A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  Inspector Patel suspected that Rahul had left India. This was no consolation to Nancy; having chosen goodness over evil, she anticipated resolution. It was a pity that Nancy would wait 20 years for a simple but informative conversation with Dr. Daruwalla which would reveal to them both that they’d made acquaintance with the same Rahul. However, not even a detective as dogged as D.C.P. Patel could have been expected to guess that a sexually altered killer might have been found at the Duckworth Club. Moreover, for 15 years, Rahul would not have been found there—at least not very often. He was more frequently in London, where, after the lengthy and painful completion of his sex-change operation, he was able to give more of his energy and concentration to what he called his art. Alas … no excess of energy or concentration would much expand his talent or his range; the cartoon quality of his belly drawings persisted. His tendency toward sexually explicit caricature endured.

  It was thematic with Rahul—an inappropriately mirthful elephant with one tusk raised, one eye winking, and water spraying from the end of its downward-pointing trunk. The size and shape of the victims’ navels afforded the artist a considerable variety of winking eyes; the amount and color of the victims’ pubic hair also varied. The water from the elephant’s trunk was constant; the elephant sprayed, with seeming indifference, over all. Many of the murdered prostitutes had shaved their pubic hair; the elephant appeared not to notice, or not to care.

  But it wasn’t only that his imagination was sexually perverse, for within Rahul a veritable war was being waged over the true identity of his sexual self, which, to his astonishment, was not appreciably clarified by the successful completion of his long-awaited sex change. Now Rahul was to all appearances a woman; if he couldn’t bear children, it had never been the desire to bear children that had compelled him to become a her. However, it was Rahul’s illusion that a new sexual identity could provide a lasting peace of mind.

  Rahul had loathed being a man. In the company of homosexuals, he’d never felt he was one of them, either. But he’d experienced little closeness with his fellow transvestites; in the company of hijras or zenanas, Rahul had felt both different and superior. It didn’t occur to him that they were content to be what they were—Rahul had never been content. There’s more than one way to be a third gender; but Rahul’s uniqueness was inseparable from his viciousness, which extended even toward his fellow transvestites.

  He detested the all-too-womanly gestures of most hijras and zenanas; he thought the mischief with which they dressed indicated an all-too-womanly frivolity. As for the traditional powers of the hijras to bless or to curse, Rahul had no belief that they possessed such powers; he believed they tended to parade themselves, either for the smug amusement of boring heterosexuals or for the titillation of more conventional homosexuals. In the homosexual community, at least there were those few—like Subodh, Rahul’s late brother—who defiantly stood out; they advertised their sexual orientation not for the entertainment of the timid but in order to discomfort the intolerant. Yet Rahul imagined that even those homosexuals who were as bold as Subodh were vulnerable to how slavishly they sought the affections of other homosexuals. Rahul had hated how girlishly Subodh had allowed himself to be dominated by Neville Eden.

  Rahul had imagined that it was only as a woman that she could dominate both women and men. He’d also imagined that being a woman would make him envy other women less, or not at all; he’d even thought that his desire to hurt and humiliate women would somehow evanesce. He was unprepared for how he would continue to hate them and desire to do them harm; prostitutes—and other women of what he presumed to be loose behavior—especially offended him, in part because of how lightly they regarded their sexual favors, and how they took for granted their sexual parts, which Rahul had been forced to acquire through such perseverance and pain.

  Rahul had put himself through the rigors of what he believed was necessary to make him happy; yet he still raged. Like some (but fortunately few) real women, Rahul was contemptuous of those men who sought his attention, while at the same time he strongly desired those men who remained indifferent to his obvious beauty. And this was only half his problem; the other half was that his need to kill certain women was surprisingly (to him) unchanged. And after he’d strangled or bludgeoned them—he favored the latter form of execution—he couldn’t resist creating his signature work of art upon their flaccid bellies; the soft stomach of a dead woman was Rahul’s preferred medium, his canvas of choice.

  Beth had been the first; killing Dieter was unmemorable to Rahul. But the spontaneity with which he’d struck down Beth and the utter unresponsiveness of her abdomen to the dhobi pen were stimulations so extreme that Rahul continued to yield to them.

  In this sense was his tragedy compounded, for his sex change had not enabled him to view other women as companionable human beings. And because Rahul still hated women, he knew he’d failed to become a woman at all. Further isolating him, in London, was the fact that Rahul also loathed his fellow transsexuals. Before his operation, he’d suffered countless psychological interviews; obviously, they were superficial, for Rahul had managed to convey an utter lack of sexual anger. He’d observed that friendliness, which he interpreted as an impulse toward a cloying kind of sympathy, impressed the evaluating psychiatrist and the sex therapists.

  There were meetings with other would-be transsexuals, both those applying for the operation and those in the more advanced phase of “training” for the postoperative women they would soon become. Complete transsexuals also attended these agonizing meetings. It was supposed to be encouraging to socialize with complete transsexuals, just to see what real women they were. This was nauseating to Rahul, who hated it when anyone dared to suggest that he or she was like him; Rahul knew that he wasn’t “like” anyone.

  It appalled him that these complete transsexuals even shared the names and phone numbers of former boyfriends. These were men, they said, who weren’t at all repulsed by women “like us”—possibly these interesting men were even attracted by them. What a concept! Rahul thought. He wasn’t becoming a woman in order to become a member of some transsexual club; if the operation was complete, no one would ever know that Rahul had not been born a woman.

  But there was one who knew: Aunt Promila. She’d been such a supporter. Gradually, Rahul resented how she sought to control him. She would continue her most generous financial assistance to his life in London, but only if he promised not to forget her—only if he would come pay some attention to her from time to time. Rahul wasn’t opposed to these periodic visits to Bombay; he was merely annoyed that his aunt manipulated how often and when he traveled to see her. And as she grew older, she grew more needy; shamelessly, and frequently, she referred to Rahul’s elevated status in her will.

  Even with Promila’s considerable influence, it took Rahul longer to legalize his change of name than it had taken him to change his sex—in spite of the bribes. And although there were many other women’s names that he preferred, it was politic of him to choose Promila, which greatly pleased his aunt and assured him an indeed favorable position in her much-mentioned will. Nevertheless, the new name on the new passport left Rahul feeling incomplete. Perhaps he felt that he could never be Promila Rai as long as his Aunt Promila was alive. Since Promila was the only person on earth whom Rahul loved, it made him feel guilty that he grew impatient with how long he had to wait for her to die.

  Remembering Aunt Promila

  He was five or six, or maybe only four; Rahul could never remember. What he did recall was that he thought he was old enough to be going to the men’s room by himself. Aunt Promila took him to the ladies’ room—she took him with her into the toilet stall, too. He’d told her that there were urinals in the men’s room and that the men stood up to pee.

  “I know a better way to pee,” she’d told him.

  At the Duckworth Club, the ladies’ room suffered from an elephant motif; in the men’s room, the tiger-hunt decor was far less obtrusive. For example, in
the ladies’ room toilet stalls, there was a pull-down platform on the inside of the stall door. It was simply a shelf that folded flat against the door when not in use. By means of a handle, the shelf could be pulled down; on this platform, a lady could put her handbag—or whatever else she took with her into the toilet stall. The handle was a ring that passed like an earring through the base of an elephant’s trunk.

  Promila would lift her skirt and pull down her panties; then she sat on the toilet seat, and Rahul—who’d also pulled down his pants and his underpants—would sit on her lap.

  “Pull down the elephant, dear,” Aunt Promila would tell him, and Rahul would lean forward until he could reach the ring through the elephant’s trunk. The elephant had no tusks; Rahul found the elephant generally lacking in realism—for example, there was no opening at the end of the elephant’s trunk.

  First Promila peed, then Rahul. He sat on his aunt’s lap, listening to her. When she wiped herself, he could feel the back of her hand against his bare bum. Then she would reach into his lap and point his little penis down into the toilet. It was difficult for him to pee from her lap.

  “Don’t miss,” she’d whisper in his ear. “Are you being careful?” Rahul tried to be careful. When he was finished, Aunt Promila wiped his penis with some toilet paper. Then she felt his penis with her bare hand. “Let’s be sure you’re dry, dear,” Promila would say to him. She always held him until his penis was stiff. “What a big boy you are,” she’d whisper.

  When they were finished, they washed their hands together.

  “The hot water is too hot—it will burn you,” Aunt Promila would warn him. Together they stood at the wildly ornate sink. There was a single faucet in the form of an elephant’s head. The water flowed through the elephant’s trunk, emerging in a broad spray. You lifted one tusk for the hot water, the other tusk for the cold. “Just the cold water, dear,” Aunt Promila told him. She let Rahul operate the faucet for both of them; he would raise and lower the tusk for cold water—just one tusk. “Always wash your hands, dear,” Aunt Promila would say.

  “Yes, Auntie,” Rahul answered. He’d supposed his aunt’s preference for cold water was a sign of her age; she must have remembered a time before there was hot water.

  When he was older, maybe 8 or 9—he could have been 10—Promila sent him to see Dr. Lowji Daruwalla. She was concerned with what she called Rahul’s inexplicable hairlessness—or so she told the doctor. In retrospect, Rahul realized that he’d disappointed his aunt—and on more than one occasion. Promila’s disappointment, Rahul also realized, was sexual; his so-called hairlessness had little to do with it. But there was no way for Promila Rai to complain about the size or the short-lived stiffness of her nephew’s penis—certainly not to Dr. Lowji Daruwalla! The question of whether or not Rahul was impotent would have to wait until Rahul was 12 or 13; at that time, the examining physician would be old Dr. Tata.

  In retrospect, Rahul would realize that his aunt was chiefly interested in knowing whether he was impotent or merely impotent with her. Naturally, she’d not told Tata that she was having a repeatedly disappointing sexual experience with Rahul; she’d implied that Rahul himself was concerned because he’d failed to maintain an erection with a prostitute. Dr. Tata’s response had been disappointing to Aunt Promila, too.

  “Perhaps it was the prostitute,” old Dr. Tata had replied.

  Years later, when he thought of his Aunt Promila, Rahul would remember that. Perhaps it was the prostitute, he would think to himself; possibly he’d not been impotent after all. All things considered, now that Rahul was a woman, what did it really matter? He sincerely loved his Aunt Promila. As for washing his hands, the memory of the elephant with one tusk raised would never be lost on Rahul; but he preferred to wash his hands in hot water.

  A Childless Couple Searches for Rahul

  With hindsight, it is impressive how Deputy Commissioner Patel fathomed Rahul’s attachment to family money—in India. The detective thought that a well-to-do relative might explain the killer’s few but periodic visits to Bombay. For 15 years, the victims who were decorated with the winking elephant were prostitutes from the Kamathipura brothels or from the brothels on Grant Road and Falkland Road. Their murders occurred in groups of two or three, within two or three weeks’ time, and then not again for nearly nine months or a year. There were no murders recorded in the hottest months, just before the monsoon, or during the monsoon itself; the murderer struck at a more comfortable time of the year. Only the first two murders, in Goa, were hot-weather murders.

  Detective Patel could find no evidence of the murders with elephant drawings in any other Indian city; this was why he had concluded that the killer lived abroad. It wasn’t hard to uncover the relatively few murders of this nature in London; although these weren’t restricted to the Indian community, the victims were always prostitutes or students—the latter, usually of an artistic inclination, were reputed to have lived in a bohemian or otherwise unconventional way. The more he studied the murderer, and the more deeply he loved Nancy, the more the deputy commissioner realized that Nancy was lucky to be alive.

  But with the passage of time, Nancy less and less wore the countenance of a woman who felt herself to be lucky. The Deutsche marks in the dildo—such an excessive amount that, at first, both Nancy and young Inspector Patel had felt quite liberated—were the beginning of Nancy and Patel’s feeling that they had been compromised. It made only the smallest dent in the sum for Nancy to send what she’d stolen from the hardware store to her parents. It was, she thought, the best way to erase the past, but her newfound crusade for justice interfered with the purity of her intention. The money was to repay the hardware store, but in sending it to her parents she couldn’t resist naming those men (in feed-and-grain supply) who’d made her feel like dirt. If her parents wanted to repay the store after knowing what had happened to their daughter there, that would be their decision.

  Thus she created a moral dilemma for her parents, which had quite the opposite effect from what Nancy desired. She had not erased the past; she’d brought it to life in her parents’ eyes, and for almost 20 years (until they died), her parents faithfully described their ongoing torment in Iowa to her—all the while begging her to come “home” but refusing to come visit her. It was never clear to Nancy what they finally did with the money.

  As for young Inspector Patel, it made a similarly small dent in the sum of Dieter’s Deutsche marks for the previously uncorrupted policeman to engage in his first and last bribe. It was simply the usual and necessary sum required for promotion, for a more lucrative posting—and one must remember that Vijay Patel was not a Maharashtrian. For a Gujarati to make the move from an inspector at the Colaba Station to a deputy commissioner in Crime Branch Headquarters at Crawford Market required what is called greasing the wheel. But—over the years, and in combination with his failure to find Rahul—the bribe had etched itself into a part of the deputy commissioner’s vulnerable self-esteem. It had been a reasonable expense, certainly not a lavish amount of money; and contrary to the infuriating fiction represented by the Inspector Dhar movies, there was no significant advancement within the Bombay police force without a little bribery.

  And although Nancy and the detective were a love story, they were unhappy. It wasn’t only that the sheer grimness of serving justice had grown to be a task, nor was it simply that Rahul had escaped unpunished. Both Mr. and Mrs. Patel assumed that a higher judgment had been made against them; for Nancy was infertile, and they’d spent nearly a decade learning the reason—and then another decade, first trying to adopt a child and finally deciding against adoption.

  In the first decade of their efforts to conceive a child, both Nancy and young Patel—she called him Vijay—believed that they were being punished for dipping into the Deutsche marks. Nancy had entirely forgotten a brief period of physical discomfort upon her return to Bombay with the dildo. A slight burning in her urethra and the appearance in her underwear of an insignificant vag
inal discharge had contributed to Nancy’s delay in initiating a sexual relationship with Vijay Patel. The symptoms were mild, and they overlapped, to some degree, with cystitis (inflammation of the bladder) and urinary tract infection. She didn’t want to imagine that Dieter had given her something venereal, although her memory of that brothel in Kamathipura, and how familiarly Dieter had spoken with the madam, gave Nancy good reason to be worried.

  Moreover, at the time, she could plainly see that she and young Patel were falling in love with each other; she wasn’t about to ask him to recommend a suitable physician. Instead, in that well-worn travel guide, which she still faithfully carried, was an on-the-road recipe for a douche; but she misread the proper proportion of vinegar and gave herself much worse burning than she began with. For a week, there was an even yellower stain in her underwear, which she ascribed to the unwise remedy of her homemade douche. As for the abdominal pain, it closely attended the onset of her period, which was unusually heavy; she had much cramping and even a little chill. She wondered if her body was trying to reject the IUD. And then she completely recovered; she only remembered this episode 10 years later. She was sitting with her husband in the office of a fancy private venereologist, and—with Vijay’s help—she was filling out a detailed questionnaire; it was part of the infertility work.