A Son of the Circus

“Oh, how he lied to me… all those years I believed it! Oh, that fucker! ” The word was so sharply spoken, it caused a dog in the alley below them to stop rooting through the garbage and bark. Over their heads, the ceiling fan barely stirred the close air, which seemed always to smell of the perpetually blocked drains, and of the sea, which in their neighborhood was not especially clean or fresh-smelling. “Oh, it was another lie!” Nancy screamed. Vijay went on holding her, although to do so for long would make them both sweat. The air was unmoving where they lived.

The goats were just pets. Yet, for 20 years, what Dieter had told her had hurt her so badly; at times, it had made her physically sick. And the heat, and the sewer smell, and the fact that, whoever Rahul was, he was still getting away with it—all this Nancy had accepted, but in the fashion that she’d accepted her childlessness, which she’d accepted so slowly and only after what had felt to her like a lingering and merciless defeat.

What the Dwarf Sees

It was late. While Nancy cried herself to sleep and Dr. Daruwalla failed to realize that the second and beautiful Mrs. Dogar had reminded him of Rahul, Vinod was driving one of Mr. Garg’s exotic dancers home from the Wetness Cabaret.

She was a middle-aged Maharashtrian with the English name of Muriel—not her real name but her exotic- dancing name—and she was upset because one of the patrons of the Wetness Cabaret had thrown an orange at her while she was dancing. The clientele of the Wetness Cabaret was vile, Muriel had decided. Even so, she rationalized, Mr. Garg was a gentleman. Garg had recognized that Muriel was upset by the episode with the orange; he’d personally engaged Vinod’s “luxury” taxi to drive Muriel home.

Although Vinod had praised Mr. Garg’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of runaway child prostitutes, the dwarf wouldn’t have gone so far as to call Mr. Garg a gentleman; possibly Garg was more of a gentleman with middle- aged women. With younger girls, Vinod wasn’t sure. The dwarf didn’t entirely share Dr. Daruwalla’s suspicions of Mr. Garg, but Vinod and Deepa had occasionally encountered a child prostitute who seemed in need of rescuing from Garg. Save this poor child, Mr. Garg seemed to be saying; save her from me, Garg might have meant.

It wouldn’t have helped Vinod and Deepa’s child-rescue operations to have Dr. Daruwalla treating Garg like a criminal. The new runaway, the boneless one—a potential plastic lady—was a case in point. Although she’d appeared to be more personally involved with Mr. Garg than she should have been, such implications wouldn’t help her cause with Dr. Daruwalla; the doctor had to pronounce her healthy or the Great Blue Nile wouldn’t take her.

Vinod now noted that the middle-aged woman with the exotic-dancing name of Muriel had fallen asleep; she slept with a somewhat sour expression, her mouth disagreeably open and her hands resting on her fat breasts. The dwarf thought that it made more sense to throw an orange at her than it did to watch her dance. But Vinod’s humanitarian instincts extended even to middle-aged strippers; he slowed down because the streets were bumpy, seeing no reason to wake the poor woman before she was home. In her sleep, Muriel suddenly cringed. She was ducking oranges, the dwarf imagined.

After Vinod dropped off Muriel, it was too late for him to go anywhere but back to the brothel area; the red- light district was the only part of Bombay where people needed a taxi at 2:00 in the morning. Soon the international travelers would be arriving at the Oberoi and the Taj, but no one who’d just flown in from Europe or North America would have the slightest inclination to cruise around the city.

Vinod thought he’d wait for the end of the last show at the Wetness Cabaret; one of Mr. Garg’s other exotic dancers might want a safe ride home. It amazed Vinod that the Wetness Cabaret, the building itself, was “home” to Mr. Garg; the dwarf couldn’t imagine sleeping there. He supposed there were rooms upstairs, above the slick bar and the sticky tables and the sloping stage. Vinod shivered to think of the dimly lit bar, the brightly lit stage, the darkened tables where the men sat—some of them masturbating, although the dominant odor of the Wetness Cabaret was one of urine. How could Garg sleep in such a place, even if he slept above it?

But as distasteful as it was to Vinod—to cruise the brothel area, as if he carried a potential customer in the Ambassador’s back seat—the dwarf had decided that he might as well stay awake. Vinod was fascinated by that hour when most of the brothels switched over; in Kamathipura, on Falkland Road and Grant Road, there came an hour of the early morning when most of the brothels would accept only all-night customers. In the dwarf’s opinion, these were different and desperate men. Who else would want to spend all night with a prostitute?

Vinod grew alert and edgy at this hour, as if—particularly in those little lanes in Kamathipura—he might spot a man who wasn’t entirely human. When he got tired, the dwarf dozed in his car; his car was more home to him than home, at least when Deepa was away at the circus. And when he was bored, Vinod would cruise past the transvestite brothels on Falkland Road and Grant Road. Vinod liked the hijras; they were so bold and so outrageous—they also seemed to like dwarfs. Possibly the hijras thought that dwarfs were outrageous.

Vinod was aware that some of the hijras didn’t like him; they were the ones who knew that the dwarf was Inspector Dhar’s driver—the ones who hated Inspector Dhar and the Cage- Girl Killer. Lately, Vinod had to be a little careful in the brothel area; the prostitute murders had made Dhar and Dhar’s dwarf more than a little unpopular. Thus that hour when most of the brothels “switched over” made Vinod more alert and edgy than usual.

While he cruised, the dwarf was among the first to notice what had changed about Bombay; the change was being enacted before Vinod’s very eyes. Gone was the movie poster of his most famous client, that larger-than-life image of Inspector Dhar which Vinod and all of Bombay had grown so used to—the huge hoardings, the overhead billboards that advertised Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer. Dhar’s handsome face, albeit bleeding slightly; the torn white shirt, open to expose Dhar’s muscular chest; the pretty, ravaged young woman slung over Dhar’s strong shoulder; and, always, the blue-gray semi-automatic pistol held in Dhar’s hard right hand. In its place, everywhere in Bombay, was a brand-new poster. Vinod thought that only the semi- automatic was the same, although Inspector Dhar’s sneer was remarkably familiar. Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence: this time, the young woman slung over Dhar’s shoulder was noticeably dead —more noticeably, she was a Western hippie.

It was the only safe time to put the posters up; if people had been awake, they would doubtless have attacked the poster-wallas. The old posters in the brothel area had long ago been destroyed; tonight, perhaps, the prostitutes left the poster-wallas unharmed because the prostitutes were happy to see that Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer was being replaced with a new offense—this time, to somebody else.

But, upon closer inspection, Vinod noted that not so much was different about the new poster as he’d first observed. The posture of the young woman over Dhar’s shoulder was quite the same, alive or dead; and again, albeit from a slightly different spot, Inspector Dhar’s cruel, handsome face was bleeding. The longer Vinod looked at the new poster, the more he found it to resemble the previous poster; it seemed to the dwarf that Dhar even wore the same torn shirt. This possibly explained why the dwarf had driven around Bombay for more than two hours before he’d noticed that a new Inspector Dhar film had been born into the world. Vinod couldn’t wait to see it.

The unspeakable life of the red-light district teemed all around him—the bartering and the betrayals and the frightening, unseen beatings—or so the excited dwarf imagined. About the most hopeful thing that could be said is that throughout the brothel area of Bombay, no one—truly no one—was fucking a goat.

15. DHAR’S TWIN