The Tusk That Did the Damage (16 page)

As the day wore on, the dead elephant gave off a stronger reek as if a wound had opened in the very air, foul and festering.

I glutted on coffee till my stomach grew upset. Nonetheless, I was determined to stay awake for our meeting with Alias. We would leave for the hunt by five the next morning.

With Leela gone, I busied myself by milking the cow. The rhythm of milk drumming tin might have calmed me at first, but White Girl kept slapping my face with her tail as if I were a vexing fly.

In the late afternoon I wandered over the land that two weeks prior had been harvested. The dirt was brittle and pocked, and soon we would have to seed again. From here I could see all five of my mother’s acres; she would will half to each son. And so would Jayan and I divy our plots for the generation to come, on and on, all of us living elbow to elbow, head to toe. I felt my future dragging me deep underground. I thought of my brother and my uncle and the greenbacks and the farmers. I thought of the elephants and the forest creatures, all their vengeful yellow eyes. Let them battle over this dirt, I thought. I was destined for elsewhere, sure as calves become cows.

But how clever can he be, the boy who fails to complete the rest of that refrain? Not all calves will be cows. Some will be supper.

That evening I could hear Leela shrilling at my brother before I had even reached the sit-out, where my mother was planted in my father’s wooden chair. Elbows on armrests, her hands hung
helpless. She raised her sad old gaze to mine and asked, “Where have you been?”

“The fields. Where else?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you anymore.”

I pretended not to catch that last part. “What are they fighting about now?”

“Ah,” she said, a grunt of surrender. “He says he’s leaving. She says she will leave him first. Rice going cold.”

I made to step inside, but she took hold of my forearm. “You won’t leave, will you, String?”

I had not heard that name since I was a child, when my father picked me up and declared me equal in weight to a string. “Now why would I leave you, Ma? Where would I go?”

“Not me. Jayan. Promise to watch him once I’m gone.”

I stepped back. “Did you ask him the same? To watch over me?”

“My boy, you do not need watching like he does. He was always a rascal, always smashing things, scared of nothing. I thought prison would put him right, but there is no right for him now.” She winced at the sound of Leela shouting. “The evenings were always bad for me, the evenings never gave me peace.”

I was stilled by her words. I turned my gaze upon a gray raft of cloud, hoping she would not see the pity in my eyes. She had no patience for pity.

“Say it, child. Promise me.”

I promised to watch over my brother. But my mother’s face remained a clench of worry, her hands moving over each other like separate creatures seeking warmth.

“Am I stupid?” Leela shouted. “You think I don’t know where you go?”

I found my brother in his room, pulling on a shirt as he looked coolly at Leela or somewhere past Leela, as if she weren’t worth looking at.

“Going where?” I asked.

She answered for him. “To meet with his fellow outlaws. To plot another poaching.”

“Is it only the elephant you care about?” Jayan said. “You should join the Forest Department.”

She hesitated. “I care about my child. What kind of father will he know? A law-breaker? A liar?”

“What lies—”

“I know you killed fifty-six elephants.
Fifty-six,
” she reiterated to me. “Shot by his own hand. Did you know?”

I gave no reply. In truth I had not known the exact figure but had always known better than to seek it out.

Jayan turned his back on us and yanked open a drawer. “Who told you that? One of your fat-mouth church friends?”

“And that last one—a mother and child. Just for five kilos? What kind of person does these things?”

Jayan slammed a drawer hard enough to crack the almari. “The kind who won’t waste a good set of tusks. That money kept you happy.”

“Oh yes, so happy! And where are these piles of gold, where have you stashed them away? In your little shed? Up the cow’s rump?”

“Don’t talk about what you do not know.”

“I know that you are a dog to these people you work for, whoever they are. Less than a dog.”

I tried to step in. “This is not like that, Leela, this is not for those people—”

“And
you
”—she pierced me with a look—“are a fool to follow.
You think he is doing this for us? For this family? No. He wants to erase the past. Show everyone what a hero he is.”

I watched Jayan’s fist open and close just as my father’s used to do when at the very edge of violence. But then by degrees, the fire subsided, and he retreated deep inside of himself where her words could not reach.

“Come, Manu,” he said. “Alias is waiting.”

Leela turned to Jayan. “Alias, who is Alias?”

“Manu, let’s go.”

“Wait.” She took a step toward me with a look that said,
You do not have to go, you do not have to do everything he says.
We stood at an awkward distance—not close, not far—through which Jayan strode.

I met her eye. A sorry sigh escaped me.

“Go then,” she called, her voice at my back. “Follow your brother all the way to Mysore. See how you like wearing their bracelets.”

As we walked, her words rolled around my head. She’d had the face of a careworn child as she spoke my name, and what did I look to her but a traitor? Yet what did she expect? Two brothers side by side naturally fell into step. And how could I, considering the oath I had pledged my sad mother and all the years of our brotherhood, betray my own blood?

All at once Jayan plunged into a one-way discussion. “Had I shot her in the hind parts, she would have tossed dirt on her wounds and charged me. Or she might have run off.” A puzzling moment passed before I understood him to be discussing the mother elephant. “Still she would have come back while we were taking the tusks. They always come back.”

“What’s done is done,” I said or some such nonsense answer. But I could tell by his silence that it would never be done, that it would remain forever undone now that Leela knew about it.

The moon was a dead man’s eye, rolled back and white. At this hour only men traveled the road, off to meet friends or court trouble. Before Raghu died, I had been no different, light of foot, easy of mind. Bloodlusting elephants had been nowhere in my line of sight.

An express bus came thundering through the dark, high beams ablaze, and though I have stood aside for many such buses, this one charging and bellowing down the road and bearing a sign in the windshield—
PARUMALA THIRUMENI PRAY FOR US
—chased my heart to a gallop that did not ease until the headlights washed me in whiteness and left me stiff in its wake.

“Manu.”

I realized that Jayan was staring at me. He stood some paces ahead, confused. “What the hell are you standing there for?”

“Is the Gravedigger fast as that?” I asked.

“As what?”

“The bus.”

Jayan searched my face for meaning. “Maybe. How would I know?”

“I thought you knew everything.”

He expelled a sigh as if rueful already for the mess he would put us in. (Ah, if he had known the half!) “You have us confused.” He aimed a finger at my chest. “You were the genius. On your way to great things, sure as calves become cows.”

The phrase made me smile.

“On your way out of here. Just as he wanted it.” It was rare to hear Jayan raise our father from the ashes without an insult
attached. “You were his best bet. Only one that would have made good.”

I looked away from my brother, glowing in the light of his words. Eventually, as always, we fell into step.

“Remember what he used to say of me?
That Jayan has fewer uses than a pile of shit.
”

“At least shit can make a thing grow.”

Jayan chuckled, the two of us oddly warmed by our father’s abuses. We drifted into our private thoughts against a rasping riot of night frogs.

“I remember the time you taught me to shoot,” I said.

“Did I?”

“In the forest. You set a plastic bottle on a log. You had me fix the back part …”

“The stock.”

“The stock against my shoulder. You told me to inhale, hold my breath, then pull the trigger. Inhale, hold, pull. I forgot all about fixing the stock. Next second I was on my back and staring up at the trees and you were all
You hit it you hit it!
”

This was one of the happiest moments in all my life, not the moment I realized what I had hit but the second my brother spoke my name. He called me with surprise and pride, called as if to claim me as his.

Jayan snorted. “From what I recall, you had the aim of a blind man.”

“I’m telling you, I hit it!”

“I doubt that very much.”

“I remember,” I said. “I remember it all.”

The Gravedigger would never grow comfortable with the lorry. It jolted him over roads that led to festivals and functions and weddings and rallies, while cars and motorcycles swerved about in a red streak of horn. In the lorry, the ground was always grumbling through his soles, as if a storm were nearing.

Sometimes, when he passed through a village on foot, people came to the door with sweets and fruit. These he did not mind, but the crowds, the churning crowds, they swallowed him into their scrum, shoved treats in his face.
Tap, tap, tap
went the Gravedigger’s trunk, blessing every bald spot and pomaded dome that approached. Parents nudged their children forward, fearful little things thin as saplings, who came with a feral scent.

Shoals of people pressed in with their awe, their need. The Gravedigger would have borne them better with Parthasarathi by his side, but the elder elephant had disappeared three days before, carted off in a lorry. At every new place, the Gravedigger searched the air for a trace of Parthasarathi, who was nowhere to be smelled or seen.

Heavy the heart and the load, now shouldered alone. The whereabouts of Parthasarathi became the Gravedigger’s constant preoccupation, plunging him to anguish during musth.

Musth was the dark time. Every few months, the Gravedigger was thunderstruck, his body vivid with rage, panting with the urge to run and crush all, down to the last man or sapling. The Gravedigger was fifteen years old, the age at which, in the forests, he would have parted from his clan and taken up with the bulls, who would have taught him how to charge and when to retreat, how to draw a cow from her clan (or read her rejection), and how to cope with musth.

At Elephant Sabu’s place, when the Gravedigger was stricken by musth, the pappans kept him shackled between trees. These were tighter chains than the changala that usually hugged his leg; tethered forefoot to hind foot, he could not take a single step. Food appeared in a trough or was tossed to him from a distance by the pappans, who stayed beyond the Gravedigger’s line of sight.

On the road, the Gravedigger was ambushed by musth more often than usual. Once, it happened at a wedding. One minute he was carrying a groom through a raucous parade, the next minute he was ripping out a stand of lemon trees, the drummers and dancers scattering like ants, while the groom clutched at the sides of his howdah and squealed.

With front leg and back leg chained between trees, the Gravedigger watched the sun creep across the sky. The trees leaked shadows. He sniffed the rubber of passing tires, the dusty musk of the bird that sat on his spine, snapping up gnats. In the old days,
Old Man would squat on the ground beneath the Gravedigger, his back turned as the elephant twisted leaves into his mouth. Over time, the Gravedigger had learned the shape of Old Man’s spine, each stone descending from the last. Every so often, Old Man would hum.

But Old Man no longer turned his back on the Gravedigger. His eyes were wary; he had dropped weight, but a bird on the Gravedigger’s back.

With no one to soothe him, the Gravedigger resorted to memory. His mind roamed over the faces and smells he had known as a calf, the flick of a cousin’s tail, the sour-milk smell of his sister’s breath, a pile of elephant ribs still echoing a faint fleshy scent. For hours he could stand quietly, falling into the past like a leaf drifting to forest floor. Such thoughts detached him from the two trees, drew him inward, drew him home.

§

Two days it took for the Gravedigger to recover from musth, ten minutes to load him into the open truck bed, thundering toward another destination. As evening fell, the smell of his fellow elephants flowed over him from a hundred yards away. He was almost home.

Relieved, he thought of the days to come, the order restored. How he would sleep to the sounds of Parthasarathi’s snoring. How he and Parthasarathi would lie beneath the sun as Old Man
hosed their sides and legs and bellies, how the pappans would rasp at his skin with a coconut hull, how he would fall into a bottomless nap.

As the lorry rumbled up to his stall, the Gravedigger caught a strange smell leaking from Parthasarathi’s stall, where Parthasarathi was not. The pappans leaped out of the cab, stretched. The Gravedigger reached his trunk in the direction of Parthasarathi’s stall and recoiled from the foreign odor. A stranger’s reek.

The Gravedigger went still beneath a mud slide of realizations. They had taken Parthasarathi away. They had put some other elephant in his place. Parthasarathi was no more.

Down came his trunk upon the lorry’s cab. He struck with all his eight tons, deaf to the shouts of the pappans and the rumbles of the other elephants, his screams filling his lungs like water until he had no breath left.

§

They locked the Gravedigger in the lorry for hours, without food. When he was hollowed of energy, they maneuvered him into his stall, Elephant Sabu watching, Old Man leading the way and making gentle sounds.

At some point, impatient, Romeo yanked the chain.

The Gravedigger swatted him to the ground. For the elephant, the gesture was little more than a tap; for Romeo, a blow that dropped him like a sandbag. All the pappans stood dumb with dread. The Gravedigger felt a dim flare of distress until Old Man began his lowing again, as if no harm had been done, no punishment looming.