John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“Yes, it was Sidhwa,” the doctor replied. “I suppose he told you, too.”

Promila Rai peered down at Dr. Daruwalla in his hammock. There was in her expression a condescension of a cold, reptilian nature; there wasn’t even a flicker of pity in her gaze, but only that which passes for eagerness in a lizard’s eyes as it singles out a fly.

“I told him ,” Promila told Farrokh. “The Bardez is my hotel. I’ve been coming here for years.”

Oh, what a choice I’ve made! thought Dr. Daruwalla. But Promila was through with him, at least for the moment. She simply wandered away, not standing on a single ceremony that could even faintly be associated with common politeness, although she’d certainly been exposed to good manners and she could apply such etiquette in excess whenever she chose.

So that was the bad news that he had for Julia, Farrokh thought: two detestable Duckworthians had arrived at the Hotel Bardez, which turned out to be one of their personal favorites. But the good news was A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, for Farrokh was 39 and it had been a long time since a book had so possessed his mind and body.

Dr. Daruwalla desired his wife—as suddenly, as disturbingly, as unashamedly as he’d ever desired her—and he marveled at the power of Mr. Salter’s prose to do that: both to be aesthetically pleasing and to give him far more than a simple hard-on. The novel seemed like a heroic act of seduction; it had enlivened all of the doctor’s senses.

He felt how the beach sand was cooling; at midday it had so burned underfoot that he could cross it only with his sandals on, but now he comfortably walked barefoot in the sand—it seemed an ideal temperature. He vowed to get up very early one morning so that he could also experience the sand at its coldest, but he would forget his vow. Nevertheless, these were the stirrings within him of a second honeymoon, for sure. I shall write a letter to Mr. James Salter, he resolved. The rest of his life, Dr. Daruwalla would regret his neglecting to write that letter, but on this day in June—in 1969, on Baga Beach in Goa—the doctor briefly felt like a new man. Farrokh was only one day away from meeting the stranger whose voice on his answering machine 20 years later still commanded the authority to fill him with dread.

“Is that him? Is that the doctor?” she would ask. When Farrokh had first heard those questions, he had no idea of the world he was about to enter.

At the Hotel Bardez, the front-desk staff told Dr. Daruwalla that the young woman had limped down the beach, all the way from a hippie enclave at Anjuna, she was checking the hotels for a doctor. “Any doctor?” she’d asked. They were proud of themselves for sending her away, but they warned the doctor that they were sure she’d be back; she wouldn’t find anyone to care for her foot at Calangute Beach, and if she made it as far as Aguada, she’d be turned away. Because of how she looked, someone might call the police.

Farrokh desired to uphold the Parsi reputation for fairness and social justice; certainly he sought to help the crippled and the maimed—a girl with a limp was at least in a category of patients the orthopedist felt familiar with. It wasn’t as if his services were sought for the purpose of making Rahul Rai complete. Yet Farrokh couldn’t be angry with the staff at the Hotel Bardez. It was out of respect for Dr. Daruwalla’s privacy that they’d sent the limping woman away; they’d meant only to protect him, although doubtless they took a degree of pleasure in abusing an apparent freak. Among the Goans, especially as the 1960s were ending, there was a felt resentment of the European and American hippies who roamed the beaches; the hippies weren’t big spenders—some of them even stole—and they were perceived as an undesirable element by the wealthier Western and Indian tourists whom the Goans wished to attract. And so, without condemning their behavior, Dr. Daruwalla politely informed the staff at the Hotel Bardez that he wished to examine the lame hippie should she return.

The doctor’s decision seemed especially disappointing to the aged tea-server who shuffled back and forth between the Hotel Bardez and the various encampments of thatch-roofed shelters; these four-poled structures, stuck in the sand and roofed with the dried fronds of coconut palms, dotted the beach. The tea-server had several times approached Dr. Daruwalla in his hammock under the palms, and it was largely out of diagnostic interest that Farrokh had observed the old man so closely. His name was Ali Ahmed; he said he was only 60 years old, although he looked 80, and he exhibited a few of the more easily recognizable and colorful physical signs of congenital syphilis. Upon his first tea service, the doctor had spotted Ali Ahmed’s “Hutchinson’s teeth”—the unmistakable peg-shaped incisors. The tea-server’s deafness, in addition to the characteristic clouding of the cornea, had confirmed Dr. Daruwalla’s diagnosis.

Farrokh was chiefly interested in positioning Ali Ahmed in such a way that the tea-server faced the morning sun. Dr. Daruwalla was trying to spot a fourth symptom, a rarity in congenital syphilis—the Argyll Robertson pupil is much more common in syphilis acquired later in life—and the doctor had cleverly thought of a way to examine the old man without his knowledge.

From his hammock, where he received his tea, Farrokh faced the Arabian Sea. Inland, at his back, the morning sun was a hazy glare above the village; from that direction, wafting over the beach, there emanated an aroma of fermented coconuts. Looking into the cloudy eyes of Ali Ahmed, Farrokh asked with feigned innocence, “What’s that smell, Ali, and where’s it coming from?” To be sure he’d be heard, Farrokh had to raise his voice.

The tea-server was at the time focused on handing the doctor a glass of tea; his pupils were constricted to accommodate the object nearby—namely, the tea glass. But when the doctor asked him from whence the powerful odor came, Ali Ahmed looked in the direction of the village; his pupils dilated (to accommodate the distant tops of the coconut and areca palms), but even as his face was lifted to the harsh sunlight his pupils did not constrict in reaction to the glare. It was the classic Argyll Robertson pupil, Dr. Daruwalla decided.

Farrokh recalled his favorite professor of infectious diseases, Herr Doktor Fritz Meitner; Dr. Meitner was fond of telling his medical students that the best way to remember the behavior of the Argyll Robertson pupil was to think of a prostitute: she accommodates, but doesn’t react. It was an all-male class; they all had laughed, but Farrokh had felt uncertain of his laughter. He’d never been with a prostitute, although they were popular in both Vienna and Bombay.

“Feni,” the tea-server said, to explain the smell. But Dr. Daruwalla already knew the answer, just as he knew that the pupils of some syphilitics don’t respond to light.

In the village—or perhaps the source of the smell was as far away as Panjim—they were distilling coconuts for the local brew called feni; the heavy, sickly-sweet fumes of the liquor drifted over the few tourists and families on holiday at Baga Beach.

Dr. Daruwalla and his family were already favorites with the staff of the small hotel, and they were passionately welcomed in the little lean- to restaurant and taverna that the Daruwallas frequented on the beachfront. The doctor was a big tipper, his wife was a classical beauty of a European tradition (as opposed to the seedy, hippie trash), his daughters were vibrantly bright and pretty—they were still of the innocent school—and the striking John D. was mesmerizing to Indians and foreigners alike. It was only to those rare families as likable as the Daruwallas that the staff of the Hotel Bardez apologized for the smell of the feni.