John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“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 Dobermann 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 I 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.”