A Son of the Circus

sorry, really! I never meant to mock anybody—I was only kidding,” he confessed. “St. Francis—you, too—please forgive me!” An unusual number of dogs were barking, as if the pitch of the doctor’s prayers were precisely in a register that the dogs could hear, too. “I am a surgeon, God,” the doctor moaned. “I need my arm—both my arms!” Thus did Dr. Daruwalla refuse to leave the hammock of his miraculous conversion, while Julia and John D. spent the morning plotting how to prevent the doctor from spending another night on the balcony.

Later in the day, as his hangover abated, Farrokh regained a little of his self-confidence. He said to Julia that he thought it would be enough for him to become a Christian; he meant that perhaps it wasn’t necessary for him to become a Catholic. Did Julia think that becoming a Protestant would be good enough? Maybe an Anglican would do. By now, Julia was quite frightened by the depth and color of the bite marks on her husband’s toe; even though the skin was unbroken, she was afraid of rabies.

“Julia!” Farrokh complained. “Here I am worrying about my mortal soul, and you’re worried about rabies!”

“Lots of monkeys have rabies,” John D. offered.

“What monkeys?” Dr. Daruwalla shouted. “I don’t see any monkeys here! Have you seen any monkeys?”

While they were arguing, they failed to notice Promila Rai and her nephew-with-breasts checking out of the hotel. They were going back to Bombay, but not tonight; Nancy was again fortunate—Rahul wouldn’t be on her ferry. Promila knew that Rahul’s holiday had been disappointing to him, and so she’d accepted an invitation for them both to spend the night at someone’s villa in Old Goa; there would be a costume party, which Rahul might find amusing.

It hadn’t been an entirely disappointing holiday for Rahul. His aunt was generous with her money, but she expected him to make his own contribution toward a much-discussed trip to London; Promila would help Rahul financially, but she wanted him to come up with some money of his own. There were several thousand Deutsche marks in Dieter’s money belt, but Rahul had been expecting more—given the quality and the amount of hashish that Dieter had told everyone he wanted to buy. Of course, there was more, much more—in the dildo.

Promila thought that her nephew was interested in art school in London. She also knew he was seeking a complete sex change, and she knew such operations were expensive; given her loathing for men, Promila was delighted with her nephew’s choice—to become her niece—but she was deluding herself if she thought that the strongest motivating factor behind Rahul’s proposed move to London was “art school.”

If the maid who cleaned Rahul’s room had looked more carefully at the discarded drawings in the wastebasket, she could have told Promila that Rahul’s talent with a pen was of a pornographic persuasion that most art schools would discourage. The self-portraits would have especially disturbed the maid, but all the discarded drawings were nothing but balled-up pieces of paper to her; she didn’t trouble herself to examine them.

They were en route to the villa in Old Goa when Promila peered into Rahul’s purse and saw Rahul’s new, curious money clip; at least he was using it as a money clip—it was really nothing but the top half of a silver pen.

“My dear, you are eccentric!” Promila said. “Why don’t you get a real money clip, if you like those things?”

“Well, Auntie,” Rahul patiently explained, “I find that real money clips are too loose, unless you carry a great wad of money in them. What I like is to carry just a few small notes outside my wallet— something handy to pay for a taxi, or for tipping.” He demonstrated that the top half of the silver pen possessed a very strong, tight clip—where it was meant to attach itself to a jacket pocket or a shirt pocket—and that this clip was perfect for holding just a few rupees. “Besides, it’s real silver,” Rahul added.

Promila held it in her veinous hand. “Why so it is, dear,” she remarked. She read aloud the one word, in script, that was engraved on the top half of the pen: “India—isn’t that quaint?”

“I certainly thought so,” Rahul remarked, returning the eccentric item to his purse.

Meanwhile, as Dr. Daruwalla grew hungrier, he also grew more relaxed about his praying; he cautiously rekindled his sense of humor. After he’d eaten, Farrokh could almost joke about his conversion. “I wonder what next the Almighty will ask of me!” he said to Julia, who once more cautioned her husband about blasphemy.

What was next in store for Dr. Daruwalla would test his newfound faith in ways the doctor would find most disturbing. By the same means that Nancy had discovered the doctor’s whereabouts, the police also discovered him. They’d found what everyone now called the “hippie grave” and they needed a doctor to hazard a guess concerning the cause of death of the grave’s ghastly occupants. They’d gone looking for a doctor on holiday. A local doctor would talk too much about the crime; at least this was what the local police told Dr. Daruwalla.

“But I don’t do autopsies!” Dr. Daruwalla protested; yet he went to Anjuna to view the remains.

It was generally supposed that the blue crabs were the reason the bodies were spoiled for viewing; and if the salt water proved itself to be a modest preservative, it did little to veil the stench. Farrokh easily concluded that several blows to the head had done them both in, but the female’s body was messier. Her forearms and the backs of her hands were battered, which suggested that she’d tried to defend herself; the male, clearly, had never known what hit him.

It was the elephant drawing that Farrokh would remember. The murdered girl’s navel had been transformed to a winking eye; the opposing tusk had been flippantly raised, like the tipping of an imaginary hat. Short, childish lines indicated that the elephant’s trunk was spraying—the “water” fanning over the dead girl’s pubic hair. Such intended mockery would remain with Dr. Daruwalla for 20 years; the doctor would remember the little drawing too well.

When Farrokh saw the broken glass, he suffered only the slightest discomfort, and the feeling quickly passed. Back at the Hotel Bardez, he was unable to find the piece of glass he’d removed from the young woman’s foot. And so what if the glass from the grave had matched? he thought. There were soda bottles everywhere. Besides, the police had already told him that the suspected murderer was a German male.

Farrokh thought that this theory suited the prejudices of the local police—namely, that only a hippie from Europe or North America could possibly perform a double slaying and then trivialize the murders with a cartoonish drawing. Ironically, these killings and that drawing stimulated Dr. Daruwalla’s need to be more creative. He found himself fantasizing that he was a detective.

The doctor’s success in the orthopedic field had given him certain commercial expectations; these considerations doubtless returned the doctor’s imagination to that notion of himself as a screenwriter. No one movie could have satisfied Farrokh’s suddenly insatiable creativity; nothing less than a series of movies, featuring the same detective, would do. Finally, that was how it happened. At the end of his holiday, on the ferry back to Bombay, Dr. Daruwalla invented Inspector Dhar.

Farrokh was watching how the young women on board the ferry couldn’t take their eyes off the beautiful John D. Suddenly, the doctor could envision the hero that these young women imagined when they looked at a young man like that. The excitement that Mr. James Salter’s example had inspired was already becoming a moment of the sexual past; it was becoming a part of the second honeymoon that Dr. Daruwalla was leaving behind. To the doctor, murder and corruption spoke louder than art. And besides, what a career John D. might have!

It would never have occurred to Farrokh that the young woman with the big dildo had seen the same murder victims he had seen. But 20 years later, even the movie version of that drawing on Beth’s belly would ring a bell with Nancy. How could it be a coincidence that the victim’s navel was the elephant’s winking eye, or that the opposing tusk was raised? In the movie, no pubic hair was shown, but those childish lines indicated to Nancy that the elephant’s trunk was still spraying—like a showerhead, or like the nozzle of a hose.

Nancy would also remember the beautiful, unshockable young man she’d been introduced to by Dr. Daruwalla. When she saw her first Inspector Dhar movie, Nancy would recall the first time she’d seen that knowing sneer. The future actor had been strong enough to carry her downstairs without apparent effort; the future movie star had been poised enough to unscrew the troublesome dildo without appearing to be appalled.

And all of this was what she meant when she left her uncompromising message on Dr. Daruwalla’s