The first image that captured Farrokh's attention was only a couple of pages into the first chapter. The narrator was riding on a train in France. "Across from me the girl has fallen asleep. She has a narrow mouth, cast down at the corners, weighted there by the sourness of knowledge." Immediately, Dr. Daruwalla felt that this was good stuff, but he also surmised that the story would end unhappily. It had never occurred to the doctor that a stumbling block between himself and most serious literature was that he disliked unhappy endings. Farrokh had forgotten that, as a younger reader, he'd once preferred unhappy endings.
It wasn't until the fifth chapter that Dr. Daruwalla became disturbed by the first-person narrator's frankly voyeuristic qualities, for these same qualities strongly brought out the doctor's own troubling voyeurism. "When she walks, she leaves me weak. A hobbled, feminine step. Full hips. Small waist." Faithfully, as always, Farrokh thought of Julia. "There's a glint of white slip where her sweater parts slightly at the bosom. My eyes keep going there in quick, helpless glances." Does Julia like this kind of thing? Farrokh wondered. And then, in the eighth chapter, the novel took a turn that made Dr. Daruwalla miserable with envy and desire. Some second honeymoon! he thought. "Her back is towards him. In a single move she pulls off her sweater and then, reaching behind herself in that elbow-awkward way, unfastens her brassiere. Slowly he turns her around."
Dr. Daruwalla was suspicious of the narrator, this first person who is obsessed with every detail of the sexual explorations of a young American abroad and a French girl from the country--an 18-year-old Anne-Marie. Farrokh didn't understand that without the narrator's discomforting presence, the reader couldn't experience the envy and desire of the perpetual onlooker, which was precisely what haunted Farrokh and impelled him to read on and on. "The next morning they do it again. Grey light, it's very early. Her breath is bad."
That was when Dr. Daruwalla knew that one of the lovers was going to die; her bad, breath was an unpleasant hint of mortality. He wanted to stop reading but he couldn't. He decided that he disliked the young American--he was supported by his father, he didn't even have a job--but his heart ached for the French girl, whose innocence was being lost. The doctor didn't know that he was supposed to feel these things. The book was beyond him.
Because his medical practice was an exercise of almost pure goodness, he was ill prepared for the real world. Mostly he saw malformations and deformities and injuries to children; he tried to restore their little joints to their intended perfection. The real world had no purpose as clear as that.
I'll read just one more chapter, Dr. Daruwalla thought. He'd already read nine. At the inland edge of the beach, he lay in the midday heat in a hammock under the dead-still fronds of the areca and coconut palms. The smell of coconut and fish and salt was occasionally laced with the smell of hashish, drifting along the beach. Where the beach touched the tropical-green mass of tangled vegetation, a sugarcane stall competed for a small triangle of shade with a wagon selling mango milkshakes. The melting ice had wet the sand.
The Daruwallas had commandeered a fleet of rooms--an entire floor of the Hotel Bardez--and there was a generous outdoor balcony, although the balcony was outfitted with only one sleeping hammock and young John D. had claimed it. Dr. Daruwalla felt so comfortable in the beach hammock that he resolved he would persuade John D. to allow him to sleep in the balcony hammock for at least one night; after all, John D. had a bed in his own room, and Farrokh and Julia could stand to be separated overnight--by which the doctor meant that he and his wife weren't inclined to make love as often as every night, or even as often as twice a week. Some second honeymoon! Farrokh thought again. He sighed.
He should have left the tenth chapter for another time, but suddenly he was reading again, like any good novel, it kept lulling him into an almost tranquil state of awareness before it jolted him--it caught him completely by surprise. "Then hurriedly, as an afterthought, he takes off his clothes and slips in beside her. An act which threatens us all. The town is silent around them. On the milk-white faces of the clock the hands, in unison, jerk to new positions. The trains are running on time. Along the empty streets, yellow headlights of a car occasionally pass and bells mark the hours, the quarters, the halves. With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion while in his own dream he rises a little and defines the moist rim of her cunt with his finger, and as he does, he comes like a bull. They remain close for a long time, still without talking. It is these exchanges which cement them, that is the terrible thing. These atrocities induce them towards love."
It wasn't even the end of the chapter, but Dr. Daruwalla had to stop reading. He was shocked; and he had an erection, which he concealed with the book, allowing it to cover his crotch like a tent. All of a sudden, in the midst of such lucid prose, of such terse elegance, there were a "cock" and "balls" and even a "cunt" (with a "moist rim")--and these acts that the lovers performed were "atrocities." Farrokh shut his eyes. Had Julia read this part? He was usually indifferent to his wife's pleasure in the passages she read aloud to him; she enjoyed discussing how certain passages affected her--they rarely had any effect on Farrokh. Dr. Daruwalla felt a surprising need to discuss the effect of this passage with his wife, and the thought of discussing such a thing with Julia inspired the doctor's erection; he felt his hard-on touching the astonishing book.
The Doctor Encounters a Sex-Change-in-Progress
When he opened his eyes, the doctor wondered if he'd died and had awakened in what the Christians call hell, for standing beside his hammock and peering down at him were two Duckworthians who were no favorites of his.
"Are you reading that book, or are you just using it to put you to sleep?" asked Promila Rai. Beside her was her sole surviving nephew, that loathsome and formerly hairless boy Rahul Rai. But something was wrong with Rahul, the doctor noticed. Rahul appeared to be a woman now. At least he had a woman's breasts; certainly, he wasn't a boy.
Understandably, Dr. Daruwalla was speechless.
"Are you still asleep?" Promila Rai asked him. She tilted her head so that she could read the novel's title and the author's name, while Farrokh tightly held the book in its tentlike position above his erection, which he naturally preferred not to reveal to Promila--or to her terrifying nephew-with-breasts.
Aggressively, Promila read the title aloud. "A Sport and a Pastime. I've never heard of it," she said.
"It's very good," Farrokh assured her.
Suspiciously, Promila read the author's name aloud. "James Salter. Who is he?" she asked.
"Someone wonderful," Farrokh replied.
"Well, what's it about?" Promila asked him impatiently.
"France," the doctor said. "The real France." It was an expression he remembered from the novel.
Already Promila was bored with him, Dr. Daruwalla realized. It had been some years since he'd last seen her; Farrokh's mother, Meher, had reported on the frequency of Promila's trips abroad, and the incomplete results of her cosmetic surgery. Looking up at Promila from his hammock, the doctor could recognize (under her eyes) the unnatural tightness of her latest face lift; yet she needed more tightening elsewhere. She was strikingly ugly, like a rare kind of poultry with an excess of wattles at her throat. It wasn't astonishing to Farrokh that the same man had left her at the altar twice; what astonished him was that the same man would have dared to come as close to Promila a second time--for she seemed, as old Lowji put it, "a Miss Havisham times two" in more than one way. Not only had she been jilted twice, but she seemed twice as vindictive, and twice as dangerous, and--to judge by her ominous nephew-with-breasts--twice as covert.
"You remember Rahul," Promila said to Farrokh, and, to be certain that she commanded the doctor's full attention, she tapped her long, veiny fingers on the spine of the book, which still concealed Farrokh's cowering erection. When he looked up at Rahul, Dr. Dar
uwalla felt his hard-on wither.
"Yes, of course--Rahul!" the doctor said. Farrokh had heard the rumors, but he'd imagined nothing more outrageous than that Rahul had embraced his late brother's flamboyant homosexuality, possibly in homage to Subodh's memory. It had been that terrible monsoon of '49 when Neville Eden had deliberately shocked Farrokh by telling him that he was taking Subodh Rai to Italy because a pasta diet improved one's stamina for the rigors of buggery. Then they'd both died in that car crash. Dr. Daruwalla supposed that young Rahul had taken it rather hard, but not this hard!
"Rahul has undergone a little sex change," said Promila Rai, with a vulgarity that was generally accepted as the utmost in sophistication by the out of it and the insecure.
Rahul corrected his aunt in a voice that reflected conflicting hormonal surges. "I'm still undergoing it, Auntie," he remarked. "I'm not quite complete," he said pointedly to Dr. Daruwalla.
"I see," the doctor replied, but he didn't see--he couldn't conceive of the changes Rahul had undergone, not to mention what was required to make Rahul "complete." The breasts were fairly small but firm and very nicely shaped; the lips were fuller and softer than Farrokh remembered them, and the makeup around the eyes was enhancing without tending to excess. If Rahul had been 12 or 13 in '49--and no more than 8 or 10 when Lowji had examined him for what his aunt had called his inexplicable hairlessness--Rahul was now 32 or 33, Farrokh figured. From his back, in the hammock, the doctor's view of Rahul was cut off just below the waist, which was as slender and pliant as a young girl's.
It was clear to the doctor that estrogens were in use, and to judge these by Rahul's breasts and flawless skin, the estrogens had been a noteworthy success; the effects on Rahul's voice were at best still in progress, because the voice had both male and female resonances in rich confusion. Had Rahul been castrated? Did one dare ask? He looked more womanly than most hijras. And why would he have had his penis removed if he intended to be "complete," for didn't that mean a fully fashioned vagina, and wasn't this vagina surgically constructed from the penis turned inside out? I'm just an orthopedist, Dr. Daruwalla thought gratefully. All the doctor asked Rahul was, "Are you changing your name, too?"
Boldly, even flirtatiously, Rahul smiled down at Farrokh; once again, the male and the female were at war within Rahul's voice. "Not until I'm the real thing," Rahul answered.
"I see," the doctor replied; he made an effort to return Rahul's smile, or at least to imply tolerance. Once more Promila startled Farrokh by drumming her fingers on the spine of his tightly held book.
"Is the whole family here?" Promila asked. She made "the whole family" sound like a grotesque element, like an entire population that was out of control.
"Yes," Dr. Daruwalla answered.
"And that beautiful boy is here, too, I hope--I want Rahul to see him!" Promila said.
"He must be eighteen--no, nineteen," Rahul said dreamily.
"Yes, nineteen," the doctor said stiffly.
"Don't anyone point him out to me," Rahul said. "I want to see if I can pick him out of the crowd." Upon this remark, Rahul turned from the hammock and moved away across the beach. Dr. Daruwalla thought that the angle of Rahul's departure was deliberate--to give the doctor, from his hammock, the best possible view of Rahul's womanly hips. Rahul's buttocks were also shown to good advantage in a snug sarong, and the tight-fitting halter top was similarly enhancing to Rahul's breasts. Still, Farrokh critically observed, the hands were too large, the shoulders too broad, the upper arms too muscular ... the feet were too long, the ankles too sturdy. Rahul was neither perfect nor complete.
"Isn't she delicious?" Promila whispered in the doctor's ear. She leaned over him in the hammock and Farrokh felt the heavy silver pendant, the main piece of her necklace, thump against his chest. So Rahul was already a full-fledged "she" in Promila's mind.
"She seems so ... womanly," Dr. Daruwalla said to the proud aunt.
"She is womanly!" replied Promila Rai.
"Well ... yes," the doctor said. He felt trapped in the hammock, with Promila suspended above him like some bird of prey--some poultry of prey. Promila's scent was permeating--a blend of sandalwood and embalming fluid, something oniony but also like moss. Dr. Daruwalla made an effort not to gag. He felt Promila pulling the novel by James Salter away from him, but he grasped the book in both hands.
"If this is such a wonderful book," she said doubtingly, "I hope you'll lend it to me."
"I think Meher's reading it next," he said, but he didn't mean Meher, his mother; he'd meant to say Julia, his wife.
"Is Meher here, too?" Promila asked quickly.
"No--I meant Julia," Farrokh said sheepishly. By Promila's sneer, he could tell she was judging him, as if his sexual life were so dull that he'd confused his mother with his wife--and before he was 40! Farrokh felt ashamed, but he was also angry. What had initially upset him about A Sport and a Pastime was now enthralling to him; he felt highly stimulated, but not in that guilty way of pornography. This was something so refined and erotic, he wanted to share it with Julia. Quite simply, and wonderfully, the novel had made him feel young again.
Dr. Daruwalla saw Rahul and Promila as sexually aberrant beings. They'd ruined his mood; they'd overshadowed something that was sexy and sincerely written, because they were so unnatural--so perverse. Farrokh supposed he should go warn Julia that Promila Rai and her nephew-with-breasts were on the prowl. The Daruwallas might have to give their underage daughters some explanation about what wasn't quite right with Rahul. Farrokh decided he would tell John D., in any case. The doctor hadn't liked how Rahul had been so eager to pick John D. "out of the crowd."
Promila had doubtless impressed her nephew-with-breasts with her own opinion--that John D. was entirely too beautiful to be the child of Danny Mills. Dr. Daruwalla thought that Rahul had gone looking for John D. because the would-be transsexual hoped to glimpse something of Neville Eden in the doctor's dear boy!
Promila had turned away from his hammock, as if she were scanning the beach for the "delicious" Rahul; Dr. Daruwalla took this occasion to stare at the back of her neck. He regretted it, for staring back at him among the discolored wrinkles was a tumorous growth with melanoid characteristics; the doctor couldn't bring himself to advise Promila that she should have a doctor look at this. It wasn't a job for an orthopedist, anyway, and Farrokh remembered how unkindly Promila had responded to Lowji's dismissal of Rahul's hairlessness. Thinking of Rahul, Dr. Daruwalla wondered if his father's diagnosis might have been hasty; possibly the hairlessness had been an early signal that something sexual needed rectifying in Rahul.
He struggled to recall the unanswered question concerning Dr. Tata. He remembered that day when Promila and Rahul had delivered the old fool to the Daruwalla estate: there'd been some speculation regarding what either Promila or Rahul would have been seeing Dr. Tata for. It was unlikely that DR TATA'S BEST, MOST FAMOUS CLINIC FOR GYNECOLOGICAL & MATERNITY NEEDS could have been treating Promila, who would never have risked her precious parts to a physician reputed to be worse than ordinary. It was Lowji who'd suggested that it might have been Rahul who was Dr. Tata's patient. "Something to do with the hairlessness business," the senior Daruwalla had said, hadn't he?
Now old Dr. Tata was dead. In keeping with the more low-key times, his son, who was also an obstetrician and gynecologist, had deleted the "best, most famous" from the clinic's name--although, as a physician, the son was reputed to be as far below ordinary as his father; within the Bombay medical community he was consistently referred to as "Tata Two." Nevertheless, maybe Tata Two had kept his father's records. Farrokh thought it might be interesting to know more about Rahul's hairlessness.
It amused Dr. Daruwalla to imagine that Promila and Rahul had been so single-minded about getting Rahul a sex change that they might have assumed a gynecological surgeon was the correct doctor to ask. You don't ask the physician who's familiar with the parts you want, but rather the doctor who knows and understands the parts you have! A
urological surgeon would be required. Dr. Daruwalla presumed there would have to be a psychiatric evaluation, too; surely no responsible physician would perform a complete sex-change operation on demand.
Then Farrokh remembered that sex-change operations were illegal in India, although this hardly prevented the hijras from castrating themselves; emasculation appeared to be the caste duty of the hijras. Apparently, Rahul suffered from no such burden of "duty"; Rahul's choice seemed to be motivated by something else--not to be the isolated third gender of a eunuch-transvestite, but to be "complete." An actual woman--this was what Rahul wanted to be, Dr. Daruwalla imagined.
"I suppose it was young Sidhwa who recommended the Hotel Bardez to you," Promila coolly said to the doctor, which forced Dr. Daruwalla to remember the unlikely source of his information. Sidhwa was a young man whose tastes struck Farrokh as entirely too trendy, but in the case of the Hotel Bardez, Sidhwa had spoken with unbridled enthusiasm--and at length.
"Yes, it was Sidhwa," the doctor replied. "I suppose he told you, too."
Promila Rai peered down at Dr. Daruwalla in his hammock. There was in her expression a condescension of a cold, reptilian nature; there wasn't even a flicker of pity in her gaze, but only that which passes for eagerness in a lizard's eyes as it singles out a fly.
"I told him," Promila told Farrokh. "The Bardez is my hotel. I've been coming here for years."
Oh, what a choice I've made! thought Dr. Daruwalla. But Promila was through with him, at least for the moment. She simply wandered away, not standing on a single ceremony that could even faintly be associated with common politeness, although she'd certainly been exposed to good manners and she could apply such etiquette in excess whenever she chose.
So that was the bad news that he had for Julia, Farrokh thought: two detestable Duckworthians had arrived at the Hotel Bardez, which turned out to be one of their personal favorites. But the good news was A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, for Farrokh was 39 and it had been a long time since a book had so possessed his mind and body.