by Tania James
I started logging the tape, marking time codes, jotting impressions. The camera followed Ravi through the crowds, into the van, pulled in on his hands. There was something I hadn’t noticed at the shoot, amid the commotion and confusion—how calm he was throughout. The showdown could’ve been set to Morricone, with Ravi as Eastwood moving through the green, arms around the gun. Wolfish, deliberate. I felt myself ambushed by awe.
So when Ravi knocked on my door, around nine, I was slightly starstruck. There he stood, the hero at rest.
“You missed dinner,” he said.
“Teddy went to a wedding. I just thought I’d get a head start on today’s stuff.”
“He left?” Ravi asked, almost hopefully.
“Yeah, he gets back day after tomorrow.”
“Then let me take you to dinner.”
“Oh.” The offer seemed fraught. “Well, I already had noodle soup …”
Ravi peered over my shoulder.
“Is that Dev?” On my laptop, an elephant calf filled the screen. Dev was easy to spot with his signature mini-mohawk. “You have more footage of him? Can I see?”
It seemed an innocent request at the time, though, I can admit to myself now, I didn’t want it to be.
I stepped aside, and easy as that, Ravi walked into my life.
Ravi had rescued Dev from a cave where a female elephant had gotten herself stuck between boulders. By the time the team found her, she was starving to death, Dev tiny against her ankle, sore spattered and weak. Ravi shouldered Dev like a sack of rice and carried him out. At the center, Dev was too weak to stand, so they propped him over belly slings.
Ravi explained all this from the foot of my bed. We had just watched a sequence of Dev nudging a soccer ball with the other calves, the keepers weaving among them, egging them on.
“What happened to Dev’s mother?” I asked.
“We had to leave her. Eventually she starved to death.”
“Jesus.”
He surveyed my room, his gaze remote, illegible. Maybe he was dismissing my foreign brand of sentimentality; maybe he was a little grossed out by the ganglia of ramen still in the pot. Landing on a thought, he lit up. “Dev will leave for Manaloor in two weeks, to be reintegrated into the park. It’s six hours away, but you should go. You should film it.”
I envisioned the perfect final shot: three little calves sauntering like cowboys into the sunset. “So we’d spend our last week in Manaloor?”
“Oh, you’re leaving.” He paused, barely hiding his disappointment. “Already.”
“Why don’t you come along? To Manaloor, I mean.”
“You don’t want me there.”
“Sure I do.”
“No, no, it’s the villagers. They would run me out, even though I have nothing to do with that mess …” He raked a hand through his hair, deciding whether to tell me or not. I didn’t press. I didn’t have to. He just started talking.
The villagers were upset—enraged, really—that the Forest Department had subsidized Shankar Timber Company to fell the trees on their forestland. Technically, it wasn’t the villagers’ land; all forestlands belonged to the Forest Department (as inherited from the British raj, who had previously claimed all forestlands for the queen). But the villagers of Manaloor felt they deserved some say over the lands where they’d been harvesting firewood and honey long before Queen Victoria was in diapers.
“Mostly they blame Samina Hakim. She is the Divisional Range Officer, the face of the Forest Department.” He shrugged. “Ah well. It will pass.”
I wanted to know more, but Ravi stood up. I felt a pang of dismay, thinking he was on his way out.
“If you won’t have dinner,” he said, “at least we can have a drink.”
Over coffee spiked with the dubious rum he kept locked in his desk, we talked. The liquor rushed my stomach and turned me loose; I was intoxicated by his presence, enamored with every detail of his life and eager to spill all of mine. I told him of my parents, who watched my films with anxious expressions, as if my work were one long oral exam to which they had no answer. He told me of his parents, who thought he was some kind of Indian Johnny Appleseed, planting trees for a living. Somewhere in that miasma of oversharing was the one story I still wish I hadn’t spilled, a name that Teddy would’ve hated me for spilling.
Shelly Blake.
As a senior, Teddy had made his thesis film about a sophomore named Shelly Blake. She was secretly, feverishly, in love with him, and thus willing to allow him access to anything, including her anorexia. She let him film her weigh-ins, her caffeine supplements, her homemade collage of runway models, her endless jogs. He gave her a camera with which to record “video diaries” on her own time; in one of these, she singed her arm with a lit cigarette.
Shelly attended the end-of-year screening, along with hundreds of students, teachers, people she didn’t know. There was more nervous laughter than she had probably anticipated. Afterward she congratulated Teddy, went home, and slit her wrists.
Ravi’s eyes widened. “Suicide?”
“Attempted. Her parents filed a lawsuit …” I remembered how Teddy had nearly dropped out of school. I remembered him sitting on the edge of his bed, head in his hands, and all at once I realized I’d just betrayed him. “It was a long time ago.”
We were silent for a time. My lips felt numb.
“Lot of secrets,” Ravi said.
“I won’t tell if you won’t.”
“No?” He gave me a sly look. “You are not recording this?”
“Recording?”
“No hidden cameras, no mics?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Good,” he said lightly, taking the mug from my hands and setting it on the floor.
My feet were between his feet. I had my mother’s pinkie toe, a tiny embarrassing tuber with barely a nail to speak of. A certain energy seemed to rise around my toe and me, my heart gathering speed. He lifted my chin. He kissed me.
I felt my head go light as we stood, as his two cool hands snuck up my shirt, lingering at my waist. I was too fleshy, too pale, unprepared on many levels (grooming included), and yet propelled by desire. There was something about the way he took his time, the way he handled the hook and eye of my bra with one hand. He was as calm and intent as he’d been earlier that day, as if he knew what to do, how it would happen, that all our banter would lead, eventually, to this narrow bed.
“Wait—” I said and sat up, shocked by a hard, vehement pounding, someone’s door shaking on its hinges. “What is that?”
“The new calf,” Ravi said. “Had to be quarantined.”
For such a cute calf by day, the newbie had morphed by night into a battering ram. We listened for a moment to the clanking padlock. My heartbeat returned. I caught Ravi casually assessing my legs and felt a pulse of anticipation. “Ignore it,” he said, and soon enough the pounding folded into the white noise, all of it draining away.
Later, he fell asleep with his arm around my waist. I lay wide awake, my back against his chest. The chest of my subject. (Which turned out to be not as hairy as his head hair implied, but sparse and pleasantly scratchy.) By then the liquor had burned off, and what had felt sweetly reckless only hours before had solidified into something irrevocable and real.
I imagined this scene through Teddy’s eyes, an exercise that made my stomach buckle. It would seem as though I’d timed my sin precisely around his absence, a calculated plan, not a plunge.
I thought of Teddy, apologizing. I crossed a line. It’s my fault.
And here I’d not only crossed a line, I’d scaled a great wall. Sleeping with the subject of your film was completely out of bounds, unpardonable, certainly missing from the index of The Art of Documentary. Would Ravi expect this to happen again? If I said no, would he close himself off, spurned and wounded? And what if I wanted to say yes?
My thoughts pinballed between all possible scenarios, settling on the greatest likelihood: in a few weeks, we would all part w
ays. No harm done.
Until then, Teddy could not find out.
I dreaded the next morning, having to clump through an awkward discussion while searching for our underwear. Against what actually happened, such a scenario now seems quaint.
Morning broke like a frying pan in the face, or stomach, rather, where the unni appams had already begun their long and ruthless assault. I traveled between toilet and bed at least three times before Ravi insisted on driving me to a medical clinic. I lay across the backseat of the jeep, my stomach spasming with every thought of those two greasy gobs.
He helped me into the waiting room where a handful of women sat with deadened expressions. One had a child in her lap, a girl with a shaved head and huge kohl-caked eyes. I took a seat across from the mother, who was whipping the end of her sari in breezy circles, and put my two-ton head in my hands.
I met a doctor in a closet-sized examining room. He asked me how I felt; I laid my head like an offering on his desk, an inch from his big, tufted knuckles. I heard him say to Ravi, with vague accusation: “She is dehydrated. Look how pale she is.”
Ravi escorted me everywhere, even when I tried to ward him off. He followed me into the doctor’s office, to the exam room, and once, regretfully, to the outhouse, from which I emerged horrified by what I’d left behind for some hapless sweeper—Why wasn’t the goddamn faucet working?—and there was Ravi, like a man dreading a verdict. The world rocked beneath me as I staggered around, half fainted, crawled onto someone’s gurney. I registered certain things. The lemur baby from the waiting room, in the lap of her mother. A small square tray of syringes. A burnt smell. The veins in my arms had thinned to pinstripes. A nurse tried feeding an IV into the back of my hand. The first two times, I gritted my teeth against the pain. No luck. The third time, the nurse lanced my flesh and, while inside, went fishing. I screamed FUCKSHITFUCK and dissolved into mortifying tears. In solidarity or dread, the lemur baby began to squall, and my throat thickened up from a certain kind of panic that had nothing to do with fainting and vomit and needles but rather the sense that I had allowed myself to arrive here, alone and sick, a foreigner in a foreign room.
“Breathe,” said a voice, a simple order that split the fog.
Ravi stepped forward. He cupped my head with a hand practiced in the art of calming the frantic and the feral. It occurred to me then that he had the jawline of a film star, or at least a prime-time anchorman. It also occurred to me that my panic was optional and that I could expel it, at least partly, with one shaky exhalation.
I watched the IV fill my limb with fluid. The baby grew calm, and her stained face made me want to wipe my own, but Ravi was holding my good hand, and the other lay limp as a glove on my chest.
Guilt made a martyr of Ravi. After we returned from the clinic, he brought me coconuts stuck with flimsy straws. On most Saturday evenings, he had dinner with his mother, but this time he told her there was an elephant calf that needed round-the-clock monitoring. Somehow he got her to make him dinner anyway, a soup of rice with green mango chutney. This he delivered to my bedside, waiterlike, a cotton towel over his arm.
Sunday morning, while Ravi snuffled into my hair, I texted Teddy: Got sick yesterday. Had to go to hospital. Don’t worry.
Moments later, my cell phone jittered on my desk. Teddy. Ravi stirred, tightened his arm around my waist.
“Are you okay?” Teddy said. “What hospital? Why didn’t you call?”
“I’m totally fine,” I croaked.
“Was it the dal? Or no—those grease balls!”
Just then, Ravi’s cell phone burst into song: the theme from James Bond. He made a lowing noise and rolled out of bed. I flapped a hand at him, pointed at my phone, mouthed Teddy.
“Is someone there?” Teddy asked.
Bleary, Ravi trudged to the bathroom and closed the door, answering the call with his usual, “Hah, tell me.”
“Uh no, I’m watching a movie.” I grasped at vaguely familiar names: Goldeneye, Goldfinger …
Thankfully, Teddy didn’t care for specifics. He said he’d be back by evening, or possibly earlier if he could catch the bus. After we hung up, I wiggled down into the warmth of my covers, listening to the murmur of Ravi’s voice. I’d never seen him stay on the phone this long.
At last Ravi emerged and shut the door, slowly, behind him.
“Teddy’s coming back,” I said with a twinge of disappointment. I brushed a black comma-shaped curl from my pillow. “You’re off the hook.”
Ravi leaned against the door. “An elephant killed someone,” he said. “In Sitamala. Near to my mother’s place.”
“What? That’s terrible.”
He nodded, absorbed in thought. There was the distant, drifting silence again, the indecipherable knit of his brow.
“Did you know the person?”
He was speechless so long I thought he hadn’t heard me. “I know the elephant,” he said finally. “Everyone does.”
The Poacher
By morning, the palli was strewn about as if exploded. Roof smashed, legs snapped. At the calm center of this chaos: a pile of thatch laid with care across the body of my cousin.
Raghu’s mouth was a hollow of astonishment. From the chest up and hip down he looked unharmed. The middle of him looked like something the elephant had tried to erase.
There were five or six greenbacks on the scene, doing nothing of note. One of them knelt by the elephant’s footprint. I expected him to come up with some advanced tracking device, but he pulled a length of string from his pocket and gently laid it round the border of the footprint as if to take the murderer’s shoe size.
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 stil
l 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.”
