A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  This was, of course, another first-draft possibility … that old Mr. Dogar would suffer a heart attack while Rahul was deliberately overexciting him. But the second Mrs. Dogar had resolved that she wouldn’t wait as long as a year for this “natural” ending to occur. It was simply too boring. If it happened soon, fine. If not, there was always the golf-club, locker-room ending; in this version, it amused the second Mrs. Dogar to imagine how they might finally find the body.

  She would report that her husband had not come home for the night. They would find his car in the Duckworth Club parking lot. The wait-staff would relate what had transpired after the Dogars had eaten their dinner; doubtless, Mr. Sethna would convey more intimate information. It was possible that no one would think to look for Mr. Dogar in his locker until the body began to stink.

  But the swimming-pool version also intrigued Rahul, The Bannerjees would confide to the authorities that such a dive in the pool was reputed to be the old fool’s inclination. Mrs. Dogar herself could always say, “I told you so.” For Rahul, the hard part about this version would be maintaining a straight face. And the rumor that old Mr. Dogar was pissing on the bougainvillea was already established.

  When the ashamed Mr. Dogar appeared at the Duckworth Club to claim his car, he spoke in apologetic tones to the disapproving Mr. Sethna, to whom the very idea of urinating outdoors was repugnant.

  “Did I seem especially drunk to you, Mr. Sethna?” Mr. Dogar asked the venerable steward. “I’m really very sorry … if I behaved insensitively.”

  “Nothing happened, really,” Mr. Sethna replied coldly. He’d already spoken to the head mali about the bougainvillea. The fool gardener confirmed that there were only isolated patches of the blight. The dead spots in the bougainvillea bordered the green at the fifth and the ninth holes; both these greens were out of sight of the Duckworth Club dining room and the clubhouse—also, they couldn’t be seen from the Ladies’ Garden. As for that bougainvillea which surrounded the Ladies’ Garden, there was only one dead patch and it was suspiciously in a spot that was out of sight from any of the club’s facilities. Mr. Sethna surmised that this gave credence to Mrs. Dogar’s urine theory—poor old Mr. Dogar was peeing on the flowers!

  It would never have occurred to the old steward that a woman—not even as vulgar a member of the species as Mrs. Dogar—could be the pissing culprit. But the killer was no amateur at foreshadowing. She’d been systematically murdering the bougainvillea for months. One of many things that the new Mrs. Dogar liked about wearing dresses was that it was comfortable not to wear underwear. The only thing Rahul missed about having a penis was how convenient it had been to pee outdoors. But her penchant for pissing on certain out-of-the-way plots of the bougainvillea was not whimsical. While in the pursuit of this odd habit, Mrs. Dogar had been mindful of her larger work-in-progress. Even before the unfortunate Mr. Lal had happened upon her while she was squatting in the bougainvillea by the fatal ninth hole (which had long been Mr. Lal’s nemesis), Rahul had already made a plan.

  In her purse, for weeks, she’d carried the two-rupee note with her first typed message to the Duckworthians: MORE MEMBERS DIE IF DHAR REMAINS A MEMBER. She’d always assumed that the easiest Duckworthian to murder would be someone who stumbled into her in one of her out-of-the-way peeing places. She’d thought it would happen at night—in the darkness. She’d imagined a younger member than Mr. Lal, probably someone who’d drunk too much beer and wandered out on the nighttime golf course—drawn by the same need that had drawn Mrs. Dogar there. She’d imagined a brief flirtation—they were the best kind.

  “So! You had to pee, too? If you tell me what you like about doing it outdoors, I’ll tell you my reasons!” Or maybe: “What else do you like to do outdoors?”

  Mrs. Dogar had also imagined that she might indulge in a kiss and a little fondling; she liked fondling. Then she would kill him, whoever he was, and she’d stick the two-rupee note in his mouth. She’d never strangled a man; with her hand strength, she didn’t doubt she could do it. She’d never much liked strangling women—not as much as she enjoyed the pure strength of a blow from a blunt instrument—but she was looking forward to strangling a man because she wanted to see if that old story was true … if men got erections and ejaculated when they were close to choking to death.

  Disappointingly, old Mr. Lal had offered Mrs. Dogar neither the opportunity for a brief flirtation nor the novelty of a strangulation. Rahul was so lazy, she rarely made breakfast for herself. Although he was officially retired, Mr. Dogar left early for his office, and Mrs. Dogar often indulged in an early-morning pee on the golf course—before even the most zealous golfers were on the fairways. Then she’d have her tea and some fruit in the Ladies’ Garden and go to her health club to lift weights and skip rope. She’d been surprised by old Mr. Lal’s early-morning assault on the bougainvillea at the ninth green.

  Rahul had only just finished peeing; she rose up out of the flowers, and there was the old duffer plodding off the green and tripping through the vines. Mr. Lal was searching for a challenging spot in this jungle in which to deposit the stupid golf ball. When he looked up from the flowers, the second Mrs. Dogar was standing directly in front of him. She’d startled him so—for a moment, she thought it would be unnecessary to kill him. He clutched his chest and staggered away from her.

  “Mrs. Dogar!” he cried. “What’s happened to you? Has someone … molested you?” Thus he gave her the idea; after all, her dress was still hiked up to her hips. Clearly distraught, she wriggled her dress down. (She would change into a sari for lunch.)

  “Oh, Mr. Lal! Thank God it’s you!” she cried. “I’ve been … taken advantage of!” she told him.

  “What a world, Mrs. Dogar! But how may I assist you? Help!” the old man shouted out.

  “Oh no, please! I couldn’t bear to see anyone else—I’m so ashamed!” she confided to him.

  “But how may I help you, Mrs. Dogar?” Mr. Lal inquired.

  “It’s painful for me to walk,” she confessed. “They hurt me.”

  “They!” the old man shouted.

  “Perhaps if you would lend me one of your clubs … if I could just use it as a cane,” Mrs. Dogar suggested. Mr. Lal was on the verge of handing her his nine iron, then changed his mind.

  “The putter would be best!” he declared. Poor Mr. Lal was out of breath from the short trot to his golf bag and his stumbling return to her side through the tangled vines, the destroyed flowers. He was much shorter than Mrs. Dogar; she was able to put one of her big hands on his shoulder—the putter in her other hand. That way, she could see over the old man’s head to the green and the fairway; no one was there.

  “You could rest on the green while I fetch you a golf cart,” Mr. Lal suggested.

  “Yes, thank you—you go ahead,” she told him. He tripped purposefully forward, but she was right behind him; before he reached the green, she had struck him senseless—she hit him just behind one ear. After he’d fallen she bashed him directly in the temple that was turned toward her, but his eyes were already open and unmoving when she struck him the second time. Mrs. Dogar suspected he’d been killed by the first blow.

  In her purse, she had no difficulty finding the two-rupee note. For 20 years, she’d clipped her small bills to the top half of that silver ballpoint pen which she’d stolen from the beach cottage in Goa. She even kept this silly memento well polished. The clip—the “pocket clasp,” as her Aunt Promila had called it—continued to maintain the perfect tension on a small number of bills, and the polished silver made the top half of the pen easy to spot in her purse; she hated how small things could become lost in purses.

  She’d inserted the two-rupee note in Mr. Lal’s gaping mouth; to her surprise, when she closed his mouth, it opened again. She’d never tried to close a dead person’s mouth before. She’d assumed that the body parts of the dead would be fairly controllable; that had certainly been her experience with manipulating limbs—sometimes an elbow or a knee had been in
the way of her belly drawing, and she’d easily rearranged it.

  The distracting detail of Mr. Lal’s mouth was what caused her to be careless. She’d returned the remaining small notes to her purse, but not the top half of the well-traveled pen; it must have fallen in the bougainvillea. She hadn’t been able to find it later, and there in the bougainvillea was the last place she recalled holding it in her hand. Mrs. Dogar assumed that the police were presently puzzling over it; with the widow Lal’s help, they’d probably determined that the top half of the pen hadn’t even belonged to Mr. Lal. Mrs. Dogar speculated that the police might even conclude that no Duckworthian would be caught dead with such a pen; that it was made of real silver was somehow negated by the sheer tackiness of the engraved word, India. Rahul found tacky things amusing. It also amused Rahul to imagine how aimlessly the police must be tracking her, for Mrs. Dogar believed that the half-pen would be just another link in a chain of meaningless clues.

  Some Small Tragedy

  It was after Mr. Dogar had apologized to Mr. Sethna and retrieved his car from the Duckworth Club parking lot that the old steward received the phone call from Mrs. Dogar. “Is my husband still there? I suppose not. I’d meant to remind him of something to attend to—he’s so forgetful.”

  “He was here, but he’s gone,” Mr. Sethna informed her.

  “Did he remember to cancel our reservation for lunch? I suppose not. Anyway, we’re not coming,” Rahul told the steward. Mr. Sethna prided himself in his daily memorizing of the reservations for lunch and dinner; he knew that there’d been no reservation for the Dogars. But when he informed Mrs. Dogar of this fact, she surprised him. “Oh, the poor man!” she cried. “He forgot to cancel the reservation, but he was so drunk last night that he forgot to make the reservation in the first place. This would be comic if it weren’t also so tragic, I suppose.”

  “I suppose …” Mr. Sethna replied, but Rahul could tell that she’d achieved her goal. One day Mr. Sethna would be an important witness to Mr. Dogar’s utter frailty. Foreshadowing was simply necessary preparation. Rahul knew that Mr. Sethna would be unsurprised when Mr. Dogar became a victim—either of a murder in the locker room or of a swimming-pool mishap.

  In some ways, this was the best part of a murder, Rahul believed. In the first draft of a work-in-progress, you had so many options—more options than you would end up with in the final act. It was only in the planning phase that you saw so many possibilities, so many variations on the outcome. In the end, it was always over too quickly; that is, if you cared about neatness, you couldn’t prolong it.

  “The poor man!” Mrs. Dogar repeated to Mr. Sethna. The poor man, indeed! Mr. Sethna thought. With a wife like Mrs. Dogar, Mr. Sethna presumed it might even be a comfort to already have one foot in the grave, so to speak.

  The old steward had just hung up the phone when Dr. Daruwalla called the Duckworth Club to make a reservation. There would be four for lunch, the doctor informed Mr. Sethna; he hoped no one had already taken his favorite table in the Ladies’ Garden. There was plenty of room, but Mr. Sethna disapproved of making a reservation for lunch on the morning of the same day; people shouldn’t trust in plans that were so spur-of-the-moment.

  “You’re in luck—I’ve just had a cancellation,” the steward told the doctor.

  “May I have the table at noon?” Farrokh asked.

  “One o’clock would be better,” Mr. Sethna instructed him, for the steward also disapproved of the doctor’s inclination to eat his lunch early. Mr. Sethna theorized that early lunch-eating contributed to the doctor’s being overweight. It was most unsightly for small men to be overweight, Mr. Sethna thought.

  Dr. Daruwalla had just hung up the phone when Dr. Tata returned his call. Farrokh remembered instantly what he’d wanted to ask Tata Two.

  “Do you remember Rahul Rai and his Aunt Promila?” Farrokh asked.

  “Doesn’t everybody remember them?” Tata Two replied.

  “But this is a professional question,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “I believe your father examined Rahul when he was twelve or thirteen. That would have been in 1949. My father examined Rahul when he was only eight or ten. It was his Aunt Promila’s request—the matter of his hairlessness was bothering her. My father dismissed it, but I believe Promila took Rahul to see your father. I was wondering if the alleged hairlessness was still the issue.”

  “Why would anyone see your father or mine about hairlessness?” asked Dr. Tata.

  “A good question,” Farrokh replied. “I believe that the real issue concerned Rahul’s sexual identity. Possibly a sex change would have been requested.”

  “My father didn’t do sex changes!” said Tata Two. “He was a gynecologist, an obstetrician …”

  “I know what he was,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “But he might have been asked to make a diagnosis … I’m speaking of Rahul’s reproductive organs, whether there was anything peculiar about them that would have warranted a sex-change operation—at least in the boy’s mind, or in his aunt’s mind. If you’ve kept your father’s records … I have my father’s.”

  “Of course I’ve kept his records!” Dr. Tata cried. “Mr. Subhash can have them on my desk in two minutes. I’ll call you back in five.” So … even Tata Two called his medical secretary Mister; perhaps, like Ranjit, Mr. Subhash was a medical secretary who’d remained in the family. Dr. Daruwalla reflected that Mr. Subhash had sounded (on the phone) like a man in his eighties!

  Ten minutes later, when Dr. Tata had not called him back, Farrokh also reflected on the presumed chaos of Tata Two’s record keeping; apparently, old Dr. Tata’s file on Rahul wasn’t exactly at Mr. Subhash’s fingertips. Or maybe it was the diagnosis of Rahul that gave Tata Two pause? Regardless, Farrokh told Ranjit that he would take no calls except one he was expecting from Dr. Tata.

  Dr. Daruwalla had one office appointment before his much-anticipated lunch at the Duckworth Club, and he told Ranjit to cancel it. Dr. Desai, from London, was in town; in his spare time from his own surgical practice, Dr. Desai was a designer of artificial joints. He was a man with a theme; joint replacement was his only topic of conversation. This made it hard on Julia whenever Farrokh tried to converse with Dr. Desai at the Duckworth Club. It was easier to deal with Desai in the office. “Should the implant be fixated to the skeleton with bone cement or is biologic fixation the method of choice?” This was typical of Dr. Desai’s initial conversation; it was what Dr. Desai said instead of, “How are your wife and kids?” For Dr. Daruwalla to cancel an office appointment with Dr. Desai was tantamount to his admitting a lack of interest in his chosen orthopedic field; but the doctor had his mind on his new screenplay—he wanted to write.

  To this end, Farrokh sat on the opposite side of his desk, eliminating his usual view; the doctor found the exercise yard of the Hospital for Crippled Children distracting—the physical therapy for some of his postoperative patients was hard for him to ignore. Dr. Daruwalla was more enticed by a make-believe world than he was drawn to confront the world he lived in.

  For the most part, Inspector Dhar’s creator was unaware of the real-life dramas that teemed all around him. Poor Nancy, with her raccoon eyes, was dressing herself for Inspector Dhar. The famous actor, even offstage and off-camera, was still acting. Mr. Sethna, who so strongly disapproved of everything, had discovered (to his deep distaste) that human urine was killing the bougainvillea. And that wasn’t the only murder-in-progress at the Duckworth Club, where Rahul was already envisioning herself as the widow Dogar. But Dr. Daruwalla was still untouched by these realities. Instead, for his inspiration, the doctor chose to stare at the circus photograph on his desk.

  There was the beautiful Suman—Suman the skywalker. The last time Dr. Daruwalla had seen her, she’d been unmarried—a 29-year-old star acrobat, the idol of all the child acrobats in training. The screenwriter was presuming that Suman was 29, and that it was high time for her to be wed; she should be engaged in more practical activities than walking upside down across the roof
of the main tent, 80 feet from the ground, with no net. A woman as wonderful as Suman should definitely be married, the screenwriter thought. Suman was an acrobat, not an actress. The screenwriter intended to give his circus characters very little responsibility in the way of acting. The boy, Ganesh, would be an accomplished actor, but his sister, Pinky, would be the real Pinky—from the Great Royal Circus. Pinky would perform as an acrobat; it wouldn’t be necessary to have her talk. (Keep her dialogue to a minimum, the screenwriter thought.)

  Farrokh was getting ahead of himself; he was already casting the movie. In his screenplay, he still had to get the children to the circus. That was when Dr. Daruwalla thought of the new missionary; in the screenplay, the doctor wouldn’t call him Martin Mills—the name Mills was too boring. The screenwriter would call him simply “Mr. Martin.” The Jesuit mission would take charge of these children because their mother was killed in St. Ignatius Church by an unsafe statue of the Holy Virgin; St. Ignatius would certainly bear some responsibility for that. And so the children would manage to be picked up by the right limousine, by Vinod; the so-called Good Samaritan dwarf would still need to get the Jesuits’ permission to take the kids to the circus. Oh, this is brilliant! thought Dr. Daruwalla. That would be how Suman and Mr. Martin meet. The morally meddlesome missionary takes the children to the circus, and the fool falls in love with the skywalker!

  Why not? The Jesuit would soon find Suman preferable to chastity. The fictional Mr. Martin would have to be a skilled actor, and the screenwriter would provide the character with a far more winning personality than that of Martin Mills. In the screenplay, the seduction of Mr. Martin would be an unconversion story. There was no small measure of mischief in the screenwriter’s next idea: that John D. would play a perfect Mr. Martin. How happy he’d be—to not be Inspector Dhar!