The lucky girl was not HIV-positive; besides, he happened to be traveling in India, as usual—with condoms. And Madhu wasn’t a girl who would ever tell anyone; she wasn’t a talker. In her present situation, she might never have the occasion to tell anyone. It was not only the child’s tarnished innocence that convinced him of the purity of this evil, like almost no other evil he’d ever imagined; it was also her strident amorality—whether this had been acquired in the brothel or, hideously, taught to her by Mr. Garg. Whatever one did to her, one wouldn’t pay for it— not in this life, or only in the torments of one’s soul. These were the darkest thoughts that Dr. Daruwalla had ever had, but he nevertheless thought his way through them; soon he was writing again.
By the movement of his pen (for she’d never stopped watching him), Madhu seemed to sense that she’d lost him. Also, her dessert was gone. She got out of the bed and walked naked to him; she peered over his shoulder, as if she knew how to read what he was writing. The screenwriter could feel her hair against his cheek and neck.
“Read it to me—just that part,” Madhu said. She leaned more firmly against him as she reached and touched the paper with her hand; she touched his last sentence. The cardamom-scented yogurt smelled sickly on her breath, and there was something like the smell of dead flowers—possibly the saffron.
The screenwriter read aloud to her: “‘Two stretcher bearers in white dhotis are running with the body of Acid Man, who is curled in a fetal position on the stretcher—his face glazed in pain, smoke still drifting from the area of his crotch.’”
Madhu made him read it again; then she said, “In
“Fetal,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “Like a baby inside its mother.”
“Who is Acid Man?” the child prostitute asked him.
“A man who’s been scarred by acid—like Mr. Garg,” Farrokh told her. At the mention of Garg’s name, there wasn’t even a flicker of recognition in the girl’s face. The doctor refused to look at her naked body, although Madhu still clung to his shoulder; where she pressed against him, he felt himself begin to sweat.
“The smoke is coming from
“From his crotch,” the screenwriter replied.
“Where’s that?” the child prostitute asked him.
“You know where that is, Madhu—go back to bed,” he told her.
She raised one arm to show him her armpit. “The hair is growing back,” she said. “You can feel it.”
“I can see that it’s growing back—I don’t need to feel it,” Farrokh replied.
“It’s growing back everywhere,” Madhu said.
“Go back to bed,” the doctor told her.
He could tell from the change in her breathing; he knew the moment when she finally fell asleep. Then he thought it was safe to lie down on the other bed. Although he was exhausted, he’d not yet fallen asleep when he felt the first of the fleas or the bedbugs. They didn’t seem to jump like fleas, and they were invisible; probably they were bedbugs. Evidently, Madhu was used to them—she hadn’t noticed.
Farrokh decided that he would rather try to sleep among the bird droppings on the balcony; possibly it was cool enough outside so there wouldn’t be any mosquitoes. But when the doctor stepped out on his balcony, there on the adjacent balcony was a wide-awake Martin Mills.
“There are a million things in my bed!” the missionary whispered.
“In mine, too,” Farrokh replied.
“I don’t know how the boy manages to sleep through all the biting and crawling!” the scholastic said.
“There are probably a million fewer things here than he’s used to in Bombay,” Dr. Daruwalla said.
The night sky was yielding to the dawn; soon the sky would be the same milky-tea color as the ground. Against such gray-brown tones, the white of the missionary’s new bandages was startling—his mittened hand, his wrapped neck, his patched ear.
“You’re quite a sight,” the doctor told him.
“You should see yourself,” the missionary replied. “Have you slept at all?”
Since the children were sleeping so soundly—and they’d only recently fallen asleep—the two men decided to take a tour of the town. After all, Mr. Das had warned them not to come to the circus too early, or else they’d interrupt the television watching. It being a Sunday, the doctor presumed that the televisions in all the troupe tents would be tuned to the
In the lobby, the Muslim boy was no longer eating to the Qawwali on the radio; the religious verses had put him to sleep. There was no need to wake him. In the driveway of the Government Circuit House, a half-dozen three-wheeled rickshaws were parked for the night; their drivers, all but one, were asleep in the passenger seats. The one driver who was awake was finishing his prayers when the doctor and the missionary hired his services. Through the sleeping town, they rode in the rickshaw; such peacefulness was improbable in Bombay.
By the Junagadh railroad station, they saw a yellow shack where several early risers were renting bicycles. They passed a coconut plantation. They saw a sign to the zoo, with a leopard on it. They passed a mosque, a hospital, the Hotel Relief, a vegetable market and an old fort; they saw two temples, two water tanks, some mango groves and what Dr. Daruwalla said was a baobab tree—Martin Mills said it wasn’t. Their driver took them to a teak forest. This was the start of the climb up Girnar Hill, the driver told them; from this point on, they would have to proceed on foot. It was a 600-meter ascent up 10,000 stone steps; it would take them about two hours, their driver said.
“Why on earth does he think we want to climb ten thousand steps for two hours?” Martin asked Farrokh. But when the doctor explained that the hill was sacred to the Jains, the Jesuit wanted to climb it.
“It’s just a bunch of temples!” Dr. Daruwalla cried. The place would probably be crawling with sadhus, practicing yoga. There would be unappetizing refreshment stalls and scavenging monkeys and the repugnant evidence of human feces along the way. (There would be eagles soaring overhead, their rickshaw driver informed them.)
There was no stopping the Jesuit from his holy climb; the doctor wondered if the arduous trek was a substitute for Mass. The climb took them barely an hour and a half, largely because the scholastic walked so fast. There were monkeys nearby, and these doubtless made the missionary walk faster; after his chimp experience, Martin was wary of ape-related animals—even small ones. They saw only one eagle. They passed several sadhus, who were climbing up the holy hill as the doctor and the Jesuit were walking down. It was too early for most of the refreshment stalls to be open; at one stall, they split an orange soda between them. The doctor had to agree that the marble temples near the summit were impressive, especially the largest and the oldest, which was a Jain temple from the 12th century.
By the time they descended, they were both panting, and Dr. Daruwalla remarked that his knees were killing him; no religion was worth 10,000 steps, Farrokh said. The occasional encounters with human feces had depressed him, and during the entire hike he’d worried that their driver would abandon them and they’d be forced to walk back to town. If Farrokh had tipped the driver too much before their climb, there would be no incentive for the driver to stay; if Farrokh had tipped him too little, the driver would be too insulted to wait for them.
“It will be a miracle if our driver hasn’t absconded,” Farrokh told Martin. But their driver was not only waiting for them; as they came upon him, they saw that the faithful man was cleaning his rickshaw.
“You really should restrict your use of this word ‘miracle,’” the missionary said; his neck bandage was beginning to unravel because the hike had made him sweat.
It was time to wake the children and take them to the circus. It vexed Farrokh that Martin Mills had waited until now to say the obvious. The scholastic would say it only once. “Dear God,” the Jesuit said, “I hope we’re doing
