A Son Of The Circus (56 page)

‘The Duckworth Club gardener?’ cried Dr Daruwalla; he’d always disliked the head mali, without knowing why.

‘There was a different head mali then … you will remember,’ the detective said.

‘Oh,’ Farrokh said. He was feeling more and more amateurish by the minute.

‘Anyway, Rahul is possibly the one making the phone calls – that’s as good a guess as any,’ Patel said. ‘But he’s no car-bomb expert.’

The doctor sat dismally still, looking at the photo– j graphic history of the murdered women. ‘But why would Rahul hate me – or Dhar?’ Dr Daruwalla asked.

‘
That
is the question you don’t answer, or even ask, in your written statement,’ said D.C.P. Patel. ‘Why,; indeed?’

Thus were both men left with this unanswered question – Dr Daruwalla as he took a taxi uptown to meet Martin Mills, and Detective Patel as he reclaimed his desk chair. There the deputy commissioner once more faced the winking elephants on the slack bellies of the brutalized women.

The deputy commissioner reflected that the mystery of Rahul’s hatred was probably unsolvable. There would be no end to the conjecture on this subject, which would remain unsatisfactorily answered, probably forever. The matter of what motivated Rahul’s hatred would remain incomplete. What was truly implausible in all the Inspector Dhar films was that
all
the murderers’ motives were plainly established; the reasons for this or that hatred, which would lead to this or that violence, were always clear. Detective Patel regretted that Rahul Rai wasn’t in a movie.

In addition to Dr Daruwalla’s written statement, the detective had secured a letter from the doctor, for it hadn’t escaped Patel’s attention that Dr Daruwalla was guest chairman of the Membership Committee at the Duckworth Club. On behalf of Deputy Commissioner Patel, the Duckworth Club was requested to release the names of its new members – ‘new’ as of the last 20 years. The deputy commissioner sent a subinspector to the club with the letter of requisition; the subinspector was instructed not to leave the Duckworth Club without the list of names. Detective Patel doubted that he would need to peruse the names of all 6,000 members; with any luck, a recent membership to a relative of the late Promila Rai would be easy to spot. It was hard for the deputy commissioner to contain himself while he waited for the subinspector to bring him the list.

At his desk, Detective Patel sat among the dust motes that danced in the movement of the ceiling fan, which was silent not because it was truly noiseless, but because the constant orchestra of the secretaries’ typewriters concealed the fan’s faint whirs and ticks. At first, the deputy commissioner had been enthusiastic about the information he’d received from Dr Daruwalla. The detective had never been this close to Rahul; now he thought it was inevitable that the killer would be apprehended — an arrest seemed imminent. Yet Detective Patel couldn’t bring himself to share his enthusiasm with his wife; he would hate to see her disappointed if there remained something inconclusive. There was always something inconclusive, the detective knew.

‘But why would Rahul hate me – or Dhar?’ Dr Daruwalla had asked. To the deputy commissioner, this question had been a typical inanity from the creator of Inspector Dhar; even so, the detective — the
real
detective – had encouraged the doctor to keep asking himself that same inane question.

Detective Patel had lived with the photographs for too long; that little elephant with its cocky tusk and its mischievous eyes had gotten to him, not to mention those murdered women with their unresponsive stomachs. There would never be a satisfactory motive for such hatred, the deputy commissioner believed. Rahul’s
real
crime was that he didn’t have sufficient justification for his actions. Something about Rahul would remain uncaptured; the horror about murders like his was that they were never sufficiently motivated. And so it seemed to Detective Patel that his wife was destined to be disappointed; he wouldn’t call her because he didn’t want to get her hopes up. As he might have guessed, Nancy called him.

‘No, sweetie,’ the detective said.

From the adjacent office, the sound of typing ceased; then, from the next office, the typing also stopped –and so on, all along the balcony.

‘No, I would have told you, sweetie,’ the deputy commissioner said.

For 20 years, Nancy had called him almost every day. She always asked him if he’d caught Beth’s killer.

‘Yes, of course I promise, sweetie,’ the detective said.

Below, in the courtyard, the big Dobermans were still asleep, and the police mechanic had mercifully stopped his infernal revving of the patrolmen’s motorcycles. The tuning of these ancient engines was so constant, the dogs usually slept through it. But even this sound had ceased, as if the mechanic — in spite of his throttling up and throttling down – had managed to hear the typing stop. The motorcycle mechanic had joined the speechless typewriters.

‘Yes, I showed the doctor the photographs,’ Patel told Nancy. ‘Yes, of course you were right, sweetie,’ the deputy commissioner told his wife.

There was a new sound in Detective Patel’s office; the detective looked all around, trying to identify it. Gradually, he became aware of the absence of typing. Then he looked up at the revolving ceiling fan and realized that it was the fan’s whirring and ticking that he heard. It was so quiet, he could hear the rusted iron wheels of the hot-lunch wagons that were pushed by hand along Dr Dadabhai Navroji Road; the dabba-wallas were on their way to deliver hot lunches to the office workers uptown.

Deputy Commissioner Patel knew that his fellow policemen and their secretaries were listening to every word of his conversation, and so he whispered into the phone. ‘Sweetie,’ the detective said, ‘it is slightly better than you first believed. The doctor didn’t merely see the bodies, the doctor also knows Rahul. Both Daruwalla and Dhar – they actually know who he is … or at least who he, or she, was.’ Patel paused, and then he whispered. ‘No, sweetie – they haven’t seen him, or her … not for twenty years.’

Then the detective once more listened to his wife –and to the ceiling fan, and to the grinding wheels of the dabba-wallas’ faraway wagons.

When the deputy commissioner spoke again, it was an outburst, not a whisper. ‘But I never dismissed your theories!’ he cried into the phone. Then there entered into his voice a familiar tone of resignation; it so pained his fellow policemen, who all admired him and could no more fathom the
motive
for the extreme love that Detective Patel felt for his wife than there was any fathoming the motivation for Rahul’s extreme hatred. There was simply no determining where either a love or a hate like that came from, and this mystery compelled the officers and their secretaries to listen. All along the balcony, it overwhelmed them to hear the intensity of what appeared to them to be a groundless, irrational love.

‘No, of course I’m not angry,’ Patel told Nancy. ‘I’m sorry if I
sounded
angry, sweetie.’ The detective sounded drained; the officers and their secretaries wished only that they could help him. They weren’t eavesdropping for information related to those murdered prostitutes; they knew that the evidence of what had been done to those women was never farther away from the deputy commissioner than the top drawer of his desk. It was the pathetic sound of Detective Patel’s love for his wretched wife that removed the hand of the motorcycle mechanic from the throttle.

In his office, Patel was painstakingly returning the photographs to his top drawer; he always returned them one by one, just as he reviewed (them faithfully and in the exact order in which the crimes had been discovered. ‘I love you, too, sweetie,’ the detective said into the phone. He always waited for Nancy to hang up first. Then he slammed shut the top drawer of his desk and rushed to the balcony. He caught his fellow policemen and their secretaries by surprise; not one of them was fast enough to start typing before the deputy commissioner started shouting.

‘Have you run out of things to describe?’ he hollered. ‘Have your fingers all fallen off?’ he screamed. ‘Are there no more murders? Is crime a thing of the past? Have you all gone on holiday? Have you nothing better to do than listen to me?’

The typing began again, although Detective Patel knew that most of these first words would be meaningless. Below him, in the courtyard, the Doberman pinschers started barking witlessly; he could see them lunging in their kennel. Also below him, the police mechanic had mounted the nearest motorcycle and was jumping again and again, but without success, on the kick starter. The engine made a dry, gasping sound, like the catching of a pawl against a ratchet wheel.

‘Bleed the carburetor – there’s too much air!’ Patel shouted to the mechanic, who quickly fussed with the carburetor; his tireless leg continued to flail the kick starter. When the engine caught and the mechanic revved the throttle so loudly that the barking Dobermans were drowned out of hearing, the deputy commissioner returned to his office and sat at his desk with his eyes closed. Gradually, his head began to bob, as if he’d found a followable rhythm, if not a melody, among the staccato outbursts from the police secretaries’ typewriters.

He’d not exactly neglected to tell Nancy that they would have lunch tomorrow at the Duckworth Club with Dr Daruwalla – probably with Inspector Dhar, too. He’d purposefully withheld this information from his wife. He knew it would worry her, or bring her to tears – or at least cause her another long night of sleeplessness and helpless sorrowing. Nancy hated to go out in public. Moreover, she’d developed a pointless dislike of both Inspector Dhar’s creator and Dhar himself. Detective Patel understood that his wife’s dislike was no more logical than her blaming both men for failing to comprehend how savagely she’d been traumatized in Goa. With equal illogic, the detective anticipated, Nancy would be ashamed of herself in both Daruwalla and Dhar’s company, for she couldn’t bear the thought of encountering anyone who’d known her
then
.

He would tell her about lunch at the Duckworth Club in the morning, the detective thought; that way, his wife might have a fair night’s sleep. Also, once he’d read over the names of the new members at the club, the deputy commissioner hoped he might know who Rahul was – or who he or she was pretending to be nowadays.

Patel’s fellow policemen and their secretaries didn’t relax until they heard the sound of his typewriter contributing its tedious music to their own. This was a welcome boredom, they knew, for with the flat clacking of the deputy commissioner’s keys, Patel’s colleagues were relieved to know that the deputy commissioner had returned to sanity – if not to peace of mind. It even comforted his junior officers to know that Patel was rewriting their own botched reports. They also knew they could expect that sometime in the afternoon Detective Patel would have their original reports back on their desks; the revised reports would be prefaced by a creative array of insults directed to their myriad inabilities – for none of them, in Detective Patel’s opinion, knew how to write a proper report. And the secretaries would be taken to task for their typing errors. He was so disdainful of the secretaries, the deputy commissioner did his own typing.

Trachoma, which is one of the leading causes of blindness in the world, is easily treatable at its earliest phase – a chlamydial infection of the conjunctiva. In Ganesh’s case, there was no scarring of the cornea. Double
E-NT
Jeejeebhoy had prescribed three weeks of tetracycline orally, together with a tetracycline ointment. Sometimes, multiple courses of treatment were needed, Dr Jeejeebhoy had said; the elephant boy’s weepy eyes would likely clear up.

‘You see?’ Martin Mills asked Dr Daruwalla. ‘We’ve already done the boy some good. It wasn’t hard, was it?’

It seemed disloyal of the doctor that they were riding in a taxi,
not
driven by Vinod; it wasn’t even a taxi from the dwarf’s company. It also seemed dangerous, for the decrepit driver had warned them that he was unfamiliar with Bombay. Before they proceeded to the mission in Mazagaon, they dropped the beggar at Chowpatty Beach, where he said he wanted to go. Dr Daruwalla couldn’t resist saying to Martin Mills that the little cripple was doubtless eager to sell his Fashion Street clothes.

‘You’re so cynical,’ the scholastic said.

‘He’ll probably sell the tetracycline, too,’ Farrokh replied. ‘He’ll probably be blind before he gets to see the circus.’

As he escorted the missionary to St Ignatius, Farrokh felt sufficiently overwhelmed to have reached the stage of making bitter resolutions to himself. Dr Daruwalla had resolved that he would never write another Inspector Dhar movie; the doctor had resolved that he would call a press conference, at which he would take the full blame for Dhar’s creation upon himself.

Thus distracted, and always a nervous passenger in Bombay – even when Vinod was at the wheel, and the dwarf was a decent driver – Dr Daruwalla was frightened to see that their taxi had nearly mowed down a pedestrian. The near-accident had no effect on Martin Mills’s impromptu lecture on Jainism. ‘A pre-Buddhist offshoot of Hinduism,’ Martin declared. The Jains were absolutely pure, the missionary explained… not just no meat, but no eggs; kill nothing, not even flies; bathe every morning. He would love to meet a Jain, Martin said. Just that quickly was the chaos of the morning behind him, if not entirely forgotten.

Apropos of nothing, the missionary then moved on to the well-worn subject of Gandhi. Farrokh reflected on how he might derail this conversation; possibly the doctor could say he preferred the warrior Shivaji to Gandhi – none of this turn-the-other-cheek shit for Shivaji! But before the doctor could deflate so much as a sentence of the scholastic’s zeal for Gandhi, Martin Mills once more changed the subject.

‘Personally, I’m more interested in Shirdi Sai Baba,’ the missionary said.

‘Ah, yes — the Jesus of Maharashtra,’ Farrokh replied facetiously. Sai Baba was a patron saint of many circus performers; the acrobats wore little Shirdi Sai Baba medallions around their necks – the Hindu equivalents of St Christopher medals. There were Shirdi Sai Baba calendars hanging in the troupe tents of the Great Royal and the Great Blue Nile. The saint’s shrine was in Maharashtra.