A Son Of The Circus (27 page)

The dispute was still raging when John D. arrived at Jamshed and Josefine’s apartment for dinner. Everyone insisted that Inspector Dhar should settle the argument. After all, an actor had a trained voice and acute powers for studying and imitating the voices of others. John I). listened to the recording only once.

‘It’s a man trying to sound like a woman,’ he said.

Dr Daruwalla was outraged – not so much by the opinion, which the doctor found simply outlandish, but by the infuriating authority with which John D. had spoken. It was the actor speaking, the doctor was certain – the actor in his role as detective. That was where the arrogant, self-assured manner came from — from
fiction
!

Everyone had objected to Dhar’s conclusion, and so the actor had rewound the tape; he’d listened to it again – actually, two more times. Then suddenly the mannerisms that Dr Daruwalla associated with Inspector Dhar vanished; it was a serious, apologetic John D. who spoke to them.

‘I’m sorry –I was wrong,’ John D. said, ‘It’s a woman trying to sound like a man.’

Because this assessment was spoken with a different kind of confidence and not at all as Inspector Dhar would have delivered the line, Dr Daruwalla said, ‘Rewind it. Play it again.’ This time they’d all agreed with John D. It was a woman, and she was trying to sound like a man. It was no one whose voice they’d ever heard before – they’d all agreed to that, too. Her English was almost perfect – very British. She had only a trace of a Hindi accent.

‘I did it. I blew his head off. I watched him burn. And I’m telling you, he deserved it. Your whole family deserves it,’ the woman had said for 20 years, probably more than 100 times. But who was she? Where did her hatred come from? And had she really done it?

Her hatred might be even stronger if she’d
not
done it. But then why take credit for doing it? the doctor wondered. How could anyone have hated Lowji
that
much? Farrokh knew that his father had said much to offend everybody, but, to Farrokh’s knowledge, his father hadn’t
personally
wronged anyone. It was easy, in India, to assume that the source of any violence was either political outrage or religious offense. When someone as prominent and outspoken as Lowji was blown up by a car bomb, it was automatic to label the killing an assassination. But Farrokh had to wonder if his father might have inspired a more personal anger, and if his killing hadn’t been just a plain old murder.

It was hard for Farrokh to imagine anyone, especially a woman, with a private grievance against his father. Then he thought of the deeply personal loathing that Mr Lai’s murderer must feel for Inspector Dhar.

(
MORE
MEMBERS
DIE
IF
DHAR
REMAINS
A
MEMBER
.) And it occurred to Dr Daruwalla that perhaps they were all being hasty to assume it was Dhar’s movie persona that had inspired such a venomous anger. Had Dr Daruwalla’s dear boy – his beloved John I). – got himself into some
private
trouble? Was this a case of a personal relationship that had soured into a murderous hatred? Dr Daruwalla felt ashamed of himself that he’d inquired so little about Dhar’s personal life. He feared he’d given John D. the impression that he was indifferent to the younger man’s private affairs.

Certainly, John D. was chaste when he was in Bombay; at least he
said
he was. There were the public appearances with starlets – the ever-available cinema bimbos — but such couplings were choreographed to create the desired scandal, which both parties would later deny. These weren’t ‘relationships’ — they were ‘publicity.’

The Inspector Dhar movies thrived on giving offense — in India, a risky enterprise. Yet the senselessness of murdering Mr Lai indicated a hatred more vicious than anything Dr Daruwalla could detect in the usual reactions to Dhar. As if on cue, as if prompted by the mere thought of giving or taking
offense
, the next phone message was from the director of all the Inspector Dhar movies. Balraj Gupta had been pestering Dr Daruwalla about the extremely touchy subject of
when
to release the new Inspector Dhar movie. Because of the prostitute killings and the general disfavor incurred by
Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer
, Gupta had delayed its opening and he was increasingly impatient.

Dr Daruwalla had privately decided that he never wanted the new Inspector Dhar film to be seen, but he knew that the movie
would be
released; he couldn’t stop it. Nor could he appeal to Balraj Gupta’s deficient instincts for social responsibility much longer; such maladroit feelings as Gupta might have had for the real-life murdered prostitutes were short-lived.

‘Gupta here!’ the director said. ‘Look at it this way. The new one will cause
new
offense. Whoever is killing the cage girls might give it up and kill someone else! We give the public something new to make them wild and crazy – we’ll be doing the prostitutes a favor!’ Balraj Gupta possessed the logic of a politician; the doctor had no doubt that the new Inspector Dhar movie would make a different group of moviegoers ‘wild and crazy.’

It was called
Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence;
the title alone would be offensive to the entire Parsi community, because the Towers of Silence were the burial wells for the Parsi dead. There were always naked corpses of Parsis in the Towers of Silence, which was why Dr Daruwalla had first supposed that
they
were the attraction to the first vulture he’d seen above the golf course at the Duckworth Club. The Parsis were understandably protective of their Towers of Silence; as a Parsi, Dr Daruwalla knew this very well. Yet in the new Inspector Dhar movie, someone is murdering Western hippies and depositing
their
bodies in the Towers of Silence. Many Indians readily took offense at European and American hippies when they were
alive
. Doongarwadi is an accepted part of Bombay culture. At the very least, the Parsis would be disgusted. And all Bombayites would reject the premise of the film as absurd. No one can get near the Towers of Silence – not even other Parsis! (Not unless they’re dead.) But of course, Dr Daruwalla thought proudly, that was what was neat and tricky about the film –
how
the bodies are deposited there, and
how
the intrepid Inspector Dhar figures this out.

With resignation, Dr Daruwalla knew that he couldn’t stall the release of
Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence
much longer; he could, however, fast-forward through Balraj Gupta’s remaining arguments for releasing the film immediately. Besides, the doctor enjoyed the high-speed distortion of Balraj Gupta’s voice far more than he appreciated the real thing.

While the doctor was being playful, he came to the last message on his answering machine. The caller was a woman. At first Farrokh supposed it was no one he knew. ‘Is that the doctor?’ she asked. It was a voice long past exhaustion, of someone who was terminally depressed. She spoke as if her mouth were too wide open, as if her lower jaw were permanently dropped. There was a deadpan, don’t-give-a-damn quality to her voice, and her accent was plain and flat – North American, surely, but Dr Daruwalla (who was good at accents) guessed more specifically that she was from the American Midwest or the Canadian prairies. Omaha or Sioux City, Regina or Saskatoon.

‘Is that the doctor?’ she asked. ‘I know who you really are, I know what you really do,’ the woman went on. ‘Tell the deputy commissioner — the
real
policeman. Tell him who you are. Tell him what you do.’ The hang-up was a little out of control, as if she’d meant to slam the phone into its cradle but, in her restrained anger, had missed the mark.

Farrokh sat trembling in his bedroom. From the dining room of his apartment, he could now hear Roopa laying out their supper on the glass-topped table. She would any minute announce to Dhar and Julia that the doctor was home and that their extraordinarily late meal was finally served. Julia would wonder why he’d snuck into the bedroom like a thief. In truth, Farrokh felt like a thief — but one unsure of what he’d stolen, and from whom.

Dr Daruwalla rewound the tape and replayed the last message. This was a brand-new threat; and because he was concentrating so hard upon the meaning of the call, the doctor almost missed the most important clue, which was the caller. Farrokh had always known that
someone
would discover him as Inspector Dhar’s creator; that part of the message was not unexpected. But why was this any business of the
real
policeman? Why did someone think that Deputy Commissioner Patel should know?

‘I know who you really are, I know what you really do.’ But so what? the screenwriter thought. ‘Tell him who you are. Tell him what you do.’ But why? Farrokh wondered. Then, by accident, the doctor found himself listening repeatedly to the woman’s opening line, the part he’d almost missed. ‘Is that the doctor?’ He played it again and again, until his hands were shaking so badly that he rewound the tape all the way into Balraj Gupta’s list of reasons for releasing the new Inspector Dhar film now.

‘Is that the doctor?’

Dr Daruwalla’s heart had never seemed to stand so still before. It can’t be
her!
he thought. But it
was
her –Farrokh was sure of it. After all these years – it
couldn’t
be! But of course, he realized, if it was her, she would know; with an intelligent guess, she could have figured it out.

That was when his wife burst into the bedroom. ‘Farrokh!’ Julia said. ‘I never knew you were home!’

But I’m not ‘home,’ the doctor thought; I’m in a very, very foreign country.

‘
Liebchen
,’ he said softly to his wife. Whenever he used the German endearment, Julia knew he was feeling tender – or else he was in trouble.

‘What is it,
Liebchen’
?’ she asked him. He held out his hand and she went to him; she sat close enough beside him to feel that he was shivering. She put her arms around him.

‘Please listen to this,’ Farrokh said to her. ‘
Bitte
.’

The first time Julia listened, Farrokh could see by her face that she was making his mistake; she was concentrating too hard on the content of the message.

‘Never mind what she says,’ said Dr Daruwalla. ‘Think about who she is.’

It was the third time before Farrokh saw Julia’s expression change.

‘It’s
her
, isn’t it?’ he asked his wife.

‘But this is a much older woman,’ Julia said quickly.

‘It’s been twenty years, Julia!’ Dr Daruwalla said. ‘She
would be a
much older woman now! She is a much older woman!’

They listened together a few more times. At last Julia said, ‘Yes, I think it is her, but what’s her connection with what’s happening now?’

In the cold bedroom – in his funereal navy-blue suit, which was comically offset by the bright-green parrot on his necktie – Dr Daruwalla was afraid that he knew what the connection was.

The past surrounded him like faces in a crowd. Among them, there was one he knew, but whose face was it? As always, something from the Great Royal Circus offered itself as a beacon. The ringmaster, Pratap Singh, was married to a lovely woman named Sumitra — everyone called her Sumi. She was in her thirties, possibly her forties; and she not only played the role of mother to many of the child performers, she was also a gifted acrobat. Sumi performed in the item called Double-Wheel Cycle, a bicycle act, with her sister-in-law Suman. Suman was Pratap’s unmarried, adopted sister; she must have been in her late twenties, possibly her thirties, when Dr Daruwalla last saw her – a petite and muscular beauty, and the best acrobat in Pratap’s troupe. Her name meant ‘rose flower’’ – or was it ‘scent of the rose flower,’ or merely the scent of flowers in general? Farrokh had never actually known, no more than he knew the story concerning
when
Suman had been adopted, or by whom.

It didn’t matter. Suman and Sumi’s bicycle duet was much loved. They could ride their bicycles backward, or lie down on them and pedal them with their hands; they could ride them on one wheel, like unicycles, or pedal them while sitting on the handlebars. Perhaps it was a special softness in Farrokh that he took such pleasure from seeing two pretty women do something so graceful together. But Suman was the star, and her Skywalk item was the best act in the Great Royal Circus.

Pratap Singh had taught Suman how to ‘skywalk’ after he’d seen it performed on television; Farrokh supposed that the act had originated with one of the European circuses. (The ringmaster couldn’t resist training everyone, not just the lions.) He’d installed a ladderlike device on the roof of the family troupe tent; the rungs of the ladder were loops of rope and the ladder was bracketed to extend horizontally across the tent roof. Suman hung upside down with her feet in the loops. She swung herself back and forth, the loops chafing the tops of her feet, which she kept rigid — at right angles to her ankles. When she’d gathered the necessary momentum, she ‘walked’ upside down – from one end of the ladder to the other – simply by stepping her feet in and out of the loops as she swung. When she practiced this across the roof of the family troupe tent, her head was only inches above the dirt floor. Pratap Singh stood next to her, to catch her if she fell.

But when Suman performed tide Skywalk from the top of the main tent, she was 80 feet from the dirt floor and she refused to use a net. If Pratap Singh had tried to catch her –
if
Suman fell – they both would have been killed. If the ringmaster threw his body under her, trying to guess where she’d land, Pratap might break Suman’s fall; then only he would be killed.

There were 18 loops in the ladder. The audience silently counted Suman’s steps. But Suman never counted her steps; it was better, she said, to ‘just walk.’ Pratap told her it wasn’t a good idea to look down. Between the top of the tent and the faraway floor, there were only the upside-down faces of the audience, staring back at her – waiting for her to fall.