A Son of the Circus

Four Baths

In Bombay, in his bedroom, where Dr. Daruwalla sat shivering in Julia’s embrace, the unresolved nature of the majority of the doctor’s phone messages depressed him: Ranjit’s peevish complaints about the dwarf’s wife; Deepa’s expectations regarding the potential bonelessness of a child prostitute; Vinod’s fear of the first-floor dogs; Father Cecil’s consternation that none of the Jesuits at St. Ignatius knew exactly when Dhar’s twin was arriving; and director Balraj Gupta’s greedy desire to release the new Inspector Dhar movie in the midst of the murders inspired by the last Inspector Dhar movie. To be sure, there was the familiar voice of the woman who tried to sound like a man and who repeatedly relished the details of old Lowji’s car bombing; this message wasn’t lacking in resolution, but it was muted by excessive repetition. And Detective Patel’s cool delivery of the news that he had a private matter to discuss didn’t sound “unresolved” to the doctor; although Dr. Daruwalla may not have known what the message meant, the deputy commissioner seemed to have made up his mind about the matter. But all these things were only mildly depressing in comparison to Farrokh’s memory of the big blonde with her bad foot.

“Liebchen,” Julia whispered to her husband. “We shouldn’t leave John D. alone. Think about the hippie another time.”

Both to break him from his trance and as a physical reminder of her affection for him, Julia squeezed Farrokh. She simply hugged him, more or less in the area of his lower chest, or just above his little beer belly. It surprised her how her husband winced in pain. The sharp tweak in his side—it must have been a rib—instantly reminded Dr. Daruwalla of his collision with the second Mrs. Dogar in the foyer of the Duckworth Club. Farrokh then told Julia the story: how the vulgar woman’s body was as hard as a stone wall.

“But you said you fell down,” Julia told him. “I would guess it was your contact with the stone floor that caused your injury.”

“No! It was that damn woman herself—her body is a rock!” Dr. Daruwalla said. “Mr. Dogar was knocked down, too! Only that crude woman was left standing.”

“Well, she’s supposed to be a fitness freak,” Julia replied.

“She’s a weight lifter!” Farrokh said. Then he remembered that the second Mrs. Dogar had reminded him of someone—definitely a long-ago movie star, he decided. He imagined that one night he would discover who it was on the videocassette recorder; both in Bombay and in Toronto, he had so many tapes of old movies that it was hard for him to remember how he’d lived before the VCR.

Farrokh sighed and his sore rib responded with a little twinge of pain.

“Let me rub some liniment on you, Liebchen,” Julia said.

“Liniment is for muscles—it was my rib she hurt,” the doctor complained.

Although Julia still favored the theory that the stone floor was the source of her husband’s pain, she humored him. “Was it Mrs. Dogar’s shoulder or her elbow that hit you?” she asked.

“You’re going to think it’s funny,” Farrokh admitted to Julia, “but I swear I ran right into her bosom.”

“Then it’s no wonder she hurt you, Liebchen,” Julia replied. It was Julia’s opinion that the second Mrs. Dogar had no bosom to speak of.

Dr. Daruwalla could sense his wife’s impatience on John D.’s behalf, but less for the fact that Inspector Dhar had been left alone than that the dear boy hadn’t been forewarned of the pending arrival of his twin. Yet even this dilemma struck the doctor as trivial—as insubstantial as the second Mrs. Dogar’s bosom—in comparison to the big blonde in the bathtub at the Hotel Bardez. Twenty years couldn’t lessen the impact of what had happened to Dr. Daruwalla there, for it had changed him more than anything in his whole life had changed him, and the long-ago memory of it endured unfaded, although he’d never returned to Goa. All other beach resorts had been ruined for him by the unpleasant association.

Julia recognized her husband’s expression. She could see how far away he was; she knew exactly where he was. Although she wanted to reassure John D. that the doctor would join them soon, it would have been heartless of her to leave her husband; dutifully, she remained seated beside him. Sometimes she thought she ought to tell him that it was his own curiosity that had got him into trouble. But this wasn’t entirely a fair accusation; dutifully, she remained silent. Her own memory, although it didn’t torture her with the same details that made the doctor miserable, was surprisingly vivid. She could still see Farrokh on the balcony of the Hotel Bardez, where he’d been as restless and bored as a little boy.

“What a long bath the hippie is taking!” the doctor had said to his wife.

“She looked like she needed a long bath, Liebchen,” Julia had told him. That was when Farrokh pulled the hippie’s rucksack closer to him and peered into the top of it; the top wouldn’t quite close.

“Don’t look at her things!” Julia told him.

“It’s just a book,” Farrokh said; he pulled the copy of Clea from the top of the rucksack. “I was just curious to know what she was reading.”

“Put it back,” Julia said.

“I will!” the doctor said, but he was reading the marked passage, the same bit about the “umbrageous violet” and the “velvet rind” that one customs official and two policemen had already found so spellbinding. “She has a poetic sensibility,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

“I find that hard to believe,” Julia told him. “Put it back!”

But putting the book back presented the doctor with a new difficulty: something was in the way.

“Stop groping through her things!” Julia said.

“The damn book doesn’t fit,” Farrokh said. “I’m not groping through her things.” An overpowering mustiness embraced him from the depths of the rucksack, a stale exhalation. The hippie’s clothing felt damp. As a married man with daughters, Dr. Daruwalla was particularly sensitive to an abundance of dirty underpants in any woman’s laundry. A mangled bra clung to his wrist as he tried to extract his hand, and still the copy of Clea wouldn’t lie flat at the top of the rucksack; something poked against the book. What the hell is this thing? the doctor wondered. Then Julia heard him gasp; she saw him spring away from the rucksack as if an animal had bitten his hand.

“What is it?” she cried.

“I don’t know!” the doctor moaned. He staggered to the rail of the balcony, where he gripped the tangled branches of the clinging vine. Several bright-yellow finches with seeds falling from their beaks exploded from among the flowers, and a gecko sprang from the branch nearest the doctor’s right hand; it wriggled into the open end of a drainpipe just as Dr. Daruwalla leaned over the balcony and vomited onto the patio below. Fortunately, no one was having afternoon tea there. There was only one of the hotel’s sweepers, who’d fallen asleep in a curled position in the shade of a large potted plant. The doctor’s falling vomit left the sweeper undisturbed.

“Liebchen!” Julia cried.

“I’m all right,” Farrokh said. “It’s nothing, really—it’s just… lunch.” Julia was staring at the hippie’s rucksack as if she expected something to crawl out from under the copy of Clea.

“What was it—what did you see?” she asked Farrokh.

“I’m not sure,” he said, but Julia was thoroughly exasperated with him.

“You don’t know, you’re not sure, it’s nothing, really—it just made you throw up!” she said. She reached for the rucksack. “Well, if you don’t tell me, I’ll just see for myself.”

“No, don’t!” the doctor cried.

“Then tell me,” Julia said.

“I saw a penis,” Farrokh said.

Not even Julia could think of anything to say.

“I mean, it can’t be a real penis,” he continued. “I don’t mean that it’s someone’s severed penis, or anything ghastly like that.”

“What do you mean?” Julia asked him.

“I mean, it’s a very lifelike, very graphic, very large male member—it’s an enormous cock, with balls!” Dr. Daruwalla said.

“Do you mean a dildo?” Julia asked him. Farrokh was shocked that she knew the word; he barely knew it himself. A colleague in Toronto, a fellow surgeon, kept a collection of pornographic magazines in his hospital locker, and it was only in one of these that Dr. Daruwalla had ever seen a dildo; the advertisement hadn’t been nearly as realistic as the terrifying thing in the hippie’s rucksack.

“I think it is a dildo, yes,” Farrokh said.

“Let me see,” Julia said; she attempted to dodge past her husband to the rucksack.

“No, Julia! Please!” Farrokh cried.

“Well, you saw it—I want to see it,” Julia said.

“I don’t think you do,” the doctor said.

“For God’s sake, Farrokh,” Julia said. He sheepishly stood aside; then he glanced nervously at the bathroom door, behind which the huge hippie was still bathing.

“Hurry up, Julia, and don’t mess up her things,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

“It’s not as if everything has been neatly folded—oh my goodness!” Julia said.

“Well, there it is—you’ve seen it. Now get away!” said Dr. Daruwalla, who was a little surprised that his wife had not recoiled in horror.

“Does it use batteries?” Julia asked; she was still looking at it.

“Batteries!” Farrokh cried. “For God’s sake, Julia—please get away!” The concept of such a thing being battery-powered would haunt the doctor’s dreams for 20 years. The idea certainly worsened the agony of waiting for the hippie to finish her bath.

Fearing that the freakish girl had drowned, Dr. Daruwalla timidly approached the bathroom door, through which he heard neither singing nor splashing; there wasn’t a sign of bathtub life. But before he could knock on the door, the doctor was surprised by the uncanny powers of the bathing hippie; she seemed to sense that someone was near.

“Hello out there,” the girl said laconically. “Would you bring me my rucksack? I forgot it.”

Dr. Daruwalla fetched the rucksack; for its size, it was uncommonly heavy. Full of batteries, Farrokh supposed. He opened the bathroom door cautiously, and only partially—just enough to reach his hand with the rucksack inside the door. Steam, with a thousand, conflicting scents, engulfed him. The girl said, “Thanks. Just drop it.” The doctor withdrew his hand and closed the door, wondering at the sound of metal as the rucksack struck the floor. Either a machete or a machine gun, Farrokh imagined; he didn’t want to know.

Julia had arranged a sturdy table on the balcony and covered it with a clean white sheet. Even late in the day, there was better light for surgery outside than in the rooms. Dr. Daruwalla assembled his instruments and prepared the anesthetic.

In the bathroom, Nancy managed to reach her rucksack without getting out of the bathtub; she began a search for anything marginally cleaner than what she’d been wearing. It was a matter of exchanging one kind of dirt for another, but she wanted to wear a long-sleeved cotton blouse and a bra and long pants; she also wanted to wash the dildo, and—if she was strong enough—she wanted to unscrew the thing and count how much money was left. It was repellent to her to touch the cock, but she managed to withdraw it from the rucksack by pinching one of the balls between the thumb and index finger of her right hand; then she dropped the dildo into the bath, where (of course) it floated, the balls slightly submerged, the circumcised head raised—almost in the manner of a perplexed, solitary swimmer. Its single, evil eye was on her.

As for Dr. Daruwalla and his wife, their growing anxiety was in no way lessened by the unmistakable sounds of the bathtub being emptied and refilled. It was the hippie’s fourth bath.

One can sympathize with Farrokh and Julia for their misunderstanding of the grunts and groans that Nancy made while she was struggling to unscrew the preposterous penis and determine the amount of Deutsche marks that it contained. After all, despite their rekindling of the sexual flame, the pleasure of which was partially owed to Mr. James Salter, the Daruwallas were sexually tame souls. Given the size of the intimidating instrument that they’d seen in the hippie’s rucksack, and the sounds of physical exertion that passed from behind the bathroom door, it’s forgivable that Farrokh and Julia allowed their imaginations to run away with them. How could the Daruwallas have known that Nancy’s cries and curses of frustration were simply the result of her being unable to unscrew the dildo? And despite how far the Daruwallas allowed their imaginations to run, they never could have imagined what truly had happened to Nancy.

Four baths wouldn’t wash away what had happened to her.

With Dieter

From the moment Dieter had moved them out of the Taj, everything for Nancy had gone from bad to worse. Their new lodgings were in a small place on Marine Drive, the Sea Green Guest House, which Nancy noticed was an off-white color—or maybe, in the smog, a kind of blue-gray. Dieter said he favored the place because it was popular with an Arab clientele, and Arabs were safe. Nancy didn’t notice many Arabs, but she might not have spotted all of them, she supposed. She also didn’t know what Dieter meant by “safe”—he meant only that the Arabs were indifferent to drug trafficking on such a small scale as his.

At the Sea Green Guest House, Nancy was introduced to one of the featured activities involved in buying high-quality narcotics—namely, waiting. Dieter made some phone calls; then they waited. According to Dieter, the best deals came to you indirectly. No matter how hard you tried to make a direct deal, and to make it in Bombay, you always ended up in Goa, doing your business with the friend of a friend. And you always had to wait.

This time the friend of a friend was known to frequent the brothel area of Bombay, although the word on the street was that the guy had already gone to Goa; Dieter would have to find him there. The way you found him was, you rented a cottage on a certain beach; then you waited. You could ask for him, but even so you’d never find him; he always found you. This time his name was Rahul. It was always a common name and you never knew the last name—just Rahul. In the red-light district, they called him “Pretty.”

“That’s a funny thing to call a guy,” Nancy observed.

“He’s probably one of those chicks with dicks,” Dieter said. This expression was new to Nancy; she doubted that Dieter had picked it up from watching American movies.

Dieter attempted to explain the transvestite scene to Nancy, but he’d never understood that the hijras were eunuchs—that they’d truly been emasculated. He’d confused the hijras with the zenanas—the unaltered transvestites. A hijra had once exposed himself to Dieter, but Dieter had mistaken the scar for a vagina—he’d thought the hijra was a real woman. As for the zenanas, the so-called chicks with dicks, Dieter also called them “little boys with breasts.” Dieter said that they were all fags who took estrogens to make their tits bigger, but the estrogens also made their pricks get smaller and smaller until they looked like little boys.

Dieter tended to dwell on sexual things, and he used the halfhearted hope of finding Rahul in Bombay as an excuse to take Nancy to the red-light district. She didn’t want to go; but Dieter seemed destined to act out the old dictum that there is at least a kind of certainty in degradation. Debasement is specific. There is something exact about sexual corruption that Dieter probably found comforting in comparison to the vagueness of looking for Rahul.

For Nancy, the wet heat and ripe smell of Bombay were only enhanced by close proximity to the cage girls on Falkland Road. “Aren’t they amazing?” Dieter asked her. But why they were “amazing” eluded Nancy. On the ground floor of the old wooden buildings, there were cagelike rooms with beckoning girls inside them; above these cages, the buildings rose not more than four or five stories, with more girls on the window-sills—or else a curtain was drawn across a window to indicate that a prostitute was with a customer.

Nancy and Dieter drank tea at the Olympia on Falkland Road; it was an old, mirror-lined café frequented by the street prostitutes and their pimps, several of whom Dieter seemed to know. But these contacts either couldn’t or wouldn’t shed any light on the whereabouts of Rahul; they wouldn’t even speak of Rahul—except to say that he belonged to the transvestite scene, which they wanted no part of.

“I told you he was one of those chicks with dicks,” Dieter told Nancy. It was growing dark when they left the café, and the cage girls demonstrated a more aggressive interest in her as she and Dieter passed. Some of them lifted their skirts and made obscene gestures, some of them threw garbage at her, and sudden groups of men surrounded her on the street; Dieter, almost casually, drove them away from her. He seemed to find the attention amusing; the more vulgar the attention was, the more it amused Dieter.

Nancy had been too overwhelmed to question him, which she realized (as she sank deeper into Dr. Daruwalla’s bathtub) was a pattern she had finally broken. She submerged the dildo, holding it against her stomach. Because the dildo had not been reseated with wax, there were bubbles. Afraid that the Deutsche marks might get wet, Nancy stopped toying with the instrument. Instead, she thought of the entrenching tool in her rucksack; the doctor had surely heard it clank against the floor.

Dieter had bought it at an army-surplus shop in Bombay. The tool was an olive-drab color; fully extended, it was a spade with a short, two-foot handle which could be folded by means of an iron hinge, and the blade of the spade could be turned at a right angle to the handle until it resembled a foot-long hoe. If Dieter were alive, he would be the first to agree that it could also be successfully employed as a tomahawk. He’d told Nancy that the entrenching tool might be useful in Goa, both for defense against the dacoits—bandits occasionally preyed upon the hippies there—and for digging the spontaneous latrine. Nancy now smiled ruefully as she reflected on the expanded features of the tool. Certainly, she’d found it adequate for digging Dieter’s grave.

When she shut her eyes and sank deeper into the tub, she could still taste the sweet, smoky tea that they served at the Olympia; she could remember its dry, bitter aftertaste, too. With her eyes shut and the warm water holding her, she could remember her changing expression in the pitted mirrors of the café. The tea had made her feel lightheaded. She was unfamiliar with the red spittle from the betel chewing that was expectorated everywhere around them, and not even the Hindi film songs and the Qawwali on the jukebox in the Olympia had prepared her for the assault of noise along Falkland Road. A drunken man followed her and pulled her hair until Dieter knocked him down and kicked him.

“The better brothels are in the rooms above the cages,” Dieter told her knowingly. A boy with a goatskin full of water collided with her; she was sure he’d meant to step on her foot. Someone pinched her breast, but she didn’t see who it was—man, woman or child.

Dieter pulled her into a bidi shop, where they also sold stationery and silver trinkets and the small pipes for smoking ganja.

“Hey, ganja-man—Mistah bhang-walla!” the proprietor greeted Dieter. He smiled happily at Nancy as he pointed to Dieter. “He Mistah bhang-master—the very best ganja-walla!” the proprietor said appreciatively.

Nancy was fingering an unusual ballpoint pen; it was real silver, and Made in India was written in script lengthwise along the pen. The bottom part said Made in, the top part said India; the pen wouldn’t close securely if the script wasn’t perfectly aligned. She thought this was a stupid flaw. Also, when you wrote with the pen, the words were all wrong; in Made India, the pen said—and in Made was upside down. “Very best quality,” the proprietor told her. “Made in England!”

“It says it’s made in India,” Nancy said.

“Yes—they make it in India, too!” the proprietor agreed.

“You’re a shitty liar,” Dieter told him, but he bought Nancy the pen.

Nancy was thinking she’d like to go somewhere cool and write postcards. In Iowa, wouldn’t they be surprised to hear where she was? But, at the same time, she was thinking, They’ll never hear from me again. Bombay both terrified and exhilarated her; it was so foreign and seemingly lawless that Nancy felt she could be anybody she wanted to be. It was the clean slate she was looking for, and in the back of her mind, with the persistence of something permanent, was that impossible goal of purity to which she’d been drawn in the person of Inspector Patel.

In the overly dramatic manner of many fallen young women, Nancy believed that only two roads remained open to her: she could keep on falling until she was indifferent to her own defilement, or else she could aspire to acts of social conscience so great and self-sacrificing that she could reclaim her innocence and redeem everything. In the world she’d descended to, there were only these choices: stay with Dieter or go to Inspector Patel. But what had she to give to Vijay Patel? Nancy feared it was nothing that the good policeman wanted.

Later, in the doorway of a transvestite brothel, a hijra exposed himself so boldly and suddenly that Nancy hadn’t time to look away. Even Dieter was forced to admit that there was no evidence of a penis—not even a little one. As to what was there, Nancy wasn’t sure. Dieter concluded that Rahul might be one of these—“a kind of radical eunuch,” he said.

Dieter’s questions about Rahul were greeted with sullenness, if not hostility. The only hijra who permitted them to come inside his cage was a fussy middle-aged transvestite who sat before a mirror in growing disappointment with his wig. In the same tiny room, a younger hijra was feeding a watery gray milk to a newborn goat by means of a baby’s bottle.

On the subject of Rahul, all the younger one would say was, “He is not being one of us.” The older one said only that Rahul was in Goa. Neither of the hijras could be drawn into a discussion of Rahul’s nickname. At the mere mention of “Pretty,” the one who was feeding the goat abruptly pulled the baby bottle out of the goat’s mouth; it made a pop and the goat bleated in surprise. The younger hijra pointed the baby bottle at Nancy and made a disparaging gesture. Nancy interpreted the bottle-pointing as an indication that she wasn’t as pretty as Rahul. She was relieved that Dieter seemed disinclined to fight, although she could sense he was angry; he wasn’t exactly gallant on her behalf, but at least he was angry.

Back on the street, to assure him she was philosophic about the insult of being ill compared to Rahul, Nancy said something that she hoped sounded tolerant in a live-and-let-live sort of way.

“Well, they weren’t very nice,” she observed, “but it was nice how they were taking care of the goat.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Dieter told her. “Some people fuck girls, some people fuck eunuchs in drag—others fuck goats.” This terrible thought made her anxious again; she knew she’d deceived herself if she’d believed she’d stopped falling.

In Kamathipura, there were other brothels. Outside a warren of small rooms, a fat woman in a magenta sari sat cross-legged on a rope bed supported by orange crates; either the woman or the bed swayed slightly. She was the madam for a higher class of prostitutes than one could find on Falkland Road or Grant Road. Naturally, Dieter didn’t tell Nancy that this was the same brothel where he’d fucked the 13-year-old girl for only five rupees because they had to do it standing up.

It seemed to Nancy that Dieter knew the enormous madam, but she couldn’t understand their conversation; two of the bolder prostitutes had come out of the brothel to stare at her close up.

A third girl, who was perhaps 12 or 13, was especially curious; she remembered Dieter from the night before. Nancy saw the blue tattoo on her upper arm, which Dieter later said was just the prostitute’s name. It was impossible for Nancy to know if her body’s other ornaments were of any religious significance or if they were merely decorative. Her bindi—the cosmetic dot on her forehead—was a saffron color edged with gold, and she wore a gold ring in her left nostril.

The girl’s curiosity was a little too extreme for Nancy, who turned away—Dieter was still talking to the madam. Their conversation had grown heated; vagueness made Dieter angry, and everyone was vague about Rahul.

“You go to Goa,” the fat madam had advised. “You say you looking for him. Then he find you.” But Nancy could tell that Dieter preferred to be in more control of the situation.

She also knew what would happen next. Back at the Sea Green Guest House, Dieter was very desirous; anger frequently had this effect on him. First he made Nancy masturbate; then he used the dildo rather roughly on her. She was surprised she was even remotely excited. Afterward, Dieter was still angry. While they waited for an overnight bus to Goa, Nancy was beginning to imagine how she would leave him. The country was so intimidating, it was hard to see herself leaving him if there was no one else.

On the bus, they saw a small American girl; she was being bothered by some Indian men. Nancy spoke up: “Are you a coward, Dieter? Why don’t you tell those guys to leave that girl alone? Why don’t you ask that girl to sit with us?”

Nancy Gets Sick

Remembering when her relationship with Dieter took such a heralded turn, Nancy felt a renewal of self-confidence in the bathroom of the Hotel Bardez. So what if she couldn’t unscrew the dildo? She would find someone with stronger hands, if not a pair of pliers. With that relaxing thought, she threw the dildo across the bathroom; it struck the blue-tiled wall and bounced back toward the bathtub. Thereupon Nancy pulled the plug, the drain gurgled loudly, and Dr. Daruwalla scurried away from his side of the bathroom door.

On the balcony, he told his wife, “I think she’s finally finished. I believe she threw the cock against the wall—she threw something, anyway.”

“It’s a dildo,” Julia said. “I wish you wouldn’t call it a cock.”

“Whatever it is, I believe she threw it,” Farrokh said.

They listened to the tub; it went on gurgling. Below them, on the patio, the sweeper had awakened from his nap beneath the shade of the potted plant; they could hear him discussing the doctor’s vomit with Punkaj, the servant boy. Punkaj’s opinion was that the culprit was a dog.

It wasn’t until Nancy stood in the tub to dry herself that the pain in her foot reminded her of why she’d come to where she was. She welcomed whatever small surgery was required to remove the glass; she was a young woman in a position to find a certain anticipated pain almost purifying.

“Are you a coward, Dieter?” Nancy whispered to herself, just to hear herself say it again; it had been so briefly gratifying.

The small girl on the bus, who was originally from Seattle, turned out to be an ashram groupie who’d traveled through the subcontinent, constantly changing her religion. She said she’d been thrown out of the Punjab for doing something insulting to the Sikhs, although she hadn’t understood what it was she’d done. She wore a close-fitting, low-cut tank top; it was evident that she didn’t wear a bra. She’d also acquired some silver bangles, which she wore on her wrists; she’d been told that the bangles had been part of someone’s dowry. (They weren’t the usual dowry material.)

Her name was Beth. She’d lost her fondness for Buddhism when a high-placed bodhisattva had tried to seduce her with chang; Nancy assumed this was something you smoked, but Dieter told her it was Tibetan rice beer, which reputedly made Westerners ill.

In Maharashtra, Beth said, she’d been to Poona, but only to express her contempt for her fellow Americans who were meditating at the Rajneesh ashram. She’d lost her fondness for what she called “California meditating,” too. No “lousy export guru” was going to win her over.

Beth was taking a “scholarly approach” to Hinduism. She wasn’t ready to study the Vedas—the ancient spiritual texts, the orthodox Hindu scriptures—under any kind of supervision; Beth would begin with her own interpretations of The Upanishads, which she was currently reading. She showed the small book of spiritual treatises to Nancy and Dieter; it was one of those thin volumes in which the Introduction and the Note on the Translations amounted to more pages than the text.

Beth didn’t think it odd to pursue her study of Hinduism by journeying to Goa, which attracted more Christian pilgrims than any other kind; she admitted she was going for the beaches, and for the companionship of people like herself. Besides, soon the monsoon would be everywhere, and by then she’d be in Rajasthan; the lakes were lovely during the monsoon—she’d heard about an ashram on a lake. Meanwhile, she was grateful for the company; it was no fun being a woman on your own in India, Beth assured them.

Around her neck was a rawhide thong, from which dangled a polished vulva-shaped stone. Beth explained that this was her yoni, an object of veneration in Shiva temples. The phallic lingam, representing the penis of Lord Shiva, is placed in the vulvate yoni, representing the vagina of Shiva’s wife, Parvati. Priests pour a libation over the two symbols; worshipers partake of a kind of communion in the runoff.

After this puzzling account of her unusual necklace, Beth was exhausted and curled up on the seat beside Nancy; she fell asleep with her head in Nancy’s lap. Dieter also fell asleep, in the seat across the aisle, but not before saying to Nancy that he thought it would be great fun to show Beth the dildo. “Let her put that lingam in her stupid yoni,” he said crudely. Nancy sat awake, hating him, as the bus moved through Maharashtra.

In the darkness, the most constant sound was the bus driver’s tape recorder, which played only Qawwali; the recorder was turned to a low volume, and Nancy found the religious verses soothing. Of course she didn’t know that they were Muslim verses, nor would she have cared. Beth’s breathing was soft and regular against her thigh; Nancy thought about how long it had been since she’d had a friend—just a friend.

The dawn light in Goa was the color of sand. Nancy marveled at how childlike Beth appeared in her sleep; in both her small hands, the waif clutched the stone vagina as if this yoni were powerful enough to protect her from every evil on the subcontinent—even from Dieter and Nancy.

In Mapusa, they changed buses because their bus from Bombay went on to Panjim. They spent a long day in Calangute while Dieter did his business, which amounted to repeatedly harassing the patrons of the bus stop for any information related to Rahul. Along Baga Road, they also stopped at the bars, the hotels and the stalls for cold drinks; in all these places, Dieter spoke privately with someone while Beth and Nancy waited. Everyone claimed to have heard of Rahul, but no one had ever seen him.

Dieter had arranged for a cottage near the beach. There was only one bathroom, and the toilet and tub needed to be flushed and filled by hand with buckets from an outdoor well, but there were two big beds that looked pretty clean and a standing partition of wooden latticework—it was almost a wall, almost private. They had a propane hot plate for boiling water. A motionless ceiling fan had been installed in the optimistic faith that one day there would also be electricity; and although there were no screens, there were mosquito nets in fair repair on both beds. Outside, there was a cistern of fresh (if not clean) water; the water in the well, with which they flushed the toilet and in which they bathed, was slightly salty. By the cistern was a hut of palm leaves; if they kept the leaves wet, this hut was an adequate cooler for soda and juice and fresh fruit. Beth was disappointed that they were some distance from the beach, Although they could hear the Arabian Sea, especially at night, they had to tramp across an area of dead and rotting palm fronds before they could walk on the sand or even see the water.

Both these luxuries and inconveniences were wasted on Nancy; upon arrival, she was immediately sick. She vomited; she was so weak from diarrhea that Beth had to fetch the water to flush the toilet for her. Beth also filled the tub for Nancy’s baths. Nancy had a fever with chills so violent and sweating so profuse that she stayed in bed all day and night, except when Beth stripped the sheets and gave them to the dhobi, who came for the laundry.

Dieter was disgusted with her; he went on about his business of looking for Rahul. Beth fixed her tea and brought her fresh bananas; when Nancy was stronger, Beth cooked her some rice. Because of the fever, Nancy tossed and turned all night and Dieter wouldn’t sleep in the same bed with her. Beth slept in a small corner of the bed beside her; Dieter slept behind the latticework partition, alone. Nancy told herself that, when she was healthy, she would go to Rajasthan with Beth. She hoped Beth hadn’t been revolted by her illness.

Then, one evening, Nancy woke up and felt a little better. She thought her fever was gone because she was so clear-headed; she thought she was past the vomiting and the diarrhea because she was ravenous. Dieter and Beth were out of the cottage; they’d gone to the disco in Calangute. There was a place called something stupid, like Coco Banana, where Dieter asked a lot of questions about Rahul. Dieter said it was cooler to go there with a girl than to look like a loser, which was apparently what you looked like when you went there alone.

There was nothing to eat in the cottage but bananas, and Nancy ate three; then she made herself some tea. After that, she went in and out, drawing water for a bath. She was surprised how tired she was after she’d carried the water, and with her fever gone, the bath felt chilly.

After her bath, she went outside to the palm-hut cooler and drank some bottled sugarcane juice, which she hoped wouldn’t bring back her diarrhea. There was nothing to do but wait for Dieter and Beth to come back. She tried reading The Upanishads, but it had made more sense to her when she had a fever and Beth read it aloud. Besides, she had lit an oil lamp to read and there were suddenly a million mosquitoes. Also, she encountered an exasperating passage in “Katha Upanishad”; it repeated, as a refrain, an irritating sentence: “This in truth is That.” She thought the phrase would drive her crazy if she read it one more time. She blew out the oil lamp and retreated under the mosquito net.

She brought the entrenching tool into the bed beside her because she was frightened to be alone in the cottage at night. There was not only the threat of bandits, of dacoit gangs; there was a gecko that lived behind the bathroom mirror—it often raced across the bathroom walls and ceiling while Nancy took her bath. She hadn’t seen the gecko tonight. She wished she knew where it was.

When she’d been feverish, she’d wondered at the shadows cast by the strange gargoyles along the top of the latticework partition; then one night the gargoyles weren’t there, and another night there’d been only one. Now that her fever was gone, she realized the “gargoyles” were in nearly constant motion—they were rats. They favored the vantage point that the partition gave them, to look down upon both beds. Nancy watched them until she fell asleep.

She was beginning to understand that she was a long way from Bombay, which was a long way from anywhere else. Not even young Vijay Patel—Police Inspector, Colaba Station—could help her here.