don’t think
Not bad, Dr. Daruwalla thought. And there should be a scene later, with the boy in full costume—a singlet sewn with blue-green sequins. As he descends on the dental trapeze, spinning in the spotlight, the gleaming sequins throw back the light. Ganesh should never quite touch the ground; instead, he descends into Pratap’s waiting arms. Pratap lifts the boy up to the cheering crowd. Then Pratap runs out of the ring with Ganesh in his arms—because after a cripple has walked on the sky, no one should see him limp.
It could work, the screenwriter thought.
After the performance, they managed to find where Ramu had parked the Land Rover, but they couldn’t find Ramu. The four of them required two rickshaws for the trip across town to the Government Circuit House; Madhu and Farrokh followed the rickshaw carrying Ganesh and Martin Mills. These were the three-wheeled rickshaws that Dr. Daruwalla hated; old Lowji had once declared that a three-wheeled rickshaw made as much sense as a moped towing a lawn chair. But Madhu and Ganesh were enjoying the ride. As their rickshaw bounced along, Madhu tightly gripped Farrokh’s knee with one hand. It was a child’s grip—not sexual groping, Dr. Daruwalla assured himself. With her other hand, Madhu waved to Ganesh. Looking at her, the doctor kept thinking: Maybe the girl will be all right— maybe she’ll make it.
On the mud flaps of the rickshaw ahead of them, Farrokh saw the face of a movie star; he thought it might be a poor likeness of either Madhuri Dixit or Jaya Prada—in any case, it wasn’t Inspector Dhar. In the cheap plastic window of the rickshaw, there was Ganesh’s face—the
In the window of the bouncing rickshaw, the boy’s dark eyes were shining. The headlight from the following rickshaw kept crossing the cripple’s smiling face. Given the distance between the two rickshaws and the fact that it was night, Dr. Daruwalla observed that the boy’s eyes looked healthy; you couldn’t see the slight discharge or the cloudiness from the tetracycline ointment. From such a partial view, you couldn’t tell that Ganesh was crippled; he looked like a happy, normal boy.
How the doctor wished it were true.
There was nothing to do about the missing piece of Martin’s earlobe. Altogether, Dr. Daruwalla used two 10mL vials of the human rabies immune globulin; he injected a half-vial directly into each of the three wound areas—the earlobe, the neck, the hand—and he administered the remaining half-vial by a deep intramuscular injection in Martin’s buttocks.
The hand was the worst—a slash wound, which the doctor packed with iodophor gauze, A bite should drain, and heal from the inside, so Dr. Daruwalla wouldn’t stitch the wound—nor did the doctor offer anything for the pain. Dr. Daruwalla had observed that the missionary was enjoying his pain. However, the zealot’s limited sense of humor didn’t permit him to appreciate Dr. Daruwalla’s joke—that the Jesuit appeared to suffer from “chimpanzee stigmata.” The doctor also couldn’t resist pointing out to Martin Mills that, on the evidence of the scholastic’s wounds, whatever had bitten Farrokh (and converted him) in Goa was certainly
“Still angry about your miracle, I see,” Martin replied.
On that testy note, the two men said their good-nights. Farrokh didn’t envy the Jesuit the task of calming Ganesh down, for the elephant boy was in no mood to sleep; the cripple couldn’t wait for his first full day at the circus to begin. Madhu, on the other hand, seemed bored and listless, if not exactly sleepy.
Their rooms at the Government Circuit House were adjacent to each other on the third floor. Off Farrokh and Madhu’s bedroom, two glass doors opened onto a small balcony covered with bird droppings. They had their own bathroom with a sink and a toilet, but no door; there was just a rug hung from a curtain rod—it didn’t quite touch the floor. The toilet could be flushed only with a bucket, which was conveniently positioned under a faucet that dripped. There was also a shower, of sorts; an open-ended pipe, without a showerhead, poked out of the bathroom wall. There was no curtain for the shower, but there was a sloped floor leading to an open drain, which (upon closer inspection) appeared to be the temporary residence of a rat; Farrokh saw its tail disappearing down the hole. Very close to the drain was a diminished bar of soap, the edges nibbled.
In the bedroom, the two beds were too close together—and doubtless infested. Both mosquito nets were yellowed and stiff, and one was torn. The one window that opened had no screen, and little air was inclined to move through it. Dr. Daruwalla thought they might as well open the glass doors to the balcony, but Madhu said she was afraid that a monkey would come inside.
The ceiling fan had only two speeds: one was so slow that the fan had no effect at all, and the other was so fast that the mosquito nets were blown away from the beds. Even in the main tent at the circus, the night air had felt cool, but the third floor of the Government Circuit House was hot and airless. Madhu solved this problem by using the bathroom first; she wet a towel and wrung it out, and then she lay naked under the towel—on the better bed, the one with the untorn mosquito net. Madhu was small, but so was the towel; it scarcely covered her breasts and left her thighs exposed. A deliberate girl, the doctor thought.
Lying there, she said, “I’m still hungry. There was nothing sweet.”
“You want a dessert?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.
“If it’s sweet,” she said.
The doctor carried the thermos with the rest of the rabies vaccine and the immune globulin down to the lobby; he hoped there was a refrigerator, for the thermos was already tepid. What if Gautam bit someone else tomorrow? Kunal had informed the doctor that the chimpanzee was “almost definitely” rabid. Rabid or not, the chimp shouldn’t be beaten; in the doctor’s opinion, only a second-rate circus beat its animals.
In the lobby, a Muslim boy was tending the desk, listening to the Qawwali on the radio; he appeared to be eating ice cream to the religious verses—his head nodding while he ate, the spoon conducting the air between the container and his mouth. But it wasn’t ice cream, the boy told Dr. Daruwalla; he offered the doctor a spoon and invited him to take a taste. The texture differed from that of ice cream—a cardamom-scented, saffron-colored yogurt, sweetened with sugar. There was a refrigerator full of the stuff, and Farrokh took a container and spoon for Madhu. He left the vaccine and the immune globulin in the refrigerator, after assuring himself that the boy knew better than to eat it.
When the doctor returned to his room, Madhu had discarded the towel. He tried to give her the Gujarati dessert without looking at her; probably on purpose, she made it awkward for him to hand her the spoon and container—he was sure she was pretending that she didn’t know where the mosquito net opened. She sat naked in bed, eating the sweetened yogurt and watching him while he arranged his writing materials.
There was an unsteady table, a thick candle affixed by wax to a dirty ashtray, a packet of matches alongside a mosquito coil. When Farrokh had spread out his pages and smoothed his hand over the pad of fresh paper, he lit the candle and the mosquito coil and turned off the overhead light. At high speed, the ceiling fan would have disturbed his work and Madhu’s mosquito net, so the doctor kept the fan on low; although this was ineffectual, he hoped that the movement of the blade might make Madhu sleepy.
“What are you doing?” the child prostitute asked him.
“Writing,” he told her.
“Read it to me,” Madhu asked him.
“You wouldn’t understand it,” Farrokh replied.
“Are you going to be sleeping?” the girl asked.
“Maybe later,” said Dr. Daruwalla.
He tried to block her out of his mind, but this was difficult. She kept watching him; the sound of her spoon in the container of yogurt was as regular as the drone of the fan. Her purposeful nakedness was oppressive, but not because he was actually tempted by her; it was more that the pure evil of having sex with her (the very
