A Son of the Circus

Another Author in Search of an Ending

The second Mrs. Dogar also suspected Dhar of unconventional sexual interests. It was frustrating to the former Rahul that Inspector Dhar had not returned the recently married woman’s attentions. And although both the disapproving Mr. Sethna and Dr. Daruwalla had observed the unrequited flirtations of Mrs. Dogar, neither gentleman had truly appreciated the seriousness of Mrs. Dogar’s designs. The former Rahul did not suffer rejection lightly.

While Farrokh had been struggling to begin his first artistic screenplay, his first quality picture, the second Mrs. Dogar had also undertaken the first draft of a story-in-progress; she had hatched a plot. Last night at the Duckworth Club, the second Mrs. Dogar had loudly denounced her husband for having had too much to drink. Mr. Dogar had had no more than his usual one whiskey and two beers; he was surprised at his wife’s accusations.

“This is your night to drive—this is my night to drink!” Mrs. Dogar had said.

She’d spoken distinctly, and deliberately in the presence of the ever-disapproving Mr. Sethna—one waiter and one busboy had overheard her, too—and she’d chosen to utter her criticism at a lull in the other conversations in the Ladies’ Garden, where the grieving Bannerjees were the only Duckworthians still dining.

The Bannerjees had been having a late, sober dinner; the murder of Mr. Lal had upset Mrs. Bannerjee too much to cook, and her intermittent conversation with her husband had concerned what efforts they might make to comfort Mr. Lal’s widow. The Bannerjees would never have guessed that the second Mrs. Dogar’s rude outburst was as premeditated as her intentions to soon join Mrs. Lal in the state of widowhood. Rahul had married Mr. Dogar out of eagerness to become his widow.

Also deliberately, Mrs. Dogar had turned to Mr. Sethna and said, “My dear Mr. Sethna, would you kindly call us a taxi? My husband is in no condition to drive us home.”

“Promila, please…” Mr. Dogar began to say.

“Give me your keys,” Mrs. Dogar commanded him. “You can take a taxi with me or you can call your own taxi, but you’re not driving a car.”

Sheepishly, Mr. Dogar handed her his ring of keys.

“Now just sit here—don’t get up and wander around,” Mrs. Dogar told him. Mrs. Dogar herself stood up. “Wait for me,” she ordered her husband—the rejected designated driver. When Mr. Dogar was alone, he glanced at the Bannerjees, who looked away; not even the waiter would look at the condemned drunk, and the busboy had slunk into the circular driveway to smoke a cigarette.

Rahul timed how long everything took. He—or, rather, she (if outward anatomy is the measure of a man or a woman)—walked into the men’s room by the door from the foyer. She knew no one could be in the men’s room, for none of the wait-staff were permitted to use it—except Mr. Sethna, who so disapproved of peeing with the hired help that he made uncontested use of the facilities marked FOR MEMBERS ONLY. The old steward was more in charge of the Duckworth Club than any member. But Mrs. Dogar knew that Mr. Sethna was busy calling a taxi.

Since she’d become a woman, Mrs. Dogar didn’t regret not using the men’s room at the Duckworth Club; its decor wasn’t as pleasing to her as the ladies’ room—Rahul loathed the men’s room wallpaper. She found the tiger-hunting motif brutal and stupid.

She moved past the urinals, the toilet stalls, the sinks for shaving, and into the darkened locker room, which extended to the clubhouse and the clubhouse bar; these latter facilities were never in use at night, and Mrs. Dogar wanted to be sure that she could navigate their interiors in darkness. The big windows of frosted glass admitted the moonlight that reflected from the tennis courts and the swimming pool, which was presently under repair and not in service; it was an empty cement-lined hole with some construction debris in the deep end, and the members were already betting that it wouldn’t be ready for use in the hotter months ahead.

Mrs. Dogar had sufficient moonlight to unlock the rear door to the clubhouse; she found the right key in less than a minute—then she relocked the door. This was just a test. She also found Mr. Dogar’s locker and unlocked it; it took the smallest key on the ring, and Mrs. Dogar discovered that she could easily find this key by touch. She unlocked and relocked the locker by touch, too, although she could see everything in the moonlight; one night, she might not have the moon.

Rahul could quite clearly make out the shrine of old golf clubs displayed on the wall. These were the clubs of famous Golfers Past and of some living, less famous Duckworthians who had retired from active play. Mrs. Dogar needed to assure herself that these clubs could be easily removed from the wall. After all, it had been a while since Rahul had visited the men’s locker room; she hadn’t been there since she’d been a boy. When she’d handled a few of the clubs to her satisfaction, she went back into the men’s room—after assuring herself that neither Mr. Sethna nor Mr. Bannerjee was using the facilities. She knew her husband wouldn’t leave the table in the Ladies’ Garden; he did what he was told.

When she could see (from the men’s room) that there was no one in the foyer, she returned to the Ladies’ Garden. She went directly to the Bannerjees’ table—they weren’t friends of the Dogars’s—and she whispered to them, “I’m sorry for my outspokenness. But when he’s like this, he’s virtually a baby—he’s so senile, he’s not to be trusted. And not only in a car. One night, after dinner—he had all his clothes on—I stopped him just before he dove into the club pool.”

“The empty pool?” said Mr. Bannerjee.

“I’m glad you understand,” Mrs. Dogar replied. “That’s what I’m talking about. If I don’t treat him like a child, he’ll hurt himself!”

Then she went to her husband, leaving the Bannerjees with this impression of Mr. Dogar’s senility and self-destructiveness —for her husband being found dead in the deep end of the club’s empty pool was one of the possible outcomes for the first draft that the second Mrs. Dogar was hard at work on. She was merely foreshadowing, as any good storyteller does. She also knew that she should set up other options, and these alternative endings were already in her mind.

“I hate to treat you like this, darling, but just sit tight while I see about our cab,” Mrs. Dogar told her husband. He was bewildered. Although his second wife was in her fifties, she was a young woman in comparison to what Mr. Dogar had been used to; the old gentleman was in his seventies—he’d been a widower for the last 10 years. He supposed these swings of mood were characteristic among younger women. He wondered if perhaps he had drunk too much. He did remember that his new wife had lost a brother to an automobile accident in Italy; he just couldn’t recall if alcohol had been the cause of the wreck.

Now Rahul was off whispering to Mr. Sethna, who disapproved of women whispering to men—for whatever reason.

“My dear Mr. Sethna,” the second Mrs. Dogar said. “I do hope you’ll forgive my aggressive behavior, but he’s simply not fit to wander about the club—much less drive a car. I’m sure he’s the one who’s been killing the flowers.”

Mr. Sethna was shocked by this allegation, but he was also eager to believe it was true. Something or someone was killing the flowers. An undiagnosed blight had struck patches of the bougainvillea. The head mali was stymied. Here, at last, was an answer: Mr. Dogar had been pissing on the flowers!

“He’s… incontinent?” Mr. Sethna inquired.

“Not at all,” said Mrs. Dogar. “He’s doing it deliberately.”

“He wants to kill the flowers?” Mr, Sethna asked.

“I’m glad you understand,” Mrs. Dogar replied. “Poor man.” With a wave, she indicated the surrounding golf course. “Naturally, he wanders out there only after dark. Like a dog, he always goes to the same spots!”

“Territorial, I suppose,” said Mr. Sethna.

“I’m glad you understand,” Mrs. Dogar said. “Now, where’s our cab?”

In the taxi, old Mr. Dogar looked as if he wasn’t sure if he should apologize or complain. But, before he could decide, his younger wife once more surprised him.

“Oh, darling, never let me treat you like that again—at least not in public. I’m so ashamed!” she cried. “They’ll think I bully you. You mustn’t let me. If I ever tell you that you can’t drive a car again, here’s what you must do… are you listening, or are you too drunk?” Mrs. Dogar asked him.

“No… I mean yes, I’m listening,” Mr. Dogar said. “No, I’m not too drunk,” the old man assured her.

“You must throw the keys on the floor and make me pick them up, as if I were your servant,” Mrs. Dogar told him.

“What?” he asked.

“Then tell me that you always carry an extra set of keys and that you’ll drive the car home, when and if you choose. Then tell me to go—tell me you wouldn’t drive me home if I begged you!” Mrs. Dogar cried.

“But, Promila, I would never …” Mr. Dogar began to say, but his wife cut him off.

“Just promise me one thing—never back down to me,” she told him. Then she seized his face in her hands and kissed him on his mouth. “First, you should tell me to take a taxi—you just carry on sitting at the dinner table, as if you’re smoldering with rage. Then you should go to the men’s room and wash your face.”

“Wash my face?” said Mr. Dogar with surprise.

“I can’t stand the smell of food on your face, darling,” Mrs. Dogar told her husband. “Just wash your face—soap and warm water. Then come home to me. I’ll be waiting for you. That’s how I want you to treat me. Only you must wash your face first. Promise me.”

It had been years since Mr. Dogar had been so aroused, nor had he ever been so confused. It was difficult to understand a younger woman, he decided—yet surely worth it.

This was a pretty good first draft, Rahul felt certain. The next time, Mr. Dogar would do as he was told. He would be abusive to her and tell her to go. But she would take the taxi no farther than the access road to the Duckworth Club, or perhaps three quarters of the length of the driveway—just out of the reach of the overhead lamps. She’d tell the driver to wait for her because she’d forgotten her purse. Then she’d cross the first green of the golf course and enter the clubhouse through the rear door, which she would have previously unlocked. She’d take off her shoes and cross the dark locker room and wait there until she heard her husband washing his face. She’d either kill him with a single blow from one of the “retired” golf clubs in the locker room, or (if possible) kill him by lifting his head by his hair and smashing his skull against the sink. Her preference for the latter method was because she preferred the swimming-pool ending. She’d be careful to clean the sink; then Mrs. Dogar would drag her husband’s body out the rear door of the clubhouse and dump him in the deep end of the empty pool. She wouldn’t keep her taxi waiting long—at the most, 10 minutes.

But killing him with a golf club would certainly be easier. After she had clubbed her husband to death, she would put a two-rupee note in his mouth and stuff his body in his locker. The note, which Mrs. Dogar already carried in her purse, displayed a typed message on the serial-number side of the money.

It was an intriguing decision—which ending Rahul would choose—for although she liked the appearance of the “accidental” death in the deep end of the pool, she also favored the attention-getting murder of another Duckworthian, especially if Inspector Dhar didn’t give up his membership. The second Mrs. Dogar was quite sure that Dhar wouldn’t resign, at least not without another killing to coax him into it.

The Way It Happened to Mr. Lal

It was an embarrassed and exhausted-looking Mr. Dogar who appeared at the Duckworth Club before 7:00 the next morning, looking every inch the portrait of a hangover. But it wasn’t alcohol that had wrecked him. Mrs. Dogar had made violent love to him the previous night; she’d scarcely waited for the taxi to depart their driveway, or for Mr. Dogar to unlock the door—she’d given him back his keys. They were fortunate that the servants didn’t mistake them for intruders, for Mrs. Dogar had pounced on her husband in the front hall; she’d torn the clothes off both of them while they were still on the first floor of the house. Then she’d made the old man run up the stairs after her, and she’d straddled him on the bedroom floor; she wouldn’t let him crawl a few feet farther so that they could do it on the bed—nor had she once volunteered to relinquish the top position.

This was, of course, another first-draft possibility… that old Mr. Dogar would suffer a heart attack while Rahul was deliberately overexciting him. But the second Mrs. Dogar had resolved that she wouldn’t wait as long as a year for this “natural” ending to occur. It was simply too boring. If it happened soon, fine. If not, there was always the golf-club, locker-room ending; in this version, it amused the second Mrs. Dogar to imagine how they might finally find the body.

She would report that her husband had not come home for the night. They would find his car in the Duckworth Club parking lot. The wait-staff would relate what had transpired after the Dogars had eaten their dinner; doubtless, Mr. Sethna would convey more intimate information. It was possible that no one would think to look for Mr. Dogar in his locker until the body began to stink.

But the swimming-pool version also intrigued Rahul, The Bannerjees would confide to the authorities that such a dive in the pool was reputed to be the old fool’s inclination. Mrs. Dogar herself could always say, “I told you so.” For Rahul, the hard part about this version would be maintaining a straight face. And the rumor that old Mr. Dogar was pissing on the bougainvillea was already established.

When the ashamed Mr. Dogar appeared at the Duckworth Club to claim his car, he spoke in apologetic tones to the disapproving Mr. Sethna, to whom the very idea of urinating outdoors was repugnant.

“Did I seem especially drunk to you, Mr. Sethna?” Mr. Dogar asked the venerable steward. “I’m really very sorry… if I behaved insensitively.”

“Nothing happened, really,” Mr. Sethna replied coldly. He’d already spoken to the head mali about the bougainvillea. The fool gardener confirmed that there were only isolated patches of the blight. The dead spots in the bougainvillea bordered the green at the fifth and the ninth holes; both these greens were out of sight of the Duckworth Club dining room and the clubhouse—also, they couldn’t be seen from the Ladies’ Garden. As for that bougainvillea which surrounded the Ladies’ Garden, there was only one dead patch and it was suspiciously in a spot that was out of sight from any of the club’s facilities. Mr. Sethna surmised that this gave credence to Mrs. Dogar’s urine theory—poor old Mr. Dogar was peeing on the flowers!

It would never have occurred to the old steward that a woman—not even as vulgar a member of the species as Mrs. Dogar—could be the pissing culprit. But the killer was no amateur at foreshadowing. She’d been systematically murdering the bougainvillea for months. One of many things that the new Mrs. Dogar liked about wearing dresses was that it was comfortable not to wear underwear. The only thing Rahul missed about having a penis was how convenient it had been to pee outdoors. But her penchant for pissing on certain out-of-the-way plots of the bougainvillea was not whimsical. While in the pursuit of this odd habit, Mrs. Dogar had been mindful of her larger work-in-progress. Even before the unfortunate Mr. Lal had happened upon her while she was squatting in the bougainvillea by the fatal ninth hole (which had long been Mr. Lal’s nemesis), Rahul had already made a plan.

In her purse, for weeks, she’d carried the two-rupee note with her first typed message to the Duckworthians: MORE MEMBERS DIE IF DHAR REMAINS A MEMBER. She’d always assumed that the easiest Duckworthian to murder would be someone who stumbled into her in one of her out-of-the-way peeing places. She’d thought it would happen at night—in the darkness. She’d imagined a younger member than Mr. Lal, probably someone who’d drunk too much beer and wandered out on the nighttime golf course—drawn by the same need that had drawn Mrs. Dogar there. She’d imagined a brief flirtation—they were the best kind.

“So! You had to pee, too? If you tell me what you like about doing it outdoors, I’ll tell you my reasons!” Or maybe: “What else do you like to do outdoors?”

Mrs. Dogar had also imagined that she might indulge in a kiss and a little fondling; she liked fondling. Then she would kill him, whoever he was, and she’d stick the two-rupee note in his mouth. She’d never strangled a man; with her hand strength, she didn’t doubt she could do it. She’d never much liked strangling women—not as much as she enjoyed the pure strength of a blow from a blunt instrument—but she was looking forward to strangling a man because she wanted to see if that old story was true… if men got erections and ejaculated when they were close to choking to death.

Disappointingly, old Mr. Lal had offered Mrs. Dogar neither the opportunity for a brief flirtation nor the novelty of a strangulation. Rahul was so lazy, she rarely made breakfast for herself. Although he was officially retired, Mr. Dogar left early for his office, and Mrs. Dogar often indulged in an early-morning pee on the golf course—before even the most zealous golfers were on the fairways. Then she’d have her tea and some fruit in the Ladies’ Garden and go to her health club to lift weights and skip rope. She’d been surprised by old Mr. Lal’s early-morning assault on the bougainvillea at the ninth green.

Rahul had only just finished peeing; she rose up out of the flowers, and there was the old duffer plodding off the green and tripping through the vines. Mr. Lal was searching for a challenging spot in this jungle in which to deposit the stupid golf ball. When he looked up from the flowers, the second Mrs. Dogar was standing directly in front of him. She’d startled him so—for a moment, she thought it would be unnecessary to kill him. He clutched his chest and staggered away from her.

“Mrs. Dogar!” he cried. “What’s happened to you? Has someone… molested you?” Thus he gave her the idea; after all, her dress was still hiked up to her hips. Clearly distraught, she wriggled her dress down. (She would change into a sari for lunch.)

“Oh, Mr. Lal! Thank God it’s you!” she cried. “I’ve been… taken advantage of!” she told him.

“What a world, Mrs. Dogar! But how may I assist you? Help!” the old man shouted out.

“Oh no, please! I couldn’t bear to see anyone else—I’m so ashamed!” she confided to him.

“But how may I help you, Mrs. Dogar?” Mr. Lal inquired.

“It’s painful for me to walk,” she confessed. “They hurt me.”

“They!” the old man shouted.

“Perhaps if you would lend me one of your clubs… if I could just use it as a cane,” Mrs. Dogar suggested. Mr. Lal was on the verge of handing her his nine iron, then changed his mind.

“The putter would be best!” he declared. Poor Mr. Lal was out of breath from the short trot to his golf bag and his stumbling return to her side through the tangled vines, the destroyed flowers. He was much shorter than Mrs. Dogar; she was able to put one of her big hands on his shoulder—the putter in her other hand. That way, she could see over the old man’s head to the green and the fairway; no one was there.

“You could rest on the green while I fetch you a golf cart,” Mr. Lal suggested.

“Yes, thank you—you go ahead,” she told him. He tripped purposefully forward, but she was right behind him; before he reached the green, she had struck him senseless—she hit him just behind one ear. After he’d fallen she bashed him directly in the temple that was turned toward her, but his eyes were already open and unmoving when she struck him the second time. Mrs. Dogar suspected he’d been killed by the first blow.

In her purse, she had no difficulty finding the two-rupee note. For 20 years, she’d clipped her small bills to the top half of that silver ballpoint pen which she’d stolen from the beach cottage in Goa. She even kept this silly memento well polished. The clip—the “pocket clasp,” as her Aunt Promila had called it—continued to maintain the perfect tension on a small number of bills, and the polished silver made the top half of the pen easy to spot in her purse; she hated how small things could become lost in purses.

She’d inserted the two-rupee note in Mr. Lal’s gaping mouth; to her surprise, when she closed his mouth, it opened again. She’d never tried to close a dead person’s mouth before. She’d assumed that the body parts of the dead would be fairly controllable; that had certainly been her experience with manipulating limbs—sometimes an elbow or a knee had been in the way of her belly drawing, and she’d easily rearranged it.

The distracting detail of Mr. Lal’s mouth was what caused her to be careless. She’d returned the remaining small notes to her purse, but not the top half of the well-traveled pen; it must have fallen in the bougainvillea. She hadn’t been able to find it later, and there in the bougainvillea was the last place she recalled holding it in her hand. Mrs. Dogar assumed that the police were presently puzzling over it; with the widow Lal’s help, they’d probably determined that the top half of the pen hadn’t even belonged to Mr. Lal. Mrs. Dogar speculated that the police might even conclude that no Duckworthian would be caught dead with such a pen; that it was made of real silver was somehow negated by the sheer tackiness of the engraved word, India. Rahul found tacky things amusing. It also amused Rahul to imagine how aimlessly the police must be tracking her, for Mrs. Dogar believed that the half-pen would be just another link in a chain of meaningless clues.

Some Small Tragedy

It was after Mr. Dogar had apologized to Mr. Sethna and retrieved his car from the Duckworth Club parking lot that the old steward received the phone call from Mrs. Dogar. “Is my husband still there? I suppose not. I’d meant to remind him of something to attend to—he’s so forgetful.”

“He was here, but he’s gone,” Mr. Sethna informed her.

“Did he remember to cancel our reservation for lunch? I suppose not. Anyway, we’re not coming,” Rahul told the steward. Mr. Sethna prided himself in his daily memorizing of the reservations for lunch and dinner; he knew that there’d been no reservation for the Dogars. But when he informed Mrs. Dogar of this fact, she surprised him. “Oh, the poor man!” she cried. “He forgot to cancel the reservation, but he was so drunk last night that he forgot to make the reservation in the first place. This would be comic if it weren’t also so tragic, I suppose.”

“I suppose …” Mr. Sethna replied, but Rahul could tell that she’d achieved her goal. One day Mr. Sethna would be an important witness to Mr. Dogar’s utter frailty. Foreshadowing was simply necessary preparation. Rahul knew that Mr. Sethna would be unsurprised when Mr. Dogar became a victim—either of a murder in the locker room or of a swimming-pool mishap.

In some ways, this was the best part of a murder, Rahul believed. In the first draft of a work-in-progress, you had so many options—more options than you would end up with in the final act. It was only in the planning phase that you saw so many possibilities, so many variations on the outcome. In the end, it was always over too quickly; that is, if you cared about neatness, you couldn’t prolong it.

“The poor man!” Mrs. Dogar repeated to Mr. Sethna. The poor man, indeed! Mr. Sethna thought. With a wife like Mrs. Dogar, Mr. Sethna presumed it might even be a comfort to already have one foot in the grave, so to speak.

The old steward had just hung up the phone when Dr. Daruwalla called the Duckworth Club to make a reservation. There would be four for lunch, the doctor informed Mr. Sethna; he hoped no one had already taken his favorite table in the Ladies’ Garden. There was plenty of room, but Mr. Sethna disapproved of making a reservation for lunch on the morning of the same day; people shouldn’t trust in plans that were so spur-of-the-moment.

“You’re in luck—I’ve just had a cancellation,” the steward told the doctor.

“May I have the table at noon?” Farrokh asked.

“One o’clock would be better,” Mr. Sethna instructed him, for the steward also disapproved of the doctor’s inclination to eat his lunch early. Mr. Sethna theorized that early lunch-eating contributed to the doctor’s being overweight. It was most unsightly for small men to be overweight, Mr. Sethna thought.

Dr. Daruwalla had just hung up the phone when Dr. Tata returned his call. Farrokh remembered instantly what he’d wanted to ask Tata Two.

“Do you remember Rahul Rai and his Aunt Promila?” Farrokh asked.

“Doesn’t everybody remember them?” Tata Two replied.

“But this is a professional question,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “I believe your father examined Rahul when he was twelve or thirteen. That would have been in 1949. My father examined Rahul when he was only eight or ten. It was his Aunt Promila’s request—the matter of his hairlessness was bothering her. My father dismissed it, but I believe Promila took Rahul to see your father. I was wondering if the alleged hairlessness was still the issue.”

“Why would anyone see your father or mine about hairlessness?” asked Dr. Tata.

“A good question,” Farrokh replied. “I believe that the real issue concerned Rahul’s sexual identity. Possibly a sex change would have been requested.”

“My father didn’t do sex changes!” said Tata Two. “He was a gynecologist, an obstetrician …”

“I know what he was,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “But he might have been asked to make a diagnosis… I’m speaking of Rahul’s reproductive organs, whether there was anything peculiar about them that would have warranted a sex-change operation—at least in the boy’s mind, or in his aunt’s mind. If you’ve kept your father’s records… I have my father’s.”

“Of course I’ve kept his records!” Dr. Tata cried. “Mr. Subhash can have them on my desk in two minutes. I’ll call you back in five.” So… even Tata Two called his medical secretary Mister; perhaps, like Ranjit, Mr. Subhash was a medical secretary who’d remained in the family. Dr. Daruwalla reflected that Mr. Subhash had sounded (on the phone) like a man in his eighties!

Ten minutes later, when Dr. Tata had not called him back, Farrokh also reflected on the presumed chaos of Tata Two’s record keeping; apparently, old Dr. Tata’s file on Rahul wasn’t exactly at Mr. Subhash’s fingertips. Or maybe it was the diagnosis of Rahul that gave Tata Two pause? Regardless, Farrokh told Ranjit that he would take no calls except one he was expecting from Dr. Tata.

Dr. Daruwalla had one office appointment before his much-anticipated lunch at the Duckworth Club, and he told Ranjit to cancel it. Dr. Desai, from London, was in town; in his spare time from his own surgical practice, Dr. Desai was a designer of artificial joints. He was a man with a theme; joint replacement was his only topic of conversation. This made it hard on Julia whenever Farrokh tried to converse with Dr. Desai at the Duckworth Club. It was easier to deal with Desai in the office. “Should the implant be fixated to the skeleton with bone cement or is biologic fixation the method of choice?” This was typical of Dr. Desai’s initial conversation; it was what Dr. Desai said instead of, “How are your wife and kids?” For Dr. Daruwalla to cancel an office appointment with Dr. Desai was tantamount to his admitting a lack of interest in his chosen orthopedic field; but the doctor had his mind on his new screenplay—he wanted to write.

To this end, Farrokh sat on the opposite side of his desk, eliminating his usual view; the doctor found the exercise yard of the Hospital for Crippled Children distracting—the physical therapy for some of his postoperative patients was hard for him to ignore. Dr. Daruwalla was more enticed by a make-believe world than he was drawn to confront the world he lived in.

For the most part, Inspector Dhar’s creator was unaware of the real-life dramas that teemed all around him. Poor Nancy, with her raccoon eyes, was dressing herself for Inspector Dhar. The famous actor, even offstage and off-camera, was still acting. Mr. Sethna, who so strongly disapproved of everything, had discovered (to his deep distaste) that human urine was killing the bougainvillea. And that wasn’t the only murder-in-progress at the Duckworth Club, where Rahul was already envisioning herself as the widow Dogar. But Dr. Daruwalla was still untouched by these realities. Instead, for his inspiration, the doctor chose to stare at the circus photograph on his desk.

There was the beautiful Suman—Suman the skywalker. The last time Dr. Daruwalla had seen her, she’d been unmarried—a 29-year-old star acrobat, the idol of all the child acrobats in training. The screenwriter was presuming that Suman was 29, and that it was high time for her to be wed; she should be engaged in more practical activities than walking upside down across the roof of the main tent, 80 feet from the ground, with no net. A woman as wonderful as Suman should definitely be married, the screenwriter thought. Suman was an acrobat, not an actress. The screenwriter intended to give his circus characters very little responsibility in the way of acting. The boy, Ganesh, would be an accomplished actor, but his sister, Pinky, would be the real Pinky—from the Great Royal Circus. Pinky would perform as an acrobat; it wouldn’t be necessary to have her talk. (Keep her dialogue to a minimum, the screenwriter thought.)

Farrokh was getting ahead of himself; he was already casting the movie. In his screenplay, he still had to get the children to the circus. That was when Dr. Daruwalla thought of the new missionary; in the screenplay, the doctor wouldn’t call him Martin Mills—the name Mills was too boring. The screenwriter would call him simply “Mr. Martin.” The Jesuit mission would take charge of these children because their mother was killed in St. Ignatius Church by an unsafe statue of the Holy Virgin; St. Ignatius would certainly bear some responsibility for that. And so the children would manage to be picked up by the right limousine, by Vinod; the so-called Good Samaritan dwarf would still need to get the Jesuits’ permission to take the kids to the circus. Oh, this is brilliant! thought Dr. Daruwalla. That would be how Suman and Mr. Martin meet. The morally meddlesome missionary takes the children to the circus, and the fool falls in love with the skywalker!

Why not? The Jesuit would soon find Suman preferable to chastity. The fictional Mr. Martin would have to be a skilled actor, and the screenwriter would provide the character with a far more winning personality than that of Martin Mills. In the screenplay, the seduction of Mr. Martin would be an unconversion story. There was no small measure of mischief in the screenwriter’s next idea: that John D. would play a perfect Mr. Martin. How happy he’d be—to not be Inspector Dhar!

What a screenplay this was going to be—what an improvement on reality! That was when Dr. Daruwalla realized that nothing was preventing him from putting himself in the movie. He wouldn’t presume to make himself a hero—perhaps a minor character with admirable intentions would suffice. But how should he describe himself? Farrokh wondered. The screenwriter didn’t know he was handsome, and to speak of himself as “highly intelligent” sounded defensive; also, in movies, you could only describe how one appeared.

There was no mirror in the doctor’s office and so he saw himself as he often looked in the full-length mirror in the foyer of the Duckworth Club, which doubtless conveyed to Dr. Daruwalla a Duckworthian sense of himself as an elegant gentleman. Such a gentlemanly doctor could play a small but pivotal role in the screenplay, for the character of the do-gooder missionary would naturally be obsessed with the idea that Ganesh’s limp could be fixed. Ideally, the character of Mr. Martin would bring the boy to be examined by none other than Dr. Daruwalla. The doctor would announce the hard truth: there were exercises that Ganesh could do—these would strengthen his legs, including the crippled leg—but the boy would always limp. (A few scenes of the crippled boy struggling bravely to perform these exercises would be excellent for audience sympathy, the screenwriter believed.)

Like Rahul, Dr. Daruwalla enjoyed this phase of storytelling—namely, plot. The thrill of exploring one’s options! In the beginning, there were always so many.

But euphoria, in the case of murder and in the case of writing, is short-lived. Farrokh began to worry that his masterpiece had already been reduced to a romantic comedy. The two kids escape in the right limo; the circus is their salvation. Suman gives up skywalking to marry a missionary, who gives up being a missionary. Even Inspector Dhar’s creator suspected that this ending was too happy. Surely something bad should happen, the screenwriter thought.

Thus the doctor sat pondering in his office at the Hospital for Crippled Children, with his back to the exercise yard. In such a setting, one might imagine that Dr. Daruwalla must have felt ashamed of himself for trying to imagine some small tragedy.

Not a Romantic Comedy

Contrary to Rahul’s opinion, the police had not found the top half of the silver pen with India inscribed on it. Rahul’s money clip had no longer been in the bougainvillea when the deputy commissioner had examined Mr. Lal’s body. The silver was so shiny in the morning sun, it had caught a crow’s sharp eyes. It was the half-pen that led the crow to discover the corpse. The crow had begun by pecking out one of Mr. Lal’s eyes; the bird was busy at the open wound behind Mr. Lal’s ear and at the wound at Mr. Lal’s temple when the first of the vultures settled on the ninth green. The crow had stood its ground until more vultures came; after all, it had found the body first. And before taking flight, the crow had stolen the silver half-pen. Crows were always stealing shiny objects. That this crow had promptly lost its prize in the ceiling fan in the Duckworth Club dining room was not necessarily a comment on the bird’s overall intelligence, but the blade of the fan (at that time of the morning) had moved in and out of the sunlight; the fan had also caught the crow’s sharp eyes. It was a silly place for a crow to land, and a waiter had rudely shooed the shitting bird away.

As for the shiny object that the crow had held so tenaciously in its beak, it had been left where it occasionally disturbed the mechanism of the ceiling fan. Dr. Daruwalla had observed one such disturbance; the doctor had also observed the landing of the shitting crow upon the fan. And so the top half of the silver pen existed only in the crowded memory of Dr. Daruwalla, and the doctor had already forgotten that the second Mrs. Dogar had reminded him of someone else—an old movie star. Farrokh had also forgotten the pain of his collision with Mrs. Dogar in the foyer of the Duckworth Club. That shiny something, which first Nancy and then Rahul and then the crow had lost, might now be lost forever, for its discovery lay within the limited abilities of Dr. Daruwalla. Frankly, both the memory and the powers of observation of a closet screenwriter are not the best. One might more sensibly rely on the mechanism of the ceiling fan to spit out the half-pen and present it, as a miracle, to Detective Patel (or to Nancy).

An unlikely miracle of that coincidental kind was exactly what was needed to rescue Martin Mills, for the Mass had been celebrated too late to save the missionary from his worst memories. There were times when every church reminded Martin of Our Lady of Victories. When his mother was in Boston, Martin always went to Mass at Our Lady of Victories on Isabella Street; it was only an eight-minute walk from the Ritz. That Sunday morning of the long Thanksgiving weekend of his ninth-grade year, young Martin slipped out of the bedroom he shared with Arif Koma without waking the Turk up. In the living room of the two-bedroom suite at the hotel, Martin saw that the door to his mother’s bedroom was ajar; this struck the boy as indicative of Vera’s carelessness, and he was about to close the door—before he left the suite to go to Mass—when his mother spoke to him.

“Is that you, Martin?” Vera asked. “Come kiss me good-morning.”

Dutifully, although he was loath to see his mother in the strongly scented disarray of her boudoir, Martin went to her. To his surprise, both Vera and her bed were unrumpled; he had the impression that his mother had already bathed and brushed her teeth and combed her hair. The sheets weren’t in their usual knot of apparent bad dreams. Also, Vera’s nightgown was a pretty, almost girlish thing; it was revealing of her dramatic bosom but not sluttishly revealing, as was often the case. Martin cautiously kissed her cheek.

“Off to church?” his mother asked him.

“To Mass—yes,” Martin told her.

“Is Arif still sleeping?” Vera inquired.

“Yes, I think so,” Martin replied. Arif’s name on his mother’s lips reminded Martin of the painful embarrassment of the night before. “I don’t think you should ask Arif about such… personal things,” Martin said suddenly.

“Personal? Do you mean sexual?” Vera asked her son. “Honestly, Martin, the poor boy has probably been dying to talk to someone about his terrible circumcision. Don’t be such a prude!”

“I think Arif is a very private person,” Martin said. “Also,” he added stubbornly, “I think he might be a bit… disturbed.”

Vera sat up in her bed with new interest. “Sexually disturbed?” she asked her son. “What gives you that idea?”

It didn’t seem a betrayal, not at the time; Martin thought he was speaking to his mother in order to protect Arif. “He masturbates,” Martin said quietly.

“Goodness, I should hope so!” Vera exclaimed. “I certainly hope that you do!”

Martin wouldn’t take this bait, but he replied, “I mean that he masturbates a lot—almost every night.”

“The poor boy!” Vera remarked. “But you sound so disapproving, Martin.”

“I think it’s… excessive,” her son told her.

“I think masturbation is quite healthy for boys your age. Have you discussed masturbation with your father?” Vera asked him.

“Discussed” wasn’t the right word. Martin had listened to Danny go on and on in reassuring tones in regard to all the desires Danny presumed that Martin was experiencing—how such desires were perfectly natural… that was Danny’s theme.

“Yes,” Martin told his mother. “Dad thinks masturbation is… normal.”

“Well, there—you see?” Vera said sarcastically. “If your sainted father says it’s normal, I suppose we should all be trying it!”

“I’ll be late for Mass,” Martin said.

“Run along, then,” his mother replied. Martin was about to close the door to her bedroom behind him when his mother gave him a parting shot. “Personally, dear, I think masturbation would be better for you than Mass. And please leave the door open—I like it that way.” Martin remembered to take the room key in case Arif was still sleeping when he came back from Mass—in case his mother was in the bathroom or talking on the telephone.

When Mass was over, he looked briefly at a window display of men’s suits in a Brooks Brothers store; the mannequins wore Christmas-tree neckties, but Martin was struck by the smoothness of the mannequins’ skin—it reminded him of Arif’s perfect complexion. Except for his pausing at this window, Martin came straight back to the suite at the Ritz. When he unlocked the door, he was happy he’d brought the room key because he thought his mother was talking on the phone; it was a one-sided conversation—all Vera. But then the awful words themselves were clear to him.

“I’m going to make you squirt again,” his mother was saying. “I absolutely know you can squirt again—I can feel you. You’re going to squirt again soon—aren’t you? Aren’t you?” The door to his mother’s bedroom was still open—a little wider open than the way she liked it—and Martin Mills could see her naked back, her naked hips and the crack in her shapely ass. She was riding Arif Koma, who lay wordlessly under her; Martin was grateful that he couldn’t see his roommate’s face.

He quietly let himself out of the suite as his mother continued to urge Arif to squirt. On the short walk back to Isabella Street, Martin wondered if it had been his own revelation of Arif’s penchant for masturbation that had given Vera the idea; probably his mother had already had the seduction in mind, but the masturbation story must have provided her with greater incentive.

Martin Mills had sat as stupefied in Our Lady of Victories Church as he’d sat waiting for the Mass at St. Ignatius. Brother Gabriel was worried about him. First the late-night-prayers—“I’ll take the turkey, I’ll take the turkey”—and then, even after Mass was over, the missionary knelt on the kneeling pad as if he were waiting for the next Mass. That was exactly what he’d done in Our Lady of Victories on Isabella Street; he’d waited for the next Mass, as if one Mass hadn’t been enough.

What also troubled Brother Gabriel were the bloodstains on the missionary’s balled-up fists. Brother Gabriel couldn’t have known about Martin’s nose, for the wound had stopped bleeding and was almost entirely concealed by a small scab on one nostril; but Brother Gabriel wondered about the bloody socks that Martin Mills clutched in his hands. The blood had dried between his knuckles and under his nails, and Brother Gabriel feared that the source of the bleeding might have been the missionary’s palms. That’s all we need to make our jubilee year a success, Brother Gabriel thought—an outbreak of stigmata!

But later, when Martin attended the morning classes, he seemed back on track, so to speak; he was lively with the students, humble with the other teachers—although, as a teacher, he’d had more experience than many of the staff at St. Ignatius School. Watching the new scholastic interact with both the pupils and the staff, the Father Rector suspended his earlier anxieties that the American might be a crazed zealot. And Father Cecil found Martin Mills to be every bit as charming and dedicated as he’d hoped.

Brother Gabriel kept silent about the turkey prayer and the bloody socks; but he noted the haunted, faraway smile that occasionally stole over the scholastic’s repertoire of otherwise earnest expressions. Martin seemed to be struck by some remembrance, possibly inspired by a face among the upper-school boys, as if the smooth, dark skin of one of the 15-year-olds had called to mind someone he’d once known… or so Brother Gabriel guessed. It was an innocent, friendly smile—almost too friendly, Brother Gabriel thought.

But Martin Mills was just remembering. Back in school, at Fessenden, after the long Thanksgiving weekend, he’d waited until the lights were out before saying what he wanted to say.

“Fucker,” Martin quietly said.

“What’s that?” Arif asked him.

“I said ‘fucker,’ as in motherfucker,” Martin said.

“Is this a game?” Arif inquired after too long a pause.

“You know what I mean, you motherfucker,” said Martin Mills.

After another long pause, Arif said, “She made me do it—sort of.”

“You’ll probably get a disease,” Martin told his roommate. Martin didn’t really mean it, nor would he have said it had it occurred to him that Arif might have fallen in love with Vera. He was surprised when Arif pounced on him in the dark and began to hit his face.

“Don’t ever say that… about your mother!” the Turk cried. “Not about your mother! She’s beautiful!”

Mr. Weems, the dorm master, broke up the fight; neither of the boys was hurt—neither of them knew how to fight. Mr. Weems was kindly; with rougher boys, he was entirely ineffectual. He was a music teacher, and—with hindsight, this is easy to say—most likely a homosexual, but no one thought of him that way (except a few of the brassier faculty wives, women of the type who thought that any unmarried man over 30 was a queer). Mr. Weems was well liked by the boys, despite his taking no part in the school’s prevailing athleticism. In his report to the Discipline Committee, the dorm master would dismiss the altercation between Martin and Arif as a “spat.” This unfortunate choice of a word would have grave consequences.

Later, when Arif Koma was diagnosed as suffering from gonorrhea—and when he wouldn’t tell the school doctor where he might have acquired it—the suspicion fell on Martin Mills. That word “spat” connoted a lover’s quarrel—at least to the more manly members of the Discipline Committee. Mr. Weems was instructed to ask the boys if they were homosexuals, if they’d been doing it. The dorm master was more sympathetic to the notion that Arif and Martin might be “doing it” than any of the faculty jocks would have been.

“If you boys are lovers, then you should see the doctor, too, Martin,” Mr. Weems explained.

“Tell him!” Martin said to Arif.

“We’re not lovers,” Arif said.

“That’s right—we’re not lovers,” Martin repeated. “But go on—tell him. I dare you,” Martin said to Arif.

“Tell me what?” the dorm master asked.

“He hates his mother,” Arif explained to Mr. Weems. Mr. Weems had met Vera; he could understand. “He’s going to tell you that I got the disease from his mother—that’s how much he hates her.”

“He fucked my mother—or, rather, she fucked him,” Martin told Mr. Weems.

“You see what I mean?” Arif Koma said.

At most private schools, the faculty is composed of truly saintly people and incompetent ogres. Martin and Arif were fortunate that their dorm master was a teacher of the saintly category; yet Mr. Weems was so well-meaning, he was perhaps more blind to depravity than a normal person.

“Please, Martin,” the dorm master said. “A sexually transmitted disease, especially at an all-boys’ school, is not something to lie about. Whatever your feelings are for your mother, what we hope to learn here is the truth—not to punish anyone, but only so that we may advise you. How can we instruct you, how can we tell you what we think you should do, if you won’t tell us the truth?”

“My mother fucked him when she thought I was at Mass,” Martin told Mr. Weems. Mr. Weems shut his eyes and smiled; he did this when he was counting, which he did to summon patience.

“I was trying to protect you, Martin,” Arif Koma said, “but I can see it’s no use.”

“Boys, please… one of you is lying,” the dorm master said.

“Okay—so we tell him,” Arif said to Martin. “What do you say?”

“Okay,” Martin replied. He knew that he liked Arif; for three years, Arif had been his only friend. If Arif wanted to say they’d been lovers, why not go along with it? There was no one else Martin Mills wanted to please as much as he wanted to please Arif. “Okay,” Martin repeated.

“Okay what?” Mr. Weems asked.

“Okay, we’re lovers,” said Martin Mills.

“I don’t know why he doesn’t have the disease,” Arif explained. “He should have it. Maybe he’s immune.”

“Are we going to get thrown out of school?” Martin asked the dorm master. He hoped so. It might teach his mother something, Martin thought; at 15, he still thought Vera was educable.

“All we did was try it,” Arif said. “We didn’t like it.”

“We don’t do it anymore,” Martin added. This was the first and last time that he’d lied; it made him feel giddy—it was almost as if he were drunk.

“But one of you must have caught this disease from someone else,” Mr. Weems reasoned. “I mean, it couldn’t have originated here, with you… not if each of you has had no other sexual contact.”

Martin Mills knew that Arif Koma had been phoning Vera and that she wouldn’t talk to the Turk; Martin knew that Arif had written to Vera, too—and that she’d not written the boy back. But it was only now that Martin realized how far his friend would go to protect Vera. He must have been absolutely gaga about her.

“I paid a prostitute. I caught this disease from a whore,” Arif told Mr. Weems.

“Where would you ever see a whore, Arif?” the dorm master asked.

“You don’t know Boston?” Arif Koma asked him. “I stayed with Martin and his mother at the Ritz. When they were asleep, I left the hotel. I asked the doorman to get me a taxi. I asked the taxi driver to find me a hooker. That’s the way you do it in New York, too,” Arif explained. “Or at least that’s the only way I know how to do it.”

And so Arif Koma was booted from the Fessenden School for catching a venereal disease from a whore. There was a statute in the school’s book of rules, something pertaining to morally reprehensible behavior with women or girls being punishable by dismissal; under this rubric, the Discipline Committee (despite Mr. Weems’s protestations) expelled Arif. It was judged that having sex with a prostitute was not a gray area when it came to “morally reprehensible behavior with women or girls.”

As for Martin, Mr. Weems also pleaded on his behalf. His homosexual encounter was a single episode of sexual experimentation; the incident should be forgotten. But the Discipline Committee insisted that Vera and Danny should know. Vera’s first response was to reiterate that masturbation was preferable for boys Martin’s age. All Martin said to his mother-naturally, not in Danny’s hearing—was, “Arif Koma has gonorrhea and so do you.”

There was barely time to talk to Arif before he was sent home. The last thing Martin said to the Turk was, “Don’t hurt yourself trying to protect my mother.”

“But I also like your father,” Arif explained. Once again, Vera had gotten away with murder because no one wanted to hurt Danny.

Arif’s suicide was the bigger shock. The note to Martin didn’t arrive in his Fessenden mailbox until two days after Arif had jumped out of the 10th-floor window of his parents’ apartment on Park Avenue. Dishonored my family—that was all the note said. Martin recalled that it was for the purpose of not dishonoring his parents, or reflecting ill on his family’s reputation, that Arif hadn’t shed a tear at his own circumcision.

There was no blaming Vera for it. The first time she was alone with Martin, Vera said, “Don’t try to tell me that it’s my fault, dear. You told me he was disturbed—sexually disturbed. You said so yourself. Besides, you don’t want to do anything that would hurt your father, do you?”

Actually, it had hurt Danny quite a bit to hear that his son had dabbled in a homosexual experience, even if it was only a single episode. Martin assured his father that he’d only tried it, and that he hadn’t liked it. Still, Martin realized that this was the sole impression Danny had of his son’s sexuality; he’d screwed his Turkish roommate when both boys were only 15 years old. It didn’t occur to Martin Mills that the truth about his sexuality might have been even more painful for Danny—namely, that his son was a 39-year-old virgin who’d never even masturbated. Nor had it occurred to Martin that he might actually have been in love with Arif Koma; certainly this was more plausible, not to mention more justifiable, than Arif falling in love with Vera.

Now here was Dr. Daruwalla “inventing” a missionary called Mr. Martin. The screenwriter knew that he needed to provide motives for Mr. Martin’s decision to become a priest; even in a movie, Farrokh felt that a vow of chastity required some explanation. Having met Vera, the screenwriter should have guessed that the real missionary’s motives in taking a vow of chastity and becoming a priest were not made of the material usually found in a romantic comedy.

A Make-Believe Death; the Real Children

The screenwriter had the good sense to know he was stalling. The problem was, who was going to die? In real life, it was the doctor’s hope that Madhu and Ganesh would be saved by the circus. In the screenplay, it simply wasn’t realistic for both children to live happily ever after. The more believable story was that only one of them would be a survivor. Pinky was the acrobat, the star. The crippled Ganesh could hope for no role more important than that of a cook’s helper—the circus’s servant boy, the circus’s sweeper. The circus would surely start him out at the bottom; he’d be scooping up the elephant shit and washing the lion piss off the stools. From such a shit-and-piss beginning, Ganesh would be fortunate to be promoted to the cook’s tent; cooking food, or serving it, would represent a form of graduation—probably the best that the crippled boy could hope for. This was true for the real Ganesh and for the character in the screenplay—this was realism, Dr. Daruwalla believed.

It should be Pinky who dies, the screenwriter decided. The only reason that the circus accepted the crippled brother in the first place was that they wanted the talented sister; the brother was part of the deal. That was the premise of the story. But if Pinky was to die, why wouldn’t the circus get rid of Ganesh? What use does the circus have for a cripple? Now this is a better story, Farrokh imagined. The burden of performance is suddenly shifted to the cripple; Ganesh must come up with something to do so that the circus will find him worth keeping. A boy without a limp can shovel the elephant shit faster.

But it was the bane of the screenwriter to always be rushing ahead of himself. Before he found something for Ganesh to do at the circus, wasn’t it necessary to determine how Pinky would die? Well, she’s an acrobat—she could always fall, the doctor prematurely decided. Maybe she’s trying to learn Suman’s Skywalk item and she simply falls. But, realistically, Pinky wouldn’t be learning to skywalk from the roof of the main tent. At the Great Royal, Pratap Singh always taught the Skywalk from the roof of the family troupe tent; the rope rungs of the ladder weren’t 80 feet in the air—the upside-down skywalker wasn’t more than a foot or two above the ground. If Farrokh wanted to use the real Great Royal Circus, which he did—and if he wanted to use his actual favorite performers (Pinky and Suman and Pratap, principally)—then the screenwriter could not have a death attributed to carelessness or to some cheap accident. Farrokh meant only to praise the Great Royal and circus life—not to condemn them. No; Pinky’s death couldn’t be the responsibility of the circus—that wasn’t the right story.

That was when Dr. Daruwalla thought of Mr. Garg, the real-life Acid Man. After all, Acid Man was already an established villain in the screenplay; why not use him? (The threat of a lawsuit seemed remote in these moments when sheer invention struck.) Acid Man could be so enthralled by Pinky’s loveliness and ability, he simply can’t bear her rising stardom—or that she’s escaped disfigurement of his special kind. Having lost Pinky to the Great Royal, the fiend performs acts of sabotage at the circus. One of the lion cubs is burned with acid, or maybe one of the dwarf clowns. Poor Pinky is killed by a lion that escapes its cage because Acid Man has burned off the lock.

Great stuff! the screenwriter thought. The irony momentarily eluded Dr. Daruwalla: here he was, plotting the death of his fictional Pinky while at the same time he awaited the real results of Madhu’s HIV test. But Farrokh had once more got ahead of himself; he was trying to imagine what Ganesh could do to make himself irreplaceable to the circus. The boy is a lowly cripple, a mere beggar; he’s clumsy, he’ll always limp—the only stunt he can perform is the bird-shit trick. (The screenwriter made a hasty note to put the bird-shit trick in the screenplay; more comic relief was necessary, now that Pinky was going to be killed by a lion.)

At that moment, Ranjit put through the phone call from Dr. Tata. Farrokh’s forward momentum, his entire train of thought, was interrupted. Farrokh was even more annoyed by the nature of Dr. Tata’s information.

“Oh, dear—dear old Dad,” said Tata Two. “I’m rather afraid he blew this one!”

It wouldn’t have surprised Dr. Daruwalla to learn that the senior Dr. Tata had blown many a diagnosis; after all, the old fool had not known (until the delivery) that Vera was giving birth to twins. What is it this time? Farrokh was tempted to ask. But he more politely inquired, “So he did see Rahul?”

“You bet he did!” said Dr. Tata. “It must have been an exciting examination—Promila claimed that the boy had proved himself to be impotent in an alleged single episode with a prostitute! But I suspect the diagnosis was a bit premature.”

“What was the diagnosis?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“Eunuchoidism!” cried Tata Two. “Nowadays, we would use the term hypogonadism. But, call it what you will, this is merely a symptom or syndrome with several possible causes. Rather like the syndrome of headache or dizziness …”

“Yes, yes,” Dr. Daruwalla said impatiently. He could tell that Tata Two had been doing a little research, or perhaps he’d been talking to a better OB/GYN; most OB/GYNs tended to know more about this sort of thing than other doctors—because they were well versed in hormones, Farrokh supposed. “What conditions might cause you to suspect hypogonadism?” Dr. Daruwalla asked Tata Two.

“If I saw a boy or a man with long limbs and an arm span—when he stretches his arms out—that is two inches more than his height. Also, his pubis-to-floor height being greater than his pubis-to-crown height,” Dr. Tata replied. He must be reading from a book, Dr. Daruwalla thought. “And if this boy or man also had absent secondary sexual characteristics …” Tata Two continued, “… you know—voice, muscular development, phallic development, extension of pubic hair up the belly in a diamond pattern …”

“But how could you assess such secondary sexual characteristics as being incomplete, unless the boy is over fifteen or so?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“Well, that’s the problem—you really couldn’t,” said Tata Two.

“Rahul was only twelve or thirteen in 1949!” Farrokh cried. It was preposterous that Promila had pronounced the boy impotent because he hadn’t been able to get an erection, or keep an erection, with a prostitute; it was more preposterous that old Dr. Tata had believed her!

“Well, that’s what I mean by the diagnosis being a bit premature,” Tata Two admitted. “The process of maturation begins at eleven or twelve… is heralded by the hardening of the testes and is usually completed within five years—although some things, like the growth of chest hair, may take another decade.” With the word “heralded,” Dr. Daruwalla was certain that Tata Two was reading from a book.

“In short, you mean that Rahul’s puberty might simply have been delayed. It was entirely too soon to call him a kind of eunuch!” Farrokh cried.

“Well, now, to say ‘eunuchoidism’ isn’t really calling someone ‘a kind of eunuch,’” Dr. Tata explained.

“To a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy, this diagnosis would have come at an impressionable age—wouldn’t you agree?” asked Dr. Daruwalla.

“That’s true,” Tata Two replied. “It might be a more appropriate diagnosis in the case of an eighteen-year-old with a microphallus.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“Well, we must remember that all the Rais were rather strange,” Dr. Tata reasoned.

“Just the sort of family to make the most out of a misdiagnosis,” Dr. Daruwalla remarked.

“I wouldn’t call it a ‘misdiagnosis’—just a bit early to know for sure,” Tata Two said defensively. It was understandable why Dr. Tata then wanted to change the subject. “Oh, I have an answer for you about the girl. Mr. Subhash told me you wanted a rush job.” Actually, Mr. Subhash had told Dr. Daruwalla that the HIV test would take at least two days—more, if the first phase was positive. “Anyway, she’s okay. The test was negative,” Dr. Tata said.

“That was fast,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “This is the girl who’s named Madhu? Her name is Madhu?”

“Yes, yes,” said Dr. Tata; it was his turn to sound impatient. “I’m looking at the results! The name is Madhu. The test was negative. Mr. Subhash just put the file on my desk.”

How old is Mr. Subhash? Dr. Daruwalla wanted to ask, but he was annoyed enough for one conversation; at least he could get the girl out of town. He thanked Tata Two, then hung up the phone. He wanted to go back to his screenplay, but first he called Ranjit into his office and asked the secretary to notify Mr. Garg that Madhu was not HIV-positive; the doctor himself didn’t want to give Garg the satisfaction.

“That was fast,” Ranjit said; but the screenplay was still occupying the majority of Dr. Daruwalla’s thoughts. At the moment, he was giving more of his attention to those children than to the children in his charge.

The doctor did remember to ask Ranjit to contact the dwarf’s wife; Deepa should be told that Madhu and Ganesh were coming to the circus—and that Dr. Daruwalla needed to know where (in all of Gujarat) the circus was. Farrokh should also have called the new missionary—to forewarn the Jesuit that they would be spending the weekend traveling to the circus with the children—but the screenplay beckoned to him; the fictional Mr. Martin was more compelling to Dr. Daruwalla than Martin Mills.

Unfortunately, the more vividly the screenwriter recalled and described the acts of the Great Royal Circus, the more he dreaded the disappointment he was certain he’d feel when he and Martin Mills delivered the real children to the Great Blue Nile.