emergencies happened on Saturday, and the doctor wasn’t on call this weekend.
The girl’s posture further upset Farrokh; Madhu more than slouched in the soft chair—she lolled. Her dress was hiked up nearly to her hips and she stared into the eyes of every man who passed. This certainly detracted from her looking like a child. Worse, Madhu seemed to be wearing perfume; she smelled a little like Deepa to Dr. Daruwalla. (Doubtless Vinod had allowed the girl some access to Deepa’s things, and Madhu had liked the perfume that the dwarf’s wife wore.) Also, the doctor believed that the air-conditioning at the Taj was too comfortable—in fact, it was too cold. At the Government Circuit House in Junagadh, where Dr. Daruwalla had arranged for them all to spend the night, there wouldn’t be any air-conditioning—just ceiling fans—and in the circus, where the children would spend the following night (and every night thereafter), there would be only tents. No ceiling fans… and probably the mosquito netting would be in disrepair. Every second they stayed in the lobby of the Taj, Dr. Daruwalla realized that he was making it harder for the children to adjust to the Great Blue Nile.
Then a most irksome thing happened. A messenger boy was paging Inspector Dhar. The method for paging at the Taj was rudimentary; some thought it quaint. The messenger tramped through the lobby with a chalkboard that dangled brass chimes, treating everyone in the lobby to an insistent dinging. The messenger boy, who thought that he’d recognized Inspector Dhar, stopped in front of Martin Mills and shook the board with its incessant chimes. Chalked on the board was MR DHAR.
“Wrong man,” Dr. Daruwalla told the messenger boy, but the boy continued to shake the chimes. “Wrong man, you moron!” the doctor shouted. But the boy was no moron; he wouldn’t leave without a tip. Once he got it, he strolled casually away, still chiming. Farrokh was furious.
“We’re going now,” he said abruptly.
“Going where?” Madhu asked him.
“To the circus?” asked Ganesh.
“No, not yet—we’re just going somewhere else,” the doctor informed them.
“Aren’t we comfortable here?” the missionary asked.
“
“Actually, a tour of Bombay would be nice—for me,” the scholastic said. “I realize the rest of you are familiar with the city, but possibly there’s something you wouldn’t mind showing me. Public gardens, perhaps. I also like marketplaces.”
Not a great idea, Farrokh knew—to be dragging Dhar’s twin through public places. Dr. Daruwalla was thinking that he could take them all to the Duckworth Club for lunch. It was certain that they wouldn’t run into Dhar at the Taj, because John D. was rehearsing with Detective Patel at the Oberoi; it was therefore likely that they wouldn’t run into John D. at the club, either. As for the outside chance that they might encounter Rahul, it didn’t bother Dr. Daruwalla to contemplate having another look at the second Mrs. Dogar; the doctor would do nothing to arouse her suspicions. But it was too early to go to lunch at the Duckworth Club, and he had to phone for a reservation; without one, Mr. Sethna would be rude to them.
Back in the Ambassador, the doctor instructed Vinod to drive them to the Asiatic Society Library, opposite Horniman Circle; this was one of those oases in the teeming city—not unlike the Duckworth Club or St. Ignatius— where the doctor was hoping that Dhar’s twin would be safe. Dr. Daruwalla was a member of the Asiatic Society Library; he’d often dozed in the cool, high-ceilinged reading rooms. The larger-than-life statues of literary geniuses had barely noticed the screenwriter’s quiet ascending and descending of the magnificent staircase.
“I’m taking you to the grandest library in Bombay,” Dr. Daruwalla told Martin Mills. “Almost a million books! Almost as many bibliophiles!”
Meanwhile, the doctor told Vinod to drive the children “around and around.” He also told the dwarf that it was important not to let the kids out of the car. They liked riding in the Ambassador, anyway—the anonymity of cruising the city, the secrecy of staring at the passing world. Madhu and Ganesh were unfamiliar with taxi riding; they stared at everyone as if they themselves were invisible—as if the dwarf’s crude Ambassador were equipped with one-way windows. Dr. Daruwalla wondered if this was because they knew they were safe with Vinod; they’d never been safe before.
The doctor had caught just a departing glimpse of the children’s faces. At that moment, they’d looked frightened—frightened of what? It certainly wasn’t that they feared they were being abandoned with a dwarf; they weren’t afraid of Vinod. No; on their faces Farrokh had seen a greater anxiety—that the circus they were supposedly being delivered to was only a dream, that they would never get out of Bombay.
“I’m quite fond of bibliophiles,” Martin Mills was saying as they climbed the stairs. For the first time, Dr. Daruwalla was aware of how loudly the scholastic spoke; the zealot was too loud for a library.
“There are over eight hundred thousand volumes here,” Farrokh whispered. “This includes ten thousand manuscripts!”
“I’m glad we’re alone for a moment,” the missionary said in a voice that rattled the wrought iron of the loggia.
The ceiling fan had snagged the string that turned the fan on and off, and only the slight ticking of the string against the blades disturbed the silence of the moldering air. The dusty books sagged on the carved teak shelves; numbered cartons of manuscripts were stacked against the bookcases; wide-bottomed, leather-padded chairs surrounded an oval table that was strewn with pencils and pads of notepaper. Only one of these chairs was on castors; it was tilted, for it was four-legged and had only three castors—the missing castor, like a paperweight, held down one of the pads of notepaper.
The American zealot, as if compelled by his countrymen’s irritating instinct to appear handy with all things, instantly undertook the task of repairing the broken chair. There were a half-dozen other chairs that the doctor and the missionary could have sat in, and Dr. Daruwalla suspected that the chair with the detached castor had probably maintained its disabled condition, untouched, for the last 10 or 20 years; perhaps the chair had been partially destroyed in celebration of Independence—more than 40 years ago! Yet here was this fool, determined to make it right. Is there no place in town I can take this idiot? Farrokh wondered. Before the doctor could stop the zealot, Martin Mills had upended the chair on the oval table, where it made a loud thump.
“Come on—you must tell me,” the missionary said. “I’m dying to hear the story of your conversion. Naturally, the Father Rector has told me about it.”
Naturally, Dr. Daruwalla thought; Father Julian had doubtless made the doctor come off as a deluded, false convert. Then, suddenly, to Farrokh’s surprise, the missionary produced a knife! It was one of those Swiss Army knives that Dhar liked so much—a kind of toolbox unto itself. With something that resembled a leather-punch, the Jesuit was boring a hole into the leg of the chair. The rotting wood fell on the table.
“It just needs a new screw hole,” Martin explained. “I can’t believe no one knew how to fix it.”
“I suppose people just sat in the other chairs,” Dr. Daruwalla suggested. While the scholastic wrestled with the chair leg, the nasty little tool on the knife suddenly snapped closed, neatly removing a hunk of Martin’s index finger. The Jesuit bled profusely onto a pad of notepaper.
“Now, look, you’ve cut yourself …” Dr. Daruwalla began.
“It’s nothing,” the zealot said, but it was evident that the chair was beginning to make the man of God angry. “I want to hear your story. Come on. I know how it starts… you’re in Goa, aren’t you? You’ve just gone to visit the sainted remains of our Francis Xavier… what’s left of him. And you go to sleep thinking of that pilgrim who bit off St. Francis’s toe.”
“I went to sleep thinking of nothing at all!” Farrokh insisted, his voice rising.
