The Tusk That Did the Damage (13 page)

He found Mani-Mathai on the front step, arms around his big knees, staring into the dark. Old Man spoke the boy’s true name, Mathai, but the boy turned his face away. Were those tears on his cheeks, or rain?

Come inside, Old Man said loudly, to be heard over the weather.

Coming, said the boy, without moving.

Old Man imagined himself in bed, sliding down a swift tunnel toward the few hours of sleep that remained. Instead he settled onto the step beside Mani-Mathai and watched the rain thin to needles.

I do hear them, said the boy. I feel the elephants talking.

I believe you, said Old Man.

The boy sucked his teeth. Old people don’t believe in anything. They think they know everything.

Who said I am old?

The boy glanced at Old Man and wiped a thick finger under his nose. You look old.

Old Man didn’t know how to respond. What would comfort the boy? A hand on the shoulder? A hand on the head? Old Man was still debating shoulder versus head when Mani-Mathai said, Could I have a day off?

Yes. One.

My father says I only get a day off when you do.

I get a day off when the elephant does.

The boy sighed into the night, his face a study. Was he born in chains?

He was taken as a calf. His mother was shot by poachers. When the forest guards found him, he was by her side.

Do you think he remembers her?

He remembers everything. That is the elephant’s great gift.

After a pause in which it seemed the boy’s mind had drifted elsewhere, Mani-Mathai said, Terrible gift.

Old Man was taken with the simple truth of those words, laid side by side. For someone so young, so simple, the boy had depths.

The elephant takes to you, said Old Man.

I feel that too.

Old Man let pass a few moments of silence, then said: Did I ever tell you about the time the elephant saved my life?

The boy looked over, wary, and shook his head.

Once we were at a temple, and people were coming up closer and closer to touch his tusk and feed him bananas and get a blessing.
I could see he was nervous, the way he stuck his trunk tip in his mouth. I tried to push the people back. I spread my arms, but they pressed in, shouting at me to get out of the way. Next thing I know I am rising through the air. The elephant had plucked me up by the waist and planted me on his back.

What did the people say?

Nothing at all! Like a school of gaping smelt down below. Like a god in flesh had landed among them and me on his back with my rump in the air.

Mani-Mathai gazed off in the direction of the elephant stalls, where eight beasts slept on their sides, eight awesome pumping hearts the size of jackfruits. Do you believe he is a god? the boy asked.

Old Man stopped short of the truth, that there were times when he feared the elephant more than he feared anyone’s god. That he sensed something cloudy behind those honey-clear eyes. That, as he was being whisked through the air, coiled up in the trunk, Old Man had thought his moment had come, that the elephant had turned on him: every pappan’s deepest fear. What he also felt in that airborne second was the prickling sensation of epiphany:
So this is what he felt for me all along.

Come, said Old Man. Still a few hours of sleep left.

Not yet. Mani-Mathai looked at him pleadingly. Tell another story. A long one.

Old Man remembered a similar hunger for stories, his father’s low voice wrapping around him like a shawl, restoring magic to the drudgery of their days. Even if no one valued the insights of a pappan anymore, the stories told of a time when they had. To pass these stories along was to hope for better. And Old Man had no son, only this boy with hope-starved eyes.

So Old Man told the story his father had told him so many times, with so many different endings, it seemed to knit itself anew each time he spoke it aloud.

§

Long ago, in the time before tusks, every bull elephant had wings. Taloned, scaly, latticed with veins, they carried the males through the air while the cow elephants watched from below, with casual interest. Such feats they performed in mating times, such aerials and dives!

Until the Sage ruined everything.

The Sage resided in the dark heart of the woods, a puckered pious grump who kept mostly to his own. One day while the Sage was praying, a flying calf dropped a foul load on his head. Some said the calf was a prankster; others said he merely had bad aim (or excellent aim, depending on your opinion of the Sage).
Set on having the last word, the Sage cursed all elephants to a flightless life.

In a matter of days, every elephant wing withered and shrank to a tissuey translucence and molted away. Elephants leaped and fell. Their thuds, their shrieks of anguish, silenced even the chattiest of birds for miles.

One of the elephants—we shall call him the Elephant—attempted to negotiate with the Sage. As usual, the Sage was in a temper, but he heard the Elephant out.

The tiger has its stripes, the Elephant complained. The peacock has its tail. The gaur is so ugly you can’t tell his rump from his face, but at least he has horns.

What do you want from me? said the Sage.

The wings, O Holy Sage. The wings were our best thing.

Don’t O Holy me. Even if I wanted to reverse the curse, which I do not, I cannot. What’s cursed is cursed.

Can’t you give us something else then? Something beautiful and mighty of our own?

After much flattery and blather, the Sage relented. He poured a fistful of dirt into a cloth pouch. Rub a pinch onto your upper teeth, he said, and see.

The Elephant did as he was told, and by next morning, two of his teeth had grown into swooping, sparkling tusks of ivory. At first, he was unimpressed. They were beautiful but useless, unlike the broad armor of wings. But that very day, the other forest animals herded around the elephant and marveled at his new equipment. The monkeys hung from them, and the birds perched near the tips. From the depths of the forest, the tigers mewled with envy.

The cow elephants found the tusks quite handsome. The other bulls, noticing this, powdered their own teeth with the Sage’s dust, and soon almost every forest bull had tusks of his own—with mixed results. Some yellowy and splayed, some slender and sharp, some blunt, some long, and one poor deformed bastard who starved to death because his tusks crisscrossed directly over his mouth. Everyone agreed that the most imperious of tusks belonged to the Elephant.

Rumor of the tusks reached the Rajah, who invited the Elephant to the palace in order to see these twin miracles for himself. In preparation, the palace floors were polished to a high sheen, the front steps demolished and rebuilt wide enough to fit an elephant’s foot. Up the steps the Elephant went, the crowds of commoners cheering down below. Inside the palace, the nobles went up in flaming fits of admiration. One lady fainted; the others stepped over her to marvel at the Elephant. Even the Rajah teared up at the sight. Such a mighty creature, and those tusks, those amazing, impossible tusks!

They fed the Elephant pomegranate and silky custard and honeyed milk, anything he requested. The Elephant had a grand time, and drowsy with sugar and pleasure, he accepted the Rajah’s offer to stay overnight in the temple, which was the only structure with ceilings high enough to contain him.

The next morning, when the Rajah came by, the Elephant began to say his farewells. But the Rajah begged him to stay one more night, as a neighboring prince had heard of the tusks and was just now on his way to the temple. The Elephant consented, for who could say no to the Rajah? Day after day, the Rajah came with another request, and as visitor after visitor passed through the temple, the Elephant began to worry. One night, he tested the temple gates and found them locked. The next morning, he woke to find his ankle chained.

And so, over the years, hundreds of people came to lay fruit at the feet of the Rajah’s elephant. They honored him in song and sculpture and painting. Children demanded toy elephants with finger-length tusks, and like the children, every rajah wanted a tusker of his own. They sent hunters into the forests, who dug deep pits, then covered them with branches and baited fruit.

In time, no respectable royal menagerie was without a half-dozen tuskers. The temples followed suit. But none was as beloved as the very first tusker, whom the Rajah cast in a silver coin, so that he might be honored to the end of days.

§

The forest elephants decided that the Sage would have to pay. Chief among them was the All-Mother, who searched the darkest leafy depths until she found the cave in which he had been hiding, too narrow for anything wider than a panther to enter.

One evening, as he tiptoed out, she swatted him to the ground and pinned him beneath the plinth of her foot. The Sage wriggled and screamed. Keep it up, she said, and I’ll stamp another hole in your head.

The Sage took shallow breaths.

He was my son, the All-Mother said. He died in that palace, inside their cage. They burned his body in their heathen way. Even his bones! How am I to grieve for my dear one without his bones?

How, the Sage said, unable to continue until the All-Mother removed her foot from his chest. How did you know of the burning?

I smelled his ashes on the wind.

The Sage plopped onto a stone, head in his hands. He hadn’t meant for the pits and the arrows and the chains. It was much worse than when he’d grounded the elephants, who did not speak to him for a full ten years afterward. Now the Sage was a fugitive in his own forest.

The All-Mother demanded that the Sage rid the tuskers of their tusks, but in these matters, the Sage was powerless. Just as the All-Mother raised her trunk to strike him dead, the Sage cried out, Wait! I have one thing to offer!

Folded between two hills was a lake, unknown to man or animal. The Sage would show her the way, and she would show the way to her kin. In this manner, the elephants would know where to go when death was upon them. Here would be their last resting place, at the edge of the secret lake, where they could sip the blue water and die in peace. Here they could come to grieve undisturbed, and their bones and the bones of their descendants would be safe from human hands.

Said the All-Mother, I don’t give a hog’s bottom about your death resort! Man will find it, and all he will see is a field of white gold for the taking. He will carve beads and bend bangles from our remains.

The Sage closed his eyes and saw that this was a narrow possibility. Someone would come, but thinking it best not to go into details, he said instead, This is one place most men will not find, but
if
any man should come and thieve even the smallest shard, he will lay it back down, along with his life.

And so it was that the elephant graveyard came to be. In time, all the elephants knew the way to the dead. Some elephants were known to limp for miles, haunches bristling with arrows, trickling blood across farm and forest and scrub grass to reach the
secret lake. Just as the Sage had promised, one sip and an elephant could expire in peace.

The location of the graveyard was a secret they guarded so carefully no elephant would speak the directions aloud; it was whispered through the pads of their feet. The elephants became so accustomed to keeping silence that they evolved toward a new language, at a frequency and range no human could hear.

Only one elephant broke the oath, a cow born with a single, dirty yellow tusk of which she was very proud. She had been scrapping with a langur, who refused to believe such a graveyard even existed. She told the langur of the location, but before the langur could swing away and tell its cohorts, the All-Mother sprang from the bush and struck the monkey dead. The loose-lipped elephant begged forgiveness from the herd, but there was no greater sin than spoiling the secret. To seal her silence, they ran her off a cliff.

§

One age passed into the next. Landmasses parted and clashed; mountains rose at the seams. Kings fought and married and begat more kings, their exploits embellished and put to song. But the fatherless boy who concerns us now was no royal, so insignificant he did not even warrant a name.

The boy was in need of work. He had heard of a road being dug and paved many miles from his village, so he set out by foot
and any lorry that would have him. Along the way, he met an old woman, slouching down the road in rags. He asked her for directions to the roadwork, and when she raised her face and smiled with a single dirty yellow fang, he wished he had waited for another person to ask. She opened her hand and drew him directions along the tangled seams of her palm lines, to a place she claimed would bring him greater riches than any old road. With no one else to guide him, he took her advice, walking and walking, unable to mark time. The sun seemed fixed in place, a white button sewn on blue sky.

At last, the boy arrived at a lake that none of his people had seen, that he had only known from the stories.

What would he tell them of the elephant graveyard? The silence was of another world. There was a lake so still it seemed of glass, and all around its banks, as far as he could see, giant elephant skulls, eye sockets wide as his head, jaws upon jaws of blunt teeth, long, clean bones, rib cages like caves, and tusks of such phosphorescence they seemed to glow from within.

The boy lifted a piece of ivory no longer than his forearm, a kilo at best. How much money could it bring? Surely more than enough to see his family through the year, at which point he would be old enough to ask the foreman for his father’s job.

He ignored the squeeze of terror in his chest. He wrapped the piece in his shirt, tucked it under his arm, and hitched his way back home. The journey lasted several days; he slept at any
teahouse that would offer him shelter and sometimes under the stars.

At home, his stepmother unraveled the fabric from the tusk as carefully as if she were removing a bandage from a wound. Her lips parted; she sent out a soft sigh. She clasped the boy’s hand, and it seemed to him, against all his prior assumptions, that she did love him after all, that she would never leave as she had so often threatened to do if he did not bring home a proper wage. Now she took to calling him
clever boy
and
my son,
as opposed to the usual
son-of-another-mother
and
orphan boy.