A Son Of The Circus (32 page)

‘Far out,’ John D. remarked. They discussed whether Rahul would be more interested in men or women. Since he
wanted
to be a woman, Dr Daruwalla deduced that Rahul was sexually interested in men. ‘It’s hard to tell,’ John D. suggested; indeed, when they returned to where the Daruwalla daughters were encamped under a thatch-roofed shelter, there was Rahul Rai in conversation with Julia!

Julia said later, ‘I think it’s young men who interest him, although I suppose a young woman would do.’

Would
do
? Dr Daruwalla thought. Promila had confided to Farrokh that this was a bad time for ‘poor Rahul.’ Apparently, they’d not traveled from Bombay together, but Promila had met her nephew at the Bardez; he’d been alone in the area for more than a week. He had ‘hippie friends,’ Promila said – somewhere near Anjuna – but things hadn’t worked out as Rahul had hoped. Farrokh didn’t desire to know more, but Promila offered her speculations anyway.

‘I presume that sexually confusing things must have happened,’ she told Dr Daruwalla.

‘Yes, I suppose,’ the doctor said. Normally, all of this would have upset Farrokh greatly, but something from his sexual triumphs with Julia had carried over into the following day. Despite everything that was ‘sexually confusing’ about Rahul, which was sexually disturbing to Dr Daruwalla, not even the doctor’s appetite was affected, although the heat was fierce.

It was unmercifully hot at midday, and there was no perceptible breeze. Along the shoreline, the fronds of the areca and coconut palms were as motionless as the grand old cashew and mango trees farther inland in the dead-still villages and towns. Not even the passing of a three-wheeled rickshaw with a damaged muffler could rouse a single dog to bark. Were it not for the heavy presence of the distilling feni, Dr Daruwalla would have guessed that the air wasn’t moving at all.

But the heat didn’t dampen the doctor’s enthusiasm for his lunch. He started with an oyster guisado and steamed prawns in a yogurt-mustard sauce; then he tried the vindaloo fish, the gravy for which was so piquant that his upper lip felt numb and he instantly perspired. He drank an ice-cold ginger feni with his meal – actually, he had two – and for dessert he ordered the bebinca. His wife was easily satisfied with a xacuti, which she shared with the girls; it was a fiery curry made almost soothing with coconut milk, cloves and nutmeg. The daughters also tried a frozen mango dessert; Dr Daruwalla had a taste, but nothing could abate the burning sensation in his mouth. As a remedy, he ordered a cold beer. Then he criticized Julia for allowing the girls to drink so much sugarcane juice.

‘In this heat, too much sugar will make them sick,’ Farrokh told his wife.

‘Listen to who’s talking!’ Julia said.

Farrokh sulked. The beer was an unfamiliar brand, which he would never remember. He would recall, however, the part of the label that said
LIQUOR
RUINS
COUNTRY
,
FAMILY
AND
LIFE
.

But as much as Dr Daruwalla was a man of unstoppable appetites, his plumpness had never been – nor would it become – displeasing to the eye. He was a fairly small man – his smallness was most apparent in the delicacy of his hands and in the neat, well-formed features of his face, which was round, boyish and friendly — and his arms and legs were thin and wiry; his bum was small, too. Even his little pot belly merely served to emphasize his smallness, his neatness, his tidiness. He liked a small, well-trimmed beard, for he also liked to shave; his throat and the sides of his face were usually clean-shaven. When he wore a mustache, it, too, was neat and small. His skin wasn’t much browner than an almond shell; his hair was black – it would soon turn gray. He would never be bald; his hair was thick, with a slight wave, and he left it long on top, although he kept it cut short on the back of his neck and above his ears, which were also small and lay perfectly flat against his head. His eyes were such a dark-brown color that they looked almost black, and because his face was so small, his eyes seemed large – maybe they
were
large. If so, only his eyes reflected his appetites. And only in comparison to John D. would someone
not
have thought of Dr Daruwalla as handsome –
small
, but handsome. He was not a fat man, but a plump one — a little, potbellied man.

While the doctor struggled to digest his meal, it might have crossed his mind that the others had behaved more sensibly. John D., as if demonstrating the self-discipline and dietary restraint that future movie stars would be wise to imitate, eschewed eating in the midday heat. He chose this time of day to take long walks on the beach; he swam intermittently and lazily – only to cool off. From his languid attitude, it was hard to tell if he walked the beach in order to look at the assembled young women or to afford them the luxury of looking at him.

In the torpid aftermath of his lunch, Dr Daruwalla barely noticed that Rahul Rai was nowhere to be seen. Farrokh was frankly relieved that the would-be transsexual wasn’t pursuing John D.; and Promila Rai had accompanied John D. for only a short distance along the water’s edge, as if the young man had immediately discouraged her by declaring his intentions to walk to the next village, or to the village after that. Wearing an absurdly wide-brimmed hat – as if it weren’t already too late to protect her cancerous skin – Promila had returned, alone, to the spot of shade allotted by her thatch-roofed shelter, and there she appeared to embalm herself with a variety of oils and chemicals.

Under their own array of thatch-roofed shelters, the Daruwalla daughters applied different oils and chemicals to their vastly younger and superior bodies; then they ventured among the intrepid sunbathers – mostly Europeans, and relatively few of them at this time of year. The Daruwalla girls were forbidden to follow John D. on his midday hikes; both Julia and Farrokh felt that the young man deserved this period of time to be free of them.

But the most sensibly behaved person at midday was always the doctor’s wife. Julia retired to the relative cool of their second-floor rooms. There was a shaded balcony with John D.’s sleeping hammock and a cot; the balcony was a good place to read or nap.

It was clearly nap time for Dr Daruwalla, who doubted he could manage the climb to the second floor of the hotel. From the taverna, he could see the balcony attached to his rooms, and he looked longingly in that direction. He thought the hammock would be nice, and he considered that he would try sleeping there tonight; if the mosquito netting was good, he’d be very comfortable, and all night he’d hear the Arabian Sea. The longer he allowed John D. to sleep there, the more firmly the young man would presume it was
his
place to sleep. But Farrokh’s renewed sexual interest in Julia gave him pause in regard to his sleeping-hammock plan; there were passages of
A Sport and a Pastime
he’d not yet discussed with his wife.

Dr Daruwalla wished he knew what else Mr James Salter had written. However, as exhilarating as this unexpected stimulation to his marriage had been, Farrokh felt slightly depressed. Mr Salter’s writing was so far above anything Dr Daruwalla could hope to imagine – much less hope to achieve – and the doctor had guessed right: one of the lovers dies, strongly implying that a love of such overpowering passion never lasts. Moreover, the novel concluded in a tone of voice that was almost physically painful to Dr Daruwalla. In the end, Farrokh felt that the very life he led with Julia – the life he cherished — was being mocked. Or was it?

Of the French girl — Anne-Marie, the surviving lover – there is only this final offering: ‘She is married. I suppose there are children. They walk together on Sundays, the sunlight falling upon them. They visit friends, talk, go home in the evening, deep in the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired.’ Wasn’t there an underlying cruelty to this? Because such a life
is
‘greatly to be desired,’ isn’t it? Dr Daruwalla thought. And how could anyone expect the married life to compete with the burning intensity of a love affair?

What disturbed the doctor was that the end of the novel made him feel ignorant, or at least inexperienced. And what was more humiliating, Farrokh felt certain, was that Julia could probably explain the ending to him in such a way that he’d understand it. It was all a matter of tone of voice; perhaps the author had intended irony, but not sarcasm. Mr Salter’s use of language was crystalline; if something was unclear, the fuzzy-headedness surely should be attributed to the reader.

But more than technical virtuosity separated Dr Daruwalla from Mr James Salter, or from any other accomplished novelist. Mr Salter and his peers wrote from a vision; they were convinced about something, and it was at least partly the passion of these writers’ convictions that gave their novels such value. Dr Daruwalla was convinced only that he would like to be more creative, that he would like to make something up. There were a lot of novelists like that, and Farrokh didn’t care to embarrass himself by being one of them. He concluded that a more shameless form of entertainment suited him; if he couldn’t write novels, maybe he could write screenplays. After all, movies weren’t as serious as novels; certainly, they weren’t as long. Dr Daruwalla presumed that his lack of a ‘vision’ wouldn’t hamper his success in the screenplay form.

But his conclusion depressed him. In the search for something to occupy his untapped creativity, the doctor had already accepted a compromise – before he’d even begun! This thought moved him to consider consoling himself with his wife’s affections. But gazing again to the distant balcony didn’t bring the doctor any closer to Julia, and Dr Daruwalla doubted that imbibing feni and beer was a wise prelude to an amorous adventure – especially in such abiding heat. Something Mr Salter had written appeared to shimmer over Dr Daruwalla in the midday inferno: The more clearly one sees this world, the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.’ There is a growing list of things I don’t know, the doctor thought.

He didn’t know, for example, the name of the thick vine that had crawled upward from the ground to embrace both the second– and the third-floor balconies of the Hotel Bardez. The vine was put to active use by the small striped squirrels that scurried over it; at night, the geckos raced up and down the vine with far greater speed and agility than any squirrel. When the sun shone against this wall of the hotel, the smallest, palest-pink flowers opened up along the vine, but Dr Daruwalla didn’t know that these flowers were not what attracted the finches to the vine. Finches are seed eaters, but Dr Daruwalla didn’t know this, nor did the doctor know that the green parrot perching on the vine had feet with two toes pointing forward and two backward. These were the details he missed, and they contributed to the growing list of things he didn’t know. This was the kind of Everyman he was – a little lost, a little misinformed (or uninformed), almost everywhere he ever was. Yet, even overfed, the doctor was undeniably attractive. Not every Everyman is attractive.

Dr Daruwalla grew so drowsy at the littered table, one of the Bardez servant boys suggested he move into a new hammock that was strung in the shade of the areca and coconut palms. Complaining to the boy that he feared the hammock was too near the main beach and he’d be bothered by sand fleas, the doctor nevertheless tested the hammock; Farrokh wasn’t sure it would support his weight. But the hammock held. For the moment, the doctor detected no sand fleas. Therefore, he was obliged to give the boy a tip.

This boy, Punkaj, seemed employed solely for the purpose of tipping, for the messages that he delivered to the Hotel Bardez and the adjacent lean-to restaurant and taverna were usually of his own invention and wholly unnecessary. For example, Punkaj asked Dr Daruwalla if he should run to the hotel and tell ‘the Mrs Doctor’ that the doctor was napping in a hammock near the beach. Dr Daruwalla said no. But in a short while, Punkaj was back beside the hammock. He reported: The Mrs Doctor is reading what I think is a book.’

‘Go away, Punkaj,’ said Dr Daruwalla, but he tipped the worthless boy nonetheless. Then the doctor lay wondering if his wife was reading the Trollope or rereading the Salter.

Considering the size of his lunch, Farrokh was fortunate that he was able to sleep at all. The strenuousness of his digestive system made a sound sleep impossible, but throughout the grumbling and rumbling of his stomach [_r– _]and the occasional hiccup or belch – the doctor fitfully dozed and dreamed, and woke up all of a sudden to wonder if his daughters were drowned or suffering from sunstroke or sexual attack. Then he dozed off again.

As Farrokh fell in and out of sleep, the imagined details of Rahul Rai’s complete sex change appeared and disappeared in his mind’s eye, drifting in and out of consciousness like the fumes from the distilling feni. This exotic aberration clashed with Farrokh’s fairly ordinary ideals: his belief in the purity of his daughters, his fidelity to his wife. Only slightly less common was Dr Daruwalla’s vision of John D., which was simply the doctor’s desire to see the young man rise above the sordid circumstances of his birth and abandonment. And if I could only play a part in
that
, Dr Daruwalla dreamed, I might one day be as creative as Mr James Salter.

But John D.’s only visible qualities were of a fleeting and superficial nature; he was arrestingly handsome, and he was so steadfastly self-confident that his poise concealed his lack of other qualities – sadly, the doctor presumed that John D. lacked other qualities. In this belief, Farrokh was aware that he relied too heavily on his brother’s estimation and his sister-in-law’s confirmation, for both Jamshed and Josefine were chronically worried that the boy had no future. He was ‘uninvolved’ with his studies, they said. But couldn’t this be an early indication of thespian detachment?

Yes, why not? John D. could be a movie star! Dr Daruwalla decided, forgetting that this notion had originated with his wife. It suddenly seemed to the doctor that John D. was
destined
to be a movie star, or else he would be nothing. It was Farrokh’s first realization that a hint of despair can start the creative juices flowing. And it must have been these juices, in combination with the more scientifically supported juices of digestion, that got the doctor’s imagination going.