A Son of the Circus

Time to Slip Away

As for Martin Mills and how he compared to the fictional Mr. Martin, Farrokh felt only the slightest guilt; the screenwriter suspected he’d created a lightweight fool out of a heavyweight lunatic, but this was only the faintest suspicion. In the screenplay, the first time the missionary visits the children in the circus, he slips and falls in elephant shit. It hadn’t yet crossed Dr. Daruwalla’s mind that the real missionary had possibly stepped into a worse mess than elephant shit.

As for Elephant Shit, it wouldn’t work as a title. Farrokh had written it in the margin of the page where the phrase first appeared, but now he crossed this out. A film of that title would be banned in India. Besides, who would want to go to a movie called Elephant Shit? People wouldn’t bring their children, and it was a movie for children, Dr. Daruwalla hoped—if it was for anybody, he thought darkly. Thus did self-doubt, the screenwriter’s old enemy, assail him; he seemed to welcome it as a friend.

The screenwriter baited himself with other bad-title possibilities. Limo Roulette was the arty choice. Farrokh worried that dwarfs the world over would be offended by the film, no matter what the title was. In his closet career as a screenwriter, Dr. Daruwalla had managed to offend almost everyone else. Rather than worry about offending dwarfs, the doctor took up the even smaller task of wondering which movie magazine would be the first to misunderstand and mock his efforts. The two he detested most were Stardust and Cine Blitz. He thought they were the most scandalous and libelous of the film-gossip press.

The mere thought of these media goons, this journalistic slime, set Farrokh to worrying about the press conference at which he intended to announce an end to Inspector Dhar. It occurred to Farrokh that if he called for a press conference, no one would attend; the screenwriter would have to ask Dhar to call for such a conference, and Dhar would have to be there—otherwise, it would look like a hoax. Worse, Dhar himself would have to do the talking; after all, he was the movie star. The trashy journalists would be less interested in Dr. Daruwalla’s motives for perpetrating this fraud than in the reasons for Dhar’s complicity. Why had Dhar gone along with the fiction that the actor was his own creator? As always, even at such a revealing press conference as Farrokh had imagined, Dhar would deliver the lines that the screenwriter had written.

The truth would simply be another acting job; moreover, the most important truth would never be told—that it was out of love for John D. that Dr. Daruwalla had invented Inspector Dhar. Such a truth would be wasted on the media sleaze. Farrokh knew that he wouldn’t want to read what mockery would be made of such a love, especially in Stardust or Cine Blitz.

Dhar’s last press conference had been deliberately conducted as a farce. Dhar had chosen the swimming pool at the Taj as the site, for he said he enjoyed the bewildered gaping of foreigners. The journalists were instantly irritated because they’d expected a more intimate environment. “Are you trying to emphasize that you are a foreigner, that you aren’t really Indian at all?” That had been the first question; Dhar had responded by diving into the pool. He’d meant to splash the photographers; that had been no accident. He’d answered only what he wanted to and ignored the rest. It was an interview punctuated by Dhar repeatedly diving into the pool. The journalists said insulting things about him while he was underwater.

Farrokh presumed that John D. would be happy to be free of the role of Inspector Dhar; the actor had enough money, and he clearly preferred his Swiss life. Yet Dr. Daruwalla suspected that, deep down, Dhar had cherished the loathing he’d inspired among the media scum; earning the hatred of the cinema-gossip journalists might have been John D.’s best performance. With that in mind, Farrokh thought he knew what John D. would prefer: no press conference, no announcement. “Let them wonder,” Dhar would say—Dhar had often said.

There was another line that the screenwriter remembered; after all, he’d not only written it—it was repeated in every Inspector Dhar movie near the end of the story. There was always the temptation for Dhar to do something more—to seduce one more woman, to gun down one more villain—but Inspector Dhar knew when to stop. He knew when the action was over. Sometimes to a scheming bartender, sometimes to a fellow policeman of a generally dissatisfied nature, sometimes to a pretty woman who’d been waiting impatiently to make love to him, Inspector Dhar would say, “Time to slip away.” Then he would.

In this case, facing the facts—that he wanted to call an end to Inspector Dhar and that he wanted to finally leave Bombay—Farrokh knew what John D.’s advice would be. “Time to slip away,” Inspector Dhar would say.

Bedbugs Ahead

In the old days, before the doctors’ offices and the examining rooms of the Hospital for Crippled Children were air-conditioned, there’d been a ceiling fan over the desk where Dr. Daruwalla now sat thinking, and the window to the exercise yard was always open. Nowadays, with the window closed and the hum of the air-conditioning a reassuring constant, Farrokh was cut off from the sound of children crying in the exercise yard. When the doctor walked through the yard, or when he was called to observe the progress of one of his postoperative patients in physical therapy, the crying children did not greatly upset him. Farrokh associated some pain with recovery; a joint, after surgery—especially after surgery—had to be moved. But in addition to the cries of pain, there were the whines that children made in anticipation of their pain, and this piteous mewling affected the doctor strongly.

Farrokh turned and faced the closed window with its view of the exercise yard; from the soundless expressions of the children, the doctor could still discern the difference between those children who were in pain and those who were pitifully frightened of the pain they expected. Soundlessly, the therapists were coaxing the children to move; there was the recent hip replacement being told to stand up, there was the new knee being asked to step forward—and the first rotation of the new elbow. The landscape of the exercise yard was timeless to Dr. Daruwalla, who reflected that his ability to hear that which was soundless was the only measure of his humanity that he was certain of. Even with the air-conditioning on, even with the window closed, Dr. Daruwalla could hear the whimpering. Time to slip away, he thought.

He opened the window and leaned outside. The heat at midday was oppressive in the rising dust, although (for Bombay) the weather had remained relatively cool and dry. The cries of the children commingled with the car horns and the chainsaw clamor of the mopeds. Dr. Daruwalla breathed it all in. He squinted into the dusty glare. He gave the exercise yard an almost detached appraisal; it was a good-bye look. Then the doctor called Ranjit for his messages.

It was no surprise to Dr. Daruwalla that Deepa had already negotiated with the Great Blue Nile; the doctor hadn’t expected the dwarf’s wife to get a better deal. The circus would attempt to train the talented “sister.” They would commit themselves to this effort for three months; they’d feed her, clothe her, shelter her and care for her crippled “brother.” If Madhu could be trained, the Great Blue Nile would keep both children; if she was untrainable, the circus would let them go.

In Farrokh’s screenplay, the Great Royal paid Pinky three rupees a day while they trained her; the fictional Ganesh worked without pay for his food and shelter. At the Great Blue Nile, Madhu’s training was considered a privilege; she wouldn’t be paid at all. And for a real boy with a crushed foot, it was enough of a privilege to be fed and sheltered; the real Ganesh would work, too. At the parents’ expense—or, in the case of orphans, it was the obligation of the children’s “sponsors”—Madhu and Ganesh would be brought to the site of the Great Blue Nile’s present location. At this time, the circus was performing in Junagadh, a small city of about 100,000 people in Gujarat.

Junagadh! It would take a day to get there, another day to get back. They would have to fly to Rajkot and then endure a car ride of two or three hours to the smaller town; a driver from the circus would meet their plane—doubtless a reckless roustabout. But the train would be worse. Farrokh knew that Julia hated him to be away overnight, and in Junagadh there would probably be nowhere to stay but the Government Circuit House; lice were likely, bedbugs a certainty. There would be 48 hours of conversation with Martin Mills, and no time to keep writing the screenplay. It had also occurred to the screenwriter that the real Dr. Daruwalla was part of a parallel story-in-progress.

Raging Hormones

When Dr. Daruwalla phoned St. Ignatius School to alert the new missionary to their upcoming journey, the doctor wondered if his writing was prophetic. He’d already described the fictional Mr. Martin as “the most popular teacher at the school”; now here was Father Cecil telling the screenwriter that Martin Mills, on the evidence of his first morning of visiting the classrooms, had instantly made “a most popular impression.” Young Martin, as Father Cecil still called him, had even persuaded the Father Rector to permit the teaching of Graham Greene to the upper-school boys; although controversial, Graham Greene was one of Martin Mills’s Catholic heroes. “After all, the novelist popularized Catholic issues,” Father Cecil said.

Farrokh, who considered himself an old fan of Graham Greene, asked suspiciously, “Catholic issues?”

“Suicide as a mortal sin, for example,” Father Cecil replied. (Apparently, Father Julian was allowing Martin Mills to teach The Heart of the Matter to the upper school.) Dr. Daruwalla felt briefly uplifted; on the long trip to Junagadh and back, perhaps the doctor would be able to steer the missionary’s conversation to Graham Greene. Who were some of the zealot’s other heroes? the doctor wondered.

Farrokh hadn’t had a good discussion of Graham Greene in quite a while. Julia and her literary friends were happier discussing more contemporary authors; they found it old-fashioned of Farrokh to prefer rereading those books he regarded as classics. Dr. Daruwalla was intimidated by Martin Mills’s education, but possibly the doctor and the scholastic would discover a common ground in the novels of Graham Greene.

Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t have known that the subject of suicide was of more interest to Martin Mills than the craft of Graham Greene as a writer. For a Catholic, suicide was a violation of God’s dominion over human life. In the case of Arif Koma, Martin reasoned, the Muslim hadn’t been in full possession of his faculties; falling in love with Vera surely suggested a loss of faculties, or a vastly different set of faculties altogether.

The denial of ecclesiastical burial was a horror to Martin Mills; however, the Church permitted suicides among those who’d lost their senses or were unaware that they were killing themselves. The missionary hoped that God would judge the Turk’s suicide as an out-of-his-head kind. After all, Martin’s mother had fucked the boy’s brains out. How could Arif have made a sane decision after that?

But if Dr. Daruwalla would be unprepared for Martin Mills’s Catholic interpretation of the doctor’s much-admired author, Farrokh was also in the dark regarding the unwelcome disturbance that had shaken St. Ignatius School in the late morning, to which Father Cecil made incoherent references. The mission had been disrupted by an unruly intruder; the police had been forced to subdue the violent individual, whose violence Father Cecil attributed to “raging hormones.”

Farrokh liked the phrase so much that he wrote it down.

“It was a transvestite prostitute, of all things,” Father Cecil whispered into the phone.

“Why are you whispering?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“The Father Rector is still upset about the episode,” Father Cecil confided to Farrokh. “Can you imagine? A hijra coming here—and during school hours!”

Dr. Daruwalla was amused at the presumed spectacle. “Perhaps he, or she, wanted to be better educated,” the doctor suggested to Father Cecil.

“It claimed it had been invited,” Father Cecil replied.

“It!” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

“Well, he or she—whatever it was, it was big and strong. A rampaging prostitute, a crazed cross-dresser!” Father Cecil whispered. “They give themselves hormones, don’t they?”

“Not hijras,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “They don’t take estrogens; they have their balls and their penises removed—with a single cut. The wound is then cauterized with hot oil. It resembles a vagina.”

“Goodness—don’t tell me!” Father Cecil said.

“Sometimes, but not usually, their breasts are surgically implanted,” Dr. Daruwalla informed the priest.

“This one was implanted with iron!” Father Cecil said enthusiastically. “And young Martin was busy teaching. The Father Rector and I, and poor Brother Gabriel, had to deal with the creature by ourselves—until the police came.”

“It sounds exciting,” Farrokh remarked.

“Fortunately, none of the children saw it,” Father Cecil said.

“Aren’t transvestite prostitutes allowed to convert?” asked Dr. Daruwalla, who enjoyed teasing any priest.

“Raging hormones,” Father Cecil repeated. “It must have just given itself an overdose.”

“I told you—they don’t usually take estrogens,” the doctor said.

“This one was taking something,” Father Cecil insisted.

“May I speak with Martin now?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. “Or is he still busy teaching?”

“He’s eating his lunch with the midgets, or maybe he’s with the submidgets today,” Father Cecil replied.

It was almost time for the doctor’s lunch at the Duckworth Club. Dr. Daruwalla left a message for Martin Mills, but Father Cecil struggled with the message to such a degree that the doctor knew he’d have to call again. “Just tell him I’ll call him back,” Farrokh finally said. “And tell him we’re definitely going to the circus.”

“Oh, won’t that be fun!” Father Cecil said.

The Hawaiian Shirt

Detective Patel had wanted to compose himself before his lunch at the Duckworth Club; however, there was the interruption of this incident at St. Ignatius. It was merely a misdemeanor, but the episode had been brought to the deputy commissioner’s attention because it fell into the category of Dhar-related crimes. The perpetrator was one of the transvestite prostitutes who’d been injured by Dhar’s dwarf driver in the fracas on Falkland Road; it was the hijra whose wrist had been broken by a blow from one of Vinod’s squash-racquet handles. The eunuch-transvestite had shown up at St. Ignatius, clubbing the old priests with his cast; his story was that Inspector Dhar had told all the transvestite prostitutes that they’d be welcome at the mission. Also, Dhar had told the hijras that they could always find him there.

“But it wasn’t Dhar,” the hijra told Detective Patel in Hindi. “It was someone being a Dhar imposter.” It would have been laughable to Patel, to hear a transvestite complaining that someone else was an “imposter,” if the detective had been in a laughing mood; instead, the deputy commissioner looked at the hijra with impatience and scorn. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, bony-faced hooker whose small breasts were showing because the top two buttons of his Hawaiian shirt were unbuttoned and the shirt was too loose for him; the looseness of his shirt and the tightness of his scarlet miniskirt were an absurd combination—hijra prostitutes usually wore saris. Also, they generally made more of an effort to be feminine than this one was making; his breasts (what the deputy commissioner could see of them) were shapely—in fact, they were very well formed—but there were whiskers on his chin and the noticeable shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. Possibly the hijra had thought that the colors of the Hawaiian shirt were feminine, not to mention the parrots and flowers; yet the shirt did little for his figure.

D.C.P. Patel continued the interrogation in Hindi. “Where’d you get that shirt?” the detective asked.

“Dhar was wearing it,” the prostitute replied.

“Not likely,” said the deputy commissioner.

“I told you he was being an imposter,” the prostitute said.

“What sort of fool would pretend to be Dhar, and dare show his face on Falkland Road?” Patel asked.

“He looked like he didn’t know he was Dhar,” the hijra replied.

“Oh, I see,” said Detective Patel. “He was an imposter but he didn’t know he was an imposter.” The hijra scratched his hooked nose with the cast on his wrist. Patel was bored with the interrogation; he kept the hijra sitting there only because the preposterous sight of him helped the detective to focus on Rahul. Of course Rahul would be 53 or 54 now, and she wouldn’t stand out as someone who was making a half-assed effort to look like a woman.

It had occurred to the deputy commissioner that this might be one of the ways that Rahul managed to commit so many murders in the same area of Bombay. Rahul could enter a brothel as a man and leave looking like a hag; she could also leave looking like an attractive, middle-aged woman. And until this waste-of-time hijra had interrupted him, Patel had been enjoying a fairly profitable morning’s work; the deputy commissioner’s research on Rahul was progressing rather nicely. The list of new members at the Duckworth Club had been helpful.

“Did you ever hear of a zenana by the name of Rahul?” Patel asked the hijra.

“That old question,” the transvestite said.

“Only she’d be a real woman now—the complete operation,” the detective added. He knew there were some hijras who envied the very idea of a complete transsexual, but not most; most hijras were exactly what they wanted to be—they had no use for a fully fashioned vagina.

“If I knew of there being someone like that, I’d probably kill her,” the hijra said good-naturedly. “For her parts,” he added with a smile; he was just kidding, of course. Detective Patel knew more about Rahul than this hijra did; in the last 24 hours, the detective had learned more about Rahul than he’d known for 20 years.

“You may go now,” said the deputy commissioner. “But leave the shirt. By your own admission, you stole it.”

“But I have nothing else to wear!” the hijra cried.

“We’ll find you something you can wear,” the policeman said. “It just may not match your miniskirt.”

When Detective Patel left Crime Branch Headquarters for his lunch at the Duckworth Club, he took a paper bag with him; in it was the Hawaiian shirt that belonged to Dhar’s imposter. The deputy commissioner knew that not every question would or could be answered over one lunch, but the question posed by the Hawaiian shirt seemed a relatively simple one.

The Actor Guesses Right

“No,” said Inspector Dhar. “I would never wear a shirt like that.” He’d glanced quickly and indifferently into the bag, not bothering to draw out the shirt—not even touching the material.

“It has a California label,” Detective Patel informed the actor.

“I’ve never been to California,” Dhar replied.

The deputy commissioner put the paper bag under his chair; he seemed disappointed that the Hawaiian shirt had not served as an icebreaker to their conversation, which had halted once again. Poor Nancy hadn’t spoken at all. Worse, she’d chosen to wear a sari, wound up in the navel-revealing fashion; the golden hairs that curled upward in a sleek line to her belly button were as worrisome to Mr. Sethna as the unsightly paper bag the policeman had placed under his chair. It was the kind of bag that a bomb would be in, the old steward thought. And how he disapproved of Western women in Indian attire! Furthermore, the fair skin of this particular woman’s midriff clashed with her sunburned face. She must have been lying in the sun with tea saucers over her eyes, Mr. Sethna thought; any evidence of women lying on their backs disturbed him.

As for the ever-voyeuristic Dr. Daruwalla, his eyes were repeatedly drawn to Nancy’s furry navel; since she’d pulled her chair snugly to their table in the Ladies’ Garden, the doctor was restless because he could no longer see this marvel. Farrokh found himself glancing sideways at Nancy’s raccoon eyes instead. The doctor made Nancy so nervous that she took her sunglasses out of her purse and put them on. She had the look of someone who was trying to gather herself together for a performance.

Inspector Dhar knew how to handle sunglasses. He simply stared into them with a satisfied expression on his face, which implied to Nancy that her sunglasses were no impediment to his vision—that he could see her clearly nonetheless. Dhar knew this would soon cause her to take the sunglasses off.

Oh great—they’re both acting! Dr. Daruwalla thought.

Mr. Sethna was disgusted with all of them. They were as socially graceless as teenagers. Not one of them had glanced at a menu; none of them had so much as raised an eyebrow to a waiter to suggest an aperitif, and they couldn’t even talk to one another! Mr. Sethna was also full of indignation at the explanation that was now before him of why Detective Patel spoke such good English: the policeman’s wife was a slatternly American! Needless to say, Mr. Sethna considered this a “mixed marriage,” of which he strongly disapproved. And the old steward was no less outraged that Inspector Dhar should have brashly presented himself at the Duckworth Club so soon after the warning in the late Mr. Lal’s mouth; the actor was recklessly endangering other Duckworthians! That Mr. Sethna had come by this information through the relentlessness and the practiced stealth of his eavesdropping didn’t cause the old steward to consider that he might not know the whole story. To a man with Mr. Sethna’s readiness to disapprove, a mere shred of information was sufficient to form a full opinion.

But of course Mr. Sethna had another reason to be outraged with Inspector Dhar. As a Parsi and a practicing Zoroastrian, the old steward had reacted predictably to the posters for the newest Inspector Dhar absurdity. Not since his days at the Ripon Club, and his famous decision to pour hot tea on the head of the man wearing the wig, had Mr. Sethna felt so aroused to righteous anger. He’d seen the work of the poster-wallas on his way home from the Duckworth Club, and he blamed Inspector Dhar and Towers of Silence for giving him uncharacteristically lurid dreams.

He’d suffered a vision of a ghostly-white statue of Queen Victoria that resembled the one they took away from Victoria Terminus, but in his dream the statue was levitating; Queen Victoria was hovering about a foot off the floor of Mr. Sethna’s beloved fire-temple, and all the Parsi faithful were bolting for the doorway. Were it not for the blasphemous cinema poster, Mr. Sethna believed he would never have had such a blasphemous dream. He’d promptly woken up and donned his prayer cap, but the prayer cap fell off when he suffered another dream. He was riding in the Parsi Panchayat Hearse to the Towers of Silence; although he was already a dead body, he could smell the rites attendant to his own death—the scent of burning sandalwood. Suddenly the stink of putrefaction, which clung to the vultures’ beaks and talons, was choking him; he woke again. His prayer cap was on the floor, where he mistook it for a waiting hunchbacked crow; pathetically, he’d tried to shoo the imagined crow away.

Dr. Daruwalla glanced only once at Mr. Sethna. From the steward’s withering stare, the doctor wondered if another hot-tea incident was brewing. Mr. Sethna interpreted the doctor’s glance as a summons.

“An aperitif before lunch, perhaps?” the steward asked the awkward foursome. Since “aperitif” wasn’t a word much used in Iowa—nor had Nancy heard it from Dieter, nor was it ever spoken in her life with Vijay Patel—she made no response to Mr. Sethna, who was looking directly at her. (If anywhere, Nancy might have encountered the word in one or another of the remaindered American novels she’d read, but she wouldn’t have known how to pronounce “aperitif” and she would have assumed that the word was inessential to understanding the plot.)

“Would the lady enjoy something to drink before her lunch?” Mr. Sethna asked, still looking at Nancy. No one at the table could hear what she said, but the old steward understood that she’d whispered for a Thums Up cola. The deputy commissioner ordered a Gold Spot orange soda, Dr. Daruwalla asked for a London Diet beer and Dhar wanted a Kingfisher.

“Well, this should be lively,” Dr. Daruwalla joked. “Two teetotalers and two beer drinkers!” This lead balloon lay on the table, which inspired the doctor to discourse, at length, on the history of the lunch menu.

It was Chinese Day at the Duckworth Club, the culinary low point of the week. In the old days, there’d been a Chinese chef among the kitchen staff, and Chinese Day had been an epicure’s delight. But the Chinese chef had left the club to open his own restaurant, and the present-day collection of cooks could not concoct Chinese; yet, one day a week, they tried.

“It’s probably safest to stick with something vegetarian,” Farrokh recommended.

“By the time you saw the bodies,” Nancy suddenly began, “I suppose they were pretty bad.”

“Yes—I’m afraid the crabs had found them,” Dr. Daruwalla replied.

“But I guess the drawing was still clear, or you wouldn’t have remembered it,” Nancy said.

“Yes—indelible ink, I’m sure,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“It was a laundry-marking pen—a dhobi pen,” Nancy told him, although she appeared to be looking at Dhar. With her sunglasses on, who knew where she was looking? “I buried them, you know,” Nancy went on. “I didn’t see them die, but I heard them. The sound of the spade,” she added.

Dhar continued to stare at her, his lip not quite sneering. Nancy took her sunglasses off and returned them to her purse. Something she saw in her purse made her pause; she held her lower lip in her teeth for three or four seconds. Then she reached in her purse and brought out the bottom half of the silver ballpoint pen, which she’d carried with her, everywhere she’d gone, for 20 years.

“He stole the other half of this—he or she,” Nancy said. She handed the half-pen to Dhar, who read the interrupted inscription.

“‘Made in’ where?” Dhar asked her.

“India,” said Nancy. “Rahul must have stolen it.”

“Who would want the top half of a pen?” Farrokh asked Detective Patel.

“Not a writer,” Dhar replied; he passed the half-pen to Dr. Daruwalla.

“It’s real silver,” the doctor observed.

“It needs to be polished,” Nancy said. The deputy commissioner looked away; he knew his wife had polished the thing only last week. Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t see any indication that the silver was dull or blackened; everything was shiny, even the inscription. When he handed the half-pen to Nancy, she didn’t put it back in her purse; instead, she placed it alongside her knife and spoon—it was brighter than both. “I use an old toothbrush to polish the lettering,” she said. Even Dhar looked away from her; that he couldn’t meet her eyes gave her confidence. “In real life,” Nancy said to the actor, “have you ever taken a bribe?” She saw the sneer she’d been looking for; she’d been expecting it.

“No, never,” Dhar told her. Now Nancy had to look away from him; she looked straight at Dr. Daruwalla.

“How come you keep it a secret… that you write all his movies?” Nancy asked the doctor.

“I already have a career,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. “The idea was to create a career for him.”

“Well, you sure did it,” Nancy told Farrokh. Detective Patel reached for her left hand, which was on the table by her fork, but Nancy put her hand in her lap. Then she faced Dhar.

“And how do you like it? Your career …” Nancy asked the actor. He responded with his patterned shrug, which enhanced his sneer. Something both cruel and merry entered his eyes.

“I have a day job… another life,” Dhar replied.

“Lucky you,” Nancy told him.

“Sweetie,” said the deputy commissioner; he reached into his wife’s lap and took her hand. She seemed to go a little limp in the rattan chair. Even Mr. Sethna could hear her exhale; the old steward had heard almost everything else, too, and what he hadn’t actually heard he’d fairly accurately surmised from reading their lips. Mr. Sethna was a good lip-reader, and for an elderly man he could move spryly around a conversation; a table for four posed few problems for him. It was easier to pick up conversation in the Ladies’ Garden than in the main dining room, because only the bower of flowers was overhead; there were no ceiling fans.

From Mr. Sethna’s point of view, it was already a much more interesting lunch than he’d anticipated. Dead bodies! A stolen part of a pen? And the most startling revelation—that Dr. Daruwalla was the actual author of that trash which had elevated Inspector Dhar to stardom! In a way, Mr. Sethna believed that he’d known it all along; the old steward had always sensed that Farrokh wasn’t the man his father was.

Mr. Sethna glided in with the drinks; then he glided away. The venomous feelings that the old steward had felt for Dhar were now what Mr. Sethna was feeling for Dr. Daruwalla. A Parsi writing for the Hindi cinema! And making fun of other Parsis! How dare he? Mr. Sethna could barely restrain himself. In his mind, he could hear the sound that his silver serving tray would make off the crown of Dr. Daruwalla’s head; it sounded like a gong. The steward had needed all his strength to resist the temptation to cover that appalling woman’s fuzzy navel with her napkin, which was carelessly lumped in her lap. A belly button like hers should be clothed—if not banned! But Mr. Sethna quickly calmed himself, for he didn’t want to miss what the real policeman was saying.

“I should like to hear the three of you describe what Rahul would look like today, assuming that Rahul is now a woman,” said the deputy commissioner. “You first,” Patel said to Dhar.

“Vanity and an overall sense of physical superiority would keep her looking younger than she is,” Dhar began.

“But she would be fifty-three or fifty-four,” Dr. Daruwalla interjected.

“You’re next. Please let him finish,” said Detective Patel.

“She wouldn’t look fifty-three or fifty-four, except maybe very early in the morning,” Dhar continued. “And she would be very fit. She has a predatory aura. She’s a stalker—I mean sexually.”

“I think she was quite hot for him when he was a boy!” Dr. Daruwalla remarked.

“Who wasn’t?” Nancy asked bitterly. Only her husband looked at her.

“Please let him finish,” Patel said patiently.

“She’s also the sort of woman who enjoys making you want her, even if she intends to reject you,” Dhar said. He made a point of looking at Nancy. “And I would assume that, like her late aunt, she has a caustic manner. She would always be ready to ridicule someone, or some idea—anything.”

“Yes, yes,” said Dr. Daruwalla impatiently, “but don’t forget, she is also a starer.”

“Excuse me—a what?” asked Detective Patel.

“A family trait—she stares at everyone. Rahul is a compulsive starer!” Farrokh replied. “She does it because she’s deliberately rude but also because she has a kind of uninhibited curiosity. That was her aunt, in spades! Rahul was brought up that way. No modesty whatsoever. Now she would be very feminine, I suppose, but not with her eyes. She is a man with her eyes—she’s always looking you over and staring you down.”

“Were you finished?” the deputy commissioner asked Dhar.

“I think so,” the actor replied.

“I never saw her clearly,” Nancy said suddenly. “There was no light, or the light was bad—only an oil lamp. I got just a peek at her, and I was sick—I had a fever.” She toyed with the bottom half of the ballpoint pen on the table, turning it at a right angle to her knife and spoon, then lining it up again. “She smelled good, and she felt very silky—but strong,” Nancy added.

“Talk about her now, not then,” Patel said. “What would she be like now?”

“The thing is,” Nancy said, “I think she feels like she can’t control something in herself, like she just needs to do things. She can’t stop herself. The things she wants are just too strong.”

“What things?” asked the detective.

“You know. We’ve talked about it,” Nancy told him.

“Tell them,” her husband said.

“She’s horny—I think she’s horny all the time,” Nancy told them.

“That’s unusual for someone who’s fifty-three or fifty-four,” Dr. Daruwalla observed.

“That’s just the feeling she gives you—believe me,” Nancy said. “She’s awfully horny.”

“Does this remind you of someone you know?” the detective asked Inspector Dhar, but Dhar kept looking at Nancy; he didn’t shrug. “Or you, Doctor—are you reminded of anyone?” the deputy commissioner asked Farrokh.

“Are you talking about someone we’ve actually met—as a woman?” Dr. Daruwalla asked the deputy commissioner.

“Precisely,” said Detective Patel.

Dhar was still looking at Nancy when he spoke. “Mrs. Dogar,” Dhar said. Farrokh put both his hands on his chest, exactly where the familiar pain in his ribs was suddenly sharp enough to take his breath away.

“Oh, very good—very impressive,” said Detective Patel. He reached across the table and patted the back of Dhar’s hand. “You wouldn’t have made a bad policeman, even if you don’t take bribes,” the detective told the actor.

“Mrs. Dogar!” Dr. Daruwalla gasped. “I knew she reminded me of someone!”

“But there’s something wrong, isn’t there?” Dhar asked the deputy commissioner. “I mean, you haven’t arrested her—have you?”

“Quite so,” Patel said. “Something is wrong.”

“I told you he’d know who it was,” Nancy told her husband.

“Yes, sweetie,” the detective said. “But it’s not a crime for Rahul to be Mrs. Dogar.”

“How did you find out?” Dr. Daruwalla asked the deputy commissioner. “Of course—the list of new members!”

“It was a good place to start,” said Detective Patel. “The estate of Promila Rai was inherited by her niece, not her nephew.”

“I never knew there was a niece,” Farrokh said.

“There wasn’t,” Patel replied. “Rahul, her nephew, went to London. He came back as her niece. He even gave himself her name—Promila. It’s perfectly legal to change your sex in England. It’s perfectly legal to change your name—even in India.”

“Rahul Rai married Mr. Dogar?” Farrokh asked.

“That was perfectly legal, too,” the detective replied. “Don’t you see, Doctor? The fact that you and Dhar could verify that Rahul was there in Goa, at the Hotel Bardez, does not confirm that Rahul was ever at the scene of the crime. And it would not be believable for Nancy to physically identify Mrs. Dogar as the Rahul of twenty years ago. As she told you, she hardly saw Rahul.”

“Besides, he had a penis then,” Nancy said.

“But, in all these killings, are there no fingerprints?” Farrokh asked.

“In the cases of the prostitutes, there are hundreds of fingerprints,” D.C.P. Patel replied.

“What about the putter that killed Mr. Lal?” Dhar asked.

“Oh, very good!” the deputy commissioner said. “But the putter was wiped clean.”

“Those drawings!” Dr. Daruwalla said. “Rahul always fancied himself an artist. Surely Mrs. Dogar must have some drawings around.”

“That would be convenient,” Patel replied. “But this very morning I sent someone to the Dogar house—to bribe the servants.” The detective paused and looked directly at Dhar. “There were no drawings. There wasn’t even a typewriter.”

“There must be ten typewriters in this club,” Dhar said. “The typed messages on the two-rupee notes—were they all typed on the same machine?”

“Oh, what a very good question,” said Detective Patel. “So far, three messages—two different typewriters. Both in this club.”

“Mrs. Dogar!” Dr. Daruwalla said again.

“Be quiet, please,” the deputy commissioner said. He suddenly pointed to Mr. Sethna. The old steward attempted to hide his face with his silver serving tray, but Detective Patel was too fast for him. “What is that old snoop’s name?” the detective asked Dr. Daruwalla.

“That’s Mr. Sethna,” Farrokh said.

“Please come here, Mr. Sethna,” the deputy commissioner said. He didn’t raise his voice or look in the steward’s direction; when Mr. Sethna pretended that he hadn’t heard, the detective said, “You heard me.” Mr. Sethna did as he was told.

“Since you’ve been listening to us—Wednesday you listened to my telephone conversation with my wife—you will kindly give me your assistance,” Detective Patel said.

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Sethna said.

“Every time Mrs. Dogar is in this club, you call me,” the deputy commissioner said. “Every reservation she makes, lunch or dinner, you let me know about it. Every little thing you know about her, I want to know, too—am I making myself clear?”

“Perfectly clear, sir,” said Mr. Sethna. “She said her husband is peeing on the flowers and that one night he’ll try to dive into the empty pool,” Mr. Sethna babbled. “She said he’s senile—and a drunk.”

“You can tell me later,” Detective Patel said. “I have just three questions. Then I want you to go far enough away from this table so that you don’t hear another word.”

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Sethna said.

“On the morning of Mr. Lal’s death… I don’t mean lunch, because I already know that she was here for lunch, but in the morning, well before lunch… did you see Mrs. Dogar here? That’s the first question,” the deputy commissioner said.

“Yes, she was here for a bit of breakfast—very early,” Mr. Sethna informed the detective. “She likes to walk on the golf course before the golfers are playing. Then she has a little fruit before she does her fitness training.”

“Second question,” Patel said. “Between breakfast and lunch, did she change what she was wearing?”

“Yes, sir,” the old steward replied. “She was wearing a dress, rather wrinkled, at breakfast. For lunch she wore a sari.”

“Third question,” the deputy commissioner said. He handed Mr. Sethna his card—his telephone number at Crime Branch Headquarters and his home number. “Were her shoes wet? I mean, for breakfast.”

“I didn’t notice,” Mr. Sethna admitted.

“Try to improve your noticing,” Detective Patel told the old steward. “Now, go far away from this table—I mean it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Sethna, already doing what he did best—gliding away. Nor did the prying old steward approach the Ladies’ Garden again during the foursome’s solemn lunch. But even at a considerable distance, Mr. Sethna was able to observe that the woman with the fuzzy navel ate very little; her rude husband ate half her food and all his own. At a proper club, people would be forbidden to eat off one another’s plates, Mr. Sethna thought. He went into the men’s room and stood in front of the full-length mirror, in which he appeared to be trembling. He held the silver serving tray in one hand and pounded it against the heel of his other hand, but he felt little satisfaction from the sound it made—a muffled bonging. He hated policemen, the old steward decided.

Farrokh Remembers the Crow

In the Ladies’ Garden, the early-afternoon sun had slanted past the apex of the bower and no longer touched the lunchers’ heads; the rays of sunlight now penetrated the wall of flowers only in patches. The tablecloth was mottled by this intermittent light, and Dr. Daruwalla watched a tiny diamond of the sun—it was reflected in the bottom half of the ballpoint pen. The brilliantly white point of light shone in the doctor’s eye as he pecked at his soggy stir-fry; the limp, dull-colored vegetables reminded him of the monsoon.

At that time of year, the Ladies’ Garden would be strewn with torn petals of the bougainvillea, the skeletal vines still clinging to the bower—with the brown sky showing through and the rain coming through. All the wicker and rattan furniture would be heaped upon itself in the ballroom, for there were no balls in the monsoon season. The golfers would sit drinking in the clubhouse bar, forlornly staring out the streaked windows at the sodden fairways. Wild clumps of the dead garden would be blowing across the greens.

The food on Chinese Day always depressed Farrokh, but there was something about the winking sun that was reflected in the bottom half of the silver ballpoint pen, something that both caught and held the doctor’s attention; something flickered in his memory. What was it? That reflected light, that shiny something… it was as small and lonely but as absolutely a presence as the far-off light of another airplane when you were flying across the miles of darkness over the Arabian Sea at night.

Farrokh stared into the dining room and at the open veranda, through which the shitting crow had flown. Dr. Daruwalla looked at the ceiling fan where the crow had landed; the doctor kept watching the fan, as if he were waiting for it to falter, or for the mechanism to catch on something—that shiny something which the shitting crow had held in its beak. Whatever it was, it was too big for the crow to have swallowed, Dr. Daruwalla thought. He took a wild guess.

“I know what it was,” the doctor said aloud. No one else had been talking; the others just looked at him as he left the table in the Ladies’ Garden and walked into the dining room, where he stood directly under the fan. Then he drew an unused chair away from the nearest table; but when he stood on it, he was still too short to reach over the top of the blades.

“Turn the fan off!” Dr. Daruwalla shouted to Mr. Sethna, who was no stranger to the doctor’s eccentric behavior—and his father’s before him. The old steward shut off the fan. Almost everyone in the dining room had stopped eating.

Dhar and Detective Patel rose from their table in the Ladies’ Garden and approached Farrokh, but the doctor waved them away. “Neither of you is tall enough,” he told them. “Only she is tall enough.” The doctor was pointing at Nancy. He was also following the good advice that the deputy commissioner had given to Mr. Sethna. (“Try to improve your noticing.”)

The fan slowed; the blades were unmoving by the time the three men helped Nancy to stand on the chair.

“Just reach over the top of the fan,” the doctor instructed her. “Do you feel a groove?” Her full figure above them in the chair was quite striking as she reached into the mechanism.

“I feel something,” she said.

“Walk your fingers around the groove,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“What am I looking for?” Nancy asked him.

“You’re going to feel it,” he told her. “I think it’s the top half of your pen.”

They had to hold her or she would have fallen, for her fingers found it almost the instant that the doctor warned her what it was.

“Try not to handle it—just hold it very lightly,” the deputy commissioner said to his wife. She dropped it on the stone floor and the detective retrieved it with a napkin, holding it only by the pocket clasp.

“‘India,’” Patel said aloud, reading that inscription which had been separated from Made in for 20 years.

It was Dhar who lifted Nancy down from the chair. She felt heavier to him than she had 20 years before. She said she needed a moment to be alone with her husband; they stood whispering together in the Ladies’ Garden, while Farrokh and John D. watched the fan start up again. Then the doctor and the actor went to join the detective and his wife, who’d returned to the table.

“Surely now you’ll have Rahul’s fingerprints,” Dr. Daruwalla told the deputy commissioner.

“Probably,” said Detective Patel. “When Mrs. Dogar comes to eat here, we’ll have the steward save us her fork or her spoon—to compare. But her fingerprints on the top of the pen don’t place her at the crime.”

Dr. Daruwalla told them all about the crow. Clearly the crow had brought the pen from the bougainvillea at the ninth green. Crows are carrion eaters.

“But what would Rahul have been doing with the top of the pen—I mean during the murder of Mr. Lal?” Detective Patel asked.

In frustration, Dr. Daruwalla blurted out, “You make it sound as if you have to witness another murder—or do you expect Mrs. Dogar to offer you a full confession?”

“It’s only necessary to make Mrs. Dogar think that we know more than we know,” the deputy commissioner answered.

“That’s easy,” Dhar said suddenly. “You tell the murderer what the murderer would confess, if the murderer were confessing. The trick is, you’ve got to make the murderer think that you really know the murderer.”

“Precisely,” Patel said.

“Wasn’t that in Inspector Dhar and the Hanging Mali?” Nancy asked the actor; she meant that it was Dr. Daruwalla’s line.

“Very good,” Dr. Daruwalla told her.

Detective Patel didn’t pat the back of Dhar’s hand; he tapped Dhar on one knuckle—just once, but sharply—with a dessert spoon. “Let’s be serious,” said the deputy commissioner. “I’m going to offer you a bribe—something you’ve always wanted.”

“There’s nothing I want,” Dhar replied.

“I think there is,” the detective told him. “I think you’d like to play a real policeman. I think you’d like to make a real arrest.”

Dhar said nothing—he didn’t even sneer.

“Do you think you’re still attractive to Mrs. Dogar?” the detective asked him.

“Oh, absolutely—you should see how she looks him over!” cried Dr. Daruwalla.

“I’m asking him,” said Detective Patel.

“Yes, I think she wants me,” Dhar replied.

“Of course she does,” Nancy said angrily.

“And if I told you how to approach her, do you think you could do it—I mean exactly as I tell you?” the detective asked Dhar.

“Oh, yes—you give him any line, he can deliver it!” cried Dr. Daruwalla.

“I’m asking you,” the policeman said to Dhar. This time, the dessert spoon rapped his knuckle hard enough for Dhar to take his hand off the table.

“You want to set her up—is that it?” Dhar asked the deputy commissioner.

“Precisely,” Patel said.

“And I just follow your instructions?” the actor asked him

“That’s it—exactly,” said the deputy commissioner.

“You can do it!” Dr. Daruwalla declared to Dhar.

“That’s not the question,” Nancy said.

“The question is, do you want to do it?” Detective Patel asked Dhar. “I think you really want to.”

“All right,” Dhar said. “Okay. Yes, I want to.”

For the first time in the course of the long lunch, Patel smiled. “I feel better, now that I’ve bribed you,” the deputy commissioner told Dhar. “Do you see? That’s all a bribe is, really—just something you want, in exchange for something else. It’s no big deal, is it?”

“We’ll see,” Dhar said. When he looked at Nancy, she was looking at him.

“You’re not sneering,” Nancy said.

“Sweetie,” said Detective Patel, taking her hand.

“I need to go to the ladies’ room,” she said. “You show me where it is,” she said to Dhar. But before his wife or the actor could stand up, the deputy commissioner stopped them.

“Just a trivial matter, before you go,” the detective said. “What is this nonsense about you and the dwarf brawling with prostitutes on Falkland Road—what is this nonsense about?” Detective Patel asked Dhar.

“That wasn’t him,” said Dr. Daruwalla quickly.

“So there’s some truth to the rumor of a Dhar imposter?” the detective asked.

“Not an imposter—a twin,” the doctor replied.

“You have a twin?” Nancy asked the actor.

“Identical,” said Dhar.

“That’s hard to believe,” she said.

“They’re not at all alike, but they’re identical,” Farrokh explained.

“It’s not the best time for you to have a twin in Bombay,” Detective Patel told the actor.

“Don’t worry—the twin is totally out of it. A missionary!” Farrokh declared.

“God help us,” Nancy said.

“Anyway, I’m taking the twin out of town for a couple of days—at least overnight,” Dr. Daruwalla told them. The doctor started to explain about the children and the circus, but no one was interested.

“The ladies’ room,” Nancy said to Dhar. “Where is it?”

Dhar was about to take her arm when she walked past him untouched; he followed her to the foyer. Almost everyone in the dining room watched her walk—the woman who’d stood on a chair.

“It will be nice for you to get out of town for a couple of days,” the deputy commissioner said to Dr. Daruwalla. Time to slip away, Farrokh was thinking; then he realized that even the moment of Nancy leaving the Ladies’ Garden with Dhar had been planned.

“Was there something you wanted her to say to him, something only she could say—alone?” the doctor asked the detective.

“Oh, what a very good question,” Patel replied. “You’re learning, Doctor,” the deputy commissioner added. “I’ll bet you could write a better movie now.”

A Three-Dollar Bill?

In the foyer, Nancy said to Dhar, “I’ve thought about you almost as much as I’ve thought about Rahul. Sometimes, you upset me more.”

“I never intended to upset you,” Dhar replied.

“What have you intended? What do you intend?” she asked him.

When he didn’t answer her, Nancy asked him, “How did you like lifting me? You’re always carrying me. Do I feel heavier to you?”

“We’re both a little heavier than we were,” Dhar answered cautiously.

“I weigh a ton, and you know it,” Nancy told him. “But I’m not trash—I never was.”

“I never thought you were trash,” Dhar told her.

“You should never look at people the way you look at me,” Nancy said. He did it again; there was his sneer. “That’s what I mean,” she told him. “I hate you for it—the way you make me feel. Later, after you’re gone, it makes me keep thinking about you. I’ve thought about you for twenty years.” She was about three inches taller than the actor; when she reached out suddenly and touched his upper lip, he stopped sneering. “That’s better. Now say something,” Nancy told him. But Dhar was thinking about the dildo—if she still had it. He couldn’t think of what to say. “You know, you really should take some responsibility for the effect you have on people. Do you ever think about that?”

“I think about it all the time—I’m supposed to have an effect,” Dhar said finally. “I’m an actor.”

“You sure are,” Nancy said. She could see him stop himself from shrugging; when he wasn’t sneering, she liked his mouth more than she thought was possible. “Do you want me? Do you ever think about that?” she asked him. She saw him thinking about what to say, so she didn’t wait. “You don’t know how to read what I want, do you?” she asked him. “You’re going to have to be better than this with Rahul. You can’t tell me what I want to hear because you don’t really know if I want you, do you? You’re going to have to read Rahul better than you can read me,” Nancy repeated.

“I can read you,” Dhar told her. “I was just trying to be polite.”

“I don’t believe you—you don’t convince me,” Nancy said. “Bad acting,” she added, but she believed him.

In the ladies’ room, when she washed her hands in the sink. Nancy saw the absurd faucet—the water flowing from the single spigot, which was an elephant’s trunk. Nancy adjusted the degree of hot and cold water, first with one tusk, then the other. Twenty years ago, at the Hotel Bardez, not even four baths had made her feel clean; now Nancy felt unclean again. She was at least relieved to see that there was no winking eye; that much Rahul had imagined, with the help of many murdered women’s navels.

She’d also noticed the pull-down platform on the inside of the toilet-stall door; the handle that lowered the shelf was a ring through an elephant’s trunk. Nancy reflected on the psychology that had compelled Rahul to select one elephant and reject the other.

When Nancy returned to the Ladies’ Garden, she offered only a matter-of-fact comment on her discovery of what she believed to be the source of inspiration for Rahul’s belly drawings. The deputy commissioner and the doctor rushed off to the ladies’ room to see the telltale elephant for themselves; their opportunity to view the Victorian faucet was delayed until the last woman had vacated the ladies’ room. Even from a considerable distance—from the far side of the dining room—Mr. Sethna was able to observe that Inspector Dhar and the woman with the obscene navel had nothing to say to each other, although they were left alone in the Ladies’ Garden for an uncomfortable amount of time.

Later, in the car, Detective Patel spoke to Nancy—before they’d left the driveway of the Duckworth Club. “I have to go back to headquarters, but I’ll take you home first,” he told her.

“You should be more careful about what you ask me to do. Vijay,” Nancy said.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Patel replied. “But I wanted to know your opinion. Can I trust him?” The deputy commissioner saw that his wife was about to cry again.

“You can trust me!” Nancy cried.

“I know I can trust you, sweetie,” Patel said. “But what about him? Do you think he can do it?”

“He’ll do anything you tell him, if he knows what you want,” Nancy answered.

“And you think Rahul will go for him?” her husband asked. “Oh, yes,” she said bitterly.

“Dhar is a pretty cool customer!” said the detective admiringly.

“Dhar is as queer as a three-dollar bill,” Nancy told him.

Not being from Iowa, Detective Patel had some difficulty with the concept of how “queer” a three-dollar bill was—not to mention that, in Bombay, they call a bill a note. “You mean that he’s gay—a homosexual?” her husband asked.

“No doubt about it. You can trust me,” Nancy repeated. They were almost home before she spoke again. “A very cool customer,” she added.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” said the deputy commissioner, because he saw that his wife couldn’t stop crying.

“I do love you, Vijay,” she managed to say.

“I love you, too, sweetie,” the detective told her.

Just Some Old Attraction-Repulsion Kind of Thing

In the Ladies’ Garden, the sun now slanted sideways through the latticework of the bower; the same shade of pinkness from the bougainvillea dappled the tablecloth, which Mr. Sethna had brushed free of crumbs. It seemed to the old steward that Dhar and Dr. Daruwalla would never leave the table. They’d long ago stopped talking about Rahul—or, rather, Mrs. Dogar. For the moment, they were both more interested in Nancy.

“But exactly what do you think is wrong with her?” Farrokh asked John D.

“It appears that the events of the last twenty years have had a strong effect on her,” Dhar answered.

“Oh, elephant shit!” cried Dr. Daruwalla. “Can’t you just once say what you’re really feeling?”

“Okay,” Dhar said. “It appears that she and her husband are a real couple… very much in love, and all of that.”

“Yes, that does appear to be the main thing about them,” the doctor agreed. But Farrokh realized that this observation didn’t greatly interest him; after all, he was still very much in love with Julia and he’d been married longer than Detective Patel. “But what was happening between the two of you—between you and her?” the doctor asked Dhar.

“It was just some old attraction-repulsion kind of thing,” John D. answered evasively.

“The next thing you’ll tell me is that the world is round,” Farrokh said, but the actor merely shrugged. Suddenly, it was not Rahul (or Mrs. Dogar) who frightened Dr. Daruwalla; it was Dhar the doctor was afraid of, and only because Dr. Daruwalla felt that he didn’t really know Dhar—not even after all these years. As before—because he felt that something unpleasant was pending—Farrokh thought of the circus; yet when he mentioned again his upcoming journey to Junagadh, he saw that John D. still wasn’t interested.

“You probably think it’s doomed to fail—just another save-the-children project,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “Like coins in a wishing well, like pebbles in the sea.”

“It sounds as if you think it’s doomed to fail,” Dhar told him.

It was truly time to slip away, the doctor thought. Then Dr. Daruwalla spotted the Hawaiian shirt in the paper bag; Detective Patel had left the package under his chair. Both men were standing, ready to leave, when the doctor pulled the loud shirt out of the bag.

“Well, look at that. The deputy commissioner actually forgot something. How uncharacteristic,” John D. remarked.

“I doubt that he forgot it. I think he wanted you to have it,” Dr. Daruwalla said. Impulsively, the doctor held up the riotous display of parrots in palm trees; there were flowers, too—red and orange and yellow against a jungle of impossible green. Farrokh placed the shoulders of the shirt against Dhar’s shoulders. “It’s the right size for you,” the doctor observed. “Are you sure you don’t want it?”

“I have all the shirts I need,” the actor told him. “Give it to my fucking twin.”