A Son of the Circus

Testing for Syphilis

At the Hotel Bardez, the front-desk staff told Dr. Daruwalla that the young woman had limped down the beach, all the way from a hippie enclave at Anjuna, she was checking the hotels for a doctor. “Any doctor?” she’d asked. They were proud of themselves for sending her away, but they warned the doctor that they were sure she’d be back; she wouldn’t find anyone to care for her foot at Calangute Beach, and if she made it as far as Aguada, she’d be turned away. Because of how she looked, someone might call the police.

Farrokh desired to uphold the Parsi reputation for fairness and social justice; certainly he sought to help the crippled and the maimed—a girl with a limp was at least in a category of patients the orthopedist felt familiar with. It wasn’t as if his services were sought for the purpose of making Rahul Rai complete. Yet Farrokh couldn’t be angry with the staff at the Hotel Bardez. It was out of respect for Dr. Daruwalla’s privacy that they’d sent the limping woman away; they’d meant only to protect him, although doubtless they took a degree of pleasure in abusing an apparent freak. Among the Goans, especially as the 1960s were ending, there was a felt resentment of the European and American hippies who roamed the beaches; the hippies weren’t big spenders—some of them even stole—and they were perceived as an undesirable element by the wealthier Western and Indian tourists whom the Goans wished to attract. And so, without condemning their behavior, Dr. Daruwalla politely informed the staff at the Hotel Bardez that he wished to examine the lame hippie should she return.

The doctor’s decision seemed especially disappointing to the aged tea-server who shuffled back and forth between the Hotel Bardez and the various encampments of thatch-roofed shelters; these four-poled structures, stuck in the sand and roofed with the dried fronds of coconut palms, dotted the beach. The tea-server had several times approached Dr. Daruwalla in his hammock under the palms, and it was largely out of diagnostic interest that Farrokh had observed the old man so closely. His name was Ali Ahmed; he said he was only 60 years old, although he looked 80, and he exhibited a few of the more easily recognizable and colorful physical signs of congenital syphilis. Upon his first tea service, the doctor had spotted Ali Ahmed’s “Hutchinson’s teeth”—the unmistakable peg-shaped incisors. The tea-server’s deafness, in addition to the characteristic clouding of the cornea, had confirmed Dr. Daruwalla’s diagnosis.

Farrokh was chiefly interested in positioning Ali Ahmed in such a way that the tea-server faced the morning sun. Dr. Daruwalla was trying to spot a fourth symptom, a rarity in congenital syphilis—the Argyll Robertson pupil is much more common in syphilis acquired later in life—and the doctor had cleverly thought of a way to examine the old man without his knowledge.

From his hammock, where he received his tea, Farrokh faced the Arabian Sea. Inland, at his back, the morning sun was a hazy glare above the village; from that direction, wafting over the beach, there emanated an aroma of fermented coconuts. Looking into the cloudy eyes of Ali Ahmed, Farrokh asked with feigned innocence, “What’s that smell, Ali, and where’s it coming from?” To be sure he’d be heard, Farrokh had to raise his voice.

The tea-server was at the time focused on handing the doctor a glass of tea; his pupils were constricted to accommodate the object nearby—namely, the tea glass. But when the doctor asked him from whence the powerful odor came, Ali Ahmed looked in the direction of the village; his pupils dilated (to accommodate the distant tops of the coconut and areca palms), but even as his face was lifted to the harsh sunlight his pupils did not constrict in reaction to the glare. It was the classic Argyll Robertson pupil, Dr. Daruwalla decided.

Farrokh recalled his favorite professor of infectious diseases, Herr Doktor Fritz Meitner; Dr. Meitner was fond of telling his medical students that the best way to remember the behavior of the Argyll Robertson pupil was to think of a prostitute: she accommodates, but doesn’t react. It was an all-male class; they all had laughed, but Farrokh had felt uncertain of his laughter. He’d never been with a prostitute, although they were popular in both Vienna and Bombay.

“Feni,” the tea-server said, to explain the smell. But Dr. Daruwalla already knew the answer, just as he knew that the pupils of some syphilitics don’t respond to light.

A Literary Seduction Scene

In the village—or perhaps the source of the smell was as far away as Panjim—they were distilling coconuts for the local brew called feni; the heavy, sickly-sweet fumes of the liquor drifted over the few tourists and families on holiday at Baga Beach.

Dr. Daruwalla and his family were already favorites with the staff of the small hotel, and they were passionately welcomed in the little lean- to restaurant and taverna that the Daruwallas frequented on the beachfront. The doctor was a big tipper, his wife was a classical beauty of a European tradition (as opposed to the seedy, hippie trash), his daughters were vibrantly bright and pretty—they were still of the innocent school—and the striking John D. was mesmerizing to Indians and foreigners alike. It was only to those rare families as likable as the Daruwallas that the staff of the Hotel Bardez apologized for the smell of the feni.

In those days, in the premonsoon months of May and June, both knowledgeable foreigners and Indians avoided the Goa beaches; it was too hot. It was, however, when the Goans who lived away from Goa came home to visit their families and friends. The children were through with school. The shrimp and lobster and fish were plentiful, and the mangoes were at their peak. (Dr. Daruwalla was enamored of mangoes.) In keeping with the holiday spirit and in order to placate all the Christians, the Catholic Church provided an abundance of feast days; although he wasn’t yet religious, the doctor had nothing against a banquet or two.

The Catholics were no longer the majority in Goa—the migrant iron miners who’d arrived early in this century were Hindus—but Farrokh, like his father, persisted in the belief that “the Romans” still overran the place. The Portuguese influence endured in the monumental architecture that Dr. Daruwalla adored; it could distinctly be tasted in the cuisine that the doctor relished. And among the names of the boats of the Christian fisherman, “Christ the King” was quite common. Bumper stickers, of both the comic and proselytizing variety, were a new if not widespread fad in Bombay; the doctor joked that the names of the boats of the Christian fishermen were Goan bumper stickers. Julia was no more amused by this than by Farrokh’s constant ridicule of St. Francis’s violated remains.

“I don’t know how anyone can justify canonization,” Dr. Daruwalla reflected to John D., largely because Julia wouldn’t listen to her husband but also because the young man had studied some theology in university. In Zürich, it would have been Protestant theology, Farrokh assumed. “Just imagine it!” Farrokh lectured to the young man. “A violent woman swallows Xavier’s toe, and they cut off his arm and send it to Rome!”

John D. smiled silently over his breakfast. The Daruwalla daughters smiled helplessly at John D. When he looked at his wife, Farrokh was surprised that she was looking straight back at him—she was smiling, too. Clearly, she’d not been listening to a word he was saying. The doctor blushed. Julia’s smile wasn’t in the least cynical; on the contrary, his wife’s expression was so sincerely amorous, Farrokh felt certain that she was determined to remind him of their pleasure the night before—even in front of John D. and the children! And judging from their night together, and the visible randiness of his wife’s thoughts on the morning after, their holiday had become a second honeymoon after all.

Reading in bed would never seem innocent again, the doctor thought, although everything had begun quite innocently. His wife had been reading the Trollope, and Farrokh hadn’t been reading at all; he’d been trying to get up the nerve to read A Sport and a Pastime in front of Julia. Instead, he lay on his back with his fingers intertwined upon his rumbling belly—an excess of pork, or else the dinner conversation had upset him. Over dinner, he’d tried to explain to his family his need to be more creative, his desire to write something, but his daughters had paid no attention to him and Julia had misunderstood him; she’d suggested a medical-advice column—if not for The Times of India, then for The Globe and Mail. John D. had advised Farrokh to keep a diary; the young man said he’d kept one once, and he’d enjoyed it—then a girlfriend had stolen it and he’d gotten out of the habit. At that point, the conversation entirely deteriorated because the Daruwalla daughters had pestered John D. about the number of girlfriends the young man had had.

After all, it was the tail end of the ’60s; even innocent young girls talked as if they were sexually knowledgeable. It disturbed Farrokh that his daughters were clearly asking John D. to tell them the number of young women he’d slept with. Typical of John D., and to Dr. Daruwalla’s great relief, the young man had skillfully and charmingly ducked the question. But the matter of the doctor’s unfulfilled creativity had been dismissed or ignored.

The subject, however, hadn’t eluded Julia. In bed after dinner, propped up with a stack of pillows—while Farrokh lay flat upon his back—his wife had assaulted him with the Trollope.

“Listen to this, Liebchen,” Julia said. “‘Early in life, at the age of fifteen, I commenced the dangerous habit of keeping a journal, and this I maintained for ten years. The volumes remained in my possession, unregarded—never looked at—till 1870, when I examined them, and, with many blushes, destroyed them. They convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness, extravagance, and conceit. But they had habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught me how to express myself with facility.’”

“I don’t want or need to keep a journal,” Farrokh said abruptly. “And. I already know how to express myself with facility.”

“There’s no need to be defensive,” Julia told him. “I just thought you’d be interested in the subject.”

“I want to create something,” Dr. Daruwalla announced. “I’m not interested in recording the mundane details of my life.”

“I wasn’t aware that our life was altogether mundane,” Julia said.

The doctor, realizing his error, said, “Certainly it’s not. I meant only that I prefer to try my hand at something imaginative—I want to imagine something.”

“Do you mean fiction?” his wife asked.

“Yes,” Farrokh said. “Ideally, I should like to write a novel, but I don’t suppose I could write a very good one.”

“Well, there are all kinds of novels,” Julia said helpfully.

Thus emboldened, Dr. Daruwalla withdrew James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime from its hiding place, which was under the newspaper on the floor beside the bed. He brought forth the novel carefully, as if it were a potentially dangerous weapon, which it was.

“For example,” Farrokh said, “I don’t suppose I could ever write a novel as good as this one.”

Julia glanced at the Salter quickly before returning her eyes to the Trollope. “No, I wouldn’t think so,” she said.

Aha! the doctor thought. So she has read it! But he asked with forced indifference, “Have you read the Salter?”

“Oh, yes,” his wife said, not taking her eyes off the Trollope. “I brought it along to reread it, actually.”

It was hard for Farrokh to remain casual, but he tried. “So you liked it, I presume?” he inquired.

“Oh, yes—very much,” Julia answered. After a weighty pause, she asked him, “And you?”

“I find it rather good,” the doctor confessed. “I suppose,” he added, “some readers might be shocked, or offended, by certain parts.”

“Oh, yes,” Julia agreed. Then she closed the Trollope and looked at him. “Which parts are you thinking of?”

It hadn’t happened quite as he’d imagined it, but this was what he wanted. Since Julia had most of the pillows, he rolled over on his stomach and propped himself up on his elbows. He began with a somewhat cautious passage. “‘He pauses at last,’” Farrokh read aloud. “‘He leans over to admire her, she does not see him. Hair covers her cheek. Her skin seems very white. He kisses her side and then, without force, as one stirs a favorite mare, begins again. She comes to life with a soft, exhausted sound, like someone saved from drowning.’”

Julia also rolled over on her stomach, gathering the pillows to her breasts. “It’s hard to imagine anyone being shocked or offended by that part,” she said.

Dr. Daruwalla cleared his throat. The ceiling fan was stirring the down on the back of Julia’s neck; her thick hair had fallen forward, hiding her eyes from his view. When he held his breath, he could hear her breathing. “‘She cannot be satisfied,’” he read on, while Julia buried her face in her arms. “‘She will not let him alone. She removes her clothes and calls to him. Once that night and twice the next morning he complies and in the darkness between lies awake, the lights of Dijon faint on the ceiling, the boulevards still. It’s a bitter night. Flats of rain are passing. Heavy drops ring in the gutter outside their window, but they are in a dovecote, they are pigeons beneath the eaves. The rain is falling all around them. Deep in feathers, breathing softly, they lie. His sperm swims slowly inside her, oozing out between her legs.’”

“Yes, that’s better,” Julia said. When he looked at her, he saw she’d turned her face to look at him; the yellow, unsteady light from the kerosene lamps wasn’t as ghostly pale as the moonlight he’d seen on her face on their first honeymoon, but even this tarnished light conveyed her willingness to trust him. Their wedding night, in the Austrian winter, was in one of those snowy Alpine towns, and their train from Vienna had arrived almost too late for-them to be admitted to the Gasthof, despite their reservation. It must have been 2:00 in the morning by the time they’d undressed and bathed and got into the feather bed, which was as white as the mountains of snow that reflected the moonlight—it was a timeless glowing—in their window.

But on their second honeymoon, Dr. Daruwalla came dangerously close to ruining the mood when he offered a faint criticism of the Salter. “I’m not sure how accurate it is to suggest that sperm swim ‘slowly,’” he said, “and technically, I suppose, it’s semen, not sperm, that would be oozing out between her legs.”

“For God’s sake, Farrokh,” his wife said. “Give me the book.”

She had no difficulty locating the passage she was looking for, although the book was unmarked. Farrokh lay on his side and watched her while she read aloud to him. “‘She is so wet by the time he has the pillows under her gleaming stomach that he goes right into her in one long, delicious move. They begin slowly. When he is close to coming he pulls his prick out and lets it cool. Then he starts again, guiding it with one hand, feeding it in like a line. She begins to roll her hips, to cry out. It’s like ministering to a lunatic. Finally he takes it out again. As he waits, tranquil, deliberate, his eye keeps falling on lubricants—her face cream, bottles in the armoire. They distract him. Their presence seems frightening, like evidence. They begin once more and this time do not stop until she cries out and he feels himself come in long, trembling runs, the head of his prick touching bone, it seems.’”

Julia handed the book back to him. “Your turn,” she said then. She also lay on her side, watching him, but as he began to read to her, she shut her eyes; he saw her face on the pillow almost exactly as he’d seen it that morning in the Alps. St. Anton—that was the place—and he’d awakened to the sound of the skiers’ boots tramping on the hard-packed snow; it seemed that an army of skiers was marching through the town to the ski lift. Only Julia and he were not there to ski. They were there to fuck, Farrokh thought, watching his wife’s sleeping face. And that was how they’d spent the week, making brief forays into the snowy paths of the town and then hurrying back to their feather bed. In the evenings, they’d had no less appetite for the hearty food than the skiers had. Watching Julia as he read to her, Farrokh remembered every day and night in St. Anton.

“‘He is thinking of the waiters in the casino, the audience at the cinema, the dark hotels as she lies on her stomach and with the ease of sitting down at a well-laid table, but no more than that, he introduces himself. They he on their sides. He tries not to move. There are only the little, invisible twitches, like a nibbling of fish.’”

Julia opened her eyes as Farrokh searched for another passage.

“Don’t stop,” she told him.

Then Dr. Daruwalla found what he was looking for—a rather short and simple part. “‘Her breasts are hard,’” he read to his wife. “‘Her cunt is sopping.’” The doctor paused. “I suppose there’d be some readers who’d be shocked or offended by that,” he added.

“Not me,” his wife told him. He closed the book and returned it to the newspaper on the floor. When he rolled back to Julia, she’d arranged the pillows under her hips and lay waiting for him. He touched her breasts first.

“Your breasts are hard,” he said to her.

“They are not,” she told him. “My breasts are old and soft.”

“I like soft better,” he said.

After she kissed him, she said, “My cunt is sopping.”

“It isn’t!” he said instinctively, but when she took his hand and made him touch her, he realized she wasn’t lying.

In the morning, the sunlight passed through the narrow slats of the blinds and stood out in horizontal bars across the bare coffee-colored wall. The newspaper on the floor was stirred by a small lizard, a gecko—only its snout protruded from between the pages—and when Dr. Daruwalla reached to pick up A Sport and a Pastime, the gecko darted under the bed. Sopping! the doctor thought to himself. He opened the book quietly, thinking his wife was still asleep.

“Keep reading—aloud,” Julia murmured.

Lunch Is Followed by Depression

It was with a renewed sexual confidence that Farrokh faced the situation of the morning. Rahul Rai had struck up a conversation with John D., and although—even by the doctor’s standards—Rahul looked fetching in “her” bikini, the small lump of evidence in the bikini’s bottom half provided Dr. Daruwalla with sufficient reason to rescue John D. from a potential confrontation. While Julia sat on the beach with the Daruwalla daughters, the doctor and John D. strolled in a manly and confiding fashion along the water’s edge.

“There’s something you should know about Rahul,” Farrokh began.

“What’s her name?” John D. asked.

“His name is Rahul,” Farrokh explained. “If you were to look under his panties, I’m almost certain you would find a penis and a pair of balls—rather small, in both cases.” They continued walking along the shoreline, with John D. appearing to pay obsessive attention to the smooth, sand-rubbed stones and the rounded, broken bits of shells.

Finally, John D. said, “The breasts look real.”

“Definitely induced—hormonally induced,” Dr. Daruwalla said. The doctor described how estrogens worked… the development of breasts, of hips; how the penis shrank to the size of a little boy’s. The testes were so reduced they resembled vulva. The penis was so shrunken it resembled an enlarged clitoris. The doctor explained as much as he knew about a complete sex-change operation, too.

“Far out,” John D. remarked. They discussed whether Rahul would be more interested in men or women. Since he wanted to be a woman, Dr. Daruwalla deduced that Rahul was sexually interested in men. “It’s hard to tell,” John D. suggested; indeed, when they returned to where the Daruwalla daughters were encamped under a thatch-roofed shelter, there was Rahul Rai in conversation with Julia!

Julia said later, “I think it’s young men who interest him, although I suppose a young woman would do.”

Would do? Dr. Daruwalla thought. Promila had confided to Farrokh that this was a bad time for “poor Rahul.” Apparently, they’d not traveled from Bombay together, but Promila had met her nephew at the Bardez; he’d been alone in the area for more than a week. He had “hippie friends,” Promila said—somewhere near Anjuna—but things hadn’t worked out as Rahul had hoped. Farrokh didn’t desire to know more, but Promila offered her speculations anyway.

“I presume that sexually confusing things must have happened,” she told Dr. Daruwalla.

“Yes, I suppose,” the doctor said. Normally, all of this would have upset Farrokh greatly, but something from his sexual triumphs with Julia had carried over into the following day. Despite everything that was “sexually confusing” about Rahul, which was sexually disturbing to Dr. Daruwalla, not even the doctor’s appetite was affected, although the heat was fierce.

It was unmercifully hot at midday, and there was no perceptible breeze. Along the shoreline, the fronds of the areca and coconut palms were as motionless as the grand old cashew and mango trees farther inland in the dead-still villages and towns. Not even the passing of a three-wheeled rickshaw with a damaged muffler could rouse a single dog to bark. Were it not for the heavy presence of the distilling feni, Dr. Daruwalla would have guessed that the air wasn’t moving at all.

But the heat didn’t dampen the doctor’s enthusiasm for his lunch. He started with an oyster guisado and steamed prawns in a yogurt-mustard sauce; then he tried the vindaloo fish, the gravy for which was so piquant that his upper lip felt numb and he instantly perspired. He drank an ice-cold ginger feni with his meal—actually, he had two—and for dessert he ordered the bebinca. His wife was easily satisfied with a xacuti, which she shared with the girls; it was a fiery curry made almost soothing with coconut milk, cloves and nutmeg. The daughters also tried a frozen mango dessert; Dr. Daruwalla had a taste, but nothing could abate the burning sensation in his mouth. As a remedy, he ordered a cold beer. Then he criticized Julia for allowing the girls to drink so much sugarcane juice.

“In this heat, too much sugar will make them sick,” Farrokh told his wife.

“Listen to who’s talking!” Julia said.

Farrokh sulked. The beer was an unfamiliar brand, which he would never remember. He would recall, however, the part of the label that said LIQUOR RUINS COUNTRY, FAMILY AND LIFE.

But as much as Dr. Daruwalla was a man of unstoppable appetites, his plumpness had never been—nor would it become—displeasing to the eye. He was a fairly small man—his smallness was most apparent in the delicacy of his hands and in the neat, well-formed features of his face, which was round, boyish and friendly—and his arms and legs were thin and wiry; his bum was small, too. Even his little pot belly merely served to emphasize his smallness, his neatness, his tidiness. He liked a small, well-trimmed beard, for he also liked to shave; his throat and the sides of his face were usually clean-shaven. When he wore a mustache, it, too, was neat and small. His skin wasn’t much browner than an almond shell; his hair was black—it would soon turn gray. He would never be bald; his hair was thick, with a slight wave, and he left it long on top, although he kept it cut short on the back of his neck and above his ears, which were also small and lay perfectly flat against his head. His eyes were such a dark-brown color that they looked almost black, and because his face was so small, his eyes seemed large—maybe they were large. If so, only his eyes reflected his appetites. And only in comparison to John D. would someone not have thought of Dr. Daruwalla as handsome—small, but handsome. He was not a fat man, but a plump one—a little, pot-bellied man.

While the doctor struggled to digest his meal, it might have crossed his mind that the others had behaved more sensibly. John D., as if demonstrating the self-discipline and dietary restraint that future movie stars would be wise to imitate, eschewed eating in the midday heat. He chose this time of day to take long walks on the beach; he swam intermittently and lazily—only to cool off. From his languid attitude, it was hard to tell if he walked the beach in order to look at the assembled young women or to afford them the luxury of looking at him.

In the torpid aftermath of his lunch, Dr. Daruwalla barely noticed that Rahul Rai was nowhere to be seen. Farrokh was frankly relieved that the would-be transsexual wasn’t pursuing John D.; and Promila Rai had accompanied John D. for only a short distance along the water’s edge, as if the young man had immediately discouraged her by declaring his intentions to walk to the next village, or to the village after that. Wearing an absurdly wide-brimmed hat—as if it weren’t already too late to protect her cancerous skin—Promila had returned, alone, to the spot of shade allotted by her thatch-roofed shelter, and there she appeared to embalm herself with a variety of oils and chemicals.

Under their own array of thatch-roofed shelters, the Daruwalla daughters applied different oils and chemicals to their vastly younger and superior bodies; then they ventured among the intrepid sunbathers—mostly Europeans, and relatively few of them at this time of year. The Daruwalla girls were forbidden to follow John D. on his midday hikes; both Julia and Farrokh felt that the young man deserved this period of time to be free of them.

But the most sensibly behaved person at midday was always the doctor’s wife. Julia retired to the relative cool of their second-floor rooms. There was a shaded balcony with John D.’s sleeping hammock and a cot; the balcony was a good place to read or nap.

It was clearly nap time for Dr. Daruwalla, who doubted he could manage the climb to the second floor of the hotel. From the taverna, he could see the balcony attached to his rooms, and he looked longingly in that direction. He thought the hammock would be nice, and he considered that he would try sleeping there tonight; if the mosquito netting was good, he’d be very comfortable, and all night he’d hear the Arabian Sea. The longer he allowed John D. to sleep there, the more firmly the young man would presume it was his place to sleep. But Farrokh’s renewed sexual interest in Julia gave him pause in regard to his sleeping-hammock plan; there were passages of A Sport and a Pastime he’d not yet discussed with his wife.

Dr. Daruwalla wished he knew what else Mr. James Salter had written. However, as exhilarating as this unexpected stimulation to his marriage had been, Farrokh felt slightly depressed. Mr. Salter’s writing was so far above anything Dr. Daruwalla could hope to imagine—much less hope to achieve—and the doctor had guessed right: one of the lovers dies, strongly implying that a love of such overpowering passion never lasts. Moreover, the novel concluded in a tone of voice that was almost physically painful to Dr. Daruwalla. In the end, Farrokh felt that the very life he led with Julia—the life he cherished—was being mocked. Or was it?

Of the French girl—Anne-Marie, the surviving lover—there is only this final offering: “She is married. I suppose there are children. They walk together on Sundays, the sunlight falling upon them. They visit friends, talk, go home in the evening, deep in the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired.” Wasn’t there an underlying cruelty to this? Because such a life is “greatly to be desired,” isn’t it? Dr. Daruwalla thought. And how could anyone expect the married life to compete with the burning intensity of a love affair?

What disturbed the doctor was that the end of the novel made him feel ignorant, or at least inexperienced. And what was more humiliating, Farrokh felt certain, was that Julia could probably explain the ending to him in such a way that he’d understand it. It was all a matter of tone of voice; perhaps the author had intended irony, but not sarcasm. Mr. Salter’s use of language was crystalline; if something was unclear, the fuzzy-headedness surely should be attributed to the reader.

But more than technical virtuosity separated Dr. Daruwalla from Mr. James Salter, or from any other accomplished novelist. Mr. Salter and his peers wrote from a vision; they were convinced about something, and it was at least partly the passion of these writers’ convictions that gave their novels such value. Dr. Daruwalla was convinced only that he would like to be more creative, that he would like to make something up. There were a lot of novelists like that, and Farrokh didn’t care to embarrass himself by being one of them. He concluded that a more shameless form of entertainment suited him; if he couldn’t write novels, maybe he could write screenplays. After all, movies weren’t as serious as novels; certainly, they weren’t as long. Dr. Daruwalla presumed that his lack of a “vision” wouldn’t hamper his success in the screenplay form.

But his conclusion depressed him. In the search for something to occupy his untapped creativity, the doctor had already accepted a compromise—before he’d even begun! This thought moved him to consider consoling himself with his wife’s affections. But gazing again to the distant balcony didn’t bring the doctor any closer to Julia, and Dr. Daruwalla doubted that imbibing feni and beer was a wise prelude to an amorous adventure—especially in such abiding heat. Something Mr. Salter had written appeared to shimmer over Dr. Daruwalla in the midday inferno: “The more clearly one sees this world, the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.” There is a growing list of things I don’t know, the doctor thought.

He didn’t know, for example, the name of the thick vine that had crawled upward from the ground to embrace both the second- and the third-floor balconies of the Hotel Bardez. The vine was put to active use by the small striped squirrels that scurried over it; at night, the geckos raced up and down the vine with far greater speed and agility than any squirrel. When the sun shone against this wall of the hotel, the smallest, palest-pink flowers opened up along the vine, but Dr. Daruwalla didn’t know that these flowers were not what attracted the finches to the vine. Finches are seed eaters, but Dr. Daruwalla didn’t know this, nor did the doctor know that the green parrot perching on the vine had feet with two toes pointing forward and two backward. These were the details he missed, and they contributed to the growing list of things he didn’t know. This was the kind of Everyman he was—a little lost, a little misinformed (or uninformed), almost everywhere he ever was. Yet, even overfed, the doctor was undeniably attractive. Not every Everyman is attractive.

A Dirty Hippie

Dr. Daruwalla grew so drowsy at the littered table, one of the Bardez servant boys suggested he move into a new hammock that was strung in the shade of the areca and coconut palms. Complaining to the boy that he feared the hammock was too near the main beach and he’d be bothered by sand fleas, the doctor nevertheless tested the hammock; Farrokh wasn’t sure it would support his weight. But the hammock held. For the moment, the doctor detected no sand fleas. Therefore, he was obliged to give the boy a tip.

This boy, Punkaj, seemed employed solely for the purpose of tipping, for the messages that he delivered to the Hotel Bardez and the adjacent lean- to restaurant and taverna were usually of his own invention and wholly unnecessary. For example, Punkaj asked Dr. Daruwalla if he should run to the hotel and tell “the Mrs. Doctor” that the doctor was napping in a hammock near the beach. Dr. Daruwalla said no. But in a short while, Punkaj was back beside the hammock. He reported: “The Mrs. Doctor is reading what I think is a book.”

“Go away, Punkaj,” said Dr. Daruwalla, but he tipped the worthless boy nonetheless. Then the doctor lay wondering if his wife was reading the Trollope or rereading the Salter.

Considering the size of his lunch, Farrokh was fortunate that he was able to sleep at all. The strenuousness of his digestive system made a sound sleep impossible, but throughout the grumbling and rumbling of his stomach—and the occasional hiccup or belch—the doctor fitfully dozed and dreamed, and woke up all of a sudden to wonder if his daughters were drowned or suffering from sunstroke or sexual attack. Then he dozed off again.

As Farrokh fell in and out of sleep, the imagined details of Rahul Rai’s complete sex change appeared and disappeared in his mind’s eye, drifting in and out of consciousness like the fumes from the distilling feni. This exotic aberration clashed with Farrokh’s fairly ordinary ideals: his belief in the purity of his daughters, his fidelity to his wife. Only slightly less common was Dr. Daruwalla’s vision of John D., which was simply the doctor’s desire to see the young man rise above the sordid circumstances of his birth and abandonment. And if I could only play a part in that, Dr. Daruwalla dreamed, I might one day be as creative as Mr. James Salter.

But John D.’s only visible qualities were of a fleeting and superficial nature; he was arrestingly handsome, and he was so steadfastly self-confident that his poise concealed his lack of other qualities—sadly, the doctor presumed that John D. lacked other qualities. In this belief, Farrokh was aware that he relied too heavily on his brother’s estimation and his sister-in-law’s confirmation, for both Jamshed and Josefine were chronically worried that the boy had no future. He was “uninvolved” with his studies, they said. But couldn’t this be an early indication of thespian detachment?

Yes, why not? John D. could be a movie star! Dr. Daruwalla decided, forgetting that this notion had originated with his wife. It suddenly seemed to the doctor that John D. was destined to be a movie star, or else he would be nothing. It was Farrokh’s first realization that a hint of despair can start the creative juices flowing. And it must have been these juices, in combination with the more scientifically supported juices of digestion, that got the doctor’s imagination going.

But, just then, a belch so alarming he failed to recognize it as his own awakened Dr. Daruwalla from these imaginings; he shifted in his hammock in order to confirm that his daughters had not been violated by either the forces of nature or the hand of man. Then he fell asleep with his mouth open, the splayed fingers of one hand lolling in the sand.

Dreamlessly, the noonday passed. The beach began to cool. A slight breeze rose; it softly gave sway to the hammock where Dr. Daruwalla lay digesting. Something had left a sour taste in his mouth—the doctor suspected the vindaloo fish or the beer—and he felt flatulent. Farrokh opened his eyes slightly to see if anyone was near his hammock—in which case it would be impolite for him to fart—and there was that pest Punkaj, the worthless servant boy.

“She come back,” Punkaj said.

“Go away, Punkaj,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“She looking for you—that hippie with her bad foot,” the boy said. He pronounced the word “heepee,” so that Dr. Daruwalla, in his digestive daze, still didn’t understand.

“Go away, Punkaj!” the doctor repeated. Then he saw the young woman limping toward him.

“Is that him? Is that the doctor?” she asked Punkaj.

“You wait there! I ask doctor first!” the boy said to her. At a glance, she could have been 18 or 25, but she was a big-boned young woman, broad-shouldered and heavy-breasted and thick through her hips. She also had thick ankles and very strong-looking hands, and she lifted the boy off the ground—holding him by the front of his shirt—and threw him on his back in the sand.

“Go fuck yourself,” she told him. Punkaj picked himself up and ran toward the hotel. Farrokh swung his legs unsteadily out of the hammock and faced her. When he stood up, he was surprised at how much the late-afternoon breeze had cooled the sand; he was also surprised that the young woman was so much taller than he was. He quickly bent down to put on his sandals; that was when he saw she was barefoot—and that one foot was nearly twice the size of the other. While the doctor was still down on one knee, the young woman rotated her swollen foot and showed him the filthy, inflamed sole.

“I stepped on some glass,” she said slowly. “I thought I picked it all out, but I guess not.”

He took her foot in his hand and felt her lean heavily on his shoulder for balance. There were several small lacerations, all closed and red and puckered with infection, and on the ball of her foot was a fiery swelling the size of an egg; in its center was an inch-long, oozing gash that was scabbed over.

Dr. Daruwalla looked up at her, but she wasn’t looking down at him; she was gazing off somewhere, and the doctor was shocked not only by her stature but by her solidity as well. She had a full, womanly figure and a peasant muscularity; her dirty, unshaven legs were ragged with golden hair, and her cutoff blue jeans were slightly torn at the crotch seam, through which poked an outrageous tuft of her golden pubic hair. She wore a black, sleeveless T-shirt with a silver skull-and-crossbones insignia, and her loose, low-slung breasts hung over Farrokh like a warning. When he stood up and looked into her face, he saw she couldn’t have been older than 18. She had full, round, freckled cheeks, and her lips were badly sun-blistered. She had a child’s little nose, also sunburned, and almost-white blond hair, which was matted and tangled and discolored by the suntan oil she’d used to try to protect her face.

Her eyes were startling to Dr. Daruwalla, not only for their pale, ice-blue color but because they reminded him of the eyes of an animal that wasn’t quite awake—not fully alert. As soon as she noticed he was looking at her, her pupils constricted and fixed hard upon him—also like an animal’s. Now she was wary; all her instincts were suddenly engaged. The doctor couldn’t return the intensity of her gaze; he looked away from her.

“I think I need some antibiotics,” the young woman said.

“Yes, you have an infection,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “I have to lance that swelling. There’s something in there—it has to come out.” She had a pretty good infection going; the doctor had also noticed the lymphangitic streaking.

The young woman shrugged; and when she moved her shoulders only that slightly, Farrokh caught the scent of her. It wasn’t just an acrid armpit odor; there was also something like the tang of urine in the way she smelled, and there was a heavy, ripe smell—faintly rotten or decayed.

“It is essential for you to be clean before I cut into you,” Dr. Daruwalla said. He was staring at the young woman’s hands; there appeared to be dried blood caked under her nails. Once more the young woman shrugged, and Dr. Daruwalla took a step back from her.

“So… where do you want to do it?” she asked, looking around.

At the taverna, the bartender was watching them. In the lean- to restaurant, only one of the tables was occupied. There were three men drinking feni; even these impaired feni drinkers were watching the girl.

“There’s a bathtub in our hotel,” the doctor said. “My wife will help you.”

“I know how to take a bath,” the young woman told him.

Farrokh was thinking that she couldn’t have walked very far on that foot. As she hobbled between the taverna and the hotel, her limp was pronounced; she leaned hard on the rail as they climbed the stairs to the rooms.

“You didn’t walk all the way from Anjuna, did you?” he asked her.

“I’m from Iowa,” she answered. For a moment, Dr. Daruwalla didn’t understand—he was trying to think of an “Iowa” in Goa. Then he laughed, but she didn’t.

“I meant, where are you staying in Goa?” he asked her.

“I’m not staying,” she told him. “I’m taking the ferry to Bombay—as soon as I can walk.”

“But where did you cut your foot?” he asked.

“On some glass,” she said. “It was sort of near Anjuna.”

This conversation, and watching her climb the stairs, exhausted Dr. Daruwalla. He preceded the girl into his rooms; he wanted to alert Julia that he’d found a patient on the beach, or that she’d found him.

Farrokh and Julia waited on the balcony while the young woman took a bath. They waited quite a long time, staring—with little comment—at the girl’s battered canvas rucksack, which she’d left with them on the balcony. Apparently, she wasn’t considering a change of clothes, or else the clothes in the rucksack were dirtier than the clothes she wore, although this was hard to imagine. Odd cloth badges were sewn to the rucksack—the insignia of the times, Dr. Daruwalla supposed. He recognized the peace symbol, the pastel flowers, Bugs Bunny, a U.S. flag with the face of a pig superimposed on it, and another silver skull and crossbones. He didn’t recognize the black-and-yellow cartoon bird with the menacing expression; he doubted it was a version of the American eagle. There was no way the doctor could have been familiar with Herky the Hawk, the wrathful symbol of athletic teams from the University of Iowa. Looking more closely, Farrokh read the words under the black-and-yellow bird: GO, HAWKEYES!

“She must belong to some sort of strange club,” the doctor said to his wife. In response, Julia sighed. It was the way she feigned indifference; Julia was still somewhat in shock at the sight of the huge young woman, not to mention the great clumps of blond hair the girl had grown in her armpits.

In the bathroom, the girl filled and emptied the tub twice. The first time was to shave her legs, but not her underarms—she valued the hair in her armpits as an indication of her rebellion; she thought of it and her pubic hair as her “fur.” She used Dr. Daruwalla’s razor; she thought about stealing it, but then she remembered she’d left her rucksack out on the balcony. The memory distracted her; she shrugged, and put the razor back where she’d found it. As she settled into the second tub of water, she fell instantly asleep—she was so exhausted—but she woke up as soon as her mouth dipped below the water. She soaped herself, she shampooed her hair, she rinsed. Then she emptied the tub and drew a third bath, letting the water rise around her.

What puzzled her about the murders was that she couldn’t locate in herself the slightest feeling of remorse. The murders weren’t her fault—whether or not they might be judged her unwitting responsibility. She refused to feel guilty, because there was absolutely nothing she could have done to save the victims. She thought only vaguely about the fact that she hadn’t tried to prevent the murders. After all, she decided, she was also a victim and, as such, a kind of eternal absolution appeared to hover over her, as detectable as the steam ascending from her bathwater.

She groaned; the water was as hot as she could stand it. She was amazed at the scum on the surface of the water. It was her third bath, but the dirt was still coming out of her.