John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“My dear, you are eccentric!” Promila said. “Why don’t you get a real money clip, if you like those things?”

“Well, Auntie,” Rahul patiently explained, “I find that real money clips are too loose, unless you carry a great wad of money in them. What I like is to carry just a few small notes outside my wallet—something handy to pay for a taxi, or for tipping.” He demonstrated that the top half of the silver pen possessed a very strong, tight clip—where it was meant to attach itself to a jacket pocket or a shirt pocket—and that this clip was perfect for holding just a few rupees. “Besides, it’s real silver,” Rahul added.

Promila held it in her veinous hand. “Why so it is, dear,” she remarked. She read aloud the one word, in script, that was engraved on the top half of the pen: “ India —isn’t that quaint?”

“ I certainly thought so,” Rahul remarked, returning the eccentric item to his purse.

Meanwhile, as Dr. Daruwalla grew hungrier, he also grew more relaxed about his praying; he cautiously rekindled his sense of humor. After he’d eaten, Farrokh could almost joke about his conversion. “I wonder what next the Almighty will ask of me!” he said to Julia, who once more cautioned her husband about blasphemy.

What was next in store for Dr. Daruwalla would test his newfound faith in ways the doctor would find most disturbing. By the same means that Nancy had discovered the doctor’s whereabouts, the police also discovered him. They’d found what everyone now called the “hippie grave” and they needed a doctor to hazard a guess concerning the cause of death of the grave’s ghastly occupants. They’d gone looking for a doctor on holiday. A local doctor would talk too much about the crime; at least this was what the local police told Dr. Daruwalla.

“But I don’t do autopsies!” Dr. Daruwalla protested; yet he went to Anjuna to view the remains.

It was generally supposed that the blue crabs were the reason the bodies were spoiled for viewing; and if the salt water proved itself to be a modest preservative, it did little to veil the stench. Farrokh easily concluded that several blows to the head had done them both in, but the female’s body was messier. Her forearms and the backs of her hands were battered, which suggested that she’d tried to defend herself; the male, clearly, had never known what hit him.

It was the elephant drawing that Farrokh would remember. The murdered girl’s navel had been transformed to a winking eye; the opposing tusk had been flippantly raised, like the tipping of an imaginary hat. Short, childish lines indicated that the elephant’s trunk was spraying—the “water” fanning over the dead girl’s pubic hair. Such intended mockery would remain with Dr. Daruwalla for 20 years; the doctor would remember the little drawing too well.

When Farrokh saw the broken glass, he suffered only the slightest discomfort, and the feeling quickly passed. Back at the Hotel Bardez, he was unable to find the piece of glass he’d removed from the young woman’s foot. And so what if the glass from the grave had matched? he thought. There were soda bottles everywhere. Besides, the police had already told him that the suspected murderer was a German male.

Farrokh thought that this theory suited the prejudices of the local police—namely, that only a hippie from Europe or North America could possibly perform a double slaying and then trivialize the murders with a cartoonish drawing. Ironically, these killings and that drawing stimulated Dr. Daruwalla’s need to be more creative. He found himself fantasizing that he was a detective.

The doctor’s success in the orthopedic field had given him certain commercial expectations; these considerations doubtless returned the doctor’s imagination to that notion of himself as a screenwriter. No one movie could have satisfied Farrokh’s suddenly insatiable creativity; nothing less than a series of movies, featuring the same detective, would do. Finally, that was how it happened. At the end of his holiday, on the ferry back to Bombay, Dr. Daruwalla invented Inspector Dhar.

Farrokh was watching how the young women on board the ferry couldn’t take their eyes off the beautiful John D. Suddenly, the doctor could envision the hero that these young women imagined when they looked at a young man like that. The excitement that Mr. James Salter’s example had inspired was already becoming a moment of the sexual past; it was becoming a part of the second honeymoon that Dr. Daruwalla was leaving behind. To the doctor, murder and corruption spoke louder than art. And besides, what a career John D. might have!

It would never have occurred to Farrokh that the young woman with the big dildo had seen the same murder victims he had seen. But 20 years later, even the movie version of that drawing on Beth’s belly would ring a bell with Nancy. How could it be a coincidence that the victim’s navel was the elephant’s winking eye, or that the opposing tusk was raised? In the movie, no pubic hair was shown, but those childish lines indicated to Nancy that the elephant’s trunk was still spraying—like a showerhead, or like the nozzle of a hose.

Nancy would also remember the beautiful, unshockable young man she’d been introduced to by Dr. Daruwalla. When she saw her first Inspector Dhar movie, Nancy would recall the first time she’d seen that knowing sneer. The future actor had been strong enough to carry her downstairs without apparent effort; the future movie star had been poised enough to unscrew the troublesome dildo without appearing to be appalled.

And all of this was what she meant when she left her uncompromising message on Dr. Daruwalla’s answering machine. “I know who you really are, I know what you really do,” Nancy had informed the doctor. “Tell the deputy commissioner—the real policeman. Tell him who you are. Tell him what you do,” Nancy had instructed the secret screenwriter, for she’d figured out who Inspector Dhar’s creator was.

Nancy knew that no one could have imagined the movie version of that drawing on Beth’s belly; Inspector Dhar’s creator had to have seen what she had seen. And the handsome John D., who now passed himself off as Inspector Dhar—that young man would never have been invited to view the murder victims. That would have been the doctor’s job. Therefore, Nancy knew that Dhar hadn’t created himself; Inspector Dhar had also been the doctor’s job.

Dr. Daruwalla was confused. He remembered introducing Nancy to John D., and how gallantly John D. had carried the heavy young woman downstairs. Had Nancy seen an Inspector Dhar movie, or all of them? Had she recognized the more mature John D.? Fine; but how had she made the imaginative leap that the doctor was Dhar’s creator? And how could she know “the real policeman,” as she called him? Dr. Daruwalla could only assume that she meant Deputy Commissioner Patel. Of course, the doctor didn’t realize that Nancy had known Detective Patel for 20 years—not to mention that she was married to him.

One might recall that Dr. Daruwalla had all this time been sitting in his bedroom in Bombay, where the doctor was alone again. Julia had at last left him sitting there; she’d gone to apologize to John D.—and to be sure that their supper was still warm enough to eat. Dr. Daruwalla knew it was an unprecedented rudeness to have kept his favorite young man waiting, but in the light of Nancy’s phone message, the doctor felt compelled to speak to D.C.P. Patel. The subject that the deputy commissioner wished to discuss in private with Dr. Daruwalla was only a part of what prompted the doctor to make the call; of more interest to Farrokh was where Nancy was now and why she knew “the real policeman.”