A Son of the Circus

“Hi. Who are you?” Beth said. Then Beth managed a gasp, which caused Nancy to stop looking through the space between the latticework. Nancy lay on her back with the jasmine-scented sari covering her face; she didn’t want to look at the ceiling, either, because she knew that the shadows of the rats would be twitching there.

“Hey, like, what are you?” she heard Beth say. “Are you a boy or a girl?”

“I’m pretty, aren’t I?” Rahul said.

“You sure are … different,” Beth replied.

From the responding sound of the entrenching tool, Nancy guessed that Rahul was displeased to be called “different.” Rahul’s preferred nickname was “Pretty.” Nancy pushed the jasmine-scented sari entirely off the bed and outside the mosquito net. She hoped it fell to the floor very close to where Rahul had left it. Then she lay with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, where the shadows of the rats scurried back and forth; it was almost as if the second and third blows from the entrenching tool were a kind of starting signal for the rats.

Later, Nancy quietly rolled on her side so that she could peek through the latticing and watch what Rahul was doing; he appeared to be performing a kind of surgery on Beth’s stomach, but Nancy soon realized that Rahul was drawing a picture on Beth’s belly. Nancy shut her eyes and wished that her fever would come back; even though she wasn’t feverish, she was so frightened that she began to shiver. It was the shivers that saved her. When Rahul came to her, Nancy’s teeth were chattering as uncontrollably as before. Instantly, she felt his lack of sexual interest; he was mocking her, or merely curious.

“Is that bad old fever back again?” Rahul asked her.

“I keep dreaming,” Nancy told him.

“Yes, of course you do, dear,” Rahul said.

“I keep trying to sleep but I keep dreaming,” Nancy said.

“Are they bad dreams?” Rahul asked her.

“Pretty bad,” Nancy said.

“Do you want to tell me about them, dear?” Rahul asked her.

“I just want to sleep,” Nancy told him. To her surprise, he let her. He parted the mosquito net and sat on the bed beside her; he rubbed her between her shoulder blades until the shivers went away and she could imitate the regular breathing of a deep sleep—she even parted her lips and tried to imagine that she was already dead. He kissed her once on the temple, and once on the tip of her nose. At last, she felt Rahul’s weight leave the bed. She also felt the entrenching tool, when Rahul gently returned it to her hands. Although she never heard a door open or close, she knew Rahul was gone when she heard the rats racing recklessly through the cottage; they even scampered under the mosquito net and across her bed, as if they were secure in their belief that there were three dead people in the cottage instead of two. That was when Nancy knew it was safe to get up. If Rahul had still been there, the rats would have known.

In the predawn light, Nancy saw that Rahul had used the dhobi pen—and indelible dhobi ink—to decorate Beth’s belly. The laundry-marking pen was a crude wooden handle with a simple, broad nib; the ink was black. Rahul had left the ink bottle and the dhobi pen on Nancy’s pillow. Nancy recalled that she’d picked up the ink bottle and the dhobi pen before putting them both back on her bed; her fingerprints were also all over the handle of the entrenching tool.

She’d become ill so soon upon her arrival; yet it was Nancy’s strong impression that this was a rustic sort of place. She doubted she’d have much success convincing the local police that a beautiful woman with a little boy’s penis had murdered Dieter and Beth. And Rahul had been smart enough not to empty Dieter’s money belt; he’d taken the money belt with him. There was no evidence of robbery. Beth’s jewelry was untouched, and there was even some money in Dieter’s wallet; their passports weren’t stolen. Nancy knew that most of the money was in the dildo, which she didn’t even try to open because Dieter had bled on it and it was sticky to touch. She wiped it with a wet towel; then she packed it in the rucksack with her things.

She thought Inspector Patel would believe her, provided she could get back to Bombay without the local police finding her first. On the surface, Nancy t

hought, it would be judged a crime of passion—one of those triangular relationships that had turned a little twisted. And the drawing on Beth’s belly gave the murders a hint of diabolism, or at least a flair for sarcasm. The elephant was surprisingly small and unadorned—a frontal view. The head was wider than it was long, the eyes were unmatched and one was squinting—actually, one eye seemed puckered, Nancy thought. The trunk hung slack, pointing straight down; from the end of the trunk, the artist had drawn several broad lines in the shape of a fan—a childish indication that water sprayed from the elephant’s trunk, as from a showerhead or from the nozzle of a hose. These lines extended into Beth’s pubic hair. The entire drawing was the size of a small hand.

Then Nancy realized why the drawing was slightly off center, and why one eye seemed “puckered.” One of the eyes was Beth’s navel, outlined in dhobi ink; the other eye was an imperfect imitation of the navel. Because the navel had real depth, the eyes weren’t the same; one eye appeared to be winking. Beth’s navel was the winking eye. What further contributed to the elephant’s mirthful or mocking expression was that one of its tusks drooped in the normal position; the opposing tusk was raised, almost as if an elephant could lift a tusk in the manner that a human being can cock an eyebrow. This was a small, ironical elephant—an elephant with an inappropriate sense of humor, to be sure.

The Getaway

Nancy dressed Beth’s body in the tank top that Beth had been wearing when Nancy first met her; at least it covered the drawing. She left Beth’s sacred yoni in place, at her throat, as if it might prove itself to be a more successful talisman in the next world than it had demonstrated itself to be in this.

The sun rose inland and a tan light filtered through the areca and coconut palms, leaving most of the beach in shade, which was a blessing for Nancy, who labored for over an hour with the entrenching tool; yet she managed to dig no better than a shallow pit near the tidemark for high tide. The pit was already half full of water when she dragged Dieter’s body along the beach and rolled him into the hole. By the time she’d arranged Beth’s body next to his, Nancy was aware of the blue crabs that she’d uncovered with her digging; they were scurrying to bury themselves again. She’d chosen an especially soft stretch of sand, the part of the beach that was nearest the cottage; now Nancy realized why the sand was soft. A tidal inlet cut through the beach and drained into the matted jungle; she’d dug too close to this inlet. Nancy knew the bodies wouldn’t stay buried for long.

Worse, in her haste to clean up the broken glass in the bathroom, she’d stepped on the jagged heel of the Coca-Cola bottle; several pieces of glass had broken off in her foot. She was wrong to think she’d picked all the pieces out, but she was in a hurry. She’d bled so heavily on the bathroom mat, she was forced to roll it up and put it (with the broken glass) in the grave; she buried it, together with the rest of Dieter’s and Beth’s things, including Beth’s silver bangles, which were much too small for Nancy, and Beth’s beloved copy of The Upanishads, which Nancy had no interest in reading herself.

It had surprised Nancy that digging the grave was harder work than dragging Dieter’s body to the beach; Dieter was tall, but he weighed less than she’d ever imagined. It crossed her mind that she could have left him anytime she’d wanted to; she could have picked him up and thrown him against a wall. She felt incredibly strong, but as soon as she’d filled the grave, she was exhausted.

A moment of panic nearly overcame Nancy when she discovered that she couldn’t find the top half of the silver ballpoint pen that Dieter had given her—the pen with Made in India written lengthwise on it in script. The bottom part said Made in, the missing part said India. Nancy had already discovered the flaw in the pen’s design: the pen wouldn’t snap securely together if the script wasn’t perfectly aligned; the top and the bottom were always getting separated. Nancy looked through the cottage for the missing top; she thought it unlikely that Rahul had taken it—it wasn’t the part of the pen that you could write with. Nancy had the part that wrote, and so she kept it; because it was small, it would make its way to the bottom of her rucksack. At least it was real silver.

Nancy knew her fever had finally gone because she was smart enough to take Dieter’s and Beth’s passports; she also reminded herself that their bodies would be found soon. Whoever rented the cottage to Dieter had known there were three of them. She suspected that the police would assume she’d leave by bus from Calangute or by ferry from Panjim. Nancy’s plan was remarkably clear-headed: she would place Dieter’s and Beth’s passports in a conspicuous place at the bus stand in Calangute, but she would take the ferry from Panjim to Bombay. That way, with any luck—and while she was on the ferry—the police would be looking for her in bus stations.

But Nancy would be the beneficiary of better luck than this. When the bodies were discovered, the landlord who rented the cottage to Dieter admitted that he’d seen Beth and Nancy only at a distance. Since Dieter was German, the landlord assumed the other two were Germans; also, he mistook Nancy for a man. After all, she was so big—especially beside Beth. The landlord would tell the police that they were looking for a German hippie male. When the passports were found in Calangute, the police realized that Beth had been an American; yet they persisted in their belief that the murderer was a German man, traveling by bus.

The grave wouldn’t be discovered right away; the tide eroded the sand near the inlet only a little bit at a time. It would be unclear whether the carrion birds or the pye-dogs were the first to catch wind of something; by then, Nancy was gone.

She waited only for the sun to top the palm trees and flood the beach in white light; it took just a few minutes for the sun to dry the wet sand of the grave. With a palm frond, Nancy wiped smooth the stretch of beach leading to the jungle and the cottage; then she limped on her way. It was still early morning when she left Anjuna. She deemed she’d discovered an isolated pocket of eccentrics when she saw the nude sunbathers and swimmers who were almost a tradition in the area. She’d been sick—she didn’t know.

The first day, her foot wasn’t too bad, but she had to walk all over Calangute after she placed the passports. There was no doctor staying at Meena’s or Varma’s. Someone told her that an English-speaking doctor was staying at the Concha Hotel; when she got there, the doctor had checked out. At the Concha, they told her there was an English-speaking doctor in Baga at the Hotel Bardez. The next day, when she went there, they turned her away; by then, her foot was infected.