The Tusk That Did the Damage (7 page)

There were two to each cage, husband and wife, most of them feathered in red, yellow, and green. Communist Chacko puckered his lips at a nearby parrot, who clung to the wire with dainty taloned feet. He raised a fingertip to its beak; the parrot bit gently and released. “She’s a sweet one,” said Communist Chacko. “The others will snip your switch off.”

“What are they for?” Raghu whispered to me.

“Breeding and selling,” said Communist Chacko. “You should see the cockatoos mate, it’s quite charming.”

I would have sooner watched a dog make turds, but in the spirit of pleasing our host, I peered into a cage of small parakeets. Four whites and two grays flicked their necks this way and that.

“I had a macaw,” Communist Chacko said wistfully. “He flew off. Can you imagine—watching one whole lakh dissolve into blue sky?”

“Maybe not a whole lakh,” said my brother. “But I know what it is to lose hard-earned money.”

Communist Chacko grinned at one of the switch-snippers. “You had a falling-out with Babu.”

“He takes too great a cut and for what? For his car? We have a mini-lorry.”

“Yes, I saw. Not the most inconspicuous vehicle.” The fat man gazed into another cage, where a diseased-looking parakeet perched alone, ragged and balding in patches, eyes like milky bulging marbles. It held itself perfectly still, wings folded tight around a tortured heart.

“He is inconsistent,” my brother went on. “Haggling like a fishmonger, wasting my time. And who is he to judge the grade? The man has cataracts for god’s sake.”

Communist Chacko sighed as if all this backbiting were undignified. His breath ruffled the blind bird’s breast.

“Will it die?” I asked, forgetting my brother’s no-talk policy. He gave me a look that said he would bury me in my books.

“Fairly soon I would think,” said Communist Chacko. “Do you like animals?”

“None I would like to see mating.”

Communist Chacko laughed. “I am not a sentimental person, you know. If you told me tomorrow their feathers were precious in China, I would be out here plucking the lovelies myself.”
Communist Chacko stepped back from the cages and resumed his preacher voice: “And God said unto Man, Be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Raghu nodded along like a born-again.

“OK, do this,” said Communist Chacko. “Deliver the tusks directly to me. I will give you two thousand more per kilo. But this is on a one-month trial basis only. Any little problem and we go back to the old way.”

After taking specific directions on protocol—where to drop off and when and to whom—we left the preacher to his fowl and emerged into the swollen heat. I trotted down the last few steps, somehow uplifted by my brother’s success and my hand in it. And perhaps I would have forgotten all about the shed had it not shrieked at me as I passed. My brother and cousin walked ahead, unhearing. The door was ajar.

How well I recall the world in that narrow room. Two long tables covered in a forest of white figurines. A troop of tiny elephants. Bangles smooth and stacked. And in the far corner a giant Nataraj with one sleek limb raised, all in ivory.

Several craftsmen sat at the tables, some carving with awls fine as a sparrow’s claw. A man ground a piece against a whetstone. A young boy went from table to table, using a careful cupped hand to sweep ivory shavings into a bag.

“We sell them to Ayurvedic doctors,” Communist Chacko said, causing my heart to jump. “Little ivory powder and coconut oil could do wonders for your dandruff.”

“I do not have dandruff.”

“Then I suppose that shit on your shoulder is snow.”

As I brushed at my shirt, I could feel his eyes on me, narrowing.

“You are a curious fellow, aren’t you?” he said.

“Sorry, sir, the door was open—”

“Oh, I don’t care. I have a license. Got it ten years before the ban, luckily.”

“So the Forest Department looks the other way?”

“Depends on who is doing the looking.” He pointed to a pair of tusks on a nearby table. “Those are for P. K. Kurian, the divisional range officer before that lardy little Muslim took over. She’s a tough one. Have you met her?”

“No.”

Communist Chacko ushered me out of the shed, closing the door. “Count yourself lucky.”

So every other month Jayan and his fat-necked associate drove their spoils to Kottayam and I returned to my studies quite happily. I was only fifteen years old, yet I had mapped the course of my life—to do my pre-degree in Commerce and attend college and someday be chief manager of a bank, with my own glass-walled office where visitors had to wait their turn. Jayan may have been our lifeboat in those days, but I would build a great ship of myself. I would keep the sea so calm my mother would hardly feel it shift beneath her feet.

But ships take a long time to build, much longer than it takes to build a dream. In the meantime Jayan would give her no peace.

One dull gray morning, the mini-lorry came up the road and stopped before our house. My brother stepped out, followed by a woman who kept her apologetic gaze on the ground.

She had dainty toe rings on each of her dusty feet, the sort of ornament that seemed to me both ridiculous and intriguing. I tried not to look too hard at her face, at the lashes that grazed her cheeks. I tried to appear calm when Jayan introduced her as his wife. Leela. A woman he had found and then married in a Kottayam courthouse.

Oh, the fit my mother threw. How could Jayan do such a thing? Elope with some Christian no-name without even a hello-goodbye to his mother? What kind of loose shameless beef-eating she-dog would run off with a Hindu, no engagement, no dowry, no nothing? (The indecent kind, that’s what—the taking-advantage kind!) And why did Jayan think the beef-eater would never run from him?

From the look of her, Leela seemed the kind of woman who had been fed an exclusive diet of pomegranate and almonds and milk, by which I mean she was fair and softly built, her features made to fill a movie screen. “World class, mangoes like that.” Raghu sighed. I smacked his head. He smacked me back, claiming she wasn’t
his
sister.

Leela had lived her life on the coast and had never seen the forests and valleys and ghats my brother had promised her. Once she asked me: “Is it true the tribals are so dark because they are partway African?”

“Partway who?”

She toyed with the tip of her braid. “I heard the tribals married the African slaves that the Britishers brought with them. That is why the tribals are so dark. Because of the Africans.” Hesitantly she added, “There are no tribals in my village.”

I stared at her, much conflicted with thoughts.
You are simple
and silly. You are the most beautiful thing I have seen. You are married to my brother. Why? My brother has the brain of a wall lizard. I am sharp in school. I am sure to make something of myself, sure as calves become cows. But will Mother let me find a Leela of my own? No. Because every family only allows itself one mistake. You are that beautiful mistake. And now I will marry some cross-eyed callus-hoofed heifer with whom my stars align.

“Not because of the Africans,” she concluded, a blush warming her cheeks.

All the facts we knew of Leela could have fit on the side of a toothpaste box. Her people hailed from some flyspeck village she neglected to name. She had no schooling or training. Her father was a bricklayer. How she and Jayan had met was a mystery my mother titled Their Filthy Beginnings and refused to read a single page.

If the world according to my mother was out of joint, the crop showed no sign of it. The stalks were growing strong, nodding strands of rice fine as seed pearls. Leela survived my mother’s silence behind a wall of politeness, swift to melt out of sight if my mother was in a mood. No sooner had my mother finished her morning tea than Leela whisked the cup away to rinse it. She took up the washing and ironing and sweeping while my mother pointed out every stain and crinkle and crumb, as if she had personally invented the art of housewifery.

All this abuse Leela bore with a steady temper. Jayan’s puppy love seemed sustenance enough. She basked in his stinky presence whenever he returned from the fields, and he was no less infatuated, his hand always grasping her waist, her braid, her
bottom, handful upon handful and never enough. He only took such liberties at what he presumed were private moments, but in a three-room house few moments are private.

Sometimes I heard the tight murmur of an argument through the walls, likely to do with his continued visits to the forest. The wild was always reaching for Jayan, noisy and glowing with adventure. No matter how they fought, she always stood by the door in the sullen dawn and watched him leave for the fields.

“I worry about him,” she said to me once, after Jayan had gone away.

Get used to it,
I thought.

“He says there is no reason to worry. What’s so wrong with cutting a tree, he says. But there must be something wrong if there are laws against it.”

“What tree?” I asked.

“Sandalwood. His side business. Isn’t it?”

I stared directly into those simple eyes. My silence made the answer plain, did it not? Yet I could not betray my brother completely; I could give no further answer than this: “Ask him.”

She hadn’t the chance to take my advice, for the day Jayan returned from his final trip, he was all
Later later not now.
The day passed without the mini-lorry coming up the road, and by noon the next day my brother was in a black mood. I knew what had him pacing—there was ivory in the shed, the marrow drying, the weight lightening, the price lessening with every passing gram.

By dusk my brother secured a car for the following morning and vowed never to work with that irresponsible bastard ever again. Little did he know the bastard had already taken the same vows.

For that very night the Karnataka police punched at our door and clomped through our sitting room and took my brother from his bed before he had a shirt on his back. They yapped a mix of Kannada and Malayalam, something about crossing state lines with weapons. They retrieved the ivory from the shed, piece after piece wrapped in newspaper and nested like eggs in the cauldron never to hatch a penny. By the time Leela went running out into the yard with a blue mundu, the policemen were leading my brother to the jeep.

See the spectacle of us standing outside our house in the night. Leela holding a blue mundu. My mother shouting at the police. Me at fifteen, watching my brother in nothing but his chaddi between two brutes who have not the decency to let him put on a shirt.

It is difficult to place faith in a man who tells you during a ten-minute phone call from prison not to worry. But Jayan convinced us that Communist Chacko would post bail as he had done twice before. “Twice? What twice?” demanded Leela. My brother said he had no time to explain. He promised there would be no trial.

But Communist Chacko failed to provide bail on account of my brother’s previous debts, which I suspected were to do with those previous bonds. And so the trial would go on. Old fat-neck would play witness for the prosecution.

Their relations had curdled of late, ever since the fat-neck had demanded his turn at the gun and the doubled wage that went with it. My brother felt he could not be trusted, neither with his aim nor with the splitting of the money, another task that fell to
the gunman. So Jayan refused him, and the traitor went straight to the police to feed them a fable about his U-turn of heart and his fresh respect for the law. Judge and jury would fall upon the fairy tale like crows on a carcass.

Whereas once my brother had won praise for being a perfect shot, now he was cast out by public opinion. Rumors ran loose that he had made big money off elephant game—why else had the Karnataka police crossed their border to collect him? Most everyone, Christian and Muslim and Hindu alike, believed killing elephants for money was a sinful pursuit, and worse that he should profit from it, hoarding untold sums, when everyone else accepted whatever skinny salary this life afforded them.

“What money!” Leela railed at me, as if I stood in for all of society. “He shot four or five elephants, that is all. He swore to me. How can they lock him away on account of four elephants?”

Okay fine, I let her believe it was four. I told myself this was not my business but theirs. Here is the truth: I would have sworn nonsense on her King James Bible if only to prevent her from leaving us, leaving me.

Most strenuously, my brother insisted that there was no need for us to come to the trial in Karnataka. Surely the jury would deem the fat-neck a faulty witness on account of his record, blotted by the petty felonies of an idiot. (Once, he attempted to burgle an office building and got himself locked in the entry.) It was too far to travel for a case that would be over in minutes. And if we were to come, who would mind the farm?

Jayan knew—how could he not, with his front-row seat—that the magistrate court would find him guilty. His was a sorry gift, the one and only he could give: an excuse not to see him with his
slim wrists in the irons, to continue our days as if nothing were different.

Four years my brother was gone from us. My mother spent most of this time confined to the house, held hostage by the belief that gawkers and gossips were waiting outside our door, their whispers burrowing through the walls. A bad husband was a misfortune. A bad son was her fault, and she felt she deserved every word said against her.

Regarding gossips, Leela said there was no use listening to every twit with a mouth. She knotted a cloth around her head, picked up a sickle, and labored in the fields alongside the adiya women who eyed the way she whacked at the stalks, sweating, cursing, cutting nothing. Eventually they showed her how to sharpen the blade against bamboo, then shear. She found the money to buy chickens and a cow named White Girl, earning us income from the eggs and milk. The chicks she guarded as fiercely as if she had laid them herself, but the predators were many. One day a vulture whisked a chick in its claws but lost its grip upon takeoff. Belly up, the chick lay cheeping in the dirt, a glistening string of its innards plucked out. Finished, I thought, and all the eggs it would have laid for us.