A Son of the Circus

While the Englishman helped the driver put the body in the front seat of the taxi, Nancy realized that the young man who’d been hit was the one who’d appeared to be drunk or drugged. It never occurred to her that the young man might already have been dead when the car hit him. But this was the subject of the Englishman’s conversation with the Tamil driver: had the boy or young man been pushed into the path of the taxi deliberately, and was he even conscious before the taxi struck him?

“He looked dead,” the Englishman kept saying.

“Yes, he is dying before!” the Tamil shouted. “I am not killing him!”

“Is he dead now?” Nancy asked quietly.

“Oh, definitely,” the Englishman replied. Like the customs inspector, he wouldn’t look at her, but the Englishman’s wife was staring at Nancy, who still clutched the fierce dildo in her fist. Still not looking at her, the Englishman handed her the sock. She covered the weapon and returned it to her big purse.

“Is this your first visit to India?” the Englishwoman asked her, while the crazed Tamil drove them faster and faster through the streets now more and more blessed with electric light; the colorful mounds of the sidewalk sleepers were visible all around them. “In Bombay, half the population sleeps on the streets—but it’s really quite safe here,” the Englishwoman said. Nancy’s pinched expression implied to the British couple that she was a newcomer to the city and its smells. Actually, it was the lingering smell of the baby that pinched Nancy’s face—how something so small could reek with such force.

The body in the front seat made its deadness known. The young man’s head lolled lifelessly, his shoulders impossibly slack. Whenever the Tamil braked or cornered, the body responded as heavily as a bag of sand. Nancy was grateful that she couldn’t see the young man’s face, which was making a dull sound against the windshield—his face rested flush against the glass—until the Tamil cornered again and then accelerated.

Still not looking at Nancy, the Englishman said, “Don’t mind the body, dear.” It seemed unclear whether he’d spoken to Nancy or to his wife.

“It doesn’t bother me,” his wife answered.

Over Marine Drive, a thick smog hung suspended, as warm as a woolen shroud; the Arabian Sea was veiled, but the Englishwoman pointed to where the sea should have been. “Out there is the ocean,” she told Nancy, who began to gag. Overhead, on the lampposts, not even the advertisements were visible in the smog. The lights strung along Marine Drive weren’t smog lights, then; they were white, not yellow.

In the careening taxi, the Englishman pointed out the window into the veil of smog. “This is the Queen’s Necklace,” he told Nancy. As the taxi raced on, he added—more to assure himself and his wife than to comfort Nancy—“Well, we’re almost there.”

“I’m going to throw up,” Nancy said.

“If you don’t think about being sick, dear, you won’t be sick,” the Englishwoman said.

The taxi departed Marine Drive for the narrower, winding streets; the three living passengers leaned in to the corners, and the dead boy in the front seat appeared to come alive. His head walloped the side window; he slid forward and his face glanced off the windshield, skidding him into the Tamil driver, who elbowed the body away. The young man’s hands flew up to his face, as if he’d just remembered something important. Then, once again, the boy’s body appeared to forget everything.

There were whistles, piercing sharp and loud: these were the sounds of the tall Sikh doormen who directed the traffic at the Taj, but Nancy was searching for some evidence of the police. Nearby, at the looming Gateway of India, Nancy thought she’d seen some sort of police activity; there were lights, the sound of hysterics, a sort of disturbance. At first, some beggar urchins were reputed to be the cause; the story was, they’d failed to beg a single rupee from a young Swedish couple who’d been photographing the Gateway of India with an ostentatious and professional use of bright-white lights and reflectors. Hence the urchins had urinated on the Gateway of India in an effort

to spoil the picture, and when they’d failed to gain suitable attention from the foreigners—the Swedes allegedly found this demonstration symbolically interesting—the urchins then attempted to urinate on the photographic equipment, and that was the cause of the ruckus. But further investigation would reveal that the Swedes had paid the beggars to pee on the Gateway of India, which had little effect—the Gateway of India was already soiled. The urchins had never attempted to pee on the Swedes’ photographic equipment; that would have been far too bold for them—they’d merely complained that they weren’t paid enough for pissing on the Gateway of India. That was the true cause of the ruckus.

Meanwhile, the dead boy in the taxi had to wait. In the driveway of the Taj, the Tamil driver became hysterical; a dead man had been thrown into the path of his car—apparently, there was a dent. The British couple confided to a policeman that the Tamil had run a red light (upon being struck by a dildo). The policeman was the bewildered constable who’d finally freed himself from the crime of urination at the Gateway of India. It wasn’t clear to Nancy if the British couple was blaming her for the accident, if it even had been an accident. After all, the Tamil and the Englishman agreed that the boy had looked dead before the taxi hit him. What was clear to Nancy was that the policeman didn’t know what a “dildo” was.

“A penis—a rather large one,” the Englishman explained to the constable.

“She?” the policeman asked, pointing to Nancy. “She is hitting the taxi-walla with a what?”

“You’ll have to show him, dear,” the Englishwoman told Nancy.

“I’m not showing him anything,” Nancy said.

Our Friend, the Real Policeman

It took an hour before Nancy was free to register in the hotel. A half hour later—she’d just finished soaking in a hot bath—a second policeman came to her room. This one wasn’t a constable—no blue shorts a yard wide, no silly leg warmers. This one wasn’t another nerd in a Nehru cap; he wore an officer’s cap with the Maharashtrian police insignia and a khaki shirt, long khaki pants, black shoes, a revolver. It was the duty officer from the Colaba Police Station, which has jurisdiction over the Taj. Without his jowls, but even then sporting that pencil-thin mustache—and 20 years before he would have occasion to question Dr. Daruwalla and Inspector Dhar at the Duckworth Club—the young Inspector Patel gave a good first impression of himself. A future deputy commissioner could be discerned in the young policeman’s composure.

Inspector Patel was aggressive but courteous, and even in his twenties he was an intimidating detective in the way that he invited a certain misunderstanding of his questions. His manner persuaded you to believe that he already knew the answers to many of the questions he asked, although he usually didn’t; thus he encouraged you to tell the truth by implying that he already knew it. And his method of questioning carried the added implication that, within your answers, Inspector Patel could discern your moral character.

In her current state, Nancy was vulnerable to such an uncommonly proper and pleasant-looking young man. To sympathize with Nancy’s situation: Inspector Patel did not present himself as a person whom even a brazen or a supremely self-confident young woman would choose to show a dildo to. Also, it was about 5:00 in the morning. There may have been some eager early risers who were heralding the sunrise that—when viewed across the water, and perfectly framed in the arch of the Gateway of India—could still summon the vainglorious days of the British Raj, but poor Nancy wasn’t among them. Besides, her only windows and the small balcony didn’t afford her a view of the sea. Dieter had arranged for one of the cheaper rooms.

Below her, in the gray-brown light, was the usual gathering of beggars—child performers, for the most part. Those international travelers who were still staggered by jet lag would find these early-morning urchins their first contact with India in the light of day.

Nancy sat at the foot of her bed in her bathrobe. The inspector sat in the only chair not strewn with her clothes or her bags. They could both hear the emptying of Nancy’s bath. Highly visible, as Dieter had advised, were the used-looking but unused guidebook and the unread novel by Lawrence Durrell.

It was not uncommon, the inspector told her, for someone to be murdered and then shoved in front of a moving car. In this case, what was unusual was that the hoax had been so obvious.

“Not to me,” Nancy told him. She explained that she’d not seen the moment of impact; she’d thought all three of them were hit—probably because she’d shut her eyes.

The Englishwoman hadn’t observed the moment of impact, either, Inspector Patel informed Nancy. “She was looking at you instead,” the policeman explained.