The Tusk That Did the Damage (12 page)

“Are you listening, boy? Hold out your hand.” My uncle dropped a pouch of heavy bullets into my palm. “Use what you need but don’t waste. In the sixties, a bullet cost five rupees; now it’s seventy. What do you think a gun like this cost?” I nearly spat when he told me: thirty-five thousand. “And that was
back then.
”

All throughout this presentation, my uncle kept fiddling with his nose—scratching, twitching, scrunching—so obvious in his anxiety that, in seesaw effect, I was lifted to a state of calm. “One more thing. Tell your brother to bury the bullet deep. Can’t let the greenbacks find it. If they find it, I am finished.”

I reassured him that all would turn out as planned.

But first I had to get the German past Leela. It was no small task to smuggle the piece from my uncle’s Maruti and into our shed. Two days had passed since Leela returned from the hospital, and surely she would have noticed our doings were she not confined to bed rest. There was a pall about her as she waited for the bleeding to start again, for the baby to vanish inside her like
a drop of water. Yet her eyes remained sharp and watchful, her wifely sense undiminished.

One evening my mother had me deliver to Leela a bowl of broken-rice soup. As was my habit, I stole a salty spoonful before giving her the bowl. When I turned to go, she caught me at the threshold: “Get me another spoon. You are sick.”

In fact, my tonsils had been feeling knobby that morning. “How did you know?”

She raised the bowl and blew across the broken rice. “I know when you are hiding something.”

“Hiding?”

“Why else would you be off so quickly?”

“To find you a spoon.”

“Don’t get smart. Look at me, Manu.”

I felt I was standing before a magistrate judge, so stern was her voice.

“What is it?” she said.

“What is what?”

“This thing you are hiding. Is it to do with him?”

“Do I have to say? Mother will hang me.”

“What makes you think I won’t?”

After some song and dance I conjured up a girl I was planning to meet near the snack stall a half mile from home. Leela viewed me through suspicious eyes. “Do you want to marry her?”

“Maybe.”

“Would her parents be happy with you?”

“How should I know?”

“Cut the innocent act. She deserves the truth. Even if she’s too stupid to ask for it.”

Leela looked down at her bowl and stirred the soup with my infected spoon. After a while she said, “Everyone thinks I trapped your brother. But how can a mouse trap a rat? At least he knew what I was.”

“A bricklayer’s daughter.” I glanced at the door, uneasy. My mother could have stood within earshot.

“Bricklayer.” Leela snorted. “My father was no bricklayer. He never lifted a thing aside from his fist.”

After our talk, Leela began to suspect my brother of misdoings no matter the time of day. She turned about and about in bed, occasionally shuffling to the doorway on the pretense of seeking fresh air, searching for our return from the fields.

One morning the window presented my mother with a nauseating sight: a Forest Department jeep grumbling up to the front of our house. My mother found she could not move.
What had Jayan done?
His old sins rushed through her in a breathtaking wave.

“Who is it?” Leela called from the bed.

The car door opened, and out came a fat black shoe, mannish if not for the mud-spattered sari hem that fell over it.

“Who?”

“Hush,” was all my mother managed to say, for it was the high priestess of the greenbacks aka the lardy little Muslim aka Divisional Range Officer Samina Hakim.

Samina Madame was widely deemed an improvement over her predecessor, a weasel who wore Ray-Bans too fine for his salary and rarely left his roost. Often she was seen stepping into a farmer’s
house and taking tea on the veranda and listening to the local complaints with her forehead as neatly pleated as her starched olive sari. Why she had arrived at our home was a mystery. My mother decided to parry any and all attacks with an offer of tea, which Samina Madame accepted.

“Sit, sit,” said my mother, gesturing to my father’s chair.

“Thank you,” said Samina Madame, not sitting, “but I came to see how Leela is doing.”

Samina Madame smiled winningly, her face a pleasant pie. For a heavyset woman there seemed not an ounce of extra to her.

My mother showed Samina Madame into Leela’s room and made a hasty introduction. Leela sat up straight. It was a tremendous blow to receive her enemy while prone and clad in a nightgown.

“Let me get the tea and biscuits,” my mother said and fled.

“Do I look like I need more biscuits?” called Samina Madame jovially.

She dragged a plastic chair next to Leela’s bed and sat. Here, Leela felt, was the harpy responsible for the imprisonment of her husband. The one who had snuffed him out through her sneaks and snitches, had handed him to the Karnataka police like a neat kilo of cake.

“I went to the hospital,” Samina Madame said. “They said you were here. How are you?”

“Fine. Alive. Most people who see the Gravedigger cannot say the same.”

“What luck your husband woke up when he did.”

Though it was I who had awoken first, Leela nodded.

“And,” Samina Madame said, “the baby?”

Leela stared straight through Samina Madame, who leaned back, made aware that she had crossed into forbidden waters.

Both women turned quiet. Samina Madame’s gaze casually traveled the walls. Leela ran a hand over her bedsheet, a new cool cotton scattered with sailboats. She knew the rule: Never buy gifts for an unborn baby. But she had seen these sailboats and disobeyed.

“Is your husband home?” Samina Madame asked.

“In the fields.”

“Will he come back for lunch?”

“You plan to stay till lunch?”

“I don’t have to.” Samina Madame smiled uncomfortably and rocked a little in her seat like a hen ridding itself of an egg.

“He works through lunch.”

“And how has your husband been doing since he came home?”

“You should know that, madame.” Leela uttered
madame
as if it were the dictionary definition of manure. “He came by your office two weeks after his release. Yours is the office with the gulmohar tree?”

Madame nodded, her brightness turning uncertain. “I don’t remember him coming.”

“He was looking for a job with the Forest Department. No one knows the inner regions like him, so he thought he might be a watcher, help patrol in the forest. Isn’t that one of the jobs you people offer?”

“Yes, as part of a pilot project aimed to harmonize the economic needs of local people with the needs of wildlife—”

“Your peons laughed in his face.”

“Who laughed? Which guard?”

“What difference would it make? All are the same.”

“Oh, I think it obvious I am not.”

“Because you take tea with us and ask about our health? I hear you also take tea with those Shankar Timber people.”

Madame faltered, plainly surprised on several fronts—that this invalid was interrogating her, that the invalid was on a first-name basis with the scandal that had attached itself to Madame’s heel like so much dog shit. “That was beyond my control.”

“I hear you take more than tea from them, madame.”

“The working plan is approved at multiple levels—Delhi, Trivandrum. I was against the felling, but I was overruled. Of course it is easy for you to sit and make accusations. Much harder to come up with solutions.”

“I come up with them all the time.”

“Then tell me.”

“We need electric fences around the farmlands and roads,” Leela said. Madame nodded. “Not the cheap stuff, the kind a baby boar could eat through.” Madame’s nodding was hypnotic. Leela found herself talking against her will. “And another thing: you should give people like my husband some opportunity. He would be of use. People like him—they want to lead a right life, they want to listen to your advices, but advices don’t fill the belly. You have to give them some way to live right.”

“And you are sure he wants to live right?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“No need to get hot.”

But Leela was sick with self-loathing. She had succumbed to this smarmy woman, this sari-clad greenback with tricks up her sweater sleeve.

“It’s fact. Majority of poachers are repeat offenders. They make the same mistakes again and again whether they want to live right or not.”

“He paid his dues.”

“Trust me, he still has his debtors, his enemies. They keep an eye on him.”

“And you keep them in your pocket.”

“I keep them close,” Madame said. “Some of them anyway. They are like chin hairs, these people. Pluck one, and four more pop up in its place.”

“Why have you come, madame? To talk about chin hairs?”

“To see what you know about your husband.” Madame frowned. “Very little, it seems.”

“I know he fell in with some bad people. They took advantage just because he was good at shooting birds and monkeys, an elephant here and there—”

“Fifty-six.”

Leela sat back, blinking. The number stole her breath. “Four,” she insisted weakly. “Five maybe.”

“His associate told the judge fifty-six. And lately your husband has been meeting with a man who has killed even more. Now what do you think they’re discussing?”

“I … I don’t know.”

As my mother’s footsteps approached, Madame laid her business card on the side table, signaling the end of the topic. “Not the weather, I can assure you.”

Old Man had only himself to blame for the hiring of Kizhakkambalam “Romeo” Kuriakose. Romeo had a straight white smile, which Old Man had mistaken as a sign of good hygiene when in fact it was a set of false teeth. Bone disease had taken all his teeth at age twenty, Romeo claimed, a blessing in disguise as now he had the smile of a prince!

The princely smile faded as soon as Old Man put a shovel in his hands and told him to tow the Gravedigger’s poo.

An elephant won’t stand for waste in its midst, said Old Man. In the forest they never foul the same place twice. Proper as Brahmins.

Romeo turned the shovel upside down and frowned at the metal end. What does that make us?

Elephant Sabu required three pappans per elephant. For the third pappan, Old Man wanted a younger lad, someone malleable and curious about the work. Before Old Man had even begun his search, Romeo dragged in the dregs of his family: his brother and his brother’s son, a baggy-eyed boy who had failed eighth standard for three straight years and kept his eyes on his feet. The boy had the shape of an urn, burly and broad shouldered,
bereft of a neck. For all his apparent strength, he flinched like a chicken in his father’s presence. His father called him a dolt, said the boy never listened to his parents no matter how they striped his backside. Wouldn’t Old Man please take the dolt under wing and tame him the way he’d tamed so many uncivilized beasts?

Your name? Old Man asked the boy.

Mathai.

Do you have an interest in elephants?

Don’t know. Never met one.

His father smacked the back of his head. What kind of answer is that? (A reasonable one, Old Man felt.)

Mathai, said Old Man, weighing the name. We will call you Mani.

A Hindu name? the boy asked. You trying to convert me?

No, idiot, said Romeo, though he’d asked the same question on his own first day. It’s so when we take the elephant to temple, those swamis won’t think you a swine-eating Nasrani.

Mani-Mathai cracked a shy smile. Only Catholics eat swine.

So the poo towing and food gathering fell to Mani-Mathai, who took the job and sponged up whatever knowledge Old Man had to offer: that an elephant always rinses its own feet before drinking water, proper as a Brahmin; that an elephant can hold ten liters of water in its trunk; that one should never bend to pick up anything that falls at an elephant’s feet, lest one’s head be used as a step stool.

Old Man was pleased with Mani-Mathai, who more than made up for the toothless drunk that was his uncle. Romeo bought the loyalty of other pappans through a steady supply of dirty jokes and bidis, an argot of girlie magazines. When not slinging abuse at his nephew, he ignored the boy, who kept to himself.

Over time, Old Man began to realize that Mani-Mathai was no dolt. His father mistook his quiet for stupidity, his mindfulness for laziness. Whereas most boys his age were as fidgety as leaves in a breeze, Mani-Mathai had a steadiness about him. For hours, he could sit with the elephants, neither bored nor drowsy, simply watching them eat.

Behind his reticence, the boy harbored strange ideas. He once described to Old Man a sound he felt, when in the company of Parthasarathi and the Gravedigger. A kind of throbbing in the air, a shifting hum he could feel in his marrow. “Not all the time,” Mani-Mathai qualified, risking a glance at Old Man. “Only sometimes.”

Old Man had never felt such a thing, but he wondered.

As soon as Romeo caught wind of Mani-Mathai’s “throbbing,” he suggested that the sensation was likely located in the boy’s chaddi pant. The other pappans joined in the ridicule. “Feel this?” said Romeo and pitched a rock at his nephew’s crotch.

Early the next morning, Mani-Mathai ran away. Early the same evening, his father restored him to Old Man’s door, clamped by the nape. There was a plum-colored bulge at the boy’s temple.

The days went rainless. Teak leaves scrolled up and fell, hard as turtle shells, dragging themselves over dry earth.

At last a storm pounded through the drought, ransacking the trees of old leaves. Rain clattered against the roof of the pappan shed. A window shutter slammed the sill, waking Old Man, who pulled the shutters closed and slid the rusty hook into place. Romeo lay asleep on his belly, facedown, arms spread in a pose of drowning. As useful in sleep as he was at work.

Mani-Mathai usually slept on a pallet between their beds, but that night, the pallet lay empty. Another escape, no doubt, which would result in another beating. Old Man heaved himself up, sure it was too late, that the boy was just another shadow between the trees by now.