A Son of the Circus

“Let me see,” Julia said; she attempted to dodge past her husband to the rucksack.

“No, Julia! Please!” Farrokh cried.

“Well, you saw it—I want to see it,” Julia said.

“I don’t think you do,” the doctor said.

“For God’s sake, Farrokh,” Julia said. He sheepishly stood aside; then he glanced nervously at the bathroom door, behind which the huge hippie was still bathing.

“Hurry up, Julia, and don’t mess up her things,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

“It’s not as if everything has been neatly folded—oh my goodness!” Julia said.

“Well, there it is—you’ve seen it. Now get away!” said Dr. Daruwalla, who was a little surprised that his wife had not recoiled in horror.

“Does it use batteries?” Julia asked; she was still looking at it.

“Batteries!” Farrokh cried. “For God’s sake, Julia—please get away!” The concept of such a thing being battery-powered would haunt the doctor’s dreams for 20 years. The idea certainly worsened the agony of waiting for the hippie to finish her bath.

Fearing that the freakish girl had drowned, Dr. Daruwalla timidly approached the bathroom door, through which he heard neither singing nor splashing; there wasn’t a sign of bathtub life. But before he could knock on the door, the doctor was surprised by the uncanny powers of the bathing hippie; she seemed to sense that someone was near.

“Hello out there,” the girl said laconically. “Would you bring me my rucksack? I forgot it.”

Dr. Daruwalla fetched the rucksack; for its size, it was uncommonly heavy. Full of batteries, Farrokh supposed. He opened the bathroom door cautiously, and only partially—just enough to reach his hand with the rucksack inside the door. Steam, with a thousand, conflicting scents, engulfed him. The girl said, “Thanks. Just drop it.” The doctor withdrew his hand and closed the door, wondering at the sound of metal as the rucksack struck the floor. Either a machete or a machine gun, Farrokh imagined; he didn’t want to know.

Julia had arranged a sturdy table on the balcony and covered it with a clean white sheet. Even late in the day, there was better light for surgery outside than in the rooms. Dr. Daruwalla assembled his instruments and prepared the anesthetic.

In the bathroom, Nancy managed to reach her rucksack without getting out of the bathtub; she began a search for anything marginally cleaner than what she’d been wearing. It was a matter of exchanging one kind of dirt for another, but she wanted to wear a long-sleeved cotton blouse and a bra and long pants; she also wanted to wash the dildo, and—if she was strong enough—she wanted to unscrew the thing and count

how much money was left. It was repellent to her to touch the cock, but she managed to withdraw it from the rucksack by pinching one of the balls between the thumb and index finger of her right hand; then she dropped the dildo into the bath, where (of course) it floated, the balls slightly submerged, the circumcised head raised—almost in the manner of a perplexed, solitary swimmer. Its single, evil eye was on her.

As for Dr. Daruwalla and his wife, their growing anxiety was in no way lessened by the unmistakable sounds of the bathtub being emptied and refilled. It was the hippie’s fourth bath.

One can sympathize with Farrokh and Julia for their misunderstanding of the grunts and groans that Nancy made while she was struggling to unscrew the preposterous penis and determine the amount of Deutsche marks that it contained. After all, despite their rekindling of the sexual flame, the pleasure of which was partially owed to Mr. James Salter, the Daruwallas were sexually tame souls. Given the size of the intimidating instrument that they’d seen in the hippie’s rucksack, and the sounds of physical exertion that passed from behind the bathroom door, it’s forgivable that Farrokh and Julia allowed their imaginations to run away with them. How could the Daruwallas have known that Nancy’s cries and curses of frustration were simply the result of her being unable to unscrew the dildo? And despite how far the Daruwallas allowed their imaginations to run, they never could have imagined what truly had happened to Nancy.

Four baths wouldn’t wash away what had happened to her.

With Dieter

From the moment Dieter had moved them out of the Taj, everything for Nancy had gone from bad to worse. Their new lodgings were in a small place on Marine Drive, the Sea Green Guest House, which Nancy noticed was an off-white color—or maybe, in the smog, a kind of blue-gray. Dieter said he favored the place because it was popular with an Arab clientele, and Arabs were safe. Nancy didn’t notice many Arabs, but she might not have spotted all of them, she supposed. She also didn’t know what Dieter meant by “safe”—he meant only that the Arabs were indifferent to drug trafficking on such a small scale as his.

At the Sea Green Guest House, Nancy was introduced to one of the featured activities involved in buying high-quality narcotics—namely, waiting. Dieter made some phone calls; then they waited. According to Dieter, the best deals came to you indirectly. No matter how hard you tried to make a direct deal, and to make it in Bombay, you always ended up in Goa, doing your business with the friend of a friend. And you always had to wait.

This time the friend of a friend was known to frequent the brothel area of Bombay, although the word on the street was that the guy had already gone to Goa; Dieter would have to find him there. The way you found him was, you rented a cottage on a certain beach; then you waited. You could ask for him, but even so you’d never find him; he always found you. This time his name was Rahul. It was always a common name and you never knew the last name—just Rahul. In the red-light district, they called him “Pretty.”

“That’s a funny thing to call a guy,” Nancy observed.

“He’s probably one of those chicks with dicks,” Dieter said. This expression was new to Nancy; she doubted that Dieter had picked it up from watching American movies.

Dieter attempted to explain the transvestite scene to Nancy, but he’d never understood that the hijras were eunuchs—that they’d truly been emasculated. He’d confused the hijras with the zenanas—the unaltered transvestites. A hijra had once exposed himself to Dieter, but Dieter had mistaken the scar for a vagina—he’d thought the hijra was a real woman. As for the zenanas, the so-called chicks with dicks, Dieter also called them “little boys with breasts.” Dieter said that they were all fags who took estrogens to make their tits bigger, but the estrogens also made their pricks get smaller and smaller until they looked like little boys.

Dieter tended to dwell on sexual things, and he used the halfhearted hope of finding Rahul in Bombay as an excuse to take Nancy to the red-light district. She didn’t want to go; but Dieter seemed destined to act out the old dictum that there is at least a kind of certainty in degradation. Debasement is specific. There is something exact about sexual corruption that Dieter probably found comforting in comparison to the vagueness of looking for Rahul.

For Nancy, the wet heat and ripe smell of Bombay were only enhanced by close proximity to the cage girls on Falkland Road. “Aren’t they amazing?” Dieter asked her. But why they were “amazing” eluded Nancy. On the ground floor of the old wooden buildings, there were cagelike rooms with beckoning girls inside them; above these cages, the buildings rose not more than four or five stories, with more girls on the window-sills—or else a curtain was drawn across a window to indicate that a prostitute was with a customer.

Nancy and Dieter drank tea at the Olympia on Falkland Road; it was an old, mirror-lined café frequented by the street prostitutes and their pimps, several of whom Dieter seemed to know. But these contacts either couldn’t or wouldn’t shed any light on the whereabouts of Rahul; they wouldn’t even speak of Rahul—except to say that he belonged to the transvestite scene, which they wanted no part of.

“I told you he was one of those chicks with dicks,” Dieter told Nancy. It was growing dark when they left the café, and the cage girls demonstrated a more aggressive interest in her as she and Dieter passed. Some of them lifted their skirts and made obscene gestures, some of them threw garbage at her, and sudden groups of men surrounded her on the street; Dieter, almost casually, drove them away from her. He seemed to find the attention amusing; the more vulgar the attention was, the more it amused Dieter.