by Tania James
T. S. Mahadevan was sixteen years old when he and his father first walked Kannan through the gates of the Sanctuary, after the elephant had been cast off by the temple that had housed him for twenty years. To Appachen, the Sanctuary was hardly an improvement, with its camera-crazy tourists and elephant-shaped trash cans and so-called pappans. Few had learned the trade from their fathers. Most hopped from one job to the next as easily as hopping a bus. All they saw in a grown elephant was its awful strength, enough to split a man in half were he too slow to strike the first blow.
Appachen had long stopped using the pronged ankush on Kannan. They spoke their own private language: a mere word and Kannan would knee him onto his back. One afternoon, they were walking along a highway when Appachen was dizzied by heat and fainted. He later awoke to the living hull of Kannan’s chest, contracting and expanding. Kannan had been standing over him to guard against passing cars, a view Appachen would remember forever, as he lay enchanted by the rhythm of that huge, flexing heart.
Stories like these led the pappans to believe that Appachen had something divine about him, some extraordinary talent derived by dark art. Some said he had once stumbled across the fabled elephant graveyard, the field of tusks and skulls no man had seen, and there obtained the gift of elephant insight. Some said he had been an elephant in some long-ago life. Young Mahadevan knew his father to be a vivid storyteller and the likely source of these theories.
But there was no contesting the depth of Appachen’s knowledge, which he put to good use in the anakoodu. In those days, half the babies lived briefly, casualties assigned to grief.
It was Appachen’s concoction of baby formula, thickened with ragi and jaggery, that roused most of the calves from near dead, though nothing could be done for the babies that had already begun to recede, limply eating and drinking while the light leaked from their eyes.
The newest calf had come to the Sanctuary with that same draining gaze. The Forest Department had found it on a mountainside, starving beside the dead bulk of its mother. Only her tail had been cut, to be sold as a talisman.
For two weeks, day and night, Old Man watched the calf. It ate little. It was always grasping for Old Man’s arm. If Old Man were to step away and trade talk with the field director, the calf would climb up the bamboo slats and cry until Old Man clucked softly, What is it, child?
These days, the calf made not a sound, as if its previous plaintive self were buried somewhere inside this silent creature. How could one so small have the stillness of an older elephant? And why did it cower from the smell of pineapple?
Appachen could not be consulted, having died ten years before, a few months after Kannan. Cardiac arrest, the doctor had called it, but Old Man knew the truth. Appachen had spent most of his life as Kannan’s pappan, so many years it was no longer clear who was leading whom.
The Filmmaker
Ravi handled the reporters like a pro. Hands in pockets, he fended off praise with an enigmatic smile, ducking further questions. The bystanders practically cheered as he cut to the van, where he ceded shotgun to Bobin in an act of magnanimity.
Here the pleasantries ended.
“What were you thinking?” Ravi said, turning on Teddy. “You make your shot and get out. You don’t wait around and get the elephant’s autograph.”
Teddy offered a blithe apology, still riding high from the shoot. “It was worth it, though, you’ll see.”
“And if she had crushed you, still it would be worth it?”
“You know she wasn’t going to crush me. She wouldn’t leave her calf a second time.”
“I know elephants. It’s you people I don’t know, and yet you are my responsibility. So next time I say run, you run.”
Teddy looked to me for backup. I took some satisfaction in saying, “Ravi’s right,” to which Teddy gave a petulant snort—you always take his side.
I was used to playing referee. Teddy and Ravi were prone to bickering, ever since their first and only interview session. The conversation quickly had turned combative, so much so it had pained me to type the transcript:
TEDDY: We’ve been discussing human-elephant conflict, but I’m wondering about the bigger picture. What about, for example, the industrial projects—the mines, the plantations—aren’t these mostly responsible for displacing elephant populations?
RAVI VARMA: Of course.
TEDDY: And many of these projects are permitted by the Forest Department, with whom you work closely.
RAVI VARMA: Yes.
TEDDY: That seems like a contradiction.
RAVI VARMA: Life abounds with contradiction.
TEDDY: It doesn’t bother you?
RAVI VARMA: Many things bother me. Like sayips who come to India and ask questions to which they have already decided an answer. That is not an interview. That is a cross-examination.
In this instance, Ravi extended a partial olive branch: “The material was good, then?”
“Are you kidding?” Teddy leaned in. I got a noseful of coconut oil; was Teddy worried about hair loss? “I was so close, I could hear her breathing.”
As the play-by-play went on, I closed my eyes, no match for the hunger headache drilling my forehead from within. My mouth was a sand trap, my tongue coated in the orange slime of my last Tic Tac.
Ravi and Teddy, meanwhile, had forgotten their beef and were now discussing the reporters and cameras and bystanders, the public side of Ravi’s work. “More than my words,” he said, “they are looking to see how I speak, how I hold myself. People do not have such a high opinion of vet doctors. They think we treat cows and buffalos only. My own brothers used to call me cow doctor—” Glancing at me, he stopped and said with typical Varmese bluntness, “I think you are bored.”
“No, just a little weak. I haven’t eaten yet.”
“Then we will stop and take some snacks.”
Over Teddy’s protests, we pulled up to a precariously slanted stall. Ravi got out and returned in moments with a paper bag blotchy with grease.
“These unni appams are famous,” he said, pointing the open bag at me. A sweet scent wafted up from the unni appams, heaped like a clutch of warm eggs. Ravi popped one whole in his mouth.
Teddy demurred, retracting into his vest like a turtle. An elephant he could handle, but Teddy lived in fear of food poisoning, always asking for bottled water over boiled, squirting his palms with an antibacterial gel that reeked of first-world caution.
“Not a good idea,” Teddy advised me. “Your IBS?”
“IBS?” Ravi frowned, through chews.
Before Teddy could elaborate on my bowels, I reached into the paper bag.
“I’m not trying to be pushy,” Teddy said.
“I know. It just comes naturally.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Ravi’s smirk.
So did Teddy. “Have it your way,” he said and got out of the car, taking the camera with him. Bobin strode in another direction, without explanation, which meant he was off to take a semipublic leak.
The unni appam was a spongy parcel of warmth, grease, and banana-flavored sweetness, the color of maple syrup. Ravi looked especially pleased when I reached into the bag for another and matched his grease-lacquered grin.
I waited for Ravi to slip me some weirdly intimate aside. It happened from time to time, when Teddy was out of earshot. You look like the girl from Dr. Zhivago … I like that funny tooth you have … Do you have freckles all over? Once he asked me: “Why do you always wear that windbag?”
“My Windbreaker?” I said. “It has lots of pockets.”
“It hides everything.”
“That’s kind of the point.” I could feel myself blush. “I’d rather not draw attention to myself out here.”
“Too late for that.”
At the time, the banter seemed harmless, maybe even necessary to our dynamic. I conducted all our interviews, drew stories from him that he rarely shared. “You have a way of talking,” he told me once, “that makes me forget th
e camera is there.” I thought I could preserve the intimacy he felt around me, keep him loose and trusting, but just when I’d fool myself into thinking I had the upper hand, he’d turn on me with that cutting cobra gaze, and my resolve would go woozy. I’d have to remind myself that we had three weeks left at the Rescue Center; there was no time for crushes, no room for any emotion other than pinpoint focus on the task at hand.
A focus that was hard to maintain when he was leaning against the van, scrutinizing me. I expected him to volley a comment about “American girls” or my funny tooth.
“You and him,” Ravi said, glancing at Teddy. “You are the same age?”
“Yeah, why?”
“He treats you like a child. And you let him.”
I flinched. “Childlike” was not how I would’ve described myself. At twenty, I’d driven from Albuquerque to Asheville with only my dad’s German shepherd by my side. I resisted lengthy melodramatic relationships. My longest had lasted four months; I squashed it after Gus said that a woman driving alone, cross-country, was basically asking for it. The memory made me bristle all over again.
“What is he doing?” Ravi asked.
“Filming,” I said sharply. In the distance, Teddy was aiming his camera at a sign that said LIFE HAS NO SPARE. “He’s just protective. You don’t know him.”
“I know you. I know you have your own mind.” Ravi balled up the paper bag as Bobin approached. “Does he?”
Ravi opened the passenger door, allowing me to climb inside. The whole way home, I kept stealing glances in the rearview. I’d spent dozens of hours interviewing him, uprooting his past, editing his answers, studying every blink and pause and grimace. And yet there remained a version of Ravi I hadn’t seen until now, the guy who had all along been studying me.
Teddy and I had never been romantic, aside from one recent and regrettable fling. Ours was a loyalty born of classes and collaboration and NoDoz and nerves, and his brush with expulsion.
We had met in Intro to Film. On our first assignment, we were sent out into the wilds of Boston with only a tripod, a light meter, and a hand-crank Bolex camera. Each of us was to shoot a light journal, to capture light and shadow on black-and-white sixteen-millimeter film. It was exhilarating—the feel of the Bolex rumbling between my hands, its spring-wound arm tracing circles in the air.
I came to class burning with anticipation, sure that I’d netted a string of beautiful shots from the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Plaza. But as we screened our dailies, it was Teddy who stole the show with his time-lapsed shots of shadows fading, darkening, interlacing, pouring like ink across stone, a calligraphic symphony of lines until the film fluttered to white, leaving the whole class enchanted. All this he’d filmed in the courtyard of his dorm.
As the years went by, Teddy and I fell into step, collaborating on every film down to his junior project, for which I served as DP. It began with an exterior shoot on a day so snowy and cold the Aaton camera had to be hugged in blankets every few takes, to keep it from stuttering to a stop. A week later, we screened the dailies to find a thick river of white coursing down the left side of the film. A whole day ruined. I’d been the one to seal and unseal the camera mag, to off-load the film into its can, a process that required nimble hands inside a lightproof bag. Apparently mine hadn’t been nimble enough. I was mortified, excuseless, solely responsible.
“So,” Teddy had said, rewinding the film, “reshoot on Thursday?”
I couldn’t believe he would trust me to shoot again. I’d expected him to demote me to gaffer’s assistant, angling a bounce board by the actors’ faces.
Teddy shrugged it off. “So you shit the bed. Nothing to freak out about.”
Both literally and figuratively, that seemed the perfect reason to freak out.
But with a calm that somehow fed off my frenzy, Teddy insisted that we’d fix it. And what he said next is embedded in my memory, proof that we were once good to each other. “I’d rather get it wrong with you than get it right with anyone else.”
We rolled up to the rusty green gates of the Rescue Center, greeted by a sign: THANKS FOR NOT INSISTING TO SEE THE ANIMALS. An odd marker when there seemed no animals to see, only a storybook hamlet of dark green huts nestled within the leaves, connected by a shaded walkway where one could pause and study the posters of animals on the walls.
The sky was overcast, diffusing a clean cold light through a woolly skein of cloud. I wanted to take advantage of the light and shoot Ravi on his rounds with the animals—the elephant calves, the goat, the langurs who streaked through the air on long, windmilling limbs. But Teddy argued that we’d shot it all before, and what was another langur sequence compared with the final shot he had gotten from the calf reunion? “I think we can even leave it as is,” he said. “One long shot, like in that Obenhaus film about the jewelry factory.”
He was always referring to That Obenhaus Film About the Jewelry Factory. I’d never seen it but felt like I had, what with all the times he had described the opening—a man punching a time clock, a shot that Obenhaus held for a full minute until the clock hands met, which Teddy called brilliant in its illustration of work and its weight on the passage of time.
“Keep in mind,” I said, “we want actual human beings to see this thing.”
Teddy followed me into my room. He lived next door to me at the Rescue Center, each “guest suite” appointed with a chair, a desk, and a twin bed on which Teddy could only fit himself diagonally. He set the camera on my desk. “Just watch the dailies tonight.”
“Why—where’ll you be?”
He unscrewed the filter between careful fingers. “Sanjay’s wedding, I told you. You can still be my date.”
“Pass.”
“Come on, he’s not that bad.”
Sanjay was Teddy’s former roommate, a soft-spoken guy who had renounced alcohol for religious reasons and embraced weed with equal fervor. In stoner mode, he was always making the sort of prickly asides (Why don’t you guys make out already?… Get a room!) that put his own loneliness on display.
I set a pot of water on my hot plate. “I’d rather stick around here,” I said. “In case something happens.”
“In case what happens?” He slipped the filter into its pouch, nestled the lens inside the camera bag. “We don’t need more elephant baths and feedings. It’s the human stories that’ll read on film.”
“Well, and I also need a break from humans.”
Teddy looked at me. “Which ones?”
I took my time breaking a cake of ramen, neatly, delicately, into the water.
Two weeks before, Teddy and I had been editing side by side, late into the night, when he leaned over and kissed me. I’d been saying something about the aspect ratio when the kiss cut me off midword, and I remember thinking, as it was happening, that contrary to every rom-com movie I’d ever seen, spontaneity was a poisoned dart to romance; in reality, the kissee needed warning, a questioning look or a leaning in. How weird to be friends for five years and then, in the space of a second, conjoined at the face.
But then the weirdness gave way to an inviting familiarity. He smelled like summer, like sunblock, scents from home. It was comforting more than thrilling, which was what caused me to pull away. Teddy seemed hurt when I asked him to go, but the next day, he returned with a sheepish apology. He understood that this was the wrong place to start something between us, that it was important to maintain an air of professionalism at the Rescue Center. “But we should, you know, revisit this,” he said, looking only at his hands. “When we get back home.”
I told him there was no need for apology, it was no big deal, hoping all the no’s would add up to a subliminal never. Whatever comfort I’d felt in that moment of indiscretion had shriveled to a sickening knot; I’d led him down the garden path, as my mother would’ve put it.
Now, as I forked the wormy noodles apart, I could feel Teddy looking at me with dread, as if he sensed I was about to burn the garden to the ground.
But I couldn’t do it. Not then and there. Not when he was my only friend.
Instead I said I wanted to stay behind and log tapes. “See if there’s an Oppenheimer in there.”
“Obenhaus,” he said, reluctantly releasing me from his gaze.
After Teddy left, I planted myself behind my laptop, plugged in the camera, and watched the rescue. The calf was on the ground, waiting to be released from the harness. Teddy zoomed in on the needy eye, the pupil like a fly trapped in sap. That close, I found the eye haunting for reasons unclear: Because I saw something familiar inside, a consciousness I could recognize? Or because I couldn’t?
For my fifteenth birthday, my father had bought me a parakeet. I loved Daisy, how her feathers gave off a powdery smell, how her feet embraced my finger with a lightness I took for trust, the shiny droplet of her eye. Sometimes I worried that Daisy was depressed, to which my father suggested I put Prozac in her feed, a joke that annoyed me. Why couldn’t Daisy be depressed? Why couldn’t she feel a host of emotions, some of them beyond our explanation? She could fly, so if her body were capable of acts beyond human limitation, couldn’t her mind be capable of emotions beyond our own, like Wing Boredom or Flock Joy or Plummet Buzz, things we couldn’t feel and, therefore, could never understand?
“Maybe you’re the one who needs medication,” my father said.
During preproduction, I had envisioned a film that would encompass my youthful questions, that would exhume the traumas sealed deep inside animal minds. Day by day, the film I’d imagined seemed to inch a bit farther from the footage we had, until now.
Teddy had been right. The shot would hold its weight on-screen, all sixty-two pulsing seconds, the heart of our film. During the moment of mother-calf reunion, Teddy hadn’t fiddled with the zoom, had let the action unfold, giving wide berth to those twining trunks, whose ministrations seemed to suggest comfort and tenderness and yet seemed somehow private, primal, on a plane of communication we could glimpse only indirectly.
