John Irving - A Son of the Circus

At first he tried to sleep on his side, which was his usual preference, but in that position he was conscious of the soreness in his ribs; on his stomach, the pain was more evident. Flat on his back—where he struggled in vain to fall asleep, and where he was inclined to snore—he wracked his overexcited brain for the precise image of the movie actress he was sure he was reminded of when he’d shamelessly stared at the second Mrs. Dogar. Despite himself, he grew sleepy. The names of actresses came to and left his lips. He saw Neelam’s full mouth, and Rekha’s nice mouth, too; he thought of Sridevi’s mischievous smile—and almost everything there was to think about Sonu Walia, too. Then he half-waked himself and thought, No, no… it’s no one contemporary, and she’s probably not even Indian. Jennifer Jones? he wondered. Ida Lupino? Rita Moreno? Dorothy Lamour! No, no… what was he thinking? It was someone whose beauty was much more cruel than the beauty of any of these. This insight nearly woke him. Had he awakened simultaneously with the reminder caused by the pain in his ribs, he might have got it. But although the hour was now late, it was still too soon for him to know.

There was more communication in the marriage bed of Mr. and Mrs. Patel at this very same late hour. Nancy was crying; her tears, as they often were, were a mix of misery and frustration. Deputy Commissioner Patel was trying, as he often did, to be comforting.

Nancy had suddenly remembered what had happened to her—maybe two weeks after the last symptoms of gonorrhea had disappeared. She’d broken out in a terrible rash, red and sore and with unbearable itching, and she’d assumed that this was a new phase of something venereal she’d caught from Dieter. Furthermore, there was no hiding this phase from her beloved policeman; young Inspector Patel had straightaway brought her to a doctor, who informed her that she’d been taking too many antimalarial pills—she was simply suffering from an allergic reaction. But how this had frightened her! And she only now remembered the goats.

For all these years, she’d thought about the goats in the brothels, but she’d not remembered how she’d first feared that it was something from the goats that had given her such a hideous rash and such uncontrollable itching. That had been her worst fear. For 20 years, when she’d thought about those brothels and the women who’d been murdered there, she’d forgotten the men Dieter had told her about—the terrible men who fucked goats. Maybe Dieter had fucked goats, too. No wonder she’d at least tried to forget this.

“But nobody is fucking those goats,” Vijay just now informed her.

“What?” Nancy said.

“Well, I don’t presume to know about the United States—or even about certain rural areas of India—but no one in Bombay is fucking goats,” her husband assured her.

“What?” Nancy said. “Dieter told me that they fucked the goats.”

“Well, it’s not at all true,” the detective said. “Those goats are pets. Of course some of them give milk. This is a bonus—for the children, I suppose. But they’re pets, just pets.”

“Oh, Vijay!” Nancy cried. He had to hold her. “Oh, Dieter lied to me!” she cried. “Oh, how he lied to me… all those years I believed it! Oh, that fucker! ” The word was so sharply spoken, it caused a dog in the alley below them to stop rooting through the garbage and bark. Over their heads, the ceiling fan barely stirred the close air, which seemed always to smell of the perpetually blocked drains, and of the sea, which in their neighborhood was not especially clean or fresh-smelling. “Oh, it was another lie!” Nancy screamed. Vijay went on holding her, although to do so for long would make them both sweat. The air was unmoving where they lived.

The goats were just pets. Yet, for 20 years, what Dieter had told her had hurt her so badly; at times, it had made her physically sick. And the heat, and the sewer smell, and the fact that, whoever Rahul was, he was still getting away with it—all this Nancy had accepted, but in the fashion that she’d accepted her childlessness, which she’d accepted so slowly and only after what had felt to her like a lingering and merciless defeat.

It was late. While Nancy cried herself to sleep and Dr. Daruwalla failed to realize that the second and beautiful Mrs. Dogar had reminded him of Rahul, Vinod was driving one of Mr. Garg’s exotic dancers home from the Wetness Cabaret.

She was a middle-aged Maharashtrian with the English name of Muriel—not her real name but her exotic-dancing name—and she was upset because one of the patrons of the Wetness Cabaret had thrown an orange at her while she was dancing. The clientele of the Wetness Cabaret was vile, Muriel had decided. Even so, she rationalized, Mr. Garg was a gentleman. Garg had recognized that Muriel was upset by the episode with the orange; he’d personally engaged Vinod’s “luxury” taxi to drive Muriel home.

Although Vinod had praised Mr. Garg’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of runaway child prostitutes, the dwarf wouldn’t have gone so far as to call Mr. Garg a gentleman; possibly Garg was more of a gentleman with middle-aged women. With younger girls, Vinod wasn’t sure. The dwarf didn’t entirely share Dr. Daruwalla’s suspicions of Mr. Garg, but Vinod and Deepa had occasionally encountered a child prostitute who seemed in need of rescuing from Garg. Save this poor child, Mr. Garg seemed to be saying; save her from me , Garg might have meant.

It wouldn’t have helped Vinod and Deepa’s child-rescue operations to have Dr. Daruwalla treating Garg like a criminal. The new runaway, the boneless one—a potential plastic lady—was a case in point. Although she’d appeared to be more personally involved with Mr. Garg than she should have been, such implications wouldn’t help her cause with Dr. Daruwalla; the doctor had to pronounce her healthy or the Great Blue Nile wouldn’t take her.

Vinod now noted that the middle-aged woman with the exotic-dancing name of Muriel had fallen asleep; she slept with a somewhat sour expression, her mouth disagreeably open and her hands resting on her fat breasts. The dwarf thought that it made more sense to throw an orange at her than it did to watch her dance. But Vinod’s humanitarian instincts extended even to middle-aged strippers; he slowed down because the streets were bumpy, seeing no reason to wake the poor woman before she was home. In her sleep, Muriel suddenly cringed. She was ducking oranges, the dwarf imagined.

After Vinod dropped off Muriel, it was too late for him to go anywhere but back to the brothel area; the red-light district was the only part of Bombay where people needed a taxi at 2:00 in the morning. Soon the international travelers would be arriving at the Oberoi and the Taj, but no one who’d just flown in from Europe or North America would have the slightest inclination to cruise around the city.

Vinod thought he’d wait for the end of the last show at the Wetness Cabaret; one of Mr. Garg’s other exotic dancers might want a safe ride home. It amazed Vinod that the Wetness Cabaret, the building itself, was “home” to Mr. Garg; the dwarf couldn’t imagine sleeping there. He supposed there were rooms upstairs, above the slick bar and the sticky tables and the sloping stage. Vinod shivered to think of the dimly lit bar, the brightly lit stage, the darkened tables where the men sat—some of them masturbating, although the dominant odor of the Wetness Cabaret was one of urine. How could Garg sleep in such a place, even if he slept above it?

But as distasteful as it was to Vinod—to cruise the brothel area, as if he carried a potential customer in the Ambassador’s back seat—the dwarf had decided that he might as well stay awake. Vinod was fascinated by that hour when most of the brothels switched over; in Kamathipura, on Falkland Road and Grant Road, there came an hour of the early morning when most of the brothels would accept only all-night customers. In the dwarf’s opinion, these were different and desperate men. Who else would want to spend all night with a prostitute?