A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  “Then it’s no wonder she hurt you, Liebchen,” Julia replied. It was Julia’s opinion that the second Mrs. Dogar had no bosom to speak of.

  Dr. Daruwalla could sense his wife’s impatience on John D.’s behalf, but less for the fact that Inspector Dhar had been left alone than that the dear boy hadn’t been forewarned of the pending arrival of his twin. Yet even this dilemma struck the doctor as trivial—as insubstantial as the second Mrs. Dogar’s bosom—in comparison to the big blonde in the bathtub at the Hotel Bardez. Twenty years couldn’t lessen the impact of what had happened to Dr. Daruwalla there, for it had changed him more than anything in his whole life had changed him, and the long-ago memory of it endured unfaded, although he’d never returned to Goa. All other beach resorts had been ruined for him by the unpleasant association.

  Julia recognized her husband’s expression. She could see how far away he was; she knew exactly where he was. Although she wanted to reassure John D. that the doctor would join them soon, it would have been heartless of her to leave her husband; dutifully, she remained seated beside him. Sometimes she thought she ought to tell him that it was his own curiosity that had got him into trouble. But this wasn’t entirely a fair accusation; dutifully, she remained silent. Her own memory, although it didn’t torture her with the same details that made the doctor miserable, was surprisingly vivid. She could still see Farrokh on the balcony of the Hotel Bardez, where he’d been as restless and bored as a little boy.

  “What a long bath the hippie is taking!” the doctor had said to his wife.

  “She looked like she needed a long bath, Liebchen,” Julia had told him. That was when Farrokh pulled the hippie’s rucksack closer to him and peered into the top of it; the top wouldn’t quite close.

  “Don’t look at her things!” Julia told him.

  “It’s just a book,” Farrokh said; he pulled the copy of Clea from the top of the rucksack. “I was just curious to know what she was reading.”

  “Put it back,” Julia said.

  “I will!” the doctor said, but he was reading the marked passage, the same bit about the “umbrageous violet” and the “velvet rind” that one customs official and two policemen had already found so spellbinding. “She has a poetic sensibility,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

  “I find that hard to believe,” Julia told him. “Put it back!”

  But putting the book back presented the doctor with a new difficulty: something was in the way.

  “Stop groping through her things!” Julia said.

  “The damn book doesn’t fit,” Farrokh said. “I’m not groping through her things.” An overpowering mustiness embraced him from the depths of the rucksack, a stale exhalation. The hippie’s clothing felt damp. As a married man with daughters, Dr. Daruwalla was particularly sensitive to an abundance of dirty underpants in any woman’s laundry. A mangled bra clung to his wrist as he tried to extract his hand, and still the copy of Clea wouldn’t lie flat at the top of the rucksack; something poked against the book. What the hell is this thing? the doctor wondered. Then Julia heard him gasp; she saw him spring away from the rucksack as if an animal had bitten his hand.

  “What is it?” she cried.

  “I don’t know!” the doctor moaned. He staggered to the rail of the balcony, where he gripped the tangled branches of the clinging vine. Several bright-yellow finches with seeds falling from their beaks exploded from among the flowers, and a gecko sprang from the branch nearest the doctor’s right hand; it wriggled into the open end of a drainpipe just as Dr. Daruwalla leaned over the balcony and vomited onto the patio below. Fortunately, no one was having afternoon tea there. There was only one of the hotel’s sweepers, who’d fallen asleep in a curled position in the shade of a large potted plant. The doctor’s falling vomit left the sweeper undisturbed.

  “Liebchen!” Julia cried.

  “I’m all right,” Farrokh said. “It’s nothing, really—it’s just … lunch.” Julia was staring at the hippie’s rucksack as if she expected something to crawl out from under the copy of Clea.

  “What was it—what did you see?” she asked Farrokh.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, but Julia was thoroughly exasperated with him.

  “You don’t know, you’re not sure, it’s nothing, really—it just made you throw up!” she said. She reached for the rucksack. “Well, if you don’t tell me, I’ll just see for myself.”

  “No, don’t!” the doctor cried.

  “Then tell me,” Julia said.

  “I saw a penis,” Farrokh said.

  Not even Julia could think of anything to say.

  “I mean, it can’t be a real penis,” he continued. “I don’t mean that it’s someone’s severed penis, or anything ghastly like that.”

  “What do you mean?” Julia asked him.

  “I mean, it’s a very lifelike, very graphic, very large male member—it’s an enormous cock, with balls!” Dr. Daruwalla said.

  “Do you mean a dildo?” Julia asked him. Farrokh was shocked that she knew the word; he barely knew it himself. A colleague in Toronto, a fellow surgeon, kept a collection of pornographic magazines in his hospital locker, and it was only in one of these that Dr. Daruwalla had ever seen a dildo; the advertisement hadn’t been nearly as realistic as the terrifying thing in the hippie’s rucksack.

  “I think it is a dildo, yes,” Farrokh said.

  “Let me see,” Julia said; she attempted to dodge past her husband to the rucksack.

  “No, Julia! Please!” Farrokh cried.

  “Well, you saw it—I want to see it,” Julia said.

  “I don’t think you do,” the doctor said.

  “For God’s sake, Farrokh,” Julia said. He sheepishly stood aside; then he glanced nervously at the bathroom door, behind which the huge hippie was still bathing.

  “Hurry up, Julia, and don’t mess up her things,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

  “It’s not as if everything has been neatly folded—oh my goodness!” Julia said.

  “Well, there it is—you’ve seen it. Now get away!” said Dr. Daruwalla, who was a little surprised that his wife had not recoiled in horror.

  “Does it use batteries?” Julia asked; she was still looking at it.

  “Batteries!” Farrokh cried. “For God’s sake, Julia—please get away!” The concept of such a thing being battery-powered would haunt the doctor’s dreams for 20 years. The idea certainly worsened the agony of waiting for the hippie to finish her bath.

  Fearing that the freakish girl had drowned, Dr. Daruwalla timidly approached the bathroom door, through which he heard neither singing nor splashing; there wasn’t a sign of bathtub life. But before he could knock on the door, the doctor was surprised by the uncanny powers of the bathing hippie; she seemed to sense that someone was near.

  “Hello out there,” the girl said laconically. “Would you bring me my rucksack? I forgot it.”

  Dr. Daruwalla fetched the rucksack; for its size, it was uncommonly heavy. Full of batteries, Farrokh supposed. He opened the bathroom door cautiously, and only partially—just enough to reach his hand with the rucksack inside the door. Steam, with a thousand, conflicting scents, engulfed him. The girl said, “Thanks. Just drop it.” The doctor withdrew his hand and closed the door, wondering at the sound of metal as the rucksack struck the floor. Either a machete or a machine gun, Farrokh imagined; he didn’t want to know.

  Julia had arranged a sturdy table on the balcony and covered it with a clean white sheet. Even late in the day, there was better light for surgery outside than in the rooms. Dr. Daruwalla assembled his instruments and prepared the anesthetic.

  In the bathroom, Nancy managed to reach her rucksack without getting out of the bathtub; she began a search for anything marginally cleaner than what she’d been wearing. It was a matter of exchanging one kind of dirt for another, but she wanted to wear a long-sleeved cotton blouse and a bra and long pants; she also wanted to wash the dildo, and—if she was strong enough—she wanted to unscrew the thing and count
how much money was left. It was repellent to her to touch the cock, but she managed to withdraw it from the rucksack by pinching one of the balls between the thumb and index finger of her right hand; then she dropped the dildo into the bath, where (of course) it floated, the balls slightly submerged, the circumcised head raised—almost in the manner of a perplexed, solitary swimmer. Its single, evil eye was on her.

  As for Dr. Daruwalla and his wife, their growing anxiety was in no way lessened by the unmistakable sounds of the bathtub being emptied and refilled. It was the hippie’s fourth bath.

  One can sympathize with Farrokh and Julia for their misunderstanding of the grunts and groans that Nancy made while she was struggling to unscrew the preposterous penis and determine the amount of Deutsche marks that it contained. After all, despite their rekindling of the sexual flame, the pleasure of which was partially owed to Mr. James Salter, the Daruwallas were sexually tame souls. Given the size of the intimidating instrument that they’d seen in the hippie’s rucksack, and the sounds of physical exertion that passed from behind the bathroom door, it’s forgivable that Farrokh and Julia allowed their imaginations to run away with them. How could the Daruwallas have known that Nancy’s cries and curses of frustration were simply the result of her being unable to unscrew the dildo? And despite how far the Daruwallas allowed their imaginations to run, they never could have imagined what truly had happened to Nancy.

  Four baths wouldn’t wash away what had happened to her.

  With Dieter

  From the moment Dieter had moved them out of the Taj, everything for Nancy had gone from bad to worse. Their new lodgings were in a small place on Marine Drive, the Sea Green Guest House, which Nancy noticed was an off-white color—or maybe, in the smog, a kind of blue-gray. Dieter said he favored the place because it was popular with an Arab clientele, and Arabs were safe. Nancy didn’t notice many Arabs, but she might not have spotted all of them, she supposed. She also didn’t know what Dieter meant by “safe”—he meant only that the Arabs were indifferent to drug trafficking on such a small scale as his.

  At the Sea Green Guest House, Nancy was introduced to one of the featured activities involved in buying high-quality narcotics—namely, waiting. Dieter made some phone calls; then they waited. According to Dieter, the best deals came to you indirectly. No matter how hard you tried to make a direct deal, and to make it in Bombay, you always ended up in Goa, doing your business with the friend of a friend. And you always had to wait.

  This time the friend of a friend was known to frequent the brothel area of Bombay, although the word on the street was that the guy had already gone to Goa; Dieter would have to find him there. The way you found him was, you rented a cottage on a certain beach; then you waited. You could ask for him, but even so you’d never find him; he always found you. This time his name was Rahul. It was always a common name and you never knew the last name—just Rahul. In the red-light district, they called him “Pretty.”

  “That’s a funny thing to call a guy,” Nancy observed.

  “He’s probably one of those chicks with dicks,” Dieter said. This expression was new to Nancy; she doubted that Dieter had picked it up from watching American movies.

  Dieter attempted to explain the transvestite scene to Nancy, but he’d never understood that the hijras were eunuchs—that they’d truly been emasculated. He’d confused the hijras with the zenanas—the unaltered transvestites. A hijra had once exposed himself to Dieter, but Dieter had mistaken the scar for a vagina—he’d thought the hijra was a real woman. As for the zenanas, the so-called chicks with dicks, Dieter also called them “little boys with breasts.” Dieter said that they were all fags who took estrogens to make their tits bigger, but the estrogens also made their pricks get smaller and smaller until they looked like little boys.

  Dieter tended to dwell on sexual things, and he used the halfhearted hope of finding Rahul in Bombay as an excuse to take Nancy to the red-light district. She didn’t want to go; but Dieter seemed destined to act out the old dictum that there is at least a kind of certainty in degradation. Debasement is specific. There is something exact about sexual corruption that Dieter probably found comforting in comparison to the vagueness of looking for Rahul.

  For Nancy, the wet heat and ripe smell of Bombay were only enhanced by close proximity to the cage girls on Falkland Road. “Aren’t they amazing?” Dieter asked her. But why they were “amazing” eluded Nancy. On the ground floor of the old wooden buildings, there were cagelike rooms with beckoning girls inside them; above these cages, the buildings rose not more than four or five stories, with more girls on the window-sills—or else a curtain was drawn across a window to indicate that a prostitute was with a customer.

  Nancy and Dieter drank tea at the Olympia on Falkland Road; it was an old, mirror-lined café frequented by the street prostitutes and their pimps, several of whom Dieter seemed to know. But these contacts either couldn’t or wouldn’t shed any light on the whereabouts of Rahul; they wouldn’t even speak of Rahul—except to say that he belonged to the transvestite scene, which they wanted no part of.

  “I told you he was one of those chicks with dicks,” Dieter told Nancy. It was growing dark when they left the café, and the cage girls demonstrated a more aggressive interest in her as she and Dieter passed. Some of them lifted their skirts and made obscene gestures, some of them threw garbage at her, and sudden groups of men surrounded her on the street; Dieter, almost casually, drove them away from her. He seemed to find the attention amusing; the more vulgar the attention was, the more it amused Dieter.

  Nancy had been too overwhelmed to question him, which she realized (as she sank deeper into Dr. Daruwalla’s bathtub) was a pattern she had finally broken. She submerged the dildo, holding it against her stomach. Because the dildo had not been reseated with wax, there were bubbles. Afraid that the Deutsche marks might get wet, Nancy stopped toying with the instrument. Instead, she thought of the entrenching tool in her rucksack; the doctor had surely heard it clank against the floor.

  Dieter had bought it at an army-surplus shop in Bombay. The tool was an olive-drab color; fully extended, it was a spade with a short, two-foot handle which could be folded by means of an iron hinge, and the blade of the spade could be turned at a right angle to the handle until it resembled a foot-long hoe. If Dieter were alive, he would be the first to agree that it could also be successfully employed as a tomahawk. He’d told Nancy that the entrenching tool might be useful in Goa, both for defense against the dacoits—bandits occasionally preyed upon the hippies there—and for digging the spontaneous latrine. Nancy now smiled ruefully as she reflected on the expanded features of the tool. Certainly, she’d found it adequate for digging Dieter’s grave.

  When she shut her eyes and sank deeper into the tub, she could still taste the sweet, smoky tea that they served at the Olympia; she could remember its dry, bitter aftertaste, too. With her eyes shut and the warm water holding her, she could remember her changing expression in the pitted mirrors of the café. The tea had made her feel lightheaded. She was unfamiliar with the red spittle from the betel chewing that was expectorated everywhere around them, and not even the Hindi film songs and the Qawwali on the jukebox in the Olympia had prepared her for the assault of noise along Falkland Road. A drunken man followed her and pulled her hair until Dieter knocked him down and kicked him.

  “The better brothels are in the rooms above the cages,” Dieter told her knowingly. A boy with a goatskin full of water collided with her; she was sure he’d meant to step on her foot. Someone pinched her breast, but she didn’t see who it was—man, woman or child.

  Dieter pulled her into a bidi shop, where they also sold stationery and silver trinkets and the small pipes for smoking ganja.

  “Hey, ganja-man—Mistah bhang-walla!” the proprietor greeted Dieter. He smiled happily at Nancy as he pointed to Dieter. “He Mistah bhang-master—the very best ganja-walla!” the proprietor said appreciatively.

  Nancy was fingering an unu
sual ballpoint pen; it was real silver, and Made in India was written in script lengthwise along the pen. The bottom part said Made in, the top part said India; the pen wouldn’t close securely if the script wasn’t perfectly aligned. She thought this was a stupid flaw. Also, when you wrote with the pen, the words were all wrong; in Made India, the pen said—and in Made was upside down. “Very best quality,” the proprietor told her. “Made in England!”

  “It says it’s made in India,” Nancy said.

  “Yes—they make it in India, too!” the proprietor agreed.

  “You’re a shitty liar,” Dieter told him, but he bought Nancy the pen.

  Nancy was thinking she’d like to go somewhere cool and write postcards. In Iowa, wouldn’t they be surprised to hear where she was? But, at the same time, she was thinking, They’ll never hear from me again. Bombay both terrified and exhilarated her; it was so foreign and seemingly lawless that Nancy felt she could be anybody she wanted to be. It was the clean slate she was looking for, and in the back of her mind, with the persistence of something permanent, was that impossible goal of purity to which she’d been drawn in the person of Inspector Patel.

  In the overly dramatic manner of many fallen young women, Nancy believed that only two roads remained open to her: she could keep on falling until she was indifferent to her own defilement, or else she could aspire to acts of social conscience so great and self-sacrificing that she could reclaim her innocence and redeem everything. In the world she’d descended to, there were only these choices: stay with Dieter or go to Inspector Patel. But what had she to give to Vijay Patel? Nancy feared it was nothing that the good policeman wanted.

  Later, in the doorway of a transvestite brothel, a hijra exposed himself so boldly and suddenly that Nancy hadn’t time to look away. Even Dieter was forced to admit that there was no evidence of a penis—not even a little one. As to what was there, Nancy wasn’t sure. Dieter concluded that Rahul might be one of these—“a kind of radical eunuch,” he said.