A Son of the Circus

“That would be the right number of years, wouldn’t it?” the detective asked. Again, Farrokh felt the twinge in his rib that he confused with his excited heart.

“He was hoping to go to London for the operation,” Farrokh explained. “In those days, I believe it would have been very difficult to get a complete sex-change operation in India. They’re still illegal here.”

“I believe that our murderer also went to London,” Patel informed the doctor. “Obviously, and only recently, he—or she—came back.”

“The person I knew was interested in going to art school … in London,” Farrokh said numbly. The photographs of the drawings on the bellies of the murdered prostitutes grew clearer in his mind, although the photographs lay facedown on the deputy commissioner’s desk. It was Patel who picked one up and looked at it again.

“Not a very good art school would have taken him, I suspect,” the detective said.

He never shut his office door, which opened on an outdoor balcony; there were a dozen such offices off this balcony, and it was the deputy commissioner’s policy that no one ever closed a door—except in the monsoon rains, and then only when the wind was wrong. With the doors open, no one being interrogated could later claim that they’d been beaten. Also, the sound of the police secretaries typing their officers’ reports was a sound that the deputy commissioner enjoyed; the cacophony of typewriters implied both industry and order. He knew that many of his fellow policemen were lazy and their secretaries were sloppy; the typed reports themselves were rarely as orderly as the clacking of the keys. On his desk, Deputy Commissioner Patel faced three reports in need of rewriting, and an additional report in greater need, but he pushed these four reports aside in order to spread out the photographs of the murdered whores’ bellies. The elephant drawings were so familiar to him that they calmed him; he didn’t want the doctor to sense his eagerness.

“And would this person that you knew have had a common sort of name, a name like Rahul?” the detective asked. It was a delivery worthy of the insincerity of Inspector Dhar.

“Rahul Rai,” said Dr. Daruwalla; it was almost a whisper, but this didn’t lessen the deputy commissioner’s quickening pleasure.

“And would this Rahul Rai have been in Goa … perhaps visiting the beaches … at or about the time when the German and the American—those bodies you saw—were murdered?” Patel asked. The doctor was slumped in his chair as if bent by indigestion.

“At my hotel—at the Bardez,” Farrokh replied. “He was staying with his aunt. And the thing is, if Rahul is in Bombay, he is certainly familiar with the Duckworth Club—his aunt was a member!”

“Was?” the detective said.

“She’s dead,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “I would presume that Rahul, he or she, inherited her fortune.”

D.C.P. Patel touched the raised tusk of the elephant in one of the photographs; then he stacked the photos in a single neat pile. He’d always known there was family money in India, but the Duckworth Club connection was a surprise. What had misled him for 20 years was Rahul’s brief notoriety in the transvestite brothels on Falkland Road and Grant Road; these were hardly the usual haunts of a Duckworthian.

“Of course I know that you know my wife,” the detective said. “I must put you together with her. She knows your Rahul, too, and it might help me to hear you compare notes—so to speak.”

“We could have lunch at the club. Someone there might know more about Rahul,” Farrokh suggested.

“Don’t you ask any questions!” the deputy commissioner suddenly shouted. It offended Dr. Daruwalla to be yelled at, but the detective was

quickly tactful, if not exactly mollifying. “We wouldn’t want to warn Rahul, would we?” Patel said, as if he were speaking to a child.

The rising dust from the courtyard had coated the leaves of the neem trees; the rail of the balcony was also coated with dust. In the detective’s office, the dull brass ceiling fan labored in an effort to push the motes of dust back out the open door. The darting shadows of fork-tailed kites occasionally moved across the deputy commissioner’s desk. The one open eve of the topmost elephant in the stack of photos seemed to notice all these things, which the doctor knew he would never forget.

“Lunch today?” suggested the detective.

“Tomorrow is better for me,” Dr. Daruwalla said. His pending obligation to deliver Martin Mills into the hands of the Jesuits at St. Ignatius was a welcome intrusion; he also needed to talk to Julia, and he wanted the time to tell Dhar—Dhar should be at the lunch with the wounded hippie. Farrokh knew that John D. had a superior memory, maybe even of Rahul.

“Tomorrow is fine,” said the deputy commissioner, but his disappointment was evident. The words his wife had used to describe Rahul were constantly with him. Also with him was the size of Rahul’s big hands, which had held his wife’s big breasts; also, the erectness and the shapeliness of Rahul’s breasts, which Nancy had felt against her back; also, the small, silky little boy’s penis, which his wife had felt against her buttocks. Nancy had said he was condescending, mocking, teasing—certainly sophisticated, probably cruel.

Because Dr. Daruwalla had only begun the struggle to compose a written report on Rahul Rai, the detective couldn’t quite leave him alone. “Give me one word for Rahul,” Patel asked Farrokh. “The first word that comes to your mind—I’m just curious,” the detective said.

“Arrogant,” the doctor replied. After 20 years, it was visible on Detective Patel’s face that this was unsatisfactory.

“Please try another,” the detective said.

“Superior,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“You’re getting closer,” Patel replied.

“Rahul is a tease,” Farrokh explained. “He condescends to you, he mocks you, he bullies you with a sort of self-satisfied sophistication. Like his late aunt, he uses his sophistication as a weapon. I think he is basically a cruel person,” The doctor paused in his description because the detective had closed his eyes and sat smiling at his desk. All the while, Deputy Commissioner Patel articulated his fingers as if he were typing up another report, but his fingers weren’t tapping the keys of his typewriter; the detective had once more spread out the photographs—they covered his desk—and he typed on the many heads of the mocking elephants, his fingers finding the navels of the murdered prostitutes … all those ceaselessly winking eyes.

Down the balcony, from another detective’s office, a man was screaming that he was telling the truth, while a policeman calmly contradicted him with the almost harmonious repetition of the word “lies.” From the courtyard kennel came a corresponding clamor—the police attack dogs.

After Dr. Daruwalla had completed his written report on Rahul, the doctor wandered onto the balcony to have a look at the dogs; they’d barked themselves out. The late-morning sun was now beating down on the courtyard; the police dogs, all Dobermans, were asleep in the only shady corner of their kennel, which was obscured from Farrokh’s view by a clump of neem trees. On the balcony itself, however, was a small cage with a newspaper floor, and the doctor knelt to play with a Doberman pinscher puppy—a prisoner in a portable pen. The puppy wriggled and whined for Farrokh’s attention. It thrust its sleek black muzzle through a square of the wire mesh; it licked the doctor’s hand—its needle-sharp teeth nipped his fingers.

“Are you a good dog?” Farrokh asked the puppy. Its wild eyes were ringed with the rusty-brown markings of its breed, which is preferred for police work in Bombay because the Dobermann short hair is suitable for the hot weather. The dogs were large and powerful and fast; they had the terrier’s jaws and tenacity, although they weren’t quite as intelligent as German shepherds.