Three Ways to Disappear

by Katy Yocom

  “I don’t give a fuck about the legalities. You will not hurt my sister again. Let this idea drop, or trust me, you’re going to wish you had.”

  The men stared each other down, and then Tarun looked up and his gaze landed directly on Sarah in the shadows. “Ah,” he said, and paced toward her as if Sanjay had suddenly ceased to exist. His gaze on Sarah was strange, predatory; he stared through her like a tiger about to strike. “Ms. DeVaughan,” he said.

  She stepped from the shadows, and he gave her a leisurely head-to-toe scan, calculated to intrude. “Mr. Thakur,” she said.

  “You’re looking well.” His gaze swiveled between her body and her face. You’re looking well loved.

  “Good evening.” She turned on her heel and crossed the courtyard.

  From behind her came Tarun’s voice: “Does Lakshmi know about this?”

  And Sanjay’s: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  .

  “He knows,” Sarah insisted.

  “He doesn’t know,” Sanjay argued. “He knows you’re the one, but not about the baby. How could he possibly?”

  “How did Padma?”

  He had no answer for her.

  Tarun knew. She had seen his eyes rove up and down her body as if he owned her. She had seen him see. She didn’t want to think about what he might do to Sanjay.

  The weekend came and went. Monday, at the office, frequent trips to the bathroom. William and his crew would begin dredging the Vinyal lake in three days, but they needed water now.

  “I talked to the park director,” Geeta said. “The district is pressuring him. Livestock are dying of thirst in every village, and there sit those three beautiful lakes, or what’s left of them, smack in the middle of Ranthambore.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Damn this drought.”

  .

  At 1:00 a.m., Sarah’s phone rang. She bolted up, heart pounding.

  “The park director called,” Geeta said. “It’s happening sooner than expected. First thing in the morning. We’ll come by at five to pick you up.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “Get some sleep,” Geeta said. “This is going to be a disaster.”

  .

  The moon had set. It was the darkest part of the night when Sarah heard the jeep at the gate. She made eye contact with her colleagues one by one as she slid into the back seat. Defeat on every face.

  “It sickens me to think it’s come to this,” Geeta said.

  “Can’t be helped,” William said.

  “It could have been helped if the government had done what they should have done when they established the park and ensured all the surrounding villages had reliable water. It’s a shit job they’ve done. A shit job.”

  The world was still black and starry when Hari pulled the jeep to a stop before the park gates. The village men had not yet arrived. A forest guard raised the gate, its metallic yawp harsh in the waiting dark. Four police officers watched them pass. Hari pulled to the shoulder and killed the engine.

  A few minutes later, the film crew arrived. They exchanged tense nods. No one spoke.

  The sky was beginning to gray as the first villagers turned off the main road. Sarah counted two hundred head of livestock before losing track. The column flowed on and on, silent men surrounded by bleating goats, lowing cattle, water buffalo. Emaciated, every one of them, and sunken-eyed from dehydration. Thirty minutes passed. A thousand, maybe two thousand, and the end of the column nowhere in sight. The park director had told Geeta he expected ten thousand head of livestock before it was over. Sarah began taking pictures despite the low light. She wanted a record of this day.

  The guards raised the creaking gate again, and the first lot flowed through. Twenty-five men, and something like a hundred head of livestock. Then six forest guards blocked the entrance, and the gate clanged down. A hundred head at a time, and ten thousand animals to water. It seemed impossible.

  The sun broke in a rosy blaze, striping the world with long, thin shadows. The guards let in a new group of men and animals every ten minutes, but the numbers waiting only swelled. Sarah couldn’t see the back of the crowd.

  The animals were the first to grow restless. Then the men.

  There was no signal, no shout, but an uprush of tension set the animals bawling. Men pushed past the guards. The police drew their guns, pointed at the sky, fired. A cadre of men wrested the gate from its hinges and threw it to the ground, and herders and livestock poured through the gap.

  The jeep sat directly in their path. Sarah clicked off shots nonstop.

  Without a word, Hari pulled onto the track, ahead of the flood, while the film crew’s jeeps rolled alongside the mob, recording. A sudden tunk: rock on metal. Tunk. Tunk. A young village man scooped stones from the ground and hurled them at the film crew, his face contorted in anger. The film crew jeeps picked up speed, but the sound rang out again from a different direction. Tunk, tunktunktunk. Like hail, pelting, and suddenly Sarah realized there must be twenty-five men stoning the film crew. The jeeps roared away down a side track.

  William and Sarah exchanged a glance. She lowered her camera and capped her lens. Hari moved to follow the film crew, but Geeta said, “No. We’ll stay ahead of the herdsmen and see what happens.”

  “Are you mad?” William asked.

  “They’re not stoning us. Anyway, it’s a bit of a moot point. There’s no getting back through the gate now.”

  Hari drove on as instructed, the set of his back radiating disapproval.

  The livestock surged down the road, enveloped in a dust cloud of their own making. Chital deer bounded away, tails high. The herders’ faces relaxed into blankness, and they ambled on with their animals as if this march into the park were an ordinary event. Langur monkeys watched from the trees. One kilometer. Two. A disaster unfolding at walking speed.

  The forward edge of the throng crested a hill. Rajbagh Lake lay below, shrunken and weed-choked, the summer palace stranded high above the diminished shore. Still, the animals smelled water. At the front of the pack, a goat began to trot. A white cow with a high hump broke into a rickety run, and the animals behind her followed. “There they go,” Geeta murmured as Hari drove to the far side of the lake and stopped at a vantage point where they had sometimes watched Machli and her cubs.

  The animals reached shore at a dead run. Momentum carried the leaders into the lake and pushed them into deeper water as the herd behind them kept coming. A white cow fell, floundered, and sank out of sight. She did not reappear.

  Sarah’s hands flew to her mouth. She should have been taking pictures, but instead she wanted to look away, to protect her baby from this sadness. Was that what motherhood would do to her? Make her no longer willing to bear witness?

  “Sickening, isn’t it,” Geeta said. “But some of these animals were going to die anyway.” She said it not to dismiss the loss, Sarah thought, but as an offering, the only words she could think of that might console them all.

  “Look,” Sanjay said, pointing. “Machli.”

  It took Sarah a minute to locate her with her binoculars. From a thicket of bushes, the tigress looked down on the lake. Sarah couldn’t imagine how strange this day must seem to her. Machli wouldn’t recognize the creatures that had overrun her territory. They were not the animals of the forest; they were heavy and stupid and lost. Their smell was thirst and fear mixed with the scum of the lake. Individually, they would make for easy prey, but Machli couldn’t possibly understand herds so large. They didn’t belong in her world.

  The tigress stood alert. Her cubs pressed against her. But she rounded on them and snarled, and when they cowered behind her, she lunged, snapping and hissing till she chased them away.

  .

  Not many animals drowned, really. A dozen, two dozen. Most kept to the shallow water, drank their fill, and were herded away.<
br />
  The throng of men and animals filled the lakeshore and kept advancing till they surrounded the jeep, making Sarah feel both claustrophobic and exposed. Geeta stood on the seat and scanned the scene, muttering about the film crew. “Where are they? This needs to be documented.”

  In one motion Sarah took up her camera, framed a shot, and pressed the shutter as Sanjay called, “Sarah, no!”

  Their eyes met, and she realized her mistake. She lowered the camera to her chest, hoping no one had seen, but a teenaged boy shouted, “No pictures!” and every herder in sight turned to stare. The boy stormed up to the jeep and demanded, “Give me the camera! Are you trying to get us all arrested?”

  William planted himself in front of Sarah, but the herder swung his stick and cracked it into William’s head, and William jerked back, and the boy climbed over him. Sarah ripped the memory card from her camera and thrust it at him, shouting, “Here! Take it!”

  The herder snatched the card, hurled it to the ground, and reached for Sarah’s throat with both hands. Not for her throat: for the camera strap. He jerked it, pulling Sarah half out of the jeep over William’s lap. The sound of glass shattering. A sharp pain flashed in the back of her neck, and her lungs went still for a sickening few seconds, the breath knocked out of her by William’s knee. When she could breathe again, her camera lay wrecked on the ground. The boy was gone.

  She pushed herself off William’s legs and dropped back into her seat, one hand tracing the raw stripe where the camera strap had scraped nearly the whole circumference of her neck, one hand on her belly, trying to judge the damage. She felt winded but nothing worse. Sanjay caught her eye, but she shook off his concern and turned to William.

  At the sight of his face, she gasped. Blood dripped from his temple, a lurid crimson. A gash ran from his scalp to his cheekbone, missing his eye by a centimeter. “I’m all right,” he said, unconvincingly.

  Geeta handed him a clean white cloth. “Just blood,” she said, her eyes locked on William’s. “Ears ringing? Tell me what you see, have you got double vision?”

  He shook his head, grimacing. “This old loaf’s too hard to crack.”

  “Sarah, you’re all right?” she asked.

  Sarah nodded.

  “I want us far from here, Hari,” Geeta said. “But I still want to see the lake.”

  “We shouldn’t be here at all,” Hari said, but he steered the jeep farther into the park, tapping the horn as animals and men milled around them.

  .

  William’s face did not stop bleeding. Flies buzzed around the cut. The air smelled of barnyard—dust, sweat, manure, the bitter odor of horns and hooves. Tufts of hair wafted through the air and stuck to Sarah’s skin. A kingfisher flitted past, an iridescent flash of beauty on this ugly day.

  Hour by hour, the lake changed. Thousands of cloven hooves punched deep holes into the sucking muck of the shoreline. Egrets and ibises settled onto the backs of wading cattle. The water level dropped as if someone had opened a drain at the bottom of the lake. Without her camera, Sarah felt useless, craven. Not a witness: a voyeur.

  Toward noon, the atmosphere turned oddly ordinary. Livestock wandered past the jeep. Men stood patiently beneath the sun, close enough that Sarah could see sweat beading on their upper lips. No one bothered them again. Sarah thought they were lucky in that regard—lucky as opposed to smart or strategic. Hari was right: It was madness, being there without even a forest guard for protection. She glanced at William and followed his gaze out over the scene. All these people, all these cattle and buffalo and goats. The havoc they were wreaking on this delicate ecosystem. All of it necessary if the animals—and the villagers who depended on them—were to survive.

  “The trenches are a muddy place,” she said.

  They sat beneath the noonday sun, its faint heat providing a strange bit of comfort.

  A tall, bone-thin man approached the jeep, the lower half of his face covered with a green bandanna. A bullock was down, he said, crowded over the edge of a ravine. It was lying with its head downhill, unable to get its legs underneath it. They needed a rope.

  Sanjay climbed out of the jeep, swung open the tailgate, and pulled out a coil of sturdy line. He hoisted it over one shoulder, seeming relieved to have something to do.

  “I’ll go with you,” Sarah said.

  “You will not,” Geeta said. “I forbid it.”

  Sanjay turned to her. “Stay here where it’s safe.”

  “Where it’s safe?” she said. “I love you. I am not letting you walk into this chaos by yourself.”

  Geeta reached for the radio and thrust it into Sarah’s hands. “Whatever you do, do not get separated.”

  Sanjay held out his hand and helped Sarah to the ground. Their eyes met. They turned to follow the man through the throng of cattle. Ranthambore was unrecognizable, as if the wind had lifted a bustling marketplace and set it down in the middle of the park. They were passing by Vinyal men, Sarah noticed. Om stood nearby on one foot, leaning listlessly against Padma’s pregnant white cow.

  They crested a rise. Off to the left, a cluster of men stood near a narrow wash, looking as if they had important business. Sarah nodded toward them. “This must be our bullock.”

  The animal lay quietly on his side in the ravine, head resting below his legs. His tongue protruded. He was not far from death.

  They needed to roll him, get his legs below his head. The owner crouched, murmuring into the animal’s ear, while the men worked the rope around his legs. Sarah moved to help with the rope, but her eyes caught Sanjay’s, and she stepped back. She didn’t need to chance a blow from flailing hooves.

  Eight men got into position on the far side of the wash and began to pull. The bullock’s legs rose into the air. His eyes widened as he flipped onto his back and then rolled fully over. He rose to his feet and began to scramble up the incline, but the rope tripped him, and he fell to his knees, thoroughly hobbled. Now they were in dangerous territory. If they couldn’t free him, they would have to leave him there to die.

  The animal lay still as two men released his forelegs. Sarah held her breath as Sanjay reached for the loop of rope around his back leg and tugged.

  When the rope came free, the bullock kicked out. A flash of movement, and Sanjay was flying.

  She ran to him in the wash. He lay limp on his back, eyes closed. For a second she thought he was dead. Then his eyes flickered, and he began to turn his head but stopped short and cried out in pain.

  Two men reached for him. “Don’t move him,” Sarah said.

  “I think it’s my collarbone,” he said. “Maybe a rib.” He reached for her with his good hand, and she caught it and held it, but in a practical way, as Geeta or William might have done. She put her ear to his chest, and he groaned. She closed her eyes, listening for a punctured lung, but it was a useless effort. She was no medic.

  She lifted her head. “I’m going to get help. Don’t try to move. We’ll get some forest guards and get you out of here.”

  She climbed out of the wash and raised park headquarters on the radio, but the voice on the other end told her there was nothing they could do. All the forest guards were arrayed between the park entrance and Rajbagh Lake, “handling crowd control.”

  She would have laughed at the absurdity if she weren’t so scared. “We need to get him to a doctor. Something’s broken.”

  Silence. She counted off two minutes. Then the voice again. “We’ll send someone, but it will take time.”

  She glanced back at Sanjay. It could be hours before help arrived. She’d go back to the jeep instead, to Hari and Geeta and William. They could splint Sanjay’s collarbone and drive him out of the park.

  She whispered a quick explanation to Sanjay and took off running through the crowd, though it was more of a duck and shuffle, like trying to run down a crowded Delhi sidewalk. She kept her eyes tra
ined on the ground. A rocky outcropping forced her to the right, then farther right. When she looked up, she found she was at the top of the rise, alone in a declivity between two low cliffs.

  Below her, a curtain of dust hung in the amber air. The lake was gone, sucked down to a pocked expanse of soupy mud, sodden with trampled lake grass. Crocodiles dispatched drowned animals’ corpses. A serpent eagle dropped from the sky to the lake bed and lifted off, a fish writhing in its talons.

  Someone stepped in front of her, blocked her way. She looked up into his face.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t. Please.”

  .

  It happens the way it happens in nightmares. She can’t get away.

  His hands feel like flame on the raw skin at her throat.

  When her vision goes, the world becomes a pounding, pulsing red. The sound of time beats, slowing, in her ears.

  A blue-black wave builds on the horizon and rushes at her from afar. Hissing, it closes over her and tumbles her down into the deep and roaring dark.

  Time slows.

  The man on top of her shrieks and leaps and vanishes.

  A wild face appears above her. Gold eyes stare down into her own.

  Machli dips her head and licks Sarah’s forehead with a sandpapery tongue. Looks into her face and chuffs, Hello, you.

  Quinn

  What? is the first question, the one said in a gasp as the hands fly to the mouth. It’s the panicked, shocked question, the one that means No. The one that makes you hear the news a second time.

  And then, When? The helpless, urgent question. The one that means I didn’t feel it. How could I not have felt it? It would have been morning in the States when it happened. Quinn and her family have lived out an entire ordinary day and gone to bed, oblivious.

  And then, How? But she can hardly follow Geeta’s reply.

  It’s past the hour for phone calls, and Quinn is sitting on the edge of the bed in her nightgown, staring into blackness in the corner of the room. Pete has wrapped his arms around her in an embrace made awkward by the phone pressed to her ear.