A Son of the Circus

Before His Conversion, Farrokh Mocks the Faithful

Twenty years ago, when he was drawn to Goa by his epicurean nostalgia for pork—scarce in the rest of India, but a staple of Goan cuisine—Dr. Daruwalla was converted to Christianity by the big toe of his right foot. He spoke of his religious conversion with the sincerest humility. That the doctor had recently visited the miraculously preserved mummy of St. Francis Xavier was not the cause of his conversion; previous to his personal experience with divine intervention, Dr. Daruwalla had even mocked the saint’s relics, which were kept under glass in the Basilica de Bom Jesus in Old Goa.

Farrokh supposed that he’d made fun of the missionary’s remains because he enjoyed teasing his wife about her religion, although Julia was never a practicing Catholic and she often expressed how it pleased her to have left the Roman trappings of her childhood in Vienna. Nevertheless, prior to their marriage, Farrokh had submitted to some tedious religious instruction from a Viennese priest. The doctor had understood that he was demonstrating a kind of theological passivity only to satisfy Julia’s mother; but—again, to tease Julia—Farrokh insisted on referring to the ring-blessing ceremony as the “ring-washing ritual,” and he pretended to be more offended by this Catholic charade than he was. In truth, he’d enjoyed telling the priest that, although he was unbaptized and had never been a practicing Zoroastrian, he nonetheless had always believed in “something”; at the time, he’d believed in nothing at all. And he’d calmly lied to both the priest and Julia’s mother—that he had no objections to his children being baptized and raised as Roman Catholics. He and Julia had privately agreed that this was a worthwhile, if not entirely innocent deception—again, to put Julia’s mother at ease.

It hadn’t hurt his daughters to have them baptized, Farrokh supposed. When Julia’s mother was still alive, and only when she’d visited the Daruwallas and their children in Toronto, or when the Daruwallas had visited her in Vienna, it had never been too painful to attend Mass. Farrokh and Julia had told their little girls that they were making their grandmother happy. This was an acceptable, even an honorable, tradition in the history of Christian churchgoing: to go through the motions of worship as a favor to a family member who appeared to be that most intractable personage, a true believer. No one had objected to this occasional enactment of a faith that was frankly quite foreign to them all, maybe even to Julia’s mother. Farrokh sometimes wondered if she had been going through the motions of worship only to please them.

It was exactly as the Daruwallas had anticipated: when Julia’s mother died, the family’s intermittent Catholicism more than lapsed—their churchgoing virtually stopped. In retrospect, Dr. Daruwalla concluded that his daughters had been preconditioned to accept that all religion was nothing more than going through the motions of worship to make someone else happy. It had been to please the doctor, after his conversion, that his daughters were administered the sacrament of marriage and other rites and ceremonies according to the Anglican Church of Canada. Maybe this was why Father Julian was so dismissive of the miracle by which Farrokh had been converted to Christianity. In the Father Rector’s opinion, it must have been only a minor miracle, if the experience managed merely to make Dr. Daruwalla an Anglican. In other words, it hadn’t been enough of a miracle to make the doctor a Roman Catholic.

It was a good time to go to Goa, Farrokh had thought. “The trip is a kind of second honeymoon for Julia,” he’d told his father.

“What kind of honeymoon is it when you take the children?” Lowji had asked; he and Meher resented that their three granddaughters weren’t being left with them. Farrokh knew that the girls, who were 11, 13, and 15, would not have stood for being left behind; the reputation of the Goa beaches was far more exciting to them than the prospect of staying with their grandparents. And the girls were determinedly committed to this vacation because John D. was going to be there. No other babysitter could command such authority over them; they were decidedly in love with their adopted elder brother.

In June of 1969, John D. was 19, and—especially to Dr. Daruwalla’s daughters—an extremely handsome European. Julia and Farrokh certainly admired the beautiful boy, but less for his good looks than for his tolerant disposition toward their children; not every 19-year-old boy could stomach so much giddy affection from three underage girls, but John D. was patient, even charming, with them. And having been schooled in Switzerland, John D. would probably be undaunted by the freaks who overran Goa—or so Farrokh had thought. In 1969, the European and American hippies were called “freaks”—especially in India.

“This is some second honeymoon, my dear,” old Lowji had said to Julia. “He is taking you and the children to the dirty beaches where the freaks debauch themselves, and it is all because of his love of pork!”

With this blessing did the younger Daruwallas depart for the former Portuguese enclave. Farrokh told Julia and John D. and his indifferent daughters that the churches and cathedrals of Goa were among the gaudier landmarks of Indian Christendom. Dr. Daruwalla was a connoisseur of Goan architecture: monumentality and massiveness he enjoyed; excessiveness, which was also reflected in the doctor’s diet, he found thrilling.

He preferred the Cathedral of St. Catherine da Se and the façade of the Franciscan Church to the unimpressive Church of the Miraculous Cross, but his overall preference for the Basilica de Bom Jesus wasn’t rooted in his architectural snobbery; rather, he was wildly amused by the silliness of the pilgrims—even Hindus!—who flocked to the basilica to view the mummified remains of St. Francis.

It is suspected, especially among non-Christians in India, that St. Francis Xavier contributed more to the Christianization of Goa after his death than the Jesuit had managed—in his short stay of only a few months—while he was alive. He died and was buried on an island off the Cantonese coast; but when he suffered the further indignity of disinterment, it was discovered that he’d hardly decomposed at all. The miracle of his intact body was shipped back to Goa, where his remarkable remains drew crowds of frenzied pilgrims. Farrokh’s favorite part of the story concerned a woman who, with the worshipful intensity of the most devout, bit off a toe of the splendid corpse. Xavier would lose more of himself, too: the Vatican required that his right arm be shipped to Rome, without which evidence St. Francis’s canonization might never have occurred.

How Dr. Daruwalla loved this story! How hungrily he viewed the shriveled relic, which was richly swaddled in vestments and brandished a staff of gold; the staff itself was encrusted with emeralds. The doctor assumed that the saint was kept under glass and elevated on a gabled monument in order to discourage other pilgrims from demonstrating their devotion with more zealous biting. Chuckling to himself while remaining outwardly most respectful, Dr. Daruwalla had surveyed the mausoleum with restrained glee. All around him, even on the casket, were numerous depictions of Xavier’s missionary heroics; but none of the saint’s adventures—not to mention the surrounding silver, or the crystal, or the alabaster, or the jasper, or even the purple marble—was as impressive to Farrokh as St. Francis’s gobbled toe.

“Now that’s what I call a miracle!” the doctor would say. “To have seen that might even have made a Christian out of me!”

When he was in a less playful temper, Farrokh harangued Julia with tales of the Holy Inquisition in Goa, for the missionary zeal that followed the Portuguese was marked by conversions under threat of death, confiscation of Hindu property and the burning of Hindu temples—not to mention the burning of heretics and grandly staged acts of faith. How it would have pleased old Lowji to hear his son carrying on in this irreverent fashion. As for Julia, she found it irritating that Farrokh so resembled his father in this respect. When it came to baiting anyone who was even remotely religious, Julia was superstitious and opposed.

“I don’t mock your lack of belief,” the doctor’s wife told him. “Don’t blame me for the Inquisition or laugh about St. Francis’s poor toe.”

The Doctor Is Turned On

Farrokh and Julia rarely argued with any venom, but they enjoyed teasing each other. An exaggerated, dramatic banter, which they weren’t inclined to suppress in public places, made the couple appear quarrelsome to the usual eavesdroppers—hotel staff, waiters or the sad couple with nothing to say to each other at an adjacent table. In those days, in the ’60s, when the Daruwallas traveled en famille, the girlish hysteria of their daughters added to the general rumpus. Therefore, when they undertook their outing in June of ’69, the Daruwallas declined several invitations to lodge themselves in some of the better villas in Old Goa.

Because they were such a loud mob, and because Dr. Daruwalla enjoyed eating at all times of the day and night, they thought it wiser and more diplomatic—at least until the children were older—not to stay in another family’s mansion, with all the breakable Portuguese pottery and the polished rosewood furniture. Instead, the Daruwallas occupied one of those beach hotels that even then had seen better days, but could neither be destroyed by the children nor offended by Dr. Daruwalla’s unceasing appetite. The spirited teasing between Farrokh and Julia was entirely overlooked by the ragged staff and the world-weary clientele of the Hotel Bardez, where the food was plentiful and fresh if not altogether appetizing, and where the rooms were almost clean. After all, it was the beach that mattered.

The Bardez had been recommended to Dr. Daruwalla by one of the younger members of the Duckworth Club. The doctor wished he could remember exactly who had praised the hotel, and why, but only snippets of the recommendation had remained in his memory. The guests were mostly Europeans, and Farrokh had thought that this would appeal to Julia and put young John D. at ease. Julia had teased her husband regarding the concept of putting John D. “at ease”; it was absurd, she pointed out, to imagine that the young man could be more at ease than he already was. As for the European clientele, they weren’t the sort of people Julia would ever want to know; they were trashy, even by John D.’s standards. In his university days in Zürich, John D. was probably as morally relaxed as other young men—or so Dr. Daruwalla supposed.

As for the Daruwalla contingent, John D. certainly stood out among them; he was as serenely composed, as ethereally calm, as the Daruwalla daughters were frenetic. The daughters were fascinated by the more unlikable European guests at the Hotel Bardez, although they clung to John D.; he was their protector whenever the young women or the young men, both in their string bikinis, would come too close. In truth, it appeared that these young women and young men approached the Daruwalla family solely to have a better view of John D., whose sublime beauty surpassed that of other young men in general and other 19-year-olds in particular.

Even Farrokh tended to gape at John D., although he knew from Jamshed and Josefine that only the dramatic arts interested the young man and that, especially for these thespian pursuits, he seemed inappropriately shy. But to see the boy, Farrokh thought, belied all the worries he’d heard expressed by his brother and sister-in-law. It was Julia who first said that John D. looked like a movie star; she said she meant by this that you were drawn to watch him even when he appeared to be doing nothing or thinking of nothing. In addition, his wife pointed out to Dr. Daruwalla, John D. projected an indeterminate age. When he was closely shaven, his skin was so perfectly smooth that he seemed much younger than 19—almost prepubescent. But when he allowed his beard to grow, even only as much as one day’s stubble, he became a grown man—at least in his late twenties—and he looked savvy and cocksure and dangerous.

“This is what you mean by a movie star?” Farrokh asked his wife.

“This is what’s attractive to women,” Julia said frankly. “That boy is a man and a boy.”

But for the first few days of his vacation, Dr. Daruwalla was too distracted to think about John D.’s potential as a movie star. Julia had made Farrokh nervous about the Duckworthian source of the recommendation for the Hotel Bardez. It was amusing to observe the European trash and the interesting Goans, but what if other Duckworthians were guests of the Hotel Bardez? It would be as if they’d never left Bombay, Julia said.

And so the doctor nervously examined the Hotel Bardez for stray Duckworthians, fearing that the Sorabjees would mysteriously materialize in the café-restaurant, or the Bannerjees would float ashore from out of the Arabian Sea, or the Lals would leap out and surprise him from behind the areca palms. Meanwhile, all Farrokh wanted was the peace of mind to reflect on his growing impulse to be more creative.

Dr. Daruwalla was disappointed that he was no longer the reader he’d once been. Watching movies was easier; he felt he’d been seduced by the sheer laziness of absorbing images on film. He was proud that he’d at least held himself above the masala movies—those junk films of the Bombay cinema, those Hindi hodgepodges of song and violence. But Farrokh was enthralled by any sleazy offering from Europe or America in the hard-boiled-detective genre; it was all-white, tough-guy trash that attracted him.

The doctor’s taste in films was in sharp contrast to what his wife liked to read. For this particular holiday Julia had brought along the autobiography of Anthony Trollope, which Farrokh was not looking forward to hearing. Julia enjoyed reading aloud to him from passages of a book she found especially well written or amusing or moving, but Farrokh’s prejudice against Dickens extended to Trollope, whose novels he’d never finished and whose autobiography he couldn’t imagine even beginning. Julia generally preferred to read fiction, but Farrokh supposed that the autobiography of a novelist almost qualified as fiction—surely novelists wouldn’t resist the impulse to make up their autobiographies.

And this led the doctor to daydreaming further on the matter of his underdeveloped creativity. Since he’d virtually stopped being a reader, he wondered if he shouldn’t try his hand at writing. An autobiography, however, was the domain of the already famous—unless, Farrokh mused, the subject had led a thrilling life. Since the doctor was neither famous nor had he, in his opinion, led a life of much excitement, he believed that an autobiography was not for him. Nevertheless, he thought, he would glance at the Trollope—when Julia wasn’t looking, and only to see if it might provide him with any inspiration. He doubted that it would.

Unfortunately, his wife’s only other reading material was a novel that had caused Farrokh some alarm. When Julia wasn’t looking, he’d already glanced at it, and the subject seemed to be relentlessly, obsessively sexual; in addition, the author was totally unknown to Dr. Daruwalla, which intimidated him as profoundly as the novel’s explicit erotica. It was one of those very skillful novels, exquisitely written in limpid prose—Farrokh knew that much—and this intimidated him, too.

Dr. Daruwalla began all novels irritably and with impatience. Julia read slowly, as if she were tasting the words, but Farrokh plunged restlessly ahead, gathering a list of petty grievances against the author until he happened on something that persuaded him the novel was worthwhile—or until he encountered some perceived blunder or an entrenched boredom, either of which would cause him to read not one more word. Whenever Farrokh had decided against a novel, he would then berate Julia for the apparent pleasure she was taking from the book. His wife was a reader of broad interests, and she finished almost everything she started; her voraciousness intimidated Dr. Daruwalla, too.

So here he was, on his second honeymoon—a term he’d used much too loosely, because he’d not so much as flirted with his wife since they’d arrived in Goa—and he was fearfully on the lookout for Duckworthians, whose dreaded appearance threatened to ruin his holiday altogether. To make matters worse, he’d found himself greatly upset—but also sexually aroused—by the novel his wife was reading. At least he thought she was reading it; maybe she hadn’t begun. If she was reading it, she’d not read any of it aloud to him, and given the calm but intense depiction of act after sexual act, surely Julia would be too embarrassed to read such passages aloud to him. Or would it be me who’d be embarrassed? he wondered.

The novel was so compelling that his covert glances at it were insufficient satisfaction; he’d begun concealing it in a newspaper or a magazine and sneaking off to a hammock with it. Julia didn’t appear to miss it; perhaps she was reading the Trollope.

The first image that captured Farrokh’s attention was only a couple of pages into the first chapter. The narrator was riding on a train in France. “Across from me the girl has fallen asleep. She has a narrow mouth, cast down at the corners, weighted there by the sourness of knowledge.” Immediately, Dr. Daruwalla felt that this was good stuff, but he also surmised that the story would end unhappily. It had never occurred to the doctor that a stumbling block between himself and most serious literature was that he disliked unhappy endings. Farrokh had forgotten that, as a younger reader, he’d once preferred unhappy endings.

It wasn’t until the fifth chapter that Dr. Daruwalla became disturbed by the first-person narrator’s frankly voyeuristic qualities, for these same qualities strongly brought out the doctor’s own troubling voyeurism. “When she walks, she leaves me weak. A hobbled, feminine step. Full hips. Small waist.” Faithfully, as always, Farrokh thought of Julia. “There’s a glint of white slip where her sweater parts slightly at the bosom. My eyes keep going there in quick, helpless glances.” Does Julia like this kind of thing? Farrokh wondered. And then, in the eighth chapter, the novel took a turn that made Dr. Daruwalla miserable with envy and desire. Some second honeymoon! he thought. “Her back is towards him. In a single move she pulls off her sweater and then, reaching behind herself in that elbow-awkward way, unfastens her brassiere. Slowly he turns her around.”

Dr. Daruwalla was suspicious of the narrator, this first person who is obsessed with every detail of the sexual explorations of a young American abroad and a French girl from the country—an 18-year-old Anne-Marie. Farrokh didn’t understand that without the narrator’s discomforting presence, the reader couldn’t experience the envy and desire of the perpetual onlooker, which was precisely what haunted Farrokh and impelled him to read on and on. “The next morning they do it again. Grey light, it’s very early. Her breath is bad.”

That was when Dr. Daruwalla knew that one of the lovers was going to die; her bad, breath was an unpleasant hint of mortality. He wanted to stop reading but he couldn’t. He decided that he disliked the young American—he was supported by his father, he didn’t even have a job—but his heart ached for the French girl, whose innocence was being lost. The doctor didn’t know that he was supposed to feel these things. The book was beyond him.

Because his medical practice was an exercise of almost pure goodness, he was ill prepared for the real world. Mostly he saw malformations and deformities and injuries to children; he tried to restore their little joints to their intended perfection. The real world had no purpose as clear as that.

I’ll read just one more chapter, Dr. Daruwalla thought. He’d already read nine. At the inland edge of the beach, he lay in the midday heat in a hammock under the dead-still fronds of the areca and coconut palms. The smell of coconut and fish and salt was occasionally laced with the smell of hashish, drifting along the beach. Where the beach touched the tropical-green mass of tangled vegetation, a sugarcane stall competed for a small triangle of shade with a wagon selling mango milkshakes. The melting ice had wet the sand.

The Daruwallas had commandeered a fleet of rooms—an entire floor of the Hotel Bardez—and there was a generous outdoor balcony, although the balcony was outfitted with only one sleeping hammock and young John D. had claimed it. Dr. Daruwalla felt so comfortable in the beach hammock that he resolved he would persuade John D. to allow him to sleep in the balcony hammock for at least one night; after all, John D. had a bed in his own room, and Farrokh and Julia could stand to be separated overnight—by which the doctor meant that he and his wife weren’t inclined to make love as often as every night, or even as often as twice a week. Some second honeymoon! Farrokh thought again. He sighed.

He should have left the tenth chapter for another time, but suddenly he was reading again, like any good novel, it kept lulling him into an almost tranquil state of awareness before it jolted him—it caught him completely by surprise. “Then hurriedly, as an afterthought, he takes off his clothes and slips in beside her. An act which threatens us all. The town is silent around them. On the milk-white faces of the clock the hands, in unison, jerk to new positions. The trains are running on time. Along the empty streets, yellow headlights of a car occasionally pass and bells mark the hours, the quarters, the halves. With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion while in his own dream he rises a little and defines the moist rim of her cunt with his finger, and as he does, he comes like a bull. They remain close for a long time, still without talking. It is these exchanges which cement them, that is the terrible thing. These atrocities induce them towards love.”

It wasn’t even the end of the chapter, but Dr. Daruwalla had to stop reading. He was shocked; and he had an erection, which he concealed with the book, allowing it to cover his crotch like a tent. All of a sudden, in the midst of such lucid prose, of such terse elegance, there were a “cock” and “balls” and even a “cunt” (with a “moist rim”)—and these acts that the lovers performed were “atrocities.” Farrokh shut his eyes. Had Julia read this part? He was usually indifferent to his wife’s pleasure in the passages she read aloud to him; she enjoyed discussing how certain passages affected her—they rarely had any effect on Farrokh. Dr. Daruwalla felt a surprising need to discuss the effect of this passage with his wife, and the thought of discussing such a thing with Julia inspired the doctor’s erection; he felt his hard-on touching the astonishing book.

The Doctor Encounters a Sex-Change-in-Progress

When he opened his eyes, the doctor wondered if he’d died and had awakened in what the Christians call hell, for standing beside his hammock and peering down at him were two Duckworthians who were no favorites of his.

“Are you reading that book, or are you just using it to put you to sleep?” asked Promila Rai. Beside her was her sole surviving nephew, that loathsome and formerly hairless boy Rahul Rai. But something was wrong with Rahul, the doctor noticed. Rahul appeared to be a woman now. At least he had a woman’s breasts; certainly, he wasn’t a boy.

Understandably, Dr. Daruwalla was speechless.

“Are you still asleep?” Promila Rai asked him. She tilted her head so that she could read the novel’s title and the author’s name, while Farrokh tightly held the book in its tentlike position above his erection, which he naturally preferred not to reveal to Promila—or to her terrifying nephew-with-breasts.

Aggressively, Promila read the title aloud. “A Sport and a Pastime. I’ve never heard of it,” she said.

“It’s very good,” Farrokh assured her.

Suspiciously, Promila read the author’s name aloud. “James Salter. Who is he?” she asked.

“Someone wonderful,” Farrokh replied.

“Well, what’s it about?” Promila asked him impatiently.

“France,” the doctor said. “The real France.” It was an expression he remembered from the novel.

Already Promila was bored with him, Dr. Daruwalla realized. It had been some years since he’d last seen her; Farrokh’s mother, Meher, had reported on the frequency of Promila’s trips abroad, and the incomplete results of her cosmetic surgery. Looking up at Promila from his hammock, the doctor could recognize (under her eyes) the unnatural tightness of her latest face lift; yet she needed more tightening elsewhere. She was strikingly ugly, like a rare kind of poultry with an excess of wattles at her throat. It wasn’t astonishing to Farrokh that the same man had left her at the altar twice; what astonished him was that the same man would have dared to come as close to Promila a second time—for she seemed, as old Lowji put it, “a Miss Havisham times two” in more than one way. Not only had she been jilted twice, but she seemed twice as vindictive, and twice as dangerous, and—to judge by her ominous nephew-with-breasts—twice as covert.

“You remember Rahul,” Promila said to Farrokh, and, to be certain that she commanded the doctor’s full attention, she tapped her long, veiny fingers on the spine of the book, which still concealed Farrokh’s cowering erection. When he looked up at Rahul, Dr. Daruwalla felt his hard-on wither.

“Yes, of course—Rahul!” the doctor said. Farrokh had heard the rumors, but he’d imagined nothing more outrageous than that Rahul had embraced his late brother’s flamboyant homosexuality, possibly in homage to Subodh’s memory. It had been that terrible monsoon of ’49 when Neville Eden had deliberately shocked Farrokh by telling him that he was taking Subodh Rai to Italy because a pasta diet improved one’s stamina for the rigors of buggery. Then they’d both died in that car crash. Dr. Daruwalla supposed that young Rahul had taken it rather hard, but not this hard!

“Rahul has undergone a little sex change,” said Promila Rai, with a vulgarity that was generally accepted as the utmost in sophistication by the out of it and the insecure.

Rahul corrected his aunt in a voice that reflected conflicting hormonal surges. “I’m still undergoing it, Auntie,” he remarked. “I’m not quite complete,” he said pointedly to Dr. Daruwalla.

“I see,” the doctor replied, but he didn’t see—he couldn’t conceive of the changes Rahul had undergone, not to mention what was required to make Rahul “complete.” The breasts were fairly small but firm and very nicely shaped; the lips were fuller and softer than Farrokh remembered them, and the makeup around the eyes was enhancing without tending to excess. If Rahul had been 12 or 13 in ’49—and no more than 8 or 10 when Lowji had examined him for what his aunt had called his inexplicable hairlessness—Rahul was now 32 or 33, Farrokh figured. From his back, in the hammock, the doctor’s view of Rahul was cut off just below the waist, which was as slender and pliant as a young girl’s.

It was clear to the doctor that estrogens were in use, and to judge these by Rahul’s breasts and flawless skin, the estrogens had been a noteworthy success; the effects on Rahul’s voice were at best still in progress, because the voice had both male and female resonances in rich confusion. Had Rahul been castrated? Did one dare ask? He looked more womanly than most hijras. And why would he have had his penis removed if he intended to be “complete,” for didn’t that mean a fully fashioned vagina, and wasn’t this vagina surgically constructed from the penis turned inside out? I’m just an orthopedist, Dr. Daruwalla thought gratefully. All the doctor asked Rahul was, “Are you changing your name, too?”

Boldly, even flirtatiously, Rahul smiled down at Farrokh; once again, the male and the female were at war within Rahul’s voice. “Not until I’m the real thing,” Rahul answered.

“I see,” the doctor replied; he made an effort to return Rahul’s smile, or at least to imply tolerance. Once more Promila startled Farrokh by drumming her fingers on the spine of his tightly held book.

“Is the whole family here?” Promila asked. She made “the whole family” sound like a grotesque element, like an entire population that was out of control.

“Yes,” Dr. Daruwalla answered.

“And that beautiful boy is here, too, I hope—I want Rahul to see him!” Promila said.

“He must be eighteen—no, nineteen,” Rahul said dreamily.

“Yes, nineteen,” the doctor said stiffly.

“Don’t anyone point him out to me,” Rahul said. “I want to see if I can pick him out of the crowd.” Upon this remark, Rahul turned from the hammock and moved away across the beach. Dr. Daruwalla thought that the angle of Rahul’s departure was deliberate—to give the doctor, from his hammock, the best possible view of Rahul’s womanly hips. Rahul’s buttocks were also shown to good advantage in a snug sarong, and the tight-fitting halter top was similarly enhancing to Rahul’s breasts. Still, Farrokh critically observed, the hands were too large, the shoulders too broad, the upper arms too muscular… the feet were too long, the ankles too sturdy. Rahul was neither perfect nor complete.

“Isn’t she delicious?” Promila whispered in the doctor’s ear. She leaned over him in the hammock and Farrokh felt the heavy silver pendant, the main piece of her necklace, thump against his chest. So Rahul was already a full-fledged “she” in Promila’s mind.

“She seems so… womanly,” Dr. Daruwalla said to the proud aunt.

“She is womanly!” replied Promila Rai.

“Well… yes,” the doctor said. He felt trapped in the hammock, with Promila suspended above him like some bird of prey—some poultry of prey. Promila’s scent was permeating—a blend of sandalwood and embalming fluid, something oniony but also like moss. Dr. Daruwalla made an effort not to gag. He felt Promila pulling the novel by James Salter away from him, but he grasped the book in both hands.

“If this is such a wonderful book,” she said doubtingly, “I hope you’ll lend it to me.”

“I think Meher’s reading it next,” he said, but he didn’t mean Meher, his mother; he’d meant to say Julia, his wife.

“Is Meher here, too?” Promila asked quickly.

“No—I meant Julia,” Farrokh said sheepishly. By Promila’s sneer, he could tell she was judging him, as if his sexual life were so dull that he’d confused his mother with his wife—and before he was 40! Farrokh felt ashamed, but he was also angry. What had initially upset him about A Sport and a Pastime was now enthralling to him; he felt highly stimulated, but not in that guilty way of pornography. This was something so refined and erotic, he wanted to share it with Julia. Quite simply, and wonderfully, the novel had made him feel young again.

Dr. Daruwalla saw Rahul and Promila as sexually aberrant beings. They’d ruined his mood; they’d overshadowed something that was sexy and sincerely written, because they were so unnatural—so perverse. Farrokh supposed he should go warn Julia that Promila Rai and her nephew-with-breasts were on the prowl. The Daruwallas might have to give their underage daughters some explanation about what wasn’t quite right with Rahul. Farrokh decided he would tell John D., in any case. The doctor hadn’t liked how Rahul had been so eager to pick John D. “out of the crowd.”

Promila had doubtless impressed her nephew-with-breasts with her own opinion—that John D. was entirely too beautiful to be the child of Danny Mills. Dr. Daruwalla thought that Rahul had gone looking for John D. because the would-be transsexual hoped to glimpse something of Neville Eden in the doctor’s dear boy!

Promila had turned away from his hammock, as if she were scanning the beach for the “delicious” Rahul; Dr. Daruwalla took this occasion to stare at the back of her neck. He regretted it, for staring back at him among the discolored wrinkles was a tumorous growth with melanoid characteristics; the doctor couldn’t bring himself to advise Promila that she should have a doctor look at this. It wasn’t a job for an orthopedist, anyway, and Farrokh remembered how unkindly Promila had responded to Lowji’s dismissal of Rahul’s hairlessness. Thinking of Rahul, Dr. Daruwalla wondered if his father’s diagnosis might have been hasty; possibly the hairlessness had been an early signal that something sexual needed rectifying in Rahul.

He struggled to recall the unanswered question concerning Dr. Tata. He remembered that day when Promila and Rahul had delivered the old fool to the Daruwalla estate: there’d been some speculation regarding what either Promila or Rahul would have been seeing Dr. Tata for. It was unlikely that DR TATA’S BEST, MOST FAMOUS CLINIC FOR GYNECOLOGICAL & MATERNITY NEEDS could have been treating Promila, who would never have risked her precious parts to a physician reputed to be worse than ordinary. It was Lowji who’d suggested that it might have been Rahul who was Dr. Tata’s patient. “Something to do with the hairlessness business,” the senior Daruwalla had said, hadn’t he?

Now old Dr. Tata was dead. In keeping with the more low-key times, his son, who was also an obstetrician and gynecologist, had deleted the “best, most famous” from the clinic’s name—although, as a physician, the son was reputed to be as far below ordinary as his father; within the Bombay medical community he was consistently referred to as “Tata Two.” Nevertheless, maybe Tata Two had kept his father’s records. Farrokh thought it might be interesting to know more about Rahul’s hairlessness.

It amused Dr. Daruwalla to imagine that Promila and Rahul had been so single-minded about getting Rahul a sex change that they might have assumed a gynecological surgeon was the correct doctor to ask. You don’t ask the physician who’s familiar with the parts you want, but rather the doctor who knows and understands the parts you have! A urological surgeon would be required. Dr. Daruwalla presumed there would have to be a psychiatric evaluation, too; surely no responsible physician would perform a complete sex-change operation on demand.

Then Farrokh remembered that sex-change operations were illegal in India, although this hardly prevented the hijras from castrating themselves; emasculation appeared to be the caste duty of the hijras. Apparently, Rahul suffered from no such burden of “duty”; Rahul’s choice seemed to be motivated by something else—not to be the isolated third gender of a eunuch-transvestite, but to be “complete.” An actual woman—this was what Rahul wanted to be, Dr. Daruwalla imagined.

“I suppose it was young Sidhwa who recommended the Hotel Bardez to you,” Promila coolly said to the doctor, which forced Dr. Daruwalla to remember the unlikely source of his information. Sidhwa was a young man whose tastes struck Farrokh as entirely too trendy, but in the case of the Hotel Bardez, Sidhwa had spoken with unbridled enthusiasm—and at length.

“Yes, it was Sidhwa,” the doctor replied. “I suppose he told you, too.”

Promila Rai peered down at Dr. Daruwalla in his hammock. There was in her expression a condescension of a cold, reptilian nature; there wasn’t even a flicker of pity in her gaze, but only that which passes for eagerness in a lizard’s eyes as it singles out a fly.

“I told him,” Promila told Farrokh. “The Bardez is my hotel. I’ve been coming here for years.”

Oh, what a choice I’ve made! thought Dr. Daruwalla. But Promila was through with him, at least for the moment. She simply wandered away, not standing on a single ceremony that could even faintly be associated with common politeness, although she’d certainly been exposed to good manners and she could apply such etiquette in excess whenever she chose.

So that was the bad news that he had for Julia, Farrokh thought: two detestable Duckworthians had arrived at the Hotel Bardez, which turned out to be one of their personal favorites. But the good news was A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, for Farrokh was 39 and it had been a long time since a book had so possessed his mind and body.

Dr. Daruwalla desired his wife—as suddenly, as disturbingly, as unashamedly as he’d ever desired her—and he marveled at the power of Mr. Salter’s prose to do that: both to be aesthetically pleasing and to give him far more than a simple hard-on. The novel seemed like a heroic act of seduction; it had enlivened all of the doctor’s senses.

He felt how the beach sand was cooling; at midday it had so burned underfoot that he could cross it only with his sandals on, but now he comfortably walked barefoot in the sand—it seemed an ideal temperature. He vowed to get up very early one morning so that he could also experience the sand at its coldest, but he would forget his vow. Nevertheless, these were the stirrings within him of a second honeymoon, for sure. I shall write a letter to Mr. James Salter, he resolved. The rest of his life, Dr. Daruwalla would regret his neglecting to write that letter, but on this day in June—in 1969, on Baga Beach in Goa—the doctor briefly felt like a new man. Farrokh was only one day away from meeting the stranger whose voice on his answering machine 20 years later still commanded the authority to fill him with dread.

“Is that him? Is that the doctor?” she would ask. When Farrokh had first heard those questions, he had no idea of the world he was about to enter.