The Tusk That Did the Damage

by Tania James

  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.

  But Leela did not waste a second in telling me to bring needle and thread. I had threaded her many a needle by then, but never had I seen her do what she did: carefully cradling the chick in her palm and fingering the innards back inside as if stuffing a pastry puff. Like a surgeon, she stitched the belly whole again, then patted a paste of turmeric over the wound.

  In the end that stitched-up chicken outlived the others. It even followed her around like some lovesick suitor who would not take no for an answer, a behavior I might have found humorous if it did not so closely resemble my own frame of mind.

  Yet I was not her only fan, so to speak.

  Two fellows called me out of the house one day, asking for Podimattom Leela. One had a long face, lizardy features. He said he knew her from before, that they were old friends. Business associates, said the other, a fellow with a face all wrinkled and scarred like a halved head of cabbage. They had heard about her financial trouble. They thought they could help.

  The lizard smiled with tiny teeth. She can find us at Hotel Meriya, he said and left.

  I found Leela out back, standing over a massive jackfruit, one of the three Synthetic Achan had given us, knowing I favored the fried chips. She bit her lip as if angry with that spiny green boulder, its stem dribbling sap.

  “Are they gone?” she asked.

  I nodded. She handed me the hoe. I lifted the thing over my head and struck the fruit. I turned the jack by a degree, then hacked again. Turned it. Hacked. Turn. Hack.

  She bent and used her fingers to pry the halves apart, the gluey sap fouling up her fingers. Each half displayed a daisy shape, with its pale yellow bulbs of fruit like petals around the pulpy core. With a kitchen knife she began carving the halves into quarters, still saying nothing, her mouth in a knot.

  I asked why they had called her Podimattom Leela. She told me it was the place where she was born.

  “No one calls me Sitamala Manu.”

  She was quiet.

  “They said you were business associates,” I said.

  “Customers.”

  “What kind.”

  “Same kind as your brother.” She spoke oh so casually, but I could see the tears sitting on the rims of her eyes. I felt a small mean wish to see them fall.

  Instead she tossed the knife onto the newspaper and dipped her fingers in a stee
l cup of oil, rubbing the white from her fingers as she brushed past me.

  I caught her by the arm. “I deserve to know …”

  “Know what. Spit it out.”

  Heat filled my face. The question required finesse. I had no finesse. I had a hoe in my hand.

  “All that honey talk about sandalwood trees …” She shook her head. “Don’t talk to me about deserve.”

  I dropped my gaze. I could think of nothing to say.

  After a while she spoke in a small voice. “Knowing those two, it will be all over town by tomorrow.”

  “It will not. I won’t let them.”

  “Oho. My hero.” She smirked at the mess of jackfruit at our feet. “Leave it, Manu, just leave it.”

  Another man would have let the moment pass and put the matter out of mind. But I was not a man; I was a boy of sixteen seething with impulse and anger, and I felt it my job to defend her. Raghu refused to join me, having seen the cretins and citing very bad odds.

  I found the lizard at the shappe next door to Hotel Meriya, holding court among his fellows, not a puddle’s worth of sense among them. The lizard caught my approach out the corner of his eye and threw himself wholeheartedly into a one-man show. Podimattom Leela! Like a butcher he appraised her parts, tongue by breast by thigh, and oh the things she could do with certain of them. Her menu never changed, long and all-inclusive, nothing left off the list and believe you me her mouth never tired—

  “Neither does yours.”

  The shiteater grinned at me. I kept my hands in the pockets of my brother’s old trousers. “Ah. Here’s her bodyguard.”

  “Leela Shivaram is her name.”

  “How was I supposed to know that? She didn’t invite me to the wedding.”

  “Now you know.”

  “I knew her differently.”

  “You knew someone else.”

  He shrugged. “Wash a crow all you want, it won’t turn white.”

  I asked him to step out. Lazily he sucked at a fish bone before heaving himself up from the table. It was difficult to maintain my air of aggression while he rinsed every mote from his mouth.

  He followed me some ways from the shappe to a stand of trees, where I turned to find the cabbage head in attendance. My heart fell. “What is he for?”

  “Not to referee, I can tell you that.”

  I kept my eyes on his feet while my fist grew hard in my pocket, four fingers looped in my father’s steel. I remembered the knuckles dull and deadly in my brother’s palm. The lizard asked if I wanted to rethink my opinions, to which I replied by smashing my metal fist into his snout.

  He spun and landed face flat on the dirt, his arms spread in a pose that recalled my father, and for a terrible moment I thought he was dead.

  The cabbage head stared at his colleague, who to my great relief struggled like a newborn to lift his head. In those few seconds of gawking, I had time enough to sling the knuckles into the trees so they wouldn’t be used against me. My fingers rang with pain.

  Take Note: I did not run. Unlike my father, I knew not to rack up my debts.

  The cabbage head sighed and gave me a look of almost fatherly disappointment. Then he popped me in the ear, the chin, and—with breathtaking finality—the belly.

  Laid out on the grass, I braced for the final kick, one that would send me to deepest sleep, when from somewhere above came a voice: “Get off him or I will shoot you to pieces.”

  The world was rocking all around me, but I made out the shape of a boy holding a rifle. A boy whose chicken-bone arms looked much like the arms of Raghu.

  “That gun’s taller than you,” said the cabbage head. “Probably not even loaded.”

  The young gunman leveled his barrel. “Take a bet, pussy man.”

  Oh, it was a first-class performance, so convincing that the cabbage head surrendered and carried his colleague away, tossing limp threats. Soon as they were gone, Raghu hustled me home, his utmost fear being that Synthetic Achan would discover that his gun had gone missing. The barrel was carved with rabbits—this much I remember of the rifle that I would meet later on, under darker circumstances. I also remember the glow of triumph in Raghu’s face as we rode home in an auto.

  “What took you so long,” I mustered through the functioning side of my mouth. “One more punch and they would have pulped me.”

  “Look in the mirror, little boy—you are pulped.”

  “I got one of them good.”

  “Now you’re hallucinating.”

  And on like that we quipped and quarreled, in place of a gratitude I knew not how to give.

  I spent the next days in a fog of pain. In letters I mentioned none of this to Jayan. It was an unspoken rule that our letters should contain nothing but peaceful scenes, a home sweeter than the home he remembered.

  For us he painted prison in similar shades:

  At 6 we get chai in our cells. At 630 we go into compound and you can play chess or carrom or read the paper. I read the paper. There are 3 std phone booths. Nice library. One man here for 15 years he got his LLB and two other degrees in jail. I would school myself in the law if I did not hate all lawyers so much. I could get better advice from the ceiling.

  None of us believed that jail was the luxury law school of Jayan’s description. Still we were most unprepared for our maiden visit.

  In the week prior, my mother and Leela had built a feast that would fill my brother’s belly ten times over, with jars of achar, both lemon and mango, and sambar and avial and rice. Half of it spoiled in the heat while we waited to obtain security clearance. Three hours of standing for thirty minutes of staring through a metal web so thick our hands could not touch his. I finally understood why he had kept us from coming so long. To see him in this state made my mother lose her speech.

  For he was someone else, my brother, eyes bulgy as a drunk’s, collarbones so high you could snap them like pencils. Even his manner of speech had changed, rambling on and on so as to leave no room for response. All he wished to discuss was the barbarity and indecency of the Karnataka justice system. In Karnataka, 30 percent of the inmates were innocent. In Karnataka, if a man killed himself, his wife was arrested as an accessory. In Karnataka, you could get six months for smoking.

  Fat lot of good to claim innocence when the whole of Karnataka begged to differ. Of course my mother and Leela said no such thing, nor did I. Mostly we kept our commentary to How are you? and What can we bring you? We well knew the answers, but there was such yearning in those thirty minutes, such blind desperation as the time ran dry.

  At one point he turned his red eyes on me. “What happened to your nose?”

  “Nothing.” My hand went to my nose, where a welt remained from last month’s bout. “I punched someone.”

  “You?”

  “Why not me?”

  “Over what?”

  Leela pierced me with a look. I had lied to both her and my mother, but one glance at my ramshackle face, and Leela had known.

  “Mugged.” My mother sighed. “Can you imagine? In the broad light of day.”

  As the years went by, we drew hope from whatever lightless corner we could. When the newspapers told that Karnataka would pardon a lotteried pick of prisoners on November 1, in celebration of the state birthday, we waited for lots that were never drawn. When Jayan dismissed his lawyer, we hired another, but they were mosquitoes, those people, always buzzing in your ear and at the same time bleeding you dry.

  By the time Jayan was freed, I was a young man of nineteen, my hopes for college on hold. I had told myself I would pursue my degree as soon as Jayan came home, but I had not foreseen what captivity could do to a man over the course of four years.

  All his swagger and ease had worn off. He had a guarded look about him, the flinch of a hunted thing. He slept all day and smoked all night, as if to make up for the bidis he could not buy in prison. He was both familiar and strange to us, as we must have been to him.

  I avoided my brother, but the women handled
him more delicately. My mother moved around him with care, and Leela rushed to his side if he so much as belched, as though he were a spill about to run off the table’s edge. She tacked his name to the end of every sentence as if to remind him of it.

  One night I heard him talking to Leela in a voice mean and muttery. She wanted him to go with her to temple for the Sita Devi Festival, the grandest hullabaloo for miles, but Jayan was in no mood. “I might as well have THIEF tattooed on my forehead, that is how everyone looks at me.”

  “So let them look. We have nothing to hide now. All the time you were gone I kept my chin up. I worked. I bent my knee for no one.”

  “Who gave you the cow and the chickens?”

  “I bought them.”

  “With what money?”

  She paused. “My wedding chain.”

  A long, vast silence.

  “You should have left,” he said.

  “And go where? Who would have me?”

  “Your sisters.”

  “They would have my money but they would not have me.” A muttering from Jayan. “You know why. And anyway, they can’t give me children.”

  I heard my brother carefully clear his throat.

  “I am tired of waiting,” she said. “You promised me a life.”

  Jayan said nothing. Her voice shifted to a different key, all soft and wanting as she asked, Should I be more specific?… thus leading to the sort of commentary that robbed me of sleep.

  As the months sped on, Jayan seemed to grow into a sturdier self. He resumed his work in the fields, and I often went with him, leaving Raghu behind. Even when Raghu invited me to watch Junior Mandrake at his house, on their brand-new LG TV, I said I was tired, having worked beside Jayan all day, Jayan who never tired or paused for a drink.

  “But it’s starring Jagathy,” Raghu said. “You like Jagathy.”

  “I like my bed better.”

  Raghu rubbed one skinny foot with the other. “You never help out at our place anymore.”

  “You already have enough help.”