A Son of the Circus

As soon as Dr. Daruwalla hung up the phone, he carried his agitation to the dinner table, where Roopa apologized for the utter deterioration of the mutton, which was her way of saying that this mushy meat in her beloved dhal was all the doctor’s fault, which of course it was. Dhar then asked the doctor if he’d read the new hate mail—Farrokh had not. A pity, John D. said, because it might well be the last of the mail from those infuriated prostitutes. Balraj Gupta, the director, had informed John D. that the new Inspector Dhar movie (Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence) was being released tomorrow. After that, John D. said ironically, the hate mail would most likely be from all the offended Parsis.

“Tomorrow!” cried Dr. Daruwalla.

“Well, actually, after midnight tonight,” Dhar said.

Dr. Daruwalla should have known. Whenever Balraj Gupta called him and asked to discuss with him something that the director wanted to do, it invariably meant that the director had already done it.

“But no more of this trivia!” Farrokh said to his wife and John D. The doctor took a deep breath; then he informed them of everything that Deputy Commissioner Patel had told him.

All Julia asked was, “How many murders has this killer managed—how many victims are there?”

“Sixty-nine,” said Dr. Daruwalla. Julia’s gasp was less surprising than John D.’s inappropriate calm.

“Does that count Mr. Lal?” Dhar asked.

“Mr. Lal makes seventy—if Mr. Lal is truly connected,” Farrokh replied.

“Of course he’s connected,” said Inspector Dhar, which irritated Dr. Daruwalla in the usual way. Here was his fictional creation once again sounding like an authority; but what Farrokh failed to acknowledge was that Dhar was a good and well-trained actor. Dhar had faithfully studied the role and taken many components of the part into himself; instinctually, he’d become quite a good detective—Dr. Daruwalla had only made up the character. Dhar’s character was an utter fiction to Farrokh, who could scarcely remember his research on various aspects of police work from screenplay to screenplay; Dhar, on the other hand, rarely forgot either these finer points or his less-than-original lines. As a screenwriter, Dr. Daruwalla was at best a gifted amateur, but Inspector Dhar was closer to the real thing than either Dhar or his creator knew.

“May I go with you to see the photographs?” Dhar asked his creator.

“I believe that the deputy commissioner wished me to see them privately,” the doctor replied.

“I’d like to see them, Farrokh,” John D. said.

“He should see them if he wants to!” Julia snapped.

“I’m not sure the police would agree,” Dr. Daruwalla began to say, but Inspector Dhar gave a most familiar and dismissive wave of his hand, a perfect gesture of contempt. Farrokh felt his exhaustion draw close to him—like old friends and family gathering around his imagined sickbed.

When John D. retired to the balcony to sleep, Julia was quick to change the subject—even before Farrokh had managed to undress for bed.

“You didn’t tell him!” she cried.

“Oh, please stop it about the damnable twin business!” he said to her. “What makes you think that’s such a priority? Especially now!”

“I think that the arrival of his twin might be more of a priority to John D.,” Julia remarked decisively. She left her husband alone in the bedroom while she used the bathroom. Then, after Farrokh had had his turn in the bathroom, he noted that Julia had already fallen asleep—or else she was pretending to be asleep.

At first he tried to sleep on his side, which was his usual preference, but in that position he was conscious of the soreness in his ribs; on his stomach, the pain was more evident. Flat on his back—where he struggled in vain to fall asleep, and where he was inclined to snore—he wracked his overexcited brain for the precise image of the movie actress he was sure he was reminded of when he’d shamelessly stared at the second Mrs. Dogar. Despite himself, he grew sleepy. The names of actresses came to and left his lips. He saw Neelam’s full mouth, and Rekha’s nice mouth, too; he thought of Sridevi’s mischievous smile—and almost everything there was to think about Sonu Walia, too. Then he half-waked himself and thought, No, no … it’s no one contemporary, and she’s probably not even Indian. Jennifer Jones? he wondered. Ida Lupino? Rita Moreno? Dorothy Lamour! No, no … what was he thinking? It was someone whose beauty was much more cruel than the beauty of any of these. This insight nearly woke him. Had he awakened simultaneously with the reminder caused by the pain in his ribs, he might have got it. But although the hour was now late, it was still too soon for him to know.

There was more communication in the marriage bed of Mr. and Mrs. Patel at this very same late hour. Nancy was crying; her tears, as they often were, were a mix of misery and frustration. Deputy Commissioner Patel was trying, as he often did, to be comforting.

Nancy had suddenly remembered what had happened to her—maybe two weeks after the last symptoms of gonorrhea had disappeared. She’d broken out in a terrible rash, red and sore and with unbearable itching, and she’d assumed that this was a new phase of something venereal she’d caught from Dieter. Furthermore, there was no hiding this phase from her beloved policeman; young Inspector Patel had straightaway brought her to a doctor, who informed her that she’d been taking too many antimalarial pills—she was simply suffering from an allergic reaction. But how this had frightened her! And she only now remembered the goats.

For all these years, she’d thought about the goats in the brothels, but she’d not remembered how she’d first feared that it was something from the goats that had given her such a hideous rash and such uncontrollable itching. That had been her worst fear. For 20 years, when she’d thought about those brothels and the women who’d been murdered there, she’d forgotten the men Dieter had told her about—the terrible men who fucked goats. Maybe Dieter had fucked goats, too. No wonder she’d at least tried to forget this.

“But nobody is fucking those goats,” Vijay just now informed her.

“What?” Nancy said.

“Well, I don’t presume to know about the United States—or even about certain rural areas of India—but no one in Bombay is fucking goats,” her husband assured her.

“What?” Nancy said. “Dieter told me that they fucked the goats.”

“Well, it’s not at all true,” the detective said. “Those goats are pets. Of course some of them give milk. This is a bonus—for the children, I suppose. But they’re pets, just pets.”

“Oh, Vijay!” Nancy cried. He had to hold her. “Oh, Dieter lied to me!” she cried. “Oh, how he lied to me … all those years I believed it! Oh, that fucker!” The word was so sharply spoken, it caused a dog in the alley below them to stop rooting through the garbage and bark. Over their heads, the ceiling fan barely stirred the close air, which seemed always to smell of the perpetually blocked drains, and o

f the sea, which in their neighborhood was not especially clean or fresh-smelling. “Oh, it was another lie!” Nancy screamed. Vijay went on holding her, although to do so for long would make them both sweat. The air was unmoving where they lived.