A Son of the Circus

A Complete Woman, but One Who Hates Women

The hollowness of the doctor’s dumb joke contributed to an empty sound that the receiver made against his ear, for Nancy wasn’t talking; her silence echoed, as if the phone call were transnational. Then Dr. Daruwalla heard Nancy say to someone else, “It’s him.” Her voice was indistinct, although her effort to cover the mouthpiece with her hand had been halfhearted. Farrokh couldn’t have known how 20 years had stolen the enthusiasm from many of Nancy’s efforts.

And yet, 20 years ago, she’d reintroduced herself to young Inspector Patel with admirable resolve, not only presenting the policeman with the dildo and the sordid particulars of Dieter’s crimes, but strengthening her confession with her intention to change. Nancy said she sought a life of righting wrongs, and she declared the extent of her attraction to young Patel in such graphic terms that she gave the proper policeman pause. Also, as Nancy had anticipated, she managed to give the inspector pangs of the severest desire, which he wouldn’t act upon, for he was both a highly professional detective and a gentleman—neither an oafish football player nor a jaded European. If the physical attraction that drew Nancy and Inspector Patel together was ever to be acted upon, Nancy knew that she would need to initiate the contact.

Although she trusted that, in the end, she would marry the idealistic detective, certain conditions beyond her control contributed to Nancy’s delay of the matter. For example, there was the distress caused by the disappearance of Rahul. As a most recent and eager convert to the pursuit of justice, Nancy was deeply disappointed that Rahul could not be found. The allegedly murderous zenana, who’d only briefly achieved a legendary status in the brothel area of Bombay, had vanished from Falkland Road and Grant Road and Kamathipura. Also, Inspector Patel discovered that the transvestite known as Pretty had always been an outsider; the hijras hated him—the few who knew him—and his fellow zenanas hated him, too.

Rahul had sold his services for an uncommonly high price, but what he sold was merely his appearance; his good looks, which were the result of his outstanding femininity in juxtaposition to his dominating physical size and strength, made him an attractive showpiece for any transvestite brothel. Once a customer was lured into the brothel by Rahul’s presence, the other zenanas—or the hijras—were the only transvestites who made themselves available for sexual contact. Hence there was to his nickname, Pretty, both an honest appraisal of his powers to attract and a disparagement of his character; for, by his refusal to do more than display himself, Rahul brandished a high-mindedness that insulted the transvestite prostitutes.

They could see he was indifferent to the offense he caused; he was also too big and strong and confident for them to threaten. The hijras hated him because he was a zenana; his fellow zenanas hated him because he’d told them he intended to make himself “complete.” But all the transvestite prostitutes hated Rahul because he wasn’t a prostitute.

There prevailed some nasty rumors about Rahul, although any evidence of these allegations eluded Inspector Patel. Some transvestite prostitutes claimed that Rahul frequented a female brothel in Kamathipura; it further outraged the transvestites to imagine that, when Rahul chose to advertise himself in their brothels on Falkland Road and Grant Road, he was in reality merely slumming. Also, there were ugly stories concerning how Rahul made use of the female prostitutes in Kamathipura; it was claimed that he never had sex with the girls but that he beat them. There was mention of a flexible rubber billy stick. If these rumors were true, the beaten girls would have nothing but raised red welts to show for their pain; such marks faded quickly and were thought to be insubstantial in comparison to broken bones or the deeper, darker discolorations of those bruises inflicted by a harder weapon. There was no legal recourse for the girls who might have suffered such beatings; whoever Rahul was, he was smart. Shortly after murdering Dieter and Beth, he was also out of the country.

Inspector Patel suspected that Rahul had left India. This was no consolation to Nancy; having chosen goodness over evil, she anticipated resolution. It was a pity that Nancy would wait 20 years for a simple but informative conversation with Dr. Daruwalla which would reveal to them both that they’d made acquaintance with the same Rahul. However, not even a detective as dogged as D.C.P. Patel could have been expected to guess that a sexually altered killer might have been found at the Duckworth Club. Moreover, for 15 years, Rahul would not have been found there—at least not very often. He was more frequently in London, where, after the lengthy and painful completion of his sex-change operation, he was able to give more of his energy and concentration to what he called his art. Alas… no excess of energy or concentration would much expand his talent or his range; the cartoon quality of his belly drawings persisted. His tendency toward sexually explicit caricature endured.

It was thematic with Rahul—an inappropriately mirthful elephant with one tusk raised, one eye winking, and water spraying from the end of its downward-pointing trunk. The size and shape of the victims’ navels afforded the artist a considerable variety of winking eyes; the amount and color of the victims’ pubic hair also varied. The water from the elephant’s trunk was constant; the elephant sprayed, with seeming indifference, over all. Many of the murdered prostitutes had shaved their pubic hair; the elephant appeared not to notice, or not to care.

But it wasn’t only that his imagination was sexually perverse, for within Rahul a veritable war was being waged over the true identity of his sexual self, which, to his astonishment, was not appreciably clarified by the successful completion of his long-awaited sex change. Now Rahul was to all appearances a woman; if he couldn’t bear children, it had never been the desire to bear children that had compelled him to become a her. However, it was Rahul’s illusion that a new sexual identity could provide a lasting peace of mind.

Rahul had loathed being a man. In the company of homosexuals, he’d never felt he was one of them, either. But he’d experienced little closeness with his fellow transvestites; in the company of hijras or zenanas, Rahul had felt both different and superior. It didn’t occur to him that they were content to be what they were—Rahul had never been content. There’s more than one way to be a third gender; but Rahul’s uniqueness was inseparable from his viciousness, which extended even toward his fellow transvestites.

He detested the all-too-womanly gestures of most hijras and zenanas; he thought the mischief with which they dressed indicated an all-too-womanly frivolity. As for the traditional powers of the hijras to bless or to curse, Rahul had no belief that they possessed such powers; he believed they tended to parade themselves, either for the smug amusement of boring heterosexuals or for the titillation of more conventional homosexuals. In the homosexual community, at least there were those few—like Subodh, Rahul’s late brother—who defiantly stood out; they advertised their sexual orientation not for the entertainment of the timid but in order to discomfort the intolerant. Yet Rahul imagined that even those homosexuals who were as bold as Subodh were vulnerable to how slavishly they sought the affections of other homosexuals. Rahul had hated how girlishly Subodh had allowed himself to be dominated by Neville Eden.

Rahul had imagined that it was only as a woman that she could dominate both women and men. He’d also imagined that being a woman would make him envy other women less, or not at all; he’d even thought that his desire to hurt and humiliate women would somehow evanesce. He was unprepared for how he would continue to hate them and desire to do them harm; prostitutes—and other women of what he presumed to be loose behavior—especially offended him, in part because of how lightly they regarded their sexual favors, and how they took for granted their sexual parts, which Rahul had been forced to acquire through such perseverance and pain.

Rahul had put himself through the rigors of what he believed was necessary to make him happy; yet he still raged. Like some (but fortunately few) real women, Rahul was contemptuous of those men who sought his attention, while at the same time he strongly desired those men who remained indifferent to his obvious beauty. And this was only half his problem; the other half was that his need to kill certain women was surprisingly (to him) unchanged. And after he’d strangled or bludgeoned them—he favored the latter form of execution—he couldn’t resist creating his signature work of art upon their flaccid bellies; the soft stomach of a dead woman was Rahul’s preferred medium, his canvas of choice.

Beth had been the first; killing Dieter was unmemorable to Rahul. But the spontaneity with which he’d struck down Beth and the utter unresponsiveness of her abdomen to the dhobi pen were stimulations so extreme that Rahul continued to yield to them.

In this sense was his tragedy compounded, for his sex change had not enabled him to view other women as companionable human beings. And because Rahul still hated women, he knew he’d failed to become a woman at all. Further isolating him, in London, was the fact that Rahul also loathed his fellow transsexuals. Before his operation, he’d suffered countless psychological interviews; obviously, they were superficial, for Rahul had managed to convey an utter lack of sexual anger. He’d observed that friendliness, which he interpreted as an impulse toward a cloying kind of sympathy, impressed the evaluating psychiatrist and the sex therapists.

There were meetings with other would-be transsexuals, both those applying for the operation and those in the more advanced phase of “training” for the postoperative women they would soon become. Complete transsexuals also attended these agonizing meetings. It was supposed to be encouraging to socialize with complete transsexuals, just to see what real women they were. This was nauseating to Rahul, who hated it when anyone dared to suggest that he or she was like him; Rahul knew that he wasn’t “like” anyone.

It appalled him that these complete transsexuals even shared the names and phone numbers of former boyfriends. These were men, they said, who weren’t at all repulsed by women “like us”—possibly these interesting men were even attracted by them. What a concept! Rahul thought. He wasn’t becoming a woman in order to become a member of some transsexual club; if the operation was complete, no one would ever know that Rahul had not been born a woman.

But there was one who knew: Aunt Promila. She’d been such a supporter. Gradually, Rahul resented how she sought to control him. She would continue her most generous financial assistance to his life in London, but only if he promised not to forget her—only if he would come pay some attention to her from time to time. Rahul wasn’t opposed to these periodic visits to Bombay; he was merely annoyed that his aunt manipulated how often and when he traveled to see her. And as she grew older, she grew more needy; shamelessly, and frequently, she referred to Rahul’s elevated status in her will.

Even with Promila’s considerable influence, it took Rahul longer to legalize his change of name than it had taken him to change his sex—in spite of the bribes. And although there were many other women’s names that he preferred, it was politic of him to choose Promila, which greatly pleased his aunt and assured him an indeed favorable position in her much-mentioned will. Nevertheless, the new name on the new passport left Rahul feeling incomplete. Perhaps he felt that he could never be Promila Rai as long as his Aunt Promila was alive. Since Promila was the only person on earth whom Rahul loved, it made him feel guilty that he grew impatient with how long he had to wait for her to die.

Remembering Aunt Promila

He was five or six, or maybe only four; Rahul could never remember. What he did recall was that he thought he was old enough to be going to the men’s room by himself. Aunt Promila took him to the ladies’ room—she took him with her into the toilet stall, too. He’d told her that there were urinals in the men’s room and that the men stood up to pee.

“I know a better way to pee,” she’d told him.

At the Duckworth Club, the ladies’ room suffered from an elephant motif; in the men’s room, the tiger-hunt decor was far less obtrusive. For example, in the ladies’ room toilet stalls, there was a pull-down platform on the inside of the stall door. It was simply a shelf that folded flat against the door when not in use. By means of a handle, the shelf could be pulled down; on this platform, a lady could put her handbag—or whatever else she took with her into the toilet stall. The handle was a ring that passed like an earring through the base of an elephant’s trunk.

Promila would lift her skirt and pull down her panties; then she sat on the toilet seat, and Rahul—who’d also pulled down his pants and his underpants—would sit on her lap.

“Pull down the elephant, dear,” Aunt Promila would tell him, and Rahul would lean forward until he could reach the ring through the elephant’s trunk. The elephant had no tusks; Rahul found the elephant generally lacking in realism—for example, there was no opening at the end of the elephant’s trunk.

First Promila peed, then Rahul. He sat on his aunt’s lap, listening to her. When she wiped herself, he could feel the back of her hand against his bare bum. Then she would reach into his lap and point his little penis down into the toilet. It was difficult for him to pee from her lap.

“Don’t miss,” she’d whisper in his ear. “Are you being careful?” Rahul tried to be careful. When he was finished, Aunt Promila wiped his penis with some toilet paper. Then she felt his penis with her bare hand. “Let’s be sure you’re dry, dear,” Promila would say to him. She always held him until his penis was stiff. “What a big boy you are,” she’d whisper.

When they were finished, they washed their hands together.

“The hot water is too hot—it will burn you,” Aunt Promila would warn him. Together they stood at the wildly ornate sink. There was a single faucet in the form of an elephant’s head. The water flowed through the elephant’s trunk, emerging in a broad spray. You lifted one tusk for the hot water, the other tusk for the cold. “Just the cold water, dear,” Aunt Promila told him. She let Rahul operate the faucet for both of them; he would raise and lower the tusk for cold water—just one tusk. “Always wash your hands, dear,” Aunt Promila would say.

“Yes, Auntie,” Rahul answered. He’d supposed his aunt’s preference for cold water was a sign of her age; she must have remembered a time before there was hot water.

When he was older, maybe 8 or 9—he could have been 10—Promila sent him to see Dr. Lowji Daruwalla. She was concerned with what she called Rahul’s inexplicable hairlessness—or so she told the doctor. In retrospect, Rahul realized that he’d disappointed his aunt—and on more than one occasion. Promila’s disappointment, Rahul also realized, was sexual; his so-called hairlessness had little to do with it. But there was no way for Promila Rai to complain about the size or the short-lived stiffness of her nephew’s penis—certainly not to Dr. Lowji Daruwalla! The question of whether or not Rahul was impotent would have to wait until Rahul was 12 or 13; at that time, the examining physician would be old Dr. Tata.

In retrospect, Rahul would realize that his aunt was chiefly interested in knowing whether he was impotent or merely impotent with her. Naturally, she’d not told Tata that she was having a repeatedly disappointing sexual experience with Rahul; she’d implied that Rahul himself was concerned because he’d failed to maintain an erection with a prostitute. Dr. Tata’s response had been disappointing to Aunt Promila, too.

“Perhaps it was the prostitute,” old Dr. Tata had replied.

Years later, when he thought of his Aunt Promila, Rahul would remember that. Perhaps it was the prostitute, he would think to himself; possibly he’d not been impotent after all. All things considered, now that Rahul was a woman, what did it really matter? He sincerely loved his Aunt Promila. As for washing his hands, the memory of the elephant with one tusk raised would never be lost on Rahul; but he preferred to wash his hands in hot water.

A Childless Couple Searches for Rahul

With hindsight, it is impressive how Deputy Commissioner Patel fathomed Rahul’s attachment to family money—in India. The detective thought that a well-to-do relative might explain the killer’s few but periodic visits to Bombay. For 15 years, the victims who were decorated with the winking elephant were prostitutes from the Kamathipura brothels or from the brothels on Grant Road and Falkland Road. Their murders occurred in groups of two or three, within two or three weeks’ time, and then not again for nearly nine months or a year. There were no murders recorded in the hottest months, just before the monsoon, or during the monsoon itself; the murderer struck at a more comfortable time of the year. Only the first two murders, in Goa, were hot-weather murders.

Detective Patel could find no evidence of the murders with elephant drawings in any other Indian city; this was why he had concluded that the killer lived abroad. It wasn’t hard to uncover the relatively few murders of this nature in London; although these weren’t restricted to the Indian community, the victims were always prostitutes or students—the latter, usually of an artistic inclination, were reputed to have lived in a bohemian or otherwise unconventional way. The more he studied the murderer, and the more deeply he loved Nancy, the more the deputy commissioner realized that Nancy was lucky to be alive.

But with the passage of time, Nancy less and less wore the countenance of a woman who felt herself to be lucky. The Deutsche marks in the dildo—such an excessive amount that, at first, both Nancy and young Inspector Patel had felt quite liberated—were the beginning of Nancy and Patel’s feeling that they had been compromised. It made only the smallest dent in the sum for Nancy to send what she’d stolen from the hardware store to her parents. It was, she thought, the best way to erase the past, but her newfound crusade for justice interfered with the purity of her intention. The money was to repay the hardware store, but in sending it to her parents she couldn’t resist naming those men (in feed-and-grain supply) who’d made her feel like dirt. If her parents wanted to repay the store after knowing what had happened to their daughter there, that would be their decision.

Thus she created a moral dilemma for her parents, which had quite the opposite effect from what Nancy desired. She had not erased the past; she’d brought it to life in her parents’ eyes, and for almost 20 years (until they died), her parents faithfully described their ongoing torment in Iowa to her—all the while begging her to come “home” but refusing to come visit her. It was never clear to Nancy what they finally did with the money.

As for young Inspector Patel, it made a similarly small dent in the sum of Dieter’s Deutsche marks for the previously uncorrupted policeman to engage in his first and last bribe. It was simply the usual and necessary sum required for promotion, for a more lucrative posting—and one must remember that Vijay Patel was not a Maharashtrian. For a Gujarati to make the move from an inspector at the Colaba Station to a deputy commissioner in Crime Branch Headquarters at Crawford Market required what is called greasing the wheel. But—over the years, and in combination with his failure to find Rahul—the bribe had etched itself into a part of the deputy commissioner’s vulnerable self-esteem. It had been a reasonable expense, certainly not a lavish amount of money; and contrary to the infuriating fiction represented by the Inspector Dhar movies, there was no significant advancement within the Bombay police force without a little bribery.

And although Nancy and the detective were a love story, they were unhappy. It wasn’t only that the sheer grimness of serving justice had grown to be a task, nor was it simply that Rahul had escaped unpunished. Both Mr. and Mrs. Patel assumed that a higher judgment had been made against them; for Nancy was infertile, and they’d spent nearly a decade learning the reason—and then another decade, first trying to adopt a child and finally deciding against adoption.

In the first decade of their efforts to conceive a child, both Nancy and young Patel—she called him Vijay—believed that they were being punished for dipping into the Deutsche marks. Nancy had entirely forgotten a brief period of physical discomfort upon her return to Bombay with the dildo. A slight burning in her urethra and the appearance in her underwear of an insignificant vaginal discharge had contributed to Nancy’s delay in initiating a sexual relationship with Vijay Patel. The symptoms were mild, and they overlapped, to some degree, with cystitis (inflammation of the bladder) and urinary tract infection. She didn’t want to imagine that Dieter had given her something venereal, although her memory of that brothel in Kamathipura, and how familiarly Dieter had spoken with the madam, gave Nancy good reason to be worried.

Moreover, at the time, she could plainly see that she and young Patel were falling in love with each other; she wasn’t about to ask him to recommend a suitable physician. Instead, in that well-worn travel guide, which she still faithfully carried, was an on-the-road recipe for a douche; but she misread the proper proportion of vinegar and gave herself much worse burning than she began with. For a week, there was an even yellower stain in her underwear, which she ascribed to the unwise remedy of her homemade douche. As for the abdominal pain, it closely attended the onset of her period, which was unusually heavy; she had much cramping and even a little chill. She wondered if her body was trying to reject the IUD. And then she completely recovered; she only remembered this episode 10 years later. She was sitting with her husband in the office of a fancy private venereologist, and—with Vijay’s help—she was filling out a detailed questionnaire; it was part of the infertility work.

What had happened was that Dieter had given her a dose of gonorrhea, which he’d caught from the 13-year-old prostitute he’d fucked standing up in the hall of that brothel in Kamathipura. It hadn’t been true, as the madam had told him, that there were no available cubicles with mattresses or cots; instead, it was the young prostitute’s request to have sex standing up, for her case of gonorrhea had advanced to the more uncomfortable symptoms of pelvic inflammatory disease. She was suffering from the so-called chandelier sign, where moving the cervix up and down elicits pain in the tubes and ovaries; in short, it hurt her to have a man’s weight pounding on her belly. It was better for her when she stood up.

As for Dieter, he was a fastidious young German who gave himself a shot of penicillin before he left the brothel; a medical student among his friends had told him that this worked well to prevent incubating syphilis. The injection, however, did nothing to abort the penicillinase-producing Neisseria gonorrhea. No one had told him that these strains were endemic in the tropics. Besides, less than a week after his contact with the infected prostitute, Dieter was murdered; he’d begun to notice only the slightest symptoms.

And what relatively mild symptoms Nancy had experienced before her spontaneous healing and the scarring were the result of the inflammation spreading from her cervix to the lining of her uterus and her tubes. When the venereologist explained to Mr. and Mrs. Patel that this was the cause of Nancy’s infertility, the distraught couple firmly believed that Dieter’s nasty disease—even from the hippie grave—was final proof of the judgment against them. They should never have taken a pfennig of those dirty Deutsche marks in the dildo.

In their ensuing efforts to adopt a child, their experience was not uncommon. The better adoption agencies, which kept prenatal records as well as a history of the natural mother’s health, were uncharitable on the issue of their “mixed” marriage; this wouldn’t have deterred the Patels in the end, but it prolonged the process of humiliating interviews and the swamp of petty paperwork. In the interim, while they awaited approval, first Nancy and then Vijay expressed whatever slight doubts they both felt about the disappointment of adopting a child when they’d hoped to have one of their own. If they’d been able to adopt a child quickly, they would have begun to love it before their doubts could have mounted; but in the extended period of waiting, they lost their nerve. It wasn’t that they believed they would have loved an adopted child insufficiently; it was that they believed the judgment against them would condemn the child to some unbearable fate.

They’d done something wrong. They were paying for it. They wouldn’t ask a child to pay for it, too. And so the Patels accepted childlessness; after almost 15 years of expecting a child, this acceptance came to them at considerable cost. In the way they walked, in the detectable lethargy with which they raised their many cups and glasses of tea, they reflected their own consciousness of this resignation to their fate. About that time, Nancy went to work—first in one of the adoption agencies that had so rigorously interviewed her, then as a volunteer in an orphanage. It wasn’t the sort of work she could sustain for very long—it made her think of the child she’d given up in Texas.

And, after 15 years or so, D.C.P. Patel began to believe that Rahul had come back to Bombay, this time to stay. The murders were now evenly spaced over the calendar year; in London, the killings had altogether stopped. What had happened was that Rahul’s Aunt Promila had finally died, and her estate on old Ridge Road—not to mention the considerable allowance she’d bestowed upon her only niece—had passed into the hands of her namesake, the former Rahul. He had become Promila’s heir, or—to be more anatomically correct—she had become Promila’s heiress. And the new Promila had not long to wait for her acceptance at the Duckworth Club, where her aunt had faithfully made application for her niece’s membership—even before she technically had a niece.

This niece was slow and deliberate about her entry into that society which the Duckworth Club would offer her; she was in no hurry to be seen. Some Duckworthians, upon meeting her, found her a touch crude—and almost all Duckworthians agreed that, although she must have been a great beauty in her prime, she was rather well advanced into that phase called middle age… especially for someone who’d never been married. That struck nearly everyone as odd, but before there was time for much talk about it, the new Promila Rai—with surprising swiftness, considering that hardly anyone really knew her—was engaged to be married. And to another Duckworthian, an elderly gentleman of such sizable wealth that his estate on old Ridge Road was rumored to put the late Promila’s place to shame! It was no surprise that the wedding was held at the Duckworth Club, but it was too bad that the wedding took place at a time when Dr. Daruwalla was in Toronto, for he—or certainly Julia—might have recognized this new Promila who’d so successfully passed herself off as the old Promila’s niece.

By the time the Daruwallas and Inspector Dhar were back in Bombay, the new Promila Rai was identified by her married name—actually by two names, one of which was never used to her face. Rahul, who’d become Promila, had lately become the beautiful Mrs. Dogar, as old Mr. Sethna usually addressed her.

Yes, of course—the former Rahul was none other than the second Mrs. Dogar, and each time Dr. Daruwalla felt the stab of pain in his ribs, where she’d collided with him in the foyer of the Duckworth Club, he mistakenly searched his forgetful mind for those now-faded film stars he saw over and over again on so many of his favorite videos. Farrokh would never find her there. Rahul wasn’t hiding in the old movies.

The Police Know the Movie Is Innocent

Just when Deputy Commissioner Patel had decided that he would never find Rahul, there was released in Bombay another predictably dreadful Inspector Dhar film. The real policeman had no desire to be further insulted; but when he learned what Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer was about, the deputy commissioner not only went to see the film—he took Nancy to see it with him the second time. There could be no doubt regarding the source of that elephant drawing. Nancy was sure she knew where that jaunty little elephant had come from. No two minds could imagine a dead woman’s navel as a winking eye; even in the movie version, the elephant raised just one tusk—it was always the same tusk, too. And the water spraying from the elephant’s trunk—who would think of such a thing? Nancy had wondered, for 20 years. A child might think of such a thing, the deputy commissioner had told her.

The police had never given out such details to the press; the police preferred to keep their business to themselves—they’d not even informed the public about the existence of such an artistic serial killer. People often killed prostitutes. Why invite the press to sensationalize the presence of a single fiend? So, in truth, the police—most especially Detective Patel—knew that these murders had long predated the release of such a fantasy as Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer. The movie merely drew the public’s attention to the real murders. The media assumed, wrongly, that the movie was to blame.

It had been Deputy Commissioner Patel’s idea to allow the misunderstanding to pass; the deputy commissioner wanted to see if the movie might inspire some jealousy on the part of Rahul, for the detective was of the opinion that, if his wife recognized the source of the inspiration of Inspector Dhar’s creator, so would the real murderer. The killing of Mr. Lal—especially the interesting two-rupee note in his mouth—indicated that the deputy commissioner had been right. Rahul must have seen the movie—assuming that Rahul wasn’t the screenwriter.

What puzzled the detective was that the note said MORE MEMBERS DIE IF DHAR REMAINS A MEMBER. Since Nancy had been smart enough to figure out that only a doctor would have been shown Beth’s decorated body, surely Rahul would know as well that it wasn’t Dhar himself who’d seen one of Rahul’s works of art; it could only be the doctor who was so frequently in Dhar’s company.

The matter that Detective Patel wished to speak of with Dr. Daruwalla in private was simply this. The detective wanted the doctor to confirm Nancy’s theories—that he was Dhar’s true creator and had seen the drawing on Beth’s belly. But the deputy commissioner also wanted to warn Dr. Daruwalla. MORE MEMBERS DIE… this could mean that the doctor might be Rahul’s future target. Detective Patel and Nancy believed that Farrokh was a more likely target than Dhar himself.

On the telephone, such complicated news took time for the policeman to deliver and for the doctor to comprehend. And since Nancy had passed the telephone to her husband, that element of the real murderer being a transvestite, or even a thoroughly convincing woman, wasn’t a part of Detective Patel’s conversation with Farrokh. Unfortunately, the name Rahul was never mentioned. It was simply agreed that Dr. Daruwalla would come to Crime Branch Headquarters, where the deputy commissioner would show him photographs of the elephants drawn on the murdered women—this for the sake of mere confirmation—and that both Dhar and the doctor should exercise extreme caution. The real murderer had seemingly been provoked by Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer—if not exactly in the way that the public and many angry prostitutes believed.

A View of Two Marriages at a Vulnerable Hour

As soon as Dr. Daruwalla hung up the phone, he carried his agitation to the dinner table, where Roopa apologized for the utter deterioration of the mutton, which was her way of saying that this mushy meat in her beloved dhal was all the doctor’s fault, which of course it was. Dhar then asked the doctor if he’d read the new hate mail—Farrokh had not. A pity, John D. said, because it might well be the last of the mail from those infuriated prostitutes. Balraj Gupta, the director, had informed John D. that the new Inspector Dhar movie (Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence) was being released tomorrow. After that, John D. said ironically, the hate mail would most likely be from all the offended Parsis.

“Tomorrow!” cried Dr. Daruwalla.

“Well, actually, after midnight tonight,” Dhar said.

Dr. Daruwalla should have known. Whenever Balraj Gupta called him and asked to discuss with him something that the director wanted to do, it invariably meant that the director had already done it.

“But no more of this trivia!” Farrokh said to his wife and John D. The doctor took a deep breath; then he informed them of everything that Deputy Commissioner Patel had told him.

All Julia asked was, “How many murders has this killer managed—how many victims are there?”

“Sixty-nine,” said Dr. Daruwalla. Julia’s gasp was less surprising than John D.’s inappropriate calm.

“Does that count Mr. Lal?” Dhar asked.

“Mr. Lal makes seventy—if Mr. Lal is truly connected,” Farrokh replied.

“Of course he’s connected,” said Inspector Dhar, which irritated Dr. Daruwalla in the usual way. Here was his fictional creation once again sounding like an authority; but what Farrokh failed to acknowledge was that Dhar was a good and well-trained actor. Dhar had faithfully studied the role and taken many components of the part into himself; instinctually, he’d become quite a good detective—Dr. Daruwalla had only made up the character. Dhar’s character was an utter fiction to Farrokh, who could scarcely remember his research on various aspects of police work from screenplay to screenplay; Dhar, on the other hand, rarely forgot either these finer points or his less-than-original lines. As a screenwriter, Dr. Daruwalla was at best a gifted amateur, but Inspector Dhar was closer to the real thing than either Dhar or his creator knew.

“May I go with you to see the photographs?” Dhar asked his creator.

“I believe that the deputy commissioner wished me to see them privately,” the doctor replied.

“I’d like to see them, Farrokh,” John D. said.

“He should see them if he wants to!” Julia snapped.

“I’m not sure the police would agree,” Dr. Daruwalla began to say, but Inspector Dhar gave a most familiar and dismissive wave of his hand, a perfect gesture of contempt. Farrokh felt his exhaustion draw close to him—like old friends and family gathering around his imagined sickbed.

When John D. retired to the balcony to sleep, Julia was quick to change the subject—even before Farrokh had managed to undress for bed.

“You didn’t tell him!” she cried.

“Oh, please stop it about the damnable twin business!” he said to her. “What makes you think that’s such a priority? Especially now!”

“I think that the arrival of his twin might be more of a priority to John D.,” Julia remarked decisively. She left her husband alone in the bedroom while she used the bathroom. Then, after Farrokh had had his turn in the bathroom, he noted that Julia had already fallen asleep—or else she was pretending to be asleep.

At first he tried to sleep on his side, which was his usual preference, but in that position he was conscious of the soreness in his ribs; on his stomach, the pain was more evident. Flat on his back—where he struggled in vain to fall asleep, and where he was inclined to snore—he wracked his overexcited brain for the precise image of the movie actress he was sure he was reminded of when he’d shamelessly stared at the second Mrs. Dogar. Despite himself, he grew sleepy. The names of actresses came to and left his lips. He saw Neelam’s full mouth, and Rekha’s nice mouth, too; he thought of Sridevi’s mischievous smile—and almost everything there was to think about Sonu Walia, too. Then he half-waked himself and thought, No, no… it’s no one contemporary, and she’s probably not even Indian. Jennifer Jones? he wondered. Ida Lupino? Rita Moreno? Dorothy Lamour! No, no… what was he thinking? It was someone whose beauty was much more cruel than the beauty of any of these. This insight nearly woke him. Had he awakened simultaneously with the reminder caused by the pain in his ribs, he might have got it. But although the hour was now late, it was still too soon for him to know.

There was more communication in the marriage bed of Mr. and Mrs. Patel at this very same late hour. Nancy was crying; her tears, as they often were, were a mix of misery and frustration. Deputy Commissioner Patel was trying, as he often did, to be comforting.

Nancy had suddenly remembered what had happened to her—maybe two weeks after the last symptoms of gonorrhea had disappeared. She’d broken out in a terrible rash, red and sore and with unbearable itching, and she’d assumed that this was a new phase of something venereal she’d caught from Dieter. Furthermore, there was no hiding this phase from her beloved policeman; young Inspector Patel had straightaway brought her to a doctor, who informed her that she’d been taking too many antimalarial pills—she was simply suffering from an allergic reaction. But how this had frightened her! And she only now remembered the goats.

For all these years, she’d thought about the goats in the brothels, but she’d not remembered how she’d first feared that it was something from the goats that had given her such a hideous rash and such uncontrollable itching. That had been her worst fear. For 20 years, when she’d thought about those brothels and the women who’d been murdered there, she’d forgotten the men Dieter had told her about—the terrible men who fucked goats. Maybe Dieter had fucked goats, too. No wonder she’d at least tried to forget this.

“But nobody is fucking those goats,” Vijay just now informed her.

“What?” Nancy said.

“Well, I don’t presume to know about the United States—or even about certain rural areas of India—but no one in Bombay is fucking goats,” her husband assured her.

“What?” Nancy said. “Dieter told me that they fucked the goats.”

“Well, it’s not at all true,” the detective said. “Those goats are pets. Of course some of them give milk. This is a bonus—for the children, I suppose. But they’re pets, just pets.”

“Oh, Vijay!” Nancy cried. He had to hold her. “Oh, Dieter lied to me!” she cried. “Oh, how he lied to me… all those years I believed it! Oh, that fucker!” The word was so sharply spoken, it caused a dog in the alley below them to stop rooting through the garbage and bark. Over their heads, the ceiling fan barely stirred the close air, which seemed always to smell of the perpetually blocked drains, and of the sea, which in their neighborhood was not especially clean or fresh-smelling. “Oh, it was another lie!” Nancy screamed. Vijay went on holding her, although to do so for long would make them both sweat. The air was unmoving where they lived.

The goats were just pets. Yet, for 20 years, what Dieter had told her had hurt her so badly; at times, it had made her physically sick. And the heat, and the sewer smell, and the fact that, whoever Rahul was, he was still getting away with it—all this Nancy had accepted, but in the fashion that she’d accepted her childlessness, which she’d accepted so slowly and only after what had felt to her like a lingering and merciless defeat.

What the Dwarf Sees

It was late. While Nancy cried herself to sleep and Dr. Daruwalla failed to realize that the second and beautiful Mrs. Dogar had reminded him of Rahul, Vinod was driving one of Mr. Garg’s exotic dancers home from the Wetness Cabaret.

She was a middle-aged Maharashtrian with the English name of Muriel—not her real name but her exotic-dancing name—and she was upset because one of the patrons of the Wetness Cabaret had thrown an orange at her while she was dancing. The clientele of the Wetness Cabaret was vile, Muriel had decided. Even so, she rationalized, Mr. Garg was a gentleman. Garg had recognized that Muriel was upset by the episode with the orange; he’d personally engaged Vinod’s “luxury” taxi to drive Muriel home.

Although Vinod had praised Mr. Garg’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of runaway child prostitutes, the dwarf wouldn’t have gone so far as to call Mr. Garg a gentleman; possibly Garg was more of a gentleman with middle-aged women. With younger girls, Vinod wasn’t sure. The dwarf didn’t entirely share Dr. Daruwalla’s suspicions of Mr. Garg, but Vinod and Deepa had occasionally encountered a child prostitute who seemed in need of rescuing from Garg. Save this poor child, Mr. Garg seemed to be saying; save her from me, Garg might have meant.

It wouldn’t have helped Vinod and Deepa’s child-rescue operations to have Dr. Daruwalla treating Garg like a criminal. The new runaway, the boneless one—a potential plastic lady—was a case in point. Although she’d appeared to be more personally involved with Mr. Garg than she should have been, such implications wouldn’t help her cause with Dr. Daruwalla; the doctor had to pronounce her healthy or the Great Blue Nile wouldn’t take her.

Vinod now noted that the middle-aged woman with the exotic-dancing name of Muriel had fallen asleep; she slept with a somewhat sour expression, her mouth disagreeably open and her hands resting on her fat breasts. The dwarf thought that it made more sense to throw an orange at her than it did to watch her dance. But Vinod’s humanitarian instincts extended even to middle-aged strippers; he slowed down because the streets were bumpy, seeing no reason to wake the poor woman before she was home. In her sleep, Muriel suddenly cringed. She was ducking oranges, the dwarf imagined.

After Vinod dropped off Muriel, it was too late for him to go anywhere but back to the brothel area; the red-light district was the only part of Bombay where people needed a taxi at 2:00 in the morning. Soon the international travelers would be arriving at the Oberoi and the Taj, but no one who’d just flown in from Europe or North America would have the slightest inclination to cruise around the city.

Vinod thought he’d wait for the end of the last show at the Wetness Cabaret; one of Mr. Garg’s other exotic dancers might want a safe ride home. It amazed Vinod that the Wetness Cabaret, the building itself, was “home” to Mr. Garg; the dwarf couldn’t imagine sleeping there. He supposed there were rooms upstairs, above the slick bar and the sticky tables and the sloping stage. Vinod shivered to think of the dimly lit bar, the brightly lit stage, the darkened tables where the men sat—some of them masturbating, although the dominant odor of the Wetness Cabaret was one of urine. How could Garg sleep in such a place, even if he slept above it?

But as distasteful as it was to Vinod—to cruise the brothel area, as if he carried a potential customer in the Ambassador’s back seat—the dwarf had decided that he might as well stay awake. Vinod was fascinated by that hour when most of the brothels switched over; in Kamathipura, on Falkland Road and Grant Road, there came an hour of the early morning when most of the brothels would accept only all-night customers. In the dwarf’s opinion, these were different and desperate men. Who else would want to spend all night with a prostitute?

Vinod grew alert and edgy at this hour, as if—particularly in those little lanes in Kamathipura—he might spot a man who wasn’t entirely human. When he got tired, the dwarf dozed in his car; his car was more home to him than home, at least when Deepa was away at the circus. And when he was bored, Vinod would cruise past the transvestite brothels on Falkland Road and Grant Road. Vinod liked the hijras; they were so bold and so outrageous—they also seemed to like dwarfs. Possibly the hijras thought that dwarfs were outrageous.

Vinod was aware that some of the hijras didn’t like him; they were the ones who knew that the dwarf was Inspector Dhar’s driver—the ones who hated Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer. Lately, Vinod had to be a little careful in the brothel area; the prostitute murders had made Dhar and Dhar’s dwarf more than a little unpopular. Thus that hour when most of the brothels “switched over” made Vinod more alert and edgy than usual.

While he cruised, the dwarf was among the first to notice what had changed about Bombay; the change was being enacted before Vinod’s very eyes. Gone was the movie poster of his most famous client, that larger-than-life image of Inspector Dhar which Vinod and all of Bombay had grown so used to—the huge hoardings, the overhead billboards that advertised Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer. Dhar’s handsome face, albeit bleeding slightly; the torn white shirt, open to expose Dhar’s muscular chest; the pretty, ravaged young woman slung over Dhar’s strong shoulder; and, always, the blue-gray semi-automatic pistol held in Dhar’s hard right hand. In its place, everywhere in Bombay, was a brand-new poster. Vinod thought that only the semi-automatic was the same, although Inspector Dhar’s sneer was remarkably familiar. Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence: this time, the young woman slung over Dhar’s shoulder was noticeably dead—more noticeably, she was a Western hippie.

It was the only safe time to put the posters up; if people had been awake, they would doubtless have attacked the poster-wallas. The old posters in the brothel area had long ago been destroyed; tonight, perhaps, the prostitutes left the poster-wallas unharmed because the prostitutes were happy to see that Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer was being replaced with a new offense—this time, to somebody else.

But, upon closer inspection, Vinod noted that not so much was different about the new poster as he’d first observed. The posture of the young woman over Dhar’s shoulder was quite the same, alive or dead; and again, albeit from a slightly different spot, Inspector Dhar’s cruel, handsome face was bleeding. The longer Vinod looked at the new poster, the more he found it to resemble the previous poster; it seemed to the dwarf that Dhar even wore the same torn shirt. This possibly explained why the dwarf had driven around Bombay for more than two hours before he’d noticed that a new Inspector Dhar film had been born into the world. Vinod couldn’t wait to see it.

The unspeakable life of the red-light district teemed all around him—the bartering and the betrayals and the frightening, unseen beatings—or so the excited dwarf imagined. About the most hopeful thing that could be said is that throughout the brothel area of Bombay, no one—truly no one—was fucking a goat.