A Son Of The Circus (54 page)

‘Can Madhu even stand on her head?’ Farrokh asked Deepa. ‘Can she walk on her hands?’

The dwarf’s wife suggested that the child could learn. After all, Deepa had been sold to the Great Blue Nile as a boneless girl, a future plastic lady; she had learned to be a trapeze artist, a flyer.

‘But you fell,’ the doctor reminded Deepa.

‘She is merely falling into a net!’ Vinod exclaimed.

There isn’t always a net,’ Dr Daruwalla said. ‘Did you land in a net, Vinod?’ Farrokh asked the dwarf.

‘I am being fortunate in other ways,’ Vinod replied. ‘Madhu won’t be working with clowns – or with elephants,’ the dwarf added.

But Farrokh had the feeling that Madhu was clumsy; she
looked
clumsy – not to mention the dubious coordination of the limping garlic-and-onion chopper, Madhu’s newly appointed brother. Farrokh felt certain that the elephant-footed boy would find another elephant to step on him. Dr Daruwalla imagined that the Great Blue Nile might even conceive of a way to display the cripple’s mashed foot; Ganesh would become a minor sideshow event – the elephant boy, they would call him.

That was when the missionary, on the evidence of less than one day’s experience in Bombay, had said to Dr Daruwalla, ‘Whatever the dangers in the circus, the circus will be better for them than their present situation – we know the alternatives to their being in the circus.’

Vinod had remarked to Inspector Dhar that he was looking surprisingly well recovered from his nightmarish experience on Falkland Road. (Farrokh thought the missionary looked awful.) To keep the dwarf and the missionary from talking further to each other, which Dr Daruwalla knew would be confusing to them both, the doctor pulled Vinod aside and informed him that he should humor Dhar – ‘and by no means contradict him’ – because the dwarf had correctly diagnosed the movie star. There
had
been brain damage; it would be delicate to assess how much.

‘Are you having to delouse him, too?’ Vinod had whispered to Farrokh. The dwarf was referring to the reason for the scholastic’s horrible haircut, but Dr Daruwalla had solemnly agreed. Yes, there had been lice and brain damage.

‘Those are being filthy prostitutes!’ Vinod had explained.

What a morning it had been already! Dr Daruwalla thought. He’d finally gotten rid of Vinod and Deepa –by sending them with Madhu to Dr Tata. Dr Daruwalla had not expected Tata Two to send them back so soon. Farrokh barely had time to get rid of Martin Mills; the doctor wanted the scholastic out of the office and the waiting room before Vinod and Deepa and Madhu returned. What’s more, Dr Daruwalla wanted time to be alone; the deputy commissioner expected the doctor to come to Crime Branch Headquarters. Doubtless the doctor’s viewing of the photographs of the murdered prostitutes would serve to undermine the collected optimism of the Jesuit, the dwarf and the dwarf’s wife. But before Farrokh could slip away to Crawford Market, where he was meeting Deputy Commissioner Patel, it was necessary for the doctor to create an errand for Martin Mills; if only for an hour or two, the missionary was in need of a mission.

The elephant boy was a problem. Ganesh had behaved badly in the exercise yard, where many of the postoperative patients among the crippled children were engaged in their various physical-therapy assignments. Ganesh took this opportunity to squirt several of the more defenseless children with the bird-shit syringe; when Ranjit took the syringe away from the aggressive boy, Ganesh bit Dr Daruwalla’s faithful secretary on the hand. Ranjit was offended that he’d been bitten by a beggar; dealing with the unruly likes of the elephant-footed boy wasn’t a suitable use of the medical secretary’s training.

On a day that had barely begun, Dr Daruwalla was already exhausted. Nevertheless, the doctor made quick and clever use of the biting episode. If Martin Mills was so sure that Bird-Shit Boy was capable of contributing to the daily chores of a circus, perhaps the missionary could be persuaded to take some responsibility for the little beggar. Martin Mills was eager to take responsibility for the elephant boy; the zealot would be likely to claim responsibility for a world of cripples, Farrokh imagined. Thereupon Dr Daruwalla assigned Martin Mills the task of taking Ganesh to Parsi General Hospital; the doctor wanted the crippled beggar to be examined by Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Jeejeebhoy – Double
E-NT
Jeejeebhoy, as he was called. Dr Jeejeebhoy was an expert on the eye problems that were epidemic in India.

Although there was a rheumy discharge and Ganesh had said that his eyelids were gummed shut every morning, there wasn’t that softness of the eyeballs that Dr Daruwalla thought of as end-stage or ‘white’ eyes; then the cornea is dull and opaque, and the patient is blind. Farrokh hoped that, whatever was wrong with Ganesh, it was in an early stage. Vinod had admitted that the circus wouldn’t take a boy who was going blind – not even the Great Blue Nile.

But before Farrokh could hurry the elephant boy and the Jesuit on their way to Parsi General, which wasn’t far, Martin Mills had spontaneously come to the aid of a woman in the waiting room. She was the mother of a crippled child; the missionary had dropped to his knees at her feet, which Farrokh found to be an irritating habit of the zealot. The woman was frightened by the gesture. Also, she wasn’t in need of aid; she was not bleeding from her lips and gums, as the scholastic had declared – she was merely eating betel nut, which the Jesuit had never seen.

Dr Daruwalla ushered Martin from the waiting room to his office, where the doctor believed that the missionary could do slightly less harm. Dr Daruwalla insisted that Ganesh come with them, for the doctor was fearful that the dangerous beggar might bite someone else. Thereupon Farrokh calmly told Martin Mills what paan was — the local version of betel. The areca nut is wrapped in a betel leaf. Other common ingredients are rose syrup, aniseed, lime paste … but people put almost everything in the betel leaf, even cocaine. The veteran betel-nut eater had red-stained lips and teeth and gums. The woman the missionary had alarmed was not bleeding; she was merely eating paan.

Finally, Farrokh was able to free himself from Martin Mills. Dr Daruwalla hoped that Double
E-NT
Jeejeebhoy would take forever to examine Ganesh’s eyes.

By midmorning, the day’s confusion had achieved a lunatic pace. It was already a day that brought to Farrokh’s mind those white-faced, dark-skinned girls in their purple tutus; it was a Load Cycle kind of day, as if everyone in the doctor’s office and waiting room were riding bicycles to cancan music. As if to emphasize this chaos, Ranjit walked into the office without knocking; the medical secretary had just read Dr Daruwalla’s mail. Although the envelope that Ranjit handed to Dr Daruwalla was addressed to the doctor, not to Inspector Dhar, there was something familiar about the cold neutrality of the typescript; even before the doctor looked inside the envelope and saw the two– j rupee note, he knew what he’d find. Farrokh was nevertheless stunned to read the message typed in capital letters on the serial-number side of the money. This time the warning said,
YOU’RE
AS
DEAD
AS
DHAR
.

There was a telephone call that added to the general confusion; in his distress, Ranjit made a mistake. The secretary thought the caller was Radiology Patel – it was a question regarding when Dr Daruwalla would come to view the photographs. Ranjit assumed that the ‘photographs’ were X rays, and he answered abruptly that the doctor was busy; either Ranjit or the doctor would call back with the answer. But after the secretary hung up, he realized that the caller hadn’t been
Radiology
Patel. It had been Deputy Commissioner Patel, of course.

There was a … Patel on the phone for you,’ Ranjit told Farrokh in an offhand fashion. ‘He wants to know when you’re coming to see the photographs.’

And now there were
two
two-rupee notes in Dr Daruwalla’s pocket; there was the warning to Dhar (
YOU’RE
AS
DEAD
AS
LAL
) and the warning to the doctor (
YOU’RE
AS
DEAD
AS
DHAR
). Farrokh felt certain that these threats would enhance the grimness of the photographs that the deputy commissioner wanted to show him.

Farrokh knew that John D., who was good at concealing his anger, was already angry with him for not forewarning the actor of the arrival of his bothersome twin. Dhar would be even angrier if Dr Daruwalla saw the photographs of the elephants drawn on the murdered prostitutes without him, but the doctor thought it unwise to bring Dhar to Crime Branch Headquarters – nor would it be advisable to bring Martin Mills. The particular police station was near St Xavier’s College, another Jesuit institution; this one was coeducational –St Ignatius admitted only boys. Martin Mills would doubtless attempt to persuade his fellow Jesuits to admit Madhu to their school in case she wasn’t acceptable to the circus. The madman would probably insist that St Xavier’s offer scholarships to other available child prostitutes! The scholastic had already announced that he would approach the Father Rector of St Ignatius on Ganesh’s behalf. Dr Daruwalla couldn’t wait to hear Father Julian’s response to the notion of St Ignatius School attempting to educate a crippled beggar from Chowpatty Beach!

While the doctor was speculating in this fashion, and as he was hurrying to examine his remaining patients, Vinod and Deepa returned with Madhu and the tetracycline. Before he could abscond to the police station, Farrokh felt obliged to set a trap for Mr Garg. The doctor told Deepa to tell Garg that Madhu was being treated for a sexually transmitted disease; that sounded vague enough. If Mr Garg had diddled the child, he would need to call Dr Daruwalla to find out
which
disease — in order to learn the prescribed cure.

‘And tell him we’re checking to see if she’s HIV-positive,’ Farrokh said.
That
ought to make the bastard squirm, Dr Daruwalla thought.

The doctor wanted Deepa and Vinod to understand that Madhu must be kept away from the Wetness Cabaret, and away from Garg. The dwarf would drive his wife to the train station – Deepa had to return to the Great Blue Nile – but Vinod had to keep Madhu with him.

‘And, remember, she’s
not
clean until she’s taken all the tetracycline,’ the doctor told the dwarf.

‘I am remembering,’ Vinod said.

Then the dwarf asked about Dhar. Where was he? Was he all right? And didn’t Dhar need his faithful driver? Dr Daruwalla explained to Vinod that Dhar was suffering from the common post-trauma delusion that he was someone else.

‘Who is he being?’ the dwarf inquired.

‘A Jesuit missionary in training to be a priest,’ the doctor replied.

Vinod was instantly sympathetic to this delusion. The actor was even more brain-damaged than the dwarf had first suspected! The key to dealing with Dhar, the doctor explained, was to expect him to be one person one minute and another person the next. The dwarf gravely nodded his big head.

Then Deepa kissed the doctor good-bye. There always lingered on her lips the sticky sweetness of those lemon drops she liked. Any physical contact with the dwarf’s wife made Dr Daruwalla blush.

Farrokh could feel himself blush, but he’d never known if his blushes were visible. He knew he was dark-skinned for a Parsi, although he was fair-skinned in comparison to many other Indians — certainly, say, to a Goan or to a South Indian. In Canada, of course, the doctor was well aware that he was usually perceived as a man ‘of color,’ but when it came to blushing, he never knew whether or not he could blush undetected. Naturally, his embarrassment was communicated by other signals quite unrelated to his complexion and utterly unknown to him. For example, in the aftermath of Deepa’s kiss, he averted his eyes but his lips remained parted, as if he’d forgotten something he was about to say. Thus he was caught all the more off guard when Madhu kissed him.

He wanted to believe that the child was merely imitating the dwarf’s wife, but the girl’s kiss was too lush and knowing — Deepa had
not
inserted her tongue. Farrokh felt Madhu’s tongue flick his own tongue, dartingly. And the girl’s breath was redolent of some dark spice – not lemon drops, possibly cardamom or clove. As Madhu withdrew from him, she flashed her first smile, and Dr Daruwalla saw the blood-red edge to her teeth at the gum line. For Farrokh to realize that the child prostitute was a veteran betel-nut eater was only a mild surprise, even anticlimactic. The doctor presumed that an addiction to paan was the least of Madhu’s problems.

The inappropriately lewd encounter with Madhu left Dr Daruwalla in no mood to be tolerant of the photographic record of Rahul’s artistry on the bellies of the murdered whores. The subject matter was no less limited than what the doctor had seen depicted on Beth’s belly 20 years ago, nor had the intervening years imparted to the artist any measurable subtlety of style. The ever-mirthful elephant winked its eye and raised the opposite tusk. The water from the end of the elephant’s trunk continued to spray the pubic hair — in many cases, the shaved pubic area – of the dead women. Not even the passing of so many years, not to mention the horror of so many murders, was sufficient to inspire Rahul beyond the first act of his imagination – namely, that the victim’s navel was always the winking eye. The differences among the women’s navels provided the only variety in the many photographs. Detective Patel remarked that both the drawings and the murders gave new meaning to that tired old phrase ‘a one-track mind.’ Dr Daruwalla, who was too appalled to speak, could only nod that he agreed.

Farrokh showed the deputy commissioner the threatening two-rupee notes, but D.C.P. Patel was unsurprised; he’d been expecting more warnings. The deputy commissioner knew that the note in Mr Lai’s mouth had been just the beginning; no murderer the detective had ever known was content to threaten potential victims only once. Either killers didn’t warn you or they repeatedly warned you. Yet, for 20 years,
this
killer hadn’t given anyone a warning; only now, beginning with Mr Lai, had there emerged a kind of vendetta against Inspector Dhar and Dr Daruwalla. It seemed unlikely to the deputy commissioner that the sole motivation for this change in Rahul had been a stupid movie. Something about the Daruwalla-Dhar connection must have infuriated Rahul – both personally and for a long time. It was the deputy commissioner’s suspicion that
Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer
had simply exacerbated Rahul’s longstanding hatred.