A Son of the Circus

he on their sides. He tries not to move. There are only the little, invisible twitches, like a nibbling of fish.’”

Julia opened her eyes as Farrokh searched for another passage.

“Don’t stop,” she told him.

Then Dr. Daruwalla found what he was looking for—a rather short and simple part. “‘Her breasts are hard,’” he read to his wife. “‘Her cunt is sopping.’” The doctor paused. “I suppose there’d be some readers who’d be shocked or offended by that,” he added.

“Not me,” his wife told him. He closed the book and returned it to the newspaper on the floor. When he rolled back to Julia, she’d arranged the pillows under her hips and lay waiting for him. He touched her breasts first.

“Your breasts are hard,” he said to her.

“They are not,” she told him. “My breasts are old and soft.”

“I like soft better,” he said.

After she kissed him, she said, “My cunt is sopping.”

“It isn’t!” he said instinctively, but when she took his hand and made him touch her, he realized she wasn’t lying.

In the morning, the sunlight passed through the narrow slats of the blinds and stood out in horizontal bars across the bare coffee-colored wall. The newspaper on the floor was stirred by a small lizard, a gecko—only its snout protruded from between the pages—and when Dr. Daruwalla reached to pick up A Sport and a Pastime, the gecko darted under the bed. Sopping! the doctor thought to himself. He opened the book quietly, thinking his wife was still asleep.

“Keep reading—aloud,” Julia murmured.

Lunch Is Followed by Depression

It was with a renewed sexual confidence that Farrokh faced the situation of the morning. Rahul Rai had struck up a conversation with John D., and although—even by the doctor’s standards—Rahul looked fetching in “her” bikini, the small lump of evidence in the bikini’s bottom half provided Dr. Daruwalla with sufficient reason to rescue John D. from a potential confrontation. While Julia sat on the beach with the Daruwalla daughters, the doctor and John D. strolled in a manly and confiding fashion along the water’s edge.

“There’s something you should know about Rahul,” Farrokh began.

“What’s her name?” John D. asked.

“His name is Rahul,” Farrokh explained. “If you were to look under his panties, I’m almost certain you would find a penis and a pair of balls—rather small, in both cases.” They continued walking along the shoreline, with John D. appearing to pay obsessive attention to the smooth, sand-rubbed stones and the rounded, broken bits of shells.

Finally, John D. said, “The breasts look real.”

“Definitely induced—hormonally induced,” Dr. Daruwalla said. The doctor described how estrogens worked… the development of breasts, of hips; how the penis shrank to the size of a little boy’s. The testes were so reduced they resembled vulva. The penis was so shrunken it resembled an enlarged clitoris. The doctor explained as much as he knew about a complete sex-change operation, too.

“Far out,” John D. remarked. They discussed whether Rahul would be more interested in men or women. Since he wanted to be a woman, Dr. Daruwalla deduced that Rahul was sexually interested in men. “It’s hard to tell,” John D. suggested; indeed, when they returned to where the Daruwalla daughters were encamped under a thatch-roofed shelter, there was Rahul Rai in conversation with Julia!

Julia said later, “I think it’s young men who interest him, although I suppose a young woman would do.”

Would do? Dr. Daruwalla thought. Promila had confided to Farrokh that this was a bad time for “poor Rahul.” Apparently, they’d not traveled from Bombay together, but Promila had met her nephew at the Bardez; he’d been alone in the area for more than a week. He had “hippie friends,” Promila said—somewhere near Anjuna—but things hadn’t worked out as Rahul had hoped. Farrokh didn’t desire to know more, but Promila offered her speculations anyway.

“I presume that sexually confusing things must have happened,” she told Dr. Daruwalla.

“Yes, I suppose,” the doctor said. Normally, all of this would have upset Farrokh greatly, but something from his sexual triumphs with Julia had carried over into the following day. Despite everything that was “sexually confusing” about Rahul, which was sexually disturbing to Dr. Daruwalla, not even the doctor’s appetite was affected, although the heat was fierce.

It was unmercifully hot at midday, and there was no perceptible breeze. Along the shoreline, the fronds of the areca and coconut palms were as motionless as the grand old cashew and mango trees farther inland in the dead-still villages and towns. Not even the passing of a three-wheeled rickshaw with a damaged muffler could rouse a single dog to bark. Were it not for the heavy presence of the distilling feni, Dr. Daruwalla would have guessed that the air wasn’t moving at all.

But the heat didn’t dampen the doctor’s enthusiasm for his lunch. He started with an oyster guisado and steamed prawns in a yogurt-mustard sauce; then he tried the vindaloo fish, the gravy for which was so piquant that his upper lip felt numb and he instantly perspired. He drank an ice-cold ginger feni with his meal—actually, he had two—and for dessert he ordered the bebinca. His wife was easily satisfied with a xacuti, which she shared with the girls; it was a fiery curry made almost soothing with coconut milk, cloves and nutmeg. The daughters also tried a frozen mango dessert; Dr. Daruwalla had a taste, but nothing could abate the burning sensation in his mouth. As a remedy, he ordered a cold beer. Then he criticized Julia for allowing the girls to drink so much sugarcane juice.

“In this heat, too much sugar will make them sick,” Farrokh told his wife.

“Listen to who’s talking!” Julia said.

Farrokh sulked. The beer was an unfamiliar brand, which he would never remember. He would recall, however, the part of the label that said LIQUOR RUINS COUNTRY, FAMILY AND LIFE.

But as much as Dr. Daruwalla was a man of unstoppable appetites, his plumpness had never been—nor would it become—displeasing to the eye. He was a fairly small man—his smallness was most apparent in the delicacy of his hands and in the neat, well-formed features of his face, which was round, boyish and friendly—and his arms and legs were thin and wiry; his bum was small, too. Even his little pot belly merely served to emphasize his smallness, his neatness, his tidiness. He liked a small, well-trimmed beard, for he also liked to shave; his throat and the sides of his face were usually clean-shaven. When he wore a mustache, it, too, was neat and small. His skin wasn’t much browner than an almond shell; his hair was black—it would soon turn gray. He would never be bald; his hair was thick, with a slight wave, and he left it long on top, although he kept it cut short on the back of his neck and above his ears, which were also small and lay perfectly flat against his head. His eyes were such a dark-brown color that they looked almost black, and because his face was so small, his eyes seemed large—maybe they were large. If so, only his eyes reflected his appetites. And only in comparison to John D. would someone not have thought of Dr. Daruwalla as handsome— small, but handsome. He was not a fat man, but a plump one—a little, pot-bellied man.

While the doctor struggled to digest his meal, it might have crossed his mind that the others had behaved more sensibly. John D., as if demonstrating the self-discipline and dietary restraint that future movie stars would be wise to imitate, eschewed eating in the midday heat. He chose this time of day to take long walks on the beach; he swam intermittently and lazily—only to cool off. From his languid attitude, it was hard to tell if he walked the beach in order to look at the assembled young women or to afford them the luxury of looking at him.

In the torpid aftermath of his lunch, Dr. Daruwalla barely noticed that Rahul Rai was nowhere to be seen. Farrokh was frankly relieved that the would-be transsexual wasn’t pursuing John D.; and Promila Rai had accompanied John D. for only a short distance along the water’s edge, as if the young man had immediately discouraged her by declaring his intentions to walk to the next village, or to the village after that. Wearing an absurdly wide-brimmed hat—as if it weren’t already too late to protect her cancerous skin—Promila had returned, alone, to the spot of shade allotted by her thatch-roofed shelter, and there she appeared to embalm herself with a