A Son of the Circus

The Enigmatic Actor

It was early to call John D., but Dr. Daruwalla hadn’t told him about Rahul; the doctor also wanted to stress the importance of John D.’s attending the lunch at the Duckworth Club with Detective Patel and Nancy. To Farrokh’s surprise, it was an alert Inspector Dhar who answered the phone in his suite at the Taj.

“You sound awake!” Dr. Daruwalla said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m reading a play—actually, two plays,” John D. replied. “What are you doing? Isn’t it time you were cutting open someone’s knee?”

This was the famous distant Dhar; the doctor felt he’d created this character, cold and sarcastic. Farrokh immediately launched into the news about Rahul—that he had a female identity these days; that, in all likelihood, the complete sex change had been accomplished. But John D. seemed barely interested. As for participating in the lunch at the Duckworth Club, not even the prospect of taking part in the capture of a serial murderer (or murderess) could engage the actor’s enthusiasm.

“I have a lot of reading to do,” John D. told Farrokh.

“But you can’t read all day,” the doctor said. “What reading?”

“I told you—two plays,” said Inspector Dhar.

“Oh, you mean homework,” Farrokh said. He assumed that John D. was studying his lines for his upcoming parts at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. The actor was thinking of Switzerland, of his day job, the doctor supposed. John D. was thinking of going home. After all, what was keeping him here? If, under the present threat, he gave up his membership at the Duckworth Club, what would he do with himself? Stay in his suite at the Taj, or at the Oberoi? Like Farrokh, John D. lived at the Duckworth Club when he was in Bombay.

“But now that the murderer is known, it’s absurd to resign from the club!” Dr. Daruwalla cried. “Any day now, they’re going to catch him!”

“Catch her,” Inspector Dhar corrected the doctor.

“Well, him or her,” Farrokh said impatiently. “The point is, the police know who they’re looking for. There won’t be any more killings.”

“I suppose seventy is enough,” John D. said. He was in a simply infuriating mood, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

“So, what are these plays?” Farrokh asked, in exasperation.

“I have only two leading roles this year,” John D. replied. “In the spring, it’s Osborne’s Der Entertainer—I’m Billy Rice—and in the fall I’m Friedrich Hofreiter in Schnitzler’s Das weite Land.”

“I see,” Farrokh said, but this was all foreign to him. He knew only that John Daruwalla was a respected professional as an actor, and that the Schauspielhaus Zürich was a sophisticated city theater with a reputation for performing both classical and modern plays. In Farrokh’s opinion, they gave short shrift to slapstick; he wondered if there were more slapstick comedies performed at the Bernhard or at the Theater am Hechtplatz—he didn’t really know Zürich.

The doctor knew only what his brother, Jamshed, had told him, and Jamshed was no veteran theatergoer—he went to see John D. In addition to Jamshed’s possibly philistine opinions, there was what little information Farrokh could force out of the guarded Dhar. The doctor didn’t know if two leading roles a year were enough, or if John D. had chosen only two such roles. The actor went on to say that he had smaller parts in something by Dürrenmatt and something by Brecht. A year ago, he’d made his directing debut—it was something by Max Frisch—and he’d played the eponymous Volpone in the Ben Jonson play. Next year, John D. had said, he hoped to direct Gorki’s Wassa Schelesnowa.

It was a pity that everything had to be in German, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

Except for his outstanding success as Inspector Dhar, John D. had never acted in films; he never auditioned. Was he lacking in ambition? Dr. Daruwalla wondered, for it seemed a mistake for Dhar not to take advantage of his perfect English. Yet John D. said he detested England, and he refused to set foot in the United States; he ventured to Toronto only to visit Farrokh and Julia. The actor wouldn’t even stray to Germany to audition for a film!

Many of the guest performers at the Schauspielhaus Zürich were German actors and actresses—Katharina Thalbach, for example. Jamshed had once told Farrokh that John D. had been romantically linked with the German actress, but John D. denied this. Dhar never appeared in a German theater, and (to Farrokh’s knowledge) there was no one at the Schauspielhaus Zürich to whom the actor had ever been “romantically linked.” Dhar was a friend of the famous Maria Becker, but not romantically a friend. Besides, Dr. Daruwalla guessed, Maria Becker would be a little too old for John D. And Jamshed had reported seeing John D. out to dinner at the Kronenhalle with Christiane Hörbiger, who was also famous—and closer to John D.’s age, the doctor speculated. But Dr. Daruwalla suspected that this sighting was no more significant than spotting John D. with any other of the regular performers at the Schauspielhaus. John D. was also friends with Fritz Schediwy and Peter Ehrlich and Peter Arens. Dhar was seen dining, on more than one occasion, with the pretty Eva Rieck. Jamshed also reported that he frequently saw John D. with the director Gerd Heinz—and as often with a local terror of the avant-garde, Matthias Frei.

John D., as an actor, eschewed the avant-garde; yet, apparently, he was on friendly terms with one of Zürich’s elder statesmen of such theater. Matthias Frei was a director and occasional playwright, a kind of deliberately underground and incomprehensible fellow—or so Dr. Daruwalla believed. Frei was about the doctor’s age, but he looked older, more rumpled; he was certainly wilder. Jamshed had told Farrokh that John D. even split the expense of renting a flat or a chalet in the mountains with Matthias Frei; one year they would rent something in the Grisons, another year they’d try the Bernese Oberland. Supposedly, it was agreeable for them to share a place because John D. preferred the mountains in the ski season and Matthias Frei liked the hiking in the summer; also, Dr. Daruwalla presumed, Frei’s friends would be people of a different generation from John D.’s friends.

But, once again, Farrokh’s view of the culture John D. inhabited was marginal. As for the actor’s love life, there was no understanding his aloofness. He’d appeared to have a long relationship with someone in a publishing house—a publicist, or so Farrokh remembered her. She was an attractive, intelligent younger woman. They’d occasionally traveled together, but not to India; for Dhar, India was strictly business. They’d never lived together. And now, Farrokh was told, this publicist and John D. were “just good friends.”

Julia surmised that John D. didn’t want to have children, and that this would eventually turn most younger women away. But now, at 39, John D. might meet a woman his own age, or a little older—someone who would accept childlessness. Or, Julia had said, perhaps he’d meet a nice divorced woman who’d already had her children—someone whose children would be grownups. That would be ideal for John D., Julia had decided.

But Dr. Daruwalla didn’t think so. Inspector Dhar had never exhibited a nesting instinct. The rentals in the mountains, a different one each year, utterly suited John D. Even in Zürich, he made a point of owning very little. His flat—which was within walking distance of the theater, the lake, the Limmat, the Kronenhalle—was also rented. He didn’t want a car. He seemed proud of his framed playbills, and even an Inspector Dhar poster or two; in Zürich, Dr. Daruwalla supposed, these Hindi cinema advertisements were probably amusing to John D.’s friends. They could never have imagined that such craziness translated into a raving audience beyond the wildest dreams of the Schauspielhaus.

In Zürich, Jamshed had observed, John D. was infrequently recognized; he was hardly the best-known of the Schauspielhaus troupe. Not exactly a character actor, he was also no star. In restaurants around town, theatergoers might recognize him, but they wouldn’t necessarily know his name. Only schoolchildren, after a comedy, would ask for his autograph; the children simply held out their playbills to anyone in the cast.

Jamshed said that Zürich had no money to give to the arts. There’d recently been a scandal because the city wanted to close down the Schauspielhaus Keller; this was the more avant-garde theater, for younger theatergoers. John D.’s friend Matthias Frei had made a big fuss. As far as Jamshed knew, the theater was always in need of money. Technical personnel hadn’t been given an annual raise; if they quit, they weren’t replaced. Farrokh and Jamshed speculated that John D.’s salary couldn’t be very significant. But of course he didn’t need the money; Inspector Dhar was rich. What did it matter to Dhar that the Schauspielhaus Zürich was inadequately subsidized by the city, by the banks, by private donations?

Julia also implied that the theater somewhat complacently rested on its illustrious history in the 1930s and ’40s, when it was a refuge for people fleeing from Germany, not only Jews but Social Democrats and Communists—or anyone who’d spoken out against the Nazis and as a result either wasn’t permitted to work or was in danger. There’d been a time when a production of Wilhelm Tell was defiant, even revolutionary—a symbolic blow against the Nazis. Many Swiss had be

en afraid to get involved in the war, yet the Schauspielhaus Zürich had been courageous at a time when any performance of Goethe’s Faust might have been the last. They’d also performed Sartre, and von Hofmannsthal, and a young Max Frisch. The Jewish refugee Kurt Hirschfeld had found a home there. But nowadays, Julia thought, there were many younger intellectuals who might find the Schauspielhaus rather staid. Dr. Daruwalla suspected that “staid” suited John D. What mattered to him was that in Zürich he was not Inspector Dhar.

When the Hindi movie star was asked where he lived, because it was obvious that he spent very little time in Bombay, Dhar always replied (with characteristic vagueness) that he lived in the Himalayas—“the abode of snow.” But John D.’s abode of snow was in the Alps, and in the city on the lake. The doctor thought that Dhar was probably a Kashmiri name, but neither Dr. Daruwalla nor Inspector Dhar had ever been to the Himalayas.

Now, on the spur of the moment, the doctor decided to tell John D. his decision.