Free A Son Of The Circus by John Irving

labeled a thug. (Vinod was proud of this allegation.) And except for the plentiful number of Indian women who’d dated him, Dhar wasn’t known to have any friends. His most public acquaintance – with an infrequent visitor to Bombay, an Honorary Consultant Surgeon at the Hospital for Crippled Children who was the hospital’s usual spokesman for its foreign fund-raising efforts – was accepted as a longstanding relationship that had withstood invasions from the media. Dr Daruwalla – a distinguished Canadian physician and family man, and a son of the former chief of staff of Bombay’s Hospital for Crippled Children (the late Dr Lowji Daruwalla) –was witheringly brief to the press. When asked about his relationship to and with Inspector Dhar, Dr Daruwalla would say, ‘I’m a doctor, not a gossip.’ Besides, the younger and the elder man were seen together only at the Duckworth Club. The media weren’t welcome there, and among the members of the club, eavesdropping (except by the old Parsi steward) was generally deplored.
    There was, however, much speculation about how Inspector Dhar could conceivably have become a member of the Duckworth Club. Movie stars weren’t welcome there, either. And given the 22-year waiting list and the fact that the actor became a member when he was only 26, Dhar must have applied for membership when he was four! Or someone had applied for him. Furthermore, it had not been sufficiently demonstrated to many Duckworthians that Inspector Dhar had distinguished himself in ‘community leadership’; some members pointed to his efforts for the Hospital for Crippled Children, but others argued that Inspector Dhar’s movies were destructive to all of Bombay. Quite understandably, there was no suppressing the rumors or the complaints that circulated through the old club on this subject.

Dr Daruwalla Is Stricken with Self-doubt

    There was also no suppressing the exciting news about the dead golfer in the bougainvillea near the ninth green. True to his fictional character, Inspector Dhar himself had located the body. Doubtless the press would expect Dhar to solve the crime. It didn’t appear there had been a crime, although there was talk among the Duckworthians that Mr Lai’s excesses on the golf course were of a criminal nature, and surely his exertions in the wrecked bougainvillea hadn’t served the old gentleman well. The vultures had spoiled a clear impression, but it seemed that Mr Lai had been the victim of his own chip shot. His lifelong opponent, Mr Bannerjee, told Dr Daruwalla that he felt as if he’d murdered his friend.
    ‘He always fell apart at the ninth hole!’ Mr Bannerjee exclaimed. ‘I never should have teased him about it!’
    Dr Daruwalla was thinking that he’d often teased Mr Lai along similar lines; it had been irresistible to tease Mr Lai in regard to the zeal with which he played a game for which he manifested minimal talent. But now that he appeared to have died at the game, Mr Lai’s enthusiasm for golf seemed less funny than before.
    Farrokh found himself sensing some faint analogy between his creation of Inspector Dhar and Mr Lai’s golf game, and this unwanted connection came to him as the result of a sudden, unpleasant odor. It wasn’t as strong an impression as the stench of a man defecating at close quarters, but instead the smell was at once more familiar and more removed – sun-rotted garbage, perhaps, or clogged drains. Farrokh thought of potted flowers and human urine.
    Far-fetched or not, the nature of the comparison between Mr Lai’s lethal golf habit and Dr Daruwalla’s screen writing was simply this: the Inspector Dhar movies were judged to be of no artistic merit whatsoever, but the labors that the doctor performed to write these screenplays were intense; the nature of Inspector Dhar’s character was crude to most viewers, and outrageously offensive to many, but the doctor had created Dhar out of the purest love; and Farrokh’s fragile