The Tusk That Did the Damage (17 page)

Elephant Sabu mouthed something at Romeo, baring his teeth in threat.

Romeo slunk away, wretched and low to the ground.

§

Unable to sleep, Old Man rose from his cot and went to check on the Gravedigger.

The elephant stood in still silhouette within the four sides of his stall. Old Man kept his distance, unable to say whether the Gravedigger was dozing. Like a nursery rhyme came his father’s advice:
An elephant asleep on its feet is an elephant ill at ease.

He could have smacked Romeo for rattling the Gravedigger so, but what was the point in railing against the toothless buffoon? Elephant Sabu was to blame for the Gravedigger’s state. It was Elephant Sabu who had assigned them so many events, stringing one against the next as smoothly as blooms on a garland. He was intent on making back what he’d paid for the Gravedigger, and what he had lost on his beloved Parthasarathi.

Old Parthasarathi had been riding in the back of a lorry, whose usual driver was home with the flu. In his stead, the driver sent his reckless, rum-soaked sons. The boys sped over a pothole that caused the elephant to slam its head into the cab. After some time, a taxi pulled even with the lorry, the driver yelling out the window, “Pull over, pull over! Something is wrong with the elephant! It is stumbling about!”

Soon as they braked, Parthasarathi fell to his knees, fell asleep.

Putting another elephant in Parthasarathi’s stall had been Elephant Sabu’s idea, a possible antidote to the Gravedigger’s loneliness. Elephant Sabu, too, was saddened by the loss of his favorite elephant, whose photo appeared each time he flipped open his mobile. He canceled Parthasarathi’s remaining engagements, returned all deposits. He brought suit against the rum brothers and braced himself for the investigations of animal cruelty brought by the Forest Department.

In purchasing the Gravedigger, Elephant Sabu had anticipated a gilded future, but now each loss seemed a stone in his pocket. His wife urged him to assign the Gravedigger more work. What’s the point, she said, of keeping such a handsome fellow at home?

So Elephant Sabu hired out the handsome fellow to temples and churches and wedding processions, even to political rallies, both Congress and Marxist, wherever the organizers would pay a fee. Some of these hucksters shirked on the amount of panna and
water they were meant to provide, and there were times when even the pappans went without proper meals. Mani-Mathai made no complaint though his belly gurgled in protest. Romeo regularly threatened to quit.

Anytime Old Man tried to reason with Elephant Sabu, he got a long speech about the costs of being in the Elephant Business—the water, the medicines, the veterinarian’s bill alone! Thirty bottles of glucose for Parthasarathi’s intestinal obstruction plus four bottles of Hermin infusion … not even trying to make a profit … simply trying to survive …

Meanwhile, the elephant had taken to nodding more than usual, to the tune of some dark, swirling rhythm.

Some of the other pappans took precautions, sneaking opium into their elephants’ feed to dull the animals during musth. Old Man would not go so far, not yet, though the Gravedigger’s silence reminded him of those early, delicate days in the anakoodu, when the calf flickered between this life and the next. Back then, the calf had latched onto Old Man, and over time, they became two halves of a single conversation. Now the elephant seemed locked inside a separate room.

The memory of Appachen’s advice descended on him from time to time, to seek another job, any job. But Old Man had refused; this was the tradition to which he’d been born, a known road that had been cleared for him by previous generations. He had meant to maintain the way, even if no one else did.

Fool’s talk, his father had said. No one wants to be a pappan anymore, not even the pappans. A toilet wiper makes more than us. And a toilet can’t kill you.

§

The sky above him wild with stars, and still the Gravedigger could not sleep. He felt a smoldering under his skin, an ache in his tusks, until the breeze brought him the scent of Old Man. That invisible presence, however brief, was a steady palm to the Gravedigger’s side.

In time, Old Man’s smell receded, his footsteps rasping away.

Moments later, another smell spilled through the darkness. The Gravedigger caught the chemical smog, the liquored stink that filled the mouth like bad fruit.

Romeo emerged from the shadows. He entered the Gravedigger’s stall and went about some mysterious business. The Gravedigger felt himself being clamped forefoot to hind foot. Something was wrong—the Gravedigger was chained this way only during musth, and in the presence of Old Man. Where was Old Man?

Finished with the chains, Romeo stood before the Gravedigger. His dark shape swayed. The Gravedigger could not see Romeo clearly, nor the pitchfork in the pappan’s grip, yet he sensed the world tightening around him, a pressure building inside his head.

The pappan stabbed the Gravedigger’s leg. Pain blazed up his flank, hot and stunning.

The same pain shocked him where the skin was most tender, behind the ear and under his tail, then his side, and his belly. There was no room between one pain and the next, no time to let the hurt breathe, only pain and pain again while the pappan barked nonsense, the aroma of liquor and sourness pouring off his skin. The Gravedigger shrank from the pappan, growing smaller and smaller until he was but a calf again, trying to hide from the hands that were yanking him from his mother’s side. Forever on it went, that blur of barking and stabbing until, at last, the Gravedigger smelled hope blooming up from the darkness.

§

Old Man was a magnificent snorer, able to sleep through any storm. Mani-Mathai, meanwhile, sought refuge beneath his own pillow. Even a slender, plipping leak in the roof could keep the boy wide-eyed for hours, so the elephant’s shrieks brought him running. And what he saw and heard stopped him dead in the darkness.

Is that what you want?
Is it?

With every question, his uncle speared the elephant’s side.

His mind gone blank, Mani-Mathai let two stabs pass in this manner before he rushed forth and kicked his uncle in the back of the knees. Romeo drunkenly flung his arms and elbows, but an easy blow to the ribs reduced him to a fetal position, hands over his face.

Mani-Mathai stood up and was flooded by the old fear of fathers and whippings.

Romeo rose, stooped, his hand on his side, his voice shrill with disbelief. You broke my rib, you stupid ape!

I’m telling Sabu Sir. In the morning, I’ll tell everything.

Go on! his uncle sneered. He’ll tell you that’s how we do things! We break the animals! You think we charm them with caramels? You think Old Man did it any different?

He wouldn’t.

You would defend him to the death. But who will defend you when the beast comes charging?

The boy looked to the elephant. It was either heaving or nodding, he could not tell which.

Romeo took a deep, pained breath before he spoke. Let me tell you something. You want the elephant’s friendship, but you cannot be both friend and master. An elephant is not like a cow or
a horse, you cannot tame it fully. Some part of it will always be wild. That is the part you cannot trust, the part you have to break again and again.

Mani-Mathai stared at the pitchfork lying on the ground. Secretly, he had always wanted his uncle to speak to him thus, as an equal, not a nuisance. But these were not words he wanted to hear, even if they carried a glint of truth; they stung.

This is our job, said Romeo. This is what we do. Now who is in charge—you or him?

The boy picked up the pitchfork, weighed it in his hands. Go, he said.

Go what? Are you even listening to me?

Go!
said Mani-Mathai, and took a swing at his uncle. He missed by inches, but it was enough to send Romeo fleeing into the night.

The rot reached for miles, penetrating windows, breaching walls. It wormed into the nose and burrowed deep, no match for mouth breathing, as we drove straight to the molten core.

Teddy rode shotgun, camera fixed on Ravi, who slouched in the opposite corner. Bobin sat in the middle, knees all pinned and prim as if contact with my boom mic would be unseemly. I asked an obvious question just to get them talking—“So where are we going?”—from which Bobin abstained by leaning back.

Ravi wore the slack, haggard expression of an inmate. He was in no mood for questioning, let alone a question he’d answered not two minutes before while the camera was unfortunately off. “We are going to the postmortem of a dead elephant in Sitamala. The goal is to ascertain the cause of death and, if it was a poaching, to recover the bullet and file a case with the police.”

“What if you don’t find the bullet?”

“Police will not even look twice at the case. Everyone is depending on me to find it: DFO. ACF. Chief Wildlife Warden.” I waited, letting Ravi’s mind leap ahead to other tangents. “The worst thing is when the bullet is in the head. The inside of the head is all tunnels and cavities, like a honeycomb. It can bounce this way and that, go anywhere …”

“Do you think it’s the same elephant who killed the boy in Sitamala?”

“No. I told you already.” He dragged a hand over his face.
“The Gravedigger is a tusker over three meters high at the shoulder. This one is smaller—we can tell from the circumference of the footprint. There is no connection.”

“But the Gravedigger definitely killed the boy in Sitamala.”

“It seems so, but …” He shook his head. “It’s strange for the Gravedigger to come back here, after so many years.”

“The bamboo might have something to do with it. Like you said.”

“Could be that. Could be he knows you want to film him and it’s making him crazy.”

Bobin cracked a rare smile. Teddy held on Ravi’s face for a moment, about to lower the camera until I asked, “Have you ever seen the Gravedigger?”

We were rounding a bend where a hank of long grass, growing almost horizontally from the hillside, reached through Ravi’s open window. Absently, he ran his fingers through the strands. “Long time ago. Back then he was called Sooryamangalam Sreeganeshan. He was the most famous temple elephant. They put his picture on calendars, postcards; there was even talk of putting him in a movie.

“My whole family went to see him at a festival. All these nine elephants they squeezed into a temple that could fit only three. There was so little room, the elephants were leaning against one another, and because Sooryamangalam Sreeganeshan was the tallest, he was in the middle. All through the blessings and the prayers, he was nodding and nodding, at nothing. I asked my mother why he was doing that. She said he was happy, he was hearing a song in his head. Can you imagine? Only a bhranthan would be nodding like that.”

“Bhranthan?”

Lost in thought, Ravi squinted at the window, as if all nine elephants were nodding in the distance.

“Madman,” Bobin clarified.

The dead elephant loomed huge and unreal, like a parade float partly deflated and collapsed on folded, rubbery limbs. Its chin lay on the dirt, its trunk outstretched, the corners of its mouth drawn up in a perverse little smile.

Ravi and Bobin began by zipping up their raincoats. They slipped on rubber aprons, wriggled fingers into gloves. Another assistant, taking extra precaution, clamped on a motorcycle helmet.

They found and photographed the burnt, black spot of the bullet hole on the elephant’s side, behind the left shoulder. But the bullet was far deeper, a baby dragonfly buried somewhere in that bulk of flesh.

Teddy closed in as Ravi wormed a stick into the burn hole, trying to assess the vector of the bullet. Bobin brandished a metal detector, sweeping the air around the wound until it began to bleat frantically. Across that spot, Ravi traced a
T.

With an X-Acto knife, Ravi sliced away a square of dermis, thick as a house mat, and peeled it back. Beneath was a shiny layer of fat and muscle, marbled with pink, and in the center, the burn hole like a black star that had bored its way through the flesh, spiraling, widening a contrail as it went. Teddy and I stepped closer. The stench of pus filled my mouth.

They took a saw to the animal’s side, the sound like a zipper going up and down. With pliers, they pinched and sheared the muscle beneath in great, gleaming swaths, blood pooling up. They cut around the huge wet balloons of organs, searched the medusal knots of the small intestine, cauliflowers of calcified fat.

Hours passed, and still no bullet.

By four o’clock, the heat had baked the stench to new heights. Teddy and I stepped away from the carcass, taking a break to switch out tapes, when Ms. Hakim came striding down a narrow berm, a handkerchief held to her mouth, followed by a forest officer with glinting badges and a mustache thin as the swipe of a knife. She surveyed the scene—carcass, Ravi, Bobin, guards—until her colorless gaze came to rest on us. I waved. She ignored me.

Putting a hold on the postmortem, Ms. Hakim summoned Ravi aside. She conferred with him quietly, and he nodded in response until something she said made him stop nodding. He scanned her face, then the ground, seemingly at a loss for words. They hung there, suspended, no longer a scene but a freeze-frame of something vital, something we would miss entirely if Teddy didn’t hurry with the tape.

As soon as we rose to join them, the conference was over. Ms. Hakim and Ravi parted ways, him to the carcass, her to us.

“Teddy. Emma.” She stuck a peremptory smile on her face. “You must be tired. Let me take you back to the center.”

I glanced at Teddy, both of us reluctant. “Oh—well, we’d prefer to stay until they’ve wrapped things up.”

“They are wrapping things up, I told them.”

“Then we’ll just get a ride with the team,” I said.

“No, they must drop off the tissue samples at the lab and then they must meet with me.”

“We could film that,” Teddy suggested. “The meeting would be an opportunity—”

“No,” Ms. Hakim said, adding a kindly grimace, as though it pained her to cut him off. “No filming in the meeting.”