The Tusk That Did the Damage (20 page)

Only when he entered the lake did his mind go still. Underwater, a hush entered his body. His limbs cycled freely, almost as though he had never worn the chain around his ankle, as if he had never known that weight.

On Friday, the villagers stormed the Forest Department. They came by the hundreds, they came with their kin, blocking the highway, shaking their fists and shouting at a pitch that pummeled the speakers of our twelve-inch television.

Teddy and I were nesting in a mangy love seat with our tiffins of rice and dal. For the last half hour, Bobin had been filling out monthly reports, sickle-bent over Ravi’s desk. When the news story began, his gaze darted up. He hadn’t blinked since. The anchorwoman spoke in a breathless stream from which I caught one word—
Sitamala.
Bobin squinted, leaned forward, shushing me every time I asked for a translation. His pen hung in the air as if he were frozen whole, aside from his thumb, which kept clicking the tip.

“A poacher was shot by forest officers,” Bobin explained, still squinting. “The same poacher who killed the elephant from the postmortem. There was some kind of scuffle …” Bobin paused to listen, his whole face scrunching up. “The officers say they shot him in self-defense.”

“So why are the villagers protesting?” I asked.

“The villagers say that poacher was not responsible for the Sitamala elephant. They say he was unarmed when he died.” Bobin snorted, shook his head. “Even though he was carrying the same type of bullet we found on the Sitamala elephant.”

“So what’s their theory?” Teddy asked.

“They say we are conspiring with the Forest Department. They say we
planted
the bullet on the man’s body. What kind of nonsense …”

Planted:
the word sent a jolt through my gut. I turned back to the TV, where the anchorwoman sped through the rest of her report. Several times, she mentioned a “Mr. Shivaram” beneath a shot of a sweaty, disheveled man leading the others, the cords in his throat pulled taut.

“Who is that?” I asked.

Bobin glanced at the screen. “Must be the dead man’s brother.”

Wednesday, well ahead of sunrise, we commenced our journey as a party of three, sidling through an opening in the tree line. We wore green half pants and black undershirts so as to camouflage our bodies and elephant shit on our arms so as to camouflage our smells. Jayan and Alias moved nimbly but I was burdened by a pack crammed with too many items: a tarpaulin, four clean shirts (to blend into the public posthunt), cartridges, bullets, binoculars, torches, matches, bidis, gram, rice, sambar masala, meat masala, black pepper, chili pepper, and salt.

I had accused Jayan of overpacking: Why so many masalas? Should we bring cinnamon and saffron too?

“Have you ever had plain wild meat?” he shot back. “Goes down like wood pulp.”

Already I was dreading our meals and was reminded of that dread each time a monkey shrieked. These were the milky hours of morning when the howlers and prowlers were scuttling in the trees, cicadas hissing like a lit fuse. All my life I had known such sounds, yet now they rang eerie and foreign in my ears.

How strange then to see my brother so sure of himself. He moved with the silky certainty of a panther stalking prey, the way his feet never faltered, the way he plucked his shirt off a snagging branch so as not to leave evidence of his presence. His face was sharp and intent, hardened by heartache. To his mind there was only one way the hunt would end.

Alias led the way, carrying his trusted rosewood and a pack much lighter than my own. His eyes swooped in on every dropping and pug mark. He knew the paths of the patrollers and the crackle of their walkie-talkies, the location of the antipoaching camps. He caught every breakage of branch, whose pure green heart meant the snap was fresh and recent. The fellow did not know dental hygiene but truly he knew his business.

We skulked through rattling thickets and phantoms of mist, a slice of raw pink at the sky’s beginning. Tall towers of tiger bamboo leaned over us, some brown and dying and scribbled over by vines. The damp earth muffled our steps. Had it been a dry day, any crackling leaf could have betrayed us.

At times we heard a shudder among the bushes, and we froze, barrels leveled at the noise before moving on. It was morning and the herds were on their way down the mountain and into the valleys to drink and bathe at the lake. By afternoon they would trail back up the slopes to the golden open scrublands, a higher altitude where only a scatter of bush and evergreen still grew. There we would stalk the Gravedigger.

Several hours passed, and my back begged relief of its burden. The silence suited me even less as it set my mind wandering toward my performance from the prior night. Sometimes the memory crept up—sticking my nose in her neck like some lecherous mutt—and made me spasm with self-hatred.

So I was grateful for the distraction of a morning snack. We shared a tube of biscuits and a flask of water, which sent me in search of a private spot, my business being of a substantial nature. My brother called after me unkindly, “Don’t get lost.”

I wove around a few trees, plucking a handful of leaves for hygienic purposes. In my desire for privacy, I ventured a bit far.

I found a discreet little clearing and lingered over it a moment. I had never voided myself upon forest floor, and for the tenth time that day I asked of myself,
How in hell did Jayan do these things?

I dropped my half pant and squatted. Instantly my bowels went on strike, demanding better conditions. I imagined my brother aflame with impatience, tromping through the forest in search of me. I doubled my efforts. At last, in sore defeat, I yanked up my half pant, preparing myself for Jayan’s ridicule, though what came first, what froze me tip to toe, was the throaty rumble rising behind me.

I turned by degrees.

The Gravedigger stood a few yards away, its body obscured by bamboo, its tusks reaching white through the vines, its head looming and vast as a cliff.

Sweat stung my eyes yet I would not blink. I stared at one of the tusks, the tip that had long ago gored a man’s galloping heart.

Running seemed pointless and beyond my power. My legs were limp, my hands empty, aside from a fistful of sanitary leaves. I prayed to the tusker as had every numbstruck luckless clod to face a rogue thusly unarmed.
Finish me quick.

Aside from an ear twitch, the tusker did not move. Its legs were granite columns, supporting such a spectacular bulk. It regarded me with its honey-hued eyes as if to take my measure, my potential for harm. As I stood there, I felt an odd calm settle over me. Fathoms deep, those eyes, small inside the cliff sides, close to the color of my own. Remote and ancient. Eyes that had seen the wild and not-wild, eyes that knew things.

The whole forest seemed to hold its breath. All at once the Gravedigger came to a conclusion that caused it to turn and saunter off, thrashing aside a tree as if it were of no more consequence than a weed. Thus the Gravedigger departed, quiet as it came, a cool gray moon. It had let me live.

I ran.

Branches slashed at my arms, vines whipped me in the face. Surely I was making a show of myself, gasping and huffing through the trees. When Alias reached out of the green and snatched my shoulder, I nearly yelped. He and my brother looked most incensed, Alias going so far as to bare his black gums. “What were you doing out there—giving birth?”

Jayan said he had gone looking for me. “Where were you?” he demanded.

I took a long trembling breath and imagined the tusker standing in judgment, weighing my fragile self, and something inside me shifted. Jayan’s gaze roved over me like a torch. For reasons I could not discern at the moment, I skirted the truth and mumbled instead: “Constipated. I am constipated.”

I turned away and shouldered the pack. Alias stuck his snout in my face. “You can shit a brick for all I care. We are on serious business here—”

Jayan put up a hand. “Enough. He understands.”

Alias looked between my brother and me, baffled by Jayan’s calm. I suspect my brother had intervened not in order to defend me from name-calling but because he had caught a secret wafting off me and knew pressure would best be applied in private.

Alias tossed Jayan’s hand away and said we would have to double our pace up the mountain in order to meet the Gravedigger on the slopes as planned. He trudged first, me second, Jayan last, my brother’s eyes boring into my back. I clenched my hand to keep it from shaking.

As soon as the news report ended, Teddy and I headed back to his room. He was utterly confused. He begged me to debrief him on what the hell Bobin had just told us and, more important, what he’d left out.

“So two days ago,” I said, “an elephant was killed in Sitamala.”

Teddy nodded impatiently. “And yesterday morning, Ravi started the postmortem.”

“Right, and sometime during the postmortem, this poacher, Mr. Shivaram—he was killed by a forest officer. The officers took a bullet off his body—”

“Out of his
body
?”

“Just listen. The guy was carrying bullets. One of those officers must’ve taken a few and delivered them to Ravi, and he, sort of, maybe …”

“Planted a bullet? On the dead elephant?”

I nodded.

“Jesus.”

“Allegedly. We don’t know what Ravi did unless we discuss it with him.”

“Oh, we’ll definitely discuss it.” Teddy paced the room in militant strides, his hands stuffed in his armpits. “We’ll film him on his rounds tomorrow morning, and then we’ll end by asking him about the dead poacher.”

“What, like, out of the blue?”

“I also want to raise the question of corruption. Something
like
How do you feel about working so closely with a Forest Department that’s been accused of a massive cover-up?
Which could lead to a discussion of the Shankar Timber case …”

I listened in silence, staring at the splayed Moleskine on his desk. Teddy was talking with his hands. I took a breath, braced for impact. “I don’t know.”

Teddy halted. “Don’t know what?”

“The whole gotcha approach didn’t work so well last time.”

“I thought you were all about spontaneity. This could be a pivotal scene.”

“We’ll just piss him off.”

“Better than getting a canned answer. We pissed off Samina Hakim; you didn’t care about that.”

“We don’t need her the way we need him. Seriously, I think it’ll go better if I talk to Ravi first.”

“Let me guess.” Teddy eyed me steadily. “Alone?”

“He gets defensive sometimes, when we’re both there.” Teddy snorted; I persisted. “I won’t ask for specifics. The shoot will still be spontaneous. But I think it’s only fair that we let him know we want to go down this road.”

“And if he says no?”

I shrugged. “Then no. It’s not worth hurting him.”

“How would our little film hurt him?”

I hesitated; Teddy read what I couldn’t say.

“Shelly was different,” he added quietly. “She completely misinterpreted … she thought she was in love with me.” He paused. “Or maybe it’s not that different.”

My stomach tensed.

“Emma, is there something you’re not telling me?”

That had always been my line, during interviews. At first I
felt the pinned, panicky sensation I must have inflicted on others, but then the panic subsided, displaced by annoyance. What got me was the trickle of condescension, the indirectness of the approach, the sting of Ravi’s comment:
He treats you like a child.

“Nothing you don’t already know.”

Teddy squinted as if he’d misheard me, until the truth seemed to crystallize, slowly, before his eyes.

“You and him,” he said.

I nodded.

When it became clear that I wouldn’t elaborate or apologize, Teddy stared hard at the ground.

“It’s over,” I said. “Obviously. We’re leaving in a few days.”

“He could tell someone. A blogger could pick it up. We’d never make a film again.”

“Now you’re being melodramatic.”

“How are you supposed to be objective now? How the hell am I supposed to trust you?”

I hesitated, unaccustomed to the scorn in his voice. “Ravi won’t say anything.”

Teddy shook his head.

“I know him, Teddy.”

“You slept with him. There’s a big fucking difference.”

A glacial silence passed as we stood there, suspended between strangers and friends.

I said I was going, but he didn’t lift his head.

In my room, I brewed black tea to stay awake; it went down in a bitter flame. I could’ve waited till morning, but my head felt so
clogged with suspicion and dread I had no room for patience. I needed Ravi to tell me that what we’d heard was simply untrue, and until then I wouldn’t sleep.

Later, I found Bobin by the jeep, overseeing two keepers as they lifted a large wire cage from the back. Inside was a small macaque, munching on a banana.

“Ravi?” I asked. Bobin pointed me to the exam room.

The hanging bulb cast a sinister glow in the center of the operating table. I didn’t notice Ravi at first, sitting in the shadows, the same pose we’d caught him in the day before. Hands hanging empty, face vacant.

“Hey,” I said, causing him to bolt to his feet. “It’s just me. No camera.”

He weighed me a moment, then went to the table and unlatched the plastic toolbox, setting vials aside like a weary bartender.

“I saw the news.” I tried to sound casual. “I heard about the protests.” No answer, no sign of recognition. “We’d like to interview you about it.” More vials, more bottles. “And we’d like to interview those farmers about what happened, maybe Officer Vasu too.”

“Why them?”

“Because it’s important to show how the local community perceives you. And the center.” I felt the villagers’ accusations vying for space in the room. “Those are some serious allegations.”

“There are many sides to the local community and most of them are supportive of us. What you are trying to sniff out is a handful of rioters.”

“What happened?”

“Confidential.”

“Did Samina make you do it?”