A Son Of The Circus (46 page)

‘Tomorrow!’ cried Dr Daruwalla.

‘Well, actually, after midnight tonight,’ Dhar said.

Dr Daruwalla should have known. Whenever Balraj Gupta called him and asked to discuss with him something that the director wanted to do, it invariably meant that the director had already done it.

‘But no more of this trivia!’ Farrokh said to his wife and John D. The doctor took a deep breath; then he informed them of everything that Deputy Commissioner Patel had told him.

All Julia asked was, ‘How many murders has this killer managed – how many victims are there?’

‘Sixty-nine,’ said Dr Daruwalla. Julia’s gasp was less surprising than John D.’s inappropriate calm.

‘Does that count Mr Lai?’ Dhar asked.

‘Mr Lai makes seventy –
if
Mr Lai is truly connected,’ Farrokh replied.

‘Of course he’s
connected
,’ said Inspector Dhar, which irritated Dr Daruwalla in the usual way. Here was his fictional creation once again sounding like an authority; but what Farrokh failed to acknowledge was that Dhar was a good and well-trained actor. Dhar had faithfully studied the role and taken many components of the part into himself; instinctually, he’d become quite a good detective – Dr Daruwalla had only made up the character. Dhar’s character was an utter fiction to Farrokh, who could scarcely remember his research on various aspects of police work from screenplay to screenplay; Dhar, on the other hand, rarely forgot either these finer points or his less-than-original lines. As a screenwriter, Dr Daruwalla was at best a gifted amateur, but Inspector Dhar was closer to the real thing than either Dhar or his creator knew.

‘May I go with you to see the photographs?’ Dhar asked his creator.

‘I believe that the deputy commissioner wished me to see them privately,’ the doctor replied.

‘I’d like to see them, Farrokh,’ John D. said.

‘He should see them if he wants to!’ Julia snapped.

‘I’m not sure the police would agree,’ Dr Daruwalla began to say, but Inspector Dhar gave a most familiar and dismissive wave of his hand, a perfect gesture of contempt. Farrokh felt his exhaustion draw close to him – like old friends and family gathering around his imagined sickbed.

When John D. retired to the balcony to sleep, Julia was quick to change the subject — even before Farrokh had managed to undress for bed.

‘You didn’t
tell
him!’ she cried.

‘Oh, please stop it about the damnable
twin
business!’ he said to her. ‘What makes you think that’s such a priority? Especially now!’

‘I think that the arrival of his twin might be more of a priority to John D.,’ Julia remarked decisively. She left her husband alone in the bedroom while she used the bathroom. Then, after Farrokh had had his turn in the bathroom, he noted that Julia had already fallen asleep – or else she was pretending to be asleep.

At first he tried to sleep on his side, which was his usual preference, but in that position he was conscious of the soreness in his ribs; on his stomach, the pain was more evident. Flat on his back – where he struggled in vain to fall asleep, and where he was inclined to snore – he wracked his overexcited brain for the precise image of the movie actress he was sure he was reminded of when he’d shamelessly stared at the second Mrs Dogar. Despite himself, he grew sleepy. The names of actresses came to and left his lips. He saw Neelam’s full mouth, and Rekha’s nice mouth, too; he thought of Sridevi’s mischievous smile – and almost everything there was to think about Sonu Walla, too. Then he half-waked himself and thought, No, no… it’s no one contemporary, and she’s probably not even Indian. Jennifer Jones? he wondered. Ida Lupino? Rita Moreno? Dorothy Lamour! No, no … what was he thinking? It was someone whose beauty was much more cruel than the beauty of any of these. This insight nearly woke him. Had he awakened simultaneously with the reminder caused by the pain in his ribs, he might have got it. But although the hour was now late, it was still too soon for him to know.

There was more communication in the marriage bed of Mr and Mrs Patel at this very same late hour. Nancy was crying; her tears, as they often were, were a mix of misery and frustration. Deputy Commissioner Patel was trying, as he often did, to be comforting.

Nancy had suddenly remembered what had happened to her — maybe two weeks after the last of her symptoms of gonorrhea had disappeared. She’d broken out in a terrible rash, red and sore and with unbearable itching, and she’d assumed that this was a new phase of something venereal she’d caught from Deiter. Furthermore, there was no hiding
this
phase from her beloved policeman; young Inspector Patel had straightaway brought her to a doctor, who informed her that she’d been taking too many antimalarial pills –she was simply suffering from an allergic: reaction. But how this had frightened her! And she only now remembered the goats.

For all these years, she’d thought about the goats in the brothels, but she’d not remembered how she’d first feared that it was something from the goats that had given her such a hideous rash and such uncontrollable itching. That had been her worst fear. For 20 years, when she’d thought about those brothels and the women who’d been murdered there, she’d forgotten the men Dieter had told her about – the terrible men who fucked goats. Maybe Dieter had fucked goats, too. No wonder she’d at least
tried
to forget this.

‘But nobody is fucking those goats,’ Vijay just now informed her.

‘What?’ Nancy said.

‘Well, I don’t presume to know about the United States – or even about certain rural areas of India – but no one in Bombay is fucking goats,’ her husband assured her.

‘What?’ Nancy said. ‘Dieter
told
me that they fucked the goats.’

‘Well, it’s not at all true,’ the detective said. ‘Those goats are pets. Of course some of them give milk. This is a bonus — for the children, I suppose. But they’re pets, just pets.’

‘Oh, Vijay!’ Nancy cried. He had to hold her. ‘Oh, Dieter
lied
to me!’ she cried. ‘Oh, how he lied to me … all those years I
believed
it! Oh, that/uclcer!’ The word was so sharply spoken, it caused a dog in the alley below them to stop rooting through the garbage and bark. Over their heads, the ceiling fan barely stirred the close air, which seemed always to smell of the perpetually blocked drains, and of the sea, which in their neighborhood was not especially clean or fresh-smelling. ‘Oh, it was another lie!’ Nancy screamed. Vijay went on holding her, although to do so for long would make them both sweat. The air was unmoving where they lived.

The goats were just pets. Yet, for 20 years, what Dieter had told her had hurt her so badly; at times, it had made her physically sick. And the heat, and the sewer smell, and the fact that, whoever Rahul
was
, he was still getting away with it – all this Nancy had accepted, but in the fashion that she’d accepted her childlessness, which she’d accepted so slowly and only after what had felt to her like a lingering and merciless defeat.

It was late. While Nancy cried herself to sleep and Dr Daruwalla failed to realize that the second and beautiful Mrs Dogar had reminded him of Rahul, Vinod was driving one of Mr Garg’s exotic dancers home from the Wetness Cabaret.

She was a middle-aged Maharashtrian with the English name of Muriel – not her real name but her exotic-dancing name – and she was upset because one of the patrons of the Wetness Cabaret had thrown an orange at her while she was dancing. The clientele of the Wetness Cabaret was vile, Muriel had decided. Even so, she rationalized, Mr Garg was a gentleman. Garg had recognized that Muriel was upset by the episode with the orange; he’d personally engaged Vinod’s ‘luxury’ taxi to drive Muriel home.

Although Vinod had praised Mr Garg’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of runaway child prostitutes, the dwarf wouldn’t have gone so far as to call Mr Garg a gentleman; possibly Garg was more of a gentleman with middle-aged women. With younger girls, Vinod wasn’t sure. The dwarf didn’t entirely share Dr Daruwalla’s suspicions of Mr Garg, but Vinod and Deepa had occasionally encountered a child prostitute who seemed in need of rescuing
from
Garg. Save this poor child, Mr Garg seemed to be saying; save her from
me
, Garg might have meant.

It wouldn’t have helped Vinod and Deepa’s child-rescue operations to have Dr Daruwalla treating Garg like a criminal. The new runaway, the boneless one – a potential plastic lady – was a case in point. Although she’d appeared to be more personally involved with Mr Garg than she should have been, such implications wouldn’t help her cause with Dr Daruwalla; the doctor had to pronounce her healthy or the Great Blue Nile wouldn’t take her.

Vinod now noted that the middle-aged woman with the exotic-dancing name of Muriel had fallen asleep; she slept with a somewhat sour expression, her mouth disagreeably open and her hands resting on her fat breasts. The dwarf thought that it made more sense to throw an orange at her than it did to watch her dance. But Vinod’s humanitarian instincts extended even to middle-aged strippers; he slowed down because the streets were bumpy, seeing no reason to wake the poor woman before she was home. In her sleep, Muriel suddenly cringed. She was ducking oranges, the dwarf imagined.

After Vinod dropped off Muriel, it was too late for him to go anywhere but back to the brothel area; the red-light district was the only part of Bombay where people needed a taxi at 2:00 in the morning. Soon the international travelers would be arriving at the Oberoi and the Taj, but no one who’d just flown in from Europe or North America would have the slightest inclination to cruise around the city.

Vinod thought he’d
wail
for the end of the last show at the Wetness Cabaret; one of Mr Garg’s other exotic dancers might want a safe ride home. It amazed Vinod that the Wetness Cabaret, the building itself, was ‘home’ to Mr Garg; the dwarf couldn’t imagine sleeping there. He supposed there were rooms upstairs, above the slick bar and the sticky tables and the sloping stage. Vinod shivered to think of the dimly lit bar, the bright lit stage, the darkened tables where the men sat — some of them masturbating, although the dominant odor of the Wetness Cabaret was one of urine. How could Garg sleep in such a place, even if he slept above it?

But as distasteful as it was to Vinod – to cruise the brothel area, as if he carried a potential customer in the Ambassador’s back seat – the dwarf had decided that he might as well stay awake. Vinod was fascinated by that hour when most of the brothels switched over; in Kamathipura, on Falkland Road and Grant Road, there came an hour of the early morning when most of the brothels would accept only all-night customers. In the dwarf’s opinion, these were different and desperate men. Who else would want to spend
all night
with a prostitute?

Vinod grew alert and edgy at this hour, as if – particularly in those little lanes in Kamathipura – he might spot a man who wasn’t entirely human. When he got tired, the dwarf dozed in his car; his car was more home to him than home, at least when Deepa was away at the circus. And when he was bored, Vinod would cruise past the transvestite brothels on Falkland Road and Grant Road. Vinod liked the hijras; they were so bold and so outrageous – they also seemed to like dwarfs. Possibly the hijras thought that
dwarfs
were outrageous.

Vinod was aware that some of the hijras
didn’t
like him; they were the ones who knew that the dwarf was Inspector Dhar’s driver – the ones who hated
Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer
. Lately, Vinod had to be a little careful in the brothel area; the prostitute murders had made Dhar
and
Dhar’s dwarf more than a little unpopular. Thus that hour when most of the brothels ‘switched over’ made Vinod more alert and edgy than usual.

While he cruised, the dwarf was among the first to notice what had changed about Bombay; the change was being enacted before Vinod’s very eyes. Gone was the movie poster of his most famous client, that larger-than-life image of Inspector Dhar which Vinod and all of Bombay had grown so used to – the huge hoardings, the overhead billboards that advertised
Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer
. Dhar’s handsome face, albeit bleeding slightly; the torn white shirt, open to expose Dhar’s muscular chest; the pretty, ravaged young woman slung over Dhar’s strong shoulder; and, always, the blue-gray semi-automatic pistol held in Dhar’s hard right hand. In its place, everywhere in Bombay, was a brand-new poster. Vinod thought that only the semi-automatic was the same, although Inspector Dhar’s sneer was remarkably familiar.
Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence;
this time, the young woman slung over Dhar’s shoulder was noticeably dead – more noticeably, she was a Western hippie.

It was the only safe time to put the posters up; if people had been awake, they would doubtless have attacked the poster-wallas. The old posters in the brothel area had long ago been destroyed; tonight, perhaps, the prostitutes left the poster-wallas unharmed because the prostitutes were happy to see that
Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer
was being replaced with a new offense – this time, to somebody else.

But, upon closer inspection, Vinod noted that not so much was different about the new poster as he’d first observed. The posture of the young woman over Dhar’s shoulder was quite the same, alive or dead; and again, albeit from a slightly different spot, Inspector Dhar’s cruel, handsome face was bleeding. The longer Vinod looked at the new poster, the more he found it to resemble the previous poster; it seemed to the dwarf that Dhar even wore the same torn shirt. This possibly explained why the dwarf had driven around Bombay for more than two hours before he’d noticed that a new Inspector Dhar film had been born into the world. Vinod couldn’t wait to see it.

The unspeakable life of the red-light district teemed all around him – the bartering and the betrayals and the frightening, unseen beatings — or so the excited dwarf imagined. About the most hopeful thing that could be said is that throughout the brothel area of Bombay, no one – truly no one – was fucking a goat.