A Son of the Circus

“Golf,” said Dr. Daruwalla; he’d never played the game but he detested it at a distance. Dhar smiled. “In Mr. Lal’s case,” the doctor continued, “I suppose you might say he was killed by an excessive desire to improve. He most probably had high blood pressure, too—a man his age shouldn’t repeatedly lose his temper in the hot sun.”

“But our weather is really quite cool,” the deputy commissioner said.

As if he’d been thinking about it for an extended time, Inspector Dhar said, “The body didn’t smell. The vultures stank, but not the body.”

Detective Patel appeared to be surprised and favorably impressed by this report, but all he said was, “Precisely.”

Dr. Daruwalla spoke with impatience: “My dear Deputy Commissioner, why don’t you begin by telling us what you know?”

“Oh, that’s absolutely not our way,” the deputy commissioner cordially replied. “Is it?” he asked Inspector Dhar.

“No, it isn’t,” Dhar agreed. “Just when do you estimate the time of death?” he asked the detective.

“Oh, what a very good question!” Patel remarked. “We estimate this morning—not even two hours before you found the body!”

Dr. Daruwalla considered this. While Mr. Bannerjee had been searching the clubhouse for his opponent and old friend, Mr. Lal had strolled to the ninth green and the bougainvillea beyond, once more to practice a good escape from his nemesis of the day before. Mr. Lal had not been late for his appointed game; if anything, poor Mr. Lal had been a little too early—at least, too eager.

“But there wouldn’t have been vultures so soon,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “There would have been no scent.”

“Not unless there was quite a lot of blood, or an open wound… and in this sun,” Inspector Dhar said. He’d learned much from his movies, even though they were very bad movies; even D.C.P. Patel was beginning to appreciate that.

“Quite so,” the detective said. “There was quite a lot of blood.”

“There was a lot of blood by the time we found him!” said Dr. Daruwalla, who still didn’t understand. “Especially around his eyes and mouth—I just assumed that the vultures had begun.”

“Vultures start pecking where there’s already blood, and at the naturally wet places,” said Detective Patel. His English was unusually good for a policeman, even for a deputy commissioner, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

The doctor was sensitive about his Hindi; he was aware that Dhar spoke the language more comfortably than he did. This was a slight embarrassment for Dr. Daruwalla, who wrote all of Dhar’s movie dialogue and his voice-over in English. The translation into Hindi was done by Dhar; those phrases that particularly appealed to him—there weren’t many—the actor left in English. And here was a not-so-common policeman indulging in the one-upmanship of speaking English to the renowned Canadian; it was what Dr. Daruwalla called “the Canadian treatment”—when a Bombayite wouldn’t even try to speak Hindi or Marathi to him. Although almost everyone spoke English at the Duckworth Club, Farrokh was thinking of something witty to say to Detective Patel in Hindi, but Dhar (in his accentless English) spoke first. Only then did the doctor realize that Dhar had not once used his show-business Hindi accent with the deputy commissioner.

“There was quite a lot of blood by one ear,” the actor said, as if he’d never stopped wondering about it.

“Very good—there absolutely was!” said the encouraging detective. “Mr. Lal was struck behind one ear, and also once in the temple—probably after he fell.”

“Struck by what?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“By what, we know—it was his putter!” said Detective Patel. “By whom, we don’t know.”

In the 130-year history of the Duckworth Sports Club-through all the perils of Independence and those many diverting occasions that could have led to violence (for example, those wild times when the inflammatory Lady Duckworth bared her breasts)—there had never been a murder! Dr. Daruwalla thought of how he would phrase this news to the Membership Committee.

It was characteristic of Farrokh not to consider his esteemed late father as the actual first murder victim in the 130-year history of Duckworthians in Bombay. The chief reason for this oversight was that Farrokh tried very hard not to think about his father’s murder at all, but a secondary reason was surely that the doctor didn’t want his father’s violent death to cloud his otherwise sunny feelings for the Duckworth Club, which has already been described as the only place (other than the circus) where Dr. Daruwalla felt at home.

Besides, Dr. Daruwalla’s father wasn’t murdered at the Duckworth Club. The car that he was driving exploded in Tardeo, not in Mahalaxmi, although these are neighboring districts. But it was generally admitted, even among Duckworthians, that the car bomb was probably installed while the senior Daruwalla’s car was parked in the Duckworth Club parking lot. Duckworthians were quick to point out that the only other person who was killed had no relationship to the club; the poor woman wasn’t even an employee. She was a construction worker, and she was said to be carrying a straw basket full of rocks on her head when the flying right- front fender of the senior Daruwalla’s car decapitated her.

But this was old news. The first Duckworthian to be murdered on the actual property of the Duckworth Club was Mr. Lal.

“Mr. Lal,” explained Detective Patel, “was engaged in swinging what I believe they call a ‘mashie,’ or is it a ‘wedgie’—what do they call the club you hit a chip shot with?” Neither Dr. Daruwalla nor Inspector Dhar was a golfer; a mashie or a wedgie sounded close enough to the real and stupid thing to them. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” the detective said. “Mr. Lal was holding one club when he was struck from behind with another—his own putter! We found it and his golf bag in the bougainvillea.”

Inspector Dhar had assumed a familiar film pose, or else he was merely thinking; he lifted his face as his fingers lightly stroked his chin, which enhanced his sneer. What he said was something that Dr. Daruwalla and Deputy Commissioner Patel had heard him say many times before; he said it in every movie.

“Forgive me for sounding most theoretical,” Dhar said. This favorite bit of dialogue was of that kind which Dhar preferred to deliver in English, although he’d delivered the line on more than one occasion in Hindi, too. “It seems,” Dhar said, “that the killer didn’t care especially who his victim was. Mr. Lal was not scheduled to meet anyone in the bougainvillea at the ninth green. It was an accident that he was there—the killer couldn’t have known.”

“Very good,” said D.C.P. Patel. “Please go on.”

“Since the killer didn’t seem to care who he killed,” Inspector Dhar said, “perhaps it was intended only that the victim be one of us.”

“Do you mean one of the members?” cried Dr. Daruwalla. “Do you mean a Duckworthian?”

“It’s just a theory,” said Inspector Dhar. Again, this was an echo; it was something he said in every movie.

“There is some evidence to support your theory, Mr. Dhar,” Detective Patel said almost casually. The deputy commissioner removed his sunglasses from the breast pocket of his crisp white shirt, which showed not a trace of evidence of his latest meal; he probed deeper into the pocket and extracted a folded square of plastic wrapping, large enough to cover a wedge of tomato or a slice of onion. From the plastic he unwrapped a two-rupee note that had previously been rolled into a typewriter, for typed on the serial-number side of the bill, in capital letters, was this warning: MORE MEMBERS DIE IF DHAR REMAINS A MEMBER.

“Forgive me, Mr. Dhar, if I ask you the obvious,” said Detective Patel.

“Yes, I have enemies,” Dhar said, without waiting for the question, “Yes, there are people who’d like to kill me.”

“But everyone would like to kill him!” cried Dr. Daruwalla. Then he touched the younger man’s hand. “Sorry,” he added.

Deputy Commissioner Patel returned the two-rupee note to his pocket. As he put on his sunglasses, the detective’s pencil-thin mustache suggested to Dr. Daruwalla a punctiliousness in shaving that the doctor had abandoned in his twenties. Such a mustache, etched both below the nose and above the lip, requires a younger man’s steady hand. At his age, the deputy commissioner must have had to prop his elbow fast against the mirror, for shaving of this kind could only be accomplished by removing the razor blade from the razor and holding the blade