A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  “What am I looking for?” Nancy asked him.

  “You’re going to feel it,” he told her. “I think it’s the top half of your pen.”

  They had to hold her or she would have fallen, for her fingers found it almost the instant that the doctor warned her what it was.

  “Try not to handle it—just hold it very lightly,” the deputy commissioner said to his wife. She dropped it on the stone floor and the detective retrieved it with a napkin, holding it only by the pocket clasp.

  “ ‘India,’ ” Patel said aloud, reading that inscription which had been separated from Made in for 20 years.

  It was Dhar who lifted Nancy down from the chair. She felt heavier to him than she had 20 years before. She said she needed a moment to be alone with her husband; they stood whispering together in the Ladies’ Garden, while Farrokh and John D. watched the fan start up again. Then the doctor and the actor went to join the detective and his wife, who’d returned to the table.

  “Surely now you’ll have Rahul’s fingerprints,” Dr. Daruwalla told the deputy commissioner.

  “Probably,” said Detective Patel. “When Mrs. Dogar comes to eat here, we’ll have the steward save us her fork or her spoon—to compare. But her fingerprints on the top of the pen don’t place her at the crime.”

  Dr. Daruwalla told them all about the crow. Clearly the crow had brought the pen from the bougainvillea at the ninth green. Crows are carrion eaters.

  “But what would Rahul have been doing with the top of the pen—I mean during the murder of Mr. Lal?” Detective Patel asked.

  In frustration, Dr. Daruwalla blurted out, “You make it sound as if you have to witness another murder—or do you expect Mrs. Dogar to offer you a full confession?”

  “It’s only necessary to make Mrs. Dogar think that we know more than we know,” the deputy commissioner answered.

  “That’s easy,” Dhar said suddenly. “You tell the murderer what the murderer would confess, if the murderer were confessing. The trick is, you’ve got to make the murderer think that you really know the murderer.”

  “Precisely,” Patel said.

  “Wasn’t that in Inspector Dhar and the Hanging Mali?” Nancy asked the actor; she meant that it was Dr. Daruwalla’s line.

  “Very good,” Dr. Daruwalla told her.

  Detective Patel didn’t pat the back of Dhar’s hand; he tapped Dhar on one knuckle—just once, but sharply—with a dessert spoon. “Let’s be serious,” said the deputy commissioner. “I’m going to offer you a bribe—something you’ve always wanted.”

  “There’s nothing I want,” Dhar replied.

  “I think there is,” the detective told him. “I think you’d like to play a real policeman. I think you’d like to make a real arrest.”

  Dhar said nothing—he didn’t even sneer.

  “Do you think you’re still attractive to Mrs. Dogar?” the detective asked him.

  “Oh, absolutely—you should see how she looks him over!” cried Dr. Daruwalla.

  “I’m asking him,” said Detective Patel.

  “Yes, I think she wants me,” Dhar replied.

  “Of course she does,” Nancy said angrily.

  “And if I told you how to approach her, do you think you could do it—I mean exactly as I tell you?” the detective asked Dhar.

  “Oh, yes—you give him any line, he can deliver it!” cried Dr. Daruwalla.

  “I’m asking you,” the policeman said to Dhar. This time, the dessert spoon rapped his knuckle hard enough for Dhar to take his hand off the table.

  “You want to set her up—is that it?” Dhar asked the deputy commissioner.

  “Precisely,” Patel said.

  “And I just follow your instructions?” the actor asked him

  “That’s it—exactly,” said the deputy commissioner.

  “You can do it!” Dr. Daruwalla declared to Dhar.

  “That’s not the question,” Nancy said.

  “The question is, do you want to do it?” Detective Patel asked Dhar. “I think you really want to.”

  “All right,” Dhar said. “Okay. Yes, I want to.”

  For the first time in the course of the long lunch, Patel smiled. “I feel better, now that I’ve bribed you,” the deputy commissioner told Dhar. “Do you see? That’s all a bribe is, really—just something you want, in exchange for something else. It’s no big deal, is it?”

  “We’ll see,” Dhar said. When he looked at Nancy, she was looking at him.

  “You’re not sneering,” Nancy said.

  “Sweetie,” said Detective Patel, taking her hand.

  “I need to go to the ladies’ room,” she said. “You show me where it is,” she said to Dhar. But before his wife or the actor could stand up, the deputy commissioner stopped them.

  “Just a trivial matter, before you go,” the detective said. “What is this nonsense about you and the dwarf brawling with prostitutes on Falkland Road—what is this nonsense about?” Detective Patel asked Dhar.

  “That wasn’t him,” said Dr. Daruwalla quickly.

  “So there’s some truth to the rumor of a Dhar imposter?” the detective asked.

  “Not an imposter—a twin,” the doctor replied.

  “You have a twin?” Nancy asked the actor.

  “Identical,” said Dhar.

  “That’s hard to believe,” she said.

  “They’re not at all alike, but they’re identical,” Farrokh explained.

  “It’s not the best time for you to have a twin in Bombay,” Detective Patel told the actor.

  “Don’t worry—the twin is totally out of it. A missionary!” Farrokh declared.

  “God help us,” Nancy said.

  “Anyway, I’m taking the twin out of town for a couple of days—at least overnight,” Dr. Daruwalla told them. The doctor started to explain about the children and the circus, but no one was interested.

  “The ladies’ room,” Nancy said to Dhar. “Where is it?”

  Dhar was about to take her arm when she walked past him untouched; he followed her to the foyer. Almost everyone in the dining room watched her walk—the woman who’d stood on a chair.

  “It will be nice for you to get out of town for a couple of days,” the deputy commissioner said to Dr. Daruwalla. Time to slip away, Farrokh was thinking; then he realized that even the moment of Nancy leaving the Ladies’ Garden with Dhar had been planned.

  “Was there something you wanted her to say to him, something only she could say—alone?” the doctor asked the detective.

  “Oh, what a very good question,” Patel replied. “You’re learning, Doctor,” the deputy commissioner added. “I’ll bet you could write a better movie now.”

  A Three-Dollar Bill?

  In the foyer, Nancy said to Dhar, “I’ve thought about you almost as much as I’ve thought about Rahul. Sometimes, you upset me more.”

  “I never intended to upset you,” Dhar replied.

  “What have you intended? What do you intend?” she asked him.

  When he didn’t answer her, Nancy asked him, “How did you like lifting me? You’re always carrying me. Do I feel heavier to you?”

  “We’re both a little heavier than we were,” Dhar answered cautiously.

  “I weigh a ton, and you know it,” Nancy told him. “But I’m not trash—I never was.”

  “I never thought you were trash,” Dhar told her.

  “You should never look at people the way you look at me,” Nancy said. He did it again; there was his sneer. “That’s what I mean,” she told him. “I hate you for it—the way you make me feel. Later, after you’re gone, it makes me keep thinking about you. I’ve thought about you for twenty years.” She was about three inches taller than the actor; when she reached out suddenly and touched his upper lip, he stopped sneering. “That’s better. Now say something,” Nancy told him. But Dhar was thinking about the dildo—if she still had it. He couldn’t think of what to say. “You know, you really should take some responsibility
for the effect you have on people. Do you ever think about that?”

  “I think about it all the time—I’m supposed to have an effect,” Dhar said finally. “I’m an actor.”

  “You sure are,” Nancy said. She could see him stop himself from shrugging; when he wasn’t sneering, she liked his mouth more than she thought was possible. “Do you want me? Do you ever think about that?” she asked him. She saw him thinking about what to say, so she didn’t wait. “You don’t know how to read what I want, do you?” she asked him. “You’re going to have to be better than this with Rahul. You can’t tell me what I want to hear because you don’t really know if I want you, do you? You’re going to have to read Rahul better than you can read me,” Nancy repeated.

  “I can read you,” Dhar told her. “I was just trying to be polite.”

  “I don’t believe you—you don’t convince me,” Nancy said. “Bad acting,” she added, but she believed him.

  In the ladies’ room, when she washed her hands in the sink. Nancy saw the absurd faucet—the water flowing from the single spigot, which was an elephant’s trunk. Nancy adjusted the degree of hot and cold water, first with one tusk, then the other. Twenty years ago, at the Hotel Bardez, not even four baths had made her feel clean; now Nancy felt unclean again. She was at least relieved to see that there was no winking eye; that much Rahul had imagined, with the help of many murdered women’s navels.

  She’d also noticed the pull-down platform on the inside of the toilet-stall door; the handle that lowered the shelf was a ring through an elephant’s trunk. Nancy reflected on the psychology that had compelled Rahul to select one elephant and reject the other.

  When Nancy returned to the Ladies’ Garden, she offered only a matter-of-fact comment on her discovery of what she believed to be the source of inspiration for Rahul’s belly drawings. The deputy commissioner and the doctor rushed off to the ladies’ room to see the telltale elephant for themselves; their opportunity to view the Victorian faucet was delayed until the last woman had vacated the ladies’ room. Even from a considerable distance—from the far side of the dining room—Mr. Sethna was able to observe that Inspector Dhar and the woman with the obscene navel had nothing to say to each other, although they were left alone in the Ladies’ Garden for an uncomfortable amount of time.

  Later, in the car, Detective Patel spoke to Nancy—before they’d left the driveway of the Duckworth Club. “I have to go back to headquarters, but I’ll take you home first,” he told her.

  “You should be more careful about what you ask me to do. Vijay,” Nancy said.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” Patel replied. “But I wanted to know your opinion. Can I trust him?” The deputy commissioner saw that his wife was about to cry again.

  “You can trust me!” Nancy cried.

  “I know I can trust you, sweetie,” Patel said. “But what about him? Do you think he can do it?”

  “He’ll do anything you tell him, if he knows what you want,” Nancy answered.

  “And you think Rahul will go for him?” her husband asked. “Oh, yes,” she said bitterly.

  “Dhar is a pretty cool customer!” said the detective admiringly.

  “Dhar is as queer as a three-dollar bill,” Nancy told him.

  Not being from Iowa, Detective Patel had some difficulty with the concept of how “queer” a three-dollar bill was—not to mention that, in Bombay, they call a bill a note. “You mean that he’s gay—a homosexual?” her husband asked.

  “No doubt about it. You can trust me,” Nancy repeated. They were almost home before she spoke again. “A very cool customer,” she added.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” said the deputy commissioner, because he saw that his wife couldn’t stop crying.

  “I do love you, Vijay,” she managed to say.

  “I love you, too, sweetie,” the detective told her.

  Just Some Old Attraction-Repulsion Kind of Thing

  In the Ladies’ Garden, the sun now slanted sideways through the latticework of the bower; the same shade of pinkness from the bougainvillea dappled the tablecloth, which Mr. Sethna had brushed free of crumbs. It seemed to the old steward that Dhar and Dr. Daruwalla would never leave the table. They’d long ago stopped talking about Rahul—or, rather, Mrs. Dogar. For the moment, they were both more interested in Nancy.

  “But exactly what do you think is wrong with her?” Farrokh asked John D.

  “It appears that the events of the last twenty years have had a strong effect on her,” Dhar answered.

  “Oh, elephant shit!” cried Dr. Daruwalla. “Can’t you just once say what you’re really feeling?”

  “Okay,” Dhar said. “It appears that she and her husband are a real couple … very much in love, and all of that.”

  “Yes, that does appear to be the main thing about them,” the doctor agreed. But Farrokh realized that this observation didn’t greatly interest him; after all, he was still very much in love with Julia and he’d been married longer than Detective Patel. “But what was happening between the two of you—between you and her?” the doctor asked Dhar.

  “It was just some old attraction-repulsion kind of thing,” John D. answered evasively.

  “The next thing you’ll tell me is that the world is round,” Farrokh said, but the actor merely shrugged. Suddenly, it was not Rahul (or Mrs. Dogar) who frightened Dr. Daruwalla; it was Dhar the doctor was afraid of, and only because Dr. Daruwalla felt that he didn’t really know Dhar—not even after all these years. As before—because he felt that something unpleasant was pending—Farrokh thought of the circus; yet when he mentioned again his upcoming journey to Junagadh, he saw that John D. still wasn’t interested.

  “You probably think it’s doomed to fail—just another save-the-children project,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “Like coins in a wishing well, like pebbles in the sea.”

  “It sounds as if you think it’s doomed to fail,” Dhar told him.

  It was truly time to slip away, the doctor thought. Then Dr. Daruwalla spotted the Hawaiian shirt in the paper bag; Detective Patel had left the package under his chair. Both men were standing, ready to leave, when the doctor pulled the loud shirt out of the bag.

  “Well, look at that. The deputy commissioner actually forgot something. How uncharacteristic,” John D. remarked.

  “I doubt that he forgot it. I think he wanted you to have it,” Dr. Daruwalla said. Impulsively, the doctor held up the riotous display of parrots in palm trees; there were flowers, too—red and orange and yellow against a jungle of impossible green. Farrokh placed the shoulders of the shirt against Dhar’s shoulders. “It’s the right size for you,” the doctor observed. “Are you sure you don’t want it?”

  “I have all the shirts I need,” the actor told him. “Give it to my fucking twin.”

  21

  ESCAPING MAHARASHTRA

  Ready for Rabies

  This time, Julia found him in the morning with his face pressing a pencil against the glass-topped table in the dining room. An ongoing title search was evident from Farrokh’s last jottings. There was Lion Piss (crossed out, blessedly) and Raging Hormones (also crossed out, she was happy to see), but the one that appeared to have pleased the screenwriter before he fell asleep was circled. As a movie title, Julia had her doubts about it. It was Limo Roulette, which reminded Julia of one of those French films that defy common sense—even when one manages to read every word of the subtitles.

  But this was far too busy a morning for Julia to take the time to read the new pages. She woke up Farrokh by blowing in his ear; while he was in the bathtub, she made his tea. She’d already packed his toilet articles and a change of clothes, and she’d teased her husband about his habit of taking with him a medical-emergency kit of an elaborately paranoid nature; after all, he was going to be away only one night.

  But Dr. Daruwalla never traveled anywhere in India without bringing with him certain precautionary items: erythromycin, the preferred antibiotic for bronchitis; Lomotil, for diarrhea.
He even carried a kit of surgical instruments, including sutures and iodophor gauze—and both an antibiotic powder and an ointment. In the usual weather, infection thrived in the simplest selection of condoms, which he freely dispensed without invitation. Indian men were renowned for not using condoms. All Dr. Daruwalla had to do was meet a man who so much as joked about prostitutes; in the doctor’s mind, this amounted to a confession. “Here—next time try one of these,” Dr. Daruwalla would say.

  The doctor also toted with him a half-dozen sterile disposable needles and syringes—just in case anyone needed any kind of shot. At a circus, people were always being bitten by dogs and monkeys. Someone had told Dr. Daruwalla that rabies was endemic among chimpanzees. For this trip, especially, Farrokh brought along three starter-doses of rabies vaccine, together with three 10mL vials of human rabies immune globulin. Both the vaccine and the immune globulin required refrigeration, but for a journey of less than 48 hours a thermos with ice would be sufficient.

  “Are you expecting to be bitten by something?” Julia had asked him.

  “I was thinking of the new missionary,” Farrokh had replied; for he believed that, if he were a rabid chimpanzee at the Great Blue Nile, he would certainly be inclined to bite Martin Mills. Yet Julia knew that he’d packed enough vaccine and immune globulin to treat himself and the missionary and both children—just in case a rabid chimpanzee attacked them all.

  Lucky Day

  In the morning, the doctor longed to read and revise the new pages of his screenplay, but there was too much to do. The elephant boy had sold all the clothes that Martin Mills had bought for him on Fashion Street. Julia had anticipated this; she’d bought the ungrateful little wretch more clothes. It was a struggle to get Ganesh to take a bath—at first because he wanted to do nothing but ride in the elevator, and then because he’d never been in a building with a balcony overlooking Marine Drive; all he wanted to do was stare at the view. Ganesh also objected to wearing a sandal on his good foot, and even Julia doubted the wisdom of concealing the mangled foot in a clean white sock; the sock wouldn’t stay clean or white for long. As for the lone sandal, Ganesh complained that the strap across the top of his foot hurt him so much, he could scarcely walk.