The Tusk That Did the Damage (6 page)

Those who came to watch pushed in with all manner of theories.

“This is the Gravedigger’s work. Who here would forget it? Buries its victims just like this.”

“But it hasn’t come round in ten years!”

“It feasts on human flesh.”

“Are you stupid? Elephants eat greens.”

“I hear it eats jackfruit by the bushel, so much you can smell it coming. Death never smelled so sweet.”

Raghu’s mother was removed from the premises for fear she would scream herself insane asking the same question over and again: What kind of father would send a child of seventeen,
seventeen,
to sit in the palli alone?

“Not alone,” he said quietly. His sunken eyes found mine.

My mouth felt dry, my tongue a lump of clay. I saw he blamed me for deserting his only son and the pain of it went through and through me.

Later we cast my cousin’s ashes in the Stream of Sins behind the temple. The mountains sat gaunt and blue on the opposite side, watching, as they had done for all time, us grievers and bathers and sinners.

I had thought the ashes would sink with grace. Yet Raghu sat in a stubborn clump on the surface as if to say,
You guilty wretch, you will not be rid of me so easy.

A wailing went up from the women, though my aunt did not cry; her grief had turned hard and silent. I watched from the banks where Raghu and I had once set sail a boat of string and sticks while our mothers prayed in the temple. There went my friend, my boyhood entire.

I loved my brother equally, but we were not equals, as he was elder to me by five years. Little creature, my mother used to call him, for the pelt of hair he had worn from birth. And there was something creaturely too about the man he became, all sinew and scruff, the way he looked through you like a cool-eyed cat. Being a hunter, Jayan knew things—how to tell between the slots of a sambar and the pug of a tiger, between cow pie and buffalo turd and elephant scat. He had a botanist’s knowledge of wild plants, though he had not studied botany or anything else since age fourteen. To him, the forest was the only school worth attending.

Jayan might have made a so-so student had my father shown any interest in discipline. What to say. I suppose my father was too busy making his own mistakes.

By day my father was a farmer; by night, an accomplished drunk, well known to finish a whole bottle of rum and still find his way to another. The drunken part of him we could have managed, shouldering him home on night after stuporous night, thinning the yogurt concoction that would have him back and bloodshot on his feet next morning. Yet he also suffered an unholy weakness for betting on cards, dogs, local elections, anywhere he might turn a note into two. You would not think him weak by his broad back and his woolly beard and his godlike gaze turned inward as if trying to make sense of the world. But it was a weakness of will that made him empty his pockets each night and sell off two of our acres to finance his madness. Weakness that made him swipe my mother’s wedding gold, a necklace so long she had looped it thrice around her throat.

“Maybe he needs the money for an investment,” I said.

“Maybe someone wants him dead,” said Jayan.

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know he is no saint.” From his pocket Jayan pulled a strange piece of metal shaped as four connected loops. He slipped the loops through his fingers and faked a punch at my nose, grinning at my flinch. “This I found in his cabinet.” Jayan gazed at his fingers as if admiring a fine piece of jewelry. “I could give you a brand-new face with it.”

I tried but could not reconcile this steel-fisted father with the one I knew. This is the power of the drink: it can split a man into two different people, each a stranger to the other. The father I
knew had never even lifted a hand to beat us, as if to do so were beneath him. His voice was warning enough: rich and deep and hollow. After he died I tried to remake his sound by murmuring into a rolled-up newspaper, until my mother finally grabbed the tube and smacked me senseless.

You see, I was his favorite. One morning he took me to the field and taught me how to guess that season’s yield: eye a square meter, count the plants, then take the average beads of rice per plant. It was only a guess, he said, for to farm was to surrender control, to suspect but never know. We used maths and omens and traced our fortunes among the stars but—he shrugged—“Some signs are misleading. And none are any use to you.”

“Why not?”

“You will grow into something greater than a farmer, my boy. Sure as calves become cows.”

There was such magic to his words, the way he pressed a finger like a wand to my chest.

Jayan, meanwhile, had his own aspirations. He helped on the farm from time to time but mostly retreated to some shady corner of town with his friends, strays and idlers we never met.

Raghu had spied my brother with a rough bunch at a shappe, trading Tamil over toddy and fish. I said nothing of this to my mother, who would have thrown a great thumping fit on account of the fish eating.

As for me I much preferred spending my school-free hours with Raghu on his father’s farm. Raghu’s father was day to my father’s night, two years older and temptation-proof. We called him Synthetic Achan (though not within earshot) due to his constant refrain: “Cola? What do you want to drink cola for? Cola
is
crawling
with synthetics.” The same went for boxed juices, white sugar, candies, chocolate, and most every other good and delicious thing.

And yet I loved Synthetic Achan, for he was the same man every hour of every day, begun with a glass of warm milk and finished off with a thimble of toddy and two smacks of the tongue. (Toddy was the only spirit he would touch, as it came straight from the coconut.) He was careful with his money and his land, having inherited seven acres to my father’s six. At the end of each harvest he was rewarded with mountains of fragrant, golden, unmilled rice, which he stored in the shed. As children, Raghu and I would scramble up the mounds and slide down the sides until our legs itched from the husks. Itchy or not, this was the best time of my life.

But mine was a flimsy happiness, not the kind of happy that lasts.

The trouble began when my mother found a pouch of bullets in Jayan’s cabinet—thick and crude as if sawed from a steering rod—and thrust the pouch at my father. She felt it a father’s duty to straighten out a wayward son even if the father himself was wayward past hope.

That evening Jayan found my father waiting on the sit-out, sober for once. My mother and I hovered in the doorway.

“What are these for?” my father said, tossing the pouch of bullets at Jayan’s feet.

Jayan took his time adjusting the new watch around his wrist before bending to pocket the bullets. The watch was a Solex, poor cousin to the Rolex, but gold and fine all the same. “For making money.”

“Black money.”

“Least it’s mine.”

My mother gripped the doorway, all the heat gone from her voice. “Not here. Inside.”

But my father was already sailing down the steps on a wave of interrogation: Was it Jayan who had brought the gun into the house and was it Jayan who had been butchering elephants and God knew what else and was it Jayan who had so shamed his mother and father by becoming the one thing they had never dreamed he would be, a lowlife poacher, and in doing so, made them lowlives as well? Was it? Did Jayan have nothing to say for himself? Did he have a banana in his mouth?

Never before had my father spent so much breath on my brother. They had always been two lone wolves content to prowl their own sides of the mountain. Now Jayan’s lips trembled as if in fear or remorse, I could not tell.

Then he broke out laughing.

“Shamed you?” said Jayan. “Shamed
you
?”

“Stop laughing.”

“I used to think you were unlucky. Now I know you’re just stupid.”

In one swipe my father had him on the ground.

My mother ran to Jayan’s side, but he blocked her with his arm. His watch face caught a glimpse of moonlight. It looked suddenly huge to me, so wrong on his slim wrist.

For a terrible second, I thought Jayan would charge at my father. Instead my brother dealt a blow much worse: he looked at my father and said we all wished him dead.

The thought had crossed my own mind once or twice. Indeed
I had imagined a fatherless life. Wouldn’t you, if you watched your father day by day destroy your mother and drink away your land, wouldn’t you once or twice imagine him resting in peace so you could honor what good memory of him remained and preserve what land and love were left?

Still Jayan should not have said it. To hear that truth out loud—it was a whipcrack to my heart.

My father tried to hide his hurt by spitting off to the side. But for a narrow moment his eyes met mine, and I saw the depths behind them, I saw how tired he was. Some men cannot master their many selves. My father was such a man, and he knew this just as he knew where his life would end.

One month later his body was pulled from a river. Bruises round the throat, a clump of his woolly beard torn out. My mother forbade us from speaking to the police for fear of reprisal, yet I could not rid the image from my mind—my father floating facedown on the water, all his hopes for me somewhere at the bottom.

Later I asked my brother, “You don’t miss him at all?”

Jayan considered the question for less than a second. “Do you miss having a car?”

“We never had a car.”

“That we did not.”

Jayan worked in the field till the sun striped his arms, till dirt gummed his nails and streaked his legs from standing calf-deep in mud. He followed my father’s right-hand man on morning rounds, learning how to sow seeds and replant the shoots stalk by tender stalk, to read the crop by its color and posture, when to
feed nitrogen to sallow plants, when to set out magnesium cakes for the rats who sucked the juice from the base of a broken stalk. Whether by mistake or misfortune or a savage flock of doves, the first two plantings suffered. In the meantime, my brother kept up his side business.

He learned to read the crop, and I learned to read him. The day before a hunt, he was always glancing at the trees, listening for his omen, the woodpecker. If the woodpecker called from the east, I would glimpse my brother the next morning slipping past the house in his hunting uniform—green half pant and black T-shirt. If, the day after he returned from the forest, a blue Maruti drove up to the shed and my brother stuffed a fertilizer sack in the trunk, the hunt had gone well. If the driver haggled with my brother at length, Jayan would assume a foul mood for the rest of the day.

As a new policy my mother turned her gaze elsewhere, for she believed Jayan might abandon us forever if pressed too hard. I never shared her doubt, yet Jayan was Jayan, and he had his days. Some nights he drank with his feckless friends, and as the hours went on, he turned his frustrations onto the nearest bystander and came home fat lipped and dented. Easy to forget he was but twenty years old.

On hunts, I would come to learn, Jayan led a gang of four. Among them he was the gunman, making twice as much as the others who carried supplies. He was careful to keep these associates apart from me out of embarrassment. He said I was fragile as a flower when it came to physical tasks, a theory he based on my love of books. (He rarely read anything longer than a receipt.)

So I was unpleasantly surprised when Jayan invited Raghu and me on a business trip to Kottayam. Jayan would be meeting with his boss, a man by the name of Communist Chacko, with whom he hoped to deal directly instead of haggling with that driver over every ounce of ivory.

“Why can’t you ask one of your other colleagues?” I said. “That one fat-necked fellow you’re always running with.”

“I cannot trust him for a thing like this, and I cannot go alone, I’ll look like a nobody.”

“But we have school.”

“We can skip it,” Raghu volunteered. This was Raghu—quick to answer even if no one had asked him a question. He was eager for adventure and adulthood, a moment of glory in his otherwise inglorious life. He was also eager to skip class.

“Good,” said Jayan, and to me: “We will save you a seat.”

By “seat,” he meant a sliver of space in a mini-lorry that pummeled my hind parts for most of the five-hour journey. All throughout Raghu asked questions about hunting and guns as if studying for a job interview. Jayan told of the time he went for a five-day hunt and found himself having to eat a dinner of boiled black monkey. “I begged them to cut off the head before cooking it, but they said the brain was the best part.” Jayan shook his head. “All curled up and tail cut. Looked just like a baby boiling in a pot.”

Not a second too soon we reached Communist Chacko’s house, a stucco hulk with stone dolphins on the gateposts. Raghu thought it all folly and waste (“What is the point? A house can’t feed a man”), but Jayan told him to shut up and say nothing until we were back on the road.

Communist Chacko had been trained as a lawyer—he always attached “Esq.” to the tail of his signature—but he was the picture of a politician with that smile, as slick and white as his marble floor. Framed photos claimed every wall, his sons Lenin and Stalin featured in most. The boys were poor in school but no matter, said Communist Chacko, Lenin-Stalin would follow him into the family business. Names like theirs they wouldn’t find a job that easy. The names had been Dolly’s idea. His wife’s people were total Marxists. Communist Chacko didn’t mind. “You know the best part of being a Marxist? You don’t have to go to church.” For one who never went to church, the man liked to preach.

Communist Chacko led us out the back door, bypassing a shed that hummed with machinery. At the foot of a steep metal staircase, he kicked up his mundu and squinted at the summit. “Come. The birds are waiting.”

What the hell kind of code was he speaking? Were “the birds” his associates awaiting us in that tarp-lined chamber on the roof? I was the last to clang up the wobbly rungs and emerge into a small space that contained Communist Chacko, Jayan, Raghu, and seven wire cages of fowl.