A Son Of The Circus (37 page)

Inside the dildo, rolled very tightly, were thousands of Deutsche marks. For the return trip to Germany, quite a lot of high-quality hashish could be packed very tightly in such a big dildo; the wax seal would prevent the dogs at German customs from smelling the Indian hemp inside.

Nancy sat at the foot of the bed while Dieter removed a roll of marks from the dildo and spread the bills out flat in his hand. Then he zipped the marks into a money belt, which was around his waist under his shirt. He left several sizable rolls of marks in the dildo, which he reassembled; he screwed the tip on tight, but he didn’t bother resealing it with wax. The line where the thing unscrewed was barely visible anyway; it was partially hidden by the fake foreskin. When Dieter had finished with this, his chief concern, he undressed and filled the bathtub. It wasn’t until he settled into the tub that Nancy spoke to him.

‘What would have happened to me if I’d been caught?’ she asked him.

‘But they wouldn’t have caught you, babe,’ Dieter told her. He’d picked up the ‘babe’ from watching American movies, he said.

‘Couldn’t you have
told
me?’ Nancy asked him.

‘Then you would have been nervous,’ Dieter said. ‘Then they
would
have caught you.’

After his bath, he rolled a joint, which they smoked together; although Nancy thought she was being cautious, she got higher than she wanted to, and just a little disoriented. It was strong stuff; Dieter assured her that it was by no means the best stuff – it was just something he’d bought en route from the airport,

‘I made a little detour,’ he told her. She was too stoned to ask him where he could have gone at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and he didn’t bother to tell her that he’d gone to a brothel in Kamathipura. He’d bought the stuff from the madam, and while he was at it he’d fucked a 13-year-old prostitute for only five rupees. He was told she was the only girl not with a customer at the time, and Dieter had fucked her standing up, in a kind of hall, because all the cots in all the cubicles were occupied – or so the madam had said.

After Dieter and Nancy smoked the joint, Dieter was able to encourage Nancy to masturbate; it seemed to her that it took a long time, and she couldn’t remember him leaving the bed to get the dildo. Later, when he was asleep, she lay awake and thought for a while about the thousands of Deutsche marks that were inside the thing that had been inside her. She decided not to tell Dieter about the murdered boy or Inspector Patel. She got out of bed and made sure the card the inspector had given her was well concealed among her clothes. She didn’t go back to bed; she was standing on the balcony at dawn when the first of the beggars arrived. After a while, the same child performers were perfectly in place, like figures painted by the daylight itself – even the crippled boy with his padded crutch. He waved to her. It was so early, he was careful not to call too loudly, but Nancy could hear him distinctly.

‘Hey, lady!’

He made her cry. She went back inside the room and watched Dieter while he was sleeping. She thought again about the thousands of Deutsche marks; she wanted to throw them out the window to the child performers, but it frightened her to imagine what a terrible scene she might cause. She went into the bathroom and tried to unscrew the dildo to count how many marks were inside, but Dieter had screwed the thing too tightly together. This was probably deliberate, she realized; at last, she was learning.

She went through his clothes, looking for the money belt – she thought she could count how many marks were there – but she couldn’t find it. She lifted the bedsheet and saw that Dieter was naked except for the money belt. It worried her that she couldn’t remember falling asleep, nor could she remember Dieter getting out of bed to put the money belt on. She would have to be more careful, she thought. Nancy was beginning to appreciate the extent to which Dieter might be willing to use her; she worried that she’d developed a morbid curiosity about how far he would go.

Nancy found it calming to speculate about Inspector Patel. She indulged herself with the comforting notion that she could turn to the inspector if she needed him, if she was
really
in trouble. Although the morning was intensely bright, Nancy didn’t close the curtains; in the light of day, it was easier for her to imagine that leaving Dieter was merely a matter of picking the right time. And if things get too bad, Nancy thought to herself, I can just pick up the phone and ask for Vijay Patel – Police Inspector, Colaba Station.

But Nancy had. never been to the East. She didn’t know where she was. She had no idea.

In Bombay, in his bedroom, where Dr Daruwalla sat shivering in Julia’s embrace, the unresolved nature of the majority of the doctor’s phone messages depressed him: Ranjit’s peevish complaints about the dwarf’s wife; Deepa’s expectations regarding the potential bonelessness of a child prostitute; Vinod’s fear of the first-floor dogs; Father Cecil’s consternation that none of the Jesuits at St Ignatius knew exactly when Dhar’s twin was arriving; and director Balraj Gupta’s greedy desire to release the new Inspector Dhar movie in the midst of the murders inspired by the last Inspector Dhar movie. To be sure, there was the familiar voice of the woman who tried to sound like a man and who repeatedly relished the details of old Lowji’s car bombing; thus message wasn’t lacking in resolution, but it was muted by excessive repetition. And Detective Patel’s cool delivery of the news that he had a private matter to discuss didn’t sound ‘unresolved’ to the doctor; although Dr Daruwalla may not have known what the message meant, the deputy commissioner seemed to have made up his mind about the matter. But all these things were only mildly depressing in comparison to Farrokh’s memory of the big blonde with her bad foot.

‘
Liebchen
,’ Julia whispered to her husband. ‘We shouldn’t leave John D. alone. Think about the hippie another time.’

Both to break him from his trance and as a physical reminder of her affection for him, Julia squeezed Farrokh. She simply hugged him, more or less in the area of his lower chest, or just above his little beer belly. It surprised her how her husband winced in pain. The sharp tweak in his side – it must have been a rib – instantly reminded Dr Daruwalla of his collision with the second Mrs Dogar in the foyer of the Duckworth Club. Farrokh then told Julia the story: how the vulgar woman’s body was as hard as a stone wall.

‘But you said you fell down,’ Julia told him. ‘I would guess it was your contact with the stone floor that caused your injury.’

‘No! It was that damn woman herself – her body is a rock!’ Dr Daruwalla said. ‘Mr Dogar was knocked down, too! Only that crude woman was left standing.’

‘Well, she’s supposed to be a fitness freak,’ Julia replied.

‘She’s a weight lifter!’ Farrokh said. Then he remembered that the second Mrs Dogar had reminded him of someone – definitely a long-ago movie star, he decided. He imagined that one night he would discover who it was on the videocassette recorder; both in Bombay and in Toronto, he had so many tapes of old movies that it was hard for him to remember how he’d lived before the
VCR
.

Farrokh sighed and his sore rib responded with a little twinge of pain.

‘Let me rub some liniment on you,
Liebchen
,’ Julia said.

‘Liniment is for muscles – it was my rib she hurt,’ the doctor complained.

Although Julia still favored the theory that the stone floor was the source of her husband’s pain, she humored him. ‘Was it Mrs Dogar’s shoulder or her elbow that hit you?’ she asked.

‘You’re going to think it’s funny,’ Farrokh admitted to Julia, ‘but I swear I ran right into her bosom.’ ‘Then it’s no wonder she hurt you,
Liebchen
,’ Julia replied. It was Julia’s opinion that the second Mrs Dogar had no bosom to speak of.

Dr Daruwalla could sense his wife’s impatience on John D.’s behalf, but less for the fact that Inspector Dhar had been left alone than that the dear boy hadn’t been forewarned of the pending arrival of his twin. Yet even this dilemma struck the doctor as trivial — as insubstantial as the second Mrs Dogar’s bosom – in comparison to the big blonde in the bathtub at the Hotel Bardez. Twenty years couldn’t lessen the impact of what had happened to Dr Daruwalla there, for it had changed him more than anything in his whole life had changed him, and the long-ago memory of it endured unfaded, although he’d never returned to Goa. All other beach resorts had been ruined for him by the unpleasant association.

Julia recognized her husband’s expression. She could see how far away he was; she knew exactly where he was. Although she wanted to reassure John D. that the doctor would join them soon, it would have been heartless of her to leave her husband; dutifully, she remained seated beside him. Sometimes she thought she ought to tell him that it was his own curiosity that had got him into trouble. But this wasn’t entirely a fair accusation; dutifully, she remained silent. Her own memory, although it didn’t torture her with the same details that made the doctor miserable, was surprisingly vivid. She could still see Farrokh on the balcony of the Hotel Bardez, where he’d been as restless and bored as a little boy.

‘What a long bath the hippie is taking!’ the doctor had said to his wife.

‘She looked like she needed a long bath,
Liebchen
,’ Julia had told him. That was when Farrokh pulled the hippie’s rucksack closer to him and peered into the top of it; the top wouldn’t quite close.

‘Don’t look at her things!’ Julia told him.

‘It’s just a book,’ Farrokh said; he pulled the copy of
Clea
from the top of the rucksack. ‘I was just curious to know what she was reading.’

‘Put it back,’ Julia said.

‘I
will,’
the doctor said, but he was reading the marked passage, the same bit about the ‘umbrageous violet’ and the ‘velvet rind’ that one customs official and two policemen had already found so spellbinding. ‘She has a poetic sensibility,’ Dr Daruwalla said.

‘I find that hard to believe,’ Julia told him. ‘Put it back!’

But putting the book back presented the doctor with a new difficulty: something was in the way.

‘Stop groping through her things!’ Julia said.

The damn book doesn’t fit,’ Farrokh said. ‘I’m
not
groping through her things.’ An overpowering mustiness embraced him from the depths of the rucksack, a stale exhalation. The hippie’s clothing felt damp. As a married man with daughters, Dr Daruwalla was particularly sensitive to an abundance of dirty underpants in
any
woman’s laundry. A mangled bra clung to his wrist as he tried to extract his hand, and still the copy of
Clea
wouldn’t lie flat at the top of the rucksack; something poked against the book. What the hell
is
this thing? the doctor wondered. Then Julia heard him gasp; she saw him spring away from the rucksack as if an animal had bitten his hand.

‘What is it?’ she cried.

‘I don’t know!’ the doctor moaned. He staggered to the rail of the balcony, where he gripped the tangled branches of the clinging vine. Several bright-yellow finches with seeds falling from their beaks exploded from among the flowers, and a gecko sprang from the branch nearest the doctor’s right hand; it wriggled into the open end of a drainpipe just as Dr Daruwalla leaned over the balcony and vomited onto the patio below. Fortunately, no one was having afternoon tea there. There was only one of the hotel’s sweepers, who’d fallen asleep in a curled position in the shade of a large potted plant. The doctor’s falling vomit left the sweeper undisturbed.

‘
Liebchen
!’ Julia cried.

‘I’m all right,’ Farrokh said. ‘It’s nothing, really – it’s just … lunch.’ Julia was staring at the hippie’s rucksack as if she expected something to crawl out from under the copy of
Clea
.

‘What was it – what did you see?’ she asked Farrokh.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, but Julia was thoroughly exasperated with him.

‘You don’t know, you’re not sure, it’s nothing, really — it just made you throw up!’ she said. She reached for the rucksack. ‘Well, if you don’t tell me, I’ll just see for myself.’

‘No, don’t!’ the doctor cried.

‘Then tell me,’ Julia said.

‘I saw a penis,’ Farrokh said.

Not even Julia could think of anything to say.

‘I mean, it can’t be a
real
penis,’ he continued. ‘I don’t mean that it’s someone’s severed penis, or anything ghastly like that.’

‘What
do
you mean?’ Julia asked him.

‘I mean, it’s a very lifelike, very graphic, very
large
male member – it’s an enormous cock, with balls!’ Dr Daruwalla said.

‘Do you mean a dildo?’ Julia asked him. Farrokh was shocked that she knew the word; he barely knew it himself. A colleague in Toronto, a fellow surgeon, kept a collection of pornographic magazines in his hospital locker, and it was only in one of these that Dr Daruwalla had ever seen a dildo; the advertisement hadn’t been nearly as realistic as the terrifying thing in the hippie’s rucksack.

‘I think it is a dildo, yes,’ Farrokh said.

‘Let me see,’ Julia said; she attempted to dodge past her husband to the rucksack.

‘No, Julia! Please!’ Farrokh cried.

‘Well, you saw it – /want to see it,’ Julia said.

‘I don’t think you do,’ the doctor said.

‘For God’s sake, Farrokh,’ Julia said. He sheepishly stood aside; then he glanced nervously at the bathroom door, behind which the huge hippie was
still
bathing.

‘Hurry up, Julia, and don’t mess up her things,’ Dr Daruwalla said.

‘It’s not as if everything has been neatly folded — oh, my goodness!’ Julia said.

‘Well, there it is – you’ve seen it. Now get away!’ said Dr Daruwalla, who was a little surprised that his wife had not recoiled in horror.

‘Does it use batteries?’ Julia asked; she was still looking at it.

‘Batteries!’ Farrokh cried. ‘For God’s sake, Julia -please get away!’ The concept of such a thing being battery-powered would haunt the doctor’s dreams for 20 years. The idea certainly worsened the agony of waiting for the hippie to finish her bath.