A Son of the Circus

“Perhaps if you would lend me one of your clubs … if I could just use it as a cane,” Mrs. Dogar suggested. Mr. Lal was on the verge of handing her his nine iron, then changed his mind.

“The putter would be best!” he declared. Poor Mr. Lal was out of breath from the short trot to his golf bag and his stumbling return to her side through the tangled vines, the destroyed flowers. He was much shorter than Mrs. Dogar; she was able to put one of her big hands on his shoulder—the putter in her other hand. That way, she could see over the old man’s head to the green and the fairway; no one was there.

“You could rest on the green while I fetch you a golf cart,” Mr. Lal suggested.

“Yes, thank you—you go ahead,” she told him. He tripped purposefully forward, but she was right behind him; before he reached the green, she had struck him senseless—she hit him just behind one ear. After he’d fallen she bashed him directly in the temple that was turned toward her, but his eyes were already open and unmoving when she struck him the second time. Mrs. Dogar suspected he’d been killed by the first blow.

In her purse, she had no difficulty finding the two-rupee note. For 20 years, she’d clipped her small bills to the top half of that silver ballpoint pen which she’d stolen from the beach cottage in Goa. She even kept this silly memento well polished. The clip—the “pocket clasp,” as her Aunt Promila had called it—continued to maintain the perfect tension on a small number of bills, and the polished silver made the top half of the pen easy to spot in her purse; she hated how small things could become lost in purses.

She’d inserted the two-rupee note in Mr. Lal’s gaping mouth; to her surprise, when she closed his mouth, it opened again. She’d never tried to close a dead person’s mouth before. She’d assumed that the body parts of the dead would be fairly controllable; that had certainly been her experience with manipulating limbs—sometimes an elbow or a knee had been in

the way of her belly drawing, and she’d easily rearranged it.

The distracting detail of Mr. Lal’s mouth was what caused her to be careless. She’d returned the remaining small notes to her purse, but not the top half of the well-traveled pen; it must have fallen in the bougainvillea. She hadn’t been able to find it later, and there in the bougainvillea was the last place she recalled holding it in her hand. Mrs. Dogar assumed that the police were presently puzzling over it; with the widow Lal’s help, they’d probably determined that the top half of the pen hadn’t even belonged to Mr. Lal. Mrs. Dogar speculated that the police might even conclude that no Duckworthian would be caught dead with such a pen; that it was made of real silver was somehow negated by the sheer tackiness of the engraved word, India. Rahul found tacky things amusing. It also amused Rahul to imagine how aimlessly the police must be tracking her, for Mrs. Dogar believed that the half-pen would be just another link in a chain of meaningless clues.

Some Small Tragedy

It was after Mr. Dogar had apologized to Mr. Sethna and retrieved his car from the Duckworth Club parking lot that the old steward received the phone call from Mrs. Dogar. “Is my husband still there? I suppose not. I’d meant to remind him of something to attend to—he’s so forgetful.”

“He was here, but he’s gone,” Mr. Sethna informed her.

“Did he remember to cancel our reservation for lunch? I suppose not. Anyway, we’re not coming,” Rahul told the steward. Mr. Sethna prided himself in his daily memorizing of the reservations for lunch and dinner; he knew that there’d been no reservation for the Dogars. But when he informed Mrs. Dogar of this fact, she surprised him. “Oh, the poor man!” she cried. “He forgot to cancel the reservation, but he was so drunk last night that he forgot to make the reservation in the first place. This would be comic if it weren’t also so tragic, I suppose.”

“I suppose …” Mr. Sethna replied, but Rahul could tell that she’d achieved her goal. One day Mr. Sethna would be an important witness to Mr. Dogar’s utter frailty. Foreshadowing was simply necessary preparation. Rahul knew that Mr. Sethna would be unsurprised when Mr. Dogar became a victim—either of a murder in the locker room or of a swimming-pool mishap.

In some ways, this was the best part of a murder, Rahul believed. In the first draft of a work-in-progress, you had so many options—more options than you would end up with in the final act. It was only in the planning phase that you saw so many possibilities, so many variations on the outcome. In the end, it was always over too quickly; that is, if you cared about neatness, you couldn’t prolong it.

“The poor man!” Mrs. Dogar repeated to Mr. Sethna. The poor man, indeed! Mr. Sethna thought. With a wife like Mrs. Dogar, Mr. Sethna presumed it might even be a comfort to already have one foot in the grave, so to speak.

The old steward had just hung up the phone when Dr. Daruwalla called the Duckworth Club to make a reservation. There would be four for lunch, the doctor informed Mr. Sethna; he hoped no one had already taken his favorite table in the Ladies’ Garden. There was plenty of room, but Mr. Sethna disapproved of making a reservation for lunch on the morning of the same day; people shouldn’t trust in plans that were so spur-of-the-moment.

“You’re in luck—I’ve just had a cancellation,” the steward told the doctor.

“May I have the table at noon?” Farrokh asked.

“One o’clock would be better,” Mr. Sethna instructed him, for the steward also disapproved of the doctor’s inclination to eat his lunch early. Mr. Sethna theorized that early lunch-eating contributed to the doctor’s being overweight. It was most unsightly for small men to be overweight, Mr. Sethna thought.

Dr. Daruwalla had just hung up the phone when Dr. Tata returned his call. Farrokh remembered instantly what he’d wanted to ask Tata Two.

“Do you remember Rahul Rai and his Aunt Promila?” Farrokh asked.

“Doesn’t everybody remember them?” Tata Two replied.

“But this is a professional question,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “I believe your father examined Rahul when he was twelve or thirteen. That would have been in 1949. My father examined Rahul when he was only eight or ten. It was his Aunt Promila’s request—the matter of his hairlessness was bothering her. My father dismissed it, but I believe Promila took Rahul to see your father. I was wondering if the alleged hairlessness was still the issue.”

“Why would anyone see your father or mine about hairlessness?” asked Dr. Tata.

“A good question,” Farrokh replied. “I believe that the real issue concerned Rahul’s sexual identity. Possibly a sex change would have been requested.”

“My father didn’t do sex changes!” said Tata Two. “He was a gynecologist, an obstetrician …”

“I know what he was,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “But he might have been asked to make a diagnosis … I’m speaking of Rahul’s reproductive organs, whether there was anything peculiar about them that would have warranted a sex-change operation—at least in the boy’s mind, or in his aunt’s mind. If you’ve kept your father’s records … I have my father’s.”

“Of course I’ve kept his records!” Dr. Tata cried. “Mr. Subhash can have them on my desk in two minutes. I’ll call you back in five.” So … even Tata Two called his medical secretary Mister; perhaps, like Ranjit, Mr. Subhash was a medical secretary who’d remained in the family. Dr. Daruwalla reflected that Mr. Subhash had sounded (on the phone) like a man in his eighties!

Ten minutes later, when Dr. Tata had not called him back, Farrokh also reflected on the presumed chaos of Tata Two’s record keeping; apparently, old Dr. Tata’s file on Rahul wasn’t exactly at Mr. Subhash’s fingertips. Or maybe it was the diagnosis of Rahul that gave Tata Two pause? Regardless, Farrokh told Ranjit that he would take no calls except one he was expecting from Dr. Tata.

Dr. Daruwalla had one office appointment before his much-anticipated lunch at the Duckworth Club, and he told Ranjit to cancel it. Dr. Desai, from London, was in town; in his spare time from his own surgical practice, Dr. Desai was a designer of artificial joints. He was a man with a theme; joint replacement was his only topic of conversation. This made it hard on Julia whenever Farrokh tried to converse with Dr. Desai at the Duckworth Club. It was easier to deal with Desai in the office. “Should the implant be fixated to the skeleton with bone cement or is biologic fixation the method of choice?” This was typical of Dr. Desai’s initial conversation; it was what Dr. Desai said instead of, “How are your wife and kids?” For Dr. Daruwalla to cancel an office appointment with Dr. Desai was tantamount to his admitting a lack of interest in his chosen orthopedic field; but the doctor had his mind on his new screenplay—he wanted to write.