John Irving - A Son of the Circus

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, not 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.