John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Farrokh showed the deputy commissioner the threatening two-rupee notes, but D.C.P. Patel was unsurprised; he’d been expecting more warnings. The deputy commissioner knew that the note in Mr. Lal’s mouth had been just the beginning; no murderer the detective had ever known was content to threaten potential victims only once. Either killers didn’t warn you or they repeatedly warned you. Yet, for 20 years, this killer hadn’t given anyone a warning; only now, beginning with Mr. Lal, had there emerged a kind of vendetta against Inspector Dhar and Dr. Daruwalla. It seemed unlikely to the deputy commissioner that the sole motivation for this change in Rahul had been a stupid movie. Something about the Daruwalla-Dhar connection must have infuriated Rahul—both personally and for a long time. It was the deputy commissioner’s suspicion that Inspector Dhar and the Cage-Girl Killer had simply exacerbated Rahul’s longstanding hatred.

“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 I 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 eve 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.