A Son of the Circus

The deputy commissioner was still thinking about the haircuts. The pompadour had a feminizing effect on old Mr. Dogar, but the same hairdo conveyed a mannishness to his wife. The detective concluded that Mrs. Dogar resembled a bullfighter; Detective Patel had never seen a bullfighter, of course.

Farrokh was dying to know which dialogue John D. had used. The sweating movie star was still fussing with his lip. The doctor observed that Dhar’s lower lip was swollen; it had the increasingly purplish hue of a contusion. The doctor waved his arms for a waiter and asked for a tall glass of ice—just ice.

“So she kissed you,” Nancy said.

“It was more like a bite,” John D. replied.

“But what did you say?” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

“Did you arrange a meeting?” Detective Patel asked Dhar.

“Lunch here, tomorrow,” the actor replied.

“Lunch!” the screenwriter said with disappointment.

“So you’ve made a start,” the policeman said.

“Yes, I think so. It’s something, anyway—I’m not sure what,” Dhar remarked.

“So she responded?” Farrokh asked. He felt frustrated, for he wanted to hear the dialogue between them—word for word.

“Look at his lip!” Nancy told the doctor. “Of course she responded!”

“Did you ask her to draw you a picture?” Farrokh wanted to know.

“That part was scary—at least it got a little strange,” Dhar said evasively. “But I think she’s going to show me something.”

“At lunch?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. John D. shrugged; he was clearly exasperated with all the questions.

“Let him talk, Farrokh. Stop putting words in his mouth,” Julia told him.

“But he’s not talking!” the doctor cried.

“She said she wanted me to submit to her,” Dhar told the deputy commissioner.

“She wants to tie him up!” Farrokh shouted.

“She said she meant more than that,” Dhar replied.

“What’s ‘more than that’?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

The waiter brought the ice and John D. held a piece to his lip.

“Put the ice in your mouth and suck on it,” the doctor told him, but John D. kept applying the ice in his own way.

“She bit me inside and out,” was all he said.

“Did you get to the part about her sex-change operation?” the screenwriter asked.

“She thought that part was funny,” John D. told them. “She laughed.”

By now the indentations on the outside of Dhar’s lower lip were easier to see, even in the candlelight in the Ladies’ Garden; the teeth marks had left such deep bruises, the discolored lip was turning from a pale purple to a dark magenta, as if Mrs. Dogar’s teeth had left a stain.

To her husband’s surprise, Nancy helped herself to a second glass of champagne; Detective Patel had been mildly shocked that his wife had accepted the first glass. Now Nancy raised her glass, as if she were toasting everyone in the Ladies’ Garden.

“Happy New Year,” she said, but to no one in particular.

“Auld Lang Syne”

Finally, they served the midnight supper. Nancy picked at her food, which her husband eventually ate. John D. couldn’t eat anything spicy because of his lip; he didn’t tell them about the erection Mrs. Dogar had given him, or how—or about how she’d said he was as big as an elephant. Dhar decided he’d tell Detective Patel later, when they were alone. When the policeman excused himself from the table, John D. followed him to the men’s room and told him there.

“I didn’t like the way she looked when she left here.” That was all the detective would say.

Back at their table, Dr. Daruwalla told them that he had a plan to “introduce” the top half of the pen; Mr. Sethna was involved—it sounded complicated. John D. repeated that he hoped Rahul was going to make him a drawing.

“That would do it, wouldn’t it?” Nancy asked her husband.

“That would help,” the deputy commissioner said. He had a bad feeling. He once again excused himself from the table, this time to call Crime Branch Headquarters. He ordered a surveillance officer to watch the Dogars’ house all night; if Mrs. Dogar left the house, he wanted the officer to follow her—and he wanted to be told if she left the house, whatever the hour.

In the men’s room, Dhar had said that he’d never felt it was Rahul’s intention to bite his lip off, nor even that taking his lip in her teeth was a deliberate decision—it wasn’t something she’d done merely to scare him, either. The actor believed that Mrs. Dogar hadn’t been able to stop herself; and all the while she’d held his lip, he’d felt that the transsexual was unable to let go.

“It wasn’t that she wanted to bite me,” Dhar had told the detective. “It was that she couldn’t help it.”

“Yes, I understand,” the policeman had said; he’d resisted the temptation to add that only in the movies did every murderer have a clear motive.

Now, as he hung up the phone, a dreary song reached the deputy commissioner in the foyer. The band was playing “Auld Lang Syne”; the drunken Duckworthians were murdering the lyrics. Patel crossed the dining room with difficulty because so many of the maudlin members were leaving their tables and traipsing to the ballroom, singing as they staggered forth. There went Mr. Bannerjee, sandwiched between his wife and the widow Lal; he appeared to be manfully intent on dancing with them both. There went Dr. and Mrs. Sorabjee, leaving little Amy alone at their table.

When the detective returned to the Daruwallas’ table, Nancy was nagging Dhar. “I’m sure that little girl is dying to dance with you again. And she’s all alone. Why don’t you ask her? Imagine how she feels. You started it,” Nancy told him. She’d had three glasses of champagne, her husband calculated; this wasn’t much, but she never drank—and she’d eaten next to nothing. Dhar was managing not to sneer; he was trying to ignore Nancy instead.

“Why don’t you ask me to dance?” Julia asked John D. “I think Farrokh has forgotten to ask me.”

Without a word, Dhar led Julia to the ballroom; Amy Sorabjee watched them all the way.

“I like your idea about the top half of the pen,” Detective Patel told Dr. Daruwalla.

The screenwriter was taken aback by this unexpected praise. “You do?” Farrokh said. “The problem is, Mrs. Dogar’s got to think that it’s been in her purse—that it’s always been there.”

“I agree that if Dhar can distract her, Mr. Sethna can plant the pen.” That was all the policeman would say.

“You do?” Dr. Daruwalla repeated.

“It would be nice if we found other things in her purse,” the deputy commissioner thought aloud.

“You mean the money with the typewritten warnings—or maybe even a drawing,” the doctor said.

“Precisely,” Patel said.

“Well, I wish I could write that!” the screenwriter replied.

Suddenly Julia was back at the table; she’d lost John D. as a dance partner when Amy Sorabjee had cut in.

“The shameless girl!” Dr. Daruwalla said.

“Come dance with me, Liebchen,” Julia told him.

Then the Patels were alone at the table; in fact, they were alone in the Ladies’ Garden. In the main dining room, an unidentified man was sleeping with his head on one of the dinner tables; everyone else was dancing, or