A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  Rahul’s lips were parted; she looked quizzically down at Dhar—her scratched eye blinking once, and then again. Her lips softly closed and she once more exhaled thinly through her nose, as if such controlled breathing helped her to think.

  “I thought I’d lost this,” Mrs. Dogar said slowly.

  “It appears you’ve lost the other half,” John D. replied; he stayed on his knees because he imagined that she liked looking down on him.

  “This is the only half I ever had,” Rahul explained.

  Dhar stood up and walked behind her chair; he didn’t want her to grab the drawings. When John D. returned to his seat, Rahul was staring at the half-pen.

  “You might as well have lost that half,” John D. told her. “You can’t use it for anything.”

  “But you’re wrong!” Mrs. Dogar cried. “It’s really marvelous as a money clip.”

  “A money clip,” the actor repeated.

  “Look here,” Rahul began. There was no money among the spilled contents of her purse, which John D. had spread on the table; she had to search in her purse. “The problem with money clips,” Mrs. Dogar told him, “is that they’re conceived for a big wad of money … the sort of wad of money that men are always flashing out of their pockets, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Inspector Dhar. He watched her fishing in her purse for some smaller bills. She pulled out a 10-rupee note, and two 5s, and when the actor saw the two 2-rupee notes with the unnatural typing on them, he raised his eyes to Mr. Sethna and the old steward began his hurried shuffle across the dining room to the Ladies’ Garden.

  “Look here,” Rahul repeated. “When you have just a few small notes, which most women must carry—for tipping, for the odd beggar—this is the perfect money clip. It holds just a few notes, but quite snugly …” Her voice trailed away because she saw that Dhar had covered the drawings with his hand; he was sliding the three drawings across the tablecloth when Rahul reached out and grabbed his pinky finger, which she sharply lifted, breaking it. John D. still managed to pull the drawings into his lap. The pinky finger of his right hand pointed straight up, as if it grew out of the back of his hand; it was dislocated at the big knuckle joint. With his left hand, Dhar was able to protect the drawings from Mrs. Dogar’s grasp. She was still struggling with him—she was trying to get the drawings away from him with her right hand—when Detective Patel hooked her neck in the crook of his elbow and pinned her left arm behind her chair.

  “You’re under arrest,” the deputy commissioner told her.

  “The top half of the pen is a money clip,” said Inspector Dhar. “She uses it for small notes. When she put the note in Mr. Lal’s mouth, the makeshift money clip must have fallen by the body—you know the rest. There’s some typing on those two-rupee notes,” Dhar told the real policeman.

  “Read it to me,” Patel said. Mrs. Dogar held herself very still; her free right hand, which had ceased struggling with John D. for the drawings, floated just above the tablecloth, as if she were about to give them all her blessing.

  “ ‘A member no more,’ ” Dhar read aloud.

  “That one was for you,” the deputy commissioner told him.

  “ ‘… because Dhar is still a member,’ ” Dhar read.

  “Who was that one for?” the policeman asked Rahul, but Mrs. Dogar was frozen in her chair, her hand still conducting an imaginary orchestra above the tablecloth; her eyes had never left Inspector Dhar. The top drawing had become wrinkled in the tussle, but John D. smoothed all three drawings against the tablecloth. He was careful not to look at them.

  “You’re quite an artist,” the deputy commissioner told Rahul, but Mrs. Dogar just kept staring at Inspector Dhar.

  Dr. Daruwalla regretted that he looked at the drawings; the second was worse than the first, and the third was the worst of all. He knew he would go to his grave still thinking of them. Julia alone had the sense to remain in the Ladies’ Garden; she knew there was no good reason to come any closer. But Nancy must have felt compelled to confront the Devil herself; it would be uncomfortable for her later to recall the last words between Dhar and Rahul.

  “I really wanted you—I wasn’t kidding,” Mrs. Dogar said to the actor.

  To Dr. Daruwalla’s surprise, John D. said to Mrs. Dogar, “I wasn’t kidding, either.”

  It must have been hard for Nancy to feel that the focus of her victimization had shifted so far from herself; it still galled her that Rahul didn’t remember who she was.

  “I was in Goa,” Nancy announced to the killer.

  “Don’t say anything, sweetie,” her husband told her.

  “Say anything you feel like saying, sweetie,” Rahul said.

  “I had a fever and you crawled into bed with me,” Nancy said.

  Mrs. Dogar appeared to be thoughtfully surprised. She stared at Nancy as she had previously stared at the top half of the pen, her recognition traveling over time. “Why, is it really you, dear?” Rahul asked Nancy. “But what on earth has happened to you?”

  “You should have killed me when you had the chance,” Nancy told her.

  “You look already dead to me,” Mrs. Dogar said.

  “Please kill her, Vijay,” Nancy said to her husband.

  “I told you this wouldn’t be very satisfying, sweetie.” That was all the deputy commissioner would say to her.

  When the uniformed constables and the subinspectors came, Detective Patel told them to put away their weapons. Rahul was not resisting arrest. The deep and unknown satisfactions of the previous night’s murder seemed to radiate from Mrs. Dogar; she was no more violent on this New Year’s Monday than whatever brief impulse had urged her to break John D.’s pinky finger. The serial killer’s smile was serene.

  Understandably, the deputy commissioner was worried about his wife. He told her he’d have to go directly to Crime Branch Headquarters, but surely she could get a ride home. Dhar’s dwarf driver had already made his presence known; Vinod was prowling the foyer of the Duckworth Club. Detective Patel suggested that perhaps Dhar wouldn’t mind taking Nancy home in his private taxi.

  “Not a good idea.” That was all Nancy would say to her husband.

  Julia said that she and Dr. Daruwalla would bring Nancy home. Dhar offered to have Vinod drive Nancy home—just the dwarf, alone. That way, she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.

  Nancy preferred this plan. “I’m safe around dwarfs,” she said. “I like dwarfs.”

  When she’d gone with Vinod, Detective Patel asked Inspector Dhar how he liked being a real policeman. “It’s better in the movies,” the actor replied. “In the movies, things happen the way they should happen.”

  After the deputy commissioner had departed with Rahul, John D. let Dr. Daruwalla snap his pinky finger into place. “Just look away—look at Julia,” the doctor recommended. Then he popped the dislocated finger back where it belonged. “We’ll take an X ray tomorrow,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “Maybe we’ll splint it, but not until it’s stopped swelling. For now, keep putting it in ice.”

  At the table in the Ladies’ Garden, John D. responded to this advice by submersing his pinky in his water glass; most of the ice in the glass had melted, so Dr. Daruwalla summoned Mr. Sethna for more. Because the old Parsi seemed deeply disappointed that no one had congratulated him on his performance, Dhar said, “Mr. Sethna, that was really brilliant—how you fell over your own tray, for example. The distracting sound of the tray itself, your particularly purposeful but graceful awkwardness … truly brilliant.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Sethna replied. “I wasn’t sure what to do with the menus.”

  “That was brilliant, too—the menus in her lap. Perfect!” said Inspector Dhar.

  “Thank you,” the steward repeated; he went away—he was so pleased with himself that he forgot to bring the ice.

  No one had eaten any lunch. Dr. Daruwalla was the first to confess to a great hunger; Julia was so relieved that Mrs. Dogar was gone, she admitted to having a considerable appetite hers
elf. John D. ate with them, although he seemed indifferent to the food.

  Farrokh reminded Mr. Sethna that he’d forgotten to bring the ice, which the steward finally delivered to the table in a silver bowl; it was a bowl that was normally reserved for chilling tiger prawns, and the movie star stuck his swollen pinky finger in it with a vaguely mortified expression. Although the finger was still swelling, especially at the joint of the big knuckle, Dhar’s pinky was not nearly as discolored as his lip.

  The actor drank more beer than he usually permitted himself at midday, and his conversation was entirely concerned with when he would leave India. Certainly before the end of the month, he thought. He questioned whether or not he’d bother to do his fair share of publicity for Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence; now that the real-life version of the cage-girl killer was captured, Dhar commented that there might (for once) be some favorable publicity attached to his brief presence in Bombay. The more he mused out loud about it, the closer Dhar came to deciding that there was really nothing keeping him in India; from John D.’s point of view, the sooner he went back to Switzerland, the better.

  The doctor remarked that he thought he and Julia would return to Canada earlier than they’d planned; Dr. Daruwalla also asserted that he couldn’t imagine coming back to Bombay in the near future, and the longer one stayed away … well, the harder it would be to ever come back. Julia let them talk. She knew how men hated to feel overwhelmed; they were really such babies whenever they weren’t in control of their surroundings—whenever they felt that they didn’t belong where they were. Also, Julia had often heard Farrokh say that he was never coming back to India; she knew he always came back.

  The late-afternoon sun was slanting sideways through the trellis in the Ladies’ Garden; the light fell in long slashes across the tablecloth, where the most famous male movie star in Bombay entertained himself by flicking stray crumbs with his fork. The ice in the prawn bowl had melted. It was time for Dr. and Mrs. Daruwalla to make an appearance at the celebration at St. Ignatius; Julia had to remind the doctor that she’d promised Martin Mills an early arrival. Understandably, the scholastic wanted to wear clean bandages to the high-tea jubilee, his introduction to the Catholic community.

  “Why does he need bandages?” John D. asked. “What’s the matter with him now?”

  “Your twin was bitten by a chimpanzee,” Farrokh informed the actor. “Probably rabid.”

  There was certainly a lot of biting going around, Dhar thought, but the events of the day had sharply curtailed his inclination toward sarcasm. His finger throbbed and he knew his lip was ugly. Inspector Dhar didn’t say a word.

  When the Daruwallas left him sitting in the Ladies’ Garden, the movie star closed his eyes; he looked asleep. Too much beer, the ever-watchful Mr. Sethna surmised; then the steward reminded himself of his conviction that Dhar was stricken with a sexually transmitted disease. The old Parsi revised his opinion—he determined that Dhar was suffering from both the beer and the disease—and he ordered the busboys to leave the actor undisturbed at his table in the Ladies’ Garden. Mr. Sethna’s disapproval of Dhar had softened considerably; the steward felt bloated with pride—to have had his small supporting role called “brilliant” and “perfect” by such a celebrity of the Hindi cinema!

  But John D. wasn’t asleep; he was trying to compose himself, which is an actor’s nonstop job. He was thinking that it had been years since he’d felt the slightest sexual attraction to any woman; but Nancy had aroused him—it seemed to him that it was her anger he’d found so appealing—and for the second Mrs. Dogar John D. had felt an even more disturbing desire. With his eyes still closed, the actor tried to imagine his own face with an ironic expression—not quite a sneer. He was 39, an age when it was unseemly to have one’s sexual identity shaken. He concluded that it hadn’t been Mrs. Dogar who’d stimulated him; rather, he’d been reliving his attraction to the old Rahul—back in those Goa days when Rahul was still a sort of man. This thought comforted John D. Watching him, Mr. Sethna saw what he thought was a sneer on the sleeping movie star’s face; then something soothing must have crossed the actor’s mind, for the sneer softened to a smile. He’s thinking of the old days, the steward imagined … before he contracted the presumed dread disease. But Inspector Dhar had amused himself with a radical idea.

  Shit, I hope I’m not about to become interested in women! the actor thought. What a mess that would make of things.

  At this same moment, Dr. Daruwalla was experiencing another kind of irony. His arrival at the mission of St. Ignatius marked his first occasion in Christian company since the doctor had discovered who’d bitten his big toe. Dr. Daruwalla’s awareness that the source of his conversion to Christianity was the love bite of a transsexual serial killer had further diminished the doctor’s already declining religious zeal; that the toe-biter had not been the ghost of the pilgrim who dismembered St. Francis Xavier was more than a little disappointing. It was also a vulnerable time for Father Julian to have greeted Farrokh as the Father Rector did. “Ah, Dr. Daruwalla, our esteemed alumnus! Have you had any miracles happen to you lately?”

  Thus baited, the doctor couldn’t resist rebandaging Martin in an eccentric fashion. Dr. Daruwalla padded the puncture wound in the scholastic’s neck so that the bandage looked as if it were meant to conceal an enormous goiter. He then rebound the Jesuit’s slashed hand in such a way that Martin had only partial use of his fingers. As for the half-eaten earlobe, the doctor was expansive with gauze and tape; he wrapped up the whole ear. The zealot could hear out of only one side of his head.

  But the clean, bright bandages only served to heighten the new missionary’s heroic appearance. Even Julia was impressed. And quickly the story circulated through the courtyard at dusk: the American missionary had just rescued two urchins from the streets of Bombay; he’d brought them to the relative safety of a circus, where a wild animal had attacked him. At the fringes of the high tea, where Dr. Daruwalla stood sulking, he overheard the story that Martin Mills had been mauled by a lion; it was only the scholastic’s self-deprecating nature that made him say the biting had been done by a monkey.

  It further depressed the doctor to see that the source of this fantasy was the piano-playing Miss Tanuja; she’d traded her wing-tipped eyeglasses for what appeared to be rose-tinted contact lenses, which lent to her eyes the glowing red bedazzlement of a laboratory rat. She still spilled recklessly beyond the confines of her Western clothes, a schoolgirl voluptuary wearing her elderly aunt’s dress. And she still sported the spear-headed bra, which uplifted and thrust forth her breasts like the sharp spires of a fallen church. As before, the crucifix that dangled between Miss Tanuja’s highly armed bosoms seemed to subject the dying Christ to a new agony—or such was Dr. Daruwalla’s disillusionment with the religion he’d adopted when Rahul bit him.

  Jubilee Day was definitely not the doctor’s sort of celebration. He felt a vague loathing for such a hearty gathering of Christians in a non-Christian country; the atmosphere of religious complicity was uncomfortably claustrophobic. Julia found him engaged in standoffish if not openly antisocial behavior; he’d been reading the examination scrolls in the entrance hall and had wandered to that spot, at the foot of the courtyard stairs, where the statue of Christ with the sick child was mounted on the wall alongside the fire extinguisher. Julia knew why Farrokh was loitering there; he was hoping that someone would speak to him and he could then comment on the irony of juxtaposing Jesus with a fire-fighting tool.

  “I’m going to take you home,” Julia warned him. Then she noticed how tired he looked, and how utterly out of place—how lost. Christianity had tricked him; India was no longer his country. When Julia kissed his cheek, she realized he’d been crying.

  “Please do take me home,” Farrokh told her.

  26

  GOOD-BYE, BOMBAY

  Well, Then

  Danny Mills died following a New Year’s Eve party in New York. It was Tuesday, January 2, before Martin Mi
lls and Dr. Daruwalla were notified. The delay was attributed to the time difference—New York is 10½ hours behind Bombay—but the real reason was that Vera hadn’t spent New Year’s Eve with Danny. Danny, who was almost 75, died alone. Vera, who was 65, didn’t discover Danny’s body until the evening of New Year’s Day.

  When Vera returned to their hotel, she wasn’t fully recovered from a tryst with a rising star of a light-beer commercial—an unbefitting fling for a woman her age. She doubtless failed to note the irony that Danny had died with the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging optimistically from their hotel-room door. The medical examiner concluded that Danny had choked on his own vomit, which was (like his blood) nearly 20 percent alcohol.

  In her two telegrams, Vera cited no clinical evidence; yet she managed to convey Danny’s inebriation to Martin in pejorative terms.

  YOUR FATHER DIED DRUNK IN A NEW YORK HOTEL

  This also communicated to her son the sordidness, not to mention the inconvenience; Vera was going to have to spend nearly all of that Tuesday shopping. Coming from California—their visit was intended to be short—neither Danny nor Vera had packed for an extended stay in the January climate.

  Vera’s telegram to Martin continued in a bitter vein.

  BEING CATHOLIC, ALTHOUGH HARDLY A MODEL OF THE SPECIES, I’M SURE DANNY WOULD HAVE WANTED YOU TO ARRANGE SOME SUITABLE SERVICE OR LAST BIT OR WHATEVER IT’S CALLED

  “Hardly a model of the species” was the sort of language Vera had learned from the moisturizer commercial of her son’s long-ago and damaged youth.

  The last dig was pure Vera—even in what passed for grief, she took a swipe at her son.

  WILL OF COURSE UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY IF YOUR VOW OF POVERTY MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO ASSIST ME IN THIS MATTER / MOM

  There followed only the name of the hotel in New York. Martin’s “vow of poverty” notwithstanding, Vera wasn’t offering to pay for his trip with her money.