A Son Of The Circus (42 page)

As Rahul undressed himself, Dr Daruwalla withdrew his maimed foot from the dangerous world; he curled himself tightly into his hammock under the mosquito net, for in his dream he was fearing that the emissaries from the Vatican were approaching – to take his arm to Rome. As Farrokh struggled to give voice to his terror of amputation, Rahul attempted to penetrate the mysteries of the mosquito net.

Rahul thought it would be best if John D. awoke to find his face firmly between Rahul’s breasts, for these latter creations were surely to be counted among Rahul’s best features. But then, since Rahul thought that the young man appeared to have been aroused by the oddity of having his big toe sucked and bitten, perhaps a bolder approach would succeed. It was frustrating to Rahul that he could proceed with no approach until he solved the puzzle of entrance to the mosquito net, which was vexing. And it was at this complicated juncture in Rahul’s attempted seduction that Farrokh finally found the voice to express his fears. Rahul, who recognized the doctor’s voice, distinctly heard Dr Daruwalla shout, ‘I don’t
want
to be a saint! I need that arm – it’s a very good arm!’

At this, the boy’s dog in the lobby barked briefly; the boy once more began to talk to the animal. Rahul hated Dr Daruwalla as fervently as he desired John D.; therefore, Rahul was appalled that he’d caressed the doctor’s foot, and he was nauseated that he’d sucked and bitten the doctor’s big toe. As he hurriedly dressed himself, Rahul was also embarrassed. The taste of Cuticura powder was bitter
on
his tongue as he climbed down the vine to the patio, where the dog in the lobby heard him spit; the dog barked again, and this time the boy unlocked the door to the lobby and peered anxiously at the misty beach.

The boy heard Dr Daruwalla cry out from the balcony: ‘Cannibals! Catholic maniacs!’ Even to an inexperienced Hindu boy, this seemed a fearful combination. Then the dog’s barking exploded at the door to the lobby, where both the boy and the dog were surprised by the sudden appearance of Rahul.

‘Don’t lock me out,’ Rahul said. The boy let him in and gave him his room key. Rahul wore a loose-fitting skirt of a kind that’s easy to put on and take off, and a bright-yellow halter top of a kind that drew the boy’s awkward attention to Rahul’s well-shaped breasts. There was a time when Rahul would have grabbed the boy’s face in both hands and pulled him into his bosom; then he might have played with the
boy’s
little prick, or else he might have kissed him, in which case Rahul would have stuck his tongue so far down the boy’s throat that the boy would have gagged. But not now; Rahul wasn’t in the mood.

He went upstairs to his room; he brushed his teeth until the taste of Dr Daruwalla’s Cuticura powder was gone. Then he undressed and lay down on his bed, where he could look at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t in the mood to masturbate. He made some drawings, but nothing worked. Rahul was furious at Dr Daruwalla for being in John D.’s hammock; it made him so angry that he couldn’t even arouse himself. In the adjacent room, Aunt Promila was snoring.

Down in the lobby, the boy tried to calm the dog down. He thought it was peculiar that the dog was so agitated; usually, women had no effect on the dog. It was only men who made the dog’s fur stand up, or made the dog walk around stiff-legged – sniffing everywhere the men had been. It puzzled the boy that the dog had reacted in this fashion to Rahul. The boy also needed to calm himself down; he’d reacted to Rahul’s breasts in his own fashion; he was so aroused that he had a sizable erection – for a boy. And he knew perfectly well that the lobby of the Hotel Bardez was no place for him to indulge his fantasies. There was nothing the boy could do. He lay down on the rush mat, where he at last coaxed the dog to join him, and there he went on speaking to the dog as before.

At dawn, on the road to Panjim, Nancy had the good fortune to arouse the sympathy of a motorcyclist who noticed her limp. It wasn’t much of a motorcycle, but it would do; it was a 250 cc. Yezdi with red plastic tassles hanging from the handlebars, a black dot painted on the headlight, and a sari-guard mounted on the left-side rear wheel. Nancy was wearing jeans, and she simply straddled the seat behind the skinny teenaged driver. She locked her hands around the boy’s waist without a word; she knew he couldn’t drive fast enough to scare her.

The Yezdi was equipped with crash bars that protruded from the motorcycle in the manner of a full fairing. In Dr Daruwalla’s profession, these so-called crash bars were known as tibial-fracture bars; they were renowned for breaking the tibias of motorcyclists — all for the sake of not denting the gas tank.

Nancy’s weight was at first disconcerting to the young driver; she had a dangerously wide effect on his cornering – he held his speed down.

‘Can’t this thing go any faster?’ she asked him. He half-understood her, or else her voice in his ear was thrilling; possibly it hadn’t been her limp he’d noticed but the tightness of her jeans, or her blond hair – or even the swaying of her breasts, which the teenager felt pressing against his back. That’s better,’ Nancy told him, after he dared to speed up. Streaming from the handlebars, the red plastic tassles were whipped by the rushing wind; they appeared to beckon Nancy toward the steamer jetty and her chosen destiny in Bombay.

She’d embraced evil; she’d found it lacking. She was the sinner in search of the impossible salvation; she thought that only the uncorrupted and incorruptible policeman could restore her essential goodness. She had spotted something conflicted about Inspector Patel. She believed that he was virtuous and honorable, but also that she could seduce him; her logic was such that she thought of his virtue and his honor as transferable to her. Nancy’s illusion was not uncommon – nor is it an illusion limited to women. It is an old belief: that several sexually wrong decisions can be remedied – even utterly erased – by one decision that is sexually right. No one should blame Nancy for trying.

As Nancy rode the Yezdi to the ferry, and to her fate, a dull but persistent pain in the big toe of his right foot awaked Dr Daruwalla from a night of bedlam dreams and indigestion. He freed himself from the mosquito net and swung his legs from the hammock, but when he put only the slightest weight on his right foot, his big toe stabbed him with a sharp pain; for a second, he imagined he was still dreaming he was St Francis’s body. In the early light, which was a muted brown –not unlike the color of Dr Daruwalla’s skin – the doctor inspected his toe. The skin was unbroken, but deep bruises of a crimson and purple hue clearly indicated the bite marks. Dr Daruwalla screamed.

‘Julia! I’ve been bitten by a ghost!’ the doctor cried. His wife came running.

‘What is it,
Liebchen?’
she asked him.

‘Look at my big toe!’ the doctor demanded.

‘Have you been biting yourself?’ Julia asked him with unconcealed distaste.

‘It’s a
miracle!’
shouted Dr Daruwalla. ‘It was the ghost of that crazy woman who bit St Francis!’ Farrokh shouted.

‘Don’t be a blasphemer,’ Julia cautioned him.

‘I am being a [_believer – _]not a blasphemer!’ the doctor cried. He ventured a step on his right foot, but the pain in his big toe was so wilting that he fell, screaming, to his knees.

‘Hush or you’ll wake up the children – you’ll wake up everybody!’ Julia scolded him.

‘Praise the Lord,’ Farrokh whispered, crawling back to his hammock. ‘I believe, God – please don’t torture me further!’ He collapsed into the hammock, hugging both his arms around his chest. ‘What if they come for my arm?’ he asked his wife.

Julia was disgusted with him. ‘I think it must be something you ate,’ she said. ‘Or else you’ve been dreaming about the dildo.’

‘I suppose
you’ve
been dreaming about it,’ Farrokh said sullenly. ‘Here I’ve suffered some sort of
conversion
and you’re thinking about a big cock!’

‘I’m thinking about how you’re behaving in a peculiar fashion,’ Julia told him.

‘But I’ve had some sort of religious experience!’ Farrokh insisted.

‘I don’t see what’s religious about it,’ Julia said.

‘Look at my toe!’ the doctor cried.

‘Maybe you bit it in your sleep,’ his wife suggested.

‘Julia!’ Farrokh said. ‘I thought you were already a Christian.’

‘Well, I don’t go around yelling and moaning about it,’ Julia said.

John D. appeared on the balcony, never realizing that Dr Daruwalla’s religious experience was very nearly his own experience – of another kind.

‘What’s going on?’ the young man asked.

‘It’s apparently unsafe to sleep on the balcony,’ Julia told him. ‘Something bit Farrokh – some kind of animal.’

‘Those are
human
teeth marks!’ the doctor declared. John D. examined the bitten toe with his usual detachment.

‘Maybe it was a monkey,’ he said.

Dr Daruwalla curled himself into a ball in the hammock, deciding to give his wife and his favorite young man the silent treatment. Julia and John D. took their breakfast with the Daruwalla daughters on the patio below the balcony; at times they would raise their eyes and look up the vine in the direction where they presumed Farrokh lay sulking. They were wrong; he wasn’t sulking — he was praying. Since the doctor was inexperienced at prayer, his praying resembled an interior monologue of a fairly standard confessional kind – especially that kind which is brought on by a bad hangover.

O God
! prayed Dr Daruwalla.
It isn’t necessary to take my arm – the toe convinced me. I don’t need any more convincing. You got me the first time, God
. The doctor paused.
Please leave the arm alone
, he added.

Later, from the lobby of the Hotel Bardez, the syphilitic tea-server thought he heard voices from the Daruwallas’ second-floor balcony. Since Ali Ahmed was known to be almost entirely deaf, it was assumed that he probably always heard ‘voices.’ But Ali Ahmed had actually heard Dr Daruwalla praying, for by midmorning the doctor was murmuring aloud and the pitch of his prayers was precisely in a register that the syphilitic tea-server could hear.

‘I am heartily sorry if I have offended Thee, God!’ Dr Daruwalla murmured intensely. ‘Heartily sorry –very sorry, really! I never meant to mock anybody – I was only kidding,’ he confessed. ‘St Francis – you, too – please forgive me!’ An unusual number of dogs were barking, as if the pitch of the doctor’s prayers were precisely in a register that the dogs could hear, too. ‘I am a surgeon, God,’ the doctor moaned. ‘I
need
my arm —
both
my arms!’ Thus did Dr Daruwalla refuse to leave the hammock of his miraculous conversion, while Julia and John D. spent the morning plotting how to prevent the doctor from spending another night on the balcony.

Later in the day, as his hangover abated, Farrokh regained a little of his self-confidence. He said to Julia that he thought it would be enough for him to become a Christian; he meant that perhaps it wasn’t necessary for him to become a
Catholic
. Did Julia think that becoming a Protestant would be good enough? Maybe an Anglican would do. By now, Julia was quite frightened by the depth and color of the bite marks on her husband’s toe; even though the skin was unbroken, she was afraid of rabies.

‘Julia!’ Farrokh complained. ‘Here I am worrying about my mortal soul, and you’re worried about rabies!’

‘Lots of monkeys have rabies,’ John D. offered.

‘
What
monkeys?’ Dr Daruwalla shouted. ‘I don’t see any monkeys here! Have you seen any monkeys?’

While they were arguing, they failed to notice Promila Rai and her nephew-with-breasts checking out of the hotel. They were going back to Bombay, but not tonight; Nancy was again fortunate – Rahul wouldn’t be on her ferry. Promila knew that Rahul’s holiday had been disappointing to him, and so she’d accepted an invitation for them both to spend the night at someone’s villa in Old Goa; there would be a costume party, which Rahul might find amusing.

It hadn’t been an entirely disappointing holiday for Rahul. His aunt was generous with her money, but she expected him to make his own contribution toward a much-discussed trip to London; Promila would help Rahul financially, but she wanted him to come up with
some
money of his own. There were several thousand Deutsche marks in Dieter’s money belt, but Rahul had been expecting more – given the quality and the amount of hashish that Dieter had told everyone he wanted to buy. Of course, there was more, much more –in the dildo.

Promila thought that her nephew was interested in art school in London. She also knew he was seeking a
complete
sex change, and she knew such operations were expensive; given her loathing for men, Promila was delighted with her nephew’s choice — to become her niece – but she was deluding herself if she thought that the strongest motivating factor behind Rahul’s proposed move to London was ‘art school.’

If the maid who cleaned Rahul’s room had looked more carefully at the discarded drawings in the waste-basket, she could have told Promila that Rahul’s talent with a pen was of a pornographic persuasion that most art schools would discourage. The self-portraits would have especially disturbed the maid, but all the discarded drawings were nothing but balled-up pieces of paper to her; she didn’t trouble herself to examine them.

They were en route to the villa in Old Goa when Promila peered into Rahul’s purse and saw Rahul’s new, curious money clip; at least he was using it as a money clip – it was really nothing but the top half of a silver pen.

‘My dear, you are eccentric!’ Promila said. ‘Why don’t you get a
real
money clip, if you like those things?’

‘Well, Auntie,’ Rahul patiently explained, ‘I find that real money clips are too loose, unless you carry a great
wad
of money in them. What I like is to carry just a few small notes outside my wallet – something handy to pay for a taxi, or for tipping.’ He demonstrated that the top half of the silver pen possessed a very strong, tight clip – where it was meant to attach itself to a jacket pocket or a shirt pocket – and that this clip was perfect for holding just a few rupees. ‘Besides, it’s real silver,’ Rahul added.