A Son Of The Circus (91 page)

Martin slept blissfully. Even without absolution, it had felt good to say all those things against himself; tomorrow was soon enough for someone to hear his full confession – perhaps he’d ask Father Julian this time. Although Father Julian was scarier than Father Cecil, the Father Rector was also a bit younger. Thus, with his conscience clear and no bugs in his bed, Martin would sleep through the night. Full of doubt one minute, brimming with conviction the next, the missionary was a walking contradiction – he was dependably unreliable.

Nancy also slept through the night; one couldn’t claim that she slept ‘blissfully,’ but at least she slept. Surely the champagne helped. She wouldn’t hear the ringing of the phone, which Detective Patel answered in the kitchen. It was 4:00 on the morning of New Year’s Day, and at first the deputy commissioner was relieved that the call was
not
from the surveillance officer who’d been assigned to watch the Dogars’ house on old Ridge Road, Malabar Hill; it was a homicide report from the red-light district in Kamathipura –a prostitute had been murdered in one of the arguably better brothels. Ordinarily, no one would have awakened the deputy commissioner with such a report, but both the investigating officer and the medical examiner were certain that the crime was Dhar-related. Once again, there was the elephant drawing on the belly of the murdered whore, but there was also a fearsome new twist to this killing, which the caller was sure Detective Patel would want to see.

As for the surveillance officer, the subinspector who was watching the Dogars’ house, he might as well have slept through the night, too. He swore that Mrs Dogar had never left her house; only
Mr
Dogar had left. The subinspector, whom the deputy commissioner would later reassign to something harmless, like answering letters of complaint, declared that he knew it was Mr Dogar because of the old man’s characteristic shuffle; also, the figure was stooped. Then there was the matter of the baggy suit, which was gray. It was a man’s suit of an exceedingly loose fit – not what Mr Dogar had worn to the new New Year’s Eve party at the Duckworth Club – and with it Mr Dogar wore a white shirt, open at the throat. The old man climbed into a taxi at about 2:00 A.M.; he returned to his house, in another taxi, at 3:45 A.M. The surveillance officer (whom the deputy commissioner would also later demote from subinspector to constable) had smugly assumed that Mr Dogar was visiting either a mistress or a prostitute.

Definitely a prostitute, thought Detective Patel. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been
Mr
Dogar.

The madam at the questionably better brothel in Kamathipura told the deputy commissioner that it was her brothel’s policy to turn out the lights at 1:00 or 2:00 A.M., depending on the volume of customers or the lack thereof. After the lights were out, she accepted only all-night visitors; to spend the night with one of her girls, the madam charged from 100 rupees on up. The ‘old man’ who’d arrived after 2:00 A.M., when the brothel was dark, had offered 300 rupees for the madam’s smallest girl.

Detective Patel first thought the madam must have meant her
youngest
girl, but the madam said she was sure that the gentleman had requested her ‘smallest’; i any case, that’s what he got. Asha was a very small delicate girl – about 15, the madam declared. About 13, the deputy commissioner guessed.

Because the lights were out and there were no more girls in the hallway, no one but the madam and saw the alleged old man – he wasn’t
that
old, the madam believed. He wasn’t at all stooped, either, the madam recalled, but (like the soon-to-be-demoted surveillance officer) she noted how loosely the suit fit him and that it was gray. ‘He’ was very clean-shaven, except for a thin mustache – the latter was false, Detective Patel assumed – and an unusual hairdo… here the madam held her hands high above her forehead and said, ‘But it was cut short in the back, and over the ears.’

‘Yes, I know – a pompadour,’ Patel said. He knew that the hair would not have been silver, streaked with white, but he asked the question anyway.

‘No, it was black, streaked with silver,’ the madam said.

And no one had seen the ‘old man’ leave. The madam had been awakened by the presence of a nun. She’d heard what she thought was someone trying to open the door from the street; when she went to see, there was a nun outside the door – it must have been about 3:00 in the morning.

‘Do you see a lot of nuns in this district at that hour?’ the deputy commissioner asked her.

‘Of course not!’ the madam cried. She’d asked the nun what she wanted, and the nun had replied that she was searching for a Christian girl from Kerala; the madam responded that she had no Kerala Christians in her house.

‘And what color was the nun’s habit?’ Patel asked, although he knew the answer would be ‘gray,’ which it was. It wasn’t an unusual color for a habit of tropical weight, but it was also something that could have been fashioned from the same gray suit that Mrs Dogar had worn when she came to the brothel. The baggy suit had probably fitted over the habit; then, in turn, the habit fit over the suit, or parts of the habit and the suit were one and the same – at least the same fabric. The white shirt could have various uses; maybe it was rolled, like a high collar, or else it could cover the head, like a kind of cowl. The detective presumed that the alleged nun didn’t have a mustache. (‘Of course not!’ the madam declared.) And because the nun had covered her head, the madam wouldn’t have noticed the pompadour.

The only reason the madam had found the dead girl so soon was that she’d been unable to fall back asleep; first, one of the all-night customers was shouting, and then, when it was finally quiet, the madam had heard the sound of water boiling, although it wasn’t time for tea. In the dead girl’s cubicle, a pot of water had come to a boil on a heating coil; that was how the madam discovered the body. Otherwise, it might have been 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning before the other prostitutes would have noticed that tiny Asha wasn’t up and about.

The deputy commissioner asked the madam about the sound of someone trying to open the door from the street – the sound that had awakened her. Wouldn’t the door have made the same sound if it had been opened from the
inside
, and then closed
behind
the departing nun? The madam admitted that this would have made the same sound; in short, if the madam hadn’t heard the door, she never would have seen the nun. And by the time Mrs Dodger took a taxi home, she was no longer a nun at all.

Detective Patel was exceedingly polite in asking the madam a most obvious question: ‘Would you consider the idea that the not-so-old man and the nun were in fact the same person?’ The madam shrugged; she doubted she could identify either of them. When the deputy commissioner pressed her on this point, all the madam would add was that she’d been sleepy; both the not-so-old man and the nun had woken her up.

Nancy was still not awake when Detective Patel returned to his flat; he’d already typed a scathing report, demoting the surveillance officer and consigning him to the Aloo of Crime Branch Headquarters.

The deputy commissioner wanted to be home when his wife woke up; he also didn’t want to call Inspector Dhar and Dr Daruwalla from the police station. Detective Patel thought he’d let them all sleep a little longer.

The deputy commissioner determined that Asha’s neck had been broken so cleanly for two reasons. One, she was small; two, she’d been completely relaxed. Rahul must have coaxed her over onto her stomach, as if to prepare her for sex in that position. But of course there’d been no sex. The deep fingerprint bruises in the prostitute’s eye sockets – and on her throat, just below her jaw – suggested that Mrs Dogar had grabbed Asha’s face from behind; she’d wrenched the small girl’s head back and to one side, until Asha’s neck snapped.

Then Rahul had rolled Asha onto her back in order to make the drawing on her belly. Although the drawing was of the usual kind, it was of less than the usual quality; it suggested undue haste, which was strange –there was no urgency for Mrs Dogar to leave the brothel. Yet something had compelled Rahul to hurry. As for the fearsome ‘new twist’ to this killing, it sickened Detective Patel. The dead girl’s lower lip was bitten clean through. Asha could not have been bitten so savagely while she was alive; her screams would have awakened the entire brothel. No; the bite had occurred after the murder and after the drawing. The minimal amount of bleeding indicated that Asha had been bitten after her heart had stopped. It was the idea of biting the girl that had made Mrs Dogar hurry, the policeman thought. She couldn’t wait to finish the drawing because Asha’s lower lip was so tempting to her.

Even such slight bleeding had made a mess, which was uncharacteristic of Rahul. It must have been Mrs Dogar who put the pot of water on the heating coil; her own face, at least her mouth, must have been marked with the prostitute’s blood. When the water was warm, Rahul dipped some of the dead girl’s clothes in the pot and used them to wash the blood off herself. Then she left – as a nun – forgetting that the heating coil was on. The boiling water had brought the madam. Although the nun had been a smart idea, this had otherwise been a sloppy job.

Nancy woke up about 8:00; she had a hangover, but Detective Patel didn’t hesitate to tell her what had happened. He could hear her being sick in the bathroom; he called the actor first, then the screenwriter. He told Dhar about the lip, but not the doctor; with Dr Daruwalla, the deputy commissioner wanted to emphasize the importance of a good script for Dhar’s lunch with Mrs Dogar. Patel told them both that he would have to arrest Rahul today; he hoped he had enough circumstantial evidence to arrest her. Whether or not he had enough evidence to
keep
her – that was another story. That was what he was counting on the actor and the screenwriter for: they had to make something happen over lunch.

Deputy Commissioner Patel was encouraged by one thing that the gullible surveillance officer had told him. After the disguised Mrs Dogar had shuffled out of the taxi and into her house, the lights were turned on in a ground-floor room – not a bedroom – and these lights remained on well after daybreak. The deputy commissioner hoped that Rahul had been drawing.

As for Dr Daruwalla, his first good night’s sleep – for five nights, and counting – had been interrupted rather early. He had no surgeries scheduled for New Year’s Day, and no office appointments, either; he’d been planning to sleep in. But upon hearing from Detective Patel, the screenwriter called John D. immediately. There was a lot to do before Dhar’s lunch at the Duckworth Club; there would be much rehearsing –some of it would be awkward, because Mr Sethna would have to be involved. The deputy commissioner had already notified the old steward.

It was from John D. that Farrokh heard about Asha’s lower lip.

‘Rahul must have been thinking of
you
!’ Dr Daruwalla cried,

‘Well, we know she has a thing about biting,’ Dhar told the doctor. ‘In all likelihood, it started with you.’

‘What do you mean?’ Dr Daruwalla asked, for John D. hadn’t told him that Mrs Dogar had confessed to gnawing on the doctor’s toe.

‘It all started with the big toe of your right foot, in Goa,’ John D. began. That was Rahul who bit you. You were right all along – it was no monkey.’

That Monday, well before meat-feeding time at the Great Blue Nile Circus in Junagadh, the elephant-footed boy would wake up to the steady coughs of the lions; their low roars rose and fell as regularly as breathing. It was a cold morning in that part of Gujarat. For the first time in his life, Ganesh could see his own breath; the huffs of breath from the lions were like blasts of steam escaping from their cages.

The Muslims delivered the meat in a wooden wagon, dotted with flies; the entire floor of the wagon was lifted from the cart and placed on the ground between the cook’s tent and the big cats’ cages – the raw beef was piled on this slab of rough wood, which was the appproximate size of a double door. Even in the cold morning air, the flies hovered over the meat, which Chandra sorted. Sometimes there was mutton mixed in with the beef, and the cook wanted to rescue it; mutton was too expensive for lions and tigers.

The big cats were bellowing now; they could smell the meat, and some of them could see the cook separating the choicer pieces of mutton. If the elephant boy was frightened by how savagely the lions and tigers devoured the raw beef, Dr Daruwalla would never learn of it; nor would the doctor ever know if the sight of the lions slipping in the meat grease upset the cripple. At the circus, it was one of the few things that always upset the doctor.

The same Monday, someone proposed to marry Madhu. The proposal, as was only proper, was first offered to Mr and Mrs Das; the ringmaster and his wife were surprised. Not only had they not begun to train the girl, but, because Madhu was untrained, she wasn’t in evidence among the performers; yet the marriage proposal was offered by a gentleman who claimed to have been in the audience for the late-evening show on Sunday. Here he was, the following morning, professing his instant devotion!

The Bengali ringmaster and his wife had children of their own; their kids had rejected the circus life. But Mr and Mrs Das had trained many other children to be circus acrobats; they were kind to these adopted kids and especially protective of the girls. After all, when these girls were properly trained, they were of some value –not only to the circus. They had acquired a little glamour; they’d even earned some money, which they’d had no occasion to spend — hence the ringmaster and his wife were used to keeping dowries for them.

Mr and Mrs Das conscientiously advised the girls whether or not a marriage proposal was worthy of acceptance or negotiation, and they routinely gave up these adopted daughters – always to decent marriages, and often making their own contributions to the girls’ dowries. In many cases, the ringmaster and his wife had grown so fond of these children that it broke their hearts to see them go. Almost all the girls would eventually leave the circus; the few who stayed became trainers.