A Son of the Circus

“What sort of fool would pretend to be Dhar, and dare show his face on Falkland Road?” Patel asked.

“He looked like he didn’t know he was Dhar,” the hijra replied.

“Oh, I see,” said Detective Patel. “He was an imposter but he didn’t know he was an imposter.” The hijra scratched his hooked nose with the cast on his wrist. Patel was bored with the interrogation; he kept the hijra sitting there only because the preposterous sight of him helped the detective to focus on Rahul. Of course Rahul would be 53 or 54 now, and she wouldn’t stand out as someone who was making a half-assed effort to look like a woman.

It had occurred to the deputy commissioner that this might be one of the ways that Rahul managed to commit so many murders in the same area of Bombay. Rahul could enter a brothel as a man and leave looking like a hag; she could also leave looking like an attractive, middle-aged woman. And until this waste-of-time hijra had interrupted him, Patel had been enjoying a fairly profitable morning’s work; the deputy commissioner’s research on Rahul was progressing rather nicely. The list of new members at the Duckworth Club had been helpful.

“Did you ever hear of a zenana by the name of Rahul?” Patel asked the hijra.

“That old question,” the transvestite said.

“Only she’d be a real woman now—the complete operation,” the detective added. He knew there were some hijras who envied the very idea of a complete transsexual, but not most; most hijras were exactly what they wanted to be—they had no use for a fully fashioned vagina.

“If I knew of there being someone like that, I’d probably kill her,” the hijra said good-naturedly. “For her parts,” he added with a smile; he was just kidding, of course. Detective Patel knew more about Rahul than this hijra did; in the last 24 hours, the detective had learned more about Rahul than he’d known for 20 years.

“You may go now,” said the deputy commissioner. “But leave the shirt. By your own admission, you stole it.”

“But I have nothing else to wear!” the hijra cried.

“We’ll find you something you can wear,” the policeman said. “It just may not match your miniskirt.”

When Detective Patel left Crime Branch Headquarters for his lunch at the Duckworth Club, he took a paper bag with him; in it was the Hawaiian shirt that belonged to Dhar’s imposter. The deputy commissioner knew that not every question would or could be answered over one lunch, but the question posed by the Hawaiian shirt seemed a relatively simple one.

The Actor Guesses Right

“No,” said Inspector Dhar. “I would never wear a shirt like that.” He’d glanced quickly and indifferently into the bag, not bothering to draw out the shirt—not even touching the material.

“It has a California label,” Detective Patel informed the actor.

“I’ve never been to California,” Dhar replied.

The deputy commissioner put the paper bag under his chair; he seemed disappointed that the Hawaiian shirt had not served as an icebreaker to their conversation, which had halted once again. Poor Nancy hadn’t spoken at all. Worse, she’d chosen to wear a sari, wound up in the navel-revealing fashion; the golden hairs that curled upward in a sleek line to her belly button were as worrisome to Mr. Sethna as the unsightly paper bag the policeman had placed under his chair. It was the kind of bag that a bomb would be in, the old steward thought. And how he disapproved of Western women in Indian attire! Furthermore, the fair skin of this particular woman’s midriff clashed with her sunburned face. She must have been lying in the sun with tea saucers over her eyes, Mr. Sethna thought; any evidence of women lying on their backs disturbed him.

As for the ever-voyeuristic Dr. Daruwalla, his eyes were repeatedly drawn to Nancy’s furry navel; since she’d pulled her chair snugly to their table in the Ladies’ Garden, the doctor was restless because he could no longer see this marvel. Farrokh found himself glancing sideways at Nancy’s raccoon eyes instead. The doctor made Nancy so nervous that she took her sunglasses out of her purse and put them on. She had the look of someone who was trying to gather herself together for a performance.

Inspector Dhar knew how to handle sunglasses. He simply stared into them with a satisfied expression on his face, which implied to Nancy that her sunglasses were no impediment to his vision—that he could see her clearly nonetheless. Dhar knew this would soon cause her to take the sunglasses off.

Oh great—they’re both acting! Dr. Daruwalla thought.

Mr. Sethna was disgusted with all of them. They were as socially graceless as teenagers. Not one of them had glanced at a menu; none of them had so much as raised an eyebrow to a waiter to suggest an aperitif, and they couldn’t even talk to one another! Mr. Sethna was also full of indignation at the explanation that was now before him of why Detective Patel spoke such good English: the policeman’s wife was a slatternly American! Needless to say, Mr. Sethna considered this a “mixed marriage,” of which he strongly disapproved. And the old steward was no less outraged that Inspector Dhar should have brashly presented himself at the Duckworth Club so soon after the warning in the late Mr. Lal’s mouth; the actor was recklessly endangering other Duckworthians! That Mr. Sethna had come by this information through the relentlessness and the practiced stealth of his eavesdropping didn’t cause the old steward to consider that he might not know the whole story. To a man with Mr. Sethna’s readiness to disapprove, a mere shred of information was sufficient to form a full opinion.

But of course Mr. Sethna had another reason to be outraged with Inspector Dhar. As a Parsi and a practicing Zoroastrian, the old steward had reacted predictably to the posters for the newest Inspector Dhar absurdity. Not since his days at the Ripon Club, and his famous decision to pour hot tea on the head of the man wearing the wig, had Mr. Sethna felt so aroused to righteous anger. He’d seen the work of the poster-wallas on his way home from the Duckworth Club, and he blamed Inspector Dhar and Towers of Silence for giving him uncharacteristically lurid dreams.

He’d suffered a vision of a ghostly-white statue of Queen Victoria that resembled the one they took away from Victoria Terminus, but in his dream the statue was levitating; Queen Victoria was hovering about a foot off the floor of Mr. Sethna’s beloved fire-temple, and all the Parsi faithful were bolting for the doorway. Were it not for the blasphemous cinema poster, Mr. Sethna believed he would never have had suc

h a blasphemous dream. He’d promptly woken up and donned his prayer cap, but the prayer cap fell off when he suffered another dream. He was riding in the Parsi Panchayat Hearse to the Towers of Silence; although he was already a dead body, he could smell the rites attendant to his own death—the scent of burning sandalwood. Suddenly the stink of putrefaction, which clung to the vultures’ beaks and talons, was choking him; he woke again. His prayer cap was on the floor, where he mistook it for a waiting hunchbacked crow; pathetically, he’d tried to shoo the imagined crow away.

Dr. Daruwalla glanced only once at Mr. Sethna. From the steward’s withering stare, the doctor wondered if another hot-tea incident was brewing. Mr. Sethna interpreted the doctor’s glance as a summons.

“An aperitif before lunch, perhaps?” the steward asked the awkward foursome. Since “aperitif” wasn’t a word much used in Iowa—nor had Nancy heard it from Dieter, nor was it ever spoken in her life with Vijay Patel—she made no response to Mr. Sethna, who was looking directly at her. (If anywhere, Nancy might have encountered the word in one or another of the remaindered American novels she’d read, but she wouldn’t have known how to pronounce “aperitif” and she would have assumed that the word was inessential to understanding the plot.)

“Would the lady enjoy something to drink before her lunch?” Mr. Sethna asked, still looking at Nancy. No one at the table could hear what she said, but the old steward understood that she’d whispered for a Thums Up cola. The deputy commissioner ordered a Gold Spot orange soda, Dr. Daruwalla asked for a London Diet beer and Dhar wanted a Kingfisher.

“Well, this should be lively,” Dr. Daruwalla joked. “Two teetotalers and two beer drinkers!” This lead balloon lay on the table, which inspired the doctor to discourse, at length, on the history of the lunch menu.

It was Chinese Day at the Duckworth Club, the culinary low point of the week. In the old days, there’d been a Chinese chef among the kitchen staff, and Chinese Day had been an epicure’s delight. But the Chinese chef had left the club to open his own restaurant, and the present-day collection of cooks could not concoct Chinese; yet, one day a week, they tried.

“It’s probably safest to stick with something vegetarian,” Farrokh recommended.