A Son of the Circus

Like Mr. Bhagwan, who had retreated into Elephant Passing, which led to his death, the screenplay of Limo Roulette went into radical retirement. It occupied the bottommost drawer in Dr. Daruwalla’s desk at home; he wouldn’t keep a copy in his office at the hospital. If he were to die suddenly, he wouldn’t have wanted anyone but Julia to discover the unproduced screenplay. The single copy was in a folder marked

PROPERTY OF INSPECTOR DHAR

for it was Farrokh’s conviction that only John D. would one day know what to do with it.

Doubtless there would be compromises required in order for Limo Roulette to be produced; there were always compromises in the movie business. Someone would say that the voice-over was “emotionally distancing”—that w

as the fashionable opinion of voice-over. Someone would complain about the little girl being killed by the lion. (Couldn’t Pinky be confined to a wheelchair, but happy, for the rest of the movie?) And despite what had happened to the real Ganesh, the screenwriter loved the ending as it was written; someone would want to tamper with that ending, which Dr. Daruwalla could never allow. The doctor knew that Limo Roulette would never be as perfect as it was in those days when he was writing it and he imagined that he was a better writer than he was.

It was a deep drawer for a mere 118 pages. As if to keep the abandoned screenplay company, Farrokh filled the drawer with photographs of chromosomes; ever since Duncan Frasier had died, Dr. Daruwalla’s dwarf-blood project had passed beyond languishing—the doctor’s enthusiasm for drawing blood from dwarfs was as dead as the gay geneticist. If anything or anyone were to tempt Dr. Daruwalla to return to India, this time the doctor couldn’t claim that the dwarfs were bringing him back.

From time to time, Dr. Daruwalla would read that perfect ending to Limo Roulette—when the cripple walks on the sky—for only by this artificial means could the doctor keep the real Ganesh alive. The screenwriter loved that moment after the Skywalk when the boy is descending on the dental trapeze, spinning in the spotlight as the gleaming sequins on his singlet throw back the light. Farrokh loved how the cripple never touches the ground; how he descends into Pratap’s waiting arms, and how Pratap holds the boy up to the cheering crowd. Then Pratap runs out of the ring with Ganesh in his arms, because after a cripple has walked on the sky, no one should see him limp. It could have worked, the screenwriter thought; it should have worked.

Dr. Daruwalla was 62; he was reasonably healthy. His weight was a small problem and he’d done little to rid his diet of admitted excesses, but the doctor nevertheless expected to live for another decade or two. John D. might well be in his sixties by the time Limo Roulette was put into the actor’s hands. The former Inspector Dhar would know for whom the part of the missionary had been intended; the actor would also be relatively free of any personal attachments to the story or its characters. If certain compromises were necessary in order to produce Limo Roulette, John D. would be able to look at the screenplay objectively. Dr. Daruwalla had no doubt that the ex-Inspector Dhar would know what to do with the material.

But for now—for the rest of his life, Farrokh knew—the story belonged in the bottommost drawer.

Sort of Fading Now

Almost three years after he left Bombay, the retired screenwriter read about the destruction of the Mosque of Babar; the unending hostilities he’d once mocked in Inspector Dhar and the Hanging Mali had turned uglier still. Fanatical Hindus had destroyed the 16th-century Babri mosque; rioting had left more than 400 dead—Prime Minister Rao called for shooting rioters on sight, both in Bhopal and in Bombay. Hindu fundamentalists weren’t pleased by Mr. Rao’s promise to rebuild the mosque; these fanatics continued to claim that the mosque had been built on the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama—they’d already begun building a temple to Rama at the site of the destroyed mosque. The hostilities would go on and on, Dr. Daruwalla knew. The violence would endure; it was always what lasted longest.

And although Madhu would never be found, Detective Patel would keep inquiring for the girl; the child prostitute would be a woman now—if she was still managing to live with the AIDS virus, which was unlikely.

“If we crash, do we burn or fly apart in little pieces?” Madhu had asked Dr. Daruwalla. “Something will get me,” she’d told the doctor. Farrokh couldn’t stop imagining her. He was always envisioning Madhu with Mr. Garg; they were traveling together from Junagadh to Bombay, escaping the Great Blue Nile. Although it would have been considered highly disgraceful, they would probably have been touching each other, not even secretly—secure in the misinformation that all that was wrong with them was a case of chlamydia.

And almost as the deputy commissioner had predicted, the second Mrs. Dogar would be unable to resist the terrible temptations that presented themselves to her in her confinement with women. She bit off a fellow prisoner’s nose. In the course of the subsequent and extremely hard labor to which Rahul was then subjected, she would rebel; it would be unnecessary to hang her, for she was beaten to death by her guards.

In another of life’s little passages, Ranjit would both retire and remarry. Dr. Daruwalla had never met the woman whose matrimonial advertisement in The Times of India finally snared his faithful medical secretary; however, the doctor had read the ad—Ranjit sent it to him. “An attractive woman of indeterminate age—innocently divorced, without issue—seeks a mature man, preferably a widower. Neatness and civility still count.” Indeed, they do, the doctor thought. Julia joked that Ranjit had probably been attracted to the woman’s punctuation.

Other couples came and went, but the nature of couples, like violence, would endure. Even little Amy Sorabjee had married. (God help her husband.) And although Mrs. Bannerjee had died, Mr. Bannerjee wasn’t a widower for long; he married the widow Lal. Of these unsavory couplings, of course, the unchanging Mr. Sethna steadfastly disapproved.

However set in his ways, the old steward still ruled the Duckworth Club dining room and the Ladies’ Garden with a possessiveness that was said to be enhanced by his newly acquired sense of himself as a promising actor. Dr. Sorabjee wrote to Dr. Daruwalla that Mr. Sethna had been seen addressing himself in the men’s-room mirror—long monologues of a thespian nature. And the old steward was observed to be slavishly devoted to Deputy Commissioner Patel, if not to the big blond wife who went everywhere with the esteemed detective. Apparently, the famous tea-pouring Parsi also fancied himself a promising policeman. Crime-branch investigation was no doubt perceived by Mr. Sethna as a heightened form of eavesdropping.

Astonishingly, the old steward appeared to approve of something! The unorthodoxy of the deputy commissioner and his American wife becoming members of the Duckworth Club didn’t bother Mr. Sethna; it bothered many an orthodox Duckworthian. Clearly, the deputy commissioner hadn’t waited 22 years for his membership; although Detective Patel satisfied the requirement for “community leadership,” his instant acceptance at the club suggested that someone had bent the rules—someone had been looking for (and had found) a loophole. To many Duckworthians, the policeman’s membership amounted to a miracle; it was also considered a scandal.

It was a minor miracle, in Detective Patel’s opinion, that no one was ever bitten by the escaped cobras in Mahalaxmi, for (according to the deputy commissioner) those cobras had been “assimilated” into the life of Bombay without a single reported bite.

It wasn’t even a minor miracle that the phone calls from the woman who tried to sound like a man continued—not only after Rahul’s imprisonment, but also after her death. It strangely comforted Dr. Daruwalla to know that the caller had never been Rahul. Every time, as if reading from a script, the caller would leave nothing out. “Your father’s head was off, completely off! I saw it sitting on the passenger seat before flames engulfed the car.”

Farrokh had learned how to interrupt the unslackening voice. “I know—I know already,” Dr. Daruwalla would say. “And his hands couldn’t let go of the steering wheel, even though his fingers were on fire—is that what you’re going to tell me? I’ve already heard it.”

But the voice never relented. “I did it. I blew his head off. I watched him burn,” said the woman who tried to sound like a man. “And I’m telling you, he deserved it. Your whole family deserves it.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Farrokh had learned to say, although he generally disliked such language.

Sometimes he would watch the video of Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer (that was Farrokh’s favorite) or Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence, which the former screenwriter believed was the most underrated of the Dhar films. But to his best friend, Mac, Farrokh would never confide that he’d written anything—not a word. Inspector Dhar was part of the doctor’s past. John D. had almost completely let Dhar go. Dr. Daruwal

la had to keep trying.

For three years, the twins had teased him; neither John D. nor Martin Mills would tell Dr. Daruwalla what had passed between them on their flight to Switzerland. While the doctor sought clarification, the twins deliberately confused him; they must have done it to exasperate him—Farrokh was such a lot of fun when he was exasperated. The former Inspector Dhar’s most irritating (and least believable) response was, “I don’t remember.” Martin Mills claimed to remember everything. But Martin never told the same story twice, and when John D. did admit to remembering something, the actor’s version unfailingly contradicted the ex-missionary’s.

“Let’s try to begin at the beginning,” Dr. Daruwalla would say. “I’m interested in that moment of recognition, the realization that you were face-to-face with your second self—so to speak.”

“I boarded the plane first,” both twins would tell him.

“I always do the same thing whenever I leave India,” the retired Inspector Dhar insisted. “I find my seat and get my little complimentary toilet kit from the flight attendant. Then I go to the lavatory and shave off my mustache, while they’re still boarding the plane.”

This much was true. It was what John D. did to un-Dhar himself. This was an established fact, one of the few that Farrokh could cling to: both twins were mustacheless when they met.