A Son of the Circus

Slowly, with the other hand, he began to work the device into her; at first she pressed herself down into his fingers, as if to get away from it, but later she lifted herself up to meet the dildo. It was very big but he never hurt her with it, and when she was so excited that she had to stop kissing him—she had to scream—he took the dildo out of her and entered her himself, from behind and with the fingers of his hand still touching her and touching her. (Compared to the dildo, Dieter was a little disappointing.)

Her parents had once warned Nancy that “experimenting with sex” could make her crazy, but the madness that Dieter had incited didn’t seem to be a dangerous madness. Still, it wasn’t the best reason to go to India.

A Memorable Arrival

There’d been some trouble with her visa, and she was worried if she’d had the right shots; because the names were in German, she hadn’t understood all the inoculations. She was sure she was taking too many antimalarial pills, but Dieter couldn’t tell her how many to take; he seemed indifferent to disease. He was more concerned that an Indian customs official would confiscate the dildo—but only if Nancy took pains to conceal it, he said. Dieter insisted that she carry it casually—with her toilet articles, in her carry-on bag. But the thing was enormous. Worse, it was of a frightening pink, mock-flesh color, and the tip, which was modeled on a circumcised penis, had a bluish tinge—like a cock left out in the cold, Nancy thought. And where the fake foreskin was rolled, there seemed to linger a residue of the lubricating jelly, which could never quite be wiped away.

Nancy put the thing in an old white athletic sock—the long kind, meant to be worn above the calf. She prayed that the Indian customs officials would ascribe to the dildo some unmentionable medicinal purpose—anything other than that most obvious purpose for which it was intended. Understandably, she wanted Dieter to take it with him, on his plane, but he pointed out to her that the customs officials would then conclude he was a homosexual; homosexuals, she should know, were routinely abused at every country’s port of entry. Dieter also told Nancy that the excessive illegal Deutsche marks were traveling with him, on his plane, and that the reason he didn’t want her flying with him was that he didn’t want her to be incriminated if he was caught.

Soaking herself in the bathtub at the Hotel Bardez, Nancy wondered why she’d believed him; with hindsight, such errors of judgment are plain to see. Nancy reflected that it hadn’t been difficult for Dieter to convince her to bring the dildo to Bombay. It hadn’t been the first time that a dildo gained such easy access to India, but what a lot of trouble this particular instrument inspired.

Nancy had never been to the East; she was introduced to it at the Bombay airport, at about 2:00 in the morning. She’d not seen men so diminished, so damaged and so transformed by turmoil, by din and by wasteful energy; their ceaseless motion and their aggressive curiosity reminded her of scurrying rats. And so many of them were barefoot. She tried to concentrate on the customs inspector, who was attended by two policemen; they weren’t barefoot. But the policemen—a couple of constables in blue shirts and wide blue shorts—were wearing the most absurd leg warmers she’d ever seen, especially in such hot weather. And she’d never seen Nehru caps on cops before.

In Frankfurt, Dieter had arranged for Nancy to be examined—in regard to the proper size for a diaphragm—but when the doctor had discovered she’d had a baby, he’d outfitted her with an intrauterine device instead. She hadn’t wanted one. When the customs inspector was examining her toiletries and one of the overseeing policemen opened a jar of her moisturizer and scooped out a gob of the cream with his finger, which the other policeman then sniffed, Nancy was grateful that there was no diaphragm or spermicidal ointment for them to play with. The constables couldn’t see or touch or smell her IUD.

But of course there was the dildo, which lay untouched in the long athletic sock while the policemen and the customs inspector pawed through the clothes in her rucksack and emptied her carry-on bag, which was really just an oversized imitation-leather purse. One of the policemen picked up the battered paperback copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Clea, the fourth novel of the Alexandria Quartet, of which Dieter had read only the first, Justine. Nancy hadn’t read any of them; but the novel was dog-eared where the last reader had presumably stopped reading, and it was at this marked page that the constable opened the book, his eyes quickly finding that passage which Dieter had underlined in pencil for just such an occasion. In truth, this copy of Clea had made the trip to India and the return trip to Germany with two of Dieter’s other women, neither of whom had read the novel or even the passage Dieter had marked. He’d chosen the particular passage because it would doubtless identify the reader to any international customs authority as a harmless fool.

The policeman was so stymied by the passage that he handed the book to his fellow constable, who looked stricken, as if he’d been asked to crack an indecipherable code; he, too, passed the book on. It was the customs inspector who finally read the passage. Nancy watched the clumsy, involuntary movement of the man’s lips, as if he were isolating olive pits. Gradually the words, or something like the words, emerged aloud; they frankly seemed incomprehensible to Nancy. She couldn’t imagine what the customs inspector and the constables made of them.

“ ‘The whole quarter lay drowsing in the umbrageous violet of approaching nightfall,’ ” the customs inspector read. “ ‘A sky of palpitating velours which was cut into by the stark flare of a thousand electric light bulbs. It lay over Tatwig Street, that night, like a velvet rind.’ ” The customs inspector stopped reading, looking like a man who’d just eaten something odd. One of the policemen stared angrily at the book, as if he felt compelled to confiscate it or destroy it on the spot, but the other constable was as distracted as a bored child; he picked up the dildo in the athletic sock and unsheathed the giant penis as one would unsheathe a sword. The sock drooped limply in the policeman’s left hand while his right hand grasped the great cock at its root, at the rock-hard pair of makeshift balls.

Suddenly seeing what he held, the policeman quickly extended the dildo to his fellow constable, who took hold of the instrument by the rolled foreskin before he recognized the exaggerated male member, which he instantly handed to the customs inspector. Still holding Clea in his left hand, the customs inspector seized the dildo at the scrotum; then he dropped the novel and snatched the sock from the first, gaping policeman. But the impressive penis was more difficult to sheathe than to unsheathe, and in his haste the customs inspector inserted the instrument the wrong way. Thus were the balls jammed into the heel of the sock, where they made an awkward lump—they didn’t fit—and the bluish tip of the thing (the circumcised head) protruded loosely from the open end of the sock. The hole at the end of the enormous cock appeared to stare out at the constables and the customs inspector like the proverbial evil eye.

“Where you stay?” one of the policemen asked Nancy. He was furiously wiping his hand on his leg warmers—a trace of the lubricating jelly, perhaps.

“Always carry your own bag,” the other constable advised her.

“Agree to a price with the taxi-walla before you get in the car,” the first policeman said.

The customs inspector wouldn’t look at her. She’d expected something worse; surely the dildo would provoke leering—at least rude or suggestive laughter, she’d thought. But she was in the land of the lingam—or so she imagined. Wasn’t the phallic symbol worshiped here? Nancy thought she’d read that the penis was a symbol of Lord Shiva. Maybe what Nancy carried in her purse was as realistic (albeit exaggerated) a lingam as these men had ever seen. Maybe she’d made an unholy use of such a symbol—was that why these men wanted nothing to do with her? But the constables and the customs inspector weren’t thinking of lingams o

r Lord Shiva; they were simply appalled at the portable penis.

Poor Nancy was left to find her own way out of the airport and into the shrill cries of the taxi-wallas. An unending lineup of taxis extended into the infernal blackness of this outlying district of Bombay; except for the oasis, which was the airport, there were no lights in Santa Cruz—there was no Sahar in 1969. It was then about 3:00 in the morning.

Nancy had to haggle with her taxi-walla over the fare into Bombay. After she arranged the prepaid trip, she still encountered some difficulty with her driver; he was a Tamil, apparently new to Bombay. He claimed to not understand Hindi or Marami; it was in uncertain English that Nancy heard him asking the other taxi-wallas for directions to the Taj.

“Lady, you don’t want to go with him,” one of the taxi-wallas told her, but she’d already paid and was sitting in the back seat of the taxi.

As they drove toward the city, the Tamil continued a lengthy debate with another Tamil driver who drove his taxi perilously close to theirs; for several miles, they drove like this—past the unlit slums in the predawn, immeasurable darkness, wherein the slum dwellers were distinguishable only by the smell of their excrement and their dead or dying fires. (What were they burning? Rubbish?) When the sidewalks on the outskirts of Bombay first appeared, still without electric light, the two Tamils raced side by side—even through the traffic circles, those wild roundabouts—their discourse progressing from an argument to a shouting match to threats, which sounded (even in Tamil) quite dire to Nancy.

The seemingly unconcerned passengers in the other Tamil’s taxi were a well-dressed British couple in their forties. Nancy guessed they were also headed to the Taj, and that this coincidence lay at the heart of the dispute between the two Tamils. (Dieter had warned her of this common practice: two drivers with two separate fares, headed for the same place. Naturally, one of the drivers was attempting to persuade the other to carry both fares.)

At a traffic light, the two stopped taxis were suddenly surrounded by barking dogs—starving curs, all snapping at one another—and Nancy imagined that, if one jumped through the open window at her, she could club it with the dildo. This passing idea perhaps prepared her for what happened at the next intersection, where again the light was against them; while they waited this time, they were slowly approached by beggars instead of dogs. The shouting Tamils had attracted some of the sidewalk sleepers, whose mounded bodies under their light-colored clothing could be dimly seen to contrast with the darkened streets and buildings. First a man in a ragged, filthy dhoti stuck his arm in Nancy’s window. Nancy noticed that the prim British couple—not in fear but out of sheer obstinacy—had closed their windows, despite the moist heat. Nancy thought she would suffocate if she closed hers.

Instead, she spoke sharply to her driver—to go! After all, the light had changed. But her Tamil and the other Tamil were too engrossed in their confrontation to obey the traffic signal. Her Tamil ignored her, and, to Nancy’s further irritation, the other Tamil now coerced his British passengers into the street; he was beckoning to them that they must join Nancy in her cab, exactly as Dieter had foretold.

Nancy shouted at her driver, who turned to her and shrugged; she shouted out the window to the other Tamil, who shouted back at her. Nancy shouted to the British couple that they shouldn’t allow themselves to be so taken advantage of; they should demand of their driver that he bring them to their prearranged, prepaid destination.

“Don’t let the bastards screw you!” Nancy shouted. Then she realized that she was waving the dildo at them; to be sure, it was still in the sock and they didn’t know it was a dildo; they could only suppose she was an hysterical young woman threatening them with a sock.

Nancy slid over in her seat. “Please get in,” she said to the British couple, but when they opened the door, Nancy’s driver protested. He even jerked the car a little forward. Nancy tapped him on his shoulder with the dildo—still in the sock. Her driver looked indifferent; his counterpart was already stuffing the British couple’s luggage into the trunk as the twosome squeezed into the seat beside her.

Nancy was pressed against the window when a beggar woman pushed a baby in the window and held it in front of her face; the child was foul-smelling, unmoving, expressionless—it looked half dead. Nancy raised the dildo, but what could she do? Whom should she hit? Instead, she screamed at the woman, who indignantly withdrew the baby from the taxi. Maybe it wasn’t even her baby, Nancy considered; possibly it was just a baby that people used for begging. Perhaps it wasn’t even a real baby.

Ahead of them, two young men were supporting a drunken or a drugged companion. They paused in crossing the road, as if they weren’t sure that the taxi had stopped. But the taxi was stopped, and Nancy was incensed that her driver and the other Tamil were still arguing. She leaned forward and brought the dildo down across the back of her driver’s neck. That was when the sock flew off. The driver turned to face her. She struck him squarely on his nose with the huge cock in her hand.

“Drive on!” she shouted at the Tamil. Suitably impressed with the giant penis, he lurched the taxi forward—through the traffic light, which had turned red again. Fortunately, no other traffic was on the street. Unfortunately, the two young men and their slumped companion were directly in the taxi’s path. At first, it seemed to Nancy that all three of them were hit. Later, she distinctly remembered that two of them had run away, although she couldn’t say that she’d actually seen the impact; she must have closed her eyes.