A Son of the Circus

the inside, and then closed behind the departing nun? The madam admitted that this would have made the same sound; in short, if the madam hadn’t heard the door, she never would have seen the nun. And by the time Mrs. Dogar took a taxi home, she was no longer a nun at all.

Detective Patel was exceedingly polite in asking the madam a most obvious question: “Would you consider the idea that the not-so-old man and the nun were in fact the same person?” The madam shrugged; she doubted she could identify either of them. When the deputy commissioner pressed her on this point, all the madam would add was that she’d been sleepy; both the not-so-old man and the nun had woken her up.

Nancy was still not awake when Detective Patel returned to his flat; he’d already typed a scathing report, demoting the surveillance officer and consigning him to the mailroom of Grime Branch Headquarters. The deputy commissioner wanted to be home when his wife woke up; he also didn’t want to call Inspector Dhar and Dr. Daruwalla from the police station. Detective Patel thought he’d let them all sleep a little longer.

The deputy commissioner determined that Asha’s neck had been broken so cleanly for two reasons. One, she was small; two, she’d been completely relaxed. Rahul must have coaxed her over onto her stomach, as if to prepare her for sex in that position. But of course there’d been no sex. The deep fingerprint bruises in the prostitute’s eye sockets—and on her throat, just below her jaw—suggested that Mrs. Dogar had grabbed Asha’s face from behind; she’d wrenched the small girl’s head back and to one side, until Asha’s neck snapped.

Then Rahul had rolled Asha onto her back in order to make the drawing on her belly. Although the drawing was of the usual kind, it was of less than the usual quality; it suggested undue haste, which was strange—there was no urgency for Mrs. Dogar to leave the brothel. Yet something had compelled Rahul to hurry. As for the fearsome “new twist” to this killing, it sickened Detective Patel. The dead girl’s lower lip was bitten clean through. Asha could not have been bitten so savagely while she was alive; her screams would have awakened the entire brothel. No; the bite had occurred after the murder and after the drawing. The minimal amount of bleeding indicated that Asha had been bitten after her heart had stopped. It was the idea of biting the girl that had made Mrs. Dogar hurry, the policeman thought. She couldn’t wait to finish the drawing because Asha’s lower lip was so tempting to her.

Even such slight bleeding had made a mess, which was uncharacteristic of Rahul. It must have been Mrs. Dogar who put the pot of water on the heating coil; her own face, at least her mouth, must have been marked with the prostitute’s blood. When the water was warm, Rahul dipped some of the dead girl’s clothes in the pot and used them to wash the blood off herself. Then she left—as a nun—forgetting that the heating coil was on. The boiling water had brought the madam. Although the nun had been a smart idea, this had otherwise been a sloppy job.

Nancy woke up about 8:00; she had a hangover, but Detective Patel didn’t hesitate to tell her what had happened. He could hear her being sick in the bathroom; he called the actor first, then the screenwriter. He told Dhar about the lip, but not the doctor; with Dr. Daruwalla, the deputy commissioner wanted to emphasize the importance of a good script for Dhar’s lunch with Mrs. Dogar. Patel told them both that he would have to arrest Rahul today; he hoped he had enough circumstantial evidence to arrest her. Whether or not he had enough evidence to keep her—that was another story. That was what he was counting on the actor and the screenwriter for: they had to make something happen over lunch.

Deputy Commissioner Patel was encouraged by one thing that the gullible surveillance officer had told him. After the disguised Mrs. Dogar had shuffled out of the taxi and into her house, the lights were turned on in a ground-floor room—not a bedroom—and these lights remained on well after daybreak. The deputy commissioner hoped that Rahul had been drawing.

As for Dr. Daruwalla, his first good night’s sleep—for five nights, and counting—had been interrupted rather early. He had no surgeries scheduled for New Year’s Day, and no office appointments, either; he’d been planning to sleep in. But upon hearing from Detective Patel, the screenwriter called John D. immediately. There was a lot to do before Dhar’s lunch at the Duckworth Club; there would be much rehearsing—some of it would be awkward, because Mr. Sethna would have to be involved. The deputy commissioner had already notified the old steward.

It was from John D. that Farrokh heard about Asha’s lower lip.

“Rahul must have been thinking of you!” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

“Well, we know she has a thing about biting,” Dhar told the doctor. “In all likelihood, it started with you.”

“What do you mean?” Dr. Daruwalla asked, for John D. hadn’t told him that Mrs. Dogar had confessed to gnawing on the doctor’s toe.

“It all started with the big toe of your right foot, in Goa,” John D. began. “That was Rahul who bit you. You were right all along—it was no monkey.”

The Wrong Madhu

That Monday, well before meat-feeding time at the Great Blue Nile Circus in Junagadh, the elephant-footed boy would wake up to the steady coughs of the lions; their low roars rose and fell as regularly as breathing. It was a cold morning in that part of Gujarat. For the first time in his life, Ganesh could see his own breath; the huffs of breath from the lions were like blasts of steam escaping from their cages.

The Muslims delivered the meat in a wooden wagon, dotted with flies; the entire floor of the wagon was lifted from the cart and placed on the ground between the cook’s tent and the big cats’ cages—the raw beef was piled on this slab of rough wood, which was the approximate size of a double door. Even in the cold morning air, the flies hovered over the meat, which Chandra sorted. Sometimes there was mutton mixed in with the beef, and the cook wanted to rescue it; mutton was too expensive for lions and tigers.

The big cats were bellowing now; they could smell the meat, and some of them could see the cook separating the choicer pieces of mutton. If the elephant boy was frightened by how savagely the lions and tigers devoured the raw beef, Dr. Daruwalla would never learn of it; nor would the doctor ever know if the sight of the lions slipping in the meat grease upset the cripple. At the circus, it was one of the few things that always upset the doctor.

That same Monday, someone proposed to marry Madhu. The proposal, as was only proper, was first offered to Mr. and Mrs. Das; the ringmaster and his wife were surprised. Not only had they not begun to train the girl, but, because Madhu was untrained, she wasn’t in evidence among the performers; yet the marriage proposal was offered by a gentleman who claimed to have been in the audience for the late-evening show on Sunday. Here he was, the following morning, professing his instant devotion!

The Bengali ringmaster and his wife had children of their own; their kids had rejected the circus life. But Mr. and Mrs. Das had trained many other children to be circus acrobats; they were kind to these adopted kids and especially protective of the girls. After all, when these girls were properly trained, they were of some value—not only to the circus. They had acquired a little glamour; they’d even earned some money, which they’d had no occasion to spend—hence the ringmaster and his wife were used to keeping dowries for them.

Mr. and Mrs. Das conscientiously advised the girls whether or not a marriage proposal was worthy of acceptance or negotiation, and they routinely gave up these adopted daughters—always to decent marriages, and often making their own contributions to the girls’ dowries. In many cases, the ringmaster and his wife had grown so fond of these children that it broke their hearts to see them go. Almost all the girls would eventually leave the circus; the few who stayed became trainers.

Madhu was very young and totally unproven, and she had no dowry. Yet here was a gentleman of means, well dressed, clearly a city person—he owned property and managed an entertainment business in Bombay—and he was offering Madhu a marriage proposal that Mr. and Mrs. Das found extremely generous; he would take the poor girl without a dowry. Doubtless, in these premarital negotiations, there would have been some substantive discussion of the remuneration that the ringmaster and his wife deserved, for (who knows?) Madhu might have become a star of the Great Blue Nile. From Mr. and Mrs. Das’s point of view, they were offered a sizable payment for a sullen girl who might never prove herself to be any kind of acrobat at all. It wasn’t as if they were being asked to part with a young woman they’d grown fond of; they’d barely had time to talk with Madhu.

It may have crossed the Bengalis’ minds to consult the doctor or the missionary; Mr. and Mrs. Das at least should have discussed the would-be marriage with Deepa, but the dwarf’s wife was still sick. So what if Deepa was