A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  On a day that had barely begun, Dr. Daruwalla was already exhausted. Nevertheless, the doctor made quick and clever use of the biting episode. If Martin Mills was so sure that Bird-Shit Boy was capable of contributing to the daily chores of a circus, perhaps the missionary could be persuaded to take some responsibility for the little beggar. Martin Mills was eager to take responsibility for the elephant boy; the zealot would be likely to claim responsibility for a world of cripples, Farrokh imagined. Thereupon Dr. Daruwalla assigned Martin Mills the task of taking Ganesh to Parsi General Hospital; the doctor wanted the crippled beggar to be examined by Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Jeejeebhoy—Double E-NT Jeejeebhoy, as he was called. Dr. Jeejeebhoy was an expert on the eye problems that were epidemic in India.

  Although there was a rheumy discharge and Ganesh had said that his eyelids were gummed shut every morning, there wasn’t that softness of the eyeballs that Dr. Daruwalla thought of as end-stage or “white” eyes; then the cornea is dull and opaque, and the patient is blind. Farrokh hoped that, whatever was wrong with Ganesh, it was in an early stage. Vinod had admitted that the circus wouldn’t take a boy who was going blind—not even the Great Blue Nile.

  But before Farrokh could hurry the elephant boy and the Jesuit on their way to Parsi General, which wasn’t far, Martin Mills had spontaneously come to the aid of a woman in the waiting room. She was the mother of a crippled child; the missionary had dropped to his knees at her feet, which Farrokh found to be an irritating habit of the zealot. The woman was frightened by the gesture. Also, she wasn’t in need of aid; she was not bleeding from her lips and gums, as the scholastic had declared—she was merely eating betel nut, which the Jesuit had never seen.

  Dr. Daruwalla ushered Martin from the waiting room to his office, where the doctor believed that the missionary could do slightly less harm. Dr. Daruwalla insisted that Ganesh come with them, for the doctor was fearful that the dangerous beggar might bite someone else. Thereupon Farrokh calmly told Martin Mills what paan was—the local version of betel. The areca nut is wrapped in a betel leaf. Other common ingredients are rose syrup, aniseed, lime paste … but people put almost everything in the betel leaf, even cocaine. The veteran betel-nut eater has red-stained lips and teeth and gums. The woman the missionary had alarmed was not bleeding; she was merely eating paan.

  Finally, Farrokh was able to free himself from Martin Mills. Dr. Daruwalla hoped that Double E-NT Jeejeebhoy would take forever to examine Ganesh’s eyes.

  By midmorning, the day’s confusion had achieved a lunatic pace. It was already a day that brought to Farrokh’s mind those white-faced, dark-skinned girls in their purple tutus; it was a Load Cycle kind of day, as if everyone in the doctor’s office and waiting room were riding bicycles to cancan music. As if to emphasize this chaos, Ranjit walked into the office without knocking; the medical secretary had just read Dr. Daruwalla’s mail. Although the envelope that Ranjit handed to Dr. Daruwalla was addressed to the doctor, not to Inspector Dhar, there was something familiar about the cold neutrality of the typescript; even before the doctor looked inside the envelope and saw the two-rupee note, he knew what he’d find. Farrokh was nevertheless stunned to read the message typed in capital letters on the serial-number side of the money. This time the warning said, YOU’RE AS DEAD AS DHAR.

  Madhu Uses Her Tongue

  There was a telephone call that added to the general confusion; in his distress, Ranjit made a mistake. The secretary thought the caller was Radiology Patel—it was a question regarding when Dr. Daruwalla would come to view the photographs. Ranjit assumed that the “photographs” were X rays, and he answered abruptly that the doctor was busy; either Ranjit or the doctor would call back with the answer. But after the secretary hung up, he realized that the caller hadn’t been Radiology Patel. It had been Deputy Commissioner Patel, of course.

  “There was a … Patel on the phone for you,” Ranjit told Farrokh in an offhand fashion. “He wants to know when you’re coming to see the photographs.”

  And now there were two two-rupee notes in Dr. Daruwalla’s pocket; there was the warning to Dhar (YOU’RE AS DEAD AS LAL) and the warning to the doctor (YOU’RE AS DEAD AS DHAR). Farrokh felt certain that these threats would enhance the grimness of the photographs that the deputy commissioner wanted to show him.

  Farrokh knew that John D., who was good at concealing his anger, was already angry with him for not forewarning the actor of the arrival of his bothersome twin. Dhar would be even angrier if Dr. Daruwalla saw the photographs of the elephants drawn on the murdered prostitutes without him, but the doctor thought it unwise to bring Dhar to Crime Branch Headquarters—nor would it be advisable to bring Martin Mills. The particular police station was near St. Xavier’s College, another Jesuit institution; this one was coeducational—St. Ignatius admitted only boys. Martin Mills would doubtless attempt to persuade his fellow Jesuits to admit Madhu to their school in case she wasn’t acceptable to the circus. The madman would probably insist that St. Xavier’s offer scholarships to other available child prostitutes! The scholastic had already announced that he would approach the Father Rector of St. Ignatius on Ganesh’s behalf. Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t wait to hear Father Julian’s response to the notion of St. Ignatius School attempting to educate a crippled beggar from Chowpatty Beach!

  While the doctor was speculating in this fashion, and as he was hurrying to examine his remaining patients, Vinod and Deepa returned with Madhu and the tetracycline. Before he could abscond to the police station, Farrokh felt obliged to set a trap for Mr. Garg. The doctor told Deepa to tell Garg that Madhu was being treated for a sexually transmitted disease; that sounded vague enough. If Mr. Garg had diddled the child, he would need to call Dr. Daruwalla to find out which disease—in order to learn the prescribed cure.

  “And tell him we’re checking to see if she’s HIV-positive,” Farrokh said. That ought to make the bastard squirm, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

  The doctor wanted Deepa and Vinod to understand that Madhu must be kept away from the Wetness Cabaret, and away from Garg. The dwarf would drive his wife to the train station—Deepa had to return to the Great Blue Nile—but Vinod had to keep Madhu with him.

  “And, remember, she’s not clean until she’s taken all the tetracycline,” the doctor told the dwarf.

  “I am remembering,” Vinod said.

  Then the dwarf asked about Dhar. Where was he? Was he all right? And didn’t Dhar need his faithful driver? Dr. Daruwalla explained to Vinod that Dhar was suffering from the common post-trauma delusion that he was someone else.

  “Who is he being?” the dwarf inquired.

  “A Jesuit missionary in training to be a priest,” the doctor replied.

  Vinod was instantly sympathetic to this delusion. The actor was even more brain-damaged than the dwarf had first suspected! The key to dealing with Dhar, the doctor explained, was to expect him to be one person one minute and another person the next. The dwarf gravely nodded his big head.

  Then Deepa kissed the doctor good-bye. There always lingered on her lips the sticky sweetness of those lemon drops she liked. Any physical contact with the dwarf’s wife made Dr. Daruwalla blush.

  Farrokh could feel himself blush, but he’d never known if his blushes were visible. He knew he was dark-skinned for a Parsi, although he was fair-skinned in comparison to many other Indians—certainly, say, to a Goan or to a South Indian. In Canada, of course, the doctor was well aware that he was usually perceived as a man “of color,” but when it came to blushing, he never knew whether or not he could blush undetected. Naturally, his embarrassment was communicated by other signals quite unrelated to his complexion and utterly unknown to him. For example, in the aftermath of Deepa’s kiss, he averted his eyes but his lips remained parted, as if he’d forgotten something he was about to say. Thus he was caught all the more off guard when Madhu kissed him.

  He wanted to believe that the child was merely imitating the dwarf’s wife, but the girl’s kiss was too lush and knowing—
Deepa had not inserted her tongue. Farrokh felt Madhu’s tongue flick his own tongue, dartingly. And the girl’s breath was redolent of some dark spice—not lemon drops, possibly cardamom or clove. As Madhu withdrew from him, she flashed her first smile, and Dr. Daruwalla saw the blood-red edge to her teeth at the gum line. For Farrokh to realize that the child prostitute was a veteran betel-nut eater was only a mild surprise, even anticlimactic. The doctor presumed that an addiction to paan was the least of Madhu’s problems.

  A Meeting at Crime Branch Headquarters

  The inappropriately lewd encounter with Madhu left Dr. Daruwalla in no mood to be tolerant of the photographic record of Rahul’s artistry on the bellies of the murdered whores. The subject matter was no less limited than what the doctor had seen depicted on Beth’s belly 20 years ago, nor had the intervening years imparted to the artist any measurable subtlety of style. The ever-mirthful elephant winked its eye and raised the opposite tusk. The water from the end of the elephant’s trunk continued to spray the pubic hair—in many cases, the shaved pubic area—of the dead women. Not even the passing of so many years, not to mention the horror of so many murders, was sufficient to inspire Rahul beyond the first act of his imagination—namely, that the victim’s navel was always the winking eye. The differences among the women’s navels provided the only variety in the many photographs. Detective Patel remarked that both the drawings and the murders gave new meaning to that tired old phrase “a one-track mind.” Dr. Daruwalla, who was too appalled to speak, could only nod that he agreed.

  Farrokh showed the deputy commissioner the threatening two-rupee notes, but D.C.P. Patel was unsurprised; he’d been expecting more warnings. The deputy commissioner knew that the note in Mr. Lal’s mouth had been just the beginning; no murderer the detective had ever known was content to threaten potential victims only once. Either killers didn’t warn you or they repeatedly warned you. Yet, for 20 years, this killer hadn’t given anyone a warning; only now, beginning with Mr. Lal, had there emerged a kind of vendetta against Inspector Dhar and Dr. Daruwalla. It seemed unlikely to the deputy commissioner that the sole motivation for this change in Rahul had been a stupid movie. Something about the Daruwalla-Dhar connection must have infuriated Rahul—both personally and for a long time. It was the deputy commissioner’s suspicion that Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer had simply exacerbated Rahul’s longstanding hatred.

  “Tell me—I’m just curious,” said Detective Patel to Dr. Daruwalla. “Do you know any hijras—I mean personally?” But as soon as he saw that the doctor was thinking about the question—the doctor had been unable to answer spontaneously—the detective added, “In your movie, you made a hijra the murderer. Whatever gave you such an idea? I mean, in my experience, the hijras I know are reasonably gentle—they’re mostly nice people. The hijra prostitutes may be bolder than the female prostitutes, yet I don’t think of them as dangerous. But possibly you knew one—someone who wasn’t very nice. I’m just curious.”

  “Well, someone had to be the murderer,” Dr. Daruwalla said defensively. “It was nothing personal.”

  “Let me be more specific,” said the deputy commissioner. It was a line that got Dr. Daruwalla’s attention, because the doctor had often written that line for Inspector Dhar. “Did you ever know somebody with a woman’s breasts and a boy’s penis? It was a rather small penis, from all reports,” the detective added. “I don’t mean a hijra. I mean a zenana—a transvestite with a penis, but with breasts.”

  That was when Farrokh felt a flutter of pain in the area of his heart. It was his injured rib, trying to remind him of Rahul. The rib was crying out to him that Rahul was the second Mrs. Dogar, but the doctor mistook the pain for an actual signal from his heart. His heart said, Rahul! But Rahul’s connection to Mrs. Dogar still eluded Dr. Daruwalla.

  “Yes, or maybe—I mean, I knew a man who was trying to become a woman,” Farrokh replied. “He’d obviously taken estrogens, maybe he’d even had surgical implants—he definitely had a woman’s breasts. But whether he’d been castrated, or if he’d had other surgery, I don’t know—I mean, I presumed he had a penis because he was interested in the complete operation … a total sex change.”

  “And did he have this operation?” the deputy commissioner asked.

  “I wouldn’t know,” the doctor replied. “I haven’t seen him, or her, for twenty years.”

  “That would be the right number of years, wouldn’t it?” the detective asked. Again, Farrokh felt the twinge in his rib that he confused with his excited heart.

  “He was hoping to go to London for the operation,” Farrokh explained. “In those days, I believe it would have been very difficult to get a complete sex-change operation in India. They’re still illegal here.”

  “I believe that our murderer also went to London,” Patel informed the doctor. “Obviously, and only recently, he—or she—came back.”

  “The person I knew was interested in going to art school … in London,” Farrokh said numbly. The photographs of the drawings on the bellies of the murdered prostitutes grew clearer in his mind, although the photographs lay facedown on the deputy commissioner’s desk. It was Patel who picked one up and looked at it again.

  “Not a very good art school would have taken him, I suspect,” the detective said.

  He never shut his office door, which opened on an outdoor balcony; there were a dozen such offices off this balcony, and it was the deputy commissioner’s policy that no one ever closed a door—except in the monsoon rains, and then only when the wind was wrong. With the doors open, no one being interrogated could later claim that they’d been beaten. Also, the sound of the police secretaries typing their officers’ reports was a sound that the deputy commissioner enjoyed; the cacophony of typewriters implied both industry and order. He knew that many of his fellow policemen were lazy and their secretaries were sloppy; the typed reports themselves were rarely as orderly as the clacking of the keys. On his desk, Deputy Commissioner Patel faced three reports in need of rewriting, and an additional report in greater need, but he pushed these four reports aside in order to spread out the photographs of the murdered whores’ bellies. The elephant drawings were so familiar to him that they calmed him; he didn’t want the doctor to sense his eagerness.

  “And would this person that you knew have had a common sort of name, a name like Rahul?” the detective asked. It was a delivery worthy of the insincerity of Inspector Dhar.

  “Rahul Rai,” said Dr. Daruwalla; it was almost a whisper, but this didn’t lessen the deputy commissioner’s quickening pleasure.

  “And would this Rahul Rai have been in Goa … perhaps visiting the beaches … at or about the time when the German and the American—those bodies you saw—were murdered?” Patel asked. The doctor was slumped in his chair as if bent by indigestion.

  “At my hotel—at the Bardez,” Farrokh replied. “He was staying with his aunt. And the thing is, if Rahul is in Bombay, he is certainly familiar with the Duckworth Club—his aunt was a member!”

  “Was?” the detective said.

  “She’s dead,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “I would presume that Rahul, he or she, inherited her fortune.”

  D.C.P. Patel touched the raised tusk of the elephant in one of the photographs; then he stacked the photos in a single neat pile. He’d always known there was family money in India, but the Duckworth Club connection was a surprise. What had misled him for 20 years was Rahul’s brief notoriety in the transvestite brothels on Falkland Road and Grant Road; these were hardly the usual haunts of a Duckworthian.

  “Of course I know that you know my wife,” the detective said. “I must put you together with her. She knows your Rahul, too, and it might help me to hear you compare notes—so to speak.”

  “We could have lunch at the club. Someone there might know more about Rahul,” Farrokh suggested.

  “Don’t you ask any questions!” the deputy commissioner suddenly shouted. It offended Dr. Daruwalla to be yelled at, but the detective was
quickly tactful, if not exactly mollifying. “We wouldn’t want to warn Rahul, would we?” Patel said, as if he were speaking to a child.

  The rising dust from the courtyard had coated the leaves of the neem trees; the rail of the balcony was also coated with dust. In the detective’s office, the dull brass ceiling fan labored in an effort to push the motes of dust back out the open door. The darting shadows of fork-tailed kites occasionally moved across the deputy commissioner’s desk. The one open eve of the topmost elephant in the stack of photos seemed to notice all these things, which the doctor knew he would never forget.

  “Lunch today?” suggested the detective.

  “Tomorrow is better for me,” Dr. Daruwalla said. His pending obligation to deliver Martin Mills into the hands of the Jesuits at St. Ignatius was a welcome intrusion; he also needed to talk to Julia, and he wanted the time to tell Dhar—Dhar should be at the lunch with the wounded hippie. Farrokh knew that John D. had a superior memory, maybe even of Rahul.

  “Tomorrow is fine,” said the deputy commissioner, but his disappointment was evident. The words his wife had used to describe Rahul were constantly with him. Also with him was the size of Rahul’s big hands, which had held his wife’s big breasts; also, the erectness and the shapeliness of Rahul’s breasts, which Nancy had felt against her back; also, the small, silky little boy’s penis, which his wife had felt against her buttocks. Nancy had said he was condescending, mocking, teasing—certainly sophisticated, probably cruel.

  Because Dr. Daruwalla had only begun the struggle to compose a written report on Rahul Rai, the detective couldn’t quite leave him alone. “Give me one word for Rahul,” Patel asked Farrokh. “The first word that comes to your mind—I’m just curious,” the detective said.