As Nancy rode the Yezdi to the ferry, and to her fate, a dull but persistent pain in the big toe of his right foot awakened Dr. Daruwalla from a night of bedlam dreams and indigestion. He freed himself from the mosquito net and swung his legs from the hammock, but when he put only the slightest weight on his right foot, his big toe stabbed him with a sharp pain; for a second, he imagined he was still dreaming he was St. Francis's body. In the early light, which was a muted brown--not unlike the color of Dr. Daruwalla's skin--the doctor inspected his toe. The skin was unbroken, but deep bruises of a crimson and purple hue clearly indicated the bite marks. Dr. Daruwalla screamed.
"Julia! I've been bitten by a ghost!" the doctor cried. His wife came running.
"What is it, Liebchen?" she asked him.
"Look at my big toe!" the doctor demanded.
"Have you been biting yourself?" Julia asked him with unconcealed distaste.
"It's a miracle!" shouted Dr. Daruwalla. "It was the ghost of that crazy woman who bit St. Francis!" Farrokh shouted.
"Don't be a blasphemer," Julia cautioned him.
"I am being a believer--not a blasphemer!" the doctor cried. He ventured a step on his right foot, but the pain in his big toe was so wilting that he fell, screaming, to his knees.
"Hush or you'll wake up the children--you'll wake up everybody!" Julia scolded him.
"Praise the Lord," Farrokh whispered, crawling back to his hammock. "I believe, God--please don't torture me further!" He collapsed into the hammock, hugging both his arms around his chest. "What if they come for my arm?" he asked his wife.
Julia was disgusted with him. "I think it must be something you ate," she said. "Or else you've been dreaming about the dildo."
"I suppose you've been dreaming about it," Farrokh said sullenly. "Here I've suffered some sort of conversion and you're thinking about a big cock!"
"I'm thinking about how you're behaving in a peculiar fashion," Julia told him.
"But I've had some sort of religious experience!" Farrokh insisted.
"I don't see what's religious about it," Julia said.
"Look at my toe!" the doctor cried.
"Maybe you bit it in your sleep," his wife suggested.
"Julia!" Dr. Daruwalla said. "I thought you were already a Christian."
"Well, I don't go around yelling and moaning about it," Julia said.
John D. appeared on the balcony, never realizing that Dr. Daruwalla's religious experience was very nearly his own experience--of another kind.
"What's going on?" the young man asked.
"It's apparently unsafe to sleep on the balcony," Julia told him. "Something bit Farrokh--some kind of animal."
"Those are human teeth marks!" the doctor declared. John D. examined the bitten toe with his usual detachment.
"Maybe it was a monkey," he said.
Dr. Daruwalla curled himself into a ball in the hammock, deciding to give his wife and his favorite young man the silent treatment. Julia and John D. took their breakfast with the Daruwalla daughters on the patio below the balcony; at times they would raise their eyes and look up the vine in the direction where they presumed Farrokh lay sulking. They were wrong; he wasn't sulking--he was praying. Since the doctor was inexperienced at prayer, his praying resembled an interior monologue of a fairly standard confessional kind--especially that kind which is brought on by a bad hangover.
O God! prayed Dr. Daruwalla. It isn't necessary to take my arm--the toe convinced me. I don't need any more convincing. You got me the first time, God. The doctor paused. Please leave the arm alone, he added.
Later, from the lobby of the Hotel Bardez, the syphilitic tea-server thought he heard voices from the Daruwallas' second-floor balcony. Since Ali Ahmed was known to be almost entirely deaf, it was assumed that he probably always heard "voices." But Ali Ahmed had actually heard Dr. Daruwalla praying, for by midmorning the doctor was murmuring aloud and the pitch of his prayers was precisely in a register that the syphilitic tea-server could hear.
"I am heartily sorry if I have offended Thee, God!" Dr. Daruwalla murmured intensely. "Heartily sorry--very sorry, really! I never meant to mock anybody--I was only kidding," he confessed. "St. Francis--you, too--please forgive me!" An unusual number of dogs were barking, as if the pitch of the doctor's prayers were precisely in a register that the dogs could hear, too. "I am a surgeon, God," the doctor moaned. "I need my arm--both my arms!" Thus did Dr. Daruwalla refuse to leave the hammock of his miraculous conversion, while Julia and John D. spent the morning plotting how to prevent the doctor from spending another night on the balcony.
Later in the day, as his hangover abated, Farrokh regained a little of his self-confidence. He said to Julia that he thought it would be enough for him to become a Christian; he meant that perhaps it wasn't necessary for him to become a Catholic. Did Julia think that becoming a Protestant would be good enough? Maybe an Anglican would do. By now, Julia was quite frightened by the depth and color of the bite marks on her husband's toe; even though the skin was unbroken, she was afraid of rabies.
"Julia!" Farrokh complained. "Here I am worrying about my mortal soul, and you're worried about rabies!"
"Lots of monkeys have rabies," John D. offered.
"What monkeys?" Dr. Daruwalla shouted. "I don't see any monkeys here! Have you seen any monkeys?"
While they were arguing, they failed to notice Promila Rai and her nephew-with-breasts checking out of the hotel. They were going back to Bombay, but not tonight; Nancy was again fortunate--Rahul wouldn't be on her ferry. Promila knew that Rahul's holiday had been disappointing to him, and so she'd accepted an invitation for them both to spend the night at someone's villa in Old Goa; there would be a costume party, which Rahul might find amusing.
It hadn't been an entirely disappointing holiday for Rahul. His aunt was generous with her money, but she expected him to make his own contribution toward a much-discussed trip to London; Promila would help Rahul financially, but she wanted him to come up with some money of his own. There were several thousand Deutsche marks in Dieter's money belt, but Rahul had been expecting more--given the quality and the amount of hashish that Dieter had told everyone he wanted to buy. Of course, there was more, much more--in the dildo.
Promila thought that her nephew was interested in art school in London. She also knew he was seeking a complete sex change, and she knew such operations were expensive; given her loathing for men, Promila was delighted with her nephew's choice--to become her niece--but she was deluding herself if she thought that the strongest motivating factor behind Rahul's proposed move to London was "art school."
If the maid who cleaned Rahul's room had looked more carefully at the discarded drawings in the wastebasket, she could have told Promila that Rahul's talent with a pen was of a pornographic persuasion that most art schools would discourage. The self-portraits would have especially disturbed the maid, but all the discarded drawings were nothing but balled-up pieces of paper to her; she didn't trouble herself to examine them.
They were en route to the villa in Old Goa when Promila peered into Rahul's purse and saw Rahul's new, curious money clip; at least he was using it as a money clip--it was really nothing but the top half of a silver pen.
"My dear, you are eccentric!" Promila said. "Why don't you get a real money clip, if you like those things?"
"Well, Auntie," Rahul patiently explained, "I find that real money clips are too loose, unless you carry a great wad of money in them. What I like is to carry just a few small notes outside my wallet--something handy to pay for a taxi, or for tipping." He demonstrated that the top half of the silver pen possessed a very strong, tight clip--where it was meant to attach itself to a jacket pocket or a shirt pocket--and that this clip was perfect for holding just a few rupees. "Besides, it's real silver," Rahul added.
Promila held it in her veinous hand. "Why so it is, dear," she remarked. She read aloud the one word, in script, that was engraved on the top half of the pen: "India--isn't that quaint?"
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"I certainly thought so," Rahul remarked, returning the eccentric item to his purse.
Meanwhile, as Dr. Daruwalla grew hungrier, he also grew more relaxed about his praying; he cautiously rekindled his sense of humor. After he'd eaten, Farrokh could almost joke about his conversion. "I wonder what next the Almighty will ask of me!" he said to Julia, who once more cautioned her husband about blasphemy.
What was next in store for Dr. Daruwalla would test his newfound faith in ways the doctor would find most disturbing. By the same means that Nancy had discovered the doctor's whereabouts, the police also discovered him. They'd found what everyone now called the "hippie grave" and they needed a doctor to hazard a guess concerning the cause of death of the grave's ghastly occupants. They'd gone looking for a doctor on holiday. A local doctor would talk too much about the crime; at least this was what the local police told Dr. Daruwalla.
"But I don't do autopsies!" Dr. Daruwalla protested; yet he went to Anjuna to view the remains.
It was generally supposed that the blue crabs were the reason the bodies were spoiled for viewing; and if the salt water proved itself to be a modest preservative, it did little to veil the stench. Farrokh easily concluded that several blows to the head had done them both in, but the female's body was messier. Her forearms and the backs of her hands were battered, which suggested that she'd tried to defend herself; the male, clearly, had never known what hit him.
It was the elephant drawing that Farrokh would remember. The murdered girl's navel had been transformed to a winking eye; the opposing tusk had been flippantly raised, like the tipping of an imaginary hat. Short, childish lines indicated that the elephant's trunk was spraying--the "water" fanning over the dead girl's pubic hair. Such intended mockery would remain with Dr. Daruwalla for 20 years; the doctor would remember the little drawing too well.
When Farrokh saw the broken glass, he suffered only the slightest discomfort, and the feeling quickly passed. Back at the Hotel Bardez, he was unable to find the piece of glass he'd removed from the young woman's foot. And so what if the glass from the grave had matched? he thought. There were soda bottles everywhere. Besides, the police had already told him that the suspected murderer was a German male.
Farrokh thought that this theory suited the prejudices of the local police--namely, that only a hippie from Europe or North America could possibly perform a double slaying and then trivialize the murders with a cartoonish drawing. Ironically, these killings and that drawing stimulated Dr. Daruwalla's need to be more creative. He found himself fantasizing that he was a detective.
The doctor's success in the orthopedic field had given him certain commercial expectations; these considerations doubtless returned the doctor's imagination to that notion of himself as a screenwriter. No one movie could have satisfied Farrokh's suddenly insatiable creativity; nothing less than a series of movies, featuring the same detective, would do. Finally, that was how it happened. At the end of his holiday, on the ferry back to Bombay, Dr. Daruwalla invented Inspector Dhar.
Farrokh was watching how the young women on board the ferry couldn't take their eyes off the beautiful John D. Suddenly, the doctor could envision the hero that these young women imagined when they looked at a young man like that. The excitement that Mr. James Salter's example had inspired was already becoming a moment of the sexual past; it was becoming a part of the second honeymoon that Dr. Daruwalla was leaving behind. To the doctor, murder and corruption spoke louder than art. And besides, what a career John D. might have!
It would never have occurred to Farrokh that the young woman with the big dildo had seen the same murder victims he had seen. But 20 years later, even the movie version of that drawing on Beth's belly would ring a bell with Nancy. How could it be a coincidence that the victim's navel was the elephant's winking eye, or that the opposing tusk was raised? In the movie, no pubic hair was shown, but those childish lines indicated to Nancy that the elephant's trunk was still spraying--like a showerhead, or like the nozzle of a hose.
Nancy would also remember the beautiful, unshockable young man she'd been introduced to by Dr. Daruwalla. When she saw her first Inspector Dhar movie, Nancy would recall the first time she'd seen that knowing sneer. The future actor had been strong enough to carry her downstairs without apparent effort; the future movie star had been poised enough to unscrew the troublesome dildo without appearing to be appalled.
And all of this was what she meant when she left her uncompromising message on Dr. Daruwalla's answering machine. "I know who you really are, I know what you really do," Nancy had informed the doctor. "Tell the deputy commissioner--the real policeman. Tell him who you are. Tell him what you do," Nancy had instructed the secret screenwriter, for she'd figured out who Inspector Dhar's creator was.
Nancy knew that no one could have imagined the movie version of that drawing on Beth's belly; Inspector Dhar's creator had to have seen what she had seen. And the handsome John D., who now passed himself off as Inspector Dhar--that young man would never have been invited to view the murder victims. That would have been the doctor's job. Therefore, Nancy knew that Dhar hadn't created himself; Inspector Dhar had also been the doctor's job.
Dr. Daruwalla was confused. He remembered introducing Nancy to John D., and how gallantly John D. had carried the heavy young woman downstairs. Had Nancy seen an Inspector Dhar movie, or all of them? Had she recognized the more mature John D.? Fine; but how had she made the imaginative leap that the doctor was Dhar's creator? And how could she know "the real policeman," as she called him? Dr. Daruwalla could only assume that she meant Deputy Commissioner Patel. Of course, the doctor didn't realize that Nancy had known Detective Patel for 20 years--not to mention that she was married to him.
The Doctor and His Patient Are Reunited
One might recall that Dr. Daruwalla had all this time been sitting in his bedroom in Bombay, where the doctor was alone again. Julia had at last left him sitting there; she'd gone to apologize to John D.--and to be sure that their supper was still warm enough to eat. Dr. Daruwalla knew it was an unprecedented rudeness to have kept his favorite young man waiting, but in the light of Nancy's phone message, the doctor felt compelled to speak to D.C.P. Patel. The subject that the deputy commissioner wished to discuss in private with Dr. Daruwalla was only a part of what prompted the doctor to make the call; of more interest to Farrokh was where Nancy was now and why she knew "the real policeman."
Given the hour, Dr. Daruwalla phoned Detective Patel at home. Farrokh was thinking that there were Patels all over Gujarat; there were many Patels in Africa, too. He knew both a hotel-chain Patel and a department-store Patel in Nairobi. He was thinking he knew only one Patel who was a policeman, when--as luck would have it--Nancy answered the phone. All she said was, "Hello," but the one word was sufficient for Farrokh to recognize her voice. Dr. Daruwalla was too confused to speak, but his silence was all the identification that Nancy needed.
"Is that the doctor?" she asked in her familiar fashion.
Dr. Daruwalla supposed it would be stupid of him to hang up, but for a moment he couldn't imagine what else to do. He knew from the surprising experience of his long and happy marriage to Julia that there was no understanding what drew or held people together. If the doctor had known that the relationship between Nancy and Detective Patel was deeply connected to the dildo, he would have admitted that his understanding of sexual attraction and compatibility was even less than he supposed. The doctor suspected some elements of interracial interest on the part of both parties--Farrokh and Julia had surely felt this. And in the curious case of Nancy and Deputy Commissioner Patel, Dr. Daruwalla also guessed that Nancy's bad-girl appearance possibly concealed a good-girl heart; the doctor could easily imagine that Nancy had wanted a cop. As for what had attracted the deputy commissioner to Nancy, Farrokh tended to overestimate the value of a light complexion; after all, he adored the fairness of Julia's skin, and Julia wasn't even a blonde. What the doctor's research for the Inspector Dhar movies h
ad failed to uncover was a characteristic common to many policemen--a love of confession. Poor Vijay Patel was prone to enjoy the confessing of crimes, and Nancy had held nothing back. She'd begun by handing him the dildo.
"You were right," she'd told him. "It unscrews. Only it was sealed with wax. I didn't know it came apart. I didn't know what was in it. But look what I brought into the country," she said. As Inspector Patel counted the Deutsche marks, Nancy kept talking. "There was more," she said, "but Dieter spent some, and some of it was stolen." After a short pause, she added, "There were two murders, but just one drawing." Then she told him absolutely everything, beginning with the football players. People have fallen in love for stranger reasons.
Meanwhile, still waiting for the doctor's answer on the telephone, Nancy grew impatient. "Hello?" she said. "Is anyone there? Is that the doctor?" she repeated.
A born procrastinator, Dr. Daruwalla nevertheless knew that Nancy wouldn't be denied; still, he didn't like to be bullied. Countless stupid remarks came to the closet screenwriter's mind; they were smart-ass, tough-guy wisecracks--the usual voice-over from old Inspector Dhar movies. ("Bad things had happened--worse things were happening. The woman was worth it--after all, she might know something. It was time to put all the cards on the table.") After a career of such glibness, it was hard for Dr. Daruwalla to know what to say to Nancy. After 20 years, it was difficult to sound casual, but the doctor lamely tried.
"So--it's you!" he said.
On her end of the phone, Nancy just waited. It was as if she expected nothing less than a full confession. Farrokh felt he was being treated unfairly. Why should Nancy want to make him feel guilty? He should have known that Nancy's sense of humor wasn't easy to locate, but Dr. Daruwalla foolishly kept trying to find it.
"So--how's the foot?" he asked her. "All better?"
14
TWENTY YEARS
A Complete Woman, but One Who Hates Women
The hollowness of the doctor's dumb joke contributed to an empty sound that the receiver made against his ear, for Nancy wasn't talking; her silence echoed, as if the phone call were transnational. Then Dr. Daruwalla heard Nancy say to someone else, "It's him." Her voice was indistinct, although her effort to cover the mouthpiece with her hand had been halfhearted. Farrokh couldn't have known how 20 years had stolen the enthusiasm from many of Nancy's efforts.