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suspected, especially among non-Christians in India, that St. Francis Xavier contributed more to the Christianization of Goa after his death than the Jesuit had managed—in his short stay of only a few months—while he was alive. He died and was buried on an island off the Cantonese coast; but when he suffered the further indignity of disinterment, it was discovered that he’d hardly decomposed at all. The miracle of his intact body was shipped back to Goa, where his remarkable remains drew crowds of frenzied pilgrims. Farrokh’s favorite part of the story concerned a woman who, with the worshipful intensity of the most devout, bit off a toe of the splendid corpse. Xavier would lose more of himself, too: the Vatican required that his right arm be shipped to Rome, without which evidence St. Francis’s canonization might never have occurred.
How Dr. Daruwalla loved this story! How hungrily he viewed the shriveled relic, which was richly swaddled in vestments and brandished a staff of gold; the staff itself was encrusted with emeralds. The doctor assumed that the saint was kept under glass and elevated on a gabled monument in order to discourage other pilgrims from demonstrating their devotion with more zealous biting. Chuckling to himself while remaining outwardly most respectful, Dr. Daruwalla had surveyed the mausoleum with restrained glee. All around him, even on the casket, were numerous depictions of Xavier’s missionary heroics; but none of the saint’s adventures—not to mention the surrounding silver, or the crystal, or the alabaster, or the jasper, or even the purple marble—was as impressive to Farrokh as St. Francis’s gobbled toe.
“Now that’s what I call a miracle!” the doctor would say. “To have seen that might even have made a Christian out of me!”
When he was in a less playful temper, Farrokh harangued Julia with tales of the Holy Inquisition in Goa, for the missionary zeal that followed the Portuguese was marked by conversions under threat of death, confiscation of Hindu property and the burning of Hindu temples—not to mention the burning of heretics and grandly staged acts of faith. How it would have pleased old Lowji to hear his son carrying on in this irreverent fashion. As for Julia, she found it irritating that Farrokh so resembled his father in this respect. When it came to baiting anyone who was even remotely religious, Julia was superstitious and opposed.
“I don’t mock your lack of belief,” the doctor’s wife told him. “Don’t blame me for the Inquisition or laugh about St. Francis’s poor toe.”
The Doctor Is Turned On
Farrokh and Julia rarely argued with any venom, but they enjoyed teasing each other. An exaggerated, dramatic banter, which they weren’t inclined to suppress in public places, made the couple appear quarrelsome to the usual eavesdroppers—hotel staff, waiters or the sad couple with nothing to say to each other at an adjacent table. In those days, in the ’60s, when the Daruwallas traveled en famille, the girlish hysteria of their daughters added to the general rumpus. Therefore, when they undertook their outing in June of ’69, the Daruwallas declined several invitations to lodge themselves in some of the better villas in Old Goa.
Because they were such a loud mob, and because Dr. Daruwalla enjoyed eating at all times of the day and night, they thought it wiser and more diplomatic—at least until the children were older—not to stay in another family’s mansion, with all the breakable Portuguese pottery and the polished rosewood furniture. Instead, the Daruwallas occupied one of those beach hotels that even then had seen better days, but could neither be destroyed by the children nor offended by Dr. Daruwalla’s unceasing appetite. The spirited teasing between Farrokh and Julia was entirely overlooked by the ragged staff and the world-weary clientele of the Hotel Bardez, where the food was plentiful and fresh if not altogether appetizing, and where the rooms were almost clean. After all, it was the beach that mattered.
The Bardez had been recommended to Dr. Daruwalla by one of the younger members of the Duckworth Club. The doctor wished he could remember exactly who had praised the hotel, and why, but only snippets of the recommendation had remained in his memory. The guests were mostly Europeans, and Farrokh had thought that this would appeal to Julia and put young John D. at ease. Julia had teased her husband regarding the concept of putting John D. “at ease”; it was absurd, she pointed out, to imagine that the young man could be more at ease than he already was. As for the European clientele, they weren’t the sort of people Julia would ever want to know; they were trashy, even by John D.’s standards. In his university days in Zürich, John D. was probably as morally relaxed as other young men—or so Dr. Daruwalla supposed.
As for the Daruwalla contingent, John D. certainly stood out among them; he was as serenely composed, as ethereally calm, as the Daruwalla daughters were frenetic. The daughters were fascinated by the more unlikable European guests at the Hotel Bardez, although they clung to John D.; he was their protector whenever the young women or the young men, both in their string bikinis, would come too close. In truth, it appeared that these young women and young men approached the Daruwalla family solely to have a better view of John D., whose sublime beauty surpassed that of other young men in general and other 19-year-olds in particular.
Even Farrokh tended to gape at John D., although he knew from Jamshed and Josefine that only the dramatic arts interested the young man and that, especially for these thespian pursuits, he seemed inappropriately shy. But to see the boy, Farrokh thought, belied all the worries he’d heard expressed by his brother and sister-in-law. It was Julia who first said that John D. looked like a movie star; she said she meant by this that you were drawn to watch him even when he appeared to be doing nothing or thinking of nothing. In addition, his wife pointed out to Dr. Daruwalla, John D. projected an indeterminate age. When he was closely shaven, his skin was so perfectly smooth that he seemed much younger than 19—almost prepubescent. But when he allowed his beard to grow, even only as much as one day’s stubble, he became a grown man—at least in his late twenties—and he looked savvy and cocksure and dangerous.
“This is what you mean by a movie star?” Farrokh asked his wife.
“This is what’s attractive to women,” Julia said frankly. “That boy is a man and a boy.”
But for the first few days of his vacation, Dr. Daruwalla was too distracted to think about John D.’s potential as a movie star. Julia had made Farrokh nervous about the Duckworthian source of the recommendation for the Hotel Bardez. It was amusing to observe the European trash and the interesting Goans, but what if other Duckworthians were guests of the Hotel Bardez? It would be as if they’d never left Bombay, Julia said.
And so the doctor nervously examined the Hotel Bardez for stray Duckworthians, fearing that the Sorabjees would mysteriously materialize in the café-restaurant, or the Bannerjees would float ashore from out of the Arabian Sea, or the Lals would leap out and surprise him from behind the areca palms. Meanwhile, all Farrokh wanted was the peace of mind to reflect on his growing impulse to be more creative.
Dr. Daruwalla was disappointed that he was no longer the reader he’d once been. Watching movies was easier; he felt he’d been seduced by the sheer laziness of absorbing images on film. He was proud that he’d at least held himself above the masala movies—those junk films of the Bombay cinema, those Hindi hodgepodges of song and violence. But Farrokh was enthralled by any sleazy offering from Europe or America in the hard-boiled-detective genre; it was all-white, tough-guy trash that attracted him.
The doctor’s taste in films was in sharp contrast to what his wife liked to read. For this particular holiday Julia had brought along the autobiography of Anthony Trollope, which Farrokh was not looking forward to hearing. Julia enjoyed reading aloud to him from passages of a book she found especially well written or amusing or moving, but Farrokh’s prejudice against Dickens extended to Trollope, whose novels he’d never finished and whose autobiography he couldn’t imagine even beginning. Julia generally preferred to read fiction, but Farrokh supposed that the autobiography of a novelist almost qualified as fiction—surely novelists wouldn’t resist the impulse to make up their autobiographies.
And this led the doctor to daydreaming further on the matter of his underdeveloped creativity. Since he’d virtually stopped being a reader, he wondered if he shouldn’t try his hand at writing. An autobiography, however, was the domain of the already famous—unless, Farrokh mused, the subject had led a thrilling life. Since the doctor was neither famous nor had he, in his opinion, led a life of much excitement, he believed that an autobiography was not for him. Nevertheless, he thought, he would glance at the Trollope—when Julia wasn’t looking, and only to see if it might provide him with any inspiration. He doubted that it would.
Unfortunately, his wife’s only other reading material was a novel that had caused Farrokh some alarm. When Julia wasn’t looking, he’d already glanced at it, and the subject seemed to be relentlessly, obsessively sexual; in addition, the author was totally unknown to Dr. Daruwalla, which intimidated him as profoundly as the novel’s explicit erotica. It was one of those very skillful novels, exquisitely written in limpid prose—Farrokh knew that much—and this intimidated him, too.
Dr. Daruwalla began all novels irritably and with impatience. Julia read slowly, as if she were tasting the words, but Farrokh plunged restlessly ahead, gathering a list of petty grievances against the author until he happened on something that persuaded him the novel was worthwhile—or until he encountered some perceived blunder or an entrenched boredom, either of which would cause him to read not one more word. Whenever Farrokh had decided against a novel, he would then berate Julia for
the apparent pleasure she was taking from the book. His wife was a reader of broad interests, and she finished almost everything she started; her voraciousness intimidated Dr. Daruwalla, too.
So here he was, on his second honeymoon—a term he’d used much too loosely, because he’d not so much as flirted with his wife since they’d arrived in Goa—and he was fearfully on the lookout for Duckworthians, whose dreaded appearance threatened to ruin his holiday altogether. To make matters worse, he’d found himself greatly upset—but also sexually aroused—by the novel his wife was reading. At least he thought she was reading it; maybe she hadn’t begun. If she was reading it, she’d not read any of it aloud to him, and given the calm but intense depiction of act after sexual act, surely Julia would be too embarrassed to read such passages aloud to him. Or would it be me who’d be embarrassed? he wondered.
The novel was so compelling that his covert glances at it were insufficient satisfaction; he’d begun concealing it in a newspaper or a magazine and sneaking off to a hammock with it. Julia didn’t appear to miss it; perhaps she was reading the Trollope.
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.
