A Son of the Circus

A Beautiful Stranger

When Nancy’s fever came back, the sweating didn’t wake her but the chills did. She knew she was delirious because it was impossible that a beautiful woman in a sari could be sitting on the bed beside her, holding her hand. At 31 or 32, the woman was at the very peak of her beauty, and her subtle jasmine scent should have told Nancy that the beautiful woman was not the result of delirium. A woman with such a wonderful smell could never be dreamed. When the woman spoke, even Nancy had reason to doubt that she was any kind of hallucination at all.

“You’re the one who’s sick, aren’t you?” the woman asked Nancy. “And they’ve left you all alone, haven’t they?”

“Yes,” Nancy whispered; she was shivering so hard, her teeth were chattering. Although she clutched the entrenching tool, she doubted she could summon the strength to lift it.

Then, as so often happens in dreams, there was no transition, no logic to the order of events, because the beautiful woman unwound her sari—she completely undressed. Even in the ghostly pallor of the moonlight, she was the color of tea; her limbs looked as smooth and hard as fine wood, like cherry. Her breasts were only slightly bigger than Beth’s, but much more upright, and when she slipped past the mosquito net and into bed beside Nancy, Nancy relinquished her grip on the entrenching tool and allowed the beautiful woman to hold her.

“They shouldn’t leave you all alone, should they?” the woman asked Nancy.

“No,” Nancy whispered; her teeth had stopped chattering, and her shivers subsided in the beautiful woman’s strong arms. At first they lay face-to-face, the woman’s firm breasts against Nancy’s softer bosom, their legs entwined. Then Nancy rolled onto her other side and the woman pressed herself against Nancy’s back; in this position, the woman’s breasts touched Nancy’s shoulder blades—the woman’s breath stirred Nancy’s hair. Nancy was impressed by the suppleness of the woman’s long, slender waist—how it curved to accommodate Nancy’s broad hips and her round bottom. And to Nancy’s surprise, the woman’s hands, which gently held Nancy’s heavy breasts, were even bigger than Nancy’s hands.

“This is better, isn’t it?” the woman asked her.

“Yes,” Nancy whispered, but her own voice sounded uncharacteristically hoarse and far away. An unshakable drowsiness attended the woman’s embrace, or else this was a new stage in Nancy’s fever, which signaled the beginning of a sleep deeper than dreams.

Nancy had never slept with a woman’s breasts pressed against her back; she marveled at how soothing it was, and she wondered if this was what men felt when they fell asleep this way. Previously, Nancy had fallen asleep with that odd sensation of a man’s inert and usually small penis brushing against her buttocks. It was upon this awareness, and on the edge of sleep, that Nancy was suddenly aware of an unusual situation, which was surely in the area of dream or delirium or both, because she felt—at the same time!—a woman’s breasts pressed against her back and a man’s sleepy penis curled against her buttocks. Another fever dream, Nancy decided.

“Won’t they be surprised, when they get here?” the beautiful woman asked her, but Nancy’s mind had drifted too far away for her to answer.

Nancy Is a Witness

When Nancy woke up, she lay alone in the moonlight, smelling the ganja and listening to Dieter and Beth; they were whispering on the other side of the partition. The rats on the latticework were so still that they appeared to be listening, too—or else the rats were stoned, because Dieter and Beth were smoking up a storm.

Nancy heard Dieter ask Beth, “What is the first sexual experience that you had some confidence in?” Nancy counted to herself in the silence; of course she knew what Beth was thinking. Then Dieter said, “Masturbation, right?”

Nancy heard Beth whisper, “Yes.”

“Everyone is different,” Dieter told Beth philosophically. “You just have to learn what your own best way is.”

Nancy lay watching the rats while she listened to Dieter. He was successful in getting Beth to relax, although Beth did possess the decency to ask, if only once, “What about Nancy?”

“Nancy is asleep,” Dieter said. “Nancy won’t object.”

“I have to be lying on my tummy,” Beth told Dieter, whose grasp of English vernacular wasn’t sound enough for him to understand “tummy.”

Nancy heard Beth roll over. There was no sound for a while, and then there came a change in Beth’s breathing, to which Dieter whispered some encouragement. There was the sound of messy kissing, and Beth panting, and then Beth uttered that special sound, which made the rats run along the top of the latticework partition and caused Nancy to reach for the entrenching tool with her big hands.

While Beth was still moaning, Dieter said to her, “Just wait right there. I have a surprise for you.”

The surprise for Nancy was that the entrenching tool was gone; she was sure she’d brought it to bed with her. She wanted to crack Dieter in the shins with it, just to drop him to his knees so that she could tell him what she thought of him. She’d give Beth one more chance. As she groped under the mosquito net and along the floor beside the bed, looking for the entrenching tool, Nancy still hoped that she and Beth could go to Rajasthan together.

That was when her hand found the jasmine-scented sari that the beautiful woman in the dream had worn. Nancy pulled the sari into bed with her and breathed it in; the scent of it brought the beautiful woman back to her mind—the woman’s unusually large, strong hands… the woman’s unusually upright, firm breasts. Last came the memory of the woman’s unusual penis, which had curled like a snail against Nancy’s buttocks as Nancy drifted into sleep.

“Dieter?” Nancy tried to whisper, but her voice made no sound. It was exactly as they’d told Dieter in Bombay: you go to Goa not to find Rahul but to let Rahul find you. Dieter had been right about one thing: there were chicks with dicks. Rahul wasn’t a hijra—he was a zenana, after all.

Nancy could hear Dieter in the bathroom, looking for the dildo in the semidarkness. She heard a bottle break against the stone floor. Dieter must have placed the bottle precariously on the edge of the tub; not much moonlight penetrated the bathroom, and he probably needed to search for the dildo with both hands. Briefly, Dieter cursed; he must have cursed in German because Nancy didn’t catch the word.

Beth called out to Dieter—she’d obviously forgotten that Nancy was supposed to be sleeping. “Did you break your Coke, Dieter?” Beth called; her own question dissolved her into mindless giggles—Dieter was addicted to Coca-Cola.

“Ssshhh!” Dieter said from the bathroom.

“Ssshhh!” Beth repeated; she made a failed effort to stifle her laughter.

The next sound that Nancy heard was one she’d been fearing, but she’d been unable to find her voice—to warn Dieter that someone else was here. She heard what she was sure was the entrenching tool, the spade end, as it made full-force contact with what sounded like the base of Dieter’s skull. A metallic after-ring followed the blow, but surprisingly little noise attended Dieter falling. Then there was the second sound of violent contact, almost as if a spade or a heavy shovel had been swung against the trunk of a tree. Nancy realized that Beth hadn’t heard this because Beth was sucking on the ganja pipe as if the fire had died in the bowl and she was trying to revive it.

Nancy lay very still, holding the jasmine-scented sari in her arms. The spectral figure with the small, upright breasts and the little boy’s penis passed close to Nancy’s bed without a sound. It was no wonder that Rahul was called Pretty, Nancy thought.

“Beth!” Nancy tried to say, but once again her voice had abandoned her.

From the other side of the partition, a sudden light came through the latticework in patches; the shadows of the startled rats were cast upon the ceiling. Nancy could see through the latticing. Beth had completely opened the mosquito net in order to light an oil lamp; she was looking for more ganja for the pipe when the naked tea-colored body appeared beside her bed. Rahul’s big hands held the entrenching tool with the handle nestled in the delicate curve of the small of his back, the spade end concealed between his shoulder blades.

“Hi,” Rahul said to Beth.

“Hi. Who are you?” Beth said. Then Beth managed a gasp, which caused Nancy to stop looking through the space between the latticework. Nancy lay on her back with the jasmine-scented sari covering her face; she didn’t want to look at the ceiling, either, because she knew that the shadows of the rats would be twitching there.

“Hey, like, what are you?” she heard Beth say. “Are you a boy or a girl?”

“I’m pretty, aren’t I?” Rahul said.

“You sure are… different,” Beth replied.

From the responding sound of the entrenching tool, Nancy guessed that Rahul was displeased to be called “different.” Rahul’s preferred nickname was “Pretty.” Nancy pushed the jasmine-scented sari entirely off the bed and outside the mosquito net. She hoped it fell to the floor very close to where Rahul had left it. Then she lay with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, where the shadows of the rats scurried back and forth; it was almost as if the second and third blows from the entrenching tool were a kind of starting signal for the rats.

Later, Nancy quietly rolled on her side so that she could peek through the latticing and watch what Rahul was doing; he appeared to be performing a kind of surgery on Beth’s stomach, but Nancy soon realized that Rahul was drawing a picture on Beth’s belly. Nancy shut her eyes and wished that her fever would come back; even though she wasn’t feverish, she was so frightened that she began to shiver. It was the shivers that saved her. When Rahul came to her, Nancy’s teeth were chattering as uncontrollably as before. Instantly, she felt his lack of sexual interest; he was mocking her, or merely curious.

“Is that bad old fever back again?” Rahul asked her.

“I keep dreaming,” Nancy told him.

“Yes, of course you do, dear,” Rahul said.

“I keep trying to sleep but I keep dreaming,” Nancy said.

“Are they bad dreams?” Rahul asked her.

“Pretty bad,” Nancy said.

“Do you want to tell me about them, dear?” Rahul asked her.

“I just want to sleep,” Nancy told him. To her surprise, he let her. He parted the mosquito net and sat on the bed beside her; he rubbed her between her shoulder blades until the shivers went away and she could imitate the regular breathing of a deep sleep—she even parted her lips and tried to imagine that she was already dead. He kissed her once on the temple, and once on the tip of her nose. At last, she felt Rahul’s weight leave the bed. She also felt the entrenching tool, when Rahul gently returned it to her hands. Although she never heard a door open or close, she knew Rahul was gone when she heard the rats racing recklessly through the cottage; they even scampered under the mosquito net and across her bed, as if they were secure in their belief that there were three dead people in the cottage instead of two. That was when Nancy knew it was safe to get up. If Rahul had still been there, the rats would have known.

In the predawn light, Nancy saw that Rahul had used the dhobi pen—and indelible dhobi ink—to decorate Beth’s belly. The laundry-marking pen was a crude wooden handle with a simple, broad nib; the ink was black. Rahul had left the ink bottle and the dhobi pen on Nancy’s pillow. Nancy recalled that she’d picked up the ink bottle and the dhobi pen before putting them both back on her bed; her fingerprints were also all over the handle of the entrenching tool.

She’d become ill so soon upon her arrival; yet it was Nancy’s strong impression that this was a rustic sort of place. She doubted she’d have much success convincing the local police that a beautiful woman with a little boy’s penis had murdered Dieter and Beth. And Rahul had been smart enough not to empty Dieter’s money belt; he’d taken the money belt with him. There was no evidence of robbery. Beth’s jewelry was untouched, and there was even some money in Dieter’s wallet; their passports weren’t stolen. Nancy knew that most of the money was in the dildo, which she didn’t even try to open because Dieter had bled on it and it was sticky to touch. She wiped it with a wet towel; then she packed it in the rucksack with her things.

She thought Inspector Patel would believe her, provided she could get back to Bombay without the local police finding her first. On the surface, Nancy thought, it would be judged a crime of passion—one of those triangular relationships that had turned a little twisted. And the drawing on Beth’s belly gave the murders a hint of diabolism, or at least a flair for sarcasm. The elephant was surprisingly small and unadorned—a frontal view. The head was wider than it was long, the eyes were unmatched and one was squinting—actually, one eye seemed puckered, Nancy thought. The trunk hung slack, pointing straight down; from the end of the trunk, the artist had drawn several broad lines in the shape of a fan—a childish indication that water sprayed from the elephant’s trunk, as from a showerhead or from the nozzle of a hose. These lines extended into Beth’s pubic hair. The entire drawing was the size of a small hand.

Then Nancy realized why the drawing was slightly off center, and why one eye seemed “puckered.” One of the eyes was Beth’s navel, outlined in dhobi ink; the other eye was an imperfect imitation of the navel. Because the navel had real depth, the eyes weren’t the same; one eye appeared to be winking. Beth’s navel was the winking eye. What further contributed to the elephant’s mirthful or mocking expression was that one of its tusks drooped in the normal position; the opposing tusk was raised, almost as if an elephant could lift a tusk in the manner that a human being can cock an eyebrow. This was a small, ironical elephant—an elephant with an inappropriate sense of humor, to be sure.

The Getaway

Nancy dressed Beth’s body in the tank top that Beth had been wearing when Nancy first met her; at least it covered the drawing. She left Beth’s sacred yoni in place, at her throat, as if it might prove itself to be a more successful talisman in the next world than it had demonstrated itself to be in this.

The sun rose inland and a tan light filtered through the areca and coconut palms, leaving most of the beach in shade, which was a blessing for Nancy, who labored for over an hour with the entrenching tool; yet she managed to dig no better than a shallow pit near the tidemark for high tide. The pit was already half full of water when she dragged Dieter’s body along the beach and rolled him into the hole. By the time she’d arranged Beth’s body next to his, Nancy was aware of the blue crabs that she’d uncovered with her digging; they were scurrying to bury themselves again. She’d chosen an especially soft stretch of sand, the part of the beach that was nearest the cottage; now Nancy realized why the sand was soft. A tidal inlet cut through the beach and drained into the matted jungle; she’d dug too close to this inlet. Nancy knew the bodies wouldn’t stay buried for long.

Worse, in her haste to clean up the broken glass in the bathroom, she’d stepped on the jagged heel of the Coca-Cola bottle; several pieces of glass had broken off in her foot. She was wrong to think she’d picked all the pieces out, but she was in a hurry. She’d bled so heavily on the bathroom mat, she was forced to roll it up and put it (with the broken glass) in the grave; she buried it, together with the rest of Dieter’s and Beth’s things, including Beth’s silver bangles, which were much too small for Nancy, and Beth’s beloved copy of The Upanishads, which Nancy had no interest in reading herself.

It had surprised Nancy that digging the grave was harder work than dragging Dieter’s body to the beach; Dieter was tall, but he weighed less than she’d ever imagined. It crossed her mind that she could have left him anytime she’d wanted to; she could have picked him up and thrown him against a wall. She felt incredibly strong, but as soon as she’d filled the grave, she was exhausted.

A moment of panic nearly overcame Nancy when she discovered that she couldn’t find the top half of the silver ballpoint pen that Dieter had given her—the pen with Made in India written lengthwise on it in script. The bottom part said Made in, the missing part said India. Nancy had already discovered the flaw in the pen’s design: the pen wouldn’t snap securely together if the script wasn’t perfectly aligned; the top and the bottom were always getting separated. Nancy looked through the cottage for the missing top; she thought it unlikely that Rahul had taken it—it wasn’t the part of the pen that you could write with. Nancy had the part that wrote, and so she kept it; because it was small, it would make its way to the bottom of her rucksack. At least it was real silver.

Nancy knew her fever had finally gone because she was smart enough to take Dieter’s and Beth’s passports; she also reminded herself that their bodies would be found soon. Whoever rented the cottage to Dieter had known there were three of them. She suspected that the police would assume she’d leave by bus from Calangute or by ferry from Panjim. Nancy’s plan was remarkably clear-headed: she would place Dieter’s and Beth’s passports in a conspicuous place at the bus stand in Calangute, but she would take the ferry from Panjim to Bombay. That way, with any luck—and while she was on the ferry—the police would be looking for her in bus stations.

But Nancy would be the beneficiary of better luck than this. When the bodies were discovered, the landlord who rented the cottage to Dieter admitted that he’d seen Beth and Nancy only at a distance. Since Dieter was German, the landlord assumed the other two were Germans; also, he mistook Nancy for a man. After all, she was so big—especially beside Beth. The landlord would tell the police that they were looking for a German hippie male. When the passports were found in Calangute, the police realized that Beth had been an American; yet they persisted in their belief that the murderer was a German man, traveling by bus.

The grave wouldn’t be discovered right away; the tide eroded the sand near the inlet only a little bit at a time. It would be unclear whether the carrion birds or the pye-dogs were the first to catch wind of something; by then, Nancy was gone.

She waited only for the sun to top the palm trees and flood the beach in white light; it took just a few minutes for the sun to dry the wet sand of the grave. With a palm frond, Nancy wiped smooth the stretch of beach leading to the jungle and the cottage; then she limped on her way. It was still early morning when she left Anjuna. She deemed she’d discovered an isolated pocket of eccentrics when she saw the nude sunbathers and swimmers who were almost a tradition in the area. She’d been sick—she didn’t know.

The first day, her foot wasn’t too bad, but she had to walk all over Calangute after she placed the passports. There was no doctor staying at Meena’s or Varma’s. Someone told her that an English-speaking doctor was staying at the Concha Hotel; when she got there, the doctor had checked out. At the Concha, they told her there was an English-speaking doctor in Baga at the Hotel Bardez. The next day, when she went there, they turned her away; by then, her foot was infected.

As she emerged from her endless baths in Dr. Daruwalla’s tub, Nancy couldn’t remember if the murders were two or three days old. She did, however, remember a glaring error in her judgment. She’d already told Dr. Daruwalla that she was taking the ferry to Bombay; that was decidedly unwise. When the doctor and his wife helped her onto the table on the balcony, they mistook her silence for anxiety regarding the small surgery, but Nancy was thinking of how to rectify her mistake. She hardly flinched at the anesthetic, and while Dr. Daruwalla probed for the broken glass, Nancy calmly said, “You know, I’ve changed my mind about Bombay. I’m going south instead. I’ll take the bus from Calangute to Panjim, then I’ll take the bus to Margao. I want to go to Mysore, where they make the incense—you know? Then I want to go to Kerala. What do you think of that?” she asked the doctor. She wanted him to remember her false itinerary.

“I think you must be a very ambitious traveler!” said Dr. Daruwalla. He extracted a surprisingly big, half-moon-shaped piece of glass from her foot; it was probably a piece from the thick heel of a Coke bottle, the doctor told her. He disinfected the smaller cuts once they were free of glass fragments. He packed the larger wound with iodophor gauze. Dr. Daruwalla also gave Nancy an antibiotic that he’d brought with him to Goa for his children. She’d have to see a doctor in a few days—sooner, if there was any redness around the wound or if she had a fever.

Nancy wasn’t listening; she was worrying how she would pay him. She didn’t think it would be proper to ask the doctor to unscrew the dildo; she also didn’t think he looked strong enough. Farrokh, in his own way, was also distracted by his thoughts about the dildo.

“I can’t pay you very much,” Nancy told the doctor.

“I don’t want you to pay me at all!” Dr. Daruwalla said. He gave her his card; it was just his habit.

Nancy read the card and said, “But I told you—I’m not going to Bombay.”

“I know, but if you feel feverish or the infection worsens, you should call me—from wherever you are. Or if you see a doctor who can’t understand you, have the doctor call me,” Farrokh said.

“Thank you,” Nancy told him.

“And don’t walk on it any more than you have to,” the doctor told her.

“I’ll be on the bus,” Nancy insisted.

As she was limping to the stairs, the doctor introduced her to John D. She was in no mood to meet such a handsome young man, and although he was very polite to her—he even offered to help her down the stairs—Nancy felt extremely vulnerable to his kind of European superiority. He showed not the slightest spark of sexual interest in her, and this hurt her more than her foot did. But she said good-bye to Dr. Daruwalla and allowed John D. to carry her downstairs; she knew she was heavy, but he looked strong. The desire to shock him grew overwhelming. Besides, she knew he was strong enough to unscrew the dildo.

“If it’s not too much trouble,” she said to him in the lobby of the hotel, “you could do me a big favor.” She showed him the dildo without removing it from her rucksack. “The tip unscrews,” she told him, watching his eyes. “But I’m just not strong enough.” She continued to regard his face while he gripped the big cock in both hands; she would remember him because of how poised he was.

As soon as he loosened the tip, she stopped him.

“That’s enough,” she told him; she didn’t want him to see the money. It disappointed her that he seemed unshockable, but she kept trying. She resolved she would look into his eyes until he had to look away. “I’m going to spare you,” she said softly. “You don’t want to know what’s inside the thing.”

She would remember him for his instinctive sneer, for John D. was an actor long before he was Inspector Dhar. She would remember that sneer, the same sneer with which Inspector Dhar would later incense all of Bombay. It was Nancy who had to look away from him; she would remember that, too.

She avoided the bus stand in Calangute; she would try to hitchhike to Panjim, even if it meant she had to walk—or defend herself with the entrenching tool. She hoped she still had a day or two before the bodies were found. But before she located the road to Panjim, she remembered the big piece of glass the doctor had removed from her foot. After showing it to her, he’d put it in an ashtray on a small table near the hammock; probably he would throw it away, she thought. But what if he heard about the broken glass in the hippie grave—it would soon be called the “hippie grave”—and what if he wondered if the piece of glass from her foot would match?

It was late at night when Nancy returned to the Hotel Bardez. The door to the lobby was locked, and the boy who slept on a rush mat in the lobby all night was still engaged in talking to the dog that spent every night with him; that was why the dog never heard Nancy when she climbed the vine to the Daruwallas’ second-floor balcony. Her procaine injection had worn off and her foot throbbed; but Nancy could have screamed in pain and knocked over the furniture and still she would never have awakened Dr. Daruwalla.

The doctor’s lunch has been described. It would be superfluous to provide similar detail regarding the doctor’s dinner; suffice it to say that he substituted the vindaloo-style pork for the fish, and he further indulged in a pork stew called sorpotel, which features pig’s liver and is abundantly flavored with vinegar. Yet it was the dried duckling with tamarind that dominated the aroma of his heavy breathing, and his snores were scented with sharp blasts of a raw red wine, which he would deeply regret in the morning. He should have stuck to beer. Julia was grateful that Dr. Daruwalla had elected to sleep in the hammock on the balcony, where only the Arabian Sea—and the lizards and insects that in the night were legion—would be disturbed by the doctor’s windy noises. Julia also desired a rest from the passions inspired by Mr. James Salter’s artistry. For the moment, her private speculations concerning the departed hippie’s dildo had cooled Julia’s sexual ardor.

As for the insect and lizard life that clung to the mosquito net enclosing the cherubic doctor in his hammock, the gecko and mosquito world appeared to be charmed by both the doctor’s music and his vapors. The doctor had bathed just before retiring, and his plump pale-brown body was everywhere dusted with Cuticura powder—from his neck to between his toes. His closely shaven throat and cheeks were refreshed with a powerful astringent redolent of lemons. He’d even shaved his mustache off, leaving only a little clump of a beard on his chin; he was almost as smooth-faced as a baby. Dr. Daruwalla was so clean and he smelled so wonderful that Nancy had the impression that only the mosquito net prevented the geckos and mosquitoes from devouring him.

At a level of sleep so deep it seemed to Farrokh that he had died and lay buried somewhere in China, the doctor dreamed that his most ardent admirers were digging up his body—to prove a point. The doctor wished they would leave him undisturbed, for he felt he was at peace; in truth, he’d passed out in the hammock in a stupor of overeating—not to mention the effect of the wine. To dream that he was prey to gravediggers was surely an indication of his overindulgence.

So what if my body is a miracle, he was dreaming—please just leave it alone!

Meanwhile, Nancy found what she was looking for; in the ashtray, where it had left only a spot of dried blood, lay the half-moon-shaped piece of glass. As she took it, she heard Dr. Daruwalla cry out, “Leave me in China!” The doctor thrashed his legs, and Nancy saw that one of his beautiful eggshell-brown feet had escaped the mosquito net and was protruding from the hammock—exposed to the terrors of the night. This disturbance sent the geckos darting in all directions and caused the mosquitoes to swarm.

Well, Nancy thought, the doctor had done her a favor, hadn’t he? She stood stock-still until she was sure Dr. Daruwalla was sound asleep; she didn’t want to wake him up, but it was hard for her to leave him when his gorgeous foot was prey to the elements. Nancy contemplated how she might safely return Farrokh’s foot to the mosquito net, but her newfound good sense persuaded her not to risk it. She descended the vine from the balcony to the patio; this required the use of both her hands, and so she delicately held the piece of broken glass in her teeth—careful that it not cut her tongue or her lips. She was limping along the dark road to Calangute when she threw the glass away. It was lost in a dense grove of palms, where it disappeared without a sound—as unseen by any living eye as Nancy’s lost innocence.

The Wrong Toe

Nancy had been fortunate to leave the Hotel Bardez when she had. She never knew that Rahul was a guest there, nor did Rahul know that Nancy had been Dr. Daruwalla’s patient. This was extremely lucky, because Rahul also climbed the vine to the Daruwallas’ second-floor balcony—on the very same night. Nancy had come and gone; but when Rahul arrived on the balcony, Dr. Daruwalla’s poor foot was still vulnerable to the nighttime predators.

Rahul himself had come as a predator. He’d learned from Dr. Daruwalla’s innocent daughters that John D. usually slept in the hammock on the balcony. Rahul had come to the balcony to seduce John D. The sexually curious may find it interesting to speculate whether or not Rahul would have met with success in his attempted seduction of the beautiful young man, but John D. was spared this test because Dr. Daruwalla was sleeping in the hammock on this busy night.

In the darkness—not to mention that he was blinded by his overeagerness—Rahul was confused. The body asleep under the mosquito net was certainly of a desirable fragrance. Maybe it was the moonlight that played tricks with skin color. Possibly it was only the moonlight which gave Rahul the impression that John D. had grown a little clump of a beard. As for the toes of the doctor’s exposed foot, they were tiny and hairless, and the foot itself was as small as a young girl’s. Rahul found that the ball of the foot was endearingly fleshy and soft, and he thought that the sole of Dr. Daruwalla’s foot was almost indecently pink—in contrast to the doctor’s sleek, brown ankle.

Rahul knelt by the doctor’s small foot; he stroked it with his large hand; he brushed his cheek against the doctor’s freshly scented toes. Naturally, it would have startled him if Dr. Daruwalla had cried out, “But I don’t want to be a miracle!”

The doctor was dreaming that he was Francis Xavier, dug up from his grave and taken against his will to the Basilica de Bom Jesus in Goa. More accurately, he was dreaming that he was Francis Xavier’s miraculously preserved body, and things were about to be done to his body—also against his will. But despite the terror of what was happening to him, in his dream Farrokh couldn’t give utterance to his fears; he was so heavily sedated with food and wine that he was forced to suffer in silence—even though he anticipated that a crazed pilgrim was about to eat his toe. After all, he knew the story.

Rahul ran his tongue along the sole of the doctor’s fragrant foot, which tasted strongly of Cuticura powder and vaguely of garlic. Because Dr. Daruwalla’s foot was the single part of him that was unprotected by the mosquito net, Rahul could manifest his powerful attraction to the delicious John D. only by enclosing what he presumed to be the big toe of John D.’s right foot in his warm mouth. Rahul then sucked on this toe with such force that Dr. Daruwalla moaned. Rahul at first fought against the desire to bite him, but he gave in to this urge and slowly sank his teeth into the squirming toe; then he once more resisted the compelling impulse to bite—then he weakened and bit down harder. It was torture for Rahul to stop himself from going too far—from swallowing Dr. Daruwalla, either whole or in pieces. When he at last released the doctor’s foot, both Rahul and Dr. Daruwalla were gasping. In his dream, the doctor was certain that the obsessed woman had already done her damage; she’d bitten off the sacred relic of his toe, and now there was tragically less of his miraculous body than they had buried.

As Rahul undressed himself, Dr. Daruwalla withdrew his maimed foot from the dangerous world; he curled himself tightly into his hammock under the mosquito net, for in his dream he was fearing that the emissaries from the Vatican were approaching—to take his arm to Rome. As Farrokh struggled to give voice to his terror of amputation, Rahul attempted to penetrate the mysteries of the mosquito net.

Rahul thought it would be best if John D. awoke to find his face firmly between Rahul’s breasts, for these latter creations were surely to be counted among Rahul’s best features. But then, since Rahul thought that the young man appeared to have been aroused by the oddity of having his big toe sucked and bitten, perhaps a bolder approach would succeed. It was frustrating to Rahul that he could proceed with no approach until he solved the puzzle of entrance to the mosquito net, which was vexing. And it was at this complicated juncture in Rahul’s attempted seduction that Farrokh finally found the voice to express his fears. Rahul, who recognized the doctor’s voice, distinctly heard Dr. Daruwalla shout, “I don’t want to be a saint! I need that arm—it’s a very good arm!”

At this, the boy’s dog in the lobby barked briefly; the boy once more began to talk to the animal. Rahul hated Dr. Daruwalla as fervently as he desired John D.; therefore, Rahul was appalled that he’d caressed the doctor’s foot, and he was nauseated that he’d sucked and bitten the doctor’s big toe. As he hurriedly dressed himself, Rahul was also embarrassed. The taste of Cuticura powder was bitter on his tongue as he climbed down the vine to the patio, where the dog in the lobby heard him spit; the dog barked again, and this time the boy unlocked the door to the lobby and peered anxiously at the misty beach.

The boy heard Dr. Daruwalla cry out from the balcony: “Cannibals! Catholic maniacs!” Even to an inexperienced Hindu boy, this seemed a fearful combination. Then the dog’s barking exploded at the door to the lobby, where both the boy and the dog were surprised by the sudden appearance of Rahul.

“Don’t lock me out,” Rahul said. The boy let him in and gave him his room key. Rahul wore a loose-fitting skirt of a kind that’s easy to put on and take off, and a bright-yellow halter top of a kind that drew the boy’s awkward attention to Rahul’s well-shaped breasts. There was a time when Rahul would have grabbed the boy’s face in both hands and pulled him into his bosom; then he might have played with the boy’s little prick, or else he might have kissed him, in which case Rahul would have stuck his tongue so far down the boy’s throat that the boy would have gagged. But not now; Rahul wasn’t in the mood.

He went upstairs to his room; he brushed his teeth until the taste of Dr. Daruwalla’s Cuticura powder was gone. Then he undressed and lay down on his bed, where he could look at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t in the mood to masturbate. He made some drawings, but nothing worked. Rahul was furious at Dr. Daruwalla for being in John D.’s hammock; it made him so angry that he couldn’t even arouse himself. In the adjacent room, Aunt Promila was snoring.

Down in the lobby, the boy tried to calm the dog down. He thought it was peculiar that the dog was so agitated; usually, women had no effect on the dog. It was only men who made the dog’s fur stand up, or made the dog walk around stiff-legged—sniffing everywhere the men had been. It puzzled the boy that the dog had reacted in this fashion to Rahul. The boy also needed to calm himself down; he’d reacted to Rahul’s breasts in his own fashion; he was so aroused that he had a sizable erection—for a boy. And he knew perfectly well that the lobby of the Hotel Bardez was no place for him to indulge his fantasies. There was nothing the boy could do. He lay down on the rush mat, where he at last coaxed the dog to join him, and there he went on speaking to the dog as before.

Farrokh Is Converted

At dawn, on the road to Panjim, Nancy had the good fortune to arouse the sympathy of a motorcyclist who noticed her limp. It wasn’t much of a motorcycle, but it would do; it was a 250 cc. Yezdi with red plastic tassels hanging from the handlebars, a black dot painted on the headlight, and a sari-guard mounted on the left-side rear wheel. Nancy was wearing jeans, and she simply straddled the seat behind the skinny teenaged driver. She locked her hands around the boy’s waist without a word; she knew he couldn’t drive fast enough to scare her.

The Yezdi was equipped with crash bars that protruded from the motorcycle in a manner of a full fairing. In Dr. Daruwalla’s profession, these so-called crash bars were known as tibialfracture bars; they were renowned for breaking the tibias of motorcyclists—all for the sake of not denting the gas tank.

Nancy’s weight was at first disconcerting to the young driver; she had a dangerously wide effect on his cornering—he held his speed down.

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” she asked him. He half-understood her, or else her voice in his ear was thrilling; possibly it hadn’t been her limp he’d noticed but the tightness of her jeans, or her blond hair—or even the swaying of her breasts, which the teenager felt pressing against his back. “That’s better,” Nancy told him, after he dared to speed up. Streaming from the handlebars, the red plastic tassels were whipped by the rushing wind; they appeared to beckon Nancy toward the steamer jetty and her chosen destiny in Bombay.

She’d embraced evil; she’d found it lacking. She was the sinner in search of the impossible salvation; she thought that only the uncorrupted and incorruptible policeman could restore her essential goodness. She had spotted something conflicted about Inspector Patel. She believed that he was virtuous and honorable, but also that she could seduce him; her logic was such that she thought of his virtue and his honor as transferable to her. Nancy’s illusion was not uncommon—nor is it an illusion limited to women. It is an old belief: that several sexually wrong decisions can be remedied—even utterly erased—by one decision that is sexually right. No one should blame Nancy for trying.

As Nancy rode the Yezdi to the ferry, and to her fate, a dull but persistent pain in the big toe of his right foot awakened Dr. Daruwalla from a night of bedlam dreams and indigestion. He freed himself from the mosquito net and swung his legs from the hammock, but when he put only the slightest weight on his right foot, his big toe stabbed him with a sharp pain; for a second, he imagined he was still dreaming he was St. Francis’s body. In the early light, which was a muted brown—not unlike the color of Dr. Daruwalla’s skin—the doctor inspected his toe. The skin was unbroken, but deep bruises of a crimson and purple hue clearly indicated the bite marks. Dr. Daruwalla screamed.

“Julia! I’ve been bitten by a ghost!” the doctor cried. His wife came running.

“What is it, Liebchen?” she asked him.

“Look at my big toe!” the doctor demanded.

“Have you been biting yourself?” Julia asked him with unconcealed distaste.

“It’s a miracle!” shouted Dr. Daruwalla. “It was the ghost of that crazy woman who bit St. Francis!” Farrokh shouted.

“Don’t be a blasphemer,” Julia cautioned him.

“I am being a believer—not a blasphemer!” the doctor cried. He ventured a step on his right foot, but the pain in his big toe was so wilting that he fell, screaming, to his knees.

“Hush or you’ll wake up the children—you’ll wake up everybody!” Julia scolded him.

“Praise the Lord,” Farrokh whispered, crawling back to his hammock. “I believe, God—please don’t torture me further!” He collapsed into the hammock, hugging both his arms around his chest. “What if they come for my arm?” he asked his wife.

Julia was disgusted with him. “I think it must be something you ate,” she said. “Or else you’ve been dreaming about the dildo.”

“I suppose you’ve been dreaming about it,” Farrokh said sullenly. “Here I’ve suffered some sort of conversion and you’re thinking about a big cock!”

“I’m thinking about how you’re behaving in a peculiar fashion,” Julia told him.

“But I’ve had some sort of religious experience!” Farrokh insisted.

“I don’t see what’s religious about it,” Julia said.

“Look at my toe!” the doctor cried.

“Maybe you bit it in your sleep,” his wife suggested.

“Julia!” Dr. Daruwalla said. “I thought you were already a Christian.”

“Well, I don’t go around yelling and moaning about it,” Julia said.

John D. appeared on the balcony, never realizing that Dr. Daruwalla’s religious experience was very nearly his own experience—of another kind.

“What’s going on?” the young man asked.

“It’s apparently unsafe to sleep on the balcony,” Julia told him. “Something bit Farrokh—some kind of animal.”

“Those are human teeth marks!” the doctor declared. John D. examined the bitten toe with his usual detachment.

“Maybe it was a monkey,” he said.

Dr. Daruwalla curled himself into a ball in the hammock, deciding to give his wife and his favorite young man the silent treatment. Julia and John D. took their breakfast with the Daruwalla daughters on the patio below the balcony; at times they would raise their eyes and look up the vine in the direction where they presumed Farrokh lay sulking. They were wrong; he wasn’t sulking—he was praying. Since the doctor was inexperienced at prayer, his praying resembled an interior monologue of a fairly standard confessional kind—especially that kind which is brought on by a bad hangover.

O God! prayed Dr. Daruwalla. It isn’t necessary to take my arm—the toe convinced me. I don’t need any more convincing. You got me the first time, God. The doctor paused. Please leave the arm alone, he added.

Later, from the lobby of the Hotel Bardez, the syphilitic tea-server thought he heard voices from the Daruwallas’ second-floor balcony. Since Ali Ahmed was known to be almost entirely deaf, it was assumed that he probably always heard “voices.” But Ali Ahmed had actually heard Dr. Daruwalla praying, for by midmorning the doctor was murmuring aloud and the pitch of his prayers was precisely in a register that the syphilitic tea-server could hear.

“I am heartily sorry if I have offended Thee, God!” Dr. Daruwalla murmured intensely. “Heartily sorry—very sorry, really! I never meant to mock anybody—I was only kidding,” he confessed. “St. Francis—you, too—please forgive me!” An unusual number of dogs were barking, as if the pitch of the doctor’s prayers were precisely in a register that the dogs could hear, too. “I am a surgeon, God,” the doctor moaned. “I need my arm—both my arms!” Thus did Dr. Daruwalla refuse to leave the hammock of his miraculous conversion, while Julia and John D. spent the morning plotting how to prevent the doctor from spending another night on the balcony.

Later in the day, as his hangover abated, Farrokh regained a little of his self-confidence. He said to Julia that he thought it would be enough for him to become a Christian; he meant that perhaps it wasn’t necessary for him to become a Catholic. Did Julia think that becoming a Protestant would be good enough? Maybe an Anglican would do. By now, Julia was quite frightened by the depth and color of the bite marks on her husband’s toe; even though the skin was unbroken, she was afraid of rabies.

“Julia!” Farrokh complained. “Here I am worrying about my mortal soul, and you’re worried about rabies!”

“Lots of monkeys have rabies,” John D. offered.

“What monkeys?” Dr. Daruwalla shouted. “I don’t see any monkeys here! Have you seen any monkeys?”

While they were arguing, they failed to notice Promila Rai and her nephew-with-breasts checking out of the hotel. They were going back to Bombay, but not tonight; Nancy was again fortunate—Rahul wouldn’t be on her ferry. Promila knew that Rahul’s holiday had been disappointing to him, and so she’d accepted an invitation for them both to spend the night at someone’s villa in Old Goa; there would be a costume party, which Rahul might find amusing.

It hadn’t been an entirely disappointing holiday for Rahul. His aunt was generous with her money, but she expected him to make his own contribution toward a much-discussed trip to London; Promila would help Rahul financially, but she wanted him to come up with some money of his own. There were several thousand Deutsche marks in Dieter’s money belt, but Rahul had been expecting more—given the quality and the amount of hashish that Dieter had told everyone he wanted to buy. Of course, there was more, much more—in the dildo.

Promila thought that her nephew was interested in art school in London. She also knew he was seeking a complete sex change, and she knew such operations were expensive; given her loathing for men, Promila was delighted with her nephew’s choice—to become her niece—but she was deluding herself if she thought that the strongest motivating factor behind Rahul’s proposed move to London was “art school.”

If the maid who cleaned Rahul’s room had looked more carefully at the discarded drawings in the wastebasket, she could have told Promila that Rahul’s talent with a pen was of a pornographic persuasion that most art schools would discourage. The self-portraits would have especially disturbed the maid, but all the discarded drawings were nothing but balled-up pieces of paper to her; she didn’t trouble herself to examine them.

They were en route to the villa in Old Goa when Promila peered into Rahul’s purse and saw Rahul’s new, curious money clip; at least he was using it as a money clip—it was really nothing but the top half of a silver pen.

“My dear, you are eccentric!” Promila said. “Why don’t you get a real money clip, if you like those things?”

“Well, Auntie,” Rahul patiently explained, “I find that real money clips are too loose, unless you carry a great wad of money in them. What I like is to carry just a few small notes outside my wallet—something handy to pay for a taxi, or for tipping.” He demonstrated that the top half of the silver pen possessed a very strong, tight clip—where it was meant to attach itself to a jacket pocket or a shirt pocket—and that this clip was perfect for holding just a few rupees. “Besides, it’s real silver,” Rahul added.

Promila held it in her veinous hand. “Why so it is, dear,” she remarked. She read aloud the one word, in script, that was engraved on the top half of the pen: “India—isn’t that quaint?”

“I certainly thought so,” Rahul remarked, returning the eccentric item to his purse.

Meanwhile, as Dr. Daruwalla grew hungrier, he also grew more relaxed about his praying; he cautiously rekindled his sense of humor. After he’d eaten, Farrokh could almost joke about his conversion. “I wonder what next the Almighty will ask of me!” he said to Julia, who once more cautioned her husband about blasphemy.

What was next in store for Dr. Daruwalla would test his newfound faith in ways the doctor would find most disturbing. By the same means that Nancy had discovered the doctor’s whereabouts, the police also discovered him. They’d found what everyone now called the “hippie grave” and they needed a doctor to hazard a guess concerning the cause of death of the grave’s ghastly occupants. They’d gone looking for a doctor on holiday. A local doctor would talk too much about the crime; at least this was what the local police told Dr. Daruwalla.

“But I don’t do autopsies!” Dr. Daruwalla protested; yet he went to Anjuna to view the remains.

It was generally supposed that the blue crabs were the reason the bodies were spoiled for viewing; and if the salt water proved itself to be a modest preservative, it did little to veil the stench. Farrokh easily concluded that several blows to the head had done them both in, but the female’s body was messier. Her forearms and the backs of her hands were battered, which suggested that she’d tried to defend herself; the male, clearly, had never known what hit him.

It was the elephant drawing that Farrokh would remember. The murdered girl’s navel had been transformed to a winking eye; the opposing tusk had been flippantly raised, like the tipping of an imaginary hat. Short, childish lines indicated that the elephant’s trunk was spraying—the “water” fanning over the dead girl’s pubic hair. Such intended mockery would remain with Dr. Daruwalla for 20 years; the doctor would remember the little drawing too well.

When Farrokh saw the broken glass, he suffered only the slightest discomfort, and the feeling quickly passed. Back at the Hotel Bardez, he was unable to find the piece of glass he’d removed from the young woman’s foot. And so what if the glass from the grave had matched? he thought. There were soda bottles everywhere. Besides, the police had already told him that the suspected murderer was a German male.

Farrokh thought that this theory suited the prejudices of the local police—namely, that only a hippie from Europe or North America could possibly perform a double slaying and then trivialize the murders with a cartoonish drawing. Ironically, these killings and that drawing stimulated Dr. Daruwalla’s need to be more creative. He found himself fantasizing that he was a detective.

The doctor’s success in the orthopedic field had given him certain commercial expectations; these considerations doubtless returned the doctor’s imagination to that notion of himself as a screenwriter. No one movie could have satisfied Farrokh’s suddenly insatiable creativity; nothing less than a series of movies, featuring the same detective, would do. Finally, that was how it happened. At the end of his holiday, on the ferry back to Bombay, Dr. Daruwalla invented Inspector Dhar.

Farrokh was watching how the young women on board the ferry couldn’t take their eyes off the beautiful John D. Suddenly, the doctor could envision the hero that these young women imagined when they looked at a young man like that. The excitement that Mr. James Salter’s example had inspired was already becoming a moment of the sexual past; it was becoming a part of the second honeymoon that Dr. Daruwalla was leaving behind. To the doctor, murder and corruption spoke louder than art. And besides, what a career John D. might have!

It would never have occurred to Farrokh that the young woman with the big dildo had seen the same murder victims he had seen. But 20 years later, even the movie version of that drawing on Beth’s belly would ring a bell with Nancy. How could it be a coincidence that the victim’s navel was the elephant’s winking eye, or that the opposing tusk was raised? In the movie, no pubic hair was shown, but those childish lines indicated to Nancy that the elephant’s trunk was still spraying—like a showerhead, or like the nozzle of a hose.

Nancy would also remember the beautiful, unshockable young man she’d been introduced to by Dr. Daruwalla. When she saw her first Inspector Dhar movie, Nancy would recall the first time she’d seen that knowing sneer. The future actor had been strong enough to carry her downstairs without apparent effort; the future movie star had been poised enough to unscrew the troublesome dildo without appearing to be appalled.

And all of this was what she meant when she left her uncompromising message on Dr. Daruwalla’s answering machine. “I know who you really are, I know what you really do,” Nancy had informed the doctor. “Tell the deputy commissioner—the real policeman. Tell him who you are. Tell him what you do,” Nancy had instructed the secret screenwriter, for she’d figured out who Inspector Dhar’s creator was.

Nancy knew that no one could have imagined the movie version of that drawing on Beth’s belly; Inspector Dhar’s creator had to have seen what she had seen. And the handsome John D., who now passed himself off as Inspector Dhar—that young man would never have been invited to view the murder victims. That would have been the doctor’s job. Therefore, Nancy knew that Dhar hadn’t created himself; Inspector Dhar had also been the doctor’s job.

Dr. Daruwalla was confused. He remembered introducing Nancy to John D., and how gallantly John D. had carried the heavy young woman downstairs. Had Nancy seen an Inspector Dhar movie, or all of them? Had she recognized the more mature John D.? Fine; but how had she made the imaginative leap that the doctor was Dhar’s creator? And how could she know “the real policeman,” as she called him? Dr. Daruwalla could only assume that she meant Deputy Commissioner Patel. Of course, the doctor didn’t realize that Nancy had known Detective Patel for 20 years—not to mention that she was married to him.

The Doctor and His Patient Are Reunited

One might recall that Dr. Daruwalla had all this time been sitting in his bedroom in Bombay, where the doctor was alone again. Julia had at last left him sitting there; she’d gone to apologize to John D.—and to be sure that their supper was still warm enough to eat. Dr. Daruwalla knew it was an unprecedented rudeness to have kept his favorite young man waiting, but in the light of Nancy’s phone message, the doctor felt compelled to speak to D.C.P. Patel. The subject that the deputy commissioner wished to discuss in private with Dr. Daruwalla was only a part of what prompted the doctor to make the call; of more interest to Farrokh was where Nancy was now and why she knew “the real policeman.”

Given the hour, Dr. Daruwalla phoned Detective Patel at home. Farrokh was thinking that there were Patels all over Gujarat; there were many Patels in Africa, too. He knew both a hotel-chain Patel and a department-store Patel in Nairobi. He was thinking he knew only one Patel who was a policeman, when—as luck would have it—Nancy answered the phone. All she said was, “Hello,” but the one word was sufficient for Farrokh to recognize her voice. Dr. Daruwalla was too confused to speak, but his silence was all the identification that Nancy needed.

“Is that the doctor?” she asked in her familiar fashion.

Dr. Daruwalla supposed it would be stupid of him to hang up, but for a moment he couldn’t imagine what else to do. He knew from the surprising experience of his long and happy marriage to Julia that there was no understanding what drew or held people together. If the doctor had known that the relationship between Nancy and Detective Patel was deeply connected to the dildo, he would have admitted that his understanding of sexual attraction and compatibility was even less than he supposed. The doctor suspected some elements of interracial interest on the part of both parties—Farrokh and Julia had surely felt this. And in the curious case of Nancy and Deputy Commissioner Patel, Dr. Daruwalla also guessed that Nancy’s bad-girl appearance possibly concealed a good-girl heart; the doctor could easily imagine that Nancy had wanted a cop. As for what had attracted the deputy commissioner to Nancy, Farrokh tended to overestimate the value of a light complexion; after all, he adored the fairness of Julia’s skin, and Julia wasn’t even a blonde. What the doctor’s research for the Inspector Dhar movies had failed to uncover was a characteristic common to many policemen—a love of confession. Poor Vijay Patel was prone to enjoy the confessing of crimes, and Nancy had held nothing back. She’d begun by handing him the dildo.

“You were right,” she’d told him. “It unscrews. Only it was sealed with wax. I didn’t know it came apart. I didn’t know what was in it. But look what I brought into the country,” she said. As Inspector Patel counted the Deutsche marks, Nancy kept talking. “There was more,” she said, “but Dieter spent some, and some of it was stolen.” After a short pause, she added, “There were two murders, but just one drawing.” Then she told him absolutely everything, beginning with the football players. People have fallen in love for stranger reasons.

Meanwhile, still waiting for the doctor’s answer on the telephone, Nancy grew impatient. “Hello?” she said. “Is anyone there? Is that the doctor?” she repeated.

A born procrastinator, Dr. Daruwalla nevertheless knew that Nancy wouldn’t be denied; still, he didn’t like to be bullied. Countless stupid remarks came to the closet screenwriter’s mind; they were smart-ass, tough-guy wisecracks—the usual voice-over from old Inspector Dhar movies. (“Bad things had happened—worse things were happening. The woman was worth it—after all, she might know something. It was time to put all the cards on the table.”) After a career of such glibness, it was hard for Dr. Daruwalla to know what to say to Nancy. After 20 years, it was difficult to sound casual, but the doctor lamely tried.

“So—it’s you!” he said.

On her end of the phone, Nancy just waited. It was as if she expected nothing less than a full confession. Farrokh felt he was being treated unfairly. Why should Nancy want to make him feel guilty? He should have known that Nancy’s sense of humor wasn’t easy to locate, but Dr. Daruwalla foolishly kept trying to find it.

“So—how’s the foot?” he asked her. “All better?”