A Son Of The Circus (55 page)

Tell me – I’m just curious,’ said Detective Patel to Dr Daruwalla. ‘Do you know any hijras – I mean
personally
!’ But as soon as he saw that the doctor was thinking about the question – the doctor had been unable to answer spontaneously — the detective added, ‘In your movie, you made a hijra the murderer. Whatever gave you such an idea? I mean, in
my
experience, the hijras 7 know are reasonably gentle – they’re mostly nice people. The hijra prostitutes may be bolder than the female prostitutes, yet I don’t think of them as dangerous. But possibly you knew one –someone who wasn’t very nice. I’m just curious.’

‘Well, someone had to be the murderer,’ Dr Daruwalla said defensively. ‘It was nothing personal.’

‘Let me be more specific,’ said the deputy commissioner. It was a line that got Dr Daruwalla’s attention, because the doctor had often written that line for Inspector Dhar. ‘Did you ever know somebody with a woman’s breasts and a boy’s penis? It was a rather small penis, from all reports,’ the detective added. ‘I don’t mean a hijra. I mean a zenana – a transvestite with a penis, but with breasts.’

That was when Farrokh felt a flutter of pain in the area of his heart. It was his injured rib, trying to remind him of Rahul. The rib was crying out to him that Rahul was the second Mrs Dogar, but the doctor mistook the pain for an actual signal from his heart. His heart said,
Rahul
! But Rahul’s connection to Mrs Dogar still eluded Dr Daruwalla.

‘Yes, or maybe — I mean, I knew a man who was trying to become a woman,’ Farrokh replied. ‘He’d obviously taken estrogens, maybe he’d even had surgical implants – he definitely had a woman’s breasts. But whether he’d been castrated, or if he’d had other surgery, I don’t know – I mean, I
presumed
he had a penis because he was interested in the
complete
operation … a total sex change.’

‘And did he have this operation?’ the deputy commissioner asked.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ the doctor replied. ‘I haven’t seen him, or her, for twenty years.’

That would be the right number of years, wouldn’t it?’ the detective asked. Again, Farrokh felt the twinge in his rib that he confused with his excited heart.

‘He was hoping to go to London for the operation,’ Farrokh explained. ‘In those days, I believe it would have been very difficult to get a complete sex-change operation in India. They’re still illegal here.’

‘I believe that our murderer also went to London,’ Patel informed the doctor. ‘Obviously, and only recently, he — or she — came back.’

‘The person I knew was interested in going to art school … in London,’ Farrokh said numbly. The photographs of the drawings on the bellies of the murdered prostitutes grew clearer in his mind, although the photographs lay facedown on the deputy commissioner’s desk. It was Patel who picked one up and looked at it again.

‘Not a very good art school would have taken him, I suspect,’ the detective said.

He never shut his office door, which opened on an outdoor balcony; there were a dozen such offices off this balcony, and it was the deputy commissioner’s policy that no one ever closed a door – except in the monsoon rains, and then only when the wind was wrong. With the doors open, no one being interrogated could later claim that they’d been beaten. Also, the sound of the police secretaries typing their officers’ reports was a sound that the deputy commissioner enjoyed; the cacophony of typewriters implied both industry and order. He knew that many of his fellow policemen were lazy and their secretaries were sloppy; the typed reports themselves were rarely as orderly as the clacking of the keys. On his desk, Deputy Commissioner Patel faced three reports in need of rewriting, and an additional report in greater need, but he pushed these four reports aside in order to spread out the photographs of the murdered whores’ bellies. The elephant drawings were so familiar to him that they calmed him; he didn’t want the doctor to sense his eagerness.

‘And would this person that you knew have had a common sort of name, a name like Rahul?’ the detective asked. It was a delivery worthy of the insincerity of Inspector Dhar.

‘Rahul Rai,’ said Dr Daruwalla; it was almost a whisper, but this didn’t lessen the deputy commissioner’s quickening pleasure.

‘And would this Rahul Rai have been in Goa … perhaps visiting the beaches … at or about the time when the German and the American – those bodies you saw – were murdered?’ Patel asked. The doctor was slumped in his chair as if bent by indigestion.

‘At my hotel – at the Bardez,’ Farrokh replied. ‘He was staying with his aunt. And the thing is, if Rahul
is
in Bombay, he is certainly familiar with the Duckworth Club — his aunt was a member!’

‘
Was?’the
detective said.

‘She’s dead,’ Dr Daruwalla said. ‘I would presume that Rahul, he or she, inherited her fortune.’

D.C.P. Patel touched the raised tusk of the elephant in one of the photographs; then he stacked the photos in a single neat pile. He’d always known there was family money in India, but the Duckworth Club connection was a surprise. What had misled him for 20 years was Rahul’s brief notoriety in the transvestite brothels on Falkland Road and Grant Road; these were hardly the usual haunts of a Duckworthian.

‘Of course I know that you know my wife,’ the detective said. ‘I must put you together with her. She knows your Rahul, too, and it might help me to hear you compare notes – so to speak.’

‘We could have lunch at the club. Someone there might know more about Rahul,’ Farrokh suggested.

‘Don’t you ask any questions!’ the deputy commissioner suddenly shouted. It offended Dr Daruwalla to be yelled at, but the detective was quickly tactful, if not exactly mollifying. ‘We wouldn’t want to warn Rahul, would we?’ Patel said, as if he were speaking to a child.

The rising dust from the courtyard had coated the leaves of the neem trees; the rail of the balcony was also coated with dust. In the detective’s office, the dull brass ceiling fan labored in an effort to push the motes of dust back out the open door. The darting shadows of fork-tailed kites occasionally moved across the deputy commissioner’s desk. The one open eye of the topmost elephant in the stack of photos seemed to notice all these things, which the doctor knew he would never forget.

‘Lunch
today
?’ suggested the detective.

‘Tomorrow is better for me,’ Dr Daruwalla said. His pending obligation to deliver Martin Mills into the hands of the Jesuits at St Ignatius was a welcome intrusion; he also needed to talk to Julia, and he wanted the time to tell Dhar — Dhar should be at the lunch with the wounded hippie. Farrokh knew that John D. had a superior memory, maybe even of Rahul.

Tomorrow is fine,’ said the deputy commissioner, but his disappointment was evident. The words his wife had used to describe Rahul were constantly with him. Also with him was the size of Rahul’s big hands, which had held his wife’s big breasts; also, the erectness and the shapeliness of Rahul’s breasts, which Nancy had felt against her back; also, the small, silky little boy’s penis, which his wife had felt against her buttocks. Nancy had said he was condescending, mocking, teasing – certainly sophisticated, probably cruel.

Because Dr Daruwalla had only begun the struggle to compose a written report on Rahul Rai, the detective couldn’t quite leave him alone. ‘Give me one word for Rahul,’ Patel asked Farrokh. ‘The first word that comes to your mind – I’m just curious,’ the detective said.

‘Arrogant,’ the doctor replied. After 20 years, it was visible on Detective Patel’s face that this was unsatisfactory.

‘Please try another,’ the detective said.

‘Superior,’ said Dr Daruwalla.

‘You’re getting closer,’ Patel replied.

‘Rahul is a tease,’ Farrokh explained. ‘He condescends to you, he mocks you, he bullies you with a sort of self-satisfied sophistication. Like his late aunt, he uses his sophistication as a weapon. I think he is basically a cruel person.’ The doctor paused in his description because the detective had closed his eyes and sat smiling at his desk. All the while, Deputy Commissioner Patel articulated his fingers as if he were typing up another report, but his fingers weren’t tapping the keys of his typewriter; the detective had once more spread out the photographs – they covered his desk – and he typed on the many heads of the mocking elephants, his fingers finding the navels of the murdered prostitutes … all those ceaselessly winking eyes.

Down the balcony, from another detective’s office, a man was screaming that he was telling the truth, while a policeman calmly contradicted him with the almost harmonious repetition of the word ‘lies.’ From the courtyard kennel came a corresponding clamor –the police attack dogs.

After Dr Daruwalla had completed his written report on Rahul, the doctor wandered onto the balcony to have a look at the dogs; they’d barked themselves out. The late-morning sun was now beating down on the courtyard; the police dogs, all Dobermans, were asleep in the only shady corner of their kennel, which was obscured from Farrokh’s view by a clump of neem trees. On the balcony itself, however, was a small cage with a newspaper floor, and the doctor knelt to play with a Doberman pinscher puppy – a prisoner in a portable pen. The puppy wriggled and whined for Farrokh’s attention. It thrust its sleek black muzzle through a square of the wire mesh; it licked the doctor’s hand – its needle-sharp teeth nipped his fingers.

‘Are you a good dog?’ Farrokh asked the puppy. Its wild eyes were ringed with the rusty-brown markings of its breed, which is preferred for police work in Bombay because the Doberman’s short hair is suitable for the hot weather. The dogs were large and powerful and fast; they had the terrier’s jaws and tenacity, although they weren’t quite as intelligent as German Shepherds.

A subinspector, a junior officer, came out of an office where at least three typewriters were resounding, and this young, officious policeman spoke aggressively to Dr Daruwalla … something to the effect that ‘spoiling’ the Doberman puppy would make it untrainable for police business, something about not treating a future attack dog as a pet. Whenever anyone spoke Hindi this abruptly to the doctor, Farrokh felt frozen by his lack of fluency in the language.

‘I’m sorry,’ Dr Daruwalla said in English.

‘No, don’t you be sorry!’ someone suddenly shouted. It was Deputy Commissioner Patel; he’d popped out of his office onto the balcony, where he stood clutching Farrokh’s written statement in his hands. ‘Go on — play with the puppy all you want to!’ the deputy commissioner shouted.

The junior policeman realized his error and quickly apologized to Dr Daruwalla. ‘I’m sorry, saar,’ he said. But before the subinspector could slip back into his office and the safe din of the typewriters, he was barked at by Detective Patel, too.

‘You
should
be sorry – speaking to
my
witness!’ the deputy commissioner yelled.

So I am a ‘witness,’ Farrokh realized. He’d made a small fortune satirizing the police; now he knew he was in utter ignorance of even a matter as trivial as the pecking order among policemen.

‘Go on – play with the puppy!’ Patel repeated to the doctor, and so Farrokh once more turned his attention to the Doberman. Since the little dog had just dropped a surprisingly large turd on the newspaper floor of its cage, Dr Daruwalla’s attention was momentarily attracted to the turd. That was when he saw that the newspaper was today’s edition of
The Times of India
, and that the Doberman’s turd had fallen on the review of
Inspector Dhar and the Towers of Silence
. It was a bad review, of such a hostile nature that its surliness seemed enhanced by the smell of dog shit.

The turd prevented all but a partial reading of the review, which was just as well; Farrokh was angered enough. There was even a gratuitous swipe taken at Dhar’s perceived weight problem. The reviewer asserted that Inspector Dhar sported too protrusive a beer belly to justify the film studio’s claim that Dhar was the Charles Bronson of Bombay.

By the nearby flutter of pages, Dr Daruwalla realized that the deputy commissioner had finished reading the doctor’s statement. The detective also stood close enough to the puppy’s cage to observe what Farrokh had been reading; Detective Patel was the one who had put the newspaper there.

‘I’m afraid it’s not a very good review,’ the deputy commissioner observed.

‘They never are,’ Farrokh said. He followed Patel back to his office. Dr Daruwalla could feel that the detective wasn’t altogether pleased by the doctor’s written report.

‘Sit down,’ Detective Patel said, but when the doctor moved to the chair he’d sat in before, the detective caught his arm and steered him around the desk. ‘No, no – you sit where /usually sit!’ And so Farrokh seated himself in the deputy commissioner’s chair. It was higher than the doctor’s previous seat; the photographs of the murdered prostitutes were easier to see, or else harder to ignore. The doctor remembered the day at Chowpatty Beach when little John D. had been so frightened by the festival mob, by all the elephant heads being carried into the sea. They’re drowning the elephants!’ the child had cried. ‘Now the elephants will be angry!’

In his written statement, Farrokh had said that he believed the hateful phone calls about his father’s assassination had been from Rahul; after all, it was the voice of a woman trying to sound like a man, and this might suit whatever voice Rahul had ended up with. Twenty years ago, Rahul’s voice had been a work-in-progress; it had been sexually undecided, But although Detective Patel found this speculation interesting, the detective was disturbed by Dr Daruwalla’s conclusion: that Rahul had been old Lowji’s assassin. This was too imaginative – it was too big a leap. This was the kind of conjecture that marred the doctor’s written report and made it, in the deputy commissioner’s opinion, ‘amateurish.’

‘Your father was blown up by professionals,’ D.C.P. Patel informed Farrokh. ‘I was still an inspector at the Colaba Station — only the duty officer. The Tardeo Police Station answered that call. I wasn’t allowed at the scene of the crime, and then the investigation was turned over to the government. But I know for a fact that Lowji Daruwalla was exploded by a team. For a while, I heard that they thought the head mali might have been involved.’