John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Inspector Patel suspected that Rahul had left India. This was no consolation to Nancy; having chosen goodness over evil, she anticipated resolution. It was a pity that Nancy would wait 20 years for a simple but informative conversation with Dr. Daruwalla which would reveal to them both that they’d made acquaintance with the same Rahul. However, not even a detective as dogged as D.C.P. Patel could have been expected to guess that a sexually altered killer might have been found at the Duckworth Club. Moreover, for 15 years, Rahul would not have been found there—at least not very often. He was more frequently in London, where, after the lengthy and painful completion of his sex-change operation, he was able to give more of his energy and concentration to what he called his art. Alas… no excess of energy or concentration would much expand his talent or his range; the cartoon quality of his belly drawings persisted. His tendency toward sexually explicit caricature endured.

It was thematic with Rahul—an inappropriately mirthful elephant with one tusk raised, one eye winking, and water spraying from the end of its downward-pointing trunk. The size and shape of the victims’ navels afforded the artist a considerable variety of winking eyes; the amount and color of the victims’ pubic hair also varied. The water from the elephant’s trunk was constant; the elephant sprayed, with seeming indifference, over all. Many of the murdered prostitutes had shaved their pubic hair; the elephant appeared not to notice, or not to care.

But it wasn’t only that his imagination was sexually perverse, for within Rahul a veritable war was being waged over the true identity of his sexual self, which, to his astonishment, was not appreciably clarified by the successful completion of his long-awaited sex change. Now Rahul was to all appearances a woman; if he couldn’t bear children, it had never been the desire to bear children that had compelled him to become a her. However, it was Rahul’s illusion that a new sexual identity could provide a lasting peace of mind.

Rahul had loathed being a man. In the company of homosexuals, he’d never felt he was one of them, either. But he’d experienced little closeness with his fellow transvestites; in the company of hijras or zenanas, Rahul had felt both different and superior. It didn’t occur to him that they were content to be what they were—Rahul had never been content. There’s more than one way to be a third gender; but Rahul’s uniqueness was inseparable from his viciousness, which extended even toward his fellow transvestites.

He detested the all-too-womanly gestures of most hijras and zenanas; he thought the mischief with which they dressed indicated an all-too-womanly frivolity. As for the traditional powers of the hijras to bless or to curse, Rahul had no belief that they possessed such powers; he believed they tended to parade themselves, either for the smug amusement of boring heterosexuals or for the titillation of more conventional homosexuals. In the homosexual community, at least there were those few—like Subodh, Rahul’s late brother—who defiantly stood out; they advertised their sexual orientation not for the entertainment of the timid but in order to discomfort the intolerant. Yet Rahul imagined that even those homosexuals who were as bold as Subodh were vulnerable to how slavishly they sought the affections of other homosexuals. Rahul had hated how girlishly Subodh had allowed himself to be dominated by Neville Eden.

Rahul had imagined that it was only as a woman that she could dominate both women and men. He’d also imagined that being a woman would make him envy other women less, or not at all; he’d even thought that his desire to hurt and humiliate women would somehow evanesce . He was unprepared for how he would continue to hate them and desire to do them harm; prostitutes—and other women of what he presumed to be loose behavior—especially offended him, in part because of how lightly they regarded their sexual favors, and how they took for granted their sexual parts, which Rahul had been forced to acquire through such perseverance and pain.

Rahul had put himself through the rigors of what he believed was necessary to make him happy; yet he still raged. Like some (but fortunately few) real women, Rahul was contemptuous of those men who sought his attention, while at the same time he strongly desired those men who remained indifferent to his obvious beauty. And this was only half his problem; the other half was that his need to kill certain women was surprisingly (to him) unchanged. And after he’d strangled or bludgeoned them—he favored the latter form of execution—he couldn’t resist creating his signature work of art upon their flaccid bellies; the soft stomach of a dead woman was Rahul’s preferred medium, his canvas of choice.

Beth had been the first; killing Dieter was unmemorable to Rahul. But the spontaneity with which he’d struck down Beth and the utter unresponsiveness of her abdomen to the dhobi pen were stimulations so extreme that Rahul continued to yield to them.

In this sense was his tragedy compounded, for his sex change had not enabled him to view other women as companionable human beings. And because Rahul still hated women, he knew he’d failed to become a woman at all. Further isolating him, in London, was the fact that Rahul also loathed his fellow transsexuals. Before his operation, he’d suffered countless psychological interviews; obviously, they were superficial, for Rahul had managed to convey an utter lack of sexual anger. He’d observed that friendliness, which he interpreted as an impulse toward a cloying kind of sympathy, impressed the evaluating psychiatrist and the sex therapists.

There were meetings with other would-be transsexuals, both those applying for the operation and those in the more advanced phase of “training” for the postoperative women they would soon become. Complete transsexuals also attended these agonizing meetings. It was supposed to be encouraging to socialize with complete transsexuals, just to see what real women they were. This was nauseating to Rahul, who hated it when anyone dared to suggest that he or she was like him; Rahul knew that he wasn’t “like” anyone.

It appalled him that these complete transsexuals even shared the names and phone numbers of former boyfriends. These were men, they said, who weren’t at all repulsed by women “like us”—possibly these interesting men were even attracted by them. What a concept! Rahul thought. He wasn’t becoming a woman in order to become a member of some transsexual club; if the operation was complete, no one would ever know that Rahul had not been born a woman.

But there was one who knew: Aunt Promila. She’d been such a supporter. Gradually, Rahul resented how she sought to control him. She would continue her most generous financial assistance to his life in London, but only if he promised not to forget her—only if he would come pay some attention to her from time to time. Rahul wasn’t opposed to these periodic visits to Bombay; he was merely annoyed that his aunt manipulated how often and when he traveled to see her. And as she grew older, she grew more needy; shamelessly, and frequently, she referred to Rahul’s elevated status in her will.

Even with Promila’s considerable influence, it took Rahul longer to legalize his change of name than it had taken him to change his sex—in spite of the bribes. And although there were many other women’s names that he preferred, it was politic of him to choose Promila, which greatly pleased his aunt and assured him an indeed favorable position in her much-mentioned will. Nevertheless, the new name on the new passport left Rahul feeling incomplete. Perhaps he felt that he could never be Promila Rai as long as his Aunt Promila was alive. Since Promila was the only person on earth whom Rahul loved, it made him feel guilty that he grew impatient with how long he had to wait for her to die.