A Son of the Circus

dinner hours; perhaps the doctor was expecting dinner guests and had decided it was the simplest way to hold the table. But when the old steward inquired of Dr. Daruwalla about the number of place settings, Mr. Sethna was informed that the doctor was going home for “supper.” Promptly, as if he’d been awakened from a dream, Farrokh got up to leave.

Mr. Sethna observed and overheard him calling his wife from the telephone in the foyer.

“Nein, Liebchen,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “I have not told him—there wasn’t a good moment to tell him.” Then Mr. Sethna listened to Dr. Daruwalla on the subject of the murder of Mr. Lal. So it is a murder! Mr. Sethna thought. Bonked by his own putter! And when he heard the part about the two-rupee note in Mr. Lal’s mouth, and specifically the intriguing threat that was connected to Inspector Dhar—MORE MEMBERS DIE IF DHAR REMAINS A MEMBER—Mr. Sethna felt that his eavesdropping efforts had been rewarded, at least for this day.

Then something mildly remarkable happened. Dr. Daruwalla hung up the phone and turned into the foyer without first looking-where he was going, and who should he run smack into but the second Mrs. Dogar. The doctor bumped into her so hard, Mr. Sethna was excited by the possibility that the vulgar woman would be knocked down. But instead it was Farrokh who fell. More astonishing, upon the collision, Mrs. Dogar was shoved backward into Mr. Dogar—and he fell down, too. What a fool for marrying such a younger, stronger woman! Mr. Sethna thought. Then there was the usual bowing and apologizing, and everyone assured everyone else that he or she was absolutely fine. Sometimes the absurdities of good manners, which were demonstrated in such profusion at the Duckworth Club, gave Mr. Sethna gas.

Thus, finally, Farrokh escaped from the old steward’s overseeing eye. But while he waited for Vinod to fetch the car, Dr. Daruwalla—unobserved by Mr. Sethna—touched the sore spot in his ribs, where there would surely be a bruise, and he marveled at the hardness and sturdiness of the second Mrs. Dogar. It was like running into a stone wall!

It crossed the doctor’s mind that Mrs. Dogar was sufficiently masculine to be a hijra—not a hijra prostitute, of course, but just an ordinary eunuch-transvestite. In which case Mrs. Dogar might not have been eyeballing Inspector Dhar for the purpose of seducing him; instead, she might have had it in her mind to castrate him!

Farrokh felt ashamed of himself for thinking like a screenwriter again. How many Kingfishers have I had? he wondered; it relieved him to hold the beer accountable for his far-fetched fantasizing. In truth, he knew nothing about Mrs. Dogar—where she’d come from—but hijras occupied such a marginal position in Indian society; the doctor was aware that most of them came from the lower classes. Whoever she was, the second Mrs. Dogar was an upper-class woman. And Mr. Dogar—although he was a foolish old fart, in Farrokh’s opinion—was a Malabar Hill man; he came from old money, and lots of it. Nor was Mr. Dogar such a fool that he wouldn’t know the difference between a vagina and a burn scar from the famous hijra hot-oil treatment.

While he waited for Vinod, Dr. Daruwalla watched the second Mrs. Dogar help Mr. Dogar into their car. She towered over the poor parking-lot attendant, who sheepishly opened the driver’s-side door for her. Farrokh was unsurprised to see that Mrs. Dogar was the driver in the family. He’d heard all about her fitness training, which he knew included weight lifting and other unfeminine pursuits. Perhaps she takes testosterone, too, the doctor imagined, for the second Mrs. Dogar looked as if her sex hormones were raging—her male sex hormones, Dr. Daruwalla speculated. He’d heard that such women sometimes develop a clitoris as large as a finger, as long as a young boy’s penis!

When either too much Kingfisher or his run-amuck imagination caused Dr. Daruwalla to speculate in this fashion, the doctor was grateful that he was merely an orthopedic surgeon. He truly didn’t want to know too much about these other things. Yet Farrokh had to force himself from further contemplation, for he found that he was wondering what would be worse: that the second Mrs. Dogar sought to emasculate Inspector Dhar, or that she was in amorous pursuit of the handsome actor— and that she possessed a clitoris of an altogether unseemly size.

Dr. Daruwalla was in such a transfixed state of mind, he didn’t notice that Vinod had one-handedly wheeled into the circular driveway of the Duckworth Club and was, with his other hand, belatedly applying the brakes. The dwarf nearly ran the doctor down. At least this served to take Dr. Daruwalla’s mind off the second Mrs. Dogar. If only for the moment, Farrokh forgot her.

Load Cycle

The better of the dwarf’s two taxis—of those two that were equipped with hand controls—was in the shop. “The carburetor is being revised,” Vinod explained. Since Dr. Daruwalla had no idea how one accomplished a carburetor revision, he didn’t press the dwarf for details. They departed the Duckworth Club in Vinod’s decaying Ambassador, which was the off-white color of a pearl—like graying teeth, Farrokh reflected. Also, its hand control for acceleration was inclined to stick.

Nevertheless, Dr. Daruwalla abruptly asked the dwarf to drive him past his father’s former house on old Ridge Road, Malabar Hill; this was doubtless because Farrokh had his father and Malabar Hill on his mind. Farrokh and Jamshed had sold the house shortly after their father’s murder—when Meher had decided to live out the rest of her life in the company of her children and her grandchildren, all of whom had already chosen not to live in India. Dr. Daruwalla’s mother would die in Toronto, in the doctor’s guest bedroom. Meher’s death, in her sleep—when it had snowed all night—was as peaceful as the bombing of old Lowji had been violent.

It wasn’t the first time Farrokh had asked Vinod to drive by his old Malabar Hill home. From the moving taxi, the house was barely visible. The former Daruwalla family estate reminded the doctor of how tangential his contact with the country of his birthplace had become, for Farrokh was a foreigner on Malabar Hill. Dr. Daruwalla lived, like a visitor, in one of those ugly apartment buildings on Marine Drive; he had the same view of the Arabian Sea as could be found from a dozen similar places. He’d paid 60 lakhs (about 250,000 dollars) for a flat of less than 1,200 square feet, and he hardly lived there at all—he visited India so rarely. He was ashamed that, the rest of the time, he didn’t rent it out. But Farrokh knew he would have been a fool to do so; the tenancy laws in Bombay favor the tenants. If Dr. Daruwalla had tenants, he’d never get them out. Besides, from the Inspector Dhar movies, the doctor had made so many lakhs that he supposed he should spend some of them in Bombay. Through the marvels of a Swiss bank account and the guile of a cunning money-dealer, Dhar had been successful in getting a sizable portion of their earnings out of India. Dr. Daruwalla also felt ashamed of that.

Vinod seemed to sense when Dr. Daruwalla was vulnerable to charity. It was his own charitable enterprise that the dwarf was thinking of; Vinod was routinely shameless in seeking the doctor’s support of his most fervent cause.

Vinod and Deepa had taken it upon themselves to rescue various urchins from the slums of Bombay; in short, they recruited street kids for the circus. They sought the more acrobatic beggars—demonstrably well coordinated children—and Vinod made every effort to steer these talented waifs toward circuses of more merit than the Great Blue Nile. Deepa was particularly devoted to saving child prostitutes, or would-be child prostitutes; rarely were these girls suitable circus material. To Dr. Daruwalla’s knowledge, the only circus that had stooped to adopt any of Vinod and Deepa’s discoveries was the less-than-great Blue Nile.

To Farrokh’s considerable discomfort, many of these girls were Mr. Garg’s discoveries—that is, long before Vinod and Deepa had found them. Mr. Garg was the owner and manager of the Wetness Cabaret, where a kind of concealed grossness was the norm. Strip joints, not to mention sex shows, aren’t permitted in Bombay—at least not to the degree of explicitness that exists in Europe and in North America. In India, there’s no nudity, whereas “wetness”—meaning wet, clinging, almost transparent clothing—is much in evidence, and sexually suggestive gestures are the mainstay of so-called exotic dancers in such seedy entertainment spots as Mr. Garg’s. Among such spots, even including the Bombay Eros Palace, the Wetness Cabaret was the worst; yet the dwarf and his wife insisted to Dr. Daruwalla that Mr. Garg was the Good Samaritan of Kamathipura. In the many lanes of brothels that were there, and throughout the red-light district on Falkland Road and on Grant Road, the Wetness Cabaret was a haven.