A Son of the Circus

Behind Every Journey Is a Reason

It was her parents’ fault, she decided. Her name was Nancy, she came from an Iowa pig-farming family of German descent and she’d been a good girl all through high school in a small Iowa town; then she’d gone to the university in Iowa City. Because she was so blond and bosomy, she’d been a popular candidate for the cheerleading squad, although she lacked the requisite personality and wasn’t chosen; still, it was her contact with the cheerleaders that led her to meet so many football players. There was a lot of partying, which Nancy was unfamiliar with, and she’d not only slept with a boy for the first time; she’d slept with her first black person, her first Hawaiian person, and the first person she’d ever known who came from New England—he was from somewhere in Maine, or maybe it was Massachusetts.

She flunked out of the University of Iowa at the end of her first semester; when she went home to the small town she’d grown up in, she was pregnant. She thought she was still a good girl, to the degree that she submitted to her parents’ recommendation without questioning it: she would have the baby, put it up for adoption and get a job. She went to work at the local hardware store, in feed-and-grain supply, while she was still carrying the child; soon she began to doubt the wisdom of her parents’ recommendation—men her father’s age began propositioning her, while she was pregnant.

She delivered the child in Texas, where the orphanage physician never let her see it—the nurses never even let her know which sex it was—and when she came home, her parents sat her down and told her that they hoped she’d learned her “lesson”; they hoped she would “behave.” Her mother said she prayed that some decent man in the town would be “forgiving” enough to marry her, one day. Her father said that God had been “lenient” with her; he implied that God was disinclined toward leniency twice.

For a while, Nancy tried to comply, but so many men of the town attempted to seduce her—they assumed she’d be easy—and so many women were worse; they assumed she was already sleeping with everyone. This punitive experience had a strange effect on her; it didn’t make her revile the football players who’d contributed to her downfall—oddly, what she loathed most was her own innocence. She refused to believe she was immoral. What degraded her was to feel stupid. And with this feeling came an anger she was unfamiliar with—it felt foreign; yet this anger was as much a part of her as the fetus she’d carried for so long but had never seen.

She applied for a passport. When it came, she robbed the hardware store—feed-and-grain, especially—of every cent she could steal. She knew that her family originally came from Germany; she thought she should go there. The cheapest flight (from Chicago) was to Frankfurt; but if Iowa City had been too sophisticated for her, Nancy was unprepared for the enterprising young Germans who frequented the area of the Hauptbahnhof and the Kaiserstrasse, where almost immediately she met a tall, dark drug dealer named Dieter. He was enduringly small-time.

The first thrilling, albeit petty, crime he introduced her to involved her posing as a prostitute on those nasty side streets off the Kaiserstrasse—the ones named after the German rivers. She’d ask for so much money that only the wealthiest, stupidest tourist or businessman would follow her to a shabby room on the Elbestrasse or the Moselstrasse; Dieter would be waiting there. Nancy made the man pay her before she unlocked the door of the room; once they were inside, Dieter would pretend to surprise her—grabbing her roughly and throwing her on the bed, abusing her for her faithlessness and her dishonesty, threatening to kill her while the man who’d paid for her services invariably fled. Not one of the men ever tried to help her. Nancy enjoyed taking advantage of their lust, and there was something gratifying about their uniform cowardice. In her mind, she was repaying those men who’d made her feel so miserable in feed-and-grain supply.

It was Dieter’s theory that all Germans were sexually ashamed of themselves. That was why he preferred India; it was both a spiritual and a sensual country. What he meant was that, for very little, you could buy anything there. He meant women and young girls, in addition to the bhang and the ganja, but he told her only about the quality of the hashish—what he would pay for it there, and what he would get for it back in Germany. He didn’t tell her the whole plan—specifically, that her American passport and her farm-girl looks were the means by which he would get the stuff through German customs. Nancy was also the means by which he’d planned to get the Deutsche marks through Indian customs. (It was marks he took to India; it was hashish he brought back.) Dieter had made the trip with American girls before; he’d also used Canadian girls—their passports aroused even less suspicion.

With both nationalities, Dieter followed a simple procedure: he never flew on the same plane with them; he made sure they’d arrived and passed through customs before he boarded a plane for Bombay. He always told them he wanted them to recover from the jet lag in a comfortable room at the Taj, because, when he got there, they’d be doing some “serious business”; he meant they’d be staying in less conspicuous lodgings, and he knew that the bus ride from Bombay to Goa could be disagreeable. Dieter could buy what he wanted in Bombay; but, inevitably, he’d be persuaded—usually by the friend of a friend—to do his buying in Goa. The hash was more expensive there, because the European and American hippies bought up the stuff like bottled water, but the quality was more reliable. It was the quality that fetched a good price in Frankfurt.

As for the trip back to Germany, Dieter would precede the designated young woman by a day; if she were ever delayed in German customs, Dieter would take this as a sign that he shouldn’t meet her. But Dieter had a system, and not one of his young women had ever been caught—at either end.

Dieter’s women were outfitted with the kind of well-worn travel guides and paperback novels that suggested earnestness in the extreme. The travel guides were dog-eared and scribbled in to draw the attention of customs officials to those areas of cultural or historical importance so keenly boring that they attracted only graduate students in the field. As for the paperback novels, by Hermann Hesse or Lawrence Durrell, they were fairly standard indications of their readers’ proclivities for the mystical and poetic; these latter tendencies were dismissed by customs officials as the habitual concerns of young women who’d never been motivated by money. Without a profit motive, surely drug trafficking could be of no interest to them.

However, these young women were not above suspicion as occasional drug users; their personal effects were thoroughly searched for a modest stash. Not once had a shred of evidence been found. Dieter was undeniably clever; a large amount of the stuff was always successfully secreted in a dog-proof container of unflinchingly crass but basic ingenuity.

In retrospect, poor Nancy would agree that the enslavement of sexual corruption empowered all of Dieter’s other abilities. In the relative safety of the Daruwallas’ bathtub at the Hotel Bardez, Nancy supposed that she’d gone along with Dieter strictly because of the sex. Her football players had been friendly oafs, and most of the time she’d been drunk on beer. With Dieter, she smoked just the right amount of hashish or marijuana—Dieter was no oaf. He had the gaunt good looks of a young man who’d recently recovered from a life-threatening illness; had he not been murdered, he doubtless would have become one of those men who progress through a number of increasingly young and naïve women, his sexual appetite growing confused with his desire to introduce the innocent to a series of successively degrading experiences. For as soon as he gave Nancy some courage in her sexual potential, he undermined what slight self-esteem she had; he made her doubt herself and hate herself in ways she’d never thought possible.

In the beginning, Dieter had simply asked her, “What is the first sexual experience that you had some confidence in?” And when she didn’t answer him—because she was thinking to herself that masturbation was the only sexual experience that she had any confidence in—he suddenly said, “Masturbation, right?”

“Yes,” Nancy said quietly. He was very gentle with her. At first, they’d just talked about it.

“Everyone is different,” Dieter said philosophically. “You just have to learn what your own best way is.”

Then he told her some stories to relax her. One time, as an adolescent, he’d actually stolen a pair of panties from the lingerie drawer of his best friend’s mother. “When they lost whatever scent they had, I put them back in her drawer and stole a fresh pair,” he told Nancy. “The thing about masturbation was that I was always afraid I’d be caught. I knew a girl who could make it work only when she was standing up.”

Nancy told him, “I have to be lying down.”

This conversation itself was more intimate than anything she’d known. It seemed so natural, how he’d led her to show him how she masturbated. She would lie rigidly on her back with her left hand clenching her left buttock; she wouldn’t actually touch the spot (it never worked when she did). Instead, she’d rub herself just above the spot with three fingers of her right hand—her thumb and pinky finger spread like wings. She turned her face to the side and Dieter would lie beside her, kissing her, until she needed to turn away from him to breathe. When she finished, he entered her; at that point, she was always aroused.

One time, when she’d finished, he said, “Roll over on your stomach. Just wait right there. I have a surprise for you.” When he came back to their bed, he snuggled beside her, kissing her again and again—deep kisses, with his tongue—while he moved one hand underneath her until he could touch her with his fingers, exactly as she’d touched herself. The first time, she never saw the dildo.

Slowly, with the other hand, he began to work the device into her; at first she pressed herself down into his fingers, as if to get away from it, but later she lifted herself up to meet the dildo. It was very big but he never hurt her with it, and when she was so excited that she had to stop kissing him—she had to scream—he took the dildo out of her and entered her himself, from behind and with the fingers of his hand still touching her and touching her. (Compared to the dildo, Dieter was a little disappointing.)

Her parents had once warned Nancy that “experimenting with sex” could make her crazy, but the madness that Dieter had incited didn’t seem to be a dangerous madness. Still, it wasn’t the best reason to go to India.

A Memorable Arrival

There’d been some trouble with her visa, and she was worried if she’d had the right shots; because the names were in German, she hadn’t understood all the inoculations. She was sure she was taking too many antimalarial pills, but Dieter couldn’t tell her how many to take; he seemed indifferent to disease. He was more concerned that an Indian customs official would confiscate the dildo—but only if Nancy took pains to conceal it, he said. Dieter insisted that she carry it casually—with her toilet articles, in her carry-on bag. But the thing was enormous. Worse, it was of a frightening pink, mock-flesh color, and the tip, which was modeled on a circumcised penis, had a bluish tinge—like a cock left out in the cold, Nancy thought. And where the fake foreskin was rolled, there seemed to linger a residue of the lubricating jelly, which could never quite be wiped away.

Nancy put the thing in an old white athletic sock—the long kind, meant to be worn above the calf. She prayed that the Indian customs officials would ascribe to the dildo some unmentionable medicinal purpose—anything other than that most obvious purpose for which it was intended. Understandably, she wanted Dieter to take it with him, on his plane, but he pointed out to her that the customs officials would then conclude he was a homosexual; homosexuals, she should know, were routinely abused at every country’s port of entry. Dieter also told Nancy that the excessive illegal Deutsche marks were traveling with him, on his plane, and that the reason he didn’t want her flying with him was that he didn’t want her to be incriminated if he was caught.

Soaking herself in the bathtub at the Hotel Bardez, Nancy wondered why she’d believed him; with hindsight, such errors of judgment are plain to see. Nancy reflected that it hadn’t been difficult for Dieter to convince her to bring the dildo to Bombay. It hadn’t been the first time that a dildo gained such easy access to India, but what a lot of trouble this particular instrument inspired.

Nancy had never been to the East; she was introduced to it at the Bombay airport, at about 2:00 in the morning. She’d not seen men so diminished, so damaged and so transformed by turmoil, by din and by wasteful energy; their ceaseless motion and their aggressive curiosity reminded her of scurrying rats. And so many of them were barefoot. She tried to concentrate on the customs inspector, who was attended by two policemen; they weren’t barefoot. But the policemen—a couple of constables in blue shirts and wide blue shorts—were wearing the most absurd leg warmers she’d ever seen, especially in such hot weather. And she’d never seen Nehru caps on cops before.

In Frankfurt, Dieter had arranged for Nancy to be examined—in regard to the proper size for a diaphragm—but when the doctor had discovered she’d had a baby, he’d outfitted her with an intrauterine device instead. She hadn’t wanted one. When the customs inspector was examining her toiletries and one of the overseeing policemen opened a jar of her moisturizer and scooped out a gob of the cream with his finger, which the other policeman then sniffed, Nancy was grateful that there was no diaphragm or spermicidal ointment for them to play with. The constables couldn’t see or touch or smell her IUD.

But of course there was the dildo, which lay untouched in the long athletic sock while the policemen and the customs inspector pawed through the clothes in her rucksack and emptied her carry-on bag, which was really just an oversized imitation-leather purse. One of the policemen picked up the battered paperback copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Clea, the fourth novel of the Alexandria Quartet, of which Dieter had read only the first, Justine. Nancy hadn’t read any of them; but the novel was dog-eared where the last reader had presumably stopped reading, and it was at this marked page that the constable opened the book, his eyes quickly finding that passage which Dieter had underlined in pencil for just such an occasion. In truth, this copy of Clea had made the trip to India and the return trip to Germany with two of Dieter’s other women, neither of whom had read the novel or even the passage Dieter had marked. He’d chosen the particular passage because it would doubtless identify the reader to any international customs authority as a harmless fool.

The policeman was so stymied by the passage that he handed the book to his fellow constable, who looked stricken, as if he’d been asked to crack an indecipherable code; he, too, passed the book on. It was the customs inspector who finally read the passage. Nancy watched the clumsy, involuntary movement of the man’s lips, as if he were isolating olive pits. Gradually the words, or something like the words, emerged aloud; they frankly seemed incomprehensible to Nancy. She couldn’t imagine what the customs inspector and the constables made of them.

“‘The whole quarter lay drowsing in the umbrageous violet of approaching nightfall,’” the customs inspector read. “‘A sky of palpitating velours which was cut into by the stark flare of a thousand electric light bulbs. It lay over Tatwig Street, that night, like a velvet rind.’” The customs inspector stopped reading, looking like a man who’d just eaten something odd. One of the policemen stared angrily at the book, as if he felt compelled to confiscate it or destroy it on the spot, but the other constable was as distracted as a bored child; he picked up the dildo in the athletic sock and unsheathed the giant penis as one would unsheathe a sword. The sock drooped limply in the policeman’s left hand while his right hand grasped the great cock at its root, at the rock-hard pair of makeshift balls.

Suddenly seeing what he held, the policeman quickly extended the dildo to his fellow constable, who took hold of the instrument by the rolled foreskin before he recognized the exaggerated male member, which he instantly handed to the customs inspector. Still holding Clea in his left hand, the customs inspector seized the dildo at the scrotum; then he dropped the novel and snatched the sock from the first, gaping policeman. But the impressive penis was more difficult to sheathe than to unsheathe, and in his haste the customs inspector inserted the instrument the wrong way. Thus were the balls jammed into the heel of the sock, where they made an awkward lump—they didn’t fit—and the bluish tip of the thing (the circumcised head) protruded loosely from the open end of the sock. The hole at the end of the enormous cock appeared to stare out at the constables and the customs inspector like the proverbial evil eye.

“Where you stay?” one of the policemen asked Nancy. He was furiously wiping his hand on his leg warmers—a trace of the lubricating jelly, perhaps.

“Always carry your own bag,” the other constable advised her.

“Agree to a price with the taxi-walla before you get in the car,” the first policeman said.

The customs inspector wouldn’t look at her. She’d expected something worse; surely the dildo would provoke leering—at least rude or suggestive laughter, she’d thought. But she was in the land of the lingam—or so she imagined. Wasn’t the phallic symbol worshiped here? Nancy thought she’d read that the penis was a symbol of Lord Shiva. Maybe what Nancy carried in her purse was as realistic (albeit exaggerated) a lingam as these men had ever seen. Maybe she’d made an unholy use of such a symbol—was that why these men wanted nothing to do with her? But the constables and the customs inspector weren’t thinking of lingams or Lord Shiva; they were simply appalled at the portable penis.

Poor Nancy was left to find her own way out of the airport and into the shrill cries of the taxi-wallas. An unending lineup of taxis extended into the infernal blackness of this outlying district of Bombay; except for the oasis, which was the airport, there were no lights in Santa Cruz—there was no Sahar in 1969. It was then about 3:00 in the morning.

Nancy had to haggle with her taxi-walla over the fare into Bombay. After she arranged the prepaid trip, she still encountered some difficulty with her driver; he was a Tamil, apparently new to Bombay. He claimed to not understand Hindi or Marami; it was in uncertain English that Nancy heard him asking the other taxi-wallas for directions to the Taj.

“Lady, you don’t want to go with him,” one of the taxi-wallas told her, but she’d already paid and was sitting in the back seat of the taxi.

As they drove toward the city, the Tamil continued a lengthy debate with another Tamil driver who drove his taxi perilously close to theirs; for several miles, they drove like this—past the unlit slums in the predawn, immeasurable darkness, wherein the slum dwellers were distinguishable only by the smell of their excrement and their dead or dying fires. (What were they burning? Rubbish?) When the sidewalks on the outskirts of Bombay first appeared, still without electric light, the two Tamils raced side by side—even through the traffic circles, those wild roundabouts—their discourse progressing from an argument to a shouting match to threats, which sounded (even in Tamil) quite dire to Nancy.

The seemingly unconcerned passengers in the other Tamil’s taxi were a well-dressed British couple in their forties. Nancy guessed they were also headed to the Taj, and that this coincidence lay at the heart of the dispute between the two Tamils. (Dieter had warned her of this common practice: two drivers with two separate fares, headed for the same place. Naturally, one of the drivers was attempting to persuade the other to carry both fares.)

At a traffic light, the two stopped taxis were suddenly surrounded by barking dogs—starving curs, all snapping at one another—and Nancy imagined that, if one jumped through the open window at her, she could club it with the dildo. This passing idea perhaps prepared her for what happened at the next intersection, where again the light was against them; while they waited this time, they were slowly approached by beggars instead of dogs. The shouting Tamils had attracted some of the sidewalk sleepers, whose mounded bodies under their light-colored clothing could be dimly seen to contrast with the darkened streets and buildings. First a man in a ragged, filthy dhoti stuck his arm in Nancy’s window. Nancy noticed that the prim British couple—not in fear but out of sheer obstinacy—had closed their windows, despite the moist heat. Nancy thought she would suffocate if she closed hers.

Instead, she spoke sharply to her driver—to go! After all, the light had changed. But her Tamil and the other Tamil were too engrossed in their confrontation to obey the traffic signal. Her Tamil ignored her, and, to Nancy’s further irritation, the other Tamil now coerced his British passengers into the street; he was beckoning to them that they must join Nancy in her cab, exactly as Dieter had foretold.

Nancy shouted at her driver, who turned to her and shrugged; she shouted out the window to the other Tamil, who shouted back at her. Nancy shouted to the British couple that they shouldn’t allow themselves to be so taken advantage of; they should demand of their driver that he bring them to their prearranged, prepaid destination.

“Don’t let the bastards screw you!” Nancy shouted. Then she realized that she was waving the dildo at them; to be sure, it was still in the sock and they didn’t know it was a dildo; they could only suppose she was an hysterical young woman threatening them with a sock.

Nancy slid over in her seat. “Please get in,” she said to the British couple, but when they opened the door, Nancy’s driver protested. He even jerked the car a little forward. Nancy tapped him on his shoulder with the dildo—still in the sock. Her driver looked indifferent; his counterpart was already stuffing the British couple’s luggage into the trunk as the twosome squeezed into the seat beside her.

Nancy was pressed against the window when a beggar woman pushed a baby in the window and held it in front of her face; the child was foul-smelling, unmoving, expressionless—it looked half dead. Nancy raised the dildo, but what could she do? Whom should she hit? Instead, she screamed at the woman, who indignantly withdrew the baby from the taxi. Maybe it wasn’t even her baby, Nancy considered; possibly it was just a baby that people used for begging. Perhaps it wasn’t even a real baby.

Ahead of them, two young men were supporting a drunken or a drugged companion. They paused in crossing the road, as if they weren’t sure that the taxi had stopped. But the taxi was stopped, and Nancy was incensed that her driver and the other Tamil were still arguing. She leaned forward and brought the dildo down across the back of her driver’s neck. That was when the sock flew off. The driver turned to face her. She struck him squarely on his nose with the huge cock in her hand.

“Drive on!” she shouted at the Tamil. Suitably impressed with the giant penis, he lurched the taxi forward—through the traffic light, which had turned red again. Fortunately, no other traffic was on the street. Unfortunately, the two young men and their slumped companion were directly in the taxi’s path. At first, it seemed to Nancy that all three of them were hit. Later, she distinctly remembered that two of them had run away, although she couldn’t say that she’d actually seen the impact; she must have closed her eyes.

While the Englishman helped the driver put the body in the front seat of the taxi, Nancy realized that the young man who’d been hit was the one who’d appeared to be drunk or drugged. It never occurred to her that the young man might already have been dead when the car hit him. But this was the subject of the Englishman’s conversation with the Tamil driver: had the boy or young man been pushed into the path of the taxi deliberately, and was he even conscious before the taxi struck him?

“He looked dead,” the Englishman kept saying.

“Yes, he is dying before!” the Tamil shouted. “I am not killing him!”

“Is he dead now?” Nancy asked quietly.

“Oh, definitely,” the Englishman replied. Like the customs inspector, he wouldn’t look at her, but the Englishman’s wife was staring at Nancy, who still clutched the fierce dildo in her fist. Still not looking at her, the Englishman handed her the sock. She covered the weapon and returned it to her big purse.

“Is this your first visit to India?” the Englishwoman asked her, while the crazed Tamil drove them faster and faster through the streets now more and more blessed with electric light; the colorful mounds of the sidewalk sleepers were visible all around them. “In Bombay, half the population sleeps on the streets—but it’s really quite safe here,” the Englishwoman said. Nancy’s pinched expression implied to the British couple that she was a newcomer to the city and its smells. Actually, it was the lingering smell of the baby that pinched Nancy’s face—how something so small could reek with such force.

The body in the front seat made its deadness known. The young man’s head lolled lifelessly, his shoulders impossibly slack. Whenever the Tamil braked or cornered, the body responded as heavily as a bag of sand. Nancy was grateful that she couldn’t see the young man’s face, which was making a dull sound against the windshield—his face rested flush against the glass—until the Tamil cornered again and then accelerated.

Still not looking at Nancy, the Englishman said, “Don’t mind the body, dear.” It seemed unclear whether he’d spoken to Nancy or to his wife.

“It doesn’t bother me,” his wife answered.

Over Marine Drive, a thick smog hung suspended, as warm as a woolen shroud; the Arabian Sea was veiled, but the Englishwoman pointed to where the sea should have been. “Out there is the ocean,” she told Nancy, who began to gag. Overhead, on the lampposts, not even the advertisements were visible in the smog. The lights strung along Marine Drive weren’t smog lights, then; they were white, not yellow.

In the careening taxi, the Englishman pointed out the window into the veil of smog. “This is the Queen’s Necklace,” he told Nancy. As the taxi raced on, he added—more to assure himself and his wife than to comfort Nancy—“Well, we’re almost there.”

“I’m going to throw up,” Nancy said.

“If you don’t think about being sick, dear, you won’t be sick,” the Englishwoman said.

The taxi departed Marine Drive for the narrower, winding streets; the three living passengers leaned in to the corners, and the dead boy in the front seat appeared to come alive. His head walloped the side window; he slid forward and his face glanced off the windshield, skidding him into the Tamil driver, who elbowed the body away. The young man’s hands flew up to his face, as if he’d just remembered something important. Then, once again, the boy’s body appeared to forget everything.

There were whistles, piercing sharp and loud: these were the sounds of the tall Sikh doormen who directed the traffic at the Taj, but Nancy was searching for some evidence of the police. Nearby, at the looming Gateway of India, Nancy thought she’d seen some sort of police activity; there were lights, the sound of hysterics, a sort of disturbance. At first, some beggar urchins were reputed to be the cause; the story was, they’d failed to beg a single rupee from a young Swedish couple who’d been photographing the Gateway of India with an ostentatious and professional use of bright-white lights and reflectors. Hence the urchins had urinated on the Gateway of India in an effort to spoil the picture, and when they’d failed to gain suitable attention from the foreigners—the Swedes allegedly found this demonstration symbolically interesting—the urchins then attempted to urinate on the photographic equipment, and that was the cause of the ruckus. But further investigation would reveal that the Swedes had paid the beggars to pee on the Gateway of India, which had little effect—the Gateway of India was already soiled. The urchins had never attempted to pee on the Swedes’ photographic equipment; that would have been far too bold for them—they’d merely complained that they weren’t paid enough for pissing on the Gateway of India. That was the true cause of the ruckus.

Meanwhile, the dead boy in the taxi had to wait. In the driveway of the Taj, the Tamil driver became hysterical; a dead man had been thrown into the path of his car—apparently, there was a dent. The British couple confided to a policeman that the Tamil had run a red light (upon being struck by a dildo). The policeman was the bewildered constable who’d finally freed himself from the crime of urination at the Gateway of India. It wasn’t clear to Nancy if the British couple was blaming her for the accident, if it even had been an accident. After all, the Tamil and the Englishman agreed that the boy had looked dead before the taxi hit him. What was clear to Nancy was that the policeman didn’t know what a “dildo” was.

“A penis—a rather large one,” the Englishman explained to the constable.

“She?” the policeman asked, pointing to Nancy. “She is hitting the taxi-walla with a what?”

“You’ll have to show him, dear,” the Englishwoman told Nancy.

“I’m not showing him anything,” Nancy said.

Our Friend, the Real Policeman

It took an hour before Nancy was free to register in the hotel. A half hour later—she’d just finished soaking in a hot bath—a second policeman came to her room. This one wasn’t a constable—no blue shorts a yard wide, no silly leg warmers. This one wasn’t another nerd in a Nehru cap; he wore an officer’s cap with the Maharashtrian police insignia and a khaki shirt, long khaki pants, black shoes, a revolver. It was the duty officer from the Colaba Police Station, which has jurisdiction over the Taj. Without his jowls, but even then sporting that pencil-thin mustache—and 20 years before he would have occasion to question Dr. Daruwalla and Inspector Dhar at the Duckworth Club—the young Inspector Patel gave a good first impression of himself. A future deputy commissioner could be discerned in the young policeman’s composure.

Inspector Patel was aggressive but courteous, and even in his twenties he was an intimidating detective in the way that he invited a certain misunderstanding of his questions. His manner persuaded you to believe that he already knew the answers to many of the questions he asked, although he usually didn’t; thus he encouraged you to tell the truth by implying that he already knew it. And his method of questioning carried the added implication that, within your answers, Inspector Patel could discern your moral character.

In her current state, Nancy was vulnerable to such an uncommonly proper and pleasant-looking young man. To sympathize with Nancy’s situation: Inspector Patel did not present himself as a person whom even a brazen or a supremely self-confident young woman would choose to show a dildo to. Also, it was about 5:00 in the morning. There may have been some eager early risers who were heralding the sunrise that—when viewed across the water, and perfectly framed in the arch of the Gateway of India—could still summon the vainglorious days of the British Raj, but poor Nancy wasn’t among them. Besides, her only windows and the small balcony didn’t afford her a view of the sea. Dieter had arranged for one of the cheaper rooms.

Below her, in the gray-brown light, was the usual gathering of beggars—child performers, for the most part. Those international travelers who were still staggered by jet lag would find these early-morning urchins their first contact with India in the light of day.

Nancy sat at the foot of her bed in her bathrobe. The inspector sat in the only chair not strewn with her clothes or her bags. They could both hear the emptying of Nancy’s bath. Highly visible, as Dieter had advised, were the used-looking but unused guidebook and the unread novel by Lawrence Durrell.

It was not uncommon, the inspector told her, for someone to be murdered and then shoved in front of a moving car. In this case, what was unusual was that the hoax had been so obvious.

“Not to me,” Nancy told him. She explained that she’d not seen the moment of impact; she’d thought all three of them were hit—probably because she’d shut her eyes.

The Englishwoman hadn’t observed the moment of impact, either, Inspector Patel informed Nancy. “She was looking at you instead,” the policeman explained.

“Oh, I see,” Nancy said.

The Englishman was quite sure that a body—at least an unconscious body, if not a dead one—had been pushed into the path of the oncoming car. “But the taxi-walla doesn’t know what he saw,” said Inspector Patel. “The Tamil keeps changing his story.” When Nancy continued to stare blankly at him, the policeman added, “The driver says he was distracted.”

“By what?” Nancy asked, although she knew by what.

“By what you hit him with,” Inspector Patel replied.

There was an uncomfortable pause while the policeman looked from chair to chair, surveying her emptied bags, the two books, her clothes. Nancy thought he must be at least five years older than she was, although he looked younger. His self-assurance made him seem disarmingly grown-up; yet he didn’t exhibit the cocksure arrogance of cops. Inspector Patel didn’t swagger; there was something in his controlled mannerisms that came from an absolute correctness of purpose. What struck Nancy as his pure goodness was riveting. And she thought he was a wonderful coffee-and-cream color; he had the blackest hair—and such a thin, perfectly edged mustache that Nancy wanted to touch it.

The overall nattiness of the young man stood in obvious contrast to that absence of vanity which is commonly associated with a happily married man. Here in the Taj, in the presence of such a buxom blonde in her bathrobe, Inspector Patel was obviously unmarried; he was as alert to the details of his appearance as he was to every inch of Nancy, and to the particular revelations of Nancy’s room. She didn’t realize he was looking for the dildo.

“May I see the thing you hit the taxi-walla with?” the inspector asked finally. God knows how the idiot Tamil had described it. Nancy went to get it from the bathroom, having decided to keep it with her toilet articles. God knows what the British couple had told the inspector. If the inspector had talked to them, they’d doubtless described her as a rude young woman brandishing an enormous cock.

Nancy gave the dildo to Inspector Patel, and again sat down at the foot of her bed. The young policeman politely handed the instrument back without looking at her.

“I’m sorry—it was necessary for me to see it,” Inspector Patel said. “I was having some difficulty imagining it,” he explained.

“Both drivers were paid their fares at the airport,” Nancy told him. “I don’t like to be cheated,” she said.

“It’s not the easiest country for a woman traveling alone,” the inspector said. By the quick way he glanced at her, she understood this was a question.

“Friends are meeting me,” Nancy told him. “I’m just waiting for them to call.” (Dieter had advised her to say this; anyone assessing her student clothing and her cheap bags would know that she couldn’t afford many nights at the Taj.)

“So will you be traveling with your friends or staying in Bombay?” the inspector asked her.

Nancy recognized her advantage. As long as she held the dildo, the young policeman would find it awkward to look in her eyes.

“I’ll do what they do,” she said indifferently. She held the penis in her lap; with the slightest movement of her wrist, she discovered, she could tap the circumcised head against her bare knee. But it was her bare feet that appeared to transfix Inspector Patel; perhaps it was their impossible whiteness, or else their improbable size—even bare, Nancy’s feet were bigger than the inspector’s little shoes.

Nancy stared at him without mercy. She enjoyed the prominent bones in his sharply featured face; it would have been impossible for her to look at his face and imagine it—even in 20 years—with jowls. She thought he had the blackest eyes and the longest eyelashes.

Still staring at Nancy’s feet, Inspector Patel spoke forlornly: “I suppose there’s no known phone number or an address where I could reach you.”

Nancy felt she understood everything that attracted her to him. She’d certainly tried hard to lose her innocence in Iowa, but the football players hadn’t touched it. She’d spoiled her real innocence in Germany, with Dieter, and now it was lost for good. But here was a man who was still innocent. She probably both frightened and attracted him—if he even knew it, Nancy thought.

“Do you want to see me again?” she asked him. She thought the question was ambiguous enough, but he stared at her feet—with both longing and horror, she imagined.

“But you couldn’t identify the two other men, even if we found them,” said Inspector Patel.

“I could identify the other taxi driver,” Nancy said.

“We’ve already got him,” the inspector told her.

Nancy stood up from the bed and carried the dildo to the bathroom. When she came back, Inspector Patel was at the window, watching the beggars. She didn’t want to have any advantage over him anymore. Maybe she was imagining that the inspector had fallen hopelessly in love with her and that, if she shoved him on the bed and fell on top of him, he would worship her and be her slave forever. Maybe it wasn’t even him she wanted; possibly it was only his obvious propriety, and only because she felt she’d given away her essential goodness and would never get it back.

Then it struck her that he was no longer interested in her feet; he kept glancing at her hands. Even though she’d put away the dildo, he wouldn’t look in her eyes.

“Do you want to see me again?” Nancy repeated. There was no ambiguity to her question now. She stood closer to him than was necessary, but he ignored the question by pointing to the child performers far below them.

“Always the same stunts—they never change,” Inspector Patel remarked. Nancy refused to look at the beggars; she continued to stare at Inspector Patel.

“You could give me your phone number,” she said. “Then I could call you.”

“But why would you?” the inspector asked her. He kept watching the beggars. Nancy turned away from him and stretched out on the bed. She lay on her stomach with the robe gathered tightly around her. She thought about her blond hair; she thought it must look nice, spread out on the pillows, but she didn’t know if Inspector Patel was looking at her. She just knew that her voice would be muffled by the pillows, and that he’d have to come closer to the bed in order to hear her.

“What if I need you?” she asked him. “What if I get in some trouble and need the police?”

“That young man was strangled,” Inspector Patel told her; by the sound of his voice, she knew he was near her.

Nancy kept her face buried in the pillows, but she reached out to the sides of the bed with her hands. She’d been thinking that she’d never learn anything about the dead boy—not even if the act of killing him had been wicked and full of hatred or merely inadvertent. Now she knew—the young man couldn’t have been inadvertently strangled.

“I didn’t strangle him,” Nancy said.

“I know that,” said Inspector Patel. When he touched her hand, she lay absolutely motionless; then his touch was gone. In a second, she heard him in the bathroom. It sounded as if he was running a bath.

“You have big hands,” he called to her. She didn’t move. “The boy was strangled by someone with small hands. Probably another boy, but maybe a woman.”

“You suspected me” Nancy said; she couldn’t tell if he’d heard her over the running bathwater. “I said, you suspected me—until you saw my hands,” Nancy called to him.

He shut the water off. The tub couldn’t be very full, Nancy thought.

“I suspect everybody,” Inspector Patel said, “but I didn’t really suspect you of strangling the boy.”

Nancy was simply too curious; she got up from the bed and went to the bathroom. Inspector Patel was sitting on the edge of the tub, watching the dildo float around and around like a toy boat.

“Just as I thought—it floats,” he said. Then he submerged it; he held it under the water for almost a full minute, never taking his eyes off it. “No bubbles,” he said. “It floats because it’s hollow,” he told her. “But if it came apart—if you could open it—there would be bubbles. I thought it would come apart.” He let the water out of the tub and wiped the dildo dry with a towel. “One of your friends called while you were registering,” Inspector Patel told Nancy. “He didn’t want to speak with you—he just wanted to know if you’d checked in.” Nancy was blocking the bathroom door; the inspector paused for her to get out of his way. “Usually, this means that someone is interested to know if you’ve passed safely through customs. Therefore, I thought you were bringing something in. But you weren’t, were you?”

“No,” Nancy managed to say.

“Well, then, as I leave, I’ll tell the hotel to give you your messages directly,” the inspector said.

“Thank you,” Nancy replied.

He’d already opened the door to the hall before he handed her his card. “Do call me if you get into any trouble,” he told her. She chose to stare at the card; it was better than watching him leave. There were several printed phone numbers, one circled with a ballpoint pen, and his printed name and title.

Nancy didn’t know how far from home Vijay Patel was. When his whole family had left Gujarat for Kenya, Vijay had come to Bombay. For a Gujarati to make any headway on a Maharashtrian police force was no small accomplishment; but the Gujarati Patels in Vijay’s family were merchants—they wouldn’t have been impressed. Vijay was as cut off from them—they were in business in Nairobi—as Nancy was from Iowa.

After she’d read and reread the policeman’s card, Nancy went out to the balcony and watched the beggars for a while. The children were enterprising performers, and there was a monotony to their stunts that was soothing. Like most foreigners, she was easily impressed by the contortionists.

Occasionally, one of the guests would throw an orange to the child performers, or a banana; some threw coins. Nancy thought it was cruel the way a crippled boy, with one leg and a padded crutch, was always beaten by the other children when he attempted to hop and stagger ahead of them to the money or the fruit. She didn’t realize that the cripple’s role was choreographed; he was central to the dramatic action. He was also older than the other children, and he was their leader; in reality, he could beat up the other children—and, on occasion, had.

But the pathos was unfamiliar to Nancy and she looked for something to throw to him; all she could find was a 10-rupee note. This was too much money to give to a beggar, but she didn’t know any better. She weighted the bill down with two bobby pins and stood on the balcony with the money held above her head until she caught the crippled boy’s attention.

“Hey, lady!” he called. Some of the child performers paused in their handstands and their contortions, and Nancy sailed the 10-rupee note into the air; it rose briefly in an updraft before it floated down. The children ran back and forth, trying to be in the right place to catch it. The crippled boy appeared content to let one of the other children grab the money.

“No, it’s for you—for you!” Nancy cried to him, but he ignored her. A tall girl, one of the contortionists, caught the 10-rupee note; she was so surprised at the amount, she didn’t hand it over to the crippled boy quite quickly enough, and so he struck her in the small of her back with his crutch—a blow with sufficient force to knock her to her hands and knees. Then the cripple snatched up the money and hopped away from the girl, who had begun crying.

Nancy realized that she’d disrupted the usual drama; somehow she was at fault. As the beggars scattered, one of the tall Sikh doormen from the Taj approached the crying girl. He carried a long wooden pole with a gleaming brass hook on one end—it was a transom pole, for opening and closing the transom windows above the tall doors—and the doorman used this pole to lift the ragged skirt of the girl’s torn and filthy dress. He deftly exposed her before she could snatch the skirt of her dress between her legs and cover herself. Then he poked the girl in the chest with the brass end of the pole, and when she tried to stand, he whacked her hard in the small of her back, exactly where the cripple had hit her with his crutch. The girl cried out. Then she scurried away from the Sikh on all fours. He was skillful in pursuing her—at herding her with sharp jabs and thrusts with the pole. Finally, she got to her feet and outran him.

The Sikh had a dark, spade-shaped beard flecked with silver, and he wore a dark-red turban; he shouldered the transom pole like a rifle, and he cast a cursory glance to Nancy on her balcony. She retreated into her room; she was sure he could see under her bathrobe and straight up her crotch—he was directly below her. But the balcony itself prevented such a view. Nancy imagined things.

Obviously, there were rules, she thought. The beggars could beg, but they couldn’t cry; it was too early in the morning, and crying would wake the guests who were managing to sleep. Nancy instantly ordered the most American thing she could find on the room-service menu—scrambled eggs and toast—and when they brought her tray, she saw two sealed envelopes propped between the orange juice and the tea. Her heart jumped because she hoped they were declarations of undying love from Inspector Patel. But one was the message from Dieter that the inspector had intercepted; it said simply that Dieter had called. He was glad she’d arrived safely—he’d see her soon. And the other was a printed request from the hotel management, asking her to kindly refrain from throwing things out her window.

She was ravenous, and as soon as she’d finished eating, she was sleepy. She closed the curtains against the light of day and turned up the ceiling fan as fast as it would go. For a while she lay awake, thinking of Inspector Patel. She even toyed with the idea of Dieter being caught with the money as he tried to pass through customs. Nancy was still naïve enough to imagine that the Deutsche marks were coming into the country with Dieter. It hadn’t even crossed her mind that she’d already brought the money in.

The Unwitting Courier

It seemed to her that she slept for days. It was dark when she woke. She would never know if it was the predawn darkness of the next day, or the predawn of the day after that. She awoke to some sort of commotion in the hall outside her room; someone was trying to get in, but she’d double-locked the door and there was a safety chain, too. She got out of bed. There, in the hall, was Dieter; he was surly to the porter, whom he sent away without a tip. Once inside the room, but only after he’d double-locked the door and hooked the safety chain in place, he turned to her and asked her where the dildo was. This wasn’t exactly gallant of him, Nancy thought, but in her sleepiness she supposed it was merely his aggressive way of being amorous. She pointed to it in the bathroom.

Then she opened her robe and let it slip off her shoulders and fall at her feet; she stood in the bathroom doorway, expecting him to kiss her, or at least look at her. Dieter held the dildo over the sink; he appeared to be heating the unnatural head of the penis with his cigarette lighter. Nancy woke up in a hurry. She picked up her bathrobe and put it back on; she stepped away from the bathroom door, but she could still observe Dieter. He was careful not to let the flame blacken the dildo, and he concentrated the heat not at the tip but at the place where the fake foreskin was rolled. It then appeared to Nancy that he was slowly melting the dildo; she realized that there was a substance, like wax, dripping into the sink. Where the fake foreskin was rolled, there emerged a thin line, circumscribing the head. When Dieter had melted the wax seal, he ran the tip of the big penis under cold water and then grasped the circumcised head with a towel. He needed quite a lot of force to unscrew the dildo, which was as hollow as Inspector Patel had observed. The wax seal had prevented any air from escaping; there’d been no bubbles underwater. Inspector Patel had been half right; he’d looked in the right place, but not in the right way—a young policeman’s error.

Inside the dildo, rolled very tightly, were thousands of Deutsche marks. For the return trip to Germany, quite a lot of high-quality hashish could be packed very tightly in such a big dildo; the wax seal would prevent the dogs at German customs from smelling the Indian hemp inside.

Nancy sat at the foot of the bed while Dieter removed a roll of marks from the dildo and spread the bills out flat in his hand. Then he zipped the marks into a money belt, which was around his waist under his shirt. He left several sizable rolls of marks in the dildo, which he reassembled; he screwed the tip on tight, but he didn’t bother resealing it with wax. The line where the thing unscrewed was barely visible anyway; it was partially hidden by the fake foreskin. When Dieter had finished with this, his chief concern, he undressed and filled the bathtub. It wasn’t until he settled into the tub that Nancy spoke to him.

“What would have happened to me if I’d been caught?” she asked him.

“But they wouldn’t have caught you, babe,” Dieter told her. He’d picked up the “babe” from watching American movies, he said.

“Couldn’t you have told me?” Nancy asked him.

“Then you would have been nervous,” Dieter said. “Then they would have caught you.”

After his bath, he rolled a joint, which they smoked together; although Nancy thought she was being cautious, she got higher than she wanted to, and just a little disoriented. It was strong stuff; Dieter assured her that it was by no means the best stuff—it was just something he’d bought en route from the airport.

“I made a little detour,” he told her. She was too stoned to ask him where he could have gone at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and he didn’t bother to tell her that he’d gone to a brothel in Kamathipura. He’d bought the stuff from the madam, and while he was at it he’d fucked a 13-year-old prostitute for only five rupees. He was told she was the only girl not with a customer at the time, and Dieter had fucked her standing up, in a kind of hall, because all the cots in all the cubicles were occupied—or so the madam had said.

After Dieter and Nancy smoked the joint, Dieter was able to encourage Nancy to masturbate; it seemed to her that it took a long time, and she couldn’t remember him leaving the bed to get the dildo. Later, when he was asleep, she lay awake and thought for a while about the thousands of Deutsche marks that were inside the thing that had been inside her. She decided not to tell Dieter about the murdered boy or Inspector Patel. She got out of bed and made sure the card the inspector had given her was well concealed among her clothes. She didn’t go back to bed; she was standing on the balcony at dawn when the first of the beggars arrived. After a while, the same child performers were perfectly in place, like figures painted by the daylight itself—even the crippled boy with his padded crutch. He waved to her. It was so early, he was careful not to call too loudly, but Nancy could hear him distinctly.

“Hey, lady!”

He made her cry. She went back inside the room and watched Dieter while he was sleeping. She thought again about the thousands of Deutsche marks; she wanted to throw them out the window to the child performers, but it frightened her to imagine what a terrible scene she might cause. She went into the bathroom and tried to unscrew the dildo to count how many marks were inside, but Dieter had screwed the thing too tightly together. This was probably deliberate, she realized; at last, she was learning.

She went through his clothes, looking for the money belt—she thought she could count how many marks were there—but she couldn’t find it. She lifted the bedsheet and saw that Dieter was naked except for the money belt. It worried her that she couldn’t remember falling asleep, nor could she remember Dieter getting out of bed to put the money belt on. She would have to be more careful, she thought. Nancy was beginning to appreciate the extent to which Dieter might be willing to use her; she worried that she’d developed a morbid curiosity about how far he would go.

Nancy found it calming to speculate about Inspector Patel. She indulged herself with the comforting notion that she could turn to the inspector if she needed him, if she was really in trouble. Although the morning was intensely bright, Nancy didn’t close the curtains; in the light of day, it was easier for her to imagine that leaving Dieter was merely a matter of picking the right time. And if things get too bad, Nancy thought to herself, I can just pick up the phone and ask for Vijay Patel—Police Inspector, Colaba Station.

But Nancy had never been to the East. She didn’t know where she was. She had no idea.