A Son of the Circus

No Monkey

It was January 1, 1990, a Monday. It was also Jubilee Day at St. Ignatius School in Mazagaon—the start of the mission’s 126th year. Well-wishers were invited to a high tea, which amounted to a light supper in the early evening; this was scheduled to follow a special late-afternoon Mass. This was also the occasion that would formally serve to introduce Martin Mills to the Catholic community in Bombay; therefore, Father Julian and Father Cecil regretted that the scholastic had returned from the circus in such mutilated condition. The previous night, Martin had frightened Brother Gabriel, who mistook the mauled figure with his bloodstained and unraveling bandages for the wandering spirit of a previously persecuted Jesuit—some poor soul who’d been tortured and then put to death.

Earlier that same night, the zealot had prevailed upon Father Cecil to hear his confession. Father Cecil was so tired, he fell asleep before he could give Martin absolution. Typically, Martin’s confession seemed unending—nor had Father Cecil caught the gist of it before he nodded off. It struck the old priest that Martin Mills was confessing nothing more serious than a lifelong disposition to complain.

Martin had begun by enumerating his several disappointments with himself, beginning with the period of his novitiate at St. Aloysius in Massachusetts. Father Cecil tried to listen closely, for there was a tone of urgency in the scholastic’s voice; yet young Martin’s capacity for finding fault with himself was vast—the poor priest soon felt that his participation in Martin’s confession was superfluous. For example, as a novice at St. Aloysius, Martin confessed, a significantly holy event had been entirely wasted on him; Martin had been unimpressed by the visit of the sacred arm of St. Francis Xavier to the Massachusetts novitiate. (Father Cecil didn’t think this was so bad.)

The acolyte bearing the saint’s severed arm was the famous Father Terry Finney, S.J.; Father Finney had selflessly undertaken the task of carrying the golden reliquary around the world. Martin confessed that, to him, the holy arm had been nothing but a skeletal limb under glass, like something partially eaten—like a leftover, Martin Mills had observed. Only now could the scholastic bear to confess having had such blasphemous thoughts. (By this time, Father Cecil was fast asleep.)

There was more; it troubled Martin that the issue of Divine Grace had taken him years to resolve to his satisfaction. And sometimes the scholastic felt he was merely making a conscious effort not to think about it. Old Father Cecil really should have heard this, for Martin Mills was dangerously full of doubt. The confession would eventually lead young Martin to his present disappointment with himself, which was the way he’d behaved on the trip to and from the circus.

The scholastic said he was guilty of loving the crippled boy more than he loved the child prostitute; his abhorrence of prostitution caused him to feel almost resigned to the girl’s fate. And Dr. Daruwalla had provoked the Jesuit on the sensitive matter of homosexuality; Martin was sorry that he’d spoken to the doctor in an intellectually arrogant fashion. At this point, Father Cecil was sleeping so soundly, the poor priest never woke when he slumped forward in the confessional and his nose poked between the latticework where Martin Mills could see it.

When Martin saw the old priest’s nose, he knew that Father Cecil was dead to the world. He didn’t want to embarrass the poor man; however, it wasn’t right to leave him sleeping in such an uncomfortable position. That was why the missionary crept away and went looking for Brother Gabriel; that was when poor Brother Gabriel mistook the wildly bandaged scholastic for a persecuted Christian from the past. After his fear had subsided, Brother Gabriel went to wake up Father Cecil, who thereafter suffered a sleepless night; the priest couldn’t remember what Martin Mills had confessed, or whether or not he’d given the zealot absolution.

Martin slept blissfully. Even without absolution, it had felt good to say all those things against himself; tomorrow was soon enough for someone to hear his full confession—perhaps he’d ask Father Julian this time. Although Father Julian was scarier than Father Cecil, the Father Rector was also a bit younger. Thus, with his conscience clear and no bugs in his bed, Martin would sleep through the night. Full of doubt one minute, brimming with conviction the next, the missionary was a walking contradiction—he was dependably unreliable.

Nancy also slept through the night; one couldn’t claim that she slept “blissfully,” but at least she slept. Surely the champagne helped. She wouldn’t hear the ringing of the phone, which Detective Patel answered in the kitchen. It was 4:00 on the morning of New Year’s Day, and at first the deputy commissioner was relieved that the call was not from the surveillance officer who’d been assigned to watch the Dogars’ house on old Ridge Road, Malabar Hill; it was a homicide report from the red-light district in Kamathipura—a prostitute had been murdered in one of the arguably better brothels. Ordinarily, no one would have awakened the deputy commissioner with such a report, but both the investigating officer and the medical examiner were certain that the crime was Dhar-related. Once again, there was the elephant drawing on the belly of the murdered whore, but there was also a fearsome new twist to this killing, which the caller was sure Detective Patel would want to see.

As for the surveillance officer, the subinspector who was watching the Dogars’ house, he might as well have slept through the night, too. He swore that Mrs. Dogar had never left her house; only Mr. Dogar had left. The subinspector, whom the deputy commissioner would later reassign to something harmless, like answering letters of complaint, declared that he knew it was Mr. Dogar because of the old man’s characteristic shuffle; also, the figure was stooped. Then there was the matter of the baggy suit, which was gray. It was a man’s suit of an exceedingly loose fit—not what Mr. Dogar had worn to the New Year’s Eve party at the Duckworth Club—and with it Mr. Dogar wore a white shirt, open at the throat. The old man climbed into a taxi at about 2:00 A.M.; he returned to his house, in another taxi, at 3:45 A.M. The surveillance officer (whom the deputy commissioner would also later demote from subinspector to constable) had smugly assumed that Mr. Dogar was visiting either a mistress or a prostitute.

Definitely a prostitute, thought Detective Patel. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been Mr. Dogar.

The madam at the questionably better brothel in Kamathipura told the deputy commissioner that it was her brothel’s policy to turn out the lights at 1:00 or 2:00 A.M., depending on the volume of customers or the lack thereof. After the lights were out, she accepted only all-night visitors; to spend the night with one of her girls, the madam charged from 100 rupees on up. The “old man” who’d arrived after 2:00 A.M., when the brothel was dark, had offered 300 rupees for the madam’s smallest girl.

Detective Patel first thought the madam must have meant her youngest girl, but the madam said she was sure that the gentleman had requested her “smallest”; in any case, that’s what he got. Asha was a very small, delicate girl—about 15, the madam declared. About 13, the deputy commissioner guessed.

Because the lights were out and there were no other girls in the hallway, no one but the madam and Asha saw the alleged old man—he wasn’t that old, the madam believed. He wasn’t at all stooped, either, the madam recalled, but (like the soon-to-be-demoted surveillance officer) she noted how loosely the suit fit him and that it was gray. “He” was very clean-shaven, except for a thin mustache—the latter was false, Detective Patel assumed—and an unusual hairdo… here the madam held her hands high above her forehead and said, “But it was cut short in the back, and over the ears.”

“Yes, I know—a pompadour,” Patel said. He knew that the hair would not have been silver, streaked with white, but he asked the question anyway.

“No, it was black, streaked with silver,” the madam said.

And no one had seen the “old man” leave. The madam had been awakened by the presence of a nun. She’d heard what she thought was someone trying to open the door from the street; when she went to see, there was a nun outside the door—it must have been about 3:00 in the morning.

“Do you see a lot of nuns in this district at that hour?” the deputy commissioner asked her.

“Of course not!” the madam cried. She’d asked the nun what she wanted, and the nun had replied that she was searching for a Christian girl from Kerala; the madam responded that she had no Kerala Christians in her house.

“And what color was the nun’s habit?” Patel asked, although he knew the answer would be “gray,” which it was. It wasn’t an unusual color for a habit of tropical weight, but it was also something that could have been fashioned from the same gray suit that Mrs. Dogar had worn when she came to the brothel. The baggy suit had probably fitted over the habit; then, in turn, the habit fit over the suit, or parts of the habit and the suit were one and the same—at least the same fabric. The white shirt could have various uses; maybe it was rolled, like a high collar, or else it could cover the head, like a kind of cowl. The detective presumed that the alleged nun didn’t have a mustache. (“Of course not!” the madam declared.) And because the nun had covered her head, the madam wouldn’t have noticed the pompadour.

The only reason the madam had found the dead girl so soon was that she’d been unable to fall back asleep; first, one of the all-night customers was shouting, and then, when it was finally quiet, the madam had heard the sound of water boiling, although it wasn’t time for tea. In the dead girl’s cubicle, a pot of water had come to a boil on a heating coil; that was how the madam discovered the body. Otherwise, it might have been 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning before the other prostitutes would have noticed that tiny Asha wasn’t up and about.

The deputy commissioner asked the madam about the sound of someone trying to open the door from the street—the sound that had awakened her. Wouldn’t the door have made the same sound if it had been opened from the inside, and then closed behind the departing nun? The madam admitted that this would have made the same sound; in short, if the madam hadn’t heard the door, she never would have seen the nun. And by the time Mrs. Dogar took a taxi home, she was no longer a nun at all.

Detective Patel was exceedingly polite in asking the madam a most obvious question: “Would you consider the idea that the not-so-old man and the nun were in fact the same person?” The madam shrugged; she doubted she could identify either of them. When the deputy commissioner pressed her on this point, all the madam would add was that she’d been sleepy; both the not-so-old man and the nun had woken her up.

Nancy was still not awake when Detective Patel returned to his flat; he’d already typed a scathing report, demoting the surveillance officer and consigning him to the mailroom of Grime Branch Headquarters. The deputy commissioner wanted to be home when his wife woke up; he also didn’t want to call Inspector Dhar and Dr. Daruwalla from the police station. Detective Patel thought he’d let them all sleep a little longer.

The deputy commissioner determined that Asha’s neck had been broken so cleanly for two reasons. One, she was small; two, she’d been completely relaxed. Rahul must have coaxed her over onto her stomach, as if to prepare her for sex in that position. But of course there’d been no sex. The deep fingerprint bruises in the prostitute’s eye sockets—and on her throat, just below her jaw—suggested that Mrs. Dogar had grabbed Asha’s face from behind; she’d wrenched the small girl’s head back and to one side, until Asha’s neck snapped.

Then Rahul had rolled Asha onto her back in order to make the drawing on her belly. Although the drawing was of the usual kind, it was of less than the usual quality; it suggested undue haste, which was strange—there was no urgency for Mrs. Dogar to leave the brothel. Yet something had compelled Rahul to hurry. As for the fearsome “new twist” to this killing, it sickened Detective Patel. The dead girl’s lower lip was bitten clean through. Asha could not have been bitten so savagely while she was alive; her screams would have awakened the entire brothel. No; the bite had occurred after the murder and after the drawing. The minimal amount of bleeding indicated that Asha had been bitten after her heart had stopped. It was the idea of biting the girl that had made Mrs. Dogar hurry, the policeman thought. She couldn’t wait to finish the drawing because Asha’s lower lip was so tempting to her.

Even such slight bleeding had made a mess, which was uncharacteristic of Rahul. It must have been Mrs. Dogar who put the pot of water on the heating coil; her own face, at least her mouth, must have been marked with the prostitute’s blood. When the water was warm, Rahul dipped some of the dead girl’s clothes in the pot and used them to wash the blood off herself. Then she left—as a nun—forgetting that the heating coil was on. The boiling water had brought the madam. Although the nun had been a smart idea, this had otherwise been a sloppy job.

Nancy woke up about 8:00; she had a hangover, but Detective Patel didn’t hesitate to tell her what had happened. He could hear her being sick in the bathroom; he called the actor first, then the screenwriter. He told Dhar about the lip, but not the doctor; with Dr. Daruwalla, the deputy commissioner wanted to emphasize the importance of a good script for Dhar’s lunch with Mrs. Dogar. Patel told them both that he would have to arrest Rahul today; he hoped he had enough circumstantial evidence to arrest her. Whether or not he had enough evidence to keep her—that was another story. That was what he was counting on the actor and the screenwriter for: they had to make something happen over lunch.

Deputy Commissioner Patel was encouraged by one thing that the gullible surveillance officer had told him. After the disguised Mrs. Dogar had shuffled out of the taxi and into her house, the lights were turned on in a ground-floor room—not a bedroom—and these lights remained on well after daybreak. The deputy commissioner hoped that Rahul had been drawing.

As for Dr. Daruwalla, his first good night’s sleep—for five nights, and counting—had been interrupted rather early. He had no surgeries scheduled for New Year’s Day, and no office appointments, either; he’d been planning to sleep in. But upon hearing from Detective Patel, the screenwriter called John D. immediately. There was a lot to do before Dhar’s lunch at the Duckworth Club; there would be much rehearsing—some of it would be awkward, because Mr. Sethna would have to be involved. The deputy commissioner had already notified the old steward.

It was from John D. that Farrokh heard about Asha’s lower lip.

“Rahul must have been thinking of you!” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

“Well, we know she has a thing about biting,” Dhar told the doctor. “In all likelihood, it started with you.”

“What do you mean?” Dr. Daruwalla asked, for John D. hadn’t told him that Mrs. Dogar had confessed to gnawing on the doctor’s toe.

“It all started with the big toe of your right foot, in Goa,” John D. began. “That was Rahul who bit you. You were right all along—it was no monkey.”

The Wrong Madhu

That Monday, well before meat-feeding time at the Great Blue Nile Circus in Junagadh, the elephant-footed boy would wake up to the steady coughs of the lions; their low roars rose and fell as regularly as breathing. It was a cold morning in that part of Gujarat. For the first time in his life, Ganesh could see his own breath; the huffs of breath from the lions were like blasts of steam escaping from their cages.

The Muslims delivered the meat in a wooden wagon, dotted with flies; the entire floor of the wagon was lifted from the cart and placed on the ground between the cook’s tent and the big cats’ cages—the raw beef was piled on this slab of rough wood, which was the approximate size of a double door. Even in the cold morning air, the flies hovered over the meat, which Chandra sorted. Sometimes there was mutton mixed in with the beef, and the cook wanted to rescue it; mutton was too expensive for lions and tigers.

The big cats were bellowing now; they could smell the meat, and some of them could see the cook separating the choicer pieces of mutton. If the elephant boy was frightened by how savagely the lions and tigers devoured the raw beef, Dr. Daruwalla would never learn of it; nor would the doctor ever know if the sight of the lions slipping in the meat grease upset the cripple. At the circus, it was one of the few things that always upset the doctor.

That same Monday, someone proposed to marry Madhu. The proposal, as was only proper, was first offered to Mr. and Mrs. Das; the ringmaster and his wife were surprised. Not only had they not begun to train the girl, but, because Madhu was untrained, she wasn’t in evidence among the performers; yet the marriage proposal was offered by a gentleman who claimed to have been in the audience for the late-evening show on Sunday. Here he was, the following morning, professing his instant devotion!

The Bengali ringmaster and his wife had children of their own; their kids had rejected the circus life. But Mr. and Mrs. Das had trained many other children to be circus acrobats; they were kind to these adopted kids and especially protective of the girls. After all, when these girls were properly trained, they were of some value—not only to the circus. They had acquired a little glamour; they’d even earned some money, which they’d had no occasion to spend—hence the ringmaster and his wife were used to keeping dowries for them.

Mr. and Mrs. Das conscientiously advised the girls whether or not a marriage proposal was worthy of acceptance or negotiation, and they routinely gave up these adopted daughters—always to decent marriages, and often making their own contributions to the girls’ dowries. In many cases, the ringmaster and his wife had grown so fond of these children that it broke their hearts to see them go. Almost all the girls would eventually leave the circus; the few who stayed became trainers.

Madhu was very young and totally unproven, and she had no dowry. Yet here was a gentleman of means, well dressed, clearly a city person—he owned property and managed an entertainment business in Bombay—and he was offering Madhu a marriage proposal that Mr. and Mrs. Das found extremely generous; he would take the poor girl without a dowry. Doubtless, in these premarital negotiations, there would have been some substantive discussion of the remuneration that the ringmaster and his wife deserved, for (who knows?) Madhu might have become a star of the Great Blue Nile. From Mr. and Mrs. Das’s point of view, they were offered a sizable payment for a sullen girl who might never prove herself to be any kind of acrobat at all. It wasn’t as if they were being asked to part with a young woman they’d grown fond of; they’d barely had time to talk with Madhu.

It may have crossed the Bengalis’ minds to consult the doctor or the missionary; Mr. and Mrs. Das at least should have discussed the would-be marriage with Deepa, but the dwarf’s wife was still sick. So what if Deepa was the one who’d spotted Madhu as a future boneless girl? The dwarf’s wife was still confined to her tent. Moreover, the ringmaster held a grudge against Vinod. Mr. Das was envious of the dwarf’s car-driving business; since Vinod had left the Great Blue Nile, the dwarf hadn’t hesitated to exaggerate his success. And the ringmaster’s wife felt herself to be vastly superior to the dwarf’s wife; to consult with Deepa was beneath Mrs. Das—even if Deepa were healthy. Besides, Mrs. Das quickly persuaded her husband that Madhu’s marriage proposal was a good deal. (It was certainly a good deal for them.)

If Madhu wasn’t interested, they’d keep the silly child in the circus; but if the unworthy girl had the wisdom to recognize her good fortune, the ringmaster and his wife would let her go, with their blessings. As for the crippled brother, the gentleman from Bombay appeared to know nothing about him. Mr. and Mrs. Das felt some responsibility for the fact that the elephant-footed boy would be left on his own; they had considered it prudent to promise Dr. Daruwalla and Martin Mills that Ganesh would be given every chance to succeed. The ringmaster and his wife saw no reason to discuss Ganesh with Deepa; the cripple hadn’t been a discovery of hers—she’d only claimed to discover the boneless girl. And what if the dwarf’s wife had something contagious?

A phone call to the doctor or the missionary would have been an appreciated courtesy—if nothing more. But there were no telephones at the circus; a trip to either the post office or the telegraph office would have been required, and Madhu surprised the ringmaster and his wife by her immediate and unrestrained acceptance of the marriage proposal. She didn’t feel that the gentleman was too old for her, as Mr. Das had feared; nor was Madhu repelled by the gentleman’s physical appearance, which had been the primary concern of Mrs. Das. The ringmaster’s wife was repulsed by the gentleman’s disfiguring scar—some sort of burn, she supposed—but Madhu made no mention of it, nor did she otherwise seem to mind such a hideous flaw.

Probably sensing, in advance, Dr. Daruwalla’s disapproval, the ringmaster would wisely send a telegram to Martin Mills; the missionary had struck Mr. and Mrs. Das as the more relaxed of the two—by which they meant the more accepting. Furthermore, the Jesuit had seemed slightly less concerned for Madhu’s prospects—or else the doctor’s concern had been more apparent. And because it was Jubilee Day at St. Ignatius, the school offices were closed; it would be Tuesday before anyone handed the telegram to Martin. Mr. Garg would already have brought his young wife back to the Wetness Cabaret.

Naturally, it was in the Bengali’s best interests to make his telegram sound upbeat.

By the time Dr. Daruwalla would hear the news, the doctor would be kicking himself; he should have known all along—for why else would Mr. Garg have asked Ranjit for the address of the Great Blue Nile? Surely Mr. Garg, like Dr. Daruwalla, knew that Madhu couldn’t read; Acid Man had never intended to send the girl a letter. And when Ranjit gave Farrokh the message (that Garg had requested the circus’s address), the faithful secretary failed to inform the doctor that Garg had also inquired when the doctor was returning from Junagadh. That same Sunday, when Dr. Daruwalla left the circus, Mr. Garg went there.

Farrokh wouldn’t be persuaded by Vinod’s notion—that Garg was so smitten by Madhu, he couldn’t let her go. Maybe Mr. Garg had been unprepared for how much he would miss Madhu, the dwarf said. Deepa insisted on the importance of the fact that Acid Man had actually married Madhu; surely Garg had no intentions of sending the girl back to a brothel—not after he’d married her. The dwarf’s wife would add that perhaps it was Madhu’s “lucky day.”

But this particular news wouldn’t find its way to Dr. Daruwalla on Jubilee Day. This news would wait. Waiting with it was worse news. Ranjit would hear it first, and the medical secretary would elect to spare the doctor such bad tidings; they were unsuitable tidings for New Year’s Day. But the busy office of Tata Two was in full operation on this holiday Monday—there were no holidays for Tata Two. It was Dr. Tata’s ancient secretary, Mr. Subhash, who informed Ranjit of the problem. The two old secretaries conversed in the manner of hostile but toothless male dogs.

“I am having information for the doctor only,” Mr. Subhash began, without bothering to identify himself.

“Then you’ll have to wait until tomorrow,” Ranjit informed the fool.

“This is Mr. Subhash, in Dr. Tata’s office,” the imperious secretary said.

“You’ll still have to wait until tomorrow,” Ranjit told him. “Dr. Daruwalla isn’t here today.”

“This is being important information—the doctor is definitely wanting to know it as soon as possible,” Mr. Subhash said.

“Then tell me,” Ranjit replied.

“Well… she is having it,” Mr. Subhash announced dramatically.

“You’ve got to be clearer than that,” Ranjit told him.

“That girl, Madhu—she is testing positive for HIV,” Mr. Subhash said. Ranjit knew this contradicted the information he’d seen in Madhu’s file; Tata Two had already told Dr. Daruwalla that Madhu’s test was negative. If the girl was carrying the AIDS virus, Ranjit assumed that Dr. Daruwalla wouldn’t have allowed her to go to the circus.

“The ELISA is being positive, and this is being confirmed by Western Blot,” Mr. Subhash was saying.

“But Dr. Tata himself told Dr. Daruwalla that Madhu’s test was negative,” Ranjit said.

“That was definitely the wrong Madhu,” old Mr. Subhash said dismissively. “Your Madhu is being HIV-positive.”

“This is a serious mistake,” Ranjit remarked.

“There is being no mistake,” Mr. Subhash said indignantly. “This is merely a matter of there being two Madhus.” But there was nothing “merely” about the matter.

Ranjit transcribed his phone conversation with Mr. Subhash into a neatly typed report, which he placed on Dr. Daruwalla’s desk; from the existing evidence, the medical secretary concluded that Madhu and Mr. Garg might be sharing something a little more serious than chlamydia. What Ranjit couldn’t have known was that Mr. Garg had gone to Junagadh and retrieved Madhu from the circus; probably Garg had made his plans to bring the girl back to Bombay only after he’d been told that Madhu was not HIV-positive—but maybe not. In the world of the Wetness Cabaret, and throughout the brothels in Kamathipura, a certain fatalism was the norm.

The news about the wrong Madhu would wait for Dr. Daruwalla, too. What was the point of hurrying evil tidings? After all, Ranjit believed that Madhu was still with the circus in Junagadh. As for Mr. Garg, Dr. Daruwalla’s secretary wrongly assumed that Acid Man had never left Bombay. And when Martin Mills called Dr. Daruwalla’s office, Ranjit saw no reason to inform the missionary that Madhu was carrying the AIDS virus. The zealot wanted his bandages changed; he’d been advised by the Father Rector that clean bandages would be more suitable for the Jubilee Day celebration. Ranjit told Martin that he’d have to call the doctor at home. Because Farrokh was hard at work—rehearsing for Rahul, with John D. and old Mr. Sethna—Julia took the message. She was surprised to hear that Dhar’s twin had been bitten by a presumed-to-be-rabid chimpanzee. Martin was surprised, and his feelings were hurt, to hear that Dr. Daruwalla hadn’t informed his wife of the painful episode.

Julia graciously accepted the Jesuit’s invitation to the high tea in honor of Jubilee Day; she promised that she’d bring Farrokh to St. Ignatius before the start of the festivities so that the doctor would have plenty of time to change Martin’s bandages. The scholastic thanked Julia, but when he hung up the phone, he felt overcome by the sheer foreignness of his situation. He’d been in India less than a week; suddenly, everything that was unfamiliar was exacting a toll.

To begin with, the zealot had been taken aback by Father Julian’s response to his confession. The Father Rector had been impatient and argumentative; his absolution had been grudging and abrupt—and it had been hastily followed by Father Julian’s insistence that Martin do something about his soiled and bloody bandages. But the priest and the scholastic had encountered a fundamental misunderstanding. At that point in his confession when Martin Mills had admitted to loving the crippled boy more than he could ever love the child prostitute, Father Julian had interrupted him and told him to be less concerned with his own capacity for love, by which the Father Rector meant that Martin should be more concerned with God’s love and God’s will—and that he should be more humble about his own, merely human role. Martin was a member of the Society of Jesus, and he should behave accordingly; he wasn’t just another egocentric social worker—a do-gooder who was constantly evaluating, criticizing and congratulating himself.

“The fate of these children isn’t in your hands,” Father Julian told the scholastic, “nor will one of them suffer, more or less, because of your love for them—or your lack of love for them. Try to stop thinking so much about yourself. You’re an instrument of God’s will—you’re not your own creation.”

This not only struck the zealot as blunt; Martin Mills was confused. That the Father Rector saw the children as already consigned to their fate seemed remarkably Calvinistic for a Jesuit; Martin feared that Father Julian might also be suffering from the influence of Hinduism, for this notion of the children’s “fate” had a karmic ring. And what was wrong with being a social worker? Hadn’t St. Ignatius Loyola himself been a social worker of unflagging zeal? Or did the Father Rector mean only that Martin shouldn’t take the fate of the circus children too personally? That the scholastic had intervened on the children’s behalf did not mean he was responsible for every little thing that might happen to them.

It was in such a spiritual fog that Martin Mills took a walk in Mazagaon; he hadn’t wandered far from the mission before he encountered that slum which Dr. Daruwalla had first shown to him—the former movie-set slum where his evil mother had fainted when she was stepped on and licked by a cow. Martin remembered that he’d vomited from the moving car.

At midmorning, on this busy Monday, the slum was teeming, but the missionary found that it was better to focus on such abjectness in a microcosmic fashion; rather than look up the length of Sophia Zuber Road for as far as he could see, Martin kept his eyes cast down—at his slowly moving feet. He never allowed his gaze to wander above ground level. Most of the slum dwellers were thus cut off at their ankles; he saw only the children’s faces—naturally, the children were begging. He saw the paws and the inquiring noses of scavenging dogs. He saw a moped that had fallen or crashed in the gutter; a garland of marigolds was entwined on its handlebars, as if the moped were being prepared for cremation. He came upon a cow—a whole cow, not just the hooves, because the cow was lying down. It was hard to navigate around the cow. But when Martin Mills stopped walking, even though he’d been walking slowly, he found himself quickly surrounded; it should be stated clearly in every guidebook for tourists—never stand still in a slum.

The cow’s long sad dignified face gazed up at him; its eyes were rimmed with flies. On the cow’s tawny flank, a patch of the smooth hide was abraded—the raw spot was no bigger than a human fist, but it was encrusted with flies. This apparent abrasion was actually the entrance to a deep hole that had been made in the cow by a vehicle transporting a ship’s mast; but Martin hadn’t witnessed the collision, nor did the milling crowd permit him a comprehensive view of the cow’s mortal wound.

Suddenly, the crowd parted; a procession was passing—all Martin saw was a lunatic mob of flower throwers. When the worshipers had filed by, the cow lay sprinkled with rose petals; some of the flowers were stuck to the wound, alongside the flies. One of the cow’s long legs was extended, for the animal was lying on its side; the hoof almost reached the curb. There in the gutter, within inches of the hoof but entirely untouched, was (unmistakably) a human turd. Beyond the serenely undisturbed turd was a vendor’s stall. They were selling something that looked purposeless to Martin Mills; it was a vivid scarlet powder, but the missionary doubted that it was a spice or anything edible. Some of it spilled into the gutter, where its dazzling red particles coated both the cow’s hoof and the human turd.

That was Martin’s microcosm of India: the mortally wounded animal, the religious ritual, the incessant flies, the unbelievably bright colors, the evidence of casual human shit—and of course the confusion of smells. The missionary had been forewarned: if he couldn’t see beyond such abjectness, he would be of scant use to St. Ignatius—or to any mission in such a world. Shaken, the scholastic wondered if he had the stomach to be a priest. So vulnerable was his state of mind, Martin Mills was fortunate that the news about Madhu was still a day away.

Take Me Home

In the Ladies’ Garden at the Duckworth Club, the noon sun shimmered above the bower. So dense was the bougainvillea, the sun shot through the flowers in pinholes; these beads of bright light dappled the tablecloths like sprinkled diamonds. Nancy passed her hands under the needle-thin rays. She was playing with the sun, trying to reflect its light in her wedding ring, when Detective Patel spoke to her. “You don’t have to be here, sweetie,” her husband said. “You can go home, you know.”

“I want to be here,” Nancy told him.

“I just want to warn you—don’t expect this to be satisfying,” the deputy commissioner said. “Somehow, even when you catch them, it’s never quite satisfying.”

Dr. Daruwalla, who kept looking at his watch, then remarked, “She’s late.”

“They’re both late,” Nancy said.

“Dhar is supposed to be late,” the policeman reminded her.

Dhar was waiting in the kitchen. When the second Mrs. Dogar arrived, Mr. Sethna would observe the increasing degrees of her irritation; when the steward saw that she was clearly agitated, he would send Dhar to her table. Dr. Daruwalla was operating on the theory that agitation inspired Rahul to act rashly.

But when she arrived, they almost didn’t recognize her. She was wearing what Western women familiarly call a little black dress; the skirt was short, with a slight flare, the waist very long and slimming. Mrs. Dogar’s small, high breasts were displayed to good effect. If she’d worn a black-linen jacket, she would have looked almost businesslike, Dr. Daruwalla believed; without a jacket, the dress was more suitable for a cocktail party in Toronto. As if intended to offend Duckworthians, the dress was sleeveless, with spaghetti straps; the brawniness of Rahul’s bare shoulders and upper arms, not to mention the breadth of her chest, hulked ostentatiously. She was too muscular for a dress like that, Farrokh decided; then it occurred to him that this was what she thought Dhar liked.

Yet Mrs. Dogar didn’t move as if she were at all conscious that she was a woman of great strength or noticeable size. Her entry into the Duckworth Club dining room wasn’t in the least aggressive. Her attitude was shy and girlish; rather than stride to her table, she allowed old Mr. Sethna to escort her on his arm—Dr. Daruwalla had never seen her this way. This wasn’t a woman who would ever pick up a spoon or a fork and ring it against her water glass; this was an extremely feminine woman—she would rather starve at her table than cause herself any unflattering attention. She would sit smiling and waiting for Dhar until the club closed and someone sent her home. Apparently, Detective Patel was prepared for this change in her, because the deputy commissioner spoke quickly to the screenwriter; Mrs. Dogar had barely been seated at her table.

“Don’t bother to keep her waiting,” the policeman said. “She’s a different woman today.”

Farrokh summoned Mr. Sethna—to have John D. “arrive”—but all the while the deputy commissioner was watching what Mrs. Dogar did with her purse. It was a table for four, as the screenwriter had suggested; this had been Julia’s idea. When there were only two people at a table for four, Julia said, a woman usually put her purse on one of the empty chairs—not on the floor—and Farrokh had wanted the purse on a chair.

“She put it on the floor, anyway,” Detective Patel observed.

Dr. Daruwalla had been unable to prevent Julia from attending this lunch; now Julia said, “That’s because she’s not a real woman.”

“Dhar will take care of it,” the deputy commissioner said.

All Farrokh could think was that the change in Mrs. Dogar was terrifying.

“It was the murder, wasn’t it?” the doctor asked the policeman. “I mean, the murder has totally calmed her—it’s had a completely soothing effect on her, hasn’t it?”

“It appears to have made her feel like a young girl,” Patel replied.

“She must have a hard time feeling like a young girl,” Nancy remarked. “What a lot to do—just to feel like a young girl.”

Then Dhar was there, at Mrs. Dogar’s table; he didn’t kiss her. He approached her unseen, from behind, and he put both his hands on her bare shoulders; perhaps he leaned on her, because she appeared to stiffen, but he was only trying to kick her purse over. When he managed to do this, she picked her purse up and put it on an empty chair.

“We’re forgetting to talk among ourselves,” the deputy commissioner said. “We can’t simply be staring at them and saying nothing.”

“Please kill her, Vijay,” Nancy said.

“I’m not carrying a gun, sweetie,” the deputy commissioner lied.

“What will the law do to her?” Julia asked the policeman.

“Capital punishment exists in India,” the detective said, “but the death penalty is rarely enacted.”

“Death is by hanging,” Dr. Daruwalla said.

“Yes, but there’s no jury system in India,” Patel said. “A single judge decides the prisoner’s fate. Life imprisonment and hard labor are much more common than the death penalty. They won’t hang her.”

“You should kill her now,” Nancy repeated.

They could see Mr. Sethna hovering around Mrs. Dogar’s table like a nervous ghost. They couldn’t see Dhar’s left hand—it was under the table. Speculation was rife that his hand was on Rahul’s thigh, or in her lap.

“Let’s just keep talking,” Patel told them cheerfully.

“Fuck you, fuck Rahul, fuck Dhar,” Nancy told Patel. “Fuck you, too,” she said to Farrokh. “Not you—I like you,” she told Julia.

“Thank you, dear,” Julia replied.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Nancy said.

“Your poor lip,” Mrs. Dogar was saying to John D. This much Mr. Sethna understood; they would understand this much from the Ladies’ Garden, too, because they saw Rahul touch Dhar’s lower lip with her long index finger—it was just a brief, feather-light touch. Dhar’s lower lip was a luminous navy blue.

“I hope you’re not in a biting mood today,” John D. told her.

“I’m in a very good mood today,” Mrs. Dogar replied. “I want to know where you’re going to take me, and what you’re going to do to me,” she said coquettishly. It was embarrassing how young and cute she seemed to think she was. Her lips were pursed, which exaggerated the deep wrinkles at the corners of her savage mouth; her smile was small and coy, as if she were blotting lipstick in a mirror. Although her makeup mostly concealed the mark, there was a tiny inflamed cut across the green-tinted eyelid of one of her eyes; it caused her to blink, as if the eye itself were sore. But it was only a small irritation, the tiniest scratch; it was all that the prostitute named Asha had been able to do to her—to flick back one hand, to poke at Rahul’s eye—maybe a second or two before Rahul broke her neck.

“You’ve scratched your eye, haven’t you?” Inspector Dhar observed, but he felt no stiffening in Mrs. Dogar’s thighs; under the table, she gently pressed her thighs together on his hand.

“I must have been thinking of you in my sleep,” she said dreamily. When she closed her eyes, her eyelids had the silver-green iridescence of a lizard; when she parted her lips, her long teeth were wet and shiny—her warm gums were the color of strong tea.

It made John D.’s lip throb to look at her, but he continued to press his palm against the inside of her thigh. He hated this part of the script. Dhar suddenly said, “Did you draw me a picture of what you want?” He felt the muscles in both her thighs grip his hand tightly—her mouth was also tightly closed—and her eyes opened wide and fixed on his lip.

“You can’t expect me to show you here,” Mrs. Dogar said.

“Just a peek,” John D. begged her. “Otherwise, I’ll be in too much of a hurry to eat.”

Had he not been so easily offended by vulgarity, Mr. Sethna would have been in eavesdropper heaven; yet the steward was trembling with disapproval and responsibility. It struck the old Parsi as an awkward moment to bring them the menus, but he knew he needed to be near her purse.

“It’s disgusting how much people eat—I loathe eating,” Mrs. Dogar said. Dhar felt her thighs go slack; it was as if her concentration span were shorter than a child’s—as if she were losing her sexual interest, and for no better reason than the merest mention of food.

“We don’t have to eat at all—we haven’t ordered,” Dhar reminded her. “We could just go—now,” he suggested, but even as he spoke he was prepared to hold her in her chair (if need be) with his left hand. The thought of being alone with her, in a suite at either the Oberoi or the Taj, would have frightened John D., except that he knew Detective Patel would never allow Rahul to leave the Duckworth Club. But Mrs. Dogar was almost strong enough to stand up, despite the downward pressure of Dhar’s hand. “Just one picture,” the actor pleaded with her. “Just show me something.”

Rahul exhaled thinly through her nose. “I’m in too good a mood to be exasperated with you,” she told him. “But you’re a very naughty boy.”

“Show me,” Dhar said. In her thighs, he thought he felt those seemingly involuntary shivers that are visible on the flanks of a horse. When she turned to her purse, John D. raised his eyes to Mr. Sethna, but the old Parsi appeared to be suffering from stage fright; the steward clutched the menus in one hand, his silver serving tray in the other. How could the old fool upend Mrs. Dogar’s purse if he didn’t have a free hand? John D. wondered.

Rahul took the purse into her lap; Dhar could feel the bottom of it, for it briefly rested on his wrist. There was more than one drawing, and Mrs. Dogar appeared to hesitate before she withdrew all three; but she still didn’t show him any of them. She held the drawings protectively in her right hand; with her left hand, she returned her purse to the empty chair—that was when Mr. Sethna sprang into erratic action. He dropped the serving tray; there was a resounding silvery clatter upon the dining room’s stone floor. Then the steward stepped on the tray—he actually appeared to trip over it—and the menus flew from his hand into Mrs. Dogar’s lap. Instinctively, she caught them, while the old Parsi staggered past her and collided with the all-important chair. There went her purse, upside down on the floor, but nothing spilled out of it until Mr. Sethna clumsily attempted to pick the purse up; then everything was everywhere. Of the three drawings, which Rahul had left unattended on the table, John D. could see only the one on top. It was enough.

The woman in the picture bore a striking resemblance to what Mrs. Dogar might have looked like as a young girl. Rahul had never exactly been a young girl, but this portrait reminded John D. of how she had looked in Goa 20 years ago. An elephant was mounting her, but this elephant had two trunks. The first trunk—it was in the usual place for an elephant’s trunk—was deeply inside the young woman’s mouth; in fact, it had emerged through the back of her head. The second trunk, which was the elephant’s preposterous penis, had penetrated the woman’s vagina; it was this trunk that had burst between the woman’s shoulder blades. Approximately at the back of the woman’s neck, John D. could see that the elephant’s two trunks were touching each other; the actor could also see that the elephant was winking. Dhar would never see the other two drawings; he wouldn’t want to. The movie star stepped quickly behind Mrs. Dogar’s chair and pushed the fumbling Mr. Sethna out of the way.

“Allow me,” Dhar said, bending to the spilled contents of her purse. Mrs. Dogar’s mood had been so improved by her recent killing, she was remarkably unprovoked by the apparent accident.

“Oh, purses! They’re such a nuisance!” Rahul said. Flirtatiously, she allowed her hand to touch the back of Inspector Dhar’s neck. He was kneeling between her chair and the empty chair; he was gathering the contents of her purse, which he then put on the table. Quite casually, the actor pointed to the top half of the silver ballpoint pen, which he’d placed between a mirror and a jar of moisturizer.

“I don’t see the bottom half of this,” the actor said. “Maybe it’s still in your purse.” Then he handed her the purse, which was easily half full, and he pretended to look under the table for the bottom half of the silver ballpoint pen—that part which Nancy had kept so well polished these 20 years.

When John D. lifted his face to her, he was still kneeling; as such, his face was level with her small, well-shaped breasts. Mrs. Dogar was holding the top half of the pen. “A rupee for your thoughts,” said Inspector Dhar; it was something he said in all his movies.

Rahul’s lips were parted; she looked quizzically down at Dhar—her scratched eye blinking once, and then again. Her lips softly closed and she once more exhaled thinly through her nose, as if such controlled breathing helped her to think.

“I thought I’d lost this,” Mrs. Dogar said slowly.

“It appears you’ve lost the other half,” John D. replied; he stayed on his knees because he imagined that she liked looking down on him.

“This is the only half I ever had,” Rahul explained.

Dhar stood up and walked behind her chair; he didn’t want her to grab the drawings. When John D. returned to his seat, Rahul was staring at the half-pen.

“You might as well have lost that half,” John D. told her. “You can’t use it for anything.”

“But you’re wrong!” Mrs. Dogar cried. “It’s really marvelous as a money clip.”

“A money clip,” the actor repeated.

“Look here,” Rahul began. There was no money among the spilled contents of her purse, which John D. had spread on the table; she had to search in her purse. “The problem with money clips,” Mrs. Dogar told him, “is that they’re conceived for a big wad of money… the sort of wad of money that men are always flashing out of their pockets, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” said Inspector Dhar. He watched her fishing in her purse for some smaller bills. She pulled out a 10-rupee note, and two 5s, and when the actor saw the two 2-rupee notes with the unnatural typing on them, he raised his eyes to Mr. Sethna and the old steward began his hurried shuffle across the dining room to the Ladies’ Garden.

“Look here,” Rahul repeated. “When you have just a few small notes, which most women must carry—for tipping, for the odd beggar—this is the perfect money clip. It holds just a few notes, but quite snugly …” Her voice trailed away because she saw that Dhar had covered the drawings with his hand; he was sliding the three drawings across the tablecloth when Rahul reached out and grabbed his pinky finger, which she sharply lifted, breaking it. John D. still managed to pull the drawings into his lap. The pinky finger of his right hand pointed straight up, as if it grew out of the back of his hand; it was dislocated at the big knuckle joint. With his left hand, Dhar was able to protect the drawings from Mrs. Dogar’s grasp. She was still struggling with him—she was trying to get the drawings away from him with her right hand—when Detective Patel hooked her neck in the crook of his elbow and pinned her left arm behind her chair.

“You’re under arrest,” the deputy commissioner told her.

“The top half of the pen is a money clip,” said Inspector Dhar. “She uses it for small notes. When she put the note in Mr. Lal’s mouth, the makeshift money clip must have fallen by the body—you know the rest. There’s some typing on those two-rupee notes,” Dhar told the real policeman.

“Read it to me,” Patel said. Mrs. Dogar held herself very still; her free right hand, which had ceased struggling with John D. for the drawings, floated just above the tablecloth, as if she were about to give them all her blessing.

“‘A member no more,’” Dhar read aloud.

“That one was for you,” the deputy commissioner told him.

“‘…because Dhar is still a member,’” Dhar read.

“Who was that one for?” the policeman asked Rahul, but Mrs. Dogar was frozen in her chair, her hand still conducting an imaginary orchestra above the tablecloth; her eyes had never left Inspector Dhar. The top drawing had become wrinkled in the tussle, but John D. smoothed all three drawings against the tablecloth. He was careful not to look at them.

“You’re quite an artist,” the deputy commissioner told Rahul, but Mrs. Dogar just kept staring at Inspector Dhar.

Dr. Daruwalla regretted that he looked at the drawings; the second was worse than the first, and the third was the worst of all. He knew he would go to his grave still thinking of them. Julia alone had the sense to remain in the Ladies’ Garden; she knew there was no good reason to come any closer. But Nancy must have felt compelled to confront the Devil herself; it would be uncomfortable for her later to recall the last words between Dhar and Rahul.

“I really wanted you—I wasn’t kidding,” Mrs. Dogar said to the actor.

To Dr. Daruwalla’s surprise, John D. said to Mrs. Dogar, “I wasn’t kidding, either.”

It must have been hard for Nancy to feel that the focus of her victimization had shifted so far from herself; it still galled her that Rahul didn’t remember who she was.

“I was in Goa,” Nancy announced to the killer.

“Don’t say anything, sweetie,” her husband told her.

“Say anything you feel like saying, sweetie,” Rahul said.

“I had a fever and you crawled into bed with me,” Nancy said.

Mrs. Dogar appeared to be thoughtfully surprised. She stared at Nancy as she had previously stared at the top half of the pen, her recognition traveling over time. “Why, is it really you, dear?” Rahul asked Nancy. “But what on earth has happened to you?”

“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” Nancy told her.

“You look already dead to me,” Mrs. Dogar said.

“Please kill her, Vijay,” Nancy said to her husband.

“I told you this wouldn’t be very satisfying, sweetie.” That was all the deputy commissioner would say to her.

When the uniformed constables and the subinspectors came, Detective Patel told them to put away their weapons. Rahul was not resisting arrest. The deep and unknown satisfactions of the previous night’s murder seemed to radiate from Mrs. Dogar; she was no more violent on this New Year’s Monday than whatever brief impulse had urged her to break John D.’s pinky finger. The serial killer’s smile was serene.

Understandably, the deputy commissioner was worried about his wife. He told her he’d have to go directly to Crime Branch Headquarters, but surely she could get a ride home. Dhar’s dwarf driver had already made his presence known; Vinod was prowling the foyer of the Duckworth Club. Detective Patel suggested that perhaps Dhar wouldn’t mind taking Nancy home in his private taxi.

“Not a good idea.” That was all Nancy would say to her husband.

Julia said that she and Dr. Daruwalla would bring Nancy home. Dhar offered to have Vinod drive Nancy home—just the dwarf, alone. That way, she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.

Nancy preferred this plan. “I’m safe around dwarfs,” she said. “I like dwarfs.”

When she’d gone with Vinod, Detective Patel asked Inspector Dhar how he liked being a real policeman. “It’s better in the movies,” the actor replied. “In the movies, things happen the way they should happen.”

After the deputy commissioner had departed with Rahul, John D. let Dr. Daruwalla snap his pinky finger into place. “Just look away—look at Julia,” the doctor recommended. Then he popped the dislocated finger back where it belonged. “We’ll take an X ray tomorrow,” Dr. Daruwalla said. “Maybe we’ll splint it, but not until it’s stopped swelling. For now, keep putting it in ice.”

At the table in the Ladies’ Garden, John D. responded to this advice by submersing his pinky in his water glass; most of the ice in the glass had melted, so Dr. Daruwalla summoned Mr. Sethna for more. Because the old Parsi seemed deeply disappointed that no one had congratulated him on his performance, Dhar said, “Mr. Sethna, that was really brilliant—how you fell over your own tray, for example. The distracting sound of the tray itself, your particularly purposeful but graceful awkwardness… truly brilliant.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Sethna replied. “I wasn’t sure what to do with the menus.”

“That was brilliant, too—the menus in her lap. Perfect!” said Inspector Dhar.

“Thank you,” the steward repeated; he went away—he was so pleased with himself that he forgot to bring the ice.

No one had eaten any lunch. Dr. Daruwalla was the first to confess to a great hunger; Julia was so relieved that Mrs. Dogar was gone, she admitted to having a considerable appetite herself. John D. ate with them, although he seemed indifferent to the food.

Farrokh reminded Mr. Sethna that he’d forgotten to bring the ice, which the steward finally delivered to the table in a silver bowl; it was a bowl that was normally reserved for chilling tiger prawns, and the movie star stuck his swollen pinky finger in it with a vaguely mortified expression. Although the finger was still swelling, especially at the joint of the big knuckle, Dhar’s pinky was not nearly as discolored as his lip.

The actor drank more beer than he usually permitted himself at midday, and his conversation was entirely concerned with when he would leave India. Certainly before the end of the month, he thought. He questioned whether or not he’d bother to do his fair share of publicity for Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence; now that the real-life version of the cage-girl killer was captured, Dhar commented that there might (for once) be some favorable publicity attached to his brief presence in Bombay. The more he mused out loud about it, the closer Dhar came to deciding that there was really nothing keeping him in India; from John D.’s point of view, the sooner he went back to Switzerland, the better.

The doctor remarked that he thought he and Julia would return to Canada earlier than they’d planned; Dr. Daruwalla also asserted that he couldn’t imagine coming back to Bombay in the near future, and the longer one stayed away… well, the harder it would be to ever come back. Julia let them talk. She knew how men hated to feel overwhelmed; they were really such babies whenever they weren’t in control of their surroundings—whenever they felt that they didn’t belong where they were. Also, Julia had often heard Farrokh say that he was never coming back to India; she knew he always came back.

The late-afternoon sun was slanting sideways through the trellis in the Ladies’ Garden; the light fell in long slashes across the tablecloth, where the most famous male movie star in Bombay entertained himself by flicking stray crumbs with his fork. The ice in the prawn bowl had melted. It was time for Dr. and Mrs. Daruwalla to make an appearance at the celebration at St. Ignatius; Julia had to remind the doctor that she’d promised Martin Mills an early arrival. Understandably, the scholastic wanted to wear clean bandages to the high-tea jubilee, his introduction to the Catholic community.

“Why does he need bandages?” John D. asked. “What’s the matter with him now?”

“Your twin was bitten by a chimpanzee,” Farrokh informed the actor. “Probably rabid.”

There was certainly a lot of biting going around, Dhar thought, but the events of the day had sharply curtailed his inclination toward sarcasm. His finger throbbed and he knew his lip was ugly. Inspector Dhar didn’t say a word.

When the Daruwallas left him sitting in the Ladies’ Garden, the movie star closed his eyes; he looked asleep. Too much beer, the ever-watchful Mr. Sethna surmised; then the steward reminded himself of his conviction that Dhar was stricken with a sexually transmitted disease. The old Parsi revised his opinion—he determined that Dhar was suffering from both the beer and the disease—and he ordered the busboys to leave the actor undisturbed at his table in the Ladies’ Garden. Mr. Sethna’s disapproval of Dhar had softened considerably; the steward felt bloated with pride—to have had his small supporting role called “brilliant” and “perfect” by such a celebrity of the Hindi cinema!

But John D. wasn’t asleep; he was trying to compose himself, which is an actor’s nonstop job. He was thinking that it had been years since he’d felt the slightest sexual attraction to any woman; but Nancy had aroused him—it seemed to him that it was her anger he’d found so appealing—and for the second Mrs. Dogar John D. had felt an even more disturbing desire. With his eyes still closed, the actor tried to imagine his own face with an ironic expression—not quite a sneer. He was 39, an age when it was unseemly to have one’s sexual identity shaken. He concluded that it hadn’t been Mrs. Dogar who’d stimulated him; rather, he’d been reliving his attraction to the old Rahul—back in those Goa days when Rahul was still a sort of man. This thought comforted John D. Watching him, Mr. Sethna saw what he thought was a sneer on the sleeping movie star’s face; then something soothing must have crossed the actor’s mind, for the sneer softened to a smile. He’s thinking of the old days, the steward imagined… before he contracted the presumed dread disease. But Inspector Dhar had amused himself with a radical idea.

Shit, I hope I’m not about to become interested in women! the actor thought. What a mess that would make of things.

At this same moment, Dr. Daruwalla was experiencing another kind of irony. His arrival at the mission of St. Ignatius marked his first occasion in Christian company since the doctor had discovered who’d bitten his big toe. Dr. Daruwalla’s awareness that the source of his conversion to Christianity was the love bite of a transsexual serial killer had further diminished the doctor’s already declining religious zeal; that the toe-biter had not been the ghost of the pilgrim who dismembered St. Francis Xavier was more than a little disappointing. It was also a vulnerable time for Father Julian to have greeted Farrokh as the Father Rector did. “Ah, Dr. Daruwalla, our esteemed alumnus! Have you had any miracles happen to you lately?”

Thus baited, the doctor couldn’t resist rebandaging Martin in an eccentric fashion. Dr. Daruwalla padded the puncture wound in the scholastic’s neck so that the bandage looked as if it were meant to conceal an enormous goiter. He then rebound the Jesuit’s slashed hand in such a way that Martin had only partial use of his fingers. As for the half-eaten earlobe, the doctor was expansive with gauze and tape; he wrapped up the whole ear. The zealot could hear out of only one side of his head.

But the clean, bright bandages only served to heighten the new missionary’s heroic appearance. Even Julia was impressed. And quickly the story circulated through the courtyard at dusk: the American missionary had just rescued two urchins from the streets of Bombay; he’d brought them to the relative safety of a circus, where a wild animal had attacked him. At the fringes of the high tea, where Dr. Daruwalla stood sulking, he overheard the story that Martin Mills had been mauled by a lion; it was only the scholastic’s self-deprecating nature that made him say the biting had been done by a monkey.

It further depressed the doctor to see that the source of this fantasy was the piano-playing Miss Tanuja; she’d traded her wing-tipped eyeglasses for what appeared to be rose-tinted contact lenses, which lent to her eyes the glowing red bedazzlement of a laboratory rat. She still spilled recklessly beyond the confines of her Western clothes, a schoolgirl voluptuary wearing her elderly aunt’s dress. And she still sported the spear-headed bra, which uplifted and thrust forth her breasts like the sharp spires of a fallen church. As before, the crucifix that dangled between Miss Tanuja’s highly armed bosoms seemed to subject the dying Christ to a new agony—or such was Dr. Daruwalla’s disillusionment with the religion he’d adopted when Rahul bit him.

Jubilee Day was definitely not the doctor’s sort of celebration. He felt a vague loathing for such a hearty gathering of Christians in a non-Christian country; the atmosphere of religious complicity was uncomfortably claustrophobic. Julia found him engaged in standoffish if not openly antisocial behavior; he’d been reading the examination scrolls in the entrance hall and had wandered to that spot, at the foot of the courtyard stairs, where the statue of Christ with the sick child was mounted on the wall alongside the fire extinguisher. Julia knew why Farrokh was loitering there; he was hoping that someone would speak to him and he could then comment on the irony of juxtaposing Jesus with a fire-fighting tool.

“I’m going to take you home,” Julia warned him. Then she noticed how tired he looked, and how utterly out of place—how lost. Christianity had tricked him; India was no longer his country. When Julia kissed his cheek, she realized he’d been crying.

“Please do take me home,” Farrokh told her.