A Son of the Circus

Ready for Rabies

This time, Julia found him in the morning with his face pressing a pencil against the glass-topped table in the dining room. An ongoing title search was evident from Farrokh’s last jottings. There was Lion Piss (crossed out, blessedly) and Raging Hormones (also crossed out, she was happy to see), but the one that appeared to have pleased the screenwriter before he fell asleep was circled. As a movie title, Julia had her doubts about it. It was Limo Roulette, which reminded Julia of one of those French films that defy common sense—even when one manages to read every word of the subtitles.

But this was far too busy a morning for Julia to take the time to read the new pages. She woke up Farrokh by blowing in his ear; while he was in the bathtub, she made his tea. She’d already packed his toilet articles and a change of clothes, and she’d teased her husband about his habit of taking with him a medical-emergency kit of an elaborately paranoid nature; after all, he was going to be away only one night.

But Dr. Daruwalla never traveled anywhere in India without bringing with him certain precautionary items: erythromycin, the preferred antibiotic for bronchitis; Lomotil, for diarrhea. He even carried a kit of surgical instruments, including sutures and iodophor gauze—and both an antibiotic powder and an ointment. In the usual weather, infection thrived in the simplest selection of condoms, which he freely dispensed without invitation. Indian men were renowned for not using condoms. All Dr. Daruwalla had to do was meet a man who so much as joked about prostitutes; in the doctor’s mind, this amounted to a confession. “Here—next time try one of these,” Dr. Daruwalla would say.

The doctor also toted with him a half-dozen sterile disposable needles and syringes—just in case anyone needed any kind of shot. At a circus, people were always being bitten by dogs and monkeys. Someone had told Dr. Daruwalla that rabies was endemic among chimpanzees. For this trip, especially, Farrokh brought along three starter-doses of rabies vaccine, together with three 10mL vials of human rabies immune globulin. Both the vaccine and the immune globulin required refrigeration, but for a journey of less than 48 hours a thermos with ice would be sufficient.

“Are you expecting to be bitten by something?” Julia had asked him.

“I was thinking of the new missionary,” Farrokh had replied; for he believed that, if he were a rabid chimpanzee at the Great Blue Nile, he would certainly be inclined to bite Martin Mills. Yet Julia knew that he’d packed enough vaccine and immune globulin to treat himself and the missionary and both children—just in case a rabid chimpanzee attacked them all.

Lucky Day

In the morning, the doctor longed to read and revise the new pages of his screenplay, but there was too much to do. The elephant boy had sold all the clothes that Martin Mills had bought for him on Fashion Street. Julia had anticipated this; she’d bought the ungrateful little wretch more clothes. It was a struggle to get Ganesh to take a bath—at first because he wanted to do nothing but ride in the elevator, and then because he’d never been in a building with a balcony overlooking Marine Drive; all he wanted to do was stare at the view. Ganesh also objected to wearing a sandal on his good foot, and even Julia doubted the wisdom of concealing the mangled foot in a clean white sock; the sock wouldn’t stay clean or white for long. As for the lone sandal, Ganesh complained that the strap across the top of his foot hurt him so much, he could scarcely walk.

When the doctor had kissed Julia good-bye, he steered the disgruntled boy to Vinod’s waiting taxi; there, in the front seat beside the dwarf, was the sullen Madhu. She was irritated by Dr. Daruwalla’s difficulty in understanding her languages. She had to try both Marathi and Hindi before the doctor understood that Madhu was displeased with the way Vinod had dressed her; Deepa had told the dwarf how to dress the girl.

“I’m not a child,” the former child prostitute said, although it was clear that it had been Deepa’s intention to make the little whore look like a child.

“The circus wants you to look like a child,” Dr. Daruwalla told Madhu, but the girl pouted; nor did she respond to Ganesh in a sisterly fashion.

Madhu glanced briefly, and with disgust, at the boy’s viscid eyes; there was a film of tetracycline ointment, which had been recently applied—it tended to give Ganesh’s eyes a glazed quality. The boy would need to continue the medication for a week or more before his eyes looked normal. “I thought they were fixing your eyes,” Madhu said cruelly; she spoke in Hindi. It had been Farrokh’s impression, when he’d been alone with Madhu or alone with Ganesh, that both children endeavored to speak English; now that the kids were together, they lapsed into Hindi and Marathi. At best, the doctor spoke Hindi tentatively—and Marathi hardly at all.

“It’s important that you behave like a brother and sister,” Farrokh reminded them, but the cripple’s mood was as sulky as Madhu’s.

“If she were my sister, I’d beat her up,” Ganesh said.

“Not with that foot, you wouldn’t,” Madhu told him.

“Now, now,” said Dr. Daruwalla; he’d decided to speak English because he was almost certain that Madhu, as well as Ganesh, could understand him, and he presumed that in English he commanded more authority. “This is your lucky day,” he told them.

“What’s a lucky day?” Madhu asked the doctor.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Ganesh said.

“It’s just an expression,” Dr. Daruwalla admitted, “but it does mean something. It means that today it is your good fortune to be leaving Bombay, to be going to the circus.”

“So you mean that we’re lucky—not the day,” the elephant-footed boy replied.

“It’s too soon to say if we’re lucky,” said the child prostitute.

On that note, they arrived at St. Ignatius, where the single-minded missionary had been waiting for them. Martin Mills climbed into the back seat of the Ambassador, an air of boundless enthusiasm surrounding him. “This is your lucky day!” the zealot announced to the children.

“We’ve been through that,” said Dr. Daruwalla. It was only 7:30 on a Saturday morning.

Out of Place at the Taj

It was 8:30 when they arrived at the terminal for domestic flights in Santa Cruz, where they were told that their flight to Rajkot would be delayed until the end of the day.

“Indian Airlines!” Dr. Daruwalla exclaimed.

“At least they are admitting it,” Vinod said.

Dr. Daruwalla decided that they could wait somewhere more comfortable than the Santa Cruz terminal. But before Farrokh could usher them all back inside the dwarf’s taxi, Martin Mills had wandered off and bought the morning newspaper; on their way back to Bombay, in rush-hour traffic, the missionary treated them to snippets from The Times of India. It would be 10:30 before they arrived at the Taj. (It was Dr. Daruwalla’s eccentric decision that they should wait for their flight to Rajkot in the lobby of the Taj Mahal Hotel.)

“Listen to this,” Martin began. “‘Two brothers stabbed.… The police have arrested one assailant while two other accused are absconding on a scooter in a rash manner.’ An unexpected use of the present tense, not to mention ‘rash,’” the English teacher observed. “Not to mention ‘absconding.’”

“‘Absconding’ is a very popular word here,” Farrokh explained.

“Sometimes it is the police who are absconding,” Ganesh said.

“What did he say?” the missionary asked.

“When a crime happens, often the police abscond,” Farrokh replied. “They’re embarrassed that they couldn’t prevent the crime, or that they can’t catch the criminal, so they run away.” But Dr. Daruwalla was thinking that this pattern of behavior didn’t apply to Detective Patel. According to John D., the deputy commissioner intended to spend the day in the actor’s suite at the Oberoi, rehearsing the best way to approach Rahul. It hurt Farrokh’s feelings that he’d not been invited to participate, or that they hadn’t offered to hold up the rehearsal until the screenwriter returned from the circus; after all, there would be dialogue to imagine and to compose, and although dialogue wasn’t part of the doctor’s day job, it was at least his other business.

“Let me be sure that I understand this,” Martin Mills said. “Sometimes, when there’s a crime, both the criminals and the police are ‘absconding.’”

“Quite so,” replied Dr. Daruwalla. He was unaware that he’d borrowed this expression from Detective Patel. The screenwriter was distracted by pride; he was thinking how clever he’d been, for he’d already made similar disrespectful use of The Times of India in his screenplay. (The fictional Mr. Martin is always reading something stupid aloud to the fictional children.)

Life imitates art, Farrokh was thinking, when Martin Mills announced, “Here’s a refreshingly frank opinion.” Martin had found the Opinion section of The Times of India; he was reading one of the letters. “Listen to this,” the missionary said. “‘Our culture will have to be changed. It should start in primary schools by teaching boys not to urinate in the open.’”

“Catch them young, in other words,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

Then Ganesh said something that made Madhu laugh.

“What did he say?” Martin asked Farrokh.

“He said there’s no place to pee except in the open,” Dr. Daruwalla replied.

Then Madhu said something that Ganesh clearly approved of.

“What did she say?” the missionary asked.

“She said she prefers to pee in parked cars—particularly at night,” the doctor told him.

When they arrived at the Taj, Madhu’s mouth was full of betel juice; the bloodred spittle overflowed the corners of her mouth.

“No betel chewing in the Taj,” the doctor said. The girl spat the lurid mess on the front tire of Vinod’s taxi; both the dwarf and the Sikh doorman observed, with disgust, how the stain extended into the circular driveway. “You won’t be allowed any paan at the circus,” the doctor reminded Madhu.

“We’re not at the circus yet,” said the sullen little whore.

The circular driveway was overcrowded with taxis and an array of expensive-looking vehicles. The elephant-footed boy said something to Madhu, who was amused.

“What did he say?” the missionary asked Dr. Daruwalla.

“He said there are lots of cars to pee in,” the doctor replied. Then he overheard Madhu telling Ganesh that she’d been in a car like one of the expensive-looking cars before; it didn’t sound like an empty boast, but Farrokh resisted the temptation to translate this information for the Jesuit. As much as Dr. Daruwalla enjoyed shocking Martin Mills, it seemed prurient to speculate on what a child prostitute had been doing in such an expensive-looking car.

“What did Madhu say?” Martin asked Farrokh.

“She said she would use the ladies’ room, instead,” Dr. Daruwalla lied.

“Good for you!” Martin told the girl. When she parted her lips to smile at him, her teeth were brightly smeared from the paan; it was as if her gums were bleeding. The doctor hoped that it was only his imagination that he saw something lewd in Madhu’s smile. When they entered the lobby, Dr. Daruwalla didn’t like the way the doorman followed Madhu with his eyes; the Sikh seemed to know that she wasn’t the sort of girl who was permitted at the Taj. No matter how Deepa had told Vinod to dress her, Madhu didn’t look like a child.

Ganesh was already shivering from the air-conditioning; the cripple looked anxious, as if he thought the Sikh doorman might throw him out. The Taj was no place for a beggar and a child prostitute, Dr. Daruwalla was thinking; it was a mistake to have brought them here.

“We’ll just have some tea,” Farrokh assured the children. “We’ll keep checking on the plane,” the doctor told the missionary. Like Madhu and Ganesh, Martin appeared overwhelmed by the opulence of the lobby. In the few minutes it took Dr. Daruwalla to arrange for special treatment from the assistant manager, some lesser official among the hotel staff had already asked the Jesuit and the children to leave. When that misunderstanding was cleared up, Vinod appeared in the lobby with the paper bag containing the Hawaiian shirt. The dwarf was dutifully observing, without comment, what he thought were Inspector Dhar’s delusions—namely, that the famous actor was a Jesuit missionary in training to be a priest. Dr. Daruwalla had meant to give the Hawaiian shirt to Martin Mills, but the doctor had forgotten the bag in the dwarf’s taxi. (Not just any taxi-walla would have been permitted in the lobby of the Taj, but Vinod was known as Inspector Dhar’s driver.)

When Farrokh presented the Hawaiian shirt to Martin Mills, the missionary was excited.

“Oh, it’s wonderful!” the zealot cried. “I used to have one just like it!”

“Actually, this is the one you used to have,” Farrokh admitted.

“No, no,” Martin whispered. “The shirt I used to have was stolen from me—one of those prostitutes took it.”

“The prostitute gave it back,” Dr. Daruwalla whispered.

“She did? Why, that’s remarkable!” said Martin Mills. “Was she contrite?”

“He, not she,” said Dr. Daruwalla. “No—he wasn’t contrite, I think.”

“What do you mean? He …” the missionary said.

“I mean that the prostitute was a him, not a her,” the doctor told Martin Mills. “He was a eunuch-transvestite—all of them were men. Well, sort of men.”

“What do you mean? Sort of…” the missionary said.

“They’re called hijras—they’ve been emasculated,” the doctor whispered. A typical surgeon, Dr. Daruwalla liked to describe the procedure in exact detail—including the cauterizing of the wound with hot oil, and not forgetting that part of the female anatomy which the puckered scar resembled when it healed.

When Martin Mills came back from the men’s room, he was wearing the Hawaiian shirt, the brilliant colors of which were a contrast to his pallor. Farrokh assumed that the paper bag now contained the shirt that the missionary had been wearing, upon which poor Martin had been sick.

“It’s a good thing that we’re getting these children out of this city,” the zealot gravely told the doctor, who once more happily entertained the notion that life was imitating art. Now, if only the fool would shut up so that the screenwriter could read over his new pages!

Dr. Daruwalla knew that they couldn’t spend the whole day at the Taj. The children were already restless. Madhu might proposition stray guests at the hotel, and the elephant boy would probably steal something—those silver trinkets from the souvenir shop, the doctor supposed. Dr. Daruwalla didn’t dare leave the children with Martin Mills while he phoned Ranjit to check his messages; he wasn’t expecting any messages, anyway—nothing but emergencies happened on Saturday, and the doctor wasn’t on call this weekend.

The girl’s posture further upset Farrokh; Madhu more than slouched in the soft chair—she lolled. Her dress was hiked up nearly to her hips and she stared into the eyes of every man who passed. This certainly detracted from her looking like a child. Worse, Madhu seemed to be wearing perfume; she smelled a little like Deepa to Dr. Daruwalla. (Doubtless Vinod had allowed the girl some access to Deepa’s things, and Madhu had liked the perfume that the dwarf’s wife wore.) Also, the doctor believed that the air-conditioning at the Taj was too comfortable—in fact, it was too cold. At the Government Circuit House in Junagadh, where Dr. Daruwalla had arranged for them all to spend the night, there wouldn’t be any air-conditioning—just ceiling fans—and in the circus, where the children would spend the following night (and every night thereafter), there would be only tents. No ceiling fans… and probably the mosquito netting would be in disrepair. Every second they stayed in the lobby of the Taj, Dr. Daruwalla realized that he was making it harder for the children to adjust to the Great Blue Nile.

Then a most irksome thing happened. A messenger boy was paging Inspector Dhar. The method for paging at the Taj was rudimentary; some thought it quaint. The messenger tramped through the lobby with a chalkboard that dangled brass chimes, treating everyone in the lobby to an insistent dinging. The messenger boy, who thought that he’d recognized Inspector Dhar, stopped in front of Martin Mills and shook the board with its incessant chimes. Chalked on the board was MR DHAR.

“Wrong man,” Dr. Daruwalla told the messenger boy, but the boy continued to shake the chimes. “Wrong man, you moron!” the doctor shouted. But the boy was no moron; he wouldn’t leave without a tip. Once he got it, he strolled casually away, still chiming. Farrokh was furious.

“We’re going now,” he said abruptly.

“Going where?” Madhu asked him.

“To the circus?” asked Ganesh.

“No, not yet—we’re just going somewhere else,” the doctor informed them.

“Aren’t we comfortable here?” the missionary asked.

“Too comfortable,” Dr. Daruwalla replied.

“Actually, a tour of Bombay would be nice—for me,” the scholastic said. “I realize the rest of you are familiar with the city, but possibly there’s something you wouldn’t mind showing me. Public gardens, perhaps. I also like marketplaces.”

Not a great idea, Farrokh knew—to be dragging Dhar’s twin through public places. Dr. Daruwalla was thinking that he could take them all to the Duckworth Club for lunch. It was certain that they wouldn’t run into Dhar at the Taj, because John D. was rehearsing with Detective Patel at the Oberoi; it was therefore likely that they wouldn’t run into John D. at the club, either. As for the outside chance that they might encounter Rahul, it didn’t bother Dr. Daruwalla to contemplate having another look at the second Mrs. Dogar; the doctor would do nothing to arouse her suspicions. But it was too early to go to lunch at the Duckworth Club, and he had to phone for a reservation; without one, Mr. Sethna would be rude to them.

Too Loud for a Library

Back in the Ambassador, the doctor instructed Vinod to drive them to the Asiatic Society Library, opposite Horniman Circle; this was one of those oases in the teeming city—not unlike the Duckworth Club or St. Ignatius—where the doctor was hoping that Dhar’s twin would be safe. Dr. Daruwalla was a member of the Asiatic Society Library; he’d often dozed in the cool, high-ceilinged reading rooms. The larger-than-life statues of literary geniuses had barely noticed the screenwriter’s quiet ascending and descending of the magnificent staircase.

“I’m taking you to the grandest library in Bombay,” Dr. Daruwalla told Martin Mills. “Almost a million books! Almost as many bibliophiles!”

Meanwhile, the doctor told Vinod to drive the children “around and around.” He also told the dwarf that it was important not to let the kids out of the car. They liked riding in the Ambassador, anyway—the anonymity of cruising the city, the secrecy of staring at the passing world. Madhu and Ganesh were unfamiliar with taxi riding; they stared at everyone as if they themselves were invisible—as if the dwarf’s crude Ambassador were equipped with one-way windows. Dr. Daruwalla wondered if this was because they knew they were safe with Vinod; they’d never been safe before.

The doctor had caught just a departing glimpse of the children’s faces. At that moment, they’d looked frightened—frightened of what? It certainly wasn’t that they feared they were being abandoned with a dwarf; they weren’t afraid of Vinod. No; on their faces Farrokh had seen a greater anxiety—that the circus they were supposedly being delivered to was only a dream, that they would never get out of Bombay.

Escaping Maharashtra: it suddenly struck him as a better title than Limo Roulette. But maybe not, Farrokh thought.

“I’m quite fond of bibliophiles,” Martin Mills was saying as they climbed the stairs. For the first time, Dr. Daruwalla was aware of how loudly the scholastic spoke; the zealot was too loud for a library.

“There are over eight hundred thousand volumes here,” Farrokh whispered. “This includes ten thousand manuscripts!”

“I’m glad we’re alone for a moment,” the missionary said in a voice that rattled the wrought iron of the loggia.

“Ssshhh!” the doctor hissed. The marble statues frowned down upon them; 80 or 90 of the library staffers had long ago assumed the frowning air of the statuary, and Dr. Daruwalla foresaw that the zealot with his booming voice would soon be rebuked by one of the slipper-clad, scolding types who scurried through the musty recesses of the Asiatic Society Library. To avoid a confrontation, the doctor steered the scholastic into a reading room with no one in it.

The ceiling fan had snagged the string that turned the fan on and off, and only the slight ticking of the string against the blades disturbed the silence of the moldering air. The dusty books sagged on the carved teak shelves; numbered cartons of manuscripts were stacked against the bookcases; wide-bottomed, leather-padded chairs surrounded an oval table that was strewn with pencils and pads of notepaper. Only one of these chairs was on castors; it was tilted, for it was four-legged and had only three castors—the missing castor, like a paperweight, held down one of the pads of notepaper.

The American zealot, as if compelled by his countrymen’s irritating instinct to appear handy with all things, instantly undertook the task of repairing the broken chair. There were a half-dozen other chairs that the doctor and the missionary could have sat in, and Dr. Daruwalla suspected that the chair with the detached castor had probably maintained its disabled condition, untouched, for the last 10 or 20 years; perhaps the chair had been partially destroyed in celebration of Independence—more than 40 years ago! Yet here was this fool, determined to make it right. Is there no place in town I can take this idiot? Farrokh wondered. Before the doctor could stop the zealot, Martin Mills had upended the chair on the oval table, where it made a loud thump.

“Come on—you must tell me,” the missionary said. “I’m dying to hear the story of your conversion. Naturally, the Father Rector has told me about it.”

Naturally, Dr. Daruwalla thought; Father Julian had doubtless made the doctor come off as a deluded, false convert. Then, suddenly, to Farrokh’s surprise, the missionary produced a knife! It was one of those Swiss Army knives that Dhar liked so much—a kind of toolbox unto itself. With something that resembled a leather-punch, the Jesuit was boring a hole into the leg of the chair. The rotting wood fell on the table.

“It just needs a new screw hole,” Martin explained. “I can’t believe no one knew how to fix it.”

“I suppose people just sat in the other chairs,” Dr. Daruwalla suggested. While the scholastic wrestled with the chair leg, the nasty little tool on the knife suddenly snapped closed, neatly removing a hunk of Martin’s index finger. The Jesuit bled profusely onto a pad of notepaper.

“Now, look, you’ve cut yourself …” Dr. Daruwalla began.

“It’s nothing,” the zealot said, but it was evident that the chair was beginning to make the man of God angry. “I want to hear your story. Come on. I know how it starts… you’re in Goa, aren’t you? You’ve just gone to visit the sainted remains of our Francis Xavier… what’s left of him. And you go to sleep thinking of that pilgrim who bit off St. Francis’s toe.”

“I went to sleep thinking of nothing at all!” Farrokh insisted, his voice rising.

“Ssshhh! This is a library,” the missionary reminded Dr. Daruwalla.

“I know it’s a library!” the doctor cried—too loudly, for they weren’t alone. At first unseen but now emerging from a pile of manuscripts was an old man who’d been sleeping in a corner chair; it was another chair on castors, for it wheeled their way. Its disagreeable rider, who’d been roused from the depths of whatever sleep his reading material had sunk him into, was wearing a Nehru jacket, which (like his hands) was gray from transmitted newsprint.

“Ssshhh!” the old reader said. Then he wheeled back into his corner of the room.

“Maybe we should find another place to discuss my conversion,” Farrokh whispered to Martin Mills.

“I’m going to fix this chair,” the Jesuit replied. Now bleeding onto the chair and the table and the pad of notepaper, Martin Mills jammed the rebellious castor into the inverted chair leg; with another dangerous-looking tool, a stubby screwdriver, he struggled to affix the castor to the chair. “So… you went to sleep… your mind an absolute blank, or so you’re telling me. And then what?”

“I dreamt I was St. Francis’s corpse …” Dr. Daruwalla began.

“Body dreams, very common,” the zealot whispered.

“Ssshhh!” said the old man in the Nehru jacket, from the corner.

“I dreamt that the crazed pilgrim was biting off my toe!” Farrokh hissed.

“You felt this?” Martin asked.

“Of course I felt it!” hissed the doctor.

“But corpses don’t feel, do they?” the scholastic said. “Oh, well… so you felt the bite, and then?”

“When I woke up, my toe was throbbing. I couldn’t stand on that foot, much less walk! And there were bite marks—not broken skin, mind you, but actual teeth marks! Those marks were real! The bite was real!” Farrokh insisted.

“Of course it was real,” the missionary said. “Something real bit you. What could it have been?”

“I was on a balcony—I was in the air!” Farrokh whispered hoarsely.

“Try to keep it down,” the Jesuit whispered. “Are you telling me that this balcony was utterly unapproachable?”

“Through locked doors… where my wife and children were asleep …” Farrokh began.

“Ah, the children!” Martin Mills cried out. “How old were they?”

“I wasn’t bitten by my own children!” Dr. Daruwalla hissed.

“Children do bite, from time to time—or as a prank,” the missionary replied. “I’ve heard that children go through actual biting ages—when they’re especially prone to bite.”

“I suppose my wife could have been hungry, too,” Farrokh said sarcastically.

“There were no trees around the balcony?” Martin Mills asked; he was now both bleeding and sweating over the stubborn chair.

“I see it coming,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “Father Julian’s monkey theory. Biting apes, swinging from vines—is that what you think?”

“The point is, you were really bitten, weren’t you?” the Jesuit asked him. “People get so confused about miracles. The miracle wasn’t that something bit you. The miracle is that you believe! Your faith is the miracle. It hardly matters that it was something… common that triggered it.”

“What happened to my toe wasn’t common!” the doctor cried.

The old reader in the Nehru jacket shot out of his corner on his chair on castors. “Ssshhh!” the old man hissed.

“Are you trying to read or trying to sleep?” the doctor shouted at the old gentleman.

“Come on—you’re disturbing him. He was here first,” Martin Mills told Dr. Daruwalla. “Look!” the scholastic said to the old man, as if the angry reader were a child. “See this chair? I’ve fixed it. Want to try it?” The missionary set the chair on all four castors and rolled it back and forth. The gentleman in the Nehru jacket eyed the zealot warily.

“He has his own chair, for God’s sake,” Farrokh said.

“Come on—give it a try!” the missionary urged the old reader.

“I have to find a telephone,” Dr. Daruwalla pleaded with the zealot. “I should make a reservation for lunch. And we should stay with the children—they’re probably bored.” But, to his dismay, the doctor saw that Martin Mills was staring up at the ceiling fan; the tangled string had caught the handyman’s eye.

“That string is annoying—if you’re trying to read,” the scholastic said. He climbed up on the oval table, which accepted his weight reluctantly.

“You’ll break the table,” the doctor warned him.

“I won’t break the table—I’m thinking of fixing the fan,” Martin Mills replied. Slowly and awkwardly, the Jesuit went from kneeling to standing.

“I can see what you’re thinking—you’re crazy!” Dr. Daruwalla said.

“Come on—you’re just angry about your miracle,” the missionary said. “I’m not trying to take your miracle away from you. I’m only trying to make you see the real miracle. It is simply that you believe—not the silly thing that made you believe. The biting was only a vehicle.”

“The biting was the miracle!” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

“No, no—that’s where you’re wrong,” Martin Mills managed to say, just before the table collapsed under him. Falling, he reached for—and fortunately missed—the fan. The gentleman in the Nehru jacket was the most astonished; when Martin Mills fell, the old reader was cautiously trying out the newly repaired chair. The collapse of the table and the missionary’s cry of alarm sent the old man scrambling. The chair leg with the freshly bored hole rejected the castor. While both the old reader and the Jesuit lay on the floor, Dr. Daruwalla was left to calm down the outraged library staffer who’d shuffled into the reading room in his slippers.

“We were just leaving,” Dr. Daruwalla told the librarian. “It’s too noisy here to concentrate on anything at all!”

Sweating and bleeding and limping, the missionary followed Farrokh down the grand staircase, under the frowning statues. To relax himself, Dr. Daruwalla was chanting, “Life imitates art. Life imitates art.”

“What’s that you say?” asked Martin Mills.

“Ssshhh!” the doctor told him. “This is a library.”

“Don’t be angry about your miracle,” the zealot said.

“It was long ago. I don’t think I believe in anything anymore,” Farrokh replied.

“Don’t say that!” the missionary cried.

“Ssshhh!” Farrokh whispered to him.

“I know, I know,” said Martin Mills. “This is a library.”

It was almost noon. Outside, in the glaring sunlight, they stared into the street without seeing the taxi that was parked at the curb. Vinod had to walk up to them; the dwarf led them to the car as if they were blind. Inside the Ambassador, the children were crying. They were sure that the circus was a myth or a hoax.

“No, no—it’s real,” Dr. Daruwalla assured them. “We’re going there, we really are—it’s just that the plane is delayed.” But what did Madhu or Ganesh know about airplanes? The doctor assumed that they’d never flown; flying would be another terror for them. And when the children saw that Martin Mills was bleeding, they were worried that there’d been some violence. “Only to a chair,” Farrokh said. He was angry at himself, for in the confusion he’d forgotten to reserve his favorite table in the Ladies’ Garden. He knew that Mr. Sethna would find a way to abuse him for this oversight.

A Misunderstanding at the Urinal

As punishment, Mr. Sethna had given the doctor’s table to Mr. and Mrs. Kohinoor and Mrs. Kohinoor’s noisy, unmarried sister. The latter woman was so shrill, not even the bower of flowers in the Ladies’ Garden could absorb her whinnies or brays. Probably on purpose, Mr. Sethna had seated Dr. Daruwalla’s party at a table in a neglected corner of the garden, where the waiters either ignored you or failed to see you from their stations in the dining room. A torn vine of the bougainvillea hung down from the bower and brushed the back of Dr. Daruwalla’s neck like a claw. The good news was it wasn’t Chinese Day. Madhu and Ganesh ordered vegetarian kabobs; the vegetables were broiled or grilled on skewers. It was a dish that children sometimes ate with their fingers. While the doctor hoped that Madhu’s and Ganesh’s unfamiliarity with knives and forks would go unnoticed, Mr. Sethna speculated on whose children they were.

The old steward observed that the cripple had kicked his one sandal off; the calluses on the sole of the boy’s good foot were as thick as a beggar’s. The foot the elephant had stepped on was still concealed by the sock, which was already gray-brown, and it didn’t fool Mr. Sethna, who could tell that the hidden foot was oddly flattened—the boy had limped on his heel. On the ball of the bad foot, the sock was still mostly white.

As for the girl, the steward detected something lascivious in her posture; furthermore, Mr. Sethna concluded that Madhu had never been in a restaurant before—she stared too openly at the waiters. Dr. Daruwalla’s grandchildren would have been better behaved than this; and although Inspector Dhar had proclaimed to the press that he would sire only Indian babies, these children bore no resemblance to the famous actor.

As for the actor, he looked awful, Mr. Sethna thought. Possibly he’d forgotten to wear his makeup. Inspector Dhar looked pale and in need of sleep; his gaudy shirt was outrageous, there was blood on his pants and overnight his physique had deteriorated—he must be suffering from acute diarrhea, the old steward determined. How else does one manage to lose 15 to 20 pounds in a day? And had the actor’s head been shaved by muggers, or was his hair falling out? On second thought, Mr. Sethna suspected that Dhar was the victim of a sexually transmitted disease. In a sick culture, where movie actors were revered as demigods, a lifestyle contagion was to be expected. That will bring the bastard down to earth, Mr. Sethna thought. Maybe Inspector Dhar has AIDS! The old steward was sorely tempted to place an anonymous phone call to Stardust or Cine Blitz; surely either of these film-gossip magazines would be intrigued by such a rumor.

“I wouldn’t marry him if he owned the Queen’s Necklace and he offered me half !” cried Mrs. Kohinoor’s unmarried sister. “I wouldn’t marry him if he gave me all of London!”

If you were in London, I could still hear you, thought Dr. Daruwalla. He picked at his pomfret; the fish at the Duckworth Club was unfailingly overcooked—Farrokh wondered why he’d ordered it. He envied how Martin Mills attacked his meat kabobs. The meat kept falling out of the flatbread; because Martin had stripped the skewers and tried to make a sandwich, the missionary’s hands were covered with chopped onions. A dark-green flag of mint leaf was stuck between the zealot’s upper front teeth. As a polite way of suggesting that the Jesuit take a look at himself in a mirror, Farrokh said, “You might want to use the men’s room here, Martin. It’s more comfortable than the facilities at the airport.”

Throughout lunch, Dr. Daruwalla couldn’t stop glancing at his watch, even though Vinod had called Indian Airlines repeatedly; the dwarf predicted a late-afternoon departure at the earliest. They were in no hurry. The doctor had called his office only to learn that there were no messages of any importance; there’d been just one call for him, and Ranjit had handled the matter competently. Mr. Garg had phoned for the mailing address, in Junagadh, of the Great Blue Nile Circus; Garg had told Ranjit that he wanted to send Madhu a letter. It was odd that Mr. Garg hadn’t asked Vinod or Deepa for the address, for the doctor had obtained the address from the dwarf’s wife. It was odder still how Garg imagined that Madhu could read a letter, or even a postcard; Madhu couldn’t read. But the doctor guessed that Mr. Garg was euphoric to learn that Madhu was not HIV-positive; maybe the creep wanted to send the poor child a thank-you note, or merely give her good-luck wishes.

Now, short of telling him that he wore a mint leaf on his front teeth, there seemed no way to compel Martin Mills to visit the men’s room. The scholastic took the children to the card room; there he tried in vain to teach them crazy eights. Soon the cards were speckled with blood; the zealot’s index finger was still bleeding. Rather than unearth his medical supplies from his suitcase, which was in the Ambassador—besides, the doctor had packed nothing as simple as a Band-Aid—Farrokh asked Mr. Sethna for a small bandage. The old steward delivered the Band-Aid to the card room with characteristic scorn and inappropriate ceremony; he presented the bandage to Martin Mills on the silver serving tray, which the steward extended at arm’s length. Dr. Daruwalla took this occasion to tell the Jesuit, “You should probably wash that wound in the men’s room—before you bandage it.”

But Martin Mills washed and bandaged his finger without once looking in the mirror above the sink, or in the full-length mirror—except at some distance, and only to appraise his lost-and-found Hawaiian shirt. The missionary never spotted the mint leaf on his teeth. He did, however, notice a tissue dispenser near the flush handle for the urinal, and he noted further that every flush handle had a tissue dispenser in close proximity to it. These tissues, when used, were not carelessly deposited in the urinals; rather, there was a silver bucket at the end of the lineup of urinals, something like an ice bucket without ice, and the used tissues were deposited in it.

This system seemed exceedingly fastidious and ultra-hygienic to Martin Mills, who reflected that he’d never wiped his penis with a tissue before. The process of urinating was made to seem more important, certainly more solemn, by the expectation of wiping one’s penis after the act. At least, this is what Martin Mills assumed the tissues were for. It troubled him that no other Duckworthians were urinating at any of the other urinals; therefore, he couldn’t be sure of the purpose of the tissue dispensers. He was about to finish peeing as usual—that is, without wiping himself—when the unfriendly old steward who had presented the Jesuit with his Band-Aid entered the men’s room. The silver serving tray was stuck in one armpit and rested against the forearm of the same arm, as if Mr. Sethna were carrying a rifle.

Because someone was watching him, Martin Mills thought he should use a tissue. He tried to wipe himself as if he always completed a responsible act of urination in this fashion; but he was so unfamiliar with the process, the tissue briefly caught on the end of his penis and then fell into the urinal. What was the protocol in the case of such a mishap? Martin wondered. The steward’s beady eyes were fastened on the. Jesuit. As if inspired, Martin Mills seized several fresh tissues, and with these held between his bandaged index finger and his thumb, he plucked the lost tissue from the urinal. With a flourish, he deposited the bunch of tissues in the silver bucket, which tilted suddenly, and almost toppled; the missionary had to steady it with both hands. Martin tried to smile reassuringly to Mr. Sethna, but he realized that because he’d grabbed the silver bucket with both hands, he’d neglected to return his penis to his pants. Maybe this was why the old steward looked away.

When Martin Mills had left the men’s room, Mr. Sethna gave the missionary’s urinal a wide berth; the steward peed as far away as possible from where the diseased actor had peed. It was definitely a sexually transmitted disease, Mr. Sethna thought. The steward had never witnessed such a grotesque example of urination. He couldn’t imagine the medical necessity of dabbing one’s penis every time one peed. The old steward didn’t know for certain if there were other Duckworthians who made the same use of the tissue dispensers as Martin Mills had made. For years, Mr. Sethna had assumed that the tissues were for wiping one’s fingers. And now, after he’d wiped his fingers, Mr. Sethna accurately deposited his tissue in the silver bucket, ruefully reflecting on the fate of Inspector Dhar. Once a demigod, now a terminal patient. For the first time since he’d poured hot tea on the head of that fop wearing the wig, the world struck Mr. Sethna as fair and just.

In the card room, while Martin Mills had been experimenting at the urinal, Dr. Daruwalla realized why the children had such difficulty in grasping crazy eights, or any other card game. No one had ever taught them their numbers; not only could they not read, they couldn’t count. The doctor was holding up his fingers with the corresponding playing card—three fingers with the three of hearts—when Martin Mills returned from the men’s room, still sporting the mint leaf on his front teeth.

Fear No Evil

Their plane to Rajkot took off at 5:10 in the afternoon, not quite eight hours after its scheduled departure. It was a tired-looking 737. The inscription on the fuselage was legible but faded.

Dr. Daruwalla quickly calculated that the plane had first been put in service in India in 1987. Where it had flown before then was anybody’s guess.

Their departure was further delayed by the need of the petty officials to confiscate Martin Mills’s Swiss Army knife—a potential terrorist’s tool. The pilot would carry the “weapon” in his pocket and hand it over to Martin in Rajkot.

“Well, I suppose I’ll never see it again,” the missionary said; he didn’t say this stoically, but more like a martyr.

Farrokh wasted no time in teasing him. “It can’t matter to you,” the doctor told him. “You’ve taken a vow of poverty, haven’t you?”

“I know what you think about my vows,” Martin replied. “You think that, because I’ve accepted poverty, I must have no fondness for material things. This shirt, for example—my knife, my books. And you think that, because I’ve accepted chastity, I must be free of sexual desire. Well, I’ll tell you: I resisted the commitment to become a priest not only because of how much I did like my few things, but also because I imagined I was in love. For ten years, I was smitten. I not only suffered from sexual desire; I’d embraced a sexual obsession. There was absolutely no getting this person out of my mind. Does this surprise you?”

“Yes, it does,” Dr. Daruwalla admitted humbly. He was also afraid of what the lunatic might confess in front of the children, but Ganesh and Madhu were too enthralled with the airplane’s preparations for takeoff to pay the slightest attention to the Jesuit’s confession.

“I continued to teach at this wretched school—the students were delinquents, not scholars—and all because I had to test myself,” Martin Mills told Dr. Daruwalla. “The object of my desire was there. Were I to leave, to run away, I would never have known if I had the strength to resist such a temptation. And so I stayed. I forced myself into the closest possible proximity to this person, only to see if I had the courage to withstand such an attraction. But I know what you think of priestly denial. You think that priests are people who simply don’t feel these ordinary desires, or who feel them less strongly than you do.”

“I’m not judging you!” said Dr. Daruwalla.

“Yes you are,” Martin replied. “You think you know all about me.”

“This person that you were in love with …” the doctor began.

“It was another teacher at the school,” the missionary answered. “I was crippled by desire. But I kept the object of my desire this close to me!” And here the zealot held his hand in front of his face. “Eventually, the attraction lessened.”

“Lessened?” Farrokh repeated.

“Either the attraction went away or I overcame it,” said Martin Mills. “Finally, I won.”

“What did you win?” Farrokh asked.

“Not freedom from desire,” the would-be priest declared. “It is more like freedom from the fear of desire. Now I know I can resist it.”

“But what about her?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“Her?” said Martin Mills.

“I mean, what were her feelings for you?” the doctor asked him. “Did she even know how you felt about her?”

“Him,” the missionary replied. “It was a he, not a she. Does that surprise you?”

“Yes, it does,” the doctor lied. What surprised him was how unsurprised he was by the Jesuit’s confession. The doctor was upset without understanding why; Farrokh felt greatly disturbed, without knowing the reason.

But the plane was taxiing, and even its lumbering movement on the runway was sufficient to panic Madhu; she’d been sitting across the aisle from Dr. Daruwalla and the missionary—now she wanted to move over and sit with the doctor. Ganesh was happily ensconced in the window seat. Awkwardly, Martin Mills changed places with Madhu; the Jesuit sat with the enraptured boy, and the child prostitute slipped into the aisle seat next to Farrokh.

“Don’t be frightened,” the doctor told her.

“I don’t want to go to the circus,” the girl said; she stared down the aisle, refusing to look out the windows. She wasn’t alone in her inexperience; half the passengers appeared to be flying for the first time. One hand reached to adjust the flow of air; then 35 other hands were reaching. Despite the repeated announcement that carry-on baggage be stowed under the seats, the passengers insisted on piling their heavy bags on what the flight attendant kept calling the hat rack, although there were few hats on board. Perhaps the fault lay with the long delay, but there were many flies on board; they were treated with a vast indifference by the otherwise excited passengers. Someone was already vomiting, and they hadn’t even taken off. At last, they took off.

The elephant boy believed he could fly. His animation appeared to be lifting the plane. The little beggar will ride a lion if they tell him to; he’ll wrestle a tiger, Dr. Daruwalla thought. How suddenly the doctor felt afraid for the cripple! Ganesh would climb to the top of the tent—the full 80 feet. Probably in compensation for his useless foot, the boy’s hands and arms were exceptionally strong. What instincts will protect him? the doctor wondered, while in his arms he felt Madhu tremble; she was moaning. In her slight bosom, the beating of her heart throbbed against Farrokh’s chest.

“If we crash, do we burn or fly apart in little pieces?” the girl asked him, her mouth against his throat.

“We won’t crash, Madhu,” he told her.

“You don’t know,” she replied. “At the circus, I could be eaten by a wild animal or I could fall. And what if they can’t train me or if they beat me?”

“Listen to me,” said Dr. Daruwalla. He was a father again. He remembered his daughters—their nightmares, their scrapes and bruises and their worst days at school. Their awful first boyfriends, who were beyond redemption. But the consequences for the crying girl in his arms were greater. “Try to look at it this way,” the doctor said. “You are escaping.” But he could say no more; he knew only what she was escaping—not what she was fleeing to. Out of the jaws of one kind of death, into the jaws of another… I hope not, was all the doctor thought.

“Something will get me,” Madhu replied. With her hot, shallow breathing against his neck, Farrokh instantly knew why Martin Mills’s admission of homosexual desire had distressed him. If Dhar’s twin was fighting against his sexual inclination, what was John D. doing?

Dr. Duncan Frasier had convinced Dr. Daruwalla that homosexuality was more a matter of biology than of conditioning. Frasier had once told Farrokh that there was a 52 percent chance that the identical twin of a gay male would also be gay. Furthermore, Farrokh’s friend and colleague Dr. Macfarlane had convinced him that homosexuality was immutable. (“If homosexuality is a learned behavior, how come it can’t be unlearned?” Mac had said.)

But what upset Dr. Daruwalla was not the doctor’s sudden conviction that John D. must also be a homosexual; rather, it was all the years of John D.’s aloofness and the remoteness of his Swiss life. Neville, not Danny, must have been the twins’ father, after all! And what does it say about me that John D. wouldn’t tell me? the doctor wondered.

Instinctively (as if she were his beloved John D.), Farrokh hugged the girl. Later, he supposed that Madhu only did as she’d been taught to do; she hugged him back, but in an inappropriately wriggling fashion. It shocked him; he pulled away from her when she began to kiss his throat.

“No, please …” he began to say.

Then the missionary spoke to him. Clearly, the elephant boy’s delight with flying had delighted Martin Mills. “Look at him! I’ll bet he’d try to walk on the wing, if we told him it was safe!” the zealot said.

“Yes, I’ll bet he would,” said Dr. Daruwalla, whose gaze never left Madhu’s face. The fear and confusion of the child prostitute were a mirror of Farrokh’s feelings.

“What do you want?” the girl whispered to him.

“No, it’s not what you think… I want you to escape,” the doctor told her. The concept meant nothing to her; she didn’t respond. She continued to stare at him; in her eyes, trust still lingered with her confusion. At the bloodred edge of her lips, the unnatural redness once more overflowed her mouth; Madhu was eating paan again. Where she’d kissed Farrokh, his throat was marked with the lurid stain, as if a vampire had bitten him. He touched the mark and his fingertips came away with the color on them. The Jesuit saw him staring at his hand.

“Did you cut yourself?” Martin Mills asked.

“No, I’m fine,” Dr. Daruwalla replied, but he wasn’t. Farrokh was admitting to himself that he knew even less about desire than the would-be priest did.

Probably sensing his confusion, Madhu once more pressed herself against the doctor’s chest. Once again, in a whisper, she asked him, “What do you want?” It horrified the doctor to realize that Madhu was asking him a sexual question.

“I want you to be a child, because you are a child,” Farrokh told the girl. “Please, won’t you try to be a child?” There was such an eagerness in Madhu’s smile that, for a moment, the doctor believed the girl had understood him. Quite like a child, she walked her fingers over his thigh; then, unlike a child, Madhu pressed her small palm firmly on Dr. Daruwalla’s penis. There’d been no groping for it; she’d known exactly where it was. Through the summer-weight material of his pants, the doctor felt the heat of Madhu’s hand.

“I’ll try what you want—anything you want,” the child prostitute told him. Instantly, Dr. Daruwalla pulled her hand away.

“Stop that!” Farrokh cried.

“I want to sit with Ganesh,” the girl told him. Farrokh let her change seats with Martin Mills.

“There’s a matter I’ve been pondering,” the missionary whispered to the doctor. “You said we had two rooms for the night. Only two?”

“I suppose we could get more …” the doctor began. His legs were shaking.

“No, no—that’s not what I’m getting at,” Martin said. “I mean, were you thinking the children would share one room, and we’d share the other?”

“Yes,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. He couldn’t stop his legs from shaking.

“But—well, I know you’ll think this is silly, but—it would seem prudent to me to not allow them to sleep together. I mean, not in the same room,” the missionary added. “After all, there is the matter of what we can only guess has been the girl’s orientation.”

“Her what?” the doctor asked. He could stop one leg from shaking, but not the other.

“Her sexual experience, I mean,” said Martin Mills. “We must assume she’s had some… sexual contact. What I mean is, what if Madhu is inclined to seduce Ganesh? Do you know what I mean?”

Dr. Daruwalla knew very well what Martin Mills meant. “You have a point,” was all the doctor said in reply.

“Well, then, suppose the boy and I take one room, and you and Madhu take the other? You see, I don’t think the Father Rector would approve of someone in my position sharing a room with the girl,” Martin explained. “It might seem contradictory to my vows.”

“Yes… your vows,” Farrokh replied. Finally, his other leg stopped shaking.

“Do you think I’m being totally silly?” the Jesuit asked the doctor. “I suppose you think it’s idiotic of me to suggest that Madhu might be so inclined—just because the poor child was… what she was.” But Farrokh could feel that he still had an erection, and Madhu had touched him so briefly.

“No, I think you’re wise to be a little worried about her… inclination,” Dr. Daruwalla answered. He spoke slowly because he was trying to remember the popular psalm. “How does it go—the twenty-third psalm?” the doctor asked the scholastic. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …’”

“‘I will fear no evil …’” said Martin Mills.

“Yes—that’s it. ‘I will fear no evil,’” Farrokh repeated.

Dr. Daruwalla assumed that the plane had left Maharashtra; he guessed they were already flying over Gujarat. Below them, the land was flat and dry-looking in the late-afternoon haze. The sky was as brown as the ground. Limo Roulette or Escaping Maharashtra—the screenwriter couldn’t make up his mind between the two titles. Farrokh thought: It depends on what happens—it depends on how the story ends.