A Son Of The Circus (72 page)

Farrokh presumed that John D. would be happy to be free of the role of Inspector Dhar; the actor had enough money, and he clearly preferred his Swiss life. Yet Dr Daruwalla suspected that, deep down, Dhar had cherished the loathing he’d inspired among the media scum; earning the hatred of the cinema-gossip journalists might have been John D.’s best performance. With that in mind, Farrokh thought he knew what John D. would prefer: no press conference, no announcement. ‘Let them wonder,’ Dhar would say – Dhar had often said.

There was another line that the screenwriter remembered; after all, he’d not only written it – it was repeated in every Inspector Dhar movie near the end of the story. There was always the temptation for Dhar to do something more – to seduce one more woman, to gun down one more villain — but Inspector Dhar knew when to stop. He knew when the action was over. Sometimes to a scheming bartender, sometimes to a fellow policeman of a generally dissatisfied nature, sometimes to a pretty woman who’d been waiting impatiently to make love to him, Inspector Dhar would say, Time to slip away.’ Then he would.

In this case, facing the facts – that he wanted to call an end to Inspector Dhar
and
that he wanted to finally leave Bombay — Farrokh knew what John D.’s advice would be. ‘Time to slip away,’ Inspector Dhar would say.

In the old days, before the doctors’ offices and the examining rooms of the Hospital for Crippled Children were air-conditioned, there’d been a ceiling fan over the desk where Dr Daruwalla now sat thinking, and the window to the exercise yard was always open. Nowadays, with the window closed and the hum of the air-conditioning a reassuring constant, Farrokh was cut off from the sound of children crying in the exercise yard. When the doctor walked through the yard, or when he was called to observe the progress of one of his postoperative patients in physical therapy, the crying children did not greatly upset him. Farrokh associated some pain with recovery; a joint, after surgery –
especially
after surgery – had to be moved. But in addition to the cries of pain, there were the whines that children made in anticipation of their pain, and this piteous mewling affected the doctor strongly.

Farrokh turned and faced the closed window with its view of the exercise yard; from the soundless expressions of the children, the doctor could still discern the difference between those children who were in pain and those who were pitifully frightened of the pain they expected. Soundlessly, the therapists were coaxing the children to move; there was the recent hip replacement being told to stand up, there was the new knee being asked to step forward – and the first rotation of the new elbow. The landscape of the exercise yard was timeless to Dr Daruwalla, who reflected that his ability to hear that which was soundless was the only measure of his humanity that he was certain of. Even with the air-conditioning on, even with the window closed, Dr Daruwalla could hear the whimpering. Time to slip away, he thought.

He opened the window and leaned outside. The heat at midday was oppressive in the rising dust, although (for Bombay) the weather had remained relatively cool and dry. The cries of the children commingled with the car horns and the chainsaw clamor of the mopeds. Dr Daruwalla breathed it all in. He squinted into the dusty glare. He gave the exercise yard an almost detached appraisal; it was a good-bye look. Then the doctor called Ranjit for his messages.

It was no surprise to Dr Daruwalla that Deepa had already negotiated with the Great Blue Nile; the doctor hadn’t expected the dwarf’s wife to get a better deal.

The circus would attempt to train the talented ‘sister.’ They would commit themselves to this effort for three months; they’d feed her, clothe her, shelter her and care for her crippled ‘brother.’ If Madhu could be trained, the Great Blue Nile would keep both children; if she was untrainable, the circus would let them go.

In Farrokh’s screenplay, the Great Royal paid Pinky three rupees a day while they trained her; the fictional Ganesh worked without pay for his food and shelter. At the Great Blue Nile, Madhu’s training was considered a privilege; she wouldn’t be paid at all. And for a real boy with a crushed foot, it was enough of a privilege to be fed and sheltered; the real Ganesh would work, too. At the parents’ expense — or, in the case of orphans, it was the obligation of the children’s ‘sponsors’ – Madhu and Ganesh would be brought to the site of the Great Blue Nile’s present location. At this time, the circus was performing in Junagadh, a small city of about 100,000 people in Gujarat.

Junagadh! It would take a day to get there, another day to get back. They would have to fly to Rajkot and then endure a car ride of two or three hours to the smaller town; a driver from the circus would meet their plane – doubtless a reckless roustabout. But the train would be worse. Farrokh knew that Julia hated him to be away overnight, and in Junagadh there would probably be nowhere to stay but the Government Circuit House; lice were likely, bedbugs a certainty. There would be 48 hours of conversation with Martin Mills, and no time to keep writing the screenplay. It had also occurred to the screenwriter that the
real
Dr Daruwalla was part of a parallel story-in-progress.

When Dr Daruwalla phoned St Ignatius School to alert the new missionary to their upcoming journey, the doctor wondered if his writing was prophetic. He’d already described the fictional Mr Martin as ‘the most popular teacher at the school’; now here was Father Cecil telling the screenwriter that Martin Mills, on the evidence of his first morning of visiting the classrooms, had instantly made ‘a most popular impression.’ Young Martin, as Father Cecil still called him, had even persuaded the Father Rector to permit the teaching of Graham Greene to the upper-school boys; although controversial, Graham Greene was one of Martin Mills’s Catholic heroes. ‘After all, the novelist popularized Catholic issues,’ Father Cecil said.

Farrokh, who considered himself an old fan of Graham Greene, asked suspiciously, ‘Catholic issues?’

‘Suicide as a mortal sin, for example,’ Father Cecil replied. (Apparently, Father Julian was allowing Martin Mills to teach The
Heart of the Matter
to the upper school.) Dr Daruwalla felt briefly uplifted; on the long trip to Junagadh and back, perhaps the doctor would be able to steer the missionary’s conversation to Graham Greene. Who were some of the zealot’s
other
heroes? the doctor wondered.

Farrokh hadn’t had a good discussion of Graham Greene in quite a while. Julia and her literary friends were happier discussing more contemporary authors; they found it old-fashioned of Farrokh to prefer ! rereading those books he regarded as classics. Dr Daruwalla was intimidated by Martin Mills’s education, but possibly the doctor and the scholastic would discover a common ground in the novels of Graham Greene.

Dr Daruwalla couldn’t have known that the subject of suicide was of more interest to Martin Mills than the craft of Graham Greene as a writer. For a Catholic, suicide was a violation of God’s dominion over human life. In the case of Arif Koma, Martin reasoned, the Muslim hadn’t been in full possession of his faculties; falling in love with Vera surely suggested a loss of faculties, or a vastly different set of faculties altogether.

The denial of ecclesiastical burial was a horror to Martin Mills; however, the Church permitted suicides among those who’d lost their senses or were unaware that they were killing themselves. The missionary hoped that God would judge the Turk’s suicide as an out-of-his-head kind. After all, Martin’s mother had fucked the boy’s brains out. How could Arif have made a sane decision after that?

But if Dr Daruwalla would be unprepared for Martin Mill’s Catholic interpretation of the doctor’s much-admired author, Farrokh was also in the dark regarding the unwelcome disturbance that had shaken St Ignatius School in the late morning, to which Father Cecil made incoherent references. The mission had been disrupted by an unruly intruder; the police had been forced to subdue the violent individual, whose violence Father Cecil attributed to ‘raging hormones.’

Farrokh liked the phrase so much that he wrote it down.

‘It was a transvestite prostitute, of all things,’ Father Cecil whispered into the phone.

‘Why are you whispering?’ Dr Daruwalla asked.

‘The Father Rector is still upset about the episode,’ Father Cecil confided to Farrokh. ‘Can you imagine? A
hijra
coming here – and during school hours!’

Dr Daruwalla was amused at the presumed spectacle. ‘Perhaps he, or she, wanted to be better educated,’ the doctor suggested to Father Cecil.

‘It claimed it had been invited,’ Father Cecil replied.

‘
It
!’ Dr Daruwalla cried.

‘Well, he or she – whatever it was, it was big and strong. A rampaging prostitute, a crazed cross-dresser!’ Father Cecil whispered. ‘They give themselves hormones, don’t they?’

‘Not hijras,’ Dr Daruwalla replied. They don’t take estrogens; they have their balls and their penises removed — with a single cut. The wound is then cauterized with hot oil. It resembles a vagina.’

‘Goodness – don’t tell me!’ Father Cecil said.

‘Sometimes, but not usually, their breasts are surgically implanted,’ Dr Daruwalla informed the priest.

‘This one was implanted with
iron!’
Father Cecil said enthusiastically. ‘And young Martin was busy teaching. The Father Rector and I, and poor Brother Gabriel, had to deal with the creature by ourselves – until the police came.’

‘It sounds exciting,’ Farrokh remarked.

‘Fortunately, none of the children saw it,’ Father Cecil said.

‘Aren’t transvestite prostitutes allowed to convert?’ asked Dr Daruwalla, who enjoyed teasing any priest.

‘Raging hormones,’ Father Cecil repeated. ‘It must have just given itself an overdose.’

‘I told you – they don’t usually take estrogens,’ the doctor said.

This one was taking something,’ Father Cecil insisted.

‘May I speak with Martin now?’ Dr Daruwalla asked. ‘Or is he still busy teaching?’

‘He’s eating his lunch with the midgets, or maybe he’s with the submidgets today,’ Father Cecil replied.

It was almost time for the doctor’s lunch at the Duckworth Club. Dr Daruwalla left a message for Martin Mills, but Father Cecil struggled with the message to such a degree that the doctor knew he’d have to call again. ‘Just tell him I’ll call him back,’ Farrokh finally said. ‘And tell him we’re definitely going to the circus.’

‘Oh, won’t that be fun!’ Father Cecil said.

Detective Patel had wanted to compose himself before his lunch at the Duckworth Club; however, there was the interruption of this incident at St Ignatius. It was merely a misdemeanor, but the episode had been brought to the deputy commissioner’s attention because it fell into the category of Dhar-related crimes.

The perpetrator was one of the transvestite prostitutes who’d been injured by Dhar’s dwarf driver in the fracas on Falkland Road; it was the hijra whose wrist had been broken by a blow from one of Vinod’s squash-racquet handles. The eunuch-transvestite had shown up at St Ignatius, clubbing the old priests with his cast; his story was that Inspector Dhar had told all the transvestite prostitutes that they’d be welcome at the mission. Also, Dhar had told the hijras that they could always find him there.

‘But it wasn’t Dhar,’ the hijra told Detective Patel in Hindi. ‘It was someone being a Dhar imposter.’ It would have been laughable to Patel, to hear a transvestite complaining that someone else was an ‘imposter,’ if the detective had been in a laughing mood; instead, the deputy commissioner looked at the hijra with impatience and scorn. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, bony-faced hooker whose small breasts were showing because the top two buttons of his Hawaiian shirt were unbuttoned and the shirt was too loose for him; the looseness of his shirt and the tightness of his scarlet miniskirt were an absurd combination – hijra prostitutes usually wore saris. Also, they generally made more of an effort to be feminine than this one was making; his breasts (what the deputy commissioner could see of them) were shapely — in fact, they were very well formed – but there were whiskers on his chin and the noticeable shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. Possibly the hijra had thought that the colors of the Hawaiian shirt were feminine, not to mention the parrots and flowers; yet the shirt did little for his figure.

D.C.P. Patel continued the interrogation in Hindi. ‘Where’d you get that shirt?’ the detective asked.

‘Dhar was wearing it,’ the prostitute replied.

‘Not likely,’ said the deputy commissioner.

‘I told you he was being an imposter,’ the prostitute said.

‘What sort of fool would pretend to be Dhar, and dare show his face on Falkland Road?’ Patel asked.

‘He looked like he didn’t know he was Dhar,’ the hijra replied.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Detective Patel. ‘He was an imposter but he didn’t
know
he was an imposter.’ The hijra scratched his hooked nose with the cast on his wrist. Patel was bored with the interrogation; he kept the hijra sitting there only because the preposterous sight of him helped the detective to focus on Rahul. Of course Rahul would be 53 or 54 now, and she wouldn’t stand out as someone who was making a half-assed effort to
look
like a woman.

It had occurred to the deputy commissioner that this might be one of the ways that Rahul managed to commit so many murders in the same area of Bombay. Rahul could enter a brothel as a man and leave looking like a hag; she could also leave looking like an attractive, middle-aged woman. And until this waste-of-time hijra had interrupted him, Patel had been enjoying a fairly profitable morning’s work; the deputy commissioner’s research on Rahul was progressing rather nicely. The list of new members at the Duckworth Club had been helpful.

‘Did you ever hear of a zenana by the name of Rahul?’ Patel asked the hijra.

That old question,’ the transvestite said.

‘Only she’d be a
real
woman now – the complete operation,’ the detective added. He knew there were some hijras who envied the very idea of a
complete
transsexual, but not most; most hijras were exactly what they wanted to be – they had no use for a fully fashioned vagina.