John Irving - A Son of the Circus

He was five or six, or maybe only four; Rahul could never remember. What he did recall was that he thought he was old enough to be going to the men’s room by himself. Aunt Promila took him to the ladies’ room—she took him with her into the toilet stall, too. He’d told her that there were urinals in the men’s room and that the men stood up to pee.

“I know a better way to pee,” she’d told him.

At the Duckworth Club, the ladies’ room suffered from an elephant motif; in the men’s room, the tiger-hunt decor was far less obtrusive. For example, in the ladies’ room toilet stalls, there was a pull-down platform on the inside of the stall door. It was simply a shelf that folded flat against the door when not in use. By means of a handle, the shelf could be pulled down; on this platform, a lady could put her handbag—or whatever else she took with her into the toilet stall. The handle was a ring that passed like an earring through the base of an elephant’s trunk.

Promila would lift her skirt and pull down her panties; then she sat on the toilet seat, and Rahul—who’d also pulled down his pants and his underpants—would sit on her lap.

“Pull down the elephant, dear,” Aunt Promila would tell him, and Rahul would lean forward until he could reach the ring through the elephant’s trunk. The elephant had no tusks; Rahul found the elephant generally lacking in realism—for example, there was no opening at the end of the elephant’s trunk.

First Promila peed, then Rahul. He sat on his aunt’s lap, listening to her. When she wiped herself, he could feel the back of her hand against his bare bum. Then she would reach into his lap and point his little penis down into the toilet. It was difficult for him to pee from her lap.

“Don’t miss,” she’d whisper in his ear. “Are you being careful?” Rahul tried to be careful. When he was finished, Aunt Promila wiped his penis with some toilet paper. Then she felt his penis with her bare hand. “Let’s be sure you’re dry, dear,” Promila would say to him. She always held him until his penis was stiff. “What a big boy you are,” she’d whisper.

When they were finished, they washed their hands together.

“The hot water is too hot—it will burn you,” Aunt Promila would warn him. Together they stood at the wildly ornate sink. There was a single faucet in the form of an elephant’s head. The water flowed through the elephant’s trunk, emerging in a broad spray. You lifted one tusk for the hot water, the other tusk for the cold. “Just the cold water, dear,” Aunt Promila told him. She let Rahul operate the faucet for both of them; he would raise and lower the tusk for cold water—just one tusk. “Always wash your hands, dear,” Aunt Promila would say.

“Yes, Auntie,” Rahul answered. He’d supposed his aunt’s preference for cold water was a sign of her age; she must have remembered a time before there was hot water.

When he was older, maybe 8 or 9—he could have been 10—Promila sent him to see Dr. Lowji Daruwalla. She was concerned with what she called Rahul’s inexplicable hairlessness—or so she told the doctor. In retrospect, Rahul realized that he’d disappointed his aunt—and on more than one occasion. Promila’s disappointment, Rahul also realized, was sexual; his so-called hairlessness had little to do with it. But there was no way for Promila Rai to complain about the size or the short-lived stiffness of her nephew’s penis—certainly not to Dr. Lowji Daruwalla! The question of whether or not Rahul was impotent would have to wait until Rahul was 12 or 13; at that time, the examining physician would be old Dr. Tata.

In retrospect, Rahul would realize that his aunt was chiefly interested in knowing whether he was impotent or merely impotent with her . Naturally, she’d not told Tata that she was having a repeatedly disappointing sexual experience with Rahul; she’d implied that Rahul himself was concerned because he’d failed to maintain an erection with a prostitute. Dr. Tata’s response had been disappointing to Aunt Promila, too.

“Perhaps it was the prostitute,” old Dr. Tata had replied.

Years later, when he thought of his Aunt Promila, Rahul would remember that. Perhaps it was the prostitute, he would think to himself; possibly he’d not been impotent after all. All things considered, now that Rahul was a woman, what did it really matter? He sincerely loved his Aunt Promila. As for washing his hands, the memory of the elephant with one tusk raised would never be lost on Rahul; but he preferred to wash his hands in hot water.

With hindsight, it is impressive how Deputy Commissioner Patel fathomed Rahul’s attachment to family money—in India. The detective thought that a well-to-do relative might explain the killer’s few but periodic visits to Bombay. For 15 years, the victims who were decorated with the winking elephant were prostitutes from the Kamathipura brothels or from the brothels on Grant Road and Falkland Road. Their murders occurred in groups of two or three, within two or three weeks’ time, and then not again for nearly nine months or a year. There were no murders recorded in the hottest months, just before the monsoon, or during the monsoon itself; the murderer struck at a more comfortable time of the year. Only the first two murders, in Goa, were hot-weather murders.

Detective Patel could find no evidence of the murders with elephant drawings in any other Indian city; this was why he had concluded that the killer lived abroad. It wasn’t hard to uncover the relatively few murders of this nature in London; although these weren’t restricted to the Indian community, the victims were always prostitutes or students—the latter, usually of an artistic inclination, were reputed to have lived in a bohemian or otherwise unconventional way. The more he studied the murderer, and the more deeply he loved Nancy, the more the deputy commissioner realized that Nancy was lucky to be alive.

But with the passage of time, Nancy less and less wore the countenance of a woman who felt herself to be lucky. The Deutsche marks in the dildo—such an excessive amount that, at first, both Nancy and young Inspector Patel had felt quite liberated—were the beginning of Nancy and Patel’s feeling that they had been compromised. It made only the smallest dent in the sum for Nancy to send what she’d stolen from the hardware store to her parents. It was, she thought, the best way to erase the past, but her newfound crusade for justice interfered with the purity of her intention. The money was to repay the hardware store, but in sending it to her parents she couldn’t resist naming those men (in feed-and-grain supply) who’d made her feel like dirt. If her parents wanted to repay the store after knowing what had happened to their daughter there, that would be their decision.

Thus she created a moral dilemma for her parents, which had quite the opposite effect from what Nancy desired. She had not erased the past; she’d brought it to life in her parents’ eyes, and for almost 20 years (until they died), her parents faithfully described their ongoing torment in Iowa to her—all the while begging her to come “home” but refusing to come visit her. It was never clear to Nancy what they finally did with the money.

As for young Inspector Patel, it made a similarly small dent in the sum of Dieter’s Deutsche marks for the previously uncorrupted policeman to engage in his first and last bribe. It was simply the usual and necessary sum required for promotion, for a more lucrative posting—and one must remember that Vijay Patel was not a Maharashtrian. For a Gujarati to make the move from an inspector at the Colaba Station to a deputy commissioner in Crime Branch Headquarters at Crawford Market required what is called greasing the wheel. But—over the years, and in combination with his failure to find Rahul—the bribe had etched itself into a part of the deputy commissioner’s vulnerable self-esteem. It had been a reasonable expense, certainly not a lavish amount of money; and contrary to the infuriating fiction represented by the Inspector Dhar movies, there was no significant advancement within the Bombay police force without a little bribery.