisements in The Times of India. It was a contest, to see which of them could identify all of Ranjit’s ads. But Ranjit’s phone message was not of a matrimonial nature. Once again, the aging secretary had called to complain about “the dwarf’s wife.” This was Ranjit’s condemning reference to Deepa, for whom he harbored a forbidding disapproval—the kind that only Mr. Sethna might have shared. Dr. Daruwalla wondered if medical secretaries were universally cruel and dismissive to anyone seeking a doctor’s attention. Was such hostility engendered only by a heartfelt desire to protect all doctors from wasting their time?
To be fair to Ranjit, Deepa was exceptionally aggressive in wasting Dr. Daruwalla’s time. She’d called to make a morning appointment for the runaway child prostitute—even before Vinod had persuaded the doctor to examine this new addition to Mr. Garg’s stable of street girls. Ranjit described the patient as “someone allegedly without bones,” for Deepa had doubtless used her circus terminology (“boneless”) with him. Ranjit was communicating his scorn for the vocabulary of the dwarf’s wife. From Deepa’s description, the child prostitute might have been made of pure plastic—“another medical marvel, and no doubt a virgin,” Ranjit concluded his sardonic message.
The next message was an old one, from Vinod. The dwarf must have called while Farrokh was still sitting in the Ladies’ Garden at the Duckworth Club. The message was really for Inspector Dhar.
“Our favorite inspector is telling me he is sleeping on your balcony tonight,” the dwarf began. “If he is changing his mind, I am just cruising—just killing time, you know. If the inspector is wanting me, he is already knowing the doormen at the Taj and at the Oberoi—for message-leaving, I am meaning. I am having a late-night picking-up at the Wetness Cabaret,” Vinod admitted, “but this is being while you are sleeping. In the morning, I am picking up you, as usual. By the way, I am reading a magazine with me in it!” the dwarf concluded.
The only magazines that Vinod read were movie magazines, where he could occasionally glimpse himself in the celebrity snapshots opening the door of one of his Ambassadors for Inspector Dhar. There on the door would be the red circle with the T in it (for taxi) and the name of the dwarf’s company, which was often partially obscured.
VINOD’S BLUE
NILE, LTD.
As opposed to “great,” Farrokh presumed.
Dhar was the only movie star who rode in Vinod’s cars; and the dwarf relished his occasional appearances with his “favorite inspector” in the film-gossip magazines. Vinod was enduringly hopeful that other movie stars would follow Dhar’s lead, but Dimple Kapadia and Jaya Prada and Pooja Bedi and Pooja Bhatt—not to mention Chunky Pandey and Sunny Deol, or Madhuri Dixit and Moon Moon Sen, to name only a few
—had all declined to ride in the dwarf’s “luxury” taxis. Possibly they thought it would damage their reputations to be seen with Dhar’s thug.
As for the “cruising” back and forth between the Oberoi and the Taj, these were Vinod’s favorite territories for moonlighting. The dwarf was recognized and well treated by the doormen because whenever Dhar was in Bombay, the actor stayed at the Oberoi and at the Taj. By maintaining a suite at both hotels, Dhar was assured of good service; as long as the Oberoi and the Taj knew they were in competition with each other, they outdid themselves to give Dhar the utmost privacy. The house detectives were harsh with autograph seekers or other celebrity hounds; at the reception desk of either hotel, if you didn’t know the given code name, which kept changing, you were told that the movie star was not a guest.
By “killing time,” Vinod meant he was picking up extra money. The dwarf was good at spotting hapless tourists in the lobbies of both hotels; he would offer to drive the foreigners to a good restaurant, or wherever they wanted to go. Vinod was also gifted at recognizing those tourists who’d had harrowing taxi experiences and were therefore vulnerable to the temptations of his “luxury” service.
Dr. Daruwalla understood that the dwarf could hardly have supported himself by driving only the doctor and Dhar around. Mr. Garg was a more regular customer. Farrokh was also familiar with the dwarf’s habit of “message-leaving,” for Vinod had taken advantage of Inspector Dhar’s celebrity status with the doormen at the Oberoi and at the Taj. It may have been awkward, but it was Vinod’s only means of putting himself “on call.” There were no cellular phones in Bombay; car phones were unknown—a decided inconvenience in the private-taxi business, which Vinod complained about periodically. There were radio pagers, or “beepers,” but the dwarf wouldn’t use them. “I am preferring to be holding out,” Vinod maintained, by which he meant he was waiting for the day when cellular phones would upgrade his car-driving enterprise.