A Son of the Circus

Now the Elephants Will Be Angry

But the past is a labyrinth. Where’s the way out? In the front hall of his apartment, where there were no dark-skinned, white-faced women in tutus, the doctor was halted by the clear but distant sound of his wife’s voice. It reached him all the way from the balcony, where Julia was indulging Inspector Dhar with his favorite view of Marine Drive. On occasion, Dhar slept on that balcony, either when he stayed so late that he preferred to spend the night, or else when he’d just arrived in Bombay and needed to reacquaint himself with the city’s smell.

Dhar swore this was the secret to his successful, almost instant adjustment to India. He could arrive from Europe, straight from Switzerland’s fresh air—tainted, in Zürich, with restaurant fumes and diesel exhaust, with burning coal and hints of sewer gas—but after just two or three days in Bombay, Dhar claimed, he was unbothered by the smog, or by the two or three million small fires for cooking food in the slums, or by the sweet rot of garbage, or even by the excremental horror of the four or five million who squatted at the curb or at the water’s edge of the surrounding sea. For in a city of nine million, surely the shit of half of these was evident in the Bombay air. It took Dr. Daruwalla two or three weeks to adjust to that permeating odor.

In the front hall, where the prevailing smell was of mildew, the doctor quietly removed his sandals; he deposited his briefcase and his old dark-brown doctor’s bag. He noted that the umbrellas in the umbrella stand were dusty with disuse; it had been three months since the end of the monsoon rains. Even from the closed kitchen he could detect the mutton and the dhal—so that’s what we’re having, again, he thought—but the aroma of the evening meal couldn’t distract Dr. Daruwalla from the powerful nostalgia of his wife speaking German, which she always spoke whenever she and Dhar were alone.

Farrokh stood and listened to the Austrian rhythms of Julia’s German—always the ish sound, never the ick—and in his mind’s eye he could see her when she was 18 or 19, when he’d courted her in her mother’s old yellow-walled house in Grinzing. It was a house cluttered with Biedermeier culture. There was a bust of Franz Grillparzer by the coat tree in the foyer. The work of a portraitist obsessively committed to children’s innocent expressions dominated the tea room, which was crowded with more cutesiness in the form of porcelain birds and silver antelopes. Farrokh remembered the afternoon he’d made a nervous, sweeping gesture with the sugar bowl—he broke a painted-glass lamp shade.

There were two clocks in the room. One of them played a fragment of a waltz by Lanner on the half hour and a slightly longer fragment of a Strauss waltz on the hour; the second clock paid similar token acknowledgments to Beethoven and Schubert—understandably, it was set a full minute behind the other. Farrokh remembered that, while Julia and her mother cleaned up the mess he’d made of the lamp shade, first the Strauss and then the Schubert played.

Whenever he recalled their many afternoon teas together, he could visualize his wife as a teenager. She was always dressed in a fashion Lady Duckworth would have admired. Julia wore a cream-colored blouse with flounced sleeves and a high, ruffled collar. They spoke German because her mother’s English wasn’t as good as theirs. Nowadays, Farrokh and Julia spoke German only occasionally. It was still their lovemaking language, or what they spoke in the dark. It was the language in which Julia had told him, “I find you very attractive.” After two years of courting her, he’d nevertheless felt this was forward of her; he’d been speechless. He was struggling with how to phrase the question—whether or not she was troubled by his darker color—when she’d added, “Especially your skin. The picture of your skin against my skin is very attractive.” (Das Bild—“the picture.”)

When people say that German or any other language is romantic, Dr. Daruwalla thought, all they really mean is that they’ve enjoyed a past in the language. There was even a certain intimacy in listening to Julia speak German to Dhar, whom she always called John D. This was the servants’ name for him, which Julia had adopted, much as she and Dr. Daruwalla had “adopted” the servants.

They were a feeble old couple, Nalin and Swaroop—Dr. Daruwalla’s children and John D. had always called her Roopa—but they’d outlived Lowji and Meher, whom they’d first served. It was a form of semiretirement to work for Farrokh and Julia; they were so infrequently in Bombay. The rest of the time, Nalin and Roopa were caretakers for the flat. If Dr. Daruwalla sold the apartment, where could the old couple go? He’d agreed with Julia that they would try to sell the place, but only after the old servants died. Even if Farrokh kept returning to India, he was rarely in Bombay so long that he couldn’t afford to stay in a decent hotel. Once, when one of the doctor’s Canadian colleagues had teased him for being so conservative about things, Julia had remarked, “Farrokh isn’t conservative—he’s absolutely extravagant. He maintains an apartment in Bombay so that his parents’ former servants will have a place to live!”

Just then the doctor overheard Julia say something about the Queen’s Necklace, which was the local name for the string of lights along Marine Drive. This name originated when the lamplights were white; the smog lights were yellow now. Julia was saying that yellow wasn’t a proper color for the necklace of a queen.

What a European she is! Dr. Daruwalla thought. He had the greatest affection for the way she’d managed to adapt to their life in Canada and to their sporadic visits to India without ever losing her old-world sensibility, which remained as distinctive in her voice as in her habit of “dressing” for dinner—even in Bombay. It wasn’t the content of Julia’s speech that Dr. Daruwalla was listening to—he wasn’t eavesdropping. It was only to hear the sound of her German, her soft accent in combination with such exact phrasing. But he realized that if Julia was talking about the Queen’s Necklace, she couldn’t possibly have told Dhar the upsetting news; the doctor’s heart sank because he realized how much he’d been hoping that his wife would have told the dear boy.

Then John D. spoke. If it soothed Farrokh to hear Julia’s German, it disturbed him to hear German from Inspector Dhar. In German, the doctor could barely recognize the John D. he knew, and it disquieted Dr. Daruwalla to hear how much more energetically Dhar spoke in German than he spoke in English. This emphasized to Dr. Daruwalla the distance that had grown between them. But Dhar’s university education had been in Zürich; he’d spent most of his life in Switzerland. And his serious (if not widely recognized) work as an actor in the theater, at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, was something that John Daruwalla took more pride in than he appeared to take in the commercial success of his role as Inspector Dhar. Why wouldn’t his German be perfect?

There was also not the slightest edge of sarcasm in Dhar’s voice when he spoke to Julia. Farrokh recognized a longstanding jealousy. John D, is more affectionate to Julia than he is to me, Dr. Daruwalla thought. And after all I’ve done for him! There was a fatherly bitterness to this idea, and it shamed him.

He slipped quietly into the kitchen, where the racket of the apparently never-ending preparation of the evening meal kept him from hearing the actor’s well-trained voice. Besides, Farrokh had at first (and falsely) assumed that Dhar was merely contributing to the conversation about the Queen’s Necklace. Then Dr. Daruwalla had heard the sudden mention of his own name—it was that old story about “the time Farrokh took me to watch the elephants in the sea.” The doctor hadn’t wanted to hear more, because he was afraid of the detectable tone of complaint he heard emerging in John D.’s memory. The dear boy was recalling that time he’d been frightened during the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi; it seemed that half the city had flocked to Chowpatty Beach, where they’d immersed their idols of the elephant-headed god, Ganesh. Farrokh hadn’t prepared the child for the orgiastic frenzy of the crowd—not to mention the size of the elephant heads, many of which were larger than the heads of real elephants. Farrokh remembered the outing as the first and only time he’d seen John D. become hysterical. The dear boy was crying, “They’re drowning the elephants! Now the elephants will be angry!”

And to think that Farrokh had criticized old Lowji for keeping the boy so sheltered. “If you take him only to the Duckworth Club,” Farrokh had told his father, “what’s he ever going to know about India?” What a hypocrite I’ve turned out to be! Dr. Daruwalla thought, for he knew of no one in Bombay who’d hidden from India as successfully as he’d concealed himself at the Duckworth Club—for years.

He’d taken an eight-year-old to Chowpatty Beach to watch a mob; there were hundreds of thousands dunking their idols of the elephant-headed god in the sea. What had he thought the child would make of this? It wasn’t the time to explain the British ban on “gathering,” their infuriating anti-assembly strictures; the hysterical eight-year-old was too young to appreciate this symbolic demonstration for freedom of expression. Farrokh tried to carry the crying boy against the grain of the crowd, but more and more the giant idols of Lord Ganesha were pressed against them; they were herded back to the sea. “It’s just a celebration,” he’d whispered in the child’s ear. “It’s not a riot.” In his arms, Farrokh felt the little boy trembling. Thus had the doctor realized the full weight of his ignorance, not only of India but of the fragility of children.

Now he wondered if John D. was telling Julia, “This is my first memory of Farrokh.” And I’m still getting the dear boy in trouble! Dr. Daruwalla thought.

The doctor distracted himself by poking his nose into the big pot of dhal. Roopa had long ago added the mutton, and she reminded him that he was late by remarking how fortunate it was that mutton usually defied overcooking. “The rice has dried out,” she added sadly.

Old Nalin, ever the optimist, tried to make Dr. Daruwalla feel better. In his fragmentary English, Nalin said, “But plenty of beer!”

Dr. Daruwalla felt guilty that there was always so much beer around; the doctor’s capacity for beer alarmed him, and Dhar’s fondness for the brew seemed limitless. Since Nalin and Roopa did the shopping, the thought of the old couple struggling with those heavy bottles also made Dr. Daruwalla feel guilty. And there was the elevator issue: because they were servants, Nalin and Roopa weren’t permitted to ride in the lift. Even with all those beer bottles, the elderly servants trudged up the stairs.

“And plenty of messages!” Nalin told the doctor. The old man was very fond of the new answering machine. Julia had insisted on it because Nalin and Roopa were terrible at taking messages; they couldn’t transcribe a phone number or spell anyone’s name. When the machine answered, the old man was thrilled to listen to it because he was absolved of any responsibility for the messages.

Farrokh took a beer with him. The apartment seemed so small. In Toronto, the Daruwallas owned a huge house. In Bombay, the doctor had to sneak through the living room, which was also the dining room, in order to get to the bedroom and the bathroom. But Dhar and Julia were still talking on the balcony; they didn’t see him. John D. was reciting the most famous part of the story; it always made Julia laugh.

“They’re drowning the elephants!” John D. was crying. “Now the elephants will be angry!” Dr. Daruwalla never thought that this sounded quite right in German.

If I run a bath, Farrokh speculated, they’ll hear it and know I’m home. I’ll have a quick wash in the sink instead, the doctor thought. He spread out a clean white shirt on the bed. He chose an uncharacteristically loud necktie with a bright-green parrot on it; it was an old Christmas present from John D.—not a tie that the doctor would ever wear in public. Farrokh was unaware how the tie would at least enliven his navy-blue suit. These were absurd clothes for Bombay, especially when dining at home, but Julia was Julia.

After he’d washed, the doctor took a quick look at his answering machine; the message light was flickering. He didn’t bother to count the number of messages. Don’t listen to them now, he warned himself. Yet the spirit of procrastination was deeply ingrained in him; to join in John D. and Julia’s conversation would lead to the inevitable confrontation concerning John D.’s twin. As Farrokh was deliberating, he saw the bundle of mail on his writing desk. Dhar must have gone out to the film studio and collected the fan mail, which was mostly hate mail.

It had long been their understanding that Dr. Daruwalla deserved the task of opening and reading the mail. Although the letters were addressed to Inspector Dhar, the content of these letters only rarely concerned Dhar’s acting or lip-syncing skills; instead, the letters were invariably about the creation of Dhar’s character or about a particular script. Because it was presumed that Dhar was the author of the screenplays, and thus the creator of his own character, the author himself was the source of the letter writers’ principal outrage; their attacks were leveled at the man who’d made it all up.

Before the death threats, especially before the real-life murders of actual prostitutes, Dr. Daruwalla had been in no great hurry to read his mail. But the serial killings of the cage girls had become so publicly acknowledged as imitations of the movie murders that Inspector Dhar’s mail had taken a turn for the worse. And in the light of Mr. Lal’s murder, Dr. Daruwalla felt compelled to search the mail for threats of any kind. He looked at the sizable bundle of new letters and wondered if, under these circumstances, he should ask Dhar and Julia to help him read through them. As if their evening together didn’t promise to be difficult enough! Maybe later, Farrokh thought—if the conversation comes around to it.

But, as he dressed, the doctor couldn’t ignore the insistent flickering of the message light on his answering machine. Well, he needn’t take the time to call anyone back, he thought, as he knotted his tie. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to hear what these messages were about—he could just jot them down and return the calls later. And so Farrokh searched for a pad of paper and a pen, which wasn’t easy to do without being heard, because the tiny bedroom was crammed full of the fragile, tinkling Victoriana he’d inherited from Lowji’s mansion on Ridge Road. Although he’d taken only what he couldn’t bear to auction, even his writing desk was crowded with the bric-a-brac of his childhood, not to mention the photographs of his three daughters; they were married, and therefore Dr. Daruwalla’s writing desk also exhibited their wedding pictures—and the pictures of his several grandchildren. Then there were his favorite photographs of John D.—downhill-skiing at Wengen and at Klosters, cross-country skiing in Pontresina and hiking in Zermatt—and several framed playbills from the Schauspielhaus Zürich, with John Daruwalla in both supporting and leading roles. He was Jean in Strindberg’s Fräulein Julie, he was Christopher Mahon in John Millington Synge’s Ein wahrer Held, he was Achilles in Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea, he was Fernando in Goethe’s Stella, he was Ivan in Chekhov’s Onkel Vanja, he was Antonio in Shakespeare’s Der Kaufmann von Venedig—once he’d been Bassanio. Shakespeare in German sounded so foreign to Farrokh. It depressed the doctor that he’d lost touch with the language of his romantic years.

At last he found a pen. Then he spotted a pad of paper under the silver statuette of Ganesh as a baby; the little elephant-headed god was sitting on the lap of his human mother, Parvati—a cute pose. Unfortunately, the grotesque reaction to Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer had sickened Farrokh with elephants. This was unfair, for Ganesh was merely elephant-headed; the god had four human arms with human hands, and two human feet. Also, Lord Ganesha sported only one whole tusk—although sometimes the god held his broken tusk in one of his four hands.

Ganesh truly bore no resemblance to the drawing of that inappropriately mirthful elephant which, in the most recent Inspector Dhar film, was the signature of a serial killer—that unsuitable cartoon which the movie murderer drew on the bellies of slain prostitutes. That elephant was no god. Besides, that elephant had both tusks intact. Even so, Dr. Daruwalla was off elephants—in any form. The doctor wished he’d asked Deputy Commissioner Patel about those drawings that the real murderer was making, for the police had said no more to the press than that the artwork of the real-life killer and serial cartoonist was “an obvious variation on the movie theme.” What did that mean?

The question deeply disturbed Dr. Daruwalla, who shuddered to recall the origin of his idea for the cartoon-drawing killer; the source of the doctor’s inspiration had been nothing less than an actual drawing on the belly of an actual murder victim. Twenty years ago, Dr. Daruwalla had been the examining physician at the scene of a crime that was never solved. Now the police were claiming that a killer-cartoonist had stolen the mocking elephant from a movie, but the screenwriter knew where the original idea had come from. Farrokh had stolen it from a murderer—maybe from the same murderer. Wouldn’t the killer know that the most recent Inspector Dhar movie was imitating him?

I’m over my head, as usual, Dr. Daruwalla decided. He also decided that he should give this information to Detective Patel—in case, somehow, the deputy commissioner didn’t already know it. But how would Patel already know it? Farrokh wondered. Second-guessing himself was the doctor’s second nature. At the Duckworth Club, Dr. Daruwalla had been impressed by the composure of the deputy commissioner; moreover, the doctor couldn’t rid himself of the impression that Detective Patel had been hiding something.

Farrokh interrupted these unwelcome thoughts as quickly as they’d come to him. Sitting next to his answering machine, he turned the volume down before he pushed the button. Still in hiding, the secret screenwriter listened to the messages.

The First-Floor Dogs

Upon hearing Ranjit’s complaining voice, Dr. Daruwalla instantly regretted his decision to forsake even one minute of Dhar and Julia’s company for as much as one phone message. A few years older than the doctor, Ranjit had nevertheless maintained both unsuitable expectations and youthful indignation; the former involved his ongoing matrimonial advertisements, which Dr. Daruwalla found inappropriate for a medical secretary in his sixties. Ranjit’s “youthful indignation” was most apparent in his responses to those women who, upon meeting him, turned him down. Naturally, Ranjit hadn’t all this time been conducting nonstop matrimonial advertisements, dating back to his earliest employment as old Lowji’s secretary. After exhaustive interviews, Ranjit had been successfully married—and long enough before Lowji’s death so that the senior Dr. Daruwalla had once more enjoyed the secretary’s pre-matrimonial industriousness.

But Ranjit’s wife had recently died, and he was only a few years away from retirement. He still worked for the surgical associates at the Hospital for Crippled Children, and he always served as Farrokh’s secretary whenever the Canadian was an Honorary Consultant Surgeon in Bombay. And Ranjit had decided that the time for remarrying was ripe. He thought he should do it without delay, for it made him sound younger to describe himself as a working medical secretary than to confess he was retired; just to be sure, in his more recent matrimonial advertisements, he’d attempted to capitalize on both his position and his pending retirement, citing that he was “rewardingly employed” and “anticipating a v. active, early retirement.”

It was things like “v. active” that Dr. Daruwalla found unseemly about Ranjit’s present matrimonials, and the fact that Ranjit was a shameless liar. Because of a standard policy at The Times of India—the advertising brides and grooms eschewed revealing their names, preferring the confidentiality of a number—it was possible for Ranjit to publish a half-dozen ads in the same Sunday’s matrimonial pages. Ranjit had discovered it was popular to claim that caste was “no bar,” while it was also still popular to declare himself a Hindu Brahmin—“caste-conscious and religion-minded, matching horoscopes a must.” Therefore, Ranjit advertised several versions of himself simultaneously. He told Farrokh that he was seeking the very best wife, with or without caste-consciousness or religion. Why not give himself the benefit of meeting everyone who was available?

Dr. Daruwalla was embarrassed that he’d been inexorably drawn into the world of Ranjit’s matrimonials. Every Sunday, Farrokh and Julia read through the marriage advertisements in The Times of India. It was a contest, to see which of them could identify all of Ranjit’s ads. But Ranjit’s phone message was not of a matrimonial nature. Once again, the aging secretary had called to complain about “the dwarf’s wife.” This was Ranjit’s condemning reference to Deepa, for whom he harbored a forbidding disapproval—the kind that only Mr. Sethna might have shared. Dr. Daruwalla wondered if medical secretaries were universally cruel and dismissive to anyone seeking a doctor’s attention. Was such hostility engendered only by a heartfelt desire to protect all doctors from wasting their time?

To be fair to Ranjit, Deepa was exceptionally aggressive in wasting Dr. Daruwalla’s time. She’d called to make a morning appointment for the runaway child prostitute—even before Vinod had persuaded the doctor to examine this new addition to Mr. Garg’s stable of street girls. Ranjit described the patient as “someone allegedly without bones,” for Deepa had doubtless used her circus terminology (“boneless”) with him. Ranjit was communicating his scorn for the vocabulary of the dwarf’s wife. From Deepa’s description, the child prostitute might have been made of pure plastic—“another medical marvel, and no doubt a virgin,” Ranjit concluded his sardonic message.

The next message was an old one, from Vinod. The dwarf must have called while Farrokh was still sitting in the Ladies’ Garden at the Duckworth Club. The message was really for Inspector Dhar.

“Our favorite inspector is telling me he is sleeping on your balcony tonight,” the dwarf began. “If he is changing his mind, I am just cruising—just killing time, you know. If the inspector is wanting me, he is already knowing the doormen at the Taj and at the Oberoi—for message-leaving, I am meaning. I am having a late-night picking-up at the Wetness Cabaret,” Vinod admitted, “but this is being while you are sleeping. In the morning, I am picking up you, as usual. By the way, I am reading a magazine with me in it!” the dwarf concluded.

The only magazines that Vinod read were movie magazines, where he could occasionally glimpse himself in the celebrity snapshots opening the door of one of his Ambassadors for Inspector Dhar. There on the door would be the red circle with the T in it (for taxi) and the name of the dwarf’s company, which was often partially obscured.

As opposed to “great,” Farrokh presumed.

Dhar was the only movie star who rode in Vinod’s cars; and the dwarf relished his occasional appearances with his “favorite inspector” in the film-gossip magazines. Vinod was enduringly hopeful that other movie stars would follow Dhar’s lead, but Dimple Kapadia and Jaya Prada and Pooja Bedi and Pooja Bhatt—not to mention Chunky Pandey and Sunny Deol, or Madhuri Dixit and Moon Moon Sen, to name only a few—had all declined to ride in the dwarf’s “luxury” taxis. Possibly they thought it would damage their reputations to be seen with Dhar’s thug.

As for the “cruising” back and forth between the Oberoi and the Taj, these were Vinod’s favorite territories for moonlighting. The dwarf was recognized and well treated by the doormen because whenever Dhar was in Bombay, the actor stayed at the Oberoi and at the Taj. By maintaining a suite at both hotels, Dhar was assured of good service; as long as the Oberoi and the Taj knew they were in competition with each other, they outdid themselves to give Dhar the utmost privacy. The house detectives were harsh with autograph seekers or other celebrity hounds; at the reception desk of either hotel, if you didn’t know the given code name, which kept changing, you were told that the movie star was not a guest.

By “killing time,” Vinod meant he was picking up extra money. The dwarf was good at spotting hapless tourists in the lobbies of both hotels; he would offer to drive the foreigners to a good restaurant, or wherever they wanted to go. Vinod was also gifted at recognizing those tourists who’d had harrowing taxi experiences and were therefore vulnerable to the temptations of his “luxury” service.

Dr. Daruwalla understood that the dwarf could hardly have supported himself by driving only the doctor and Dhar around. Mr. Garg was a more regular customer. Farrokh was also familiar with the dwarf’s habit of “message-leaving,” for Vinod had taken advantage of Inspector Dhar’s celebrity status with the doormen at the Oberoi and at the Taj. It may have been awkward, but it was Vinod’s only means of putting himself “on call.” There were no cellular phones in Bombay; car phones were unknown—a decided inconvenience in the private-taxi business, which Vinod complained about periodically. There were radio pagers, or “beepers,” but the dwarf wouldn’t use them. “I am preferring to be holding out,” Vinod maintained, by which he meant he was waiting for the day when cellular phones would upgrade his car-driving enterprise.

Therefore, if Farrokh or John D. wanted the dwarf, they left a message for him with the doormen at the Taj and the Oberoi. But there was another reason for Vinod to call. Vinod didn’t like showing up at Dr. Daruwalla’s apartment building unannounced; there was no phone in the lobby, and Vinod refused to see himself as a “servant”—he refused to climb the stairs. When it came to climbing stairs, his dwarfism was a handicap. Dr. Daruwalla had protested, on Vinod’s behalf, to the Residents’ Society. At first, Farrokh had argued that the dwarf was a cripple—cripples shouldn’t be forced to use the stairs. The Residents’ Society had argued that cripples shouldn’t be servants. Dr. Daruwalla had countered that Vinod was an independent businessman; the dwarf was nobody’s servant. After all, Vinod owned a private-taxi company. A chauffeur was a servant, the Residents’ Society said.

Regardless of the absurd ruling, Farrokh had told Vinod that if he ever had to come to the Daruwallas’ sixth-floor flat, he was to take the restricted residents’ elevator. But whenever Vinod stood in the lobby and waited for the elevator—regardless of the lateness of the hour—his presence would be detected by the first-floor dogs. The first-floor flats harbored a disproportionate number of dogs; and although the doctor was disinclined to believe Vinod’s interpretation—that all dogs hated all dwarfs—he could offer no scientifically acceptable reason why all the first-floor dogs should suddenly awake and commence their frenzied barking whenever Vinod was waiting for the forbidden lift.

And so it was tediously necessary for Vinod to arrange an exact time for picking up Farrokh or John D. so that the dwarf could wait in the Ambassador at the curb—or in the nearby alley—and not enter the lobby of the apartment building at all. Besides, it sorely tested the delicate ecosystem of the apartment building to have Vinod attract the late-night, furious attention of the first-floor dogs; and Farrokh was already in hot water with the Residents’ Society—his dissent to their opinion on the elevator issue had offended the building’s other residents.

Since the doctor was the son of an acknowledged great man—and a famously assassinated great man, too—there was other fuel for resenting Dr. Daruwalla. That he lived abroad and could still afford to have his apartment occupied by his servants—often, for years without a single visit—had certainly made him unpopular, if not openly despised.

That the dogs appeared guilty of discrimination against dwarfs wasn’t the sole reason that Dr. Daruwalla disliked them. Their insane barking disturbed the doctor because of its total irrationality; any irrationality reminded Farrokh of everything he failed to comprehend about India.

Only that morning he’d stood on his balcony and overheard his fifth-floor neighbor, Dr. Malik Abdul Aziz—a model “Servant of the Almighty”—praying on the balcony below him. When Dhar slept on the balcony, he often commented to Farrokh on how soothing it was to wake up to the prayers of Dr. Aziz.

“Praise be to Allah, Lord of Creation”—that much Dr. Daruwalla had understood. And later there was something about “the straight path.” It was a very pure prayer—Farrokh had liked it, and he’d long admired Dr. Aziz for his unswerving faith—but Dr. Daruwalla’s thoughts had veered sharply away from religion, in the direction of politics, because he was reminded of the aggressive billboards he’d seen around the city. The messages on such hoardings were essentially hostile; they merely purported to be religious.

And that wasn’t as bad as those Shiv Sena slogans, which were all over Bombay. (MAHARASHTRA FOR MAHARASHTRIANS. Or, SAY IT WITH PRIDE: I’M A HINDU.)

Something evil had corrupted the purity of prayer. Something as dignified and private as Dr. Aziz, with his prayer rug rolled out on his own balcony, had been compromised by proselytizing, had been distorted by politics. And if this madness had a sound, Farrokh knew, it would be the sound of irrationally barking dogs.

Inoperable

In the apartment building, Dr. Daruwalla and Dr. Aziz were the most consistent early risers; surgeries for both—Dr. Aziz was a urologist. If he prays every morning, so should I, Farrokh thought. Politely, that morning, he had waited for the Muslim to finish. There followed the shuffling sound of Dr. Aziz’s slippers as he rolled up his prayer rug while Dr. Daruwalla leafed through his Book of Common Prayer; Farrokh was looking for something appropriate, or at least familiar. He was ashamed that his ardor for Christianity seemed to be receding into the past, or had his faith entirely retreated? After all, it had been only a minor sort of miracle that had converted him; perhaps Farrokh needed another small miracle to inspire him now. He realized that most Christians were faithful without the incentive of any miracle, and this realization instantly interfered with his search for a prayer. As a Christian, too, he’d lately begun to wonder if he was a fake.

In Toronto, Farrokh was an unassimilated Canadian—and an Indian who avoided the Indian community. In Bombay, the doctor was constantly confronted with how little he knew India—and how unlike an Indian he thought himself to be. In truth, Dr. Daruwalla was an orthopedist and a Duckworthian, and—in both cases—he was merely a member of two private clubs. Even his conversion to Christianity felt false; he was merely a holiday churchgoer, Christmas and Easter—he couldn’t remember when he’d last partaken of the innermost pleasure of prayer.

Although it was quite a mouthful—and it was the whole story of what he was supposed to believe, in a nutshell—Dr. Daruwalla had begun his experiment in prayer with the so-called Apostles’ Creed, the standard Confession of the Faith. “‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth …’” Farrokh recited breathlessly, but the capital letters were a distraction to him; he stopped.

Later, as he had stepped into the elevator, Dr. Daruwalla reflected on how easily his mood for prayer had been lost. He resolved that he would compliment Dr. Aziz on his highly disciplined faith at the first opportunity. But when Dr. Aziz stepped into the elevator at the fifth floor, Farrokh was completely flustered. He scarcely managed to say, “Good morning, Doctor—you’re looking well!”

“Why, thank you—so are you, Doctor!” said Dr. Aziz, looking somewhat sly and conspiratorial. When the elevator door closed and they were alone together, Dr. Aziz said, “Have you heard about Dr. Dev?”

Farrokh wondered, Which Dr. Dev? There was a Dr. Dev who was a cardiologist, there was another Dev who was an anesthesiologist—there are a bunch of Devs, he thought. Even Dr. Aziz was known in the medical community as Urology Aziz, which was the only sensible way to distinguish him from a half-dozen other Dr. Azizes.

“Dr. Dev?” Dr. Daruwalla asked cautiously.

“Gastroenterology Dev,” said Urology Aziz.

“Oh, yes, that Dr. Dev,” Farrokh said.

“But have you heard?” asked Dr. Aziz. “He has AIDS—he caught it from a patient. And I don’t mean from sexual contact.”

“From examining a patient?” Dr. Daruwalla said.

“From a colonoscopy, I believe,” said Dr. Aziz. “She was a prostitute.”

“From a colonoscopy… but how?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“At least forty percent of the prostitutes must be infected with the virus,” Dr. Aziz said. “Among my patients, the ones who see prostitutes test HIV-positive twenty percent of the time!”

“But from a colonoscopy. I don’t understand how” Farrokh insisted, but Dr. Aziz was too excited to listen.

“I have patients telling me—a urologist—that they have cured themselves of AIDS by drinking their own urine!” Dr. Aziz said.

“Ah, yes, urine therapy,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “Very popular, but—”

“But here is the problem!” cried Dr. Aziz. He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket; some words were scrawled on the paper in longhand. “Do you know what the Kama Sutra says?” Dr. Aziz asked Farrokh. Here was a Muslim asking a Parsi (and a convert to Christianity) about a Hindu collection of aphorisms concerning sexual exploits—some would say “love.” Dr. Daruwalla thought it wise to be careful; he said nothing.

As for urine therapy, it was also wise to say nothing. Moraji Desai, the former prime minister, was a practitioner of urine therapy—and wasn’t there something called the Water of Life Foundation? Best to say nothing about that, too, Farrokh concluded. Besides, Urology Aziz wanted to read something from the Kama Sutra. It would be best to listen.

“Among the many situations where adultery is allowed,” Dr. Aziz said, “just listen to this: ‘When such clandestine relations are safe and a sure method of earning money.’” Dr. Aziz refolded the often-folded piece of paper and returned this evidence to his pocket. “Well, do you see?” he said.

“What do you mean?” Farrokh asked.

“Well, that’s the problem—obviously!” Dr. Aziz said.

Farrokh was still trying to figure out how Dr. Dev had caught AIDS while performing a colonoscopy; meanwhile, Dr. Aziz had concluded that AIDS among prostitutes was caused directly by the bad advice given in the Kama Sutra. (Farrokh doubted that most prostitutes could read.) This was another example of the first-floor dogs—they were barking again. Dr. Daruwalla smiled nervously all the way to the entrance to the alley, where Urology Aziz had parked his car.

There’d been some brief confusion, because Vinod’s Ambassador had momentarily blocked the alley, but Dr. Aziz was soon on his way. Farrokh had waited in the alley for the dwarf to turn his car around. It was a close, narrow alley—briny-smelling, because of the proximity of the sea, and as warm and steamy as a blocked drain. The alley was a haven for the beggars who frequented the small seaside hotels along Marine Drive. Dr. Daruwalla supposed that these beggars were especially interested in the Arab clientele; they were reputed to give more money. But the beggar who suddenly emerged from the alley wasn’t one of these.

He was a badly limping boy who could occasionally be seen standing on his head at Chowpatty Beach. The doctor knew that this wasn’t a trick of sufficient promise for Vinod and Deepa to offer the urchin a home at the circus. The boy had slept on the beach—his hair was caked with sand—and the first sunlight had driven him into the alley for a few more hours’ sleep. The two automobiles, arriving and departing, had probably attracted his attention. When Vinod backed the Ambassador into the alley, the beggar blocked the doctor’s way to the car. The boy stood with both arms extended, palms up; there was a veil of mucous over his eyes and a whitish paste marked the corners of his mouth.

The eyes of the orthopedic surgeon were drawn to the boy’s limp. The beggar’s right foot was rigidly locked in a right-angle position, as if the foot and ankle were permanently fused—a deformity called ankylosis, which was familiar to Dr. Daruwalla from the common congenital condition of clubfoot. Yet both the foot and ankle were unusually flattened—a crush injury, the doctor guessed—and the boy bore his weight on his heel alone. Also, the bad foot was considerably smaller than the good one; this led the doctor to imagine that the injury had damaged the epiphyseal plates, which is the region in bones where growth takes place. It wasn’t only that the boy’s foot had fused with his ankle; his foot had also stopped growing. Farrokh felt certain that the boy was inoperable.

Just then, Vinod opened the driver’s-side door. The beggar was wary of the dwarf, but Vinod wasn’t brandishing his squash-racquet handles. The dwarf was nevertheless determined to open the rear door for Dr. Daruwalla, who observed that the beggar was taller but frailer than Vinod—Vinod simply pushed the boy out of the way. Farrokh saw the beggar stumble; his mashed foot was as stiff as a hammer. Once inside the Ambassador, the doctor lowered the window only enough so that the boy could hear him.

“Maaf karo,” Dr. Daruwalla said gently. It was what he always said to beggars: “Forgive me.”

The boy spoke English. “I don’t forgive you,” he said.

Also in English, Farrokh said what was on his mind: “What happened to your foot?”

“An elephant stepped on it,” the cripple replied.

That would explain it, the doctor thought, but he didn’t believe the story; beggars were liars.

“Was it being a circus elephant?” Vinod inquired.

“It was just an elephant stepping off a train,” the boy told the dwarf. “I was a baby, and my father left me lying on the station platform—he was in a bidi shop.”

“You were stepped on by an elephant while your father was buying cigarettes?” Farrokh asked. This certainly sounded like a tall tale, but the cripple listlessly nodded. “So I suppose your name is Ganesh—after the elephant god,” Dr. Daruwalla asked the boy. Without appearing to notice the doctor’s sarcasm, the cripple nodded again.

“It was the wrong name for me,” the boy replied.

Apparently, Vinod believed the beggar. “He is being a doctor,” the dwarf said, pointing to Farrokh. “He is fixing you, maybe,” Vinod added, pointing to the boy. But the beggar was already limping away from the car.

“You can’t fix what elephants do,” Ganesh said.

The doctor didn’t believe he could fix what the elephant had done, either. “Maaf karo,” Dr. Daruwalla repeated. Neither stopping nor bothering to look back, the cripple made no further response to Farrokh’s favorite expression.

Then the dwarf drove Dr. Daruwalla to the hospital, where one surgery for clubfoot and another for wryneck awaited him. Farrokh tried to distract himself by daydreaming about a back operation—a laminectomy with fusion. Then Dr. Daruwalla dreamed of something more ambitious—the placement of Harrington rods for a severe vertebral infection, with vertebral collapse. But even in prepping his surgeries for, the clubfoot and the wryneck, the doctor would keep thinking about how he might fix the beggar’s foot.

Farrokh could cut through the fibrous tissue and the contracted, shrunken tendons—there were plastic procedures to elongate tendons—but the problem with such a crush injury was the bony fusion; Dr. Daruwalla would have to saw through bone. By damaging the vascular bundles around the foot, he could compromise the blood supply; the result might be gangrene. Of course there was always amputation and the fitting of a prosthesis, but the boy would probably refuse such an operation. In fact, Farrokh knew, his own father would have refused to perform such an operation; as a surgeon, Lowji had lived by the old adage primum non nocere—above all, do no harm.

Forget the boy, Farrokh had thought. Thus he’d performed the clubfoot and the wryneck and, thereafter, he’d faced the Membership Committee at the Duckworth Club, where he had also lunched with Inspector Dhar, a lunch much disturbed by the death of Mr. Lal and the discomfort that D.C.P. Patel had caused them. (Dr. Daruwalla had had a busy day.)

And now, as he listened to the phone messages on his answering machine, Farrokh was trying to imagine the precise moment in the bougainvillea by the ninth green when Mr. Lal had been struck down. Perhaps when Dr. Daruwalla was in surgery; possibly before, when he’d encountered Dr. Aziz on the elevator, or one of the times when he’d said “Maaf karo” to the crippled beggar whose English was unbelievably good.

Doubtless the boy was one of those enterprising beggars who sold himself as a guide to foreign tourists. Cripples were the best hustlers, Farrokh knew. Many of them had maimed themselves; some of them had been purposefully injured by their parents—for being crippled improved their opportunities as beggars. These thoughts of mutilation, especially of self-inflicted wounds, led the doctor to thinking about the hijras again. Then his thoughts returned to the golf-course murder.

In retrospect, what astonished Dr. Daruwalla was how anyone could have gotten close enough to Mr. Lal to strike the old golfer with his own putter. For how could you sneak up on a man who was flailing away in the flowers? His body would have been twisting from side to side, and bending over to fuss with the stupid ball. And where would his golf bag have been? Not far away. How could anyone approach Mr. Lal’s golf bag, take out the putter and then hit Mr. Lal—all when Mr. Lal wasn’t looking? It wouldn’t work in a movie, Farrokh knew—not even in an Inspector Dhar movie.

That was when the doctor realized that Mr. Lal’s murderer had to have been someone Mr. Lal knew, and if the murderer had been another golfer—presumably with his own bag of clubs—why would he have needed to use Mr. Lal’s putter? But what a nongolfer could have been doing in the vicinity of the ninth green—and still not have aroused Mr. Lal’s suspicions—was at least for the moment quite beyond the imaginative powers of Inspector Dhar’s creator.

Farrokh wondered what sort of dogs were barking in the killer’s head. Angry dogs, Dr. Daruwalla supposed, for in the murderer’s mind there was such a terrifying irrationality; the mind of Dr. Aziz would appear reasonable in comparison. But then Farrokh’s speculations on this subject were interrupted by the third phone message. The doctor’s answering machine was truly relentless.

“Goodness!” cried the unidentified voice. It was a voice of such lunatic exuberance, Dr. Daruwalla presumed it was no one he knew.