apartment building on Marine Drive. No one saw him slip into the building, but the dwarf roamed around the lobby, breathing heavily, until he had all the first-floor dogs barking. Then Vinod swaggered back to his taxi; he felt only mildly uplifted by the insults of the screaming residents, who’d earlier been disturbed by the report that their all- important elevator sign had been stolen.
Wherever the sad dwarf drove, the life of the city seemed to be eluding him; still, he wouldn’t go home. In the predawn light, Vinod stopped the Ambassador to joke with a traffic policeman in Mazagaon.
“Where is the traffic being?” Vinod asked the constable. The policeman had his baton out, as if there were a crowd or a riot to direct. No one was anywhere around: not another car, not a single bicycle, not one pedestrian. Of the sidewalk sleepers, the few who were awake hadn’t risen beyond a sitting position or from their knees. The constable recognized Dhar’s thug driver—every policeman knew Vinod. The constable said there’d been a disturbance—a religious procession streaming out of Sophia Zuber Road—but Vinod had missed it. The abandoned traffic policeman said he’d be obliged to the dwarf if Vinod would drive him the length of Sophia Zuber Road, just to prove that there was no more trouble. And so, with the lonely constable in the car, Vinod cautiously proceeded through one of Bombay’s better slums.
There wasn’t much to see; more sidewalk sleepers were waking up, but the slum dwellers were still sleeping. At that part of Sophia Zuber Road where Martin Mills, almost a month ago, had encountered the mortally wounded cow, Vinod and the traffic policeman saw the tail end of a procession—a few sadhus chanting, the usual flower flingers. There was a huge clotted bloodstain in the gutter of the road, where the cow had finally died; the earlier disturbance, the religious procession, had been merely the removal of the dead cow’s body. Some zealots had managed to keep the cow alive all this time.
This zeal was also not God’s will, Dr. Daruwalla would have said; this doomed effort was also “just India,” which was more than enough.
27. EPILOGUE
On a Friday in May, more than two years after the Daruwallas had returned to Toronto from Bombay, Farrokh felt an urge to show Little India to his friend Macfarlane. They took Mac’s car. It was their lunch hour, but the traffic on Gerrard was so congested, they soon realized they wouldn’t have much time for lunch; they might barely have time to get to Little India and back to the hospital.
They’d been spending their lunch hour together for the past 18 months, ever since Macfarlane had tested HIV-positive; Mac’s boyfriend—Dr. Duncan Frasier, the gay geneticist—had died of AIDS over a year ago. As for debating the merits of his dwarf-blood project, Farrokh had found no one to replace Frasier, and Mac hadn’t found a new boyfriend.
The shorthand nature of the conversation between Dr. Daruwalla and Dr. Macfarlane, in regard to Mac’s living with the AIDS virus, was a model of emotional restraint.
“How have you been doing?” Dr. Daruwalla would ask.
“Good,” Dr. Macfarlane would reply. “I’m off AZT—switched to DDI. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No—but why? Were your T cells dropping?”
“Kind of,” Mac would say. “They dropped below two hundred. I was feeling like shit on AZT, so Schwartz decided to switch me to DDI. I feel better—I’m more energetic now. And I’m taking Bactrim prophylactically… to prevent PCP pneumonia.”
“Oh,” Farrokh would say.
“It isn’t as bad as it sounds. I feel great,” Mac would say. “If the DDI stops working, there’s DDC and many more—I hope.”
“I’m glad you feel that way,” Farrokh would find himself saying.
“Meanwhile,” Macfarlane would say, “I’ve got this little game going. I sit and visualize my healthy T cells—I picture them resisting the virus. I see my T cells shooting bullets at the virus, and the virus being cut down in a hail of gunfire—that’s the idea, anyway.”
“Is that Schwartz’s idea?” Dr. Daruwalla would ask.
“No, it’s
“It sounds like Schwartz.”
“And I go to my support group,” Mac would add. “Support groups seem to be one of the things that correlate with long-term survival.”
“Really,” Farrokh would say.
“Really,” Macfarlane would repeat. “And of course what they call taking charge of your illness—not being passive, and not necessarily accepting everything your doctor tells you.”
“Poor Schwartz,” Dr. Daruwalla would reply. “I’m glad
“That makes two of us,” Mac would say.
This was their two-minute drill; usually, they could cover the subject that quickly—at least they tried to. They liked to let their lunch hour be about other things: for example, Dr. Daruwalla’s sudden desire to take Dr. Macfarlane to Little India.
It had been in May when the racist goons had driven Farrokh to Little India against his will; that had also been a Friday, a day when much of Little India had appeared to be closed—or were only the butcher shops closed? Dr. Daruwalla wondered if this was because the Friday prayers were faithfully attended by the local Muslims; it was one of those things he didn’t know. Farrokh knew only that he wanted Macfarlane to see Little India, and he had this sudden feeling that he wanted all the conditions to be the same—the same weather, the same shops, the same mannequins (if not the same saris).
Doubtless, Dr. Daruwalla had been inspired by something he’d read in the newspapers, probably something about the Heritage Front. It greatly upset him to read about the Heritage Front—those neo-Nazi louts, that white supremacist scum. Since there were antihate laws in Canada, Dr. Daruwalla wondered why groups like the Heritage Front were allowed to foment so much racist hatred.
Macfarlane had no difficulty finding a place to park; as before, Little India was fairly deserted—in this respect, it wasn’t like India at all. Farrokh stopped walking in front of the Ahmad Grocers on Gerrard, at Coxwell; he pointed diagonally across the street to the boarded-up offices of the Canadian Ethnic Immigration Services—it looked closed for good, not just because it was Friday.
“This is where I was dragged out of the car,” Dr. Daruwalla explained. They continued walking on Gerrard. Pindi Embroidery was gone, but a clothes rack of kaftans stood lifelessly on the sidewalk. “There was more wind the day I was here,” Farrokh told Mac. “The kaftans were dancing in the wind.”
At the corner of Rhodes and Gerrard, Nirma Fashions was still in business. They noted the Singh Farm, advertising fresh fruits and vegetables. They viewed the facade of the United Church, which also served as the Shri Ram Hindu Temple; the Reverend Lawrence Pushee, minister of the former, had chosen an interesting theme for the coming Sunday service. A Gandhi quotation forewarned the congregation: “There is enough for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.”
Not only the Canadian Ethnic Immigration Services, but also the Chinese were experiencing hard times; the Luck City Poultry Company was closed down. At the corner of Craven and Gerrard, the “Indian Cuisine Specialists,” formerly the Nirala restaurant, were now calling themselves Hira Moti, and the familiar advertisement for Kingfisher lager promised that the beer was (as always) INSTILLED WITH INNER STRENGTH. A MEGASTARS poster advertised the arrival of Jeetendra and Bali of Patel Rap; Sapna Mukerjee was also performing.
“I walked along here, bleeding,” Farrokh said to Mac. In the window of either Kala Kendar or Sonali’s, the same blond mannequin was wearing a sari; she still looked out of place among the other mannequins. Dr. Daruwalla thought of Nancy.
They passed Satyam, “the store for the whole family”; they read an old announcement for the Miss Diwali
