A Son of the Circus

A Little Something Venereal

Deepa had taken the night train to Bombay; she’d traveled from somewhere in Gujarat—from wherever the Great Blue Nile was playing. She’d arranged to bring the runaway child prostitute to Dr. Daruwalla’s office at the Hospital for Crippled Children, intending to shepherd the girl through her examination—it was the child’s first doctor’s visit. Deepa didn’t expect there would be anything wrong; she planned to take the girl back to the Great Blue Nile with her. It was true that the child had run away from a brothel, but—according to Mr. Garg—she’d managed to run away when she was still a virgin. Dr. Daruwalla didn’t think so.

Her name was Madhu, which means “honey.” She had the floppy, oversized hands and feet and the disproportionately small body of a large-pawed puppy, of the kind one always assumes will become a big dog. But in Madhu’s case this was a sign of malnutrition; her body had failed to develop in proportion to her hands and feet. Also, Madhu’s head wasn’t as large as it appeared at first glance. Her long, oval face was simply unmatched to her petite body. Her protuberant eyes were the tawny yellow of a lion’s, but remote with distraction; her lips were full and womanly and entirely too grown-up for her unformed face, which was still the face of a child.

It was her child-woman appearance that must have been Madhu’s particular appeal in the brothel she’d run away from; her undersized body reflected this disquieting ambivalence. She had no hips—that is, she had the hips of a boy—but her breasts, which were absurdly small, were nonetheless as fully formed and womanly as her compelling mouth. Although Garg had told Deepa that the child was prepubescent, Dr. Daruwalla guessed that Madhu had not yet had her period because she’d never had enough to eat and she was overworked; furthermore, it was not that the girl hadn’t grown any underarm or pubic hair—someone had skillfully shaved her. Farrokh made Deepa feel the faint stubble that was growing in Madhu’s armpits.

The doctor’s memory of his accidental encounter with Deepa’s pudenda surfaced at the oddest times. The sight of the dwarf’s wife touching the hollow of the young girl’s armpit gave Farrokh the shivers. It was the wiry strength of the former flyer’s hand that the doctor remembered—how she’d grabbed his chin as he’d struggled to raise the bridge of his nose off her pubic bone, how she’d simply wrenched his head out of her crotch. And he was off balance, his forehead pressing into her belly and the scratchy sequins on her singlet, so that a good portion of his weight rested on her; yet Deepa had cranked on his chin with only one hand and had managed to lift him. Her hands were strong from the trapeze work. And now the sight of Deepa’s sinewy hand in the girl’s armpit was enough to make Farrokh turn away—not from the exposed girl but from Deepa.

Farrokh realized that probably there remained more innocence in Deepa than what innocence, if any, remained in Madhu; the dwarf’s wife had never been a prostitute. The indifference with which Madhu had undressed for Dr. Daruwalla’s cursory examination made the doctor feel that the girl was probably an experienced prostitute. Farrokh knew how awkwardly most children Madhu’s age undressed. After all, it wasn’t only that he was a doctor; he had daughters.

Madhu was silent; perhaps she didn’t comprehend the reason for her physical exam, or else she was ashamed. When she covered her breasts and held her hand over her mouth, Madhu looked like an 8-year-old child. But Dr. Daruwalla believed that the girl was at least 13 or 14.

“I’m sure it was someone else who shaved her—she didn’t shave herself,” Farrokh told Deepa. From his research for Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer, the doctor knew a few things about the brothels. In the brothels, virginity was a term of sale—not one of accuracy. Maybe in order to look like a virgin, one had to be shaved. The doctor knew that most of the older prostitutes were also shaved. Pubic hair, like underarm hair, was simply an invitation to lice.

The dwarf’s wife was disappointed; she’d hoped that Dr. Daruwalla was going to be the first and last doctor whom Madhu would be required to see. Dr. Daruwalla didn’t think so. He found Madhu disturbingly mature; not even to please Deepa could he give the girl a clean bill of health, not without first making Madhu see Gynecology Tata—Tata Two, as he was more commonly known.

Dr. Tata (the son) was not the best OB/GYN in Bombay, but—like his father before him—he saw any referral from any other physician immediately. It had long been Dr. Daruwalla’s suspicion that these referrals were the heart of Tata Two’s business. Farrokh doubted that many patients were inclined to see Tata Two twice. Despite removing the adjectival “best” and “most famous” from his clinic’s description—it was now called DR TATA’s CLINIC FOR GYNECOLOGICAL & MATERNITY NEEDS—the clinic was the most steadfastly mediocre in the city. If one of his orthopedic patients had a problem of an OB/GYN nature, Dr. Daruwalla never would have referred her to Tata Two. But for a routine examination—for a simple certificate of health, or a standard venereal-disease screening—Tata Two would do, and Tata Two was fast.

He was remarkably fast in Madhu’s case. While Vinod drove Deepa and Madhu to Dr. Tata’s office, where Dr. Tata would keep them waiting only a short time, Farrokh attempted to restrain Martin Mills from playing too zealous a role in embracing that cause which the dwarf and his wife practiced like a religion. Having observed the scholastic’s compassion for the elephant-footed beggar, Vinod had wasted little time in enlisting the famous Inspector Dhar’s services. Unfortunately, it had been impossible to conceal from the missionary that the only uncrippled child in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room was, or had been, a child prostitute.

Even before Dr. Daruwalla could complete his examination of Madhu, the damage had been done: Martin Mills had been totally swayed by Vinod and Deepa’s insane idea that every runaway from the brothels of Bombay could become an acrobat in the circus. To Martin, sending child prostitutes to the circus was a step en route to saving their souls. Farrokh feared what was coming next—that is, as soon as it occurred to Martin. It was only a matter of time before the missionary would decide that Ganesh, the elephant-footed boy, could save his little soul at the circus, too. Dr. Daruwalla knew there weren’t enough circuses for all the children that the Jesuit believed he could rescue.

Then Dr. Tata called with the news about Madhu.

“Yes, she is certainly sexually active—too many previous partners to count!—and yes, she has a little something venereal,” said Tata Two. “But, under the circumstances, it could be a lot worse.”

“And you’ll check if she’s HIV-positive?” asked Dr. Daruwalla.

“We’re checking—we’ll let you know,” Dr. Tata said.

“So what have you found?” Farrokh asked. “Is it gonorrhea?”

“No, but there’s some inflammation of the cervix, and a slight discharge,” Dr. Tata explained. “She doesn’t complain of any urethritis—the inflammation in her urethra is so mild, it may go unnoticed. I’m guessing it’s chlamydia I’ll put her on a course of tetracycline. But it’s difficult to diagnose a chlamydial infection—as you know, chlamydiae are not visible under the microscope.”

“Yes, yes,” said Dr. Daruwalla impatiently; he didn’t know this about chlamydiae, but he didn’t care to know. He had been lectured to enough for one day, commencing with a rehashing of the Protestant Reformation and the Jesuitical approach to free will. All he wanted to know was if Madhu was sexually active. And might there be something venereal that he could pin on the acid-scarred Mr. Garg? All of Mr. Garg’s previous discoveries had carried something venereal; the doctor would have loved to attribute the blame for this to Garg himself. Farrokh didn’t believe that the cause of the sexually transmitted disease was always the brothel that the girl was running away from. Most of all—and the doctor couldn’t have explained why—it was Deepa and Vinod’s seemingly good opinion of Mr. Garg that Dr. Daruwalla wished he could change. Why didn’t the dwarf and his wife see that Mr. Garg was egregiously slimy?

“So, if she’s not HIV-positive, you’ll call her clean?” Farrokh asked Tata Two.

“After the course of tetracycline, and provided no one lets her return to the brothel,” Dr. Tata said.

And provided Deepa doesn’t take the girl back to the Wetness Cabaret, or to Mr. Garg, Farrokh thought. Dr. Daruwalla understood that Deepa would need to return to the Great Blue Nile before the doctor knew the results of Madhu’s HIV test. Vinod would have to look after Madhu and keep her away from Garg; the girl would be safe with the dwarf.

Meanwhile, the doctor could observe that the morally meddlesome nature of Martin Mills had been momentarily curbed; the missionary was enthralled by Farrokh’s favorite circus photograph—the doctor always kept it on his office desk. It was a picture of Pratap Singh’s adopted sister, Suman, the star of the Great Royal Circus. Suman was in her costume for the Peacock Dance; she stood in the wing of the main tent, helping two little girls into their peacock costumes. The peacocks were always played by little girls. Suman was putting on their peacock heads; she was tucking their hair under the blue-green feathers of the long peacock necks.

The Peacock Dance was performed in all the Indian circuses. (The peacock is the national bird of India.) In the Great Royal, Suman always played the legendary woman whose lover has been cast under a spell to make him forget her. In the moonlight, she dances with two peacocks; she wears bells on her ankles and wrists.

But what haunted Dr. Daruwalla about the Peacock Dance was neither Suman’s beauty nor the little girls in their peacock costumes. Instead, it always seemed to him that the little girls (the peacocks) were about to die. The music for the dance was soft and eerie, and the lions were audible in the background. In the darkness outside the ring, the lions were being moved from their cages and into the holding tunnel, which was a long, tubular cage that led to the ring. The lions hated the holding tunnel. They fought among themselves because they were pressed too low to the ground; they could neither go back to their cages nor advance into the ring. Farrokh had always imagined that a lion would escape. When the peacock girls were finished with their dance and running back to their troupe tent—there in the dark avenue, the escaped lion would catch them and kill them.

After the Peacock Dance, the roustabouts set up the cage for the lions in the ring. To distract the audience from the tedious assembly of the cage and the setting up of the hoops of fire, a motorcycle act was performed in the open wing of the main tent. It was so insanely loud, no one would hear the peacock girls screaming if a lion was loose. The motorcycles raced in opposite directions inside a steel-mesh ball; this was called the Globe of Death, because if the motorcycles ever collided, it was possible that both riders could be killed. But Dr. Daruwalla imagined it was called the Globe of Death because the sound of the motorcycles concealed the fate of the peacock girls.

The first time he’d seen Suman, she was helping the little girls into their peacock costumes; she seemed to be a mother to them, although she had no children of her own. But it also seemed to Farrokh that Suman was dressing the little girls for the last time. They would run out of the ring, the Globe of Death would begin and the escaped lion would already be waiting for them in the dark avenue of the troupe tents.

Maybe, if she wasn’t HIV-positive, Madhu would become one of the peacock girls at the Great Blue Nile. Either way, whether she was HIV-positive or a peacock girl, Dr. Daruwalla thought that Madhu’s chances were pretty slim. Garg’s girls were always in need of more than a dose of tetracycline.

Martin Luther Is Put to Dubious Use

Martin Mills had insisted on observing Dr. Daruwalla at his doctor’s chores, for the zealot had proclaimed–even before he saw a single one of Dr. Daruwalla’s patients—that the doctor was performing “the Lord’s work.” After all, what activity was nearer to Jesus than healing crippled children? It was right up there with saving their little souls, Farrokh guessed. Dr. Daruwalla had allowed the missionary to follow him as closely as his own shadow, but only because he wanted to observe how the zealot was recovering from his beating. The doctor had alertly anticipated any indications that the scholastic might have suffered a serious head injury, but Martin Mills was ploddingly disproving this theory. Martin’s particular madness seemed in no way trauma-related; rather, it appeared to be the result of blind conviction and a systematic education. Furthermore, after their experience on Fashion Street, Dr. Daruwalla didn’t dare let Martin Mills wander freely in Bombay; yet the doctor hadn’t found the time to deliver the madman to the presumed safety of St. Ignatius.

On Fashion Street, Martin Mills had been completely unaware of that giant likeness of Inspector Dhar which was freshly plastered above the stalls of the clothes bazaar. The missionary had noticed the other movie advertisement; side by side with Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence was a poster for Death Wish, with a sizable likeness of Charles Branson.

“That looks like Charles Bronson!” the Jesuit had observed.

“That is Charles Bronson,” Farrokh had informed him. But of himself, in the image of Inspector Dhar, the missionary saw no resemblance. The clothes vendors, however, looked upon the Jesuit with baleful eyes. One refused to sell him anything; the scholastic assumed that the merchant had nothing in the right size. Another screamed at Martin Mills that his appearance on Fashion Street was nothing but a film-publicity stunt. This was probably because the missionary insisted on carrying the crippled beggar. The accusation had been made in Marathi, and the elephant-footed boy had enlivened the exchange by spitting on a rack of the merchant’s clothes.

“Now, now—even though they revile you, simply smile,” Martin Mills had told the crippled boy. “Show them charity.” The Jesuit must have assumed it was Ganesh and his crushed foot that had caused the outburst.

It was a wonder they’d escaped from Fashion Street with their lives; Dr. Daruwalla had also managed to persuade Martin Mills to get his hair cut. It was short enough to begin with, but the doctor had said something about the weather growing hotter and hotter, and that in India many ascetics and holy men shaved their heads. The haircut that Farrokh had arranged—with one of those three-rupee curbside barbers who hang out at the end of the clothing stalls on Fashion Street—had been as close to a shaven head as possible. But even as a “skinhead,” Martin Mills exhibited something of Inspector Dhar’s aggressive quality. The resemblance went well beyond the propensity for the family sneer.

John D. had little to say; yet he was unstoppably opinionated—and when he was acting, he always knew his lines. Martin Mills, on the other hand, never shut up; but wasn’t what Martin had to say also a recitation? Weren’t they the lines of another kind of actor, the ceaseless intervening of a true believer? Weren’t both twins unstoppably opinionated? Certainly they were both stubborn.

The doctor was fascinated that barely a majority of Bombayites appeared to recognize Inspector Dhar in Martin Mills; there were almost as many individuals who seemed to see no resemblance whatsoever. Vinod, who knew Dhar well, never doubted that Martin was Dhar. Deepa also knew Dhar, and she was indifferent to the movie star’s fame; because she’d never seen an Inspector Dhar movie, the character meant nothing to her. When Deepa met the missionary in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room, she instantly took Martin Mills for what he was: an American do-gooder. But this had long been her opinion of Dhar. If the dwarf’s wife had never seen an Inspector Dhar movie, she had seen Dhar’s TV appearance on behalf of the Hospital for Crippled Children. Dhar had always struck Deepa as a do-gooder and a non-Indian. On the other hand, Ranjit wasn’t fooled. The medical secretary saw only the slightest resemblance to Dhar in the frail missionary. Ranjit didn’t even suspect the two of being twins; his only comment, which he whispered to Dr. Daruwalla, was that he’d never known Dhar had a brother. Given Martin Mills’s ravaged condition, Ranjit assumed he was Dhar’s older brother.

Dr. Daruwalla’s first concern was to keep Martin Mills in the dark; once the doctor could get the missionary to St. Ignatius, Martin would be kept in perpetual darkness—or so the doctor hoped. Farrokh wanted it to be John D.’s decision whether to know his twin or not. But in the doctor’s office, and in the waiting room, it had been awkward to keep Martin Mills separated from Vinod and Deepa. Short of telling the dwarf and his wife that the missionary was Dhar’s twin, Dr. Daruwalla didn’t know what to do or how to keep them apart.

It was upon Vinod’s initiative that Madhu and Ganesh were introduced to each other, as if a 13-year-old child prostitute and a 10-year-old beggar who’d allegedly been stepped on by an elephant would instantly have worlds in common. To Dr. Daruwalla’s surprise, the children appeared to hit it off. Madhu was excited to learn that the ugly problem with Ganesh’s eyes—if not the ugly foot—might soon be corrected. Ganesh imagined that he could do very well for himself in the circus, too.

“With that foot?” Farrokh said. “What could you do in the circus with that foot?”

“Well, there are things he can do with his arms,” Martin Mills replied. Dr. Daruwalla feared that the Jesuit had been schooled to refute any defeatist argument.

“Vinod,” Farrokh said beseechingly. “Could the boy even be a roustabout with a limp like that? Do you see them letting him shovel the elephant shit? He could limp after the wheelbarrow, I suppose …”

“Clowns are limping,” Vinod replied. “I am limping,” the dwarf added.

“So you’re saying that he can limp and be laughed at, like a clown,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“There’s always working in the cook’s tent,” Vinod said stubbornly. “He could be kneading and rolling out the dough for the chapati. He could be chopping up the garlic and the onions for the dhal.”

“But why would they take him, when there are countless boys with two good feet to do that?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. The doctor kept his eye on Bird-Shit Boy, knowing that his discouraging arguments might meet with the beggar’s disapproval and a corresponding measure of bird shit.

“We could tell the circus that they had to take the two of them together!” Martin cried. “Madhu and Ganesh—we could say that they’re brother and sister, that one looks after the other!”

“We could lie, in other words,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“For the good of these children, I could lie!” the missionary said.

“I’ll bet you could!” Farrokh cried. He was frustrated that he couldn’t remember his father’s favorite condemnation of Martin Luther. What had old Lowji said about Luther’s justification for lying? Farrokh wished he could surprise the scholastic with what he recalled as a fitting quotation, but it was Martin Mills who surprised him.

“You’re a Protestant, aren’t you?” the Jesuit asked the doctor. “You should be advised by what your old friend Luther said: ‘What wrong can there be in telling a downright good lie for a good cause …’”

“Luther is not my old friend!” Dr. Daruwalla snapped. Martin Mills had left something out of the quotation, but Farrokh couldn’t remember what it was. What was missing was the part about this downright good lie being not only for a good cause but also “for the advancement of the Christian Church.” Farrokh knew he’d been fooled, but he lacked the necessary information to fight back; therefore, he chose to fight with Vinod instead.

“And I suppose you’re telling me that Madhu here is another Pinky—is that it?” Farrokh asked the dwarf.

This was a sore point between them. Because Vinod and Deepa had been Great Blue Nile performers, they were sensitive to Dr. Daruwalla’s preference for the performers of the Great Royal. There was a “Pinky” in the Great Royal Circus; she was a star. She’d been bought by the circus when she was only three or four. She’d been trained by Pratap Singh and his wife, Sumi. By the time Pinky was seven or eight, she could balance on her forehead at the top of a 10-foot-high bamboo pole; the pole was balanced on the forehead of a bigger girl, who stood on another girl’s shoulders… the act was that kind of impossible thing. It was an item that called for a girl whose sense of balance was one in a million. Although Deepa and Vinod had never performed for the Great Royal Circus, they knew which circuses had high standards—at least higher than the standards at the Great Blue Nile. Yet Deepa brought the doctor these wrecked little whores from Kamathipura and proclaimed them circus material; at best, they were Great Blue Nile material.

“Can Madhu even stand on her head?” Farrokh asked Deepa. “Can she walk on her hands?”

The dwarf’s wife suggested that the child could learn. After all, Deepa had been sold to the Great Blue Nile as a boneless girl, a future plastic lady; she had learned to be a trapeze artist, a flyer.

“But you fell,” the doctor reminded Deepa.

“She is merely falling into a net!” Vinod exclaimed.

“There isn’t always a net,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “Did you land in a net, Vinod?” Farrokh asked the dwarf.

“I am being fortunate in other ways,” Vinod replied. “Madhu won’t be working with clowns—or with elephants,” the dwarf added.

But Farrokh had the feeling that Madhu was clumsy; she looked clumsy—not to mention the dubious coordination of the limping garlic-and-onion chopper, Madhu’s newly appointed brother. Farrokh felt certain that the elephant-footed boy would find another elephant to step on him. Dr. Daruwalla imagined that the Great Blue Nile might even conceive of a way to display the cripple’s mashed foot; Ganesh would become a minor sideshow event—the elephant boy, they would call him.

That was when the missionary, on the evidence of less than one day’s experience in Bombay, had said to Dr. Daruwalla, “Whatever the dangers in the circus, the circus will be better for them than their present situation—we know the alternatives to their being in the circus.”

Vinod had remarked to Inspector Dhar that he was looking surprisingly well recovered from his nightmarish experience on Falkland Road. (Farrokh thought the missionary looked awful.) To keep the dwarf and the missionary from talking further to each other, which Dr. Daruwalla knew would be confusing to them both, the doctor pulled Vinod aside and informed him that he should humor Dhar—“and by no means contradict him”—because the dwarf had correctly diagnosed the movie star. There had been brain damage; it would be delicate to assess how much.

“Are you having to delouse him, too?” Vinod had whispered to Farrokh. The dwarf was referring to the reason for the scholastic’s horrible haircut, but Dr. Daruwalla had solemnly agreed. Yes, there had been lice and brain damage.

“Those are being filthy prostitutes!” Vinod had exclaimed.

What a morning it had been already! Dr. Daruwalla thought. He’d finally gotten rid of Vinod and Deepa—by sending them with Madhu to Dr. Tata. Dr. Daruwalla had not expected Tata Two to send them back so soon. Farrokh barely had time to get rid of Martin Mills; the doctor wanted the scholastic out of the office and the waiting room before Vinod and Deepa and Madhu returned. What’s more, Dr. Daruwalla wanted time to be alone; the deputy commissioner expected the doctor to come to Crime Branch Headquarters. Doubtless the doctor’s viewing of the photographs of the murdered prostitutes would serve to undermine the collected optimism of the Jesuit, the dwarf and the dwarf’s wife. But before Farrokh could slip away to Crawford Market, where he was meeting Deputy Commissioner Patel, it was necessary for the doctor to create an errand for Martin Mills; if only for an hour or two, the missionary was in need of a mission.

Another Warning

The elephant boy was a problem. Ganesh had behaved badly in the exercise yard, where many of the postoperative patients among the crippled children were engaged in their various physical-therapy assignments. Ganesh took this opportunity to squirt several of the more defenseless children with the bird-shit syringe; when Ranjit took the syringe away from the aggressive boy, Ganesh bit Dr. Daruwalla’s faithful secretary on the hand. Ranjit was offended that he’d been bitten by a beggar; dealing with the unruly likes of the elephant-footed boy wasn’t a suitable use of the medical secretary’s training.

On a day that had barely begun, Dr. Daruwalla was already exhausted. Nevertheless, the doctor made quick and clever use of the biting episode. If Martin Mills was so sure that Bird-Shit Boy was capable of contributing to the daily chores of a circus, perhaps the missionary could be persuaded to take some responsibility for the little beggar. Martin Mills was eager to take responsibility for the elephant boy; the zealot would be likely to claim responsibility for a world of cripples, Farrokh imagined. Thereupon Dr. Daruwalla assigned Martin Mills the task of taking Ganesh to Parsi General Hospital; the doctor wanted the crippled beggar to be examined by Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Jeejeebhoy—Double E-NT Jeejeebhoy, as he was called. Dr. Jeejeebhoy was an expert on the eye problems that were epidemic in India.

Although there was a rheumy discharge and Ganesh had said that his eyelids were gummed shut every morning, there wasn’t that softness of the eyeballs that Dr. Daruwalla thought of as end-stage or “white” eyes; then the cornea is dull and opaque, and the patient is blind. Farrokh hoped that, whatever was wrong with Ganesh, it was in an early stage. Vinod had admitted that the circus wouldn’t take a boy who was going blind—not even the Great Blue Nile.

But before Farrokh could hurry the elephant boy and the Jesuit on their way to Parsi General, which wasn’t far, Martin Mills had spontaneously come to the aid of a woman in the waiting room. She was the mother of a crippled child; the missionary had dropped to his knees at her feet, which Farrokh found to be an irritating habit of the zealot. The woman was frightened by the gesture. Also, she wasn’t in need of aid; she was not bleeding from her lips and gums, as the scholastic had declared—she was merely eating betel nut, which the Jesuit had never seen.

Dr. Daruwalla ushered Martin from the waiting room to his office, where the doctor believed that the missionary could do slightly less harm. Dr. Daruwalla insisted that Ganesh come with them, for the doctor was fearful that the dangerous beggar might bite someone else. Thereupon Farrokh calmly told Martin Mills what paan was—the local version of betel. The areca nut is wrapped in a betel leaf. Other common ingredients are rose syrup, aniseed, lime paste… but people put almost everything in the betel leaf, even cocaine. The veteran betel-nut eater has red-stained lips and teeth and gums. The woman the missionary had alarmed was not bleeding; she was merely eating paan.

Finally, Farrokh was able to free himself from Martin Mills. Dr. Daruwalla hoped that Double E-NT Jeejeebhoy would take forever to examine Ganesh’s eyes.

By midmorning, the day’s confusion had achieved a lunatic pace. It was already a day that brought to Farrokh’s mind those white-faced, dark-skinned girls in their purple tutus; it was a Load Cycle kind of day, as if everyone in the doctor’s office and waiting room were riding bicycles to cancan music. As if to emphasize this chaos, Ranjit walked into the office without knocking; the medical secretary had just read Dr. Daruwalla’s mail. Although the envelope that Ranjit handed to Dr. Daruwalla was addressed to the doctor, not to Inspector Dhar, there was something familiar about the cold neutrality of the typescript; even before the doctor looked inside the envelope and saw the two-rupee note, he knew what he’d find. Farrokh was nevertheless stunned to read the message typed in capital letters on the serial-number side of the money. This time the warning said, YOU’RE AS DEAD AS DHAR.

Madhu Uses Her Tongue

There was a telephone call that added to the general confusion; in his distress, Ranjit made a mistake. The secretary thought the caller was Radiology Patel—it was a question regarding when Dr. Daruwalla would come to view the photographs. Ranjit assumed that the “photographs” were X rays, and he answered abruptly that the doctor was busy; either Ranjit or the doctor would call back with the answer. But after the secretary hung up, he realized that the caller hadn’t been Radiology Patel. It had been Deputy Commissioner Patel, of course.

“There was a… Patel on the phone for you,” Ranjit told Farrokh in an offhand fashion. “He wants to know when you’re coming to see the photographs.”

And now there were two two-rupee notes in Dr. Daruwalla’s pocket; there was the warning to Dhar (YOU’RE AS DEAD AS LAL) and the warning to the doctor (YOU’RE AS DEAD AS DHAR). Farrokh felt certain that these threats would enhance the grimness of the photographs that the deputy commissioner wanted to show him.

Farrokh knew that John D., who was good at concealing his anger, was already angry with him for not forewarning the actor of the arrival of his bothersome twin. Dhar would be even angrier if Dr. Daruwalla saw the photographs of the elephants drawn on the murdered prostitutes without him, but the doctor thought it unwise to bring Dhar to Crime Branch Headquarters—nor would it be advisable to bring Martin Mills. The particular police station was near St. Xavier’s College, another Jesuit institution; this one was coeducational—St. Ignatius admitted only boys. Martin Mills would doubtless attempt to persuade his fellow Jesuits to admit Madhu to their school in case she wasn’t acceptable to the circus. The madman would probably insist that St. Xavier’s offer scholarships to other available child prostitutes! The scholastic had already announced that he would approach the Father Rector of St. Ignatius on Ganesh’s behalf. Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t wait to hear Father Julian’s response to the notion of St. Ignatius School attempting to educate a crippled beggar from Chowpatty Beach!

While the doctor was speculating in this fashion, and as he was hurrying to examine his remaining patients, Vinod and Deepa returned with Madhu and the tetracycline. Before he could abscond to the police station, Farrokh felt obliged to set a trap for Mr. Garg. The doctor told Deepa to tell Garg that Madhu was being treated for a sexually transmitted disease; that sounded vague enough. If Mr. Garg had diddled the child, he would need to call Dr. Daruwalla to find out which disease—in order to learn the prescribed cure.

“And tell him we’re checking to see if she’s HIV-positive,” Farrokh said. That ought to make the bastard squirm, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

The doctor wanted Deepa and Vinod to understand that Madhu must be kept away from the Wetness Cabaret, and away from Garg. The dwarf would drive his wife to the train station—Deepa had to return to the Great Blue Nile—but Vinod had to keep Madhu with him.

“And, remember, she’s not clean until she’s taken all the tetracycline,” the doctor told the dwarf.

“I am remembering,” Vinod said.

Then the dwarf asked about Dhar. Where was he? Was he all right? And didn’t Dhar need his faithful driver? Dr. Daruwalla explained to Vinod that Dhar was suffering from the common post-trauma delusion that he was someone else.

“Who is he being?” the dwarf inquired.

“A Jesuit missionary in training to be a priest,” the doctor replied.

Vinod was instantly sympathetic to this delusion. The actor was even more brain-damaged than the dwarf had first suspected! The key to dealing with Dhar, the doctor explained, was to expect him to be one person one minute and another person the next. The dwarf gravely nodded his big head.

Then Deepa kissed the doctor good-bye. There always lingered on her lips the sticky sweetness of those lemon drops she liked. Any physical contact with the dwarf’s wife made Dr. Daruwalla blush.

Farrokh could feel himself blush, but he’d never known if his blushes were visible. He knew he was dark-skinned for a Parsi, although he was fair-skinned in comparison to many other Indians—certainly, say, to a Goan or to a South Indian. In Canada, of course, the doctor was well aware that he was usually perceived as a man “of color,” but when it came to blushing, he never knew whether or not he could blush undetected. Naturally, his embarrassment was communicated by other signals quite unrelated to his complexion and utterly unknown to him. For example, in the aftermath of Deepa’s kiss, he averted his eyes but his lips remained parted, as if he’d forgotten something he was about to say. Thus he was caught all the more off guard when Madhu kissed him.

He wanted to believe that the child was merely imitating the dwarf’s wife, but the girl’s kiss was too lush and knowing—Deepa had not inserted her tongue. Farrokh felt Madhu’s tongue flick his own tongue, dartingly. And the girl’s breath was redolent of some dark spice—not lemon drops, possibly cardamom or clove. As Madhu withdrew from him, she flashed her first smile, and Dr. Daruwalla saw the blood-red edge to her teeth at the gum line. For Farrokh to realize that the child prostitute was a veteran betel-nut eater was only a mild surprise, even anticlimactic. The doctor presumed that an addiction to paan was the least of Madhu’s problems.

A Meeting at Crime Branch Headquarters

The inappropriately lewd encounter with Madhu left Dr. Daruwalla in no mood to be tolerant of the photographic record of Rahul’s artistry on the bellies of the murdered whores. The subject matter was no less limited than what the doctor had seen depicted on Beth’s belly 20 years ago, nor had the intervening years imparted to the artist any measurable subtlety of style. The ever-mirthful elephant winked its eye and raised the opposite tusk. The water from the end of the elephant’s trunk continued to spray the pubic hair—in many cases, the shaved pubic area—of the dead women. Not even the passing of so many years, not to mention the horror of so many murders, was sufficient to inspire Rahul beyond the first act of his imagination—namely, that the victim’s navel was always the winking eye. The differences among the women’s navels provided the only variety in the many photographs. Detective Patel remarked that both the drawings and the murders gave new meaning to that tired old phrase “a one-track mind.” Dr. Daruwalla, who was too appalled to speak, could only nod that he agreed.

Farrokh showed the deputy commissioner the threatening two-rupee notes, but D.C.P. Patel was unsurprised; he’d been expecting more warnings. The deputy commissioner knew that the note in Mr. Lal’s mouth had been just the beginning; no murderer the detective had ever known was content to threaten potential victims only once. Either killers didn’t warn you or they repeatedly warned you. Yet, for 20 years, this killer hadn’t given anyone a warning; only now, beginning with Mr. Lal, had there emerged a kind of vendetta against Inspector Dhar and Dr. Daruwalla. It seemed unlikely to the deputy commissioner that the sole motivation for this change in Rahul had been a stupid movie. Something about the Daruwalla-Dhar connection must have infuriated Rahul—both personally and for a long time. It was the deputy commissioner’s suspicion that Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer had simply exacerbated Rahul’s longstanding hatred.

“Tell me—I’m just curious,” said Detective Patel to Dr. Daruwalla. “Do you know any hijras—I mean personally?” But as soon as he saw that the doctor was thinking about the question—the doctor had been unable to answer spontaneously—the detective added, “In your movie, you made a hijra the murderer. Whatever gave you such an idea? I mean, in my experience, the hijras I know are reasonably gentle—they’re mostly nice people. The hijra prostitutes may be bolder than the female prostitutes, yet I don’t think of them as dangerous. But possibly you knew one—someone who wasn’t very nice. I’m just curious.”

“Well, someone had to be the murderer,” Dr. Daruwalla said defensively. “It was nothing personal.”

“Let me be more specific,” said the deputy commissioner. It was a line that got Dr. Daruwalla’s attention, because the doctor had often written that line for Inspector Dhar. “Did you ever know somebody with a woman’s breasts and a boy’s penis? It was a rather small penis, from all reports,” the detective added. “I don’t mean a hijra. I mean a zenana—a transvestite with a penis, but with breasts.”

That was when Farrokh felt a flutter of pain in the area of his heart. It was his injured rib, trying to remind him of Rahul. The rib was crying out to him that Rahul was the second Mrs. Dogar, but the doctor mistook the pain for an actual signal from his heart. His heart said, Rahul! But Rahul’s connection to Mrs. Dogar still eluded Dr. Daruwalla.

“Yes, or maybe—I mean, I knew a man who was trying to become a woman,” Farrokh replied. “He’d obviously taken estrogens, maybe he’d even had surgical implants—he definitely had a woman’s breasts. But whether he’d been castrated, or if he’d had other surgery, I don’t know—I mean, I presumed he had a penis because he was interested in the complete operation… a total sex change.”

“And did he have this operation?” the deputy commissioner asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” the doctor replied. “I haven’t seen him, or her, for twenty years.”

“That would be the right number of years, wouldn’t it?” the detective asked. Again, Farrokh felt the twinge in his rib that he confused with his excited heart.

“He was hoping to go to London for the operation,” Farrokh explained. “In those days, I believe it would have been very difficult to get a complete sex-change operation in India. They’re still illegal here.”

“I believe that our murderer also went to London,” Patel informed the doctor. “Obviously, and only recently, he—or she—came back.”

“The person I knew was interested in going to art school… in London,” Farrokh said numbly. The photographs of the drawings on the bellies of the murdered prostitutes grew clearer in his mind, although the photographs lay facedown on the deputy commissioner’s desk. It was Patel who picked one up and looked at it again.

“Not a very good art school would have taken him, I suspect,” the detective said.

He never shut his office door, which opened on an outdoor balcony; there were a dozen such offices off this balcony, and it was the deputy commissioner’s policy that no one ever closed a door—except in the monsoon rains, and then only when the wind was wrong. With the doors open, no one being interrogated could later claim that they’d been beaten. Also, the sound of the police secretaries typing their officers’ reports was a sound that the deputy commissioner enjoyed; the cacophony of typewriters implied both industry and order. He knew that many of his fellow policemen were lazy and their secretaries were sloppy; the typed reports themselves were rarely as orderly as the clacking of the keys. On his desk, Deputy Commissioner Patel faced three reports in need of rewriting, and an additional report in greater need, but he pushed these four reports aside in order to spread out the photographs of the murdered whores’ bellies. The elephant drawings were so familiar to him that they calmed him; he didn’t want the doctor to sense his eagerness.

“And would this person that you knew have had a common sort of name, a name like Rahul?” the detective asked. It was a delivery worthy of the insincerity of Inspector Dhar.

“Rahul Rai,” said Dr. Daruwalla; it was almost a whisper, but this didn’t lessen the deputy commissioner’s quickening pleasure.

“And would this Rahul Rai have been in Goa… perhaps visiting the beaches… at or about the time when the German and the American—those bodies you saw—were murdered?” Patel asked. The doctor was slumped in his chair as if bent by indigestion.

“At my hotel—at the Bardez,” Farrokh replied. “He was staying with his aunt. And the thing is, if Rahul is in Bombay, he is certainly familiar with the Duckworth Club—his aunt was a member!”

“Was?” the detective said.

“She’s dead,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “I would presume that Rahul, he or she, inherited her fortune.”

D.C.P. Patel touched the raised tusk of the elephant in one of the photographs; then he stacked the photos in a single neat pile. He’d always known there was family money in India, but the Duckworth Club connection was a surprise. What had misled him for 20 years was Rahul’s brief notoriety in the transvestite brothels on Falkland Road and Grant Road; these were hardly the usual haunts of a Duckworthian.

“Of course I know that you know my wife,” the detective said. “I must put you together with her. She knows your Rahul, too, and it might help me to hear you compare notes—so to speak.”

“We could have lunch at the club. Someone there might know more about Rahul,” Farrokh suggested.

“Don’t you ask any questions!” the deputy commissioner suddenly shouted. It offended Dr. Daruwalla to be yelled at, but the detective was quickly tactful, if not exactly mollifying. “We wouldn’t want to warn Rahul, would we?” Patel said, as if he were speaking to a child.

The rising dust from the courtyard had coated the leaves of the neem trees; the rail of the balcony was also coated with dust. In the detective’s office, the dull brass ceiling fan labored in an effort to push the motes of dust back out the open door. The darting shadows of fork-tailed kites occasionally moved across the deputy commissioner’s desk. The one open eve of the topmost elephant in the stack of photos seemed to notice all these things, which the doctor knew he would never forget.

“Lunch today?” suggested the detective.

“Tomorrow is better for me,” Dr. Daruwalla said. His pending obligation to deliver Martin Mills into the hands of the Jesuits at St. Ignatius was a welcome intrusion; he also needed to talk to Julia, and he wanted the time to tell Dhar—Dhar should be at the lunch with the wounded hippie. Farrokh knew that John D. had a superior memory, maybe even of Rahul.

“Tomorrow is fine,” said the deputy commissioner, but his disappointment was evident. The words his wife had used to describe Rahul were constantly with him. Also with him was the size of Rahul’s big hands, which had held his wife’s big breasts; also, the erectness and the shapeliness of Rahul’s breasts, which Nancy had felt against her back; also, the small, silky little boy’s penis, which his wife had felt against her buttocks. Nancy had said he was condescending, mocking, teasing—certainly sophisticated, probably cruel.

Because Dr. Daruwalla had only begun the struggle to compose a written report on Rahul Rai, the detective couldn’t quite leave him alone. “Give me one word for Rahul,” Patel asked Farrokh. “The first word that comes to your mind—I’m just curious,” the detective said.

“Arrogant,” the doctor replied. After 20 years, it was visible on Detective Patel’s face that this was unsatisfactory.

“Please try another,” the detective said.

“Superior,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“You’re getting closer,” Patel replied.

“Rahul is a tease,” Farrokh explained. “He condescends to you, he mocks you, he bullies you with a sort of self-satisfied sophistication. Like his late aunt, he uses his sophistication as a weapon. I think he is basically a cruel person,” The doctor paused in his description because the detective had closed his eyes and sat smiling at his desk. All the while, Deputy Commissioner Patel articulated his fingers as if he were typing up another report, but his fingers weren’t tapping the keys of his typewriter; the detective had once more spread out the photographs—they covered his desk—and he typed on the many heads of the mocking elephants, his fingers finding the navels of the murdered prostitutes… all those ceaselessly winking eyes.

Down the balcony, from another detective’s office, a man was screaming that he was telling the truth, while a policeman calmly contradicted him with the almost harmonious repetition of the word “lies.” From the courtyard kennel came a corresponding clamor—the police attack dogs.

After Dr. Daruwalla had completed his written report on Rahul, the doctor wandered onto the balcony to have a look at the dogs; they’d barked themselves out. The late-morning sun was now beating down on the courtyard; the police dogs, all Dobermans, were asleep in the only shady corner of their kennel, which was obscured from Farrokh’s view by a clump of neem trees. On the balcony itself, however, was a small cage with a newspaper floor, and the doctor knelt to play with a Doberman pinscher puppy—a prisoner in a portable pen. The puppy wriggled and whined for Farrokh’s attention. It thrust its sleek black muzzle through a square of the wire mesh; it licked the doctor’s hand—its needle-sharp teeth nipped his fingers.

“Are you a good dog?” Farrokh asked the puppy. Its wild eyes were ringed with the rusty-brown markings of its breed, which is preferred for police work in Bombay because the Dobermann short hair is suitable for the hot weather. The dogs were large and powerful and fast; they had the terrier’s jaws and tenacity, although they weren’t quite as intelligent as German shepherds.

A subinspector, a junior officer, came out of an office where at least three typewriters were resounding, and this young, officious policeman spoke aggressively to Dr. Daruwalla… something to the effect that “spoiling” the Doberman puppy would make it untrainable for police business, something about not treating a future attack dog as a pet. Whenever anyone spoke Hindi this abruptly to the doctor, Farrokh felt frozen by his lack of fluency in the language.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Daruwalla said in English.

“No, don’t you be sorry!” someone suddenly shouted. It was Deputy Commissioner Patel; he’d popped out of his office onto the balcony, where he stood clutching Farrokh’s written statement in his hands. “Go on—play with the puppy all you want to!” the deputy commissioner shouted.

The junior policeman realized his error and quickly apologized to Dr. Daruwalla. “I’m sorry, saar,” he said. But before the subinspector could slip back into his office and the safe din of the typewriters, he was barked at by Detective Patel, too.

“You should be sorry—speaking to my witness!” the deputy commissioner yelled.

So I am a “witness,” Farrokh realized. He’d made a small fortune satirizing the police; now he knew he was in utter ignorance of even a matter as trivial as the pecking order among policemen.

“Go on—play with the puppy!” Patel repeated to the doctor, and so Farrokh once more turned his attention to the Doberman. Since the little dog had just dropped a surprisingly large turd on the newspaper floor of its cage, Dr. Daruwalla’s attention was momentarily attracted to the turd. That was when he saw that the newspaper was today’s edition of The Times of India, and that the Doberman’s turd had fallen on the review of Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence. It was a bad review, of such a hostile nature that its surliness seemed enhanced by the smell of dog shit.

The turd prevented all but a partial reading of the review, which was just as well; Farrokh was angered enough. There was even a gratuitous swipe taken at Dhar’s perceived weight problem. The reviewer asserted that Inspector Dhar sported too protrusive a beer belly to justify the film studio’s claim that Dhar was the Charles Bronson of Bombay.

By the nearby flutter of pages, Dr. Daruwalla realized that the deputy commissioner had finished reading the doctor’s statement. The detective also stood close enough to the puppy’s cage to observe what Farrokh had been reading; Detective Patel was the one who had put the newspaper there.

“I’m afraid it’s not a very good review,” the deputy commissioner observed.

“They never are,” Farrokh said. He followed Patel back to his office. Dr. Daruwalla could feel that the detective wasn’t altogether pleased by the doctor’s written report.

“Sit down,” Detective Patel said, but when the doctor moved to the chair he’d sat in before, the detective caught his arm and steered him around the desk. “No, no—you sit where I usually sit!” And so Farrokh seated himself in the deputy commissioner’s chair. It was higher than the doctor’s previous seat; the photographs of the murdered prostitutes were easier to see, or else harder to ignore. The doctor remembered the day at Chowpatty Beach when little John D. had been so frightened by the festival mob, by all the elephant heads being carried into the sea. “They’re drowning the elephants!” the child had cried. “Now the elephants will be angry!”

In his written statement, Farrokh had said that he believed the hateful phone calls about his father’s assassination had been from Rahul; after all, it was the voice of a woman trying to sound like a man, and this might suit whatever voice Rahul had ended up with. Twenty years ago, Rahul’s voice had been a work-in-progress; it had been sexually undecided. But although Detective Patel found this speculation interesting, the detective was disturbed by Dr. Daruwalla’s conclusion: that Rahul had been old Lowji’s assassin. This was too imaginative—it was too big a leap. This was the kind of conjecture that marred the doctor’s written report and made it, in the deputy commissioner’s opinion, “amateurish.”

“Your father was blown up by professionals,” D.C.P. Patel informed Farrokh. “I was still an inspector at the Colaba Station—only the duty officer. The Tardeo Police Station answered that call. I wasn’t allowed at the scene of the crime, and then the investigation was turned over to the government. But I know for a fact that Lowji Daruwalla was exploded by a team. For a while, I heard that they thought the head mali might have been involved.”

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

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

“Oh,” Farrokh said. He was feeling more and more amateurish by the minute.

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

The doctor sat dismally still, looking at the photographic history of the murdered women. “But why would Rahul hate me—or Dhar?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

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

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

No Motive

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

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

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

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

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

“No, sweetie,” the detective said.

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

“No, I would have told you, sweetie,” the deputy commissioner said.

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

“Yes, of course I promise, sweetie,” the detective said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin’s Mother Makes Him Sick

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

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

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

“You’re so cynical,” the scholastic said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The parallels to Jesus are understandable,” Martin Mills began, “although Sai Baba was a teenager before he gained attention and he was an old man, in his eighties, when he died… I believe in 1918.”

“From his pictures, I always thought he looked a little like Lee Marvin… the Lee Marvin of Maharashtra,” Farrokh said.

“Lee Marvin! Not Shirdi Sai Baba …” the missionary protested.

And here, in an effort to interrupt the zealot’s upcoming lecture on the parallels between Christianity and the cult of Sai Baba worship, the doctor launched into a description of the terrible teeterboard item that bore responsibility for Vinod’s aerial assault of the surprised audience at the less-than-great Blue Nile Circus. Dr. Daruwalla made it clear that such careless elephant-stamping acts would likely be in store for the less-than-innocent Madhu and the elephant-footed Ganesh. But the doctor’s calculated pessimism failed to bait the missionary into repeating his claim that the perils of the circus—of any circus—paled in comparison to the hardships facing a prostitute or a beggar in Bombay. As swiftly as he’d dropped Gandhi for Sai Baba, Martin Mills now abandoned the Jesus of Maharashtra, too.

The missionary’s new and sudden interest was prompted by a billboard they were passing, an advertisement for Close-Up.

“Look at that!” cried Martin Mills. Their taxi’s startled driver barely avoided being broadsided by a Thums Up cola truck; it was as big and bright red as a fire engine. “English usage is so important,” the scholastic declared. “What worries me about those children is that their English will deteriorate in the circus. Perhaps we could insist that someone in the circus tutor them!”

“How will speaking English serve them in the circus?” Farrokh asked. He knew it was nonsense to think that Madhu possessed enough English for her grasp of the language to “deteriorate.” It was still a mystery to Dr. Daruwalla that the elephant boy’s spoken English and his apparent understanding of the language were as good as they were; perhaps someone had already tutored him. Maybe the missionary would suggest that Ganesh tutor Madhu! But Martin Mills didn’t wait for the doctor to elaborate on his thesis that English would never provide these children with any advantage—not in the circus.

“Speaking English serves anyone well,” said the English teacher. “One day, English will be the language of the world.”

“Bad English is already the language of the world,” said Dr. Daruwalla despairingly. That the children might be mashed by elephants was not the missionary’s concern, but the moron wished proper English usage on them!

Passing Dr. Vora’s Gynecological and Maternity Hospital, Farrokh realized that their decrepit driver was lost; the wretch made a sudden turn and was almost sideswiped by a careening olive-drab van belonging to the Spastics’ Society of India. Only a moment later—or so it seemed; it was longer—the doctor realized that his own sense of direction had deserted him, for they were passing the Times of India Building when Martin Mills announced, “We could give the children a subscription to The Times of India and have it sent to them at the circus. We’d have to insist that they give it at least an hour a day of their attention, of course.”

“Of course …” said Dr. Daruwalla. The doctor thought he might faint with frustration, for their troubled driver had missed the turn he should have taken—there went Sir J. J. Road.

“I’m planning to read the newspaper myself, daily,” the missionary went on. “When you’re a foreigner, there’s nothing like a local newspaper to orient you.” The thought of anyone becoming oriented by The Times of India made Farrokh feel that a head-on collision with an approaching double-decker bus might be an improvement on the scholastic’s continued conversation. Then, in the next instant, they’d plunged into Mazagaon—St. Ignatius was now very near—and the doctor, for no calculated reason, instructed their driver to take a slight detour through the slum on Sophia Zuber Road.

“A part of this slum was once a movie set,” Dr. Daruwalla explained to Martin Mills. “It was in this very slum that your mother fainted when she was sneezed on, and then licked, by a cow. Of course, she was pregnant with you at the time—I suppose you’ve heard the story …”

“Please stop the car!” the missionary cried.

When their driver braked, but before the taxi came to a complete halt, Martin Mills opened the rear door and vomited into the moving street. Because nothing in a slum goes unseen, this episode attracted the attention of several slum dwellers, who began to jog beside the slowing car. Their frightened driver speeded up in order to get away from them.

“After your mother fainted, there was a riot,” Farrokh continued. “Apparently, there was massive confusion concerning who licked whom… your mother or the cow.”

“Please stop—not the car. Please don’t mention my mother,” Martin said.

“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Daruwalla, who was secretly excited. At last Farrokh had found a subject that gave him the upper hand.

A Half Dozen Cobras

It would be no less long a day for Deputy Commissioner Patel than it would be for Dr. Daruwalla, but the level of confusion in the detective’s day would be slightly less overwhelming. The deputy commissioner easily revised the first botched report that awaited his attention—a suspected murder at the Suba Guest House. It turned out to be a suicide. The report had to be rewritten because the duty officer had misinterpreted the young man’s suicide note as a clue left behind by the presumed murderer. Later, the victim’s mother had identified her son’s handwriting. The deputy commissioner could sympathize with the duty officer’s mistake, for it wasn’t much of a suicide note.

Had sex with a woman who smelled like meat Not very pure.

As for the second report in need of rewriting, the deputy commissioner was less sympathetic with the subinspector who’d been summoned to the Alexandria Girls’ English Institution. A young student had been discovered in the lavatory, presumably raped and murdered. But when the subinspector arrived at the school, he found the girl to be very much alive; she was totally recovered from her own murder and indignant at the suggestion that she’d been raped. It turned out she’d suffered her first period, and—withdrawing to the lavatory to look more closely at what was happening to her—she’d fainted at the sight of her own blood. There a hysterical teacher had found her, mistaking the blood as proof of the rape of a virgin. The teacher also assumed that the girl was dead.

The reason the report had to be rewritten was that the subinspector couldn’t bring himself to mention that the poor girl had suffered her “period”; it was, he said upon interrogation, as morally impossible for him to write this word as it would be for him to write the word “menstruation,” which (he added) was very nearly a morally impossible word for him even to say. And so the erroneously reported rape and murder was called, in writing, “a case of first female bleeding.” Detective Patel needed to remind himself that his 20 years with Nancy had made it easy for him to recognize the tortured morality of many of his colleagues; he restrained himself from too harsh a judgment of the subinspector.

The third report that needed to be revised was Dhar-related; it had never been reported as a crime at all. There’d been a perplexing brouhaha on Falkland Road in the wee hours. Dhar’s dwarf bodyguard—that cocky thug!—had beaten up a half-dozen hijras. Two were still hospitalized, and one of the four who’d been released was wearing a cast on a broken wrist. Two of the transvestite prostitutes had been persuaded not to press charges against Dhar’s dwarf, whom the investigating officer referred to by the name many policemen used for Vinod: “the half-bodyguard.” But the report was stupidly written because the part about Inspector Dhar being under attack, and Vinod coming to his rescue, was merely a footnote; there was no mention of what Dhar had been doing in the neighborhood in the first place—the report was too unfinished for submission.

The deputy commissioner made a note to inquire of Dhar what had possessed the actor to approach the hijra prostitutes. If the fool wanted to fuck a prostitute, surely an expensive call girl would be within his financial reach—and safer. The incident struck the detective as highly out of character for the circumspect celebrity. Wouldn’t it be funny if Inspector Dhar was a homosexual? the deputy commissioner thought.

There was at least some humor in the deputy commissioner’s day. The fourth report had come to Crime Branch Headquarters from the Tardeo Police Station. At least six snakes were loose near the Mahalaxmi temple, but there were no reported bitings—meaning, none yet. The duty officer from the Tardeo Station had taken photographs. Detective Patel recognized the broad expanse of stairs leading to the Mahalaxmi. At the top of the steps, where the temple loomed, there was a wide pavilion where the worshipers bought coconut and flowers for their offerings; this was also where the worshipers left their sandals and shoes. But, in the photos, the deputy commissioner could see that the stairs leading to the temple were dotted with stray sandals and shoes—indicating that a panicked crowd had only recently fled up or down the steps. In the aftermath of riots, the ground was always strewn with sandals and shoes; people had run right out of them or up the backs of other people’s heels.

The temple steps were usually crowded; now they were deserted—the flower stalls and the coconut shops were empty of people, too. Everywhere there were only scattered sandals and shoes! At the bottom of the temple stairs, Detective Patel noted the tall woven baskets where the cobras were kept; the baskets were overturned, presumably empty. The snake charmers had fled with everyone else. But where had the cobras gone?

It must have been quite a scene, the deputy commissioner imagined. The worshipers running and screaming, the snakes slithering away. Detective Patel thought that most of the cobras belonging to snake charmers had no venom, although they could still bite.

The puzzle in the photographs was what was missing from the pictures. What had been the crime? Had one snake charmer thrown his cobra at another snake charmer? Had a tourist tripped over one of the cobra baskets? In one second the snakes were loose, in another second people were running out of their shoes. But what was the crime?

Deputy Commissioner Patel sent the snake report back to the Tardeo Police Station. The escaped cobras were their problem. Probably the snakes were venomless; if they were snake charmers’ snakes, at least they were tame. The detective knew that a half-dozen cobras in Mahalaxmi weren’t half as dangerous as Rahul.

At the Mission, Farrokh Is Inspired

It was a surprisingly subdued missionary whom Farrokh delivered to the Jesuits at St. Ignatius. Inside the cloister, Martin Mills exhibited the obedience of a well-trained dog; the once-admired “modesty of the eyes” became a fixed feature of his face—he looked more like a monk than a Jesuit. The doctor couldn’t have known that the Father Rector and Father Cecil and Brother Gabriel had been expecting a loud clown in a Hawaiian shirt; Dr. Daruwalla was disappointed at the almost reverential greeting the scholastic received. In his unpressed Fashion Street shirt—not to mention his haunted, scratched face and his concentration-camp haircut—the new missionary made a serious first impression.

Dr. Daruwalla unaccountably lingered at the mission. Farrokh supposed that he was hoping for an opportunity to warn Father Julian that Martin Mills was a madman; but the doctor was of a considerably mixed mind when it came to involving himself to a greater extent in the newcomer’s future. Furthermore, Farrokh found that it was impossible to get the Father Rector alone. They’d arrived just after the schoolboys had finished lunch. Father Cecil and Brother Gabriel—with not fewer than a combined 145 years between them—insisted on struggling with the scholastic’s suitcase, and this left Father Julian to conduct Martin’s first tour of St. Ignatius. Dr. Daruwalla followed behind.

Since his own school days, Farrokh had spent only intermittent time at the place. He reviewed the examination scrolls in the entrance hall with a detached curiosity. The Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (I.C.S.E.) marked the completion of junior high school. In the Examination Certificate of 1973, St. Ignatius demonstrated its Spanish connection by commemorating the death of Picasso; this must have been Brother Gabriel’s idea. A photograph of the artist was among the photos of that year’s graduates, as if Picasso had also passed the requisite exam; and there were these few words: PICASSO PASSES AWAY. In 1975, the 300th anniversary of Shivaji’s Coronation was commemorated; in ’76, the Montreal Olympics was observed; in ’77, the deaths of both Charlie Chaplin and Elvis were mourned—they were also pictured among the graduates. This yearbook-minded sentimentality was interamixed with religious and nationalistic fervor. The centerpiece of the entrance hall was a larger-than-life statue of the Virgin Mary standing on the head of the serpent with the apple in its mouth, as if she thus circumvented or had altered the Old Testament. And over the entranceway itself were side-by-side portraits—one of the pope of the moment, the other of Nehru as a young man.

Haunted by nostalgia, but more strongly disturbed by a culture that had never become his, Farrokh felt himself losing his faint resolve. Why warn the Father Rector about Martin Mills? Why try to warn any of them? The whole place, perhaps owing its inspiration to St. Ignatius Loyola himself, spoke of survival—not to mention a humbling instinct for repentance. As for the Jesuits’ success in Bombay and the rest of India, Farrokh assumed that the Indian stress on mother-worship gave the Catholics a certain advantage. The cult of the Virgin Mary was just more mother-worship, wasn’t it? Even in an all-boys’ school, the Holy Mother dominated the statuary.

Only a scattering of English names appeared on the examination scrolls, yet passable English was an admissions requirement and fluency in the language was expected of any St. Ignatius graduate; it was the classroom language throughout the school, and the only language posted in writing.

At the student canteen, in the courtyard, was a photograph of the junior school’s most recent trip: there were the boys in their white shirts with navy-blue ties; they wore navy-blue shorts and kneesocks, too—and black shoes. The caption, to this photo said: OUR JUNIORS, INC. OUR MIDGETS AND OUR SUBMIDGETS. (Dr. Daruwalla disapproved of abbreviations.)

In the first-aid room, a boy with a stomach ache lay curled on a cot, above which was tacked a photo of the stereotypical sunset at Haji Ali’s Tomb. The caption that accompanied this sunset was as egregious a non sequitur as any that had thus far been uttered by Martin Mills: YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, BUT IF YOU LIVE RIGHT, ONCE IS ENOUGH.

Moving on to the music parlor, the doctor was struck by the tunelessness of the piano, which, in combination with the abrasive singing of the untalented music teacher, made it hard for Dr. Daruwalla to recognize even as oft-droned a dirge as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” She was an English teacher, a certain Miss Tanuja, and Farrokh overheard Father Julian explaining to Martin Mills that this time-honored method of teaching a language through song lyrics was still popular with the younger children. Since very few of the children were contributing more than mumbles to Miss Tanuja’s braying voice. Farrokh doubted the Father Rector on this point; maybe the problem wasn’t the method but Miss Tanuja.

She struck Dr. Daruwalla as one of those Indian women who remain uncontained by Western clothes, which Miss Tanuja was wearing with special gracelessness and folly. Perhaps the children couldn’t sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” because they were distracted by the riotous array of Miss Tanuja’s ensemble; the doctor observed that even Martin Mills appeared to be distracted by her. Farrokh cruelly assumed that Miss Tanuja was desperate to marry. She was very round-faced and of a medium, milk-chocolate complexion, and she wore very sharply angled glasses—of the kind with upward-sweeping wing tips embedded with small, bright gems. Perhaps Miss Tanuja thought that these eyeglasses contrasted pleasingly with the smoothness and roundness of her face.

She had the plump, youthful figure of a high-school voluptuary, but she wore a dark skirt that hugged her hips too tightly and was the wrong length for her. Miss Tanuja was short and the dress chopped her legs off at midcalf, which gave Dr. Daruwalla the impression that her thick ankles were wrists and her fat little feet were hands. Her blouse had a reflecting luminosity of a blue-green nature, as if flecked with algae dredged from a pond; and although the woman’s most pleasing quality was an overall curvaceousness, she’d chosen a bra that served her badly. From what little Dr. Daruwalla knew of bras, he judged it to be the old-fashioned pointy type—one of those rigidly constructed halters more suitable for protecting women from fencing injuries than for enhancing their natural shapeliness. And between Miss Tanuja’s outrageously uplifted and sharply pointed breasts, there hung a crucifix, as if the Christ on Miss Tanuja’s cross—in addition to his other agonies—were expected to endure the misery of bouncing on the teacher’s ample but spear-headed bosoms.

“Miss Tanuja has been with us for many years,” Father Julian whispered.

“I see,” said Dr. Daruwalla, but Martin Mills merely stared.

Then they passed a classroom of smaller children in I-3. The kids were napping with their heads on their desks—either “midgets” or “sub-midgets,” Farrokh guessed.

“Do you play the piano?” the Father Rector was asking the new missionary.

“I always wanted to learn,” Martin said. Maybe the madman could practice the piano between bouts of orienting himself in The Times of India, Dr. Daruwalla thought.

And to change the subject from his lack of musical skills, the scholastic asked Father Julian about the sweepers, for there were everywhere about the mission an abundance of men and women who were sweeping—they also cleaned the toilets—and the missionary assumed that these sweepers were people from the untouchable castes.

The Father Rector used the words “bhangee” and “maitrani,” but Martin Mills was a man with more of a mission than Father Julian supposed. Martin asked the Father Rector directly: “And do their children attend this school?” All of a sudden, Dr. Daruwalla liked him.

“Well, no—that wouldn’t be suitable, you see,” Father Julian was saying, but Farrokh was impressed by how gracefully Martin Mills interrupted the Father Rector. The scholastic simply breezed into a description of “rescuing” the crippled beggar and the child prostitute; it was Martin’s one-step-at-a-time method, and the missionary virtually waltzed the Father Rector through the steps. First the circus—instead of begging, or the brothel. Then the mastery of the English language—“so civilizing as to be essential”—and then “the intelligent conversion”; Martin Mills also called this “the informed life in Christ.”

A class of seniors, on recess, was enjoying a savage, silent dirt fight in the courtyard, but Dr. Daruwalla marveled how the Jesuits were undistracted by this minor violence; they spoke and listened with the concentration of lions stalking a kill.

“But surely, Martin, you wouldn’t credit yourself with these children’s conversion?” Father Julian said. “That is, should they eventually be converted.”

“Well, no… what do you mean?” Martin asked.

“Only that I never know if I have converted anyone,” the Father Rector replied. “And if these children were converted, how could you presume it happened because of you? Don’t be too proud. If it happens, it was God. It wasn’t you.”

“Why, no—of course not!” said Martin Mills. “If it happens, it was God!”

Was this “obedience”? Dr. Daruwalla wondered.

When Father Julian led Martin to his cubicle, which Dr. Daruwalla imagined as a kind of prison cell with built-in instruments to chastise the flesh, the doctor continued to roam; he wanted to look at the sleeping children again, because that image of sleeping with his head on his desk was more appealing than anything else he could remember about attending St. Ignatius School—it had been so many years ago. But when he peered into I-3 again, a teacher he hadn’t seen before regarded him sternly, as if his presence in the doorway would disturb the children. And this time the doctor noticed the exposed wiring for the fluorescent lights, which were off, and the exposed wiring for the ceiling fan, which was on. Suspended over the blackboard like a puppet on tangled, immobile strings was yet another statue of the Virgin Mary. From Farrokh’s Canadian perspective, this particular Holy Mother was covered with frost, or a light snow; but it was only rising chalk dust from the blackboard that had settled on the statue.

Dr. Daruwalla amused himself by reading as many printed messages and announcements as he could find. There was a plea from the Social Concern Group—“to help less fortunate brothers and sisters.” Prayers were offered for the Souls in Purgatory. There was the pleasing juxtaposition of the Minimax fire extinguisher that was mounted on the wall beside the statue of Christ with the sick child; in fire-extinguisher language, a short list of instructions was printed next to a page from a lined notebook on which a child’s handwriting proclaimed, “Thanks to Infant Jesus and Our Lady of Perpetual Help.” Farrokh felt somewhat more comforted by the presence of the fire extinguisher. The great stone mission had been erected in 1865; the fluorescent lights, the ceiling fans, the vast network of haphazard wiring—these had been added later. The doctor concluded that an electrical fire was entirely possible.

Farrokh tried to familiarize himself with all the meetings that a good Christian could go to. There was an announced Meeting of Liturgical Readers, and the Meeting of the Members of the Cross—“to make parish members more politically conscious.” The present topic of proposed conversation in the Adult Catholic Education Program was “The Christian Today in the World of Non-Christian Religions.” This month, the Hope Alive Center was conducted by Dr. Yusuf Merchant. Dr. Daruwalla wondered what “conducted by” meant. There was a Get to Know Each Other Party for the Altar Service Corps, which Farrokh suspected would be a grim gathering.

Under the archway of the second-floor balcony, the doctor was struck by the unfinished irregularity of the pieces of stained glass—as if the very notion of God were this fragmented, this incomplete. In the Icon Chapel, the doctor abruptly closed a hymnal upon encountering the hymn called “Bring Me Oil.” Then he read the bookmark that he’d removed from the hymnal; the bookmark celebrated St. Ignatius’s upcoming jubilee year—“a labour of love in building youth for 125 years.” There was also the word “world-affirming”; Dr. Daruwalla had never had the slightest idea what this implied. Farrokh peeked into the hymnal again, but even the name of the thing offended him; it was called the “Song Book of the Charismatic Renewal in India”—he hadn’t known that there was any charismatic renewal! And so he exchanged the hymnal for a prayer book, wherein he looked no further than the opening line of the first prayer: “Keep us, Lord, as the apple of Your eye.”

Dr. Daruwalla then discovered the Holy Father’s Intentions for 1990. For January, it was advised that the dialogue between the Catholic and Anglican communities continue in the quest for Christian unity. For February, prayers were offered for those Catholics who, in many parts of the world, suffered either verbal or physical persecution. For March, the parishioners were exhorted to give a more authentic witness for support of the needy—and fidelity to the poverty of the Gospels. Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t read past March, for the phrase “poverty of the Gospels” stopped him. Farrokh felt surrounded by too much that was meaningless to him.

Even Brother Gabriel’s fastidious collecting of icons meant little to the doctor, and the icon-collection room at St. Ignatius was famous in Bombay. To Farrokh, the depictions were lugubrious and obscure. There was a 16th-century Adoration of the Magi, of the Ukrainian School; there was a 15th-century Decapitation of John the Baptist, of the Central Northern School. In the Passing of Our Lord category, there was a Last Supper, a Crucifixion, a Deposition (the taking of Christ’s body from the cross), an Entombment, a Resurrection and an Ascension; they were all icons from the 14th through the 18th centuries, and they varied among the Novgorod School, the Byzantine School, the Moscow School… and so on. There was one called the Dormition of the Virgin, and that did it for Dr. Daruwalla; the doctor didn’t know what the Dormition was.

From the icons, the doctor roamed to the Father Rector’s office, where something resembling a cribbage board was nailed to the closed door; by means of holes and pegs, Father Julian could indicate his whereabouts or availability—“back soon” or “do not disturb,” “rec. room” or “back late,” “back for supper” or “out of Bombay.” That was when Dr. Daruwalla considered that he should be “out of Bombay”; that he’d been born here didn’t mean that he belonged here.

When he heard the bell signifying the end of school, Farrokh realized that it was already 3:00 in the afternoon. He stood on the second-floor balcony and watched the schoolboys racing through the dusty courtyard. Cars and buses were taking them away; either their mothers or their ayahs were coming to fetch them home. From the perspective of the balcony, Dr. Daruwalla determined that they were the fattest children he’d ever seen in India. This was uncharitable; not half the children at St. Ignatius were half as plump as Farrokh. Nevertheless, the doctor knew that he would no more interfere with the new missionary’s zeal than he would choose to leap from the balcony and kill himself in front of these blameless children.

Farrokh also knew that almost no one of rank at the mission would mistake Martin Mills for Inspector Dhar. The Jesuits weren’t known for their appreciation of so-called Bollywood, the trashy Hindi film scene; young women in soaking-wet saris weren’t their thing. Superheroes and fiendish villains, violence and vulgarity, tawdriness and corniness—and the occasional descending god, intervening in pathetic, merely human affairs… Inspector Dhar was not famous at St. Ignatius. Among the schoolboys, however, more than one student of Martin Mills might note the resemblance. Inspector Dhar was popular with schoolboys.

Dr. Daruwalla still lingered; he had things to do, but he couldn’t make himself leave. He didn’t know that he was writing; it had never begun quite like this before. When the children were gone, he went inside St. Ignatius Church—but not to pray. A huge wheel of unlit candles hung above the center table, which resembled a refectory table only in its shape; in fact, it was a folding table of a household kind—better suited, say, for sorting laundry. The pulpit, to the right of this table (as Farrokh faced the altar), was equipped with an inappropriately shiny microphone; upon this pulpit a Lectionary lay open, from which the doctor assumed that the lector would be reading—possibly at the evening Mass. Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t resist snooping. The Lectionary was open to the Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians.

“Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we do not lose heart,” wrote the converted one. [II Corinthians 4:1] Skipping ahead, the doctor read: “We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.” [4:8–10]

Dr. Daruwalla felt small. He ventured into a pew in one of the side aisles—as if he wasn’t significant enough, in his lack of faith, to sit in a center-aisle seat. His own conversion seemed trifling, and very far behind him; in his daily thoughts, he barely honored it—perhaps he had been bitten by a monkey, he concluded. He noted that the church was without an organ; another, probably tuneless piano stood to the left of the folding table—another inappropriately shiny microphone stood on it.

From far outside the church, the doctor was aware of the constantly passing mopeds—the snarling of their low-powered engines, the ducklike quacking of their infernal horns. The highly staged altarpiece drew the doctor’s eye: there was Christ on the Cross and those two familiar women forlornly flanking him. Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, Dr. Daruwalla presumed. The life-sized figures of the saints, all in stone, were mounted on the columns that defined the aisles; these massive pillars each supported a saint, and at the saints’ feet were tilted oscillating fans—pointed down, in order to cool the congregation.

Blasphemously, Dr. Daruwalla noticed that one of the stone saints had worked herself loose from her pillar; a thick chain had been secured around the saint’s neck, and this chain was attached to the pillar by a sizable steel grommet. The doctor wished he knew which saint she was; he thought that all the female saints too closely resembled the Virgin Mary—at least as statues. Whoever this saint was, she appeared to have been hung in effigy; but without the chain around her neck, she might have toppled into a pew. Dr. Daruwalla judged that the stone saint was big enough to kill a pew of worshipers.

Finally, Farrokh said his good-byes to Martin Mills and the other Jesuits. The scholastic suddenly begged to hear the details of Dr. Daruwalla’s conversion. The doctor supposed that Father Julian had given Martin a cunning and sarcastic rendition of the story.

“Oh, it was nothing,” Farrokh replied modestly. This probably concurred with the Father Rector’s version.

“But I should love to hear about it!” Martin said.

“If you tell him yours, I’m sure he’ll tell you his,” Father Julian said to Farrokh.

“Maybe another time,” Dr. Daruwalla said. Never had he so much desired to flee. He had to promise that he’d attend Martin’s lecture at the YWCA, although he had no intentions of attending; he would rather die than attend. He’d heard quite enough lecturing from Martin Mills!

“It’s the YWCA at Cooperage, you know,” Father Cecil informed him. Since Dr. Daruwalla was sensitive to those Bombayites who assumed that he barely knew his way around the city, the doctor was snappish in his reply.

“I know where it is!” Farrokh said.

Then a little girl appeared, out of nowhere. She was crying because she’d come to St. Ignatius with her mother, to pick up her brother after school, and somehow they’d left without her. There’d been other children in the car. It wasn’t a crisis, the Jesuits decided. The mother would realize what had happened and return to the school. It was merely necessary to comfort the child, and someone should call the mother so that she’d not drive recklessly in fear that her daughter was lost. But there was another problem: the little girl confided to them that she needed to pee. Brother Gabriel declared to Dr. Daruwalla that there was “no official peeing place for girls” at St. Ignatius.

“But where does Miss Tanuja pee?” Martin Mills asked.

Good for him! Dr. Daruwalla thought. He’s going to drive them all crazy.

“And I saw several women among the sweepers,” Martin added.

“There must be three or four women teachers, aren’t there?” Dr. Daruwalla asked innocently.

Of course there was a peeing place for girls! These old men simply didn’t know where it was.

“Someone could see if a men’s room is unoccupied,” Father Cecil suggested.

“Then one of us could guard the door,” Father Julian advised.

When Farrokh finally left them all, they were still discussing this awkward necessity to bend the rules. The doctor presumed that the little girl still needed to pee.

Tetracycline

Dr. Daruwalla was on his way back to the Hospital for Crippled Children when he realized that he’d started another screenplay; he knew that this one would not be starring Inspector Dhar. In his mind’s eye, he saw a beggar working the Arab hotels along Marine Drive; he saw the Queen’s Necklace at night… that string of yellow smog lights… and he heard Julia saying that yellow wasn’t the proper color for the necklace of a queen. For the first time, Farrokh felt that he understood the start of a story—the characters were set in motion by the fates that awaited them. Something of the authority of an ending was already contained in the beginning scene.

He was exhausted; he had much to talk about with Julia, and he had to talk to John D. Dr. Daruwalla and his wife were having an early dinner at the Ripon Club. Then the doctor had planned to write a first draft of a little speech he would be giving soon; he’d been invited to say something to the Society for the Rehabilitation of Crippled Children—they were such faithful sponsors of the hospital. But now he knew he would write all night—and not his speech. At last, he thought, he had a screenplay in him that justified the telling. In his mind’s eye, he saw the characters arriving at Victoria Terminus, but this time he knew where they were going; he wondered if he’d ever been so excited.

The familiar figure in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room distracted the doctor from the story he’d imagined; among the waiting children, the tall man indeed stood out. Even seated, his military erectness immediately captured Farrokh’s attention. The taut sallow skin and the slack mouth; the lion-yellow eyes; the acid-shriveled ear and the raw pink smear that had burned a swath along his jawline and down the side of his throat, where it disappeared under the collar of Mr. Garg’s shirt—all this captured Dr. Daruwalla’s attention, too.

One look at the nervously wriggling fingers of Mr. Garg’s locked hands confirmed Farrokh’s suspicions. It was clear tc the doctor that Garg was itching to know the specific nature of Madhu’s “sexually transmitted disease”; Dr. Daruwalla felt only an empty triumph. To see Garg—guilty and ready to grovel, and reduced to waiting his turn among the crippled children—would be the full extent of the doctor’s slight victory, for Dr. Daruwalla knew, even at this very moment, that something more than professional confidentiality would prevent him from disclosing Mr. Garg’s guilt to Deepa and Vinod. Besides, how could the dwarf and his wife not already know that Garg diddled young girls? It may have been Garg’s guilt that compelled him to allow Deepa and Vinod to attempt their circus rescues of so many of these children. Surely the dwarf and his wife already knew what Farrokh was only beginning to guess: that many of these little prostitutes would have preferred to stay with Mr. Garg. Like the circus, even the Great Blue Nile, maybe Garg was better than a brothel.

Mr. Garg stood and faced Farrokh. The eyes of every crippled child in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room were fixed on the acid scar, but the doctor looked only at the whites of Garg’s eyes, which were a jaundice-yellow—and at the deeper, tawny lion-yellow of Garg’s irises, which offset his black pupils. Garg had the same eyes as Madhu. The doctor passingly wondered if they might be related.

“I was here first—before any of them,” Mr. Garg whispered.

“I’ll bet you were,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

If it was guilt that had flickered in Garg’s lion eyes, it seemed to be fading; a shy smile tightened his usually slack lips, and something conspiratorial crept into his voice. “So… I guess you know about Madhu and me,” Mr. Garg said.

What can one say to such a man? Dr. Daruwalla thought. The doctor realized that Deepa and Vinod and even Martin Mills were right: let every girl-child be an acrobat in the circus, even in the Great Blue Nile—even if they fall and die. Let them be eaten by lions! For it was true that Madhu was both a child and a prostitute—worse, she was Mr. Garg’s girl. There was truly nothing to say to such a man. Only a strictly professional question came to Dr. Daruwalla’s mind, and he put it to Garg as bluntly as he could.

“Are you allergic to tetracycline?” the doctor asked him.