A Son of the Circus

  As for urine therapy, it was also wise to say nothing. Moraji Desai, the former prime minister, was a practitioner of urine therapy--and wasn't there something called the Water of Life Foundation? Best to say nothing about that, too, Farrokh concluded. Besides, Urology Aziz wanted to read something from the Kama Sutra. It would be best to listen.

  "Among the many situations where adultery is allowed," Dr. Aziz said, "just listen to this: 'When such clandestine relations are safe and a sure method of earning money.' " Dr. Aziz refolded the often-folded piece of paper and returned this evidence to his pocket. "Well, do you see?" he said.

  "What do you mean?" Farrokh asked.

  "Well, that's the problem--obviously!" Dr. Aziz said.

  Farrokh was still trying to figure out how Dr. Dev had caught AIDS while performing a colonoscopy; meanwhile, Dr. Aziz had concluded that AIDS among prostitutes was caused directly by the bad advice given in the Kama Sutra. (Farrokh doubted that most prostitutes could read.) This was another example of the first-floor dogs--they were barking again. Dr. Daruwalla smiled nervously all the way to the entrance to the alley, where Urology Aziz had parked his car.

  There'd been some brief confusion, because Vinod's Ambassador had momentarily blocked the alley, but Dr. Aziz was soon on his way. Farrokh had waited in the alley for the dwarf to turn his car around. It was a close, narrow alley--briny-smelling, because of the proximity of the sea, and as warm and steamy as a blocked drain. The alley was a haven for the beggars who frequented the small seaside hotels along Marine Drive. Dr. Daruwalla supposed that these beggars were especially interested in the Arab clientele; they were reputed to give more money. But the beggar who suddenly emerged from the alley wasn't one of these.

  He was a badly limping boy who could occasionally be seen standing on his head at Chowpatty Beach. The doctor knew that this wasn't a trick of sufficient promise for Vinod and Deepa to offer the urchin a home at the circus. The boy had slept on the beach--his hair was caked with sand--and the first sunlight had driven him into the alley for a few more hours' sleep. The two automobiles, arriving and departing, had probably attracted his attention. When Vinod backed the Ambassador into the alley, the beggar blocked the doctor's way to the car. The boy stood with both arms extended, palms up; there was a veil of mucous over his eyes and a whitish paste marked the corners of his mouth.

  The eyes of the orthopedic surgeon were drawn to the boy's limp. The beggar's right foot was rigidly locked in a right-angle position, as if the foot and ankle were permanently fused--a deformity called ankylosis, which was familiar to Dr. Daruwalla from the common congenital condition of clubfoot. Yet both the foot and ankle were unusually flattened--a crush injury, the doctor guessed--and the boy bore his weight on his heel alone. Also, the bad foot was considerably smaller than the good one; this led the doctor to imagine that the injury had damaged the epiphyseal plates, which is the region in bones where growth takes place. It wasn't only that the boy's foot had fused with his ankle; his foot had also stopped growing. Farrokh felt certain that the boy was inoperable.

  Just then, Vinod opened the driver's-side door. The beggar was wary of the dwarf, but Vinod wasn't brandishing his squash-racquet handles. The dwarf was nevertheless determined to open the rear door for Dr. Daruwalla, who observed that the beggar was taller but frailer than Vinod--Vinod simply pushed the boy out of the way. Farrokh saw the beggar stumble; his mashed foot was as stiff as a hammer. Once inside the Ambassador, the doctor lowered the window only enough so that the boy could hear him.

  "Maaf karo," Dr. Daruwalla said gently. It was what he always said to beggars: "Forgive me."

  The boy spoke English. "I don't forgive you," he said.

  Also in English, Farrokh said what was on his mind: "What happened to your foot?"

  "An elephant stepped on it," the cripple replied.

  That would explain it, the doctor thought, but he didn't believe the story; beggars were liars.

  "Was it being a circus elephant?" Vinod inquired.

  "It was just an elephant stepping off a train," the boy told the dwarf. "I was a baby, and my father left me lying on the station platform--he was in a bidi shop."

  "You were stepped on by an elephant while your father was buying cigarettes?" Farrokh asked. This certainly sounded like a tall tale, but the cripple listlessly nodded. "So I suppose your name is Ganesh--after the elephant god," Dr. Daruwalla asked the boy. Without appearing to notice the doctor's sarcasm, the cripple nodded again.

  "It was the wrong name for me," the boy replied.

  Apparently, Vinod believed the beggar. "He is being a doctor," the dwarf said, pointing to Farrokh. "He is fixing you, maybe," Vinod added, pointing to the boy. But the beggar was already limping away from the car.

  "You can't fix what elephants do," Ganesh said.

  The doctor didn't believe he could fix what the elephant had done, either. "Maaf karo," Dr. Daruwalla repeated. Neither stopping nor bothering to look back, the cripple made no further response to Farrokh's favorite expression.

  Then the dwarf drove Dr. Daruwalla to the hospital, where one surgery for clubfoot and another for wryneck awaited him. Farrokh tried to distract himself by daydreaming about a back operation--a laminectomy with fusion. Then Dr. Daruwalla dreamed of something more ambitious--the placement of Harrington rods for a severe vertebral infection, with vertebral collapse. But even in prepping his surgeries for, the clubfoot and the wryneck, the doctor would keep thinking about how he might fix the beggar's foot.

  Farrokh could cut through the fibrous tissue and the contracted, shrunken tendons--there were plastic procedures to elongate tendons--but the problem with such a crush injury was the bony fusion; Dr. Daruwalla would have to saw through bone. By damaging the vascular bundles around the foot, he could compromise the blood supply; the result might be gangrene. Of course there was always amputation and the fitting of a prosthesis, but the boy would probably refuse such an operation. In fact, Farrokh knew, his own father would have refused to perform such an operation; as a surgeon, Lowji had lived by the old adage primum non nocere--above all, do no harm.

  Forget the boy, Farrokh had thought. Thus he'd performed the clubfoot and the wryneck and, thereafter, he'd faced the Membership Committee at the Duckworth Club, where he had also lunched with Inspector Dhar, a lunch much disturbed by the death of Mr. Lal and the discomfort that D.C.P. Patel had caused them. (Dr. Daruwalla had had a busy day.)

  And now, as he listened to the phone messages on his answering machine, Farrokh was trying to imagine the precise moment in the bougainvillea by the ninth green when Mr. Lal had been struck down. Perhaps when Dr. Daruwalla was in surgery; possibly before, when he'd encountered Dr. Aziz on the elevator, or one of the times when he'd said "Maaf karo" to the crippled beggar whose English was unbelievably good.

  Doubtless the boy was one of those enterprising beggars who sold himself as a guide to foreign tourists. Cripples were the best hustlers, Farrokh knew. Many of them had maimed themselves; some of them had been purposefully injured by their parents--for being crippled improved their opportunities as beggars. These thoughts of mutilation, especially of self-inflicted wounds, led the doctor to thinking about the hijras again. Then his thoughts returned to the golf-course murder.

  In retrospect, what astonished Dr. Daruwalla was how anyone could have gotten close enough to Mr. Lal to strike the old golfer with his own putter. For how could you sneak up on a man who was flailing away in the flowers? His body would have been twisting from side to side, and bending over to fuss with the stupid ball. And where would his golf bag have been? Not far away. How could anyone approach Mr. Lal's golf bag, take out the putter and then hit Mr. Lal--all when Mr. Lal wasn't looking? It wouldn't work in a movie, Farrokh knew--not even in an Inspector Dhar movie.

  That was when the doctor realized that Mr. Lal's murderer had to have been someone Mr. Lal knew, and if the murderer had been another golfer--presumably with his own bag of clubs--why would he have needed to use Mr. Lal
's putter? But what a nongolfer could have been doing in the vicinity of the ninth green--and still not have aroused Mr. Lal's suspicions--was at least for the moment quite beyond the imaginative powers of Inspector Dhar's creator.

  Farrokh wondered what sort of dogs were barking in the killer's head. Angry dogs, Dr. Daruwalla supposed, for in the murderer's mind there was such a terrifying irrationality; the mind of Dr. Aziz would appear reasonable in comparison. But then Farrokh's speculations on this subject were interrupted by the third phone message. The doctor's answering machine was truly relentless.

  "Goodness!" cried the unidentified voice. It was a voice of such lunatic exuberance, Dr. Daruwalla presumed it was no one he knew.

  8

  TOO MANY MESSAGES

  For Once, the Jesuits Don't Know Everything

  At first Farrokh failed to recognize the hysterical enthusiasm that characterized the voice of the ever-optimistic Father Cecil, who was 72 and therefore easily panicked by the challenge to speak clearly and calmly to an answering machine. Father Cecil was the senior priest at St. Ignatius, an Indian Jesuit of unrelenting good cheer; as such, he stood in startling juxtaposition to the Father Rector--Father Julian--who was 68 years old and English and one of those intellectual Jesuits with a caustic disposition. Father Julian was so sarcastic that he was an instant source of renewing Dr. Daruwalla's combined awe and suspicion of Catholics. But the message was from Father Cecil--therefore free of facetiousness. "Goodness!" Father Cecil began, as if offering a general description of the world he saw all around him.

  What now? thought Dr. Daruwalla. Because he was among the distinguished alumni of St. Ignatius School, Farrokh was frequently asked to give inspirational speeches to the students; in previous years, he'd also addressed the Young Women's Christian Association. He'd once been an active member of the Catholic and Anglican Community for Christian Unity and the so-called Hope Alive Committee. But such activities failed to interest him anymore. Dr. Daruwalla sincerely hoped that Father Cecil wasn't calling him with a repeat request for the doctor to relate again the stirring experience of his conversion.

  After all, despite Dr. Daruwalla's past commitment to Catholic and Anglican unity, he was an Anglican; he felt uncomfortable in the presence of a certain overzealous, albeit small, percentage of the faithful followers of St. Ignatius Church. Farrokh had declined a recent invitation to speak at the Catholic Charismatic Information Centre; the suggested topic had been "The Charismatic Renewal in India." The doctor had replied that his own small experience--the entirely quiet, little miracle of his conversion--didn't compare to ecstatic religious experiences (speaking in tongues and spontaneous healing, and so forth). "But a miracle is a miracle!" Father Cecil had said. To Farrokh's surprise, Father Julian had taken the doctor's side.

  "I quite agree with Dr. Daruwalla," Father Julian had said. "His experience hardly qualifies as a miracle at all."

  Dr. Daruwalla had been miffed. He was quite willing to portray his conversion experience as a low-key kind of miracle; he was always humble when relating the story. There were no marks on his body that even remotely resembled the wounds on the crucified body of Christ. His was no stigmata story. He wasn't one of those nonstop bleeders! But for the Father Rector to dismiss his experience as hardly qualifying as a miracle at all ... well, this sorely vexed Dr. Daruwalla. The insult fueled Farrokh's insecurities and prejudices in regard to the superior education of the Jesuits. They were not only holier than thou, they were more knowing than thou! But the message was about Dhar's twin, not about the doctor's conversion.

  Of course! Dhar's twin was the first American missionary in the highly esteemed 125-year history of St. Ignatius; neither the church nor the school had been blessed with an American missionary before. Dhar's twin was what the Jesuits call a scholastic, which Dr. Daruwalla already understood to mean that he'd endured much religious and philosophic study and that he'd taken his simple vows. However, the doctor knew, Dhar's twin was still a few years away from being ordained as a priest. This was a period of soul-searching, Dr. Daruwalla supposed--the final test of those simple vows.

  The vows themselves gave Farrokh the shivers. Poverty, chastity, obedience--they weren't so "simple." It was hard to imagine the progeny of a Hollywood screenwriter like Danny Mills opting for poverty; it was harder still to conceive of the offspring of Veronica Rose choosing chastity. And regarding the tricky Jesuitical ramifications of obedience, Dr. Daruwalla knew that he himself didn't know nearly enough. What he also suspected was that, should one of those crafty Jesuits try to explain "obedience" to him, the explanation itself would be a marvel of equivocation--of oversubtle reasoning--and, in the end, Farrokh would have no clearer understanding of a vow of obedience than he'd had before. In Dr. Daruwalla's estimation, the Jesuits were intellectually crafty and sly. And this was hardest of all for the doctor to imagine: that a child of Danny Mills and Veronica Rose could be intellectually crafty and sly. Even Dhar, who'd had a decent European education, was no intellectual.

  But then Dr. Daruwalla reminded himself that Dhar and his twin could also be the genetic creation of Neville Eden. Neville had always struck Farrokh as crafty and sly. What a puzzle! Just what was a man who was almost 40 doing by becoming--or trying to become--a priest? What failures had led him to this? Farrokh assumed that only blunders or disillusionments could lead a man to vows of such a radically repressive nature.

  Now here was Father Cecil saying that "young Martin" had mentioned, in a letter, that Dr. Daruwalla was "an old friend of the family." So his name was Martiri--Martin Mills. Farrokh remembered that, in her letter to him, Vera had already told him this. And "young Martin" wasn't so young, Dr. Daruwalla knew--except to Father Cecil, who was 72. But the gist of Father Cecil's phone message caught Dr. Daruwalla by surprise.

  "Do you know exactly when he's coming?" Father Cecil asked.

  What does he mean--do I know? Farrokh thought. Why doesn't he know? But neither Father Julian nor Father Cecil could remember exactly when Martin Mills was arriving; they blamed Brother Gabriel for losing the American's letter.

  Brother Gabriel had come to Bombay and St. Ignatius after the Spanish Civil War; he'd been on the Communist side, and his first contribution to St. Ignatius had been to collect the Russian and Byzantine icons for which the mission chapel and its icon-collection room were famous. Brother Gabriel was also in charge of the mail.

  When Farrokh was 10 or 12 and a student at St. Ignatius, Brother Gabriel would have been 26 or 28; Dr. Daruwalla remembered that Brother Gabriel was at that time still struggling to learn Hindi and Marathi, and that his English was melodious, with a Spanish accent. The doctor recalled a short, sturdy man in a black cassock, exhorting an army of sweepers to raise more and more clouds of dust from the stone floors. Farrokh also remembered that Brother Gabriel was in charge of the other servants, and the garden, and the kitchen, and the linen room--in addition to the mail. But the icons were his passion. He was a friendly, vigorous man, neither an intellectual nor a priest, and Dr. Daruwalla calculated that, today, Brother Gabriel would be around 75. No wonder he's losing letters, Farrokh thought.

  So no one knew exactly when Dhar's twin would arrive! Father Cecil added that the American's teaching duties would commence almost immediately. St. Ignatius didn't recognize the week between Christmas and New Year's as a holiday; only Christmas Day and New Year's Day were school vacations, an annoyance that Farrokh remembered from his own school days. The doctor guessed that the school was still sensitive to the charge made by many non-Christian parents that Christmas was overemphasized.

  It was possible, Father Cecil opined, that young Martin would make contact with Dr. Daruwalla before he contacted anyone at St. Ignatius. Or perhaps the doctor had already heard from the American? Already heard? thought Dr. Daruwalla, in a panic.

  Here was Dhar's twin--due to arrive any day now--and Dhar still didn't know! And the naive American would arrive at Sahar Airport at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning; that was when all the
flights from Europe and North America arrived. (Dr. Daruwalla presumed that all Americans coming to India were "naive.") At that dreadfully early hour, St. Ignatius would quite literally be closed--like a castle, like an army barracks, like the compound or the cloister that it was. If the priests and brothers didn't know exactly when Martin Mills was arriving, no one would leave any lights on or any doors open for him--no one would meet his plane. And so the bewildered missionary might come directly to Dr. Daruwalla; he might simply show up on the doctor's doorstep at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. (Dr. Daruwalla presumed that all missionaries coming to India were "bewildered.")

  Farrokh couldn't remember what he'd written to Vera. Had he given the horrid woman his home address or the address of the Hospital for Crippled Children? Fittingly, she'd written to him in care of the Duckworth Club. Of Bombay, of all of India, it was possibly only the Duckworth Club that Vera remembered. (Doubtless she'd repressed the cow.)

  Damn other people's messes! Dr. Daruwalla was muttering aloud. He was a surgeon; as such, he was an extremely neat and tidy man. The sheer sloppiness of human relationships appalled him, especially those relationships to which he felt he'd brought a special responsibility and care. Brother-sister, brother-brother, child-parent, parent-child. What was the matter with human beings, that they made such a shambles out of these basic relationships?

  Dr. Daruwalla didn't want to hide Dhar from his twin. He didn't want to hurt Danny--with the cruel evidence of what his wife had done, and how she'd lied--but he felt he was largely protecting Vera by helping her to keep her lie intact. As for Dhar, he was so disgusted by everything he'd heard about his mother, he'd stopped being curious about her when he was in his twenties; he'd never expressed a desire to know her--not even to meet her. Admittedly, his curiosity about his father had persisted into his thirties, but Dhar had lately seemed resigned to the fact that he would never know him. Perhaps the proper word was "hardened," not "resigned."