Deepa’s hip, not her neck or back. But until someone could keep her from flopping around in the net, the doctor didn’t dare go to her. Vinod had instantly crawled into the net. Now Farrokh told him to clamp Deepa’s head between his knees and hold her shoulders with his hands. Only when the dwarf securely held her—only when Deepa couldn’t move her neck or her back, or even rotate her shoulders—did Dr. Daruwalla dare to enter the net.
In the time it had taken Vinod to crawl into the net with her, and all the time that the dwarf held his wife’s head tightly between his knees—while Dr. Daruwalla crawled into the sagging net and made his slow, awkward way toward them—the net never stopped swaying and the empty trapeze that dangled above them moved out of rhythm with the net.
Farrokh had never been in a safety net before. He was a nonathlete who was (even 15 years ago) noticeably plump, arid his climb into the trapeze artists’ net was a monumental struggle, aided only by his gratitude for his first samples of dwarf blood. As Dr. Daruwalla proceeded on all fours across the dipping, swaying net to where poor Deepa lay in her dwarf husband’s clutches, the doctor most resembled a fat, tentative mouse traversing a vast spiderweb.
Farrokh’s unreasonable fear of being pitched out of the net at least distracted him from the murmuring of the circus audience; they were impatient for the rescue process to hurry up. That the loudspeaker had introduced him to the restless crowd did nothing to prepare Dr. Daruwalla for the arduousness of his adventure. “Here is coming the doctor!” the ringmaster had declared over the loudspeaker, in a melodramatic effort to hold the crowd. But what a long time it took the doctor to reach the fallen flyer! Furthermore, Farrokh’s weight caused the net to dip nearer the ground; he was like an ungainly lover approaching his prey in a soft bed that sags in the middle.
Then, suddenly, the net sagged so steeply that Dr. Daruwalla was thrown off balance; clumsily, he fell forward. The plump physician thrust his fingers through the holes in the net; since he’d already removed his sandals before climbing into the net, he tried to insert his toes (like claws) through the holes in the net, too. But in spite of this effort to slow his own momentum, which was now of a pace to at last be of interest to the bored audience, gravity prevailed. Dr. Daruwalla pitched headfirst into the sequined belly of Deepa’s tight singlet.
Deepa’s neck and back were undamaged—the doctor had correctly diagnosed her injury from his view of her fall. Her hip was dislocated; it hurt her when Farrokh fell upon her abdomen. The doctor’s forehead was scratched by the pink and fire-engine-red sequins that formed a star over Deepa’s pelvis, and the bridge of Dr. Daruwalla’s nose ground to a sharp halt against her pubis.
Under vastly different circumstances, their collision might have been sexually thrilling, but not to a woman with a dislocated hip (and with her head clamped tightly between a dwarf’s knees). For Dr. Daruwalla—the fallen flyer’s pain and her screams notwithstanding—this encounter with Deepa’s pubic bone would be recorded as his single extramarital experience. Farrokh would never forget it.
Here he’d been called out of the audience to aid a dwarf’s wife in distress. And then, in full view of the unimpressed crowd, the doctor had ended up with his face jammed into the injured woman’s crotch. Was it any wonder he couldn’t forget her, or the mixed sensations that she’d caused him?
Even today, so many years later, Farrokh felt flushed with embarrassment and titillation, for his memory of the trapeze artist’s taut belly still excited him. Where his cheek had come to rest against her inner thigh, Farrokh could still feel how her tights were soaked with sweat. All the time he heard Deepa screaming in pain (as the doctor clumsily struggled to move his weight off her), he also heard the cartilage in his nose cracking, for Deepa’s pubis was as hard as an ankle or an elbow. And when Dr. Daruwalla breathed in her dangerous aroma, he thought he’d at last identified the smell of sex, which struck him as an earthy commingling of death and flowers.
It was there, in the swaying safety net, that Vinod first accused him. “All this is happening because you are wanting blood from dwarfs,” the dwarf said.
In 15 years, the Indian customs authorities had detained Dr. Daruwalla only twice; both times, the disposable hypodermic needles—about a hundred of them—had caught their attention. It had been necessary for the doctor to explain the difference between syringes, which are used to give injections, and Vacutainers, which are used to draw blood; in the Vacutainer system, neither the glass vials nor the plastic needle holders are equipped with plungers. The doctor wasn’t carrying syringes, for putting drugs in; he was carrying Vacutainers, for taking blood out.
“Whose blood is being taken out?” the customs man had asked.
Even the answer to that question had been easier to explain than the problem that currently presented itself to the doctor.
The current problem was, Dr. Daruwalla had upsetting news for the famous actor with the unlikely name of Inspector Dhar. Not sure of the degree to which Dhar would be distressed, the doctor was impelled by cowardice; he planned to give the movie star the bad news in a public place. Inspector Dhar’s poise in public was renowned; Farrokh felt he could rely on the actor to keep his composure. Not everyone in Bombay would have thought of a private club as a public place, but Dr. Daruwalla believed that the choice was both private and public enough for the crisis at hand.
That morning, when Dr. Daruwalla had arrived at the Duckworth Sports Club, he had thought it was unremarkable to see a vulture high in the sky above the golf course; he didn’t consider the bird of death as an omen attached to the unwelcome news he carried. The club was in Mahalaxmi, not far from Malabar Hill; everyone in Bombay knew why vultures were attracted to Malabar Hill. When a corpse was placed in the Towers of Silence, the vultures—from as far as 30 miles outside Bombay—could scent the ripening remains.
Farrokh was familiar with Doongarwadi. The so-called Towers of Silence are seven huge cairns on Malabar Hill where the Parsis lay out the naked cadavers of their dead to be picked clean by the carrion eaters. As a Parsi, Dr. Daruwalla was descended from Persian Zoroastrians who had come to India in the seventh and eighth centuries to escape Muslim persecution. Farrokh’s father, however, was such a virulent, acerbic atheist that the doctor had never been a practicing Zoroastrian. And Farrokh’s conversion to Christianity would doubtless have killed his godless father, except that his father was already dead. The doctor didn’t convert until he was almost 40.
Because Dr. Daruwalla was a Christian, his own mortal body would never be exposed in the Towers of Silence; but despite his father’s inflammatory atheism, Farrokh respected the habits of his fellow Parsis and practicing Zoroastrians—and he
In general, Dr. Daruwalla wished the vultures well. The limestone cairns contributed to the swift decomposition of even the larger bones, and those parts of Parsis that stayed intact were washed away in the monsoon season. In regard to disposing of the dead, in the doctor’s opinion, the Parsis had found an admirable solution.
As for the living, Dr. Daruwalla had this morning, as on most mornings, been up early. His first surgeries at the Hospital for Crippled Children, where he continued to enjoy the title of Honorary Consultant Surgeon, included one operation for clubfoot and another for wryneck; the latter is an infrequent operation nowadays, and it was not the sort of surgery that reflected Farrokh’s main interest in practicing orthopedics, albeit intermittently, in Bombay. Dr. Daruwalla was interested in bone and joint infections. In India, such infections typically follow a motor-vehicle accident and a compound fracture; the fracture is exposed to the air because the skin is broken, and five weeks after the injury, pus is bubbling from a sinus (a puckered opening) in the wound. These infections are chronic because the bone is dead, and dead bone behaves like a foreign body. Dead bone is called sequestrum; in Bombay, Farrokh’s fellow orthopedists liked to call him “Dead Bone” Daruwalla—those who knew him best called him “Dwarf Blood” Daruwalla, too. Teasing aside, infected bones and joints were not another hobby—they were Farrokh’s field.
In Canada, it often seemed to the doctor that his orthopedic practice involved almost as many sports injuries as birth defects or spasmodic contractions. In Toronto, Dr. Daruwalla still specialized in orthopedics for children, but he felt more essentially needed—hence more exhilarated—in Bombay. In India, it was common to see orthopedic patients with little handkerchiefs tied around their legs; the handkerchiefs covered sinus tracts, which
