by John Irving
“Arrogant,” the doctor replied. After 20 years, it was visible on Detective Patel’s face that this was unsatisfactory.
“Please try another,” the detective said.
“Superior,” said Dr. Daruwalla.
“You’re getting closer,” Patel replied.
“Rahul is a tease,” Farrokh explained. “He condescends to you, he mocks you, he bullies you with a sort of self-satisfied sophistication. Like his late aunt, he uses his sophistication as a weapon. I think he is basically a cruel person,” The doctor paused in his description because the detective had closed his eyes and sat smiling at his desk. All the while, Deputy Commissioner Patel articulated his fingers as if he were typing up another report, but his fingers weren’t tapping the keys of his typewriter; the detective had once more spread out the photographs—they covered his desk—and he typed on the many heads of the mocking elephants, his fingers finding the navels of the murdered prostitutes … all those ceaselessly winking eyes.
Down the balcony, from another detective’s office, a man was screaming that he was telling the truth, while a policeman calmly contradicted him with the almost harmonious repetition of the word “lies.” From the courtyard kennel came a corresponding clamor—the police attack dogs.
After Dr. Daruwalla had completed his written report on Rahul, the doctor wandered onto the balcony to have a look at the dogs; they’d barked themselves out. The late-morning sun was now beating down on the courtyard; the police dogs, all Dobermans, were asleep in the only shady corner of their kennel, which was obscured from Farrokh’s view by a clump of neem trees. On the balcony itself, however, was a small cage with a newspaper floor, and the doctor knelt to play with a Doberman pinscher puppy—a prisoner in a portable pen. The puppy wriggled and whined for Farrokh’s attention. It thrust its sleek black muzzle through a square of the wire mesh; it licked the doctor’s hand—its needle-sharp teeth nipped his fingers.
“Are you a good dog?” Farrokh asked the puppy. Its wild eyes were ringed with the rusty-brown markings of its breed, which is preferred for police work in Bombay because the Dobermann short hair is suitable for the hot weather. The dogs were large and powerful and fast; they had the terrier’s jaws and tenacity, although they weren’t quite as intelligent as German shepherds.
A subinspector, a junior officer, came out of an office where at least three typewriters were resounding, and this young, officious policeman spoke aggressively to Dr. Daruwalla … something to the effect that “spoiling” the Doberman puppy would make it untrainable for police business, something about not treating a future attack dog as a pet. Whenever anyone spoke Hindi this abruptly to the doctor, Farrokh felt frozen by his lack of fluency in the language.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Daruwalla said in English.
“No, don’t you be sorry!” someone suddenly shouted. It was Deputy Commissioner Patel; he’d popped out of his office onto the balcony, where he stood clutching Farrokh’s written statement in his hands. “Go on—play with the puppy all you want to!” the deputy commissioner shouted.
The junior policeman realized his error and quickly apologized to Dr. Daruwalla. “I’m sorry, saar,” he said. But before the subinspector could slip back into his office and the safe din of the typewriters, he was barked at by Detective Patel, too.
“You should be sorry—speaking to my witness!” the deputy commissioner yelled.
So I am a “witness,” Farrokh realized. He’d made a small fortune satirizing the police; now he knew he was in utter ignorance of even a matter as trivial as the pecking order among policemen.
“Go on—play with the puppy!” Patel repeated to the doctor, and so Farrokh once more turned his attention to the Doberman. Since the little dog had just dropped a surprisingly large turd on the newspaper floor of its cage, Dr. Daruwalla’s attention was momentarily attracted to the turd. That was when he saw that the newspaper was today’s edition of The Times of India, and that the Doberman’s turd had fallen on the review of Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence. It was a bad review, of such a hostile nature that its surliness seemed enhanced by the smell of dog shit.
The turd prevented all but a partial reading of the review, which was just as well; Farrokh was angered enough. There was even a gratuitous swipe taken at Dhar’s perceived weight problem. The reviewer asserted that Inspector Dhar sported too protrusive a beer belly to justify the film studio’s claim that Dhar was the Charles Bronson of Bombay.
By the nearby flutter of pages, Dr. Daruwalla realized that the deputy commissioner had finished reading the doctor’s statement. The detective also stood close enough to the puppy’s cage to observe what Farrokh had been reading; Detective Patel was the one who had put the newspaper there.
“I’m afraid it’s not a very good review,” the deputy commissioner observed.
“They never are,” Farrokh said. He followed Patel back to his office. Dr. Daruwalla could feel that the detective wasn’t altogether pleased by the doctor’s written report.
“Sit down,” Detective Patel said, but when the doctor moved to the chair he’d sat in before, the detective caught his arm and steered him around the desk. “No, no—you sit where I usually sit!” And so Farrokh seated himself in the deputy commissioner’s chair. It was higher than the doctor’s previous seat; the photographs of the murdered prostitutes were easier to see, or else harder to ignore. The doctor remembered the day at Chowpatty Beach when little John D. had been so frightened by the festival mob, by all the elephant heads being carried into the sea. “They’re drowning the elephants!” the child had cried. “Now the elephants will be angry!”
In his written statement, Farrokh had said that he believed the hateful phone calls about his father’s assassination had been from Rahul; after all, it was the voice of a woman trying to sound like a man, and this might suit whatever voice Rahul had ended up with. Twenty years ago, Rahul’s voice had been a work-in-progress; it had been sexually undecided. But although Detective Patel found this speculation interesting, the detective was disturbed by Dr. Daruwalla’s conclusion: that Rahul had been old Lowji’s assassin. This was too imaginative—it was too big a leap. This was the kind of conjecture that marred the doctor’s written report and made it, in the deputy commissioner’s opinion, “amateurish.”
“Your father was blown up by professionals,” D.C.P. Patel informed Farrokh. “I was still an inspector at the Colaba Station—only the duty officer. The Tardeo Police Station answered that call. I wasn’t allowed at the scene of the crime, and then the investigation was turned over to the government. But I know for a fact that Lowji Daruwalla was exploded by a team. For a while, I heard that they thought the head mali might have been involved.”
“The Duckworth Club gardener?” cried Dr. Daruwalla; he’d always disliked the head mali, without knowing why.
“There was a different head mali then … you will remember,” the detective said.
“Oh,” Farrokh said. He was feeling more and more amateurish by the minute.
“Anyway, Rahul is possibly the one making the phone calls—that’s as good a guess as any,” Patel said. “But he’s no car-bomb expert.”
The doctor sat dismally still, looking at the photographic history of the murdered women. “But why would Rahul hate me—or Dhar?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.
“That is the question you don’t answer, or even ask, in your written statement,” said D.C.P. Patel. “Why, indeed?”
Thus were both men left with this unanswered question—Dr. Daruwalla as he took, a taxi uptown to meet Martin Mills, and Detective Patel as he reclaimed his desk chair. There the deputy commissioner once more faced the winking elephants on the slack bellies of the brutalized women.
No Motive
The deputy commissioner reflected that the mystery of Rahul’s hatred was probably unsolvable. There would be no end to the conjecture on this subject, which would remain unsatisfactorily answered, probably forever. The matter of what motivated Rahul’s hatred would remain
incomplete. What was truly implausible in all the Inspector Dhar films was that all the murderers’ motives were plainly established; the reasons for this or that hatred, which would lead to this or that violence, were always clear. Detective Patel regretted that Rahul Rai wasn’t in a movie.
In addition to Dr. Daruwalla’s written statement, the detective had secured a letter from the doctor, for it hadn’t escaped Patel’s attention that Dr. Daruwalla was guest chairman of the Membership Committee at the Duckworth Club. On behalf of Deputy Commissioner Patel, the Duckworth Club was requested to release the names of its new members—“new” as of the last 20 years. The deputy commissioner sent a subinspector to the club with the letter of requisition; the subinspector was instructed not to leave the Duckworth Club without the list of names. Detective Patel doubted that he would need to peruse the names of all 6,000 members; with any luck, a recent membership to a relative of the late Promila Rai would be easy to spot. It was hard for the deputy commissioner to contain himself while he waited for the subinspector to bring him the list.
At his desk, Detective Patel sat among the dust motes that danced in the movement of the ceiling fan, which was silent not because it was truly noiseless, but because the constant orchestra of the secretaries’ typewriters concealed the fan’s faint whirs and ticks. At first, the deputy commissioner had been enthusiastic about the information he’d received from Dr. Daruwalla. The detective had never been this close to Rahul; now he thought it was inevitable that the killer would be apprehended—an arrest seemed imminent. Yet Detective Patel couldn’t bring himself to share his enthusiasm with his wife; he would hate to see her disappointed if there remained something inconclusive. There was always something inconclusive, the detective knew.
“But why would Rahul hate me—or Dhar?” Dr. Daruwalla had asked. To the deputy commissioner, this question had been a typical inanity from the creator of Inspector Dhar; even so, the detective—the real detective—had encouraged the doctor to keep asking himself that same inane question.
Detective Patel had lived with the photographs for too long; that little elephant with its cocky tusk and its mischievous eyes had gotten to him, not to mention those murdered women with their unresponsive stomachs. There would never be a satisfactory motive for such hatred, the deputy commissioner believed. Rahul’s real crime was that he didn’t have sufficient justification for his actions. Something about Rahul would remain uncaptured; the horror about murders like his was that they were never sufficiently motivated. And so it seemed to Detective Patel that his wife was destined to be disappointed; he wouldn’t call her because he didn’t want to get her hopes up. As he might have guessed, Nancy called him.
“No, sweetie,” the detective said.
From the adjacent office, the sound of typing ceased; then, from the next office, the typing also stopped—and so on, all along the balcony.
“No, I would have told you, sweetie,” the deputy commissioner said.
For 20 years, Nancy had called him almost every day. She always asked him if he’d caught Beth’s killer.
“Yes, of course I promise, sweetie,” the detective said.
Below, in the courtyard, the big Dobermans were still asleep, and the police mechanic had mercifully stopped his infernal revving of the patrolmen’s motorcycle’s. The tuning of these ancient engines was so constant, the dogs usually slept through it. But even this sound had ceased, as if the mechanic—in spite of his throttling up and throttling down—had managed to hear the typing stop. The motorcycle mechanic had joined the speechless typewriters.
“Yes, I showed the doctor the photographs,” Patel told Nancy. “Yes, of course you were right, sweetie,” the deputy commissioner told his wife.
There was a new sound in Detective Patel’s office; the detective looked all around, trying to identify it. Gradually, he became aware of the absence of typing. Then he looked up at the revolving ceiling fan and realized that it was the fan’s whirring and ticking that he heard. It was so quiet, he could hear the rusted iron wheels of the hot-lunch wagons that were pushed by hand along Dr. Dadabhai Navroji Road; the dabba-wallas were on their way to deliver hot lunches to the office workers uptown.
Deputy Commissioner Patel knew that his fellow policemen and their secretaries were listening to every word of his conversation, and so he whispered into the phone. “Sweetie,” the detective said, “it is slightly better than you first believed. The doctor didn’t merely see the bodies, the doctor also knows Rahul. Both Daruwalla and Dhar—they actually know who he is … or at least who he, or she, was.” Patel paused, and then he whispered, “No, sweetie—they haven’t seen him, or her … not for twenty years.”
Then the detective once more listened to his wife—and to the ceiling fan, and to the grinding wheels of the dabba-wallas’ faraway wagons.
When the deputy commissioner spoke again, it was an outburst, not a whisper. “But I never dismissed your theories!” he cried into the phone. Then there entered into his voice a familiar tone of resignation; it so pained his fellow policemen, who all admired him and could no more fathom the motive for the extreme love that Detective Patel felt for his wife than there was any fathoming the motivation for Rahul’s extreme hatred. There was simply no determining where either a love or a hate like that came from, and this mystery compelled the officers and their secretaries to listen. All along the balcony, it overwhelmed them to hear the intensity of what appeared to them to be a groundless, irrational love.
“No, of course I’m not angry,” Patel told Nancy. “I’m sorry if I sounded angry, sweetie.” The detective sounded drained; the officers and their secretaries wished only that they could help him. They weren’t eavesdropping for information related to those murdered prostitutes; they knew that the evidence of what had been done to those women was never farther away from the deputy commissioner than the top drawer of his desk. It was the pathetic sound of Detective Patel’s love for his wretched wife that removed the hand of the motorcycle mechanic from the throttle.
In his office, Patel was painstakingly returning the photographs to his top drawer; he always returned them one by one, just as he reviewed them faithfully and in the exact order in which the crimes had been discovered. “I love you, too, sweetie,” the detective said into the phone. He always waited for Nancy to hang up first. Then he slammed shut the top drawer of his desk and rushed to the balcony. He caught his fellow policemen and their secretaries by surprise; not one of them was fast enough to start typing before the deputy commissioner started shouting.
“Have you run out of things to describe?” he hollered. “Have your fingers all fallen off?” he screamed. “Are there no more murders? Is crime a thing of the past? Have you all gone on holiday? Have you nothing better to do than listen to me?”
The typing began again, although Detective Patel knew that most of these first words would be meaningless. Below him, in the courtyard, the Doberman pinschers started barking witlessly; he could see them lunging in their kennel. Also below him, the police mechanic had mounted the nearest motorcycle and was jumping again and again, but without success, on the kick starter. The engine made a dry, gasping sound, like the catching of a pawl against a rachet wheel.
“Bleed the carburetor—there’s too much air!” Patel shouted to the mechanic, who quickly fussed with the carburetor; his tireless leg continued to flail the kick starter. When the engine caught and the mechanic revved the throttle so loudly that the barking Dobermans were drowned out of hearing, the deputy commissioner returned to his office and sat at his desk with his eyes closed. Gradually, his head began to bob, as if he’d found a followable rhythm, if not a melody, among the staccato outbursts from the police secretaries’ typewriters.
He’d not exactly neglected to tell Nancy that they would have lunch tomorrow at the Duckworth Club with Dr. Daruwalla—probably with Inspector Dhar, too. He’d purposefully withheld this information from his wife. He knew it would worry her, or bring her to tears—or at least cause her another
long night of sleeplessness and helpless sorrowing. Nancy hated to go out in public. Moreover, she’d developed a pointless dislike of both Inspector Dhar’s creator and Dhar himself. Detective Patel understood that his wife’s dislike was no more logical than her blaming both men for failing to comprehend how savagely she’d been traumatized in Goa. With equal illogic, the detective anticipated, Nancy would be ashamed of herself in both Daruwalla and Dhar’s company, for she couldn’t bear the thought of encountering anyone who’d known her then.
He would tell her about lunch at the Duckworth Club in the morning, the detective thought; that way, his wife might have a fair night’s sleep. Also, once he’d read over the names of the new members at the club, the deputy commissioner hoped he might know who Rahul was—or who he or she was pretending to be nowadays.
Patel’s fellow policemen and their secretaries didn’t relax until they heard the sound of his typewriter contributing its tedious music to their own. This was a welcome boredom, they knew, for with the flat clacking of the deputy commissioner’s keys, Patel’s colleagues were relieved to know that the deputy commissioner had returned to sanity—if not to peace of mind. It even comforted his junior officers to know that Patel was rewriting their own botched reports. They also knew they could expect that sometime in the afternoon Detective Patel would have their original reports back on their desks; the revised reports would be prefaced by a creative array of insults directed to their myriad inabilities—for none of them, in Detective Patel’s opinion, knew how to write a proper report. And the secretaries would be taken to task for their typing errors. He was so disdainful of the secretaries, the deputy commissioner did his own typing.
Martin’s Mother Makes Him Sick
Trachoma, which is one of the leading causes of blindness in the world, is easily treatable at its earliest phase—a chlamydial infection of the conjunctiva. In Ganesh’s case, there was no scarring of the cornea. Double E-NT Jeejeebhoy had prescribed three weeks of tetracycline orally, together with a tetracycline ointment. Sometimes, multiple courses of treatment were needed, Dr. Jeejeebhoy had said; the elephant boy’s weepy eyes would likely clear up.