A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  The seemingly unconcerned passengers in the other Tamil’s taxi were a well-dressed British couple in their forties. Nancy guessed they were also headed to the Taj, and that this coincidence lay at the heart of the dispute between the two Tamils. (Dieter had warned her of this common practice: two drivers with two separate fares, headed for the same place. Naturally, one of the drivers was attempting to persuade the other to carry both fares.)

  At a traffic light, the two stopped taxis were suddenly surrounded by barking dogs—starving curs, all snapping at one another—and Nancy imagined that, if one jumped through the open window at her, she could club it with the dildo. This passing idea perhaps prepared her for what happened at the next intersection, where again the light was against them; while they waited this time, they were slowly approached by beggars instead of dogs. The shouting Tamils had attracted some of the sidewalk sleepers, whose mounded bodies under their light-colored clothing could be dimly seen to contrast with the darkened streets and buildings. First a man in a ragged, filthy dhoti stuck his arm in Nancy’s window. Nancy noticed that the prim British couple—not in fear but out of sheer obstinacy—had closed their windows, despite the moist heat. Nancy thought she would suffocate if she closed hers.

  Instead, she spoke sharply to her driver—to go! After all, the light had changed. But her Tamil and the other Tamil were too engrossed in their confrontation to obey the traffic signal. Her Tamil ignored her, and, to Nancy’s further irritation, the other Tamil now coerced his British passengers into the street; he was beckoning to them that they must join Nancy in her cab, exactly as Dieter had foretold.

  Nancy shouted at her driver, who turned to her and shrugged; she shouted out the window to the other Tamil, who shouted back at her. Nancy shouted to the British couple that they shouldn’t allow themselves to be so taken advantage of; they should demand of their driver that he bring them to their prearranged, prepaid destination.

  “Don’t let the bastards screw you!” Nancy shouted. Then she realized that she was waving the dildo at them; to be sure, it was still in the sock and they didn’t know it was a dildo; they could only suppose she was an hysterical young woman threatening them with a sock.

  Nancy slid over in her seat. “Please get in,” she said to the British couple, but when they opened the door, Nancy’s driver protested. He even jerked the car a little forward. Nancy tapped him on his shoulder with the dildo—still in the sock. Her driver looked indifferent; his counterpart was already stuffing the British couple’s luggage into the trunk as the twosome squeezed into the seat beside her.

  Nancy was pressed against the window when a beggar woman pushed a baby in the window and held it in front of her face; the child was foul-smelling, unmoving, expressionless—it looked half dead. Nancy raised the dildo, but what could she do? Whom should she hit? Instead, she screamed at the woman, who indignantly withdrew the baby from the taxi. Maybe it wasn’t even her baby, Nancy considered; possibly it was just a baby that people used for begging. Perhaps it wasn’t even a real baby.

  Ahead of them, two young men were supporting a drunken or a drugged companion. They paused in crossing the road, as if they weren’t sure that the taxi had stopped. But the taxi was stopped, and Nancy was incensed that her driver and the other Tamil were still arguing. She leaned forward and brought the dildo down across the back of her driver’s neck. That was when the sock flew off. The driver turned to face her. She struck him squarely on his nose with the huge cock in her hand.

  “Drive on!” she shouted at the Tamil. Suitably impressed with the giant penis, he lurched the taxi forward—through the traffic light, which had turned red again. Fortunately, no other traffic was on the street. Unfortunately, the two young men and their slumped companion were directly in the taxi’s path. At first, it seemed to Nancy that all three of them were hit. Later, she distinctly remembered that two of them had run away, although she couldn’t say that she’d actually seen the impact; she must have closed her eyes.

  While the Englishman helped the driver put the body in the front seat of the taxi, Nancy realized that the young man who’d been hit was the one who’d appeared to be drunk or drugged. It never occurred to her that the young man might already have been dead when the car hit him. But this was the subject of the Englishman’s conversation with the Tamil driver: had the boy or young man been pushed into the path of the taxi deliberately, and was he even conscious before the taxi struck him?

  “He looked dead,” the Englishman kept saying.

  “Yes, he is dying before!” the Tamil shouted. “I am not killing him!”

  “Is he dead now?” Nancy asked quietly.

  “Oh, definitely,” the Englishman replied. Like the customs inspector, he wouldn’t look at her, but the Englishman’s wife was staring at Nancy, who still clutched the fierce dildo in her fist. Still not looking at her, the Englishman handed her the sock. She covered the weapon and returned it to her big purse.

  “Is this your first visit to India?” the Englishwoman asked her, while the crazed Tamil drove them faster and faster through the streets now more and more blessed with electric light; the colorful mounds of the sidewalk sleepers were visible all around them. “In Bombay, half the population sleeps on the streets—but it’s really quite safe here,” the Englishwoman said. Nancy’s pinched expression implied to the British couple that she was a newcomer to the city and its smells. Actually, it was the lingering smell of the baby that pinched Nancy’s face—how something so small could reek with such force.

  The body in the front seat made its deadness known. The young man’s head lolled lifelessly, his shoulders impossibly slack. Whenever the Tamil braked or cornered, the body responded as heavily as a bag of sand. Nancy was grateful that she couldn’t see the young man’s face, which was making a dull sound against the windshield—his face rested flush against the glass—until the Tamil cornered again and then accelerated.

  Still not looking at Nancy, the Englishman said, “Don’t mind the body, dear.” It seemed unclear whether he’d spoken to Nancy or to his wife.

  “It doesn’t bother me,” his wife answered.

  Over Marine Drive, a thick smog hung suspended, as warm as a woolen shroud; the Arabian Sea was veiled, but the Englishwoman pointed to where the sea should have been. “Out there is the ocean,” she told Nancy, who began to gag. Overhead, on the lampposts, not even the advertisements were visible in the smog. The lights strung along Marine Drive weren’t smog lights, then; they were white, not yellow.

  In the careening taxi, the Englishman pointed out the window into the veil of smog. “This is the Queen’s Necklace,” he told Nancy. As the taxi raced on, he added—more to assure himself and his wife than to comfort Nancy—“Well, we’re almost there.”

  “I’m going to throw up,” Nancy said.

  “If you don’t think about being sick, dear, you won’t be sick,” the Englishwoman said.

  The taxi departed Marine Drive for the narrower, winding streets; the three living passengers leaned in to the corners, and the dead boy in the front seat appeared to come alive. His head walloped the side window; he slid forward and his face glanced off the windshield, skidding him into the Tamil driver, who elbowed the body away. The young man’s hands flew up to his face, as if he’d just remembered something important. Then, once again, the boy’s body appeared to forget everything.

  There were whistles, piercing sharp and loud: these were the sounds of the tall Sikh doormen who directed the traffic at the Taj, but Nancy was searching for some evidence of the police. Nearby, at the looming Gateway of India, Nancy thought she’d seen some sort of police activity; there were lights, the sound of hysterics, a sort of disturbance. At first, some beggar urchins were reputed to be the cause; the story was, they’d failed to beg a single rupee from a young Swedish couple who’d been photographing the Gateway of India with an ostentatious and professional use of bright-white lights and reflectors. Hence the urchins had urinated on the Gateway of India in an effort
to spoil the picture, and when they’d failed to gain suitable attention from the foreigners—the Swedes allegedly found this demonstration symbolically interesting—the urchins then attempted to urinate on the photographic equipment, and that was the cause of the ruckus. But further investigation would reveal that the Swedes had paid the beggars to pee on the Gateway of India, which had little effect—the Gateway of India was already soiled. The urchins had never attempted to pee on the Swedes’ photographic equipment; that would have been far too bold for them—they’d merely complained that they weren’t paid enough for pissing on the Gateway of India. That was the true cause of the ruckus.

  Meanwhile, the dead boy in the taxi had to wait. In the driveway of the Taj, the Tamil driver became hysterical; a dead man had been thrown into the path of his car—apparently, there was a dent. The British couple confided to a policeman that the Tamil had run a red light (upon being struck by a dildo). The policeman was the bewildered constable who’d finally freed himself from the crime of urination at the Gateway of India. It wasn’t clear to Nancy if the British couple was blaming her for the accident, if it even had been an accident. After all, the Tamil and the Englishman agreed that the boy had looked dead before the taxi hit him. What was clear to Nancy was that the policeman didn’t know what a “dildo” was.

  “A penis—a rather large one,” the Englishman explained to the constable.

  “She?” the policeman asked, pointing to Nancy. “She is hitting the taxi-walla with a what?”

  “You’ll have to show him, dear,” the Englishwoman told Nancy.

  “I’m not showing him anything,” Nancy said.

  Our Friend, the Real Policeman

  It took an hour before Nancy was free to register in the hotel. A half hour later—she’d just finished soaking in a hot bath—a second policeman came to her room. This one wasn’t a constable—no blue shorts a yard wide, no silly leg warmers. This one wasn’t another nerd in a Nehru cap; he wore an officer’s cap with the Maharashtrian police insignia and a khaki shirt, long khaki pants, black shoes, a revolver. It was the duty officer from the Colaba Police Station, which has jurisdiction over the Taj. Without his jowls, but even then sporting that pencil-thin mustache—and 20 years before he would have occasion to question Dr. Daruwalla and Inspector Dhar at the Duckworth Club—the young Inspector Patel gave a good first impression of himself. A future deputy commissioner could be discerned in the young policeman’s composure.

  Inspector Patel was aggressive but courteous, and even in his twenties he was an intimidating detective in the way that he invited a certain misunderstanding of his questions. His manner persuaded you to believe that he already knew the answers to many of the questions he asked, although he usually didn’t; thus he encouraged you to tell the truth by implying that he already knew it. And his method of questioning carried the added implication that, within your answers, Inspector Patel could discern your moral character.

  In her current state, Nancy was vulnerable to such an uncommonly proper and pleasant-looking young man. To sympathize with Nancy’s situation: Inspector Patel did not present himself as a person whom even a brazen or a supremely self-confident young woman would choose to show a dildo to. Also, it was about 5:00 in the morning. There may have been some eager early risers who were heralding the sunrise that—when viewed across the water, and perfectly framed in the arch of the Gateway of India—could still summon the vainglorious days of the British Raj, but poor Nancy wasn’t among them. Besides, her only windows and the small balcony didn’t afford her a view of the sea. Dieter had arranged for one of the cheaper rooms.

  Below her, in the gray-brown light, was the usual gathering of beggars—child performers, for the most part. Those international travelers who were still staggered by jet lag would find these early-morning urchins their first contact with India in the light of day.

  Nancy sat at the foot of her bed in her bathrobe. The inspector sat in the only chair not strewn with her clothes or her bags. They could both hear the emptying of Nancy’s bath. Highly visible, as Dieter had advised, were the used-looking but unused guidebook and the unread novel by Lawrence Durrell.

  It was not uncommon, the inspector told her, for someone to be murdered and then shoved in front of a moving car. In this case, what was unusual was that the hoax had been so obvious.

  “Not to me,” Nancy told him. She explained that she’d not seen the moment of impact; she’d thought all three of them were hit—probably because she’d shut her eyes.

  The Englishwoman hadn’t observed the moment of impact, either, Inspector Patel informed Nancy. “She was looking at you instead,” the policeman explained.

  “Oh, I see,” Nancy said.

  The Englishman was quite sure that a body—at least an unconscious body, if not a dead one—had been pushed into the path of the oncoming car. “But the taxi-walla doesn’t know what he saw,” said Inspector Patel. “The Tamil keeps changing his story.” When Nancy continued to stare blankly at him, the policeman added, “The driver says he was distracted.”

  “By what?” Nancy asked, although she knew by what.

  “By what you hit him with,” Inspector Patel replied.

  There was an uncomfortable pause while the policeman looked from chair to chair, surveying her emptied bags, the two books, her clothes. Nancy thought he must be at least five years older than she was, although he looked younger. His self-assurance made him seem disarmingly grown-up; yet he didn’t exhibit the cocksure arrogance of cops. Inspector Patel didn’t swagger; there was something in his controlled mannerisms that came from an absolute correctness of purpose. What struck Nancy as his pure goodness was riveting. And she thought he was a wonderful coffee-and-cream color; he had the blackest hair—and such a thin, perfectly edged mustache that Nancy wanted to touch it.

  The overall nattiness of the young man stood in obvious contrast to that absence of vanity which is commonly associated with a happily married man. Here in the Taj, in the presence of such a buxom blonde in her bathrobe, Inspector Patel was obviously unmarried; he was as alert to the details of his appearance as he was to every inch of Nancy, and to the particular revelations of Nancy’s room. She didn’t realize he was looking for the dildo.

  “May I see the thing you hit the taxi-walla with?” the inspector asked finally. God knows how the idiot Tamil had described it. Nancy went to get it from the bathroom, having decided to keep it with her toilet articles. God knows what the British couple had told the inspector. If the inspector had talked to them, they’d doubtless described her as a rude young woman brandishing an enormous cock.

  Nancy gave the dildo to Inspector Patel, and again sat down at the foot of her bed. The young policeman politely handed the instrument back without looking at her.

  “I’m sorry—it was necessary for me to see it,” Inspector Patel said. “I was having some difficulty imagining it,” he explained.

  “Both drivers were paid their fares at the airport,” Nancy told him. “I don’t like to be cheated,” she said.

  “It’s not the easiest country for a woman traveling alone,” the inspector said. By the quick way he glanced at her, she understood this was a question.

  “Friends are meeting me,” Nancy told him. “I’m just waiting for them to call.” (Dieter had advised her to say this; anyone assessing her student clothing and her cheap bags would know that she couldn’t afford many nights at the Taj.)

  “So will you be traveling with your friends or staying in Bombay?” the inspector asked her.

  Nancy recognized her advantage. As long as she held the dildo, the young policeman would find it awkward to look in her eyes.

  “I’ll do what they do,” she said indifferently. She held the penis in her lap; with the slightest movement of her wrist, she discovered, she could tap the circumcised head against her bare knee. But it was her bare feet that appeared to transfix Inspector Patel; perhaps it was their impossible whiteness, or else their improbable size—even bare, Nancy’s feet
were bigger than the inspector’s little shoes.

  Nancy stared at him without mercy. She enjoyed the prominent bones in his sharply featured face; it would have been impossible for her to look at his face and imagine it—even in 20 years—with jowls. She thought he had the blackest eyes and the longest eyelashes.

  Still staring at Nancy’s feet, Inspector Patel spoke forlornly: “I suppose there’s no known phone number or an address where I could reach you.”

  Nancy felt she understood everything that attracted her to him. She’d certainly tried hard to lose her innocence in Iowa, but the football players hadn’t touched it. She’d spoiled her real innocence in Germany, with Dieter, and now it was lost for good. But here was a man who was still innocent. She probably both frightened and attracted him—if he even knew it, Nancy thought.

  “Do you want to see me again?” she asked him. She thought the question was ambiguous enough, but he stared at her feet—with both longing and horror, she imagined.

  “But you couldn’t identify the two other men, even if we found them,” said Inspector Patel.

  “I could identify the other taxi driver,” Nancy said.

  “We’ve already got him,” the inspector told her.

  Nancy stood up from the bed and carried the dildo to the bathroom. When she came back, Inspector Patel was at the window, watching the beggars. She didn’t want to have any advantage over him anymore. Maybe she was imagining that the inspector had fallen hopelessly in love with her and that, if she shoved him on the bed and fell on top of him, he would worship her and be her slave forever. Maybe it wasn’t even him she wanted; possibly it was only his obvious propriety, and only because she felt she’d given away her essential goodness and would never get it back.

  Then it struck her that he was no longer interested in her feet; he kept glancing at her hands. Even though she’d put away the dildo, he wouldn’t look in her eyes.

  “Do you want to see me again?” Nancy repeated. There was no ambiguity to her question now. She stood closer to him than was necessary, but he ignored the question by pointing to the child performers far below them.