A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  “Rahul has undergone a little sex change,” said Promila Rai, with a vulgarity that was generally accepted as the utmost in sophistication by the out of it and the insecure.

  Rahul corrected his aunt in a voice that reflected conflicting hormonal surges. “I’m still undergoing it, Auntie,” he remarked. “I’m not quite complete,” he said pointedly to Dr. Daruwalla.

  “I see,” the doctor replied, but he didn’t see—he couldn’t conceive of the changes Rahul had undergone, not to mention what was required to make Rahul “complete.” The breasts were fairly small but firm and very nicely shaped; the lips were fuller and softer than Farrokh remembered them, and the makeup around the eyes was enhancing without tending to excess. If Rahul had been 12 or 13 in ’49—and no more than 8 or 10 when Lowji had examined him for what his aunt had called his inexplicable hairlessness—Rahul was now 32 or 33, Farrokh figured. From his back, in the hammock, the doctor’s view of Rahul was cut off just below the waist, which was as slender and pliant as a young girl’s.

  It was clear to the doctor that estrogens were in use, and to judge these by Rahul’s breasts and flawless skin, the estrogens had been a noteworthy success; the effects on Rahul’s voice were at best still in progress, because the voice had both male and female resonances in rich confusion. Had Rahul been castrated? Did one dare ask? He looked more womanly than most hijras. And why would he have had his penis removed if he intended to be “complete,” for didn’t that mean a fully fashioned vagina, and wasn’t this vagina surgically constructed from the penis turned inside out? I’m just an orthopedist, Dr. Daruwalla thought gratefully. All the doctor asked Rahul was, “Are you changing your name, too?”

  Boldly, even flirtatiously, Rahul smiled down at Farrokh; once again, the male and the female were at war within Rahul’s voice. “Not until I’m the real thing,” Rahul answered.

  “I see,” the doctor replied; he made an effort to return Rahul’s smile, or at least to imply tolerance. Once more Promila startled Farrokh by drumming her fingers on the spine of his tightly held book.

  “Is the whole family here?” Promila asked. She made “the whole family” sound like a grotesque element, like an entire population that was out of control.

  “Yes,” Dr. Daruwalla answered.

  “And that beautiful boy is here, too, I hope—I want Rahul to see him!” Promila said.

  “He must be eighteen—no, nineteen,” Rahul said dreamily.

  “Yes, nineteen,” the doctor said stiffly.

  “Don’t anyone point him out to me,” Rahul said. “I want to see if I can pick him out of the crowd.” Upon this remark, Rahul turned from the hammock and moved away across the beach. Dr. Daruwalla thought that the angle of Rahul’s departure was deliberate—to give the doctor, from his hammock, the best possible view of Rahul’s womanly hips. Rahul’s buttocks were also shown to good advantage in a snug sarong, and the tight-fitting halter top was similarly enhancing to Rahul’s breasts. Still, Farrokh critically observed, the hands were too large, the shoulders too broad, the upper arms too muscular … the feet were too long, the ankles too sturdy. Rahul was neither perfect nor complete.

  “Isn’t she delicious?” Promila whispered in the doctor’s ear. She leaned over him in the hammock and Farrokh felt the heavy silver pendant, the main piece of her necklace, thump against his chest. So Rahul was already a full-fledged “she” in Promila’s mind.

  “She seems so … womanly,” Dr. Daruwalla said to the proud aunt.

  “She is womanly!” replied Promila Rai.

  “Well … yes,” the doctor said. He felt trapped in the hammock, with Promila suspended above him like some bird of prey—some poultry of prey. Promila’s scent was permeating—a blend of sandalwood and embalming fluid, something oniony but also like moss. Dr. Daruwalla made an effort not to gag. He felt Promila pulling the novel by James Salter away from him, but he grasped the book in both hands.

  “If this is such a wonderful book,” she said doubtingly, “I hope you’ll lend it to me.”

  “I think Meher’s reading it next,” he said, but he didn’t mean Meher, his mother; he’d meant to say Julia, his wife.

  “Is Meher here, too?” Promila asked quickly.

  “No—I meant Julia,” Farrokh said sheepishly. By Promila’s sneer, he could tell she was judging him, as if his sexual life were so dull that he’d confused his mother with his wife—and before he was 40! Farrokh felt ashamed, but he was also angry. What had initially upset him about A Sport and a Pastime was now enthralling to him; he felt highly stimulated, but not in that guilty way of pornography. This was something so refined and erotic, he wanted to share it with Julia. Quite simply, and wonderfully, the novel had made him feel young again.

  Dr. Daruwalla saw Rahul and Promila as sexually aberrant beings. They’d ruined his mood; they’d overshadowed something that was sexy and sincerely written, because they were so unnatural—so perverse. Farrokh supposed he should go warn Julia that Promila Rai and her nephew-with-breasts were on the prowl. The Daruwallas might have to give their underage daughters some explanation about what wasn’t quite right with Rahul. Farrokh decided he would tell John D., in any case. The doctor hadn’t liked how Rahul had been so eager to pick John D. “out of the crowd.”

  Promila had doubtless impressed her nephew-with-breasts with her own opinion—that John D. was entirely too beautiful to be the child of Danny Mills. Dr. Daruwalla thought that Rahul had gone looking for John D. because the would-be transsexual hoped to glimpse something of Neville Eden in the doctor’s dear boy!

  Promila had turned away from his hammock, as if she were scanning the beach for the “delicious” Rahul; Dr. Daruwalla took this occasion to stare at the back of her neck. He regretted it, for staring back at him among the discolored wrinkles was a tumorous growth with melanoid characteristics; the doctor couldn’t bring himself to advise Promila that she should have a doctor look at this. It wasn’t a job for an orthopedist, anyway, and Farrokh remembered how unkindly Promila had responded to Lowji’s dismissal of Rahul’s hairlessness. Thinking of Rahul, Dr. Daruwalla wondered if his father’s diagnosis might have been hasty; possibly the hairlessness had been an early signal that something sexual needed rectifying in Rahul.

  He struggled to recall the unanswered question concerning Dr. Tata. He remembered that day when Promila and Rahul had delivered the old fool to the Daruwalla estate: there’d been some speculation regarding what either Promila or Rahul would have been seeing Dr. Tata for. It was unlikely that DR TATA’S BEST, MOST FAMOUS CLINIC FOR GYNECOLOGICAL & MATERNITY NEEDS could have been treating Promila, who would never have risked her precious parts to a physician reputed to be worse than ordinary. It was Lowji who’d suggested that it might have been Rahul who was Dr. Tata’s patient. “Something to do with the hairlessness business,” the senior Daruwalla had said, hadn’t he?

  Now old Dr. Tata was dead. In keeping with the more low-key times, his son, who was also an obstetrician and gynecologist, had deleted the “best, most famous” from the clinic’s name—although, as a physician, the son was reputed to be as far below ordinary as his father; within the Bombay medical community he was consistently referred to as “Tata Two.” Nevertheless, maybe Tata Two had kept his father’s records. Farrokh thought it might be interesting to know more about Rahul’s hairlessness.

  It amused Dr. Daruwalla to imagine that Promila and Rahul had been so single-minded about getting Rahul a sex change that they might have assumed a gynecological surgeon was the correct doctor to ask. You don’t ask the physician who’s familiar with the parts you want, but rather the doctor who knows and understands the parts you have! A urological surgeon would be required. Dr. Daruwalla presumed there would have to be a psychiatric evaluation, too; surely no responsible physician would perform a complete sex-change operation on demand.

  Then Farrokh remembered that sex-change operations were illegal in India, although this hardly prevented the hijras from castrating themselves; emasculatio
n appeared to be the caste duty of the hijras. Apparently, Rahul suffered from no such burden of “duty”; Rahul’s choice seemed to be motivated by something else—not to be the isolated third gender of a eunuch-transvestite, but to be “complete.” An actual woman—this was what Rahul wanted to be, Dr. Daruwalla imagined.

  “I suppose it was young Sidhwa who recommended the Hotel Bardez to you,” Promila coolly said to the doctor, which forced Dr. Daruwalla to remember the unlikely source of his information. Sidhwa was a young man whose tastes struck Farrokh as entirely too trendy, but in the case of the Hotel Bardez, Sidhwa had spoken with unbridled enthusiasm—and at length.

  “Yes, it was Sidhwa,” the doctor replied. “I suppose he told you, too.”

  Promila Rai peered down at Dr. Daruwalla in his hammock. There was in her expression a condescension of a cold, reptilian nature; there wasn’t even a flicker of pity in her gaze, but only that which passes for eagerness in a lizard’s eyes as it singles out a fly.

  “I told him,” Promila told Farrokh. “The Bardez is my hotel. I’ve been coming here for years.”

  Oh, what a choice I’ve made! thought Dr. Daruwalla. But Promila was through with him, at least for the moment. She simply wandered away, not standing on a single ceremony that could even faintly be associated with common politeness, although she’d certainly been exposed to good manners and she could apply such etiquette in excess whenever she chose.

  So that was the bad news that he had for Julia, Farrokh thought: two detestable Duckworthians had arrived at the Hotel Bardez, which turned out to be one of their personal favorites. But the good news was A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, for Farrokh was 39 and it had been a long time since a book had so possessed his mind and body.

  Dr. Daruwalla desired his wife—as suddenly, as disturbingly, as unashamedly as he’d ever desired her—and he marveled at the power of Mr. Salter’s prose to do that: both to be aesthetically pleasing and to give him far more than a simple hard-on. The novel seemed like a heroic act of seduction; it had enlivened all of the doctor’s senses.

  He felt how the beach sand was cooling; at midday it had so burned underfoot that he could cross it only with his sandals on, but now he comfortably walked barefoot in the sand—it seemed an ideal temperature. He vowed to get up very early one morning so that he could also experience the sand at its coldest, but he would forget his vow. Nevertheless, these were the stirrings within him of a second honeymoon, for sure. I shall write a letter to Mr. James Salter, he resolved. The rest of his life, Dr. Daruwalla would regret his neglecting to write that letter, but on this day in June—in 1969, on Baga Beach in Goa—the doctor briefly felt like a new man. Farrokh was only one day away from meeting the stranger whose voice on his answering machine 20 years later still commanded the authority to fill him with dread.

  “Is that him? Is that the doctor?” she would ask. When Farrokh had first heard those questions, he had no idea of the world he was about to enter.

  10

  CROSSED PATHS

  Testing for Syphilis

  At the Hotel Bardez, the front-desk staff told Dr. Daruwalla that the young woman had limped down the beach, all the way from a hippie enclave at Anjuna, she was checking the hotels for a doctor. “Any doctor?” she’d asked. They were proud of themselves for sending her away, but they warned the doctor that they were sure she’d be back; she wouldn’t find anyone to care for her foot at Calangute Beach, and if she made it as far as Aguada, she’d be turned away. Because of how she looked, someone might call the police.

  Farrokh desired to uphold the Parsi reputation for fairness and social justice; certainly he sought to help the crippled and the maimed—a girl with a limp was at least in a category of patients the orthopedist felt familiar with. It wasn’t as if his services were sought for the purpose of making Rahul Rai complete. Yet Farrokh couldn’t be angry with the staff at the Hotel Bardez. It was out of respect for Dr. Daruwalla’s privacy that they’d sent the limping woman away; they’d meant only to protect him, although doubtless they took a degree of pleasure in abusing an apparent freak. Among the Goans, especially as the 1960s were ending, there was a felt resentment of the European and American hippies who roamed the beaches; the hippies weren’t big spenders—some of them even stole—and they were perceived as an undesirable element by the wealthier Western and Indian tourists whom the Goans wished to attract. And so, without condemning their behavior, Dr. Daruwalla politely informed the staff at the Hotel Bardez that he wished to examine the lame hippie should she return.

  The doctor’s decision seemed especially disappointing to the aged tea-server who shuffled back and forth between the Hotel Bardez and the various encampments of thatch-roofed shelters; these four-poled structures, stuck in the sand and roofed with the dried fronds of coconut palms, dotted the beach. The tea-server had several times approached Dr. Daruwalla in his hammock under the palms, and it was largely out of diagnostic interest that Farrokh had observed the old man so closely. His name was Ali Ahmed; he said he was only 60 years old, although he looked 80, and he exhibited a few of the more easily recognizable and colorful physical signs of congenital syphilis. Upon his first tea service, the doctor had spotted Ali Ahmed’s “Hutchinson’s teeth”—the unmistakable peg-shaped incisors. The tea-server’s deafness, in addition to the characteristic clouding of the cornea, had confirmed Dr. Daruwalla’s diagnosis.

  Farrokh was chiefly interested in positioning Ali Ahmed in such a way that the tea-server faced the morning sun. Dr. Daruwalla was trying to spot a fourth symptom, a rarity in congenital syphilis—the Argyll Robertson pupil is much more common in syphilis acquired later in life—and the doctor had cleverly thought of a way to examine the old man without his knowledge.

  From his hammock, where he received his tea, Farrokh faced the Arabian Sea. Inland, at his back, the morning sun was a hazy glare above the village; from that direction, wafting over the beach, there emanated an aroma of fermented coconuts. Looking into the cloudy eyes of Ali Ahmed, Farrokh asked with feigned innocence, “What’s that smell, Ali, and where’s it coming from?” To be sure he’d be heard, Farrokh had to raise his voice.

  The tea-server was at the time focused on handing the doctor a glass of tea; his pupils were constricted to accommodate the object nearby—namely, the tea glass. But when the doctor asked him from whence the powerful odor came, Ali Ahmed looked in the direction of the village; his pupils dilated (to accommodate the distant tops of the coconut and areca palms), but even as his face was lifted to the harsh sunlight his pupils did not constrict in reaction to the glare. It was the classic Argyll Robertson pupil, Dr. Daruwalla decided.

  Farrokh recalled his favorite professor of infectious diseases, Herr Doktor Fritz Meitner; Dr. Meitner was fond of telling his medical students that the best way to remember the behavior of the Argyll Robertson pupil was to think of a prostitute: she accommodates, but doesn’t react. It was an all-male class; they all had laughed, but Farrokh had felt uncertain of his laughter. He’d never been with a prostitute, although they were popular in both Vienna and Bombay.

  “Feni,” the tea-server said, to explain the smell. But Dr. Daruwalla already knew the answer, just as he knew that the pupils of some syphilitics don’t respond to light.

  A Literary Seduction Scene

  In the village—or perhaps the source of the smell was as far away as Panjim—they were distilling coconuts for the local brew called feni; the heavy, sickly-sweet fumes of the liquor drifted over the few tourists and families on holiday at Baga Beach.

  Dr. Daruwalla and his family were already favorites with the staff of the small hotel, and they were passionately welcomed in the little lean- to restaurant and taverna that the Daruwallas frequented on the beachfront. The doctor was a big tipper, his wife was a classical beauty of a European tradition (as opposed to the seedy, hippie trash), his daughters were vibrantly bright and pretty—they were still of the innocent school—and the striking John D. was mesmerizing to Indians and fo
reigners alike. It was only to those rare families as likable as the Daruwallas that the staff of the Hotel Bardez apologized for the smell of the feni.

  In those days, in the premonsoon months of May and June, both knowledgeable foreigners and Indians avoided the Goa beaches; it was too hot. It was, however, when the Goans who lived away from Goa came home to visit their families and friends. The children were through with school. The shrimp and lobster and fish were plentiful, and the mangoes were at their peak. (Dr. Daruwalla was enamored of mangoes.) In keeping with the holiday spirit and in order to placate all the Christians, the Catholic Church provided an abundance of feast days; although he wasn’t yet religious, the doctor had nothing against a banquet or two.

  The Catholics were no longer the majority in Goa—the migrant iron miners who’d arrived early in this century were Hindus—but Farrokh, like his father, persisted in the belief that “the Romans” still overran the place. The Portuguese influence endured in the monumental architecture that Dr. Daruwalla adored; it could distinctly be tasted in the cuisine that the doctor relished. And among the names of the boats of the Christian fisherman, “Christ the King” was quite common. Bumper stickers, of both the comic and proselytizing variety, were a new if not widespread fad in Bombay; the doctor joked that the names of the boats of the Christian fishermen were Goan bumper stickers. Julia was no more amused by this than by Farrokh’s constant ridicule of St. Francis’s violated remains.

  “I don’t know how anyone can justify canonization,” Dr. Daruwalla reflected to John D., largely because Julia wouldn’t listen to her husband but also because the young man had studied some theology in university. In Zürich, it would have been Protestant theology, Farrokh assumed. “Just imagine it!” Farrokh lectured to the young man. “A violent woman swallows Xavier’s toe, and they cut off his arm and send it to Rome!”