A Son Of The Circus (38 page)

Fearing that the freakish girl had drowned, Dr Daruwalla timidly approached the bathroom door, through which he heard neither singing nor splashing; there wasn’t a sign of bathtub life. But before he could knock on the door, the doctor was surprised by the uncanny powers of the bathing hippie; she seemed to sense that someone was near.

‘Hello out there,’ the girl said laconically. ‘Would you bring me my rucksack? I forgot it.’

Dr Daruwalla fetched the rucksack; for its size, it was uncommonly heavy. Full of batteries, Farrokh supposed. He opened the bathroom door cautiously, and only partially – just enough to reach his hand with the rucksack inside the door. Steam, with a thousand, conflicting scents, engulfed him. The girl said, Thanks. Just drop it.’ The doctor withdrew his hand and closed the door, wondering at the sound of metal as the rucksack struck the floor. Either a machete or a machine gun, Farrokh imagined; he didn’t want to know.

Julia had arranged a sturdy table on the balcony and covered it with a clean white sheet. Even late in the day, there was better light for surgery outside than in the rooms. Dr Daruwalla assembled his instruments and prepared the anesthetic.

In the bathroom, Nancy managed to reach her rucksack without getting out of the bathtub; she began a search for anything marginally cleaner than what she’d been wearing. It was a matter of exchanging one kind of dirt for another, but she wanted to wear a long– sleeved cotton blouse and a bra and long pants; she also wanted to wash the dildo, and – if she was strong enough – she wanted to unscrew the thing and count how much money was left. It was repellent to her to touch the cock, but she managed to withdraw it from the rucksack by pinching one of the balls between the thumb and index finger of her right hand; then she dropped the dildo into the bath, where (of course) it floated, the balls slightly submerged, the circumcised head raised – almost in the manner of a perplexed, solitary swimmer. Its single, evil eye was on her.

As for Dr Daruwalla and his wife, their growing anxiety was in no way lessened by the unmistakable sounds of the bathtub being emptied and refilled. It was the hippie’
s fourth
bath.

One can sympathize with Farrokh and Julia for their misunderstanding of the grunts and groans that Nancy made while she was struggling to unscrew the preposterous penis and determine the amount of Deutsche marks that it contained. After all, despite their rekindling of the sexual flame, the pleasure of which was partially owed to Mr James Salter, the Daruwallas were sexually tame souls. Given the size of the intimidating instrument that they’d seen in the hippie’s rucksack, and the sounds of physical exertion that passed from behind the bathroom door, it’s forgivable that Farrokh and Julia allowed their imaginations to run away with them. How could the Daruwallas have known that Nancy’s cries and curses of frustration were simply the result of her being unable to unscrew the dildo? And despite how far the Daruwallas allowed their imaginations to run, they never could have imagined what truly had happened to Nancy.

Four baths wouldn’t wash away what had happened to her.

From the moment Dieter had moved them out of the Taj, everything for Nancy had gone from bad to worse. Their new lodgings were in a small place on Marine Drive, the Sea Green Guest House, which Nancy noticed was an off-white color – or maybe, in the smog, a kind of blue-gray. Dieter said he favored the place because it was popular with an Arab clientele, and Arabs were safe. Nancy didn’t notice many Arabs, but she might not have spotted all of them, she supposed. She also didn’t know what Dieter meant by ‘safe’ – he meant only that the Arabs were indifferent to drug trafficking on such a small scale as his.

At the Sea Green Guest House, Nancy was introduced to one of the featured activities involved in buying high-quality narcotics – namely, waiting. Dieter made some phone calls; then they waited. According to Dieter, the best deals came to you indirectly. No matter how hard you tried to make a direct deal, and to make it in Bombay, you always ended up in Goa, doing your business with the friend of a friend. And you always had to wait.

This time the friend of a friend was known to frequent the brothel area of Bombay, although the word on the street was that the guy had already gone to Goa; Dieter would have to find him there. The way you found him was, you rented a cottage on a certain beach; then you waited. You could ask for him, but even so you’d never find him; he always found you. This time his name was Rahul. It was always a common name and you never knew the last name – just Rahul. In the red-light district, they called him ‘Pretty.’

That’s a funny thing to call a guy,’ Nancy observed.

‘He’s probably one of those chicks with dicks,’ Dieter said. This expression was new to Nancy; she doubted that Dieter had picked it up from watching American movies.

Dieter attempted to explain the transvestite scene to Nancy, but he’d never understood that the hijras were eunuchs – that they’d truly been emasculated. He’d confused the hijras with the zenanas — the unaltered transvestites. A hijra had once exposed himself to Dieter, but Dieter had mistaken the scar for a vagina -he’d thought the hijra was a real woman. As for the zenanas, the so-called chicks with dicks, Dieter also called them ‘little boys with breasts.’ Dieter said that they were all fags who took estrogens to make their tits bigger, but the estrogens also made their pricks get smaller and smaller until they looked like little boys.

Dieter tended to dwell on sexual things, and he used the halfhearted hope of finding Rahul in Bombay as an excuse to take Nancy to the red-light district. She didn’t want to go; but Dieter seemed destined to act out the old dictum that there is at least a kind of certainty in degradation. Debasement is specific. There is something exact about sexual corruption that Dieter probably found comforting in comparison to the vagueness of looking for Rahul.

For Nancy, the wet heat and ripe smell of Bombay were only enhanced by close proximity to the cage girls on Falkland Road. ‘Aren’t they amazing?’ Dieter asked her. But why they were ‘amazing’ eluded Nancy. On the ground floor of the old wooden buildings, there were cagelike rooms with beckoning girls inside them; above these cages, the buildings rose not more than four or five stories, with more girls on the windowsills – or else a curtain was drawn across a window to indicate that a prostitute was with a customer.

Nancy and Dieter drank tea at the Olympia on Falkland Road; it was an old, mirror-lined cafe frequented by the street prostitutes and then– pimps, several of whom Dieter seemed to know. But these contacts either couldn’t or wouldn’t shed any light on the whereabouts of Rahul; they wouldn’t even speak of Rahul – except to say that he belonged to the transvestite scene, which they wanted no part of.

‘I told you he was one of those chicks with dicks,’ Dieter told Nancy. It was growing dark when they left the cafe, and the cage girls demonstrated a more aggressive interest in her as she and Dieter passed. Some of them lifted their skirts and made obscene gestures, some of them threw garbage at her, and sudden groups of men surrounded her on the street; Dieter, almost casually, drove them away from her. He seemed to find the attention amusing; the more vulgar the attention was, the more it amused Dieter.

Nancy had been too overwhelmed to question him, which she realized (as she sank deeper into Dr Daruwalla’s bathtub) was a pattern she had finally broken. She submerged the dildo, holding it against her stomach. Because the dildo had not been resealed with wax, there were bubbles. Afraid that the Deutsche marks might get wet, Nancy stopped toying with the instrument. Instead, she thought of the entrenching tool in her rucksack; the doctor had surely heard it clank against the floor.

Dieter had bought it at an army-surplus shop in Bombay. The tool was an olive-drab color; fully extended, it was a spade with a short, two-foot handle which could be folded by means of an iron hinge, and the blade of the spade could be turned at a right angle to the handle and it resembled a foot-long hoe. If Dieter were alive, he would be the first to agree that it could also be successfully employed as a tomahawk. He’d told Nancy that the entrenching tool might be useful in Goa, both for defense against the dacoits – bandits occasionally preyed upon the hippies there – and for digging the spontaneous latrine. Nancy now smiled ruefully as she reflected on the expanded features of the tool. Certainly, she’d found it adequate for digging Dieter’s grave.

When she shut her eyes and sank deeper into the tub, she could still taste the sweet, smoky tea that they served at the Olympia; she could remember its dry, bitter aftertaste, too. With her eyes shut and the warm water holding her, she could remember her changing expression in the pitted mirrors of the cafe. The tea had made her feel lightheaded. She was unfamiliar with the red spittle from the betel chewing that was expectorated everywhere around them, and not even the Hindi film songs and the Qawwali on the jukebox in the Olympia had prepared her for the assault of noise along Falkland Road. A drunken man followed her and pulled her hair until Dieter knocked him down and kicked him.

‘The better brothels are in the rooms above the cages,’ Dieter told her knowingly. A boy with a goatskin full of water collided with her; she was sure he’d meant to step on her foot. Someone pinched her breast, but she didn’t see who it was – man, woman or child.

Dieter pulled her into a bidi shop, where they also sold stationery and silver trinkets and the small pipes for smoking ganja.

‘Hey, ganja-man – Mistah bhang-walla!’ the proprietor greeted Dieter. He smiled happily at Nancy as he pointed to Dieter. ‘He Mistah bhang-master – the very best ganja-walla!’ the proprietor said appreciatively.

Nancy was fingering an unusual ballpoint pen; it was real silver, and
Made in India
was written in script lengthwise along the pen. The bottom part said
Made in
, the top part said
India;
the pen wouldn’t close securely if the script wasn’t perfectly aligned. She thought this was a stupid flaw. Also, when you wrote with the pen, the words were all wrong; in
Made India
, the pen said – and
in Made
was upside down. ‘Very best quality,’ the proprietor told her. ‘Made in England!’

‘It says it’s made in India,’ Nancy said.

‘Yes – they make it in India, too!’ the proprietor agreed.

‘You’re a shitty liar,’ Dieter told him, but he bought Nancy the pen.

Nancy was thinking she’d like to go somewhere cool and write postcards. In Iowa, wouldn’t they be surprised to hear where she was? But, at the same time, she was thinking. They’ll never hear from me again. Bombay both terrified and exhilarated her; it was so foreign and seemingly lawless that Nancy felt she could be anybody she wanted to be. It was the clean slate she was looking for, and in the back of her mind, with the persistence of something permanent, was that impossible goal of purity to which she’d been drawn in the person of Inspector Patel.

In the overly dramatic manner of many fallen young women, Nancy believed that only two roads remained open to her: she could keep on falling until she was indifferent to her own defilement, or else she could aspire to acts of social conscience so great and self-sacrificing that she could reclaim her innocence and redeem everything. In the world she’d descended to, there were only these choices: stay with Dieter or go to Inspector Patel. But what had she to give to Vijay Patel? Nancy feared it was nothing that the good policeman wanted.

Later, in the doorway of a transvestite brothel, a hijra exposed himself so boldly and suddenly that Nancy hadn’t time to look away. Even Dieter was forced to admit that there was no evidence of a penis – not even a little one. As to what was there, Nancy wasn’t sure. Dieter concluded that Rahul might be one of these – ‘a kind of radical eunuch,’ he said.

Dieter’s questions about Rahul were greeted with sullenness, if not hostility. The only hijra who permitted them to come inside his cage was a fussy middle-aged transvestite who sat before a mirror in growing disappointment with his wig. In the same tiny room, a younger hijra was feeding a watery gray milk to a newborn goat by means of a baby’s bottle.

On the subject of Rahul, all the younger one would say was, ‘He is not being one of us.’ The older one said only that Rahul was in Goa. Neither of the hijras could be drawn into a discussion of Rahul’s nickname. At the mere mention of ‘Pretty,’ the one who was feeding the goat abruptly pulled the baby bottle out of the goat’s mouth; it made a pop and the goat bleated in surprise. The younger hijra pointed the baby bottle at Nancy and made a disparaging gesture. Nancy interpreted the bottle-pointing as an indication that she wasn’t as pretty as Rahul. She was relieved that Dieter seemed disinclined to fight, although she could sense he was angry; he wasn’t exactly gallant on her behalf, but at least he was angry.

Back on the street, to assure him she was philosophic about the insult of being ill compared to Rahul, Nancy said something that she hoped sounded tolerant in a live-and-let-live sort of way.

‘Well, they weren’t very nice,’ she observed, ‘but it was nice how they were taking care of the goat.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Dieter told her. ‘Some people fuck girls, some people fuck eunuchs in drag — others fuck goats.’ This terrible thought made her anxious again; she knew she’d deceived herself if she’d believed she’d stopped falling.

In Kamathipura, there were other brothels. Outside a warren of small rooms, a fat woman in a magenta sari sat cross-legged on a rope bed supported by orange crates; either the woman or the bed swayed slightly. She was the madam for a higher class of prostitutes than one could find on Falkland Road or Grant Road. Naturally, Dieter didn’t tell Nancy that this was the same brothel where he’d fucked the 13-year-old girl for only five rupees because they had to do it standing up.

It seemed to Nancy that Dieter knew the enormous madam, but she couldn’t understand their conversation; two of the bolder prostitutes had come out of the brothel to stare at her close up.