A Son Of The Circus (29 page)

And this led the doctor to daydreaming further on the matter of his underdeveloped creativity. Since he’d virtually stopped being a reader, he wondered if he shouldn’t try his hand at writing. An autobiography, however, was the domain of the already famous –unless, Farrokh mused, the subject had led a thrilling life. Since the doctor was neither famous nor had he, in his opinion, led a life of much excitement, he believed that an autobiography was not for him. Nevertheless, he thought, he would glance at the Trollope — when Julia wasn’t looking, and only to see if it might provide him with any inspiration. He doubted that it would.

Unfortunately, his wife’s only other reading material was a novel that had caused Farrokh some alarm. When Julia wasn’t looking, he’d already glanced at it, and the subject seemed to be relentless; obsessively sexual; in addition, the author was totally unknown to Dr Daruwalla, which intimidated him as profoundly as the novel’s explicit erotica. It was one of those very skillful novels, exquisitely written in limpid prose –Farrokh knew that much – and this intimidated him, too.

Dr Daruwalla began all novels irritably and with impatience. Julia read slowly, as if she were tasting the words, but Farrokh plunged restlessly ahead, gathering a list of petty grievances against the author until he happened on
something
that persuaded him the novel was worthwhile – or until he encountered some perceived blunder or an entrenched boredom, either of which would cause him to read not one more word. Whenever Farrokh had decided against a novel, he would then berate Julia for the apparent pleasure she was taking from the book. His wife was a reader of broad interests, and she finished almost everything she started; her voraciousness intimidated Dr Daruwalla, too.

So here he was, on his second honeymoon – a term he’d used much too loosely, because he’d not so much as flirted with his wife since they’d arrived in Goa –and he was fearfully on the lookout for Duckworthians, whose dreaded appearance threatened to ruin his holiday altogether. To make matters worse, he’d found himself greatly upset – but also sexually aroused – by the novel his wife was reading. At least he
thought
she was reading it; maybe she hadn’t begun. If she was reading it, she’d not read any of it aloud to him, and given the calm but intense depiction of act after sexual act, surely Julia would be too embarrassed to read such passages aloud to him. Or would it be
me
who’d be embarrassed? he wondered.

The novel was so compelling that his covert glances at it were insufficient satisfaction; he’d begun concealing it in a newspaper or a magazine and sneaking off to a hammock with it. Julia didn’t appear to miss it; perhaps she was reading the Trollope.

The first image that captured Farrokh’s attention was only a couple of pages into the first chapter. The narrator was riding on a train in France. ‘Across from me the girl has fallen asleep. She has a narrow mouth, cast down at the corners, weighted there by the sourness of knowledge.’ Immediately, Dr Daruwalla felt that this was good stuff, but he also surmised that the story would end unhappily. It had never occurred to the doctor that a stumbling block between himself and most serious literature was that he disliked unhappy endings. Farrokh had forgotten that, as a younger reader, he’d once preferred unhappy endings.

It wasn’t until the fifth chapter that Dr Daruwalla became disturbed by the first-person narrator’s frankly voyeuristic qualities, for these same qualities strongly brought out the doctor’s own troubling voyeurism. ‘When she walks, she leaves me weak. A hobbled, feminine step. Full hips. Small waist.’ Faithfully, as always, Farrokh thought of Julia. There’s a glint of white slip where her sweater parts slightly at the bosom. My eyes keep going there in quick, helpless glances.’ Does Julia
like
this kind of thing? Farrokh wondered. And then, in the eighth chapter, the novel took a turn that made Dr Daruwalla miserable with envy and desire. Some second honeymoon! he thought. ‘Her back is towards him. In a single move she pulls off her sweater and then, reaching behind herself in that elbow-awkward way, unfastens her brassiere. Slowly he turns her around.’

Dr Daruwalla was suspicious of the narrator, this first person who is obsessed with every detail of the sexual explorations of a young American abroad and a French girl from the country – an 18-year-old Anne-Marie. Farrokh didn’t understand that without the narrator’s discomforting presence, the reader couldn’t experience the envy and desire of the perpetual onlooker, which was precisely what haunted Farrokh and impelled him to read on and on. The next morning they do it again. Grey light, it’s very early. Her breath is bad.’

That was when Dr Daruwalla knew that one of the lovers was going to die; her bad breath was an unpleasant hint of mortality. He wanted to stop reading but he couldn’t. He decided that he disliked the young American – he was supported by his father, he didn’t even have a job – but his heart ached for the French girl, whose innocence was being lost. The doctor didn’t know that he was supposed to feel these things. The book was beyond him.

Because his medical practice was an exercise of almost pure goodness, he was ill prepared for the real world. Mostly he saw malformations and deformities and injuries to children; he tried to restore their little joints to their intended perfection. The real world had no purpose as clear as that.

I’ll read just one more chapter, Dr Daruwalla thought. He’d already read nine. At the inland edge of the beach, he lay in the midday heat in a hammock under the dead-still fronds of the areca and coconut palms. The smell of coconut and fish and salt was occasionally laced with the smell of hashish, drifting along the beach. Where the beach touched the tropical-green mass of tangled vegetation, a sugarcane stall competed for a small triangle of shade with a wagon selling mango milkshakes. The melting ice had wet the sand.

The Daruwallas had commandeered a fleet of rooms – an entire floor of the Hotel Bardez – and there was a generous outdoor balcony, although the balcony was outfitted with only one sleeping hammock and young John D. had claimed it. Dr Daruwalla felt so comfortable in the beach hammock that he resolved he would persuade John D. to allow him to sleep in the balcony hammock for at least one night; after all, John D. had a bed in his own room, and Farrokh and Julia could stand to be separated overnight – by which the doctor meant that he and his wife weren’t inclined to make love as often as every night, or even as often as twice a week. Some second honeymoon! Farrokh thought again. He sighed.

He should have left the tenth chapter for another time, but suddenly he was reading again; like any good novel, it kept lulling him into an almost tranquil state of awareness before it jolted him – it caught him completely by surprise. Then hurriedly, as an afterthought, he takes off his clothes and slips in beside her. An act which threatens us all. The town is silent around them. On the milk-white faces of the clock the hands, in unison, jerk to new positions. The trains are running on time. Along the empty streets, yellow headlights of a car occasionally pass and bells mark the hours, the quarters, the halves. With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion while in his own dream he rises a little and defines the moist rim of her cunt with his finger, and as he does, he comes like a bull. They remain close for a long time, still without talking. It is these exchanges which cement them, that is the terrible thing. These atrocities induce them towards love.’

It wasn’t even the end of the chapter, but Dr Daruwalla had to stop reading. He was shocked; and he had an erection, which he concealed with the book, allowing it to cover his crotch like a tent. All of a sudden, in the midst of such lucid prose, of such terse elegance, there were a ‘cock’ and ‘balls’ and even a ‘cunt’ (with a ‘moist rim’) – and these acts that the lovers performed were ‘atrocities.’ Farrokh shut his eyes. Had Julia read
this
part? He was usually indifferent to his wife’s pleasure in the passages she read aloud to him; she enjoyed discussing how certain passages affected her–they rarely had
any
effect on Farrokh. Dr Daruwalla felt a surprising need to discuss the effect of
this
passage with his wife, and the thought of discussing such a thing with Julia inspired the doctor’s erection; he felt his hard-on touching the astonishing book.

When he opened his eyes, the doctor wondered if he’d died and had awakened in what the Christians call hell, for standing beside his hammock and peering down at him were two Duckworthians who were no favorites of his.

‘Are you reading that book, or are you just using it to put you to sleep?’ asked Promila Rai. Beside her was her sole surviving nephew, that loathsome and formerly hairless boy Rahul Rai. But something was wrong with Rahul, the doctor noticed. Rahul appeared to be a woman now. At least he had a woman’s breasts; certainly, he wasn’t a boy.

Understandably, Dr Daruwalla was speechless.

‘Are you still asleep?’ Promila Rai asked him. She tilted her head so that she could read the novel’s title and the author’s name, while Farrokh tightly held the book in its tentlike position above his erection, which he naturally preferred
not
to reveal to Promila – or to her terrifying nephew-with-breasts.

Aggressively, Promila read the title aloud. ‘
A Sport and a Pastime
. I’ve never heard of it,’ she said.

‘It’s very good,’ Farrokh assured her.

Suspiciously, Promila read the author’s name aloud. ‘James Salter. Who is he?’ she asked.

‘Someone wonderful,’ Farrokh replied.

‘Well, what’s it about?’ Promila asked him impatiently.

‘France,’ the doctor said. The real France.’ It was an expression he remembered from the novel.

Already Promila was bored with him, Dr Daruwalla realized. It had been some years since he’d last seen her; Farrokh’s mother, Meher, had reported on the frequency of Promila’s trips abroad, and the incomplete results of her cosmetic surgery. Looking up at Promila from his hammock, the doctor could recognize (under her eyes) the unnatural tightness of her latest face lift; yet she needed more tightening elsewhere. She was strikingly ugly, like a rare kind of poultry with an excess of wattles at her throat. It wasn’t astonishing to Farrokh that the same man had left her at the altar twice; what astonished him was that the same man would have dared to come as close to Promila a second time – for she seemed, as old Lowji put it, ‘a Miss Havisham times two’ in more than one way. Not only had she been jilted twice, but she seemed twice as vindictive, and twice as dangerous, and – to judge by her ominous nephew-with-breasts — twice as covert.

‘You remember Rahul,’ Promila said to Farrokh, and, to be certain that she commanded the doctor’s full attention, she tapped her long, veiny fingers on the spine of the book, which still concealed Farrokh’s cowering erection. When he looked up at Rahul, Dr Daruwalla felt his hard-on wither.

‘Yes, of course – Rahul!’ the doctor said. Farrokh had heard the rumors, but he’d imagined nothing more outrageous than that Rahul had embraced his late brother’s flamboyant homosexuality, possibly in homage to Subodh’s memory. It had been that terrible monsoon of ‘49 when Neville Eden had deliberately shocked Farrokh by telling him that he was taking Subodh Rai to Italy because a pasta diet improved one’s stamina for the rigors of buggery. Then they’d both died in that car crash. Dr Daruwalla supposed that young Rahul had taken it rather hard, but not
this
hard!

‘Rahul has undergone a little sex change,’ said Promila Rai, with a vulgarity that was generally accepted as the utmost in sophistication
by
the out of it and the insecure.

Rahul corrected his aunt in a voice that reflected conflicting hormonal surges. ‘I’m still undergoing it, Auntie,’ he remarked. ‘I’m not quite
complete
,’ he said pointedly to Dr Daruwalla.

‘I see,’ the doctor replied, but he didn’t see – he couldn’t conceive of the changes Rahul had undergone, riot to mention what was required to make Rahul ‘complete.’ The breasts were fairly small but firm and very nicely shaped; the lips were fuller and softer than Farrokh remembered them, and the makeup around the eyes was enhancing without tending to excess. If Rahul had been 12 or 13 in ‘49 – and no more than 8 or 10 when Lowji had examined him for what his aunt had called his inexplicable hairlessness – Rahul was now 32 or 33, Farrokh figured. From his back, in the hammock, the doctor’s view of Rahul was cut off just below the waist, which was as slender and pliant as a young girl’s.

It was clear to the doctor that estrogens were in use, and to judge these by Rahul’s breasts and flawless skin, the estrogens had been a noteworthy success; the effects on Rahul’s voice were at best still in progress, because the voice had both male and female resonances in rich confusion. Had Rahul been castrated? Did one dare ask? He looked more womanly than most hijras. And why would he have had his penis removed if he intended to be ‘complete,’ for didn’t that mean a fully fashioned vagina, and wasn’t this vagina surgically constructed from the penis turned inside out? I’m just an orthopedist, Dr Daruwalla thought gratefully. All the doctor asked Rahul was, ‘Are you changing your name, too?’

Boldly, even flirtatiously, Rahul smiled down at Farrokh; once again, the male and the female were at war with Rahul’s voice. ‘Not until I’m the real thing,’ Rahul answered.

‘I see,’ the doctor replied; he made an effort to return Rahul’s smile, or at least to imply tolerance. Once more Promila startled Farrokh by drumming her fingers on the spine of his tightly held book.

‘Is the whole family here?’ Promila asked. She made ‘the whole family’ sound like a grotesque element, like an entire population that was out of control.

‘Yes,’ Dr Daruwalla answered.

‘And that beautiful boy is here, too, I hope – I want Rahul to see him!’ Promila said.

‘He must be eighteen – no, nineteen,’ Rahul said dreamily.