by Tania James
“Well, Father says you have to sit in the palli with me tonight.”
“Tonight? I’m too tired.”
“Not too tired for that pumpkin of yours.” He raised his voice loud enough for my mother to hear. “What’s her name—Kamini? Yamini?”
I told him to go screw a stone.
To be clear: I did not know “screw a stone” would be my final words to Raghu, my cousin-brother and truest friend, who had saved my life not long before he lost his own. It gnaws at me still that I did not go to meet him that night, but the worst thing I did was to witness the hurt in his face and walk away.
§
Six months after my brother was released, my cousin was killed.
In the days after his death, Raghu appeared at temple and in the fields and one time on the back of a lorry. I had been similarly visited by my father for a while. I once chased a public bus, sure I had seen my father inside taking the tickets.
Work was the only wall I could lean against. Given my mother’s permission, I took to toiling in Synthetic Achan’s fields, as he was short a pair of hands. Not that my uncle wanted mine. He abominated my very presence and would not glance my way, not even when he uttered an order, not even when I said, at the end of the day, “I’ll go and come,” to which he issued not even a grunt. I poured my sweat into his soil and came up with a possible solution for the parakeets that came cackling out of the sky and into the rice. One whole morning I spent staking two poles along the eastern side of his farm and twisting a long length of white plastic between them, strung with bottle caps and bells. The plastic flashed and glimmered, jangling in the breeze. My uncle asked if I was scaring the little shits or throwing them a party.
At night I lay awake thinking of the Gravedigger, a name I had known since childhood along with its other titles. Schoolchildren had set its killing spree to song:
Here it comes
the Ottayan, the Undertaker
Sent its master
to his Maker
What had that master done, I wondered, to give his elephant such a fiending for death?
In the days that followed, the Gravedigger took one more palli and one more soul. The palli belonged to a farm down the way, its walls crashed to kindling. The man inside escaped and lived to feed us a dubious story: I was lying on my side by the fire lost in a daydream when I felt a sniff at my ear so gentle I half thought it was my wife, though, honestly speaking, she would sooner fart in church than show affections, so I turned and found myself faced with the Gravedigger’s big fat hose! I did not think, I drew back my fist and punched it—dsh!—in the nostrils. Naturally it was not expecting such heroics, for it snatched its trunk away, giving me just enough time to jump out and run.
We could not question the Kuruva woman. She had been hauling firewood on her back, skirting the forest, when the Gravedigger found her. Dozens of women had likely done the same to keep their cook fires burning, each convinced that she would not be the one to cross the murderer’s path. A whole morning passed before a lorry slowed and noticed a little cushion of a foot jutting from beneath piled wood. As in the case of my cousin, the Gravedigger had conducted its own private burial.
And so, the Forest Department cautioned us with the obvious: to keep to our homes at dusk. It promoted the Gravedigger to rogue status but stopped short of issuing the order for its killing. Not until it would kill more of our own.
In the meantime I kept to Synthetic Achan’s fields. I woke at 6:00 a.m., several hours before the laborers came fresh off the jeep. This was a tough half-lazy lot of men who demanded a thimble or two of Old Cask for breakfast. When they cut, I cut, and when they heaved bundles on their heads, so did I.
In the evenings I lingered in my uncle’s fields. From the rear of his house I watched the rose-orange sky and the goats among the balsa blooms and the mountains beyond, hiding the Gravedigger in their deeps.
Before long the parakeets interrupted my idyll, sailing triumphantly over my slack piece of plastic. Down they swooped in a green flittering cloud and clipped the beaded strands before lifting away. My sole defense was to hoot and bang a spoon against a tin pan, but the pretty thieves had already fled for the trees, where they would pick at the rice just as crows pick at a dead man’s eyes.
The parakeets were unusually quiet when Synthetic Achan came up beside me. “Your little ribbon didn’t work.”
“There’s not enough wind.”
“I don’t care about the birds,” he said. “I have a bigger problem.”
I snuck a glance across his face and wondered when the hair at his temples had gone gray.
“Guess who came to pay respects,” he said. “Forest Department.”
“When?”
“Some days ago. They said they would give me ten thousand rupees for damages, so long as I filled out some form. ‘An Application for Compensation,’ they called it. The pigs. I said, What should I do with it? Buy another son? But then I had an idea.” He turned to me. “I could give it to you and Jayan.”
“You don’t owe us anything.”
“I know that. It’s you who owes me.”
How smooth and cold the claim. How heavy the hand on my shoulder.
“You want us to kill the Gravedigger?”
“Louder, boy, the greenbacks didn’t hear you.”
I shook my head. “Jayan will say no. He will not go to jail again.”
“Just listen. Your brother made the mistake of working with some no-name ruffian. This time we are all on Jayan’s side, all us farmers. No one would fault him or name him to the police.” I had trouble picturing this second family of farmers—where had they been for the past four years? “All our people want some safety for our fields, our harvest, our children …”
Am I not your child? I wanted to ask. But the mere mention of children had stolen his voice. He turned away and repeatedly rubbed his nose with his finger as if to give his face something to do.
“If they accuse your brother or you or anyone else, I will confess to it. I will stand trial; I will take it all on my head, I swear it. No difference between living out here and living in a cage.” He paused and added softly, “Not to me.”
He had never looked so old, and yet in his ruined face I saw an echo of my cousin.
“He listens to you, Manu.”
I stood in silence, yet what choice did I have? I look back at the young man I was and see a boy, powerless before the only person he had yearned all his life to call Father.
I tried to approach my brother, but it was impossible to find him alone what with his wife around every corner. Leela put no trust in Jayan and kept one ear always tilted in his direction lest he should slip into his old ways. A pretty warden she made, but a warden all the same.
At last I found him in the courtyard. He was raking a fat pile of harvest, forking and fluffing the stalks, sweating as he went. In two more days the stalks would dry and he would steer the cattle-drawn plow around the pile, threshing the rice to loosen the hulls.
All I desired was a pause to precede our discussion, but Jayan kept talking as if to avoid it. That day his chosen subject was the tractor-tiller. “Kunjappen said the tractor-tiller can do in thirty minutes what the plow takes hours to do.”
“We used his contraption last year. More bugs in that rice than lice on a stray.”
“What is that to do with the tractor-tiller?”
Back and forth we bickered on the merits and follies of the tractor-tiller until I blurted, “I talked to Synthetic Achan.”
“Talking now, is he?”
I relayed Synthetic Achan’s request. Jayan listened in silence, doing more stabbing than fluffing.
“How much is he offering?” Jayan said finally.
“Ten thousand at the least.”
“And he wants me to do it.”
“Not you,” I said quickly. “We thought you would know someone else for the job.”
“Someone eager to go to jail? There’s a rare species.”
&n
bsp; “No one would go to jail. Uncle swore it.”
“Who made him chief minister?”
“He watched over us while you were gone.”
“And for that I give him my thanks. But not the rest of my life.”
A fair answer, I admit. Jayan simply wanted to make an honest living, upright and in the open. I wanted a cure for my guilt.
As if guessing my thoughts, Jayan said, “Raghu is dead. And if you had been with him that night, you would be too.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. You run like an old woman.”
He gave a demonstration, amusing only himself.
“What do I tell Synthetic Achan?”
“Tell him you have other duties now.” A smile tugged at his mouth. “Tell him you will soon be an uncle yourself.”
Hard to believe I had not realized Leela was five months pregnant. Indeed I had noticed she was plumping in places, but I had assumed she was gaining weight the way many young wives pack their middles and behinds, trading their slim-waisted skirts for house gowns.
After Jayan disclosed her secret, I could notice nothing else. Though Leela had barely a bump beneath her house gown, suddenly it seemed to me that her attributes were growing by the minute. Twice she caught my ungallant eye and began a habit of tossing a towel over her bosom whenever I approached with a glass of warm milk or a boiled egg or whatever my mother had me bring her.
Intent on building a life of substance for his child, Jayan worked long days, drank much less, and even took Leela to temple for some baby-blessing ceremony. He enlisted my help in digging a trench around the shed where we kept our rice bureau locked. Other farmers had reported elephant raids to their sheds, where a single beast could sniff out and swallow a year’s worth of food. We hired a few more hands to help with the digging and bolstered the side walls with timber. Over it we laid down a plank for crossing.
My mother filed many a complaint against the plank, but my brother thought it the only solution. What would she have him do—plant a bitter hedge around the shed like Kunjappen had done? One bull had braved the taste, then suffered loose motions all over the walls and bushes.
Speaking of smells, I suppose the outhouse is not a topic of dignified discourse, but let me indulge because as you will see the toilet and its placement would alter the course of our lives.
When Jayan was in jail, Synthetic Achan undertook renovations on his house and offered a few to ours, partly out of generosity and also out of shame that his own brother’s family should still be living under a paddy-grass roof. My mother installed a gas stove, which she never used unless guests were in the house; she much preferred the smoky infusions of a wood-burning stove. She had the paddy-grass roof switched to tile. I missed the look of the grass when it was fresh and sun dazzled, but I did not miss the way it grizzled and grayed over the months until we had to haul fresh grass onto the frame.
The single modernity my mother would not accept was a toilet inside the house. “But no one has an outhouse anymore,” I told her. “Ours is an inconvenience.”
“What,” she said, “to take ten steps outside for your business?” Neither Leela nor I could persuade my mother. She plainly refused to suffer the sounds and smells and squalor of a toilet spreading through our rooms.
Now that Leela was pregnant, my mother regretted her prior stance. She had not considered the burdens of pregnancy, one being that every ten minutes the pregnant woman is on her way to do the needful. In the middle of the night Leela would slip out without turning on a light. Between the churning notes of Jayan’s snore, I listened for her footsteps to make sure she had not fallen.
On a night such as this, her footsteps fading, I drifted off and later awoke to the hushed hiss of rain.
I peeked into my brother’s room. Her side of the mattress lay empty. I shook him until he turned and saw her gone, the scowl fading from his face.
Without waking my mother, we rushed into the drizzle. I had to feel my way along the clothesline strung between our back door and the outhouse, which kept us from straying on moonless nights. The outhouse door lay ajar. Empty.
“Manu,” he said, staring at the banana tree cracked in half, its crown in the dirt. Our fishtail palm shorn of two huge fans. I knelt over a rounded depression of earth, my eyes leaping to the next and the next where they all at once disappeared as if the elephant had taken flight.
Hoarsely, my brother shouted her name. Soon my mother came running around the house wielding a flashlight. We searched and we searched. The sky was dark and wild, trees writhing in the wind. A calm took me over. I called her name as if she were nearby, not gored or mashed or tangled in the branches of a tree. I looked, but all I could see was Raghu’s palli in splinters before me.
At last my mother shouted us over to the trench that surrounded the rice shed. She was kneeling at the edge.
There lay Leela on her back, her nightie twisted up around her soiled knees. The flashlight glared upon her face, but she lay still and pretty as a battered doll in the trench we had dug deep as a grave.
Imagine her on that moonless night. She has just done her needful when she hears the splintering of timber. Dread steps softly up her spine. She stands up slow on trembling knees and, for a moment, nothing moves. She wills herself to unhook the rusty latch and exit the outhouse.
There it is waiting, like a suitor come calling.
The Gravedigger nods, its trunk upcurled, and lets out a breath. Raindrops slither around her bare neck, but she feels nothing. Is it panting? Is it a vision? She feels far away, a phantom among the living.
Her heart thuds in her throat, a reminder of what she is: flesh and marrow, spit and vigor. Mother-to-be.
How she runs.
Blood pounds in her ears louder than the Gravedigger’s feet, but its stride is long and impossible. They are two animals locked in the ancient dance of hunter and hunted, and a small part of her considers one possible end—her end—just as the earth consumes her.
The Elephant
The flames of tiny lamplights trembled down the road to the temple. The Gravedigger could smell the hot oil, the chili-rubbed corn, the ice cream and peanuts, the plastic of inflatable toys, the petals of flowers, marigolds and rose water, all these shifting, rippling scents, and beneath them all, a heavy silt: the smell of people.
The Gravedigger was new to the festival season, new to parading and blessing and standing in wait. Seven months before, at the Sanctuary, he had been visited by a man who fed him a handful of caramels. Nosing through the man’s pockets, the Gravedigger found more. Old Man spoke sharply, but the Candy Man laughed and spread his arms, his knuckles stroking the underside of the Gravedigger’s trunk. His eyes were small and set deep, like seeds.
So one day the Gravedigger was picking the Candy Man’s pockets; the next day he was trapped in an open truck bed and bumping down the road to a new home. Sudden changes disagreed with the Gravedigger. He still trembled when remembering the day he was trucked out of the forest and into the Sanctuary, when life narrowed to a pitch-black cavern, and every which way was a wall. Then, as now, he perceived little of his situation. One comfort sustained him—that Old Man had come along.
The Gravedigger did not understand that he had been purchased by the Candy Man, who was locally known as Elephant Sabu. In addition to the Gravedigger, Elephant Sabu owned seven elephants, six of which he rented out for logging. The gentle Parthasarathi used to join them at the camp, where he had obtained a brief fame for saving a life. The story went that he had stood for five whole minutes over a ditch, holding a log in his trunk, refusing to fit the log in the ditch. Only when the forest workers looked in the ditch did they find there a sleeping dog, curled up and snug as a snail.
Now Parthasarathi was getting old, his vision foggy and his legs gone frail, a pink swelling at his temple like the knot on an old kindal tree. So he and the Gravedigger were assigned to work the festivals.
Elephant Sabu’s wife was appalled
by the Gravedigger’s price. Thirty-eight lakhs? For thirty-eight lakhs, they could have bought a parcel of land, as her father had suggested, plus a car. Yet Elephant Sabu believed the tusker’s near-perfect physique would in time reap enough profit for multiple cars. After all, the elephant met every single one of the twelve auspicious traits:
1. Prominent bulge between eyes
2. Head held high
3. Large ears that can touch over bridge of trunk
4. Tusk shape: outward and up, whitish color
5. Nice dip on crown of head
6. Eyes honey colored and wide
7. Trunk reaches ground and curls up
8. Over 10 feet high at shoulder
9. Strong thick legs
10. Long body and rounded back
11. Tip of tail like a paintbrush, reaching to ankle
12. Whitish nails, 4 and 4 on front feet, 5 and 5 on back = 18
= Auspicious Number
Elephant Sabu was a veritable encyclopedia of pachydermal knowledge. Yet this was wasted on his wife, who didn’t even let him get to number 5 before she told him where he could stuff the rest.
§
In a thicket tucked away from the festival mayhem, the Gravedigger ate his panna, becalmed by his bath and the sluggishly munching presence of Parthasarathi. They spent most of their hours in shared company, whether standing still during a puja or sleeping in their adjacent stalls. They bathed together. They drank together. They dozed side by side. When the Gravedigger began to wring his head for dark, cloudy reasons, Parthasarathi rumbled at a frequency only the Gravedigger could perceive. He focused on the hum and the rest of the raucous world fell away.
The Gravedigger found a similar reassurance in the musk of Old Man, who sat on a low wall, his arms around his knees, watching as always.
§
With all sixteen elephants bathed and blessed, the puja began.
The priests took turns feeding the Gravedigger packed balls of rice and brown sugar, laced with turmeric. The last in line, a boy priest, sheepishly raised a hunk of brown sugar to the Gravedigger’s mouth. Still chewing, the Gravedigger plucked the hunk and kept it curled in his trunk. Awestruck, the boy priest backed away.
