A Son of the Circus

skirt of a kind that’s easy to put on and take off, and a bright-yellow halter top of a kind that drew the boy’s awkward attention to Rahul’s well-shaped breasts. There was a time when Rahul would have grabbed the boy’s face in both hands and pulled him into his bosom; then he might have played with the boy’s little prick, or else he might have kissed him, in which case Rahul would have stuck his tongue so far down the boy’s throat that the boy would have gagged. But not now; Rahul wasn’t in the mood.

He went upstairs to his room; he brushed his teeth until the taste of Dr. Daruwalla’s Cuticura powder was gone. Then he undressed and lay down on his bed, where he could look at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t in the mood to masturbate. He made some drawings, but nothing worked. Rahul was furious at Dr. Daruwalla for being in John D.’s hammock; it made him so angry that he couldn’t even arouse himself. In the adjacent room, Aunt Promila was snoring.

Down in the lobby, the boy tried to calm the dog down. He thought it was peculiar that the dog was so agitated; usually, women had no effect on the dog. It was only men who made the dog’s fur stand up, or made the dog walk around stiff-legged—sniffing everywhere the men had been. It puzzled the boy that the dog had reacted in this fashion to Rahul. The boy also needed to calm himself down; he’d reacted to Rahul’s breasts in his own fashion; he was so aroused that he had a sizable erection—for a boy. And he knew perfectly well that the lobby of the Hotel Bardez was no place for him to indulge his fantasies. There was nothing the boy could do. He lay down on the rush mat, where he at last coaxed the dog to join him, and there he went on speaking to the dog as before.

Farrokh Is Converted

At dawn, on the road to Panjim, Nancy had the good fortune to arouse the sympathy of a motorcyclist who noticed her limp. It wasn’t much of a motorcycle, but it would do; it was a 250 cc. Yezdi with red plastic tassels hanging from the handlebars, a black dot painted on the headlight, and a sari-guard mounted on the left-side rear wheel. Nancy was wearing jeans, and she simply straddled the seat behind the skinny teenaged driver. She locked her hands around the boy’s waist without a word; she knew he couldn’t drive fast enough to scare her.

The Yezdi was equipped with crash bars that protruded from the motorcycle in a manner of a full fairing. In Dr. Daruwalla’s profession, these so-called crash bars were known as tibialfracture bars; they were renowned for breaking the tibias of motorcyclists—all for the sake of not denting the gas tank.

Nancy’s weight was at first disconcerting to the young driver; she had a dangerously wide effect on his cornering—he held his speed down.

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” she asked him. He half-understood her, or else her voice in his ear was thrilling; possibly it hadn’t been her limp he’d noticed but the tightness of her jeans, or her blond hair—or even the swaying of her breasts, which the teenager felt pressing against his back. “That’s better,” Nancy told him, after he dared to speed up. Streaming from the handlebars, the red plastic tassels were whipped by the rushing wind; they appeared to beckon Nancy toward the steamer jetty and her chosen destiny in Bombay.

She’d embraced evil; she’d found it lacking. She was the sinner in search of the impossible salvation; she thought that only the uncorrupted and incorruptible policeman could restore her essential goodness. She had spotted something conflicted about Inspector Patel. She believed that he was virtuous and honorable, but also that she could seduce him; her logic was such that she thought of his virtue and his honor as transferable to her. Nancy’s illusion was not uncommon—nor is it an illusion limited to women. It is an old belief: that several sexually wrong decisions can be remedied—even utterly erased—by one decision that is sexually right. No one should blame Nancy for trying.

As Nancy rode the Yezdi to the ferry, and to her fate, a dull but persistent pain in the big toe of his right foot awakened Dr. Daruwalla from a night of bedlam dreams and indigestion. He freed himself from the mosquito net and swung his legs from the hammock, but when he put only the slightest weight on his right foot, his big toe stabbed him with a sharp pain; for a second, he imagined he was still dreaming he was St. Francis’s body. In the early light, which was a muted brown—not unlike the color of Dr. Daruwalla’s skin—the doctor inspected his toe. The skin was unbroken, but deep bruises of a crimson and purple hue clearly indicated the bite marks. Dr. Daruwalla screamed.

“Julia! I’ve been bitten by a ghost!” the doctor cried. His wife came running.

“What is it, Liebchen?” she asked him.

“Look at my big toe!” the doctor demanded.

“Have you been biting yourself?” Julia asked him with unconcealed distaste.

“It’s a miracle!” shouted Dr. Daruwalla. “It was the ghost of that crazy woman who bit St. Francis!” Farrokh shouted.

“Don’t be a blasphemer,” Julia cautioned him.

“I am being a believer—not a blasphemer!” the doctor cried. He ventured a step on his right foot, but the pain in his big toe was so wilting that he fell, screaming, to his knees.

“Hush or you’ll wake up the children—you’ll wake up everybody!” Julia scolded him.

“Praise the Lord,” Farrokh whispered, crawling back to his hammock. “I believe, God—please don’t torture me further!” He collapsed into the hammock, hugging both his arms around his chest. “What if they come for my arm?” he asked his wife.

Julia was disgusted with him. “I think it must be something you ate,” she said. “Or else you’ve been dreaming about the dildo.”

“I suppose you’ve been dreaming about it,” Farrokh said sullenly. “Here I’ve suffered some sort of conversion and you’re thinking about a big cock!”

“I’m thinking about how you’re behaving in a peculiar fashion,” Julia told him.

“But I’ve had some sort of religious experience!” Farrokh insisted.

“I don’t see what’s religious about it,” Julia said.

“Look at my toe!” the doctor cried.

“Maybe you bit it in your sleep,” his wife suggested.

“Julia!” Dr. Daruwalla said. “I thought you were already a Christian.”

“Well, I don’t go around yelling and moaning about it,” Julia said.

John D. appeared on the balcony, never realizing that Dr. Daruwalla’s religious experience was very nearly his own experience—of another kind.

“What’s going on?” the young man asked.

“It’s apparently unsafe to sleep on the balcony,” Julia told him. “Something bit Farrokh—some kind of animal.”

“Those are human teeth marks!” the doctor declared. John D. examined the bitten toe with his usual detachment.

“Maybe it was a monkey,” he said.

Dr. Daruwalla curled himself into a ball in the hammock, deciding to give his wife and his favorite young man the silent treatment. Julia and John D. took their breakfast with the Daruwalla daughters on the patio below the balcony; at times they would raise their eyes and look up the vine in the direction where they presumed Farrokh lay sulking. They were wrong; he wasn’t sulking—he was praying. Since the doctor was inexperienced at prayer, his praying resembled an interior monologue of a fairly standard confessional kind—especially that kind which is brought on by a bad hangover.

O God! prayed Dr. Daruwalla. It isn’t necessary to take my arm—the toe convinced me. I don’t need any more convincing. You got me the first time, God. The doctor paused. Please leave the arm alone, he added.

Later, from the lobby of the Hotel Bardez, the syphilitic tea-server thought he heard voices from the Daruwallas’ second-floor balcony. Since Ali Ahmed was known to be almost entirely deaf, it was assumed that he probably always heard “voices.” But Ali Ahmed had actually heard Dr. Daruwalla praying, for by midmorning the doctor was murmuring aloud and the pitch of his prayers was precisely in a register that the syphilitic tea-server could hear.

“I am heartily sorry if I have offended Thee, God!” Dr. Daruwalla murmured intensely. “Heartily sorry—very