The Tusk That Did the Damage

by Tania James

  The boy lifted a piece of ivory no longer than his forearm, a kilo at best. How much money could it bring? Surely more than enough to see his family through the year, at which point he would be old enough to ask the foreman for his father’s job.

  He ignored the squeeze of terror in his chest. He wrapped the piece in his shirt, tucked it under his arm, and hitched his way back home. The journey lasted several days; he slept at any teahouse that would offer him shelter and sometimes under the stars.

  At home, his stepmother unraveled the fabric from the tusk as carefully as if she were removing a bandage from a wound. Her lips parted; she sent out a soft sigh. She clasped the boy’s hand, and it seemed to him, against all his prior assumptions, that she did love him after all, that she would never leave as she had so often threatened to do if he did not bring home a proper wage. Now she took to calling him clever boy and my son, as opposed to the usual son-of-another-mother and orphan boy.

  The next morning, the boy moved through the world with fresh hope, glancing on occasion at the base of their cashew tree, where he had buried the pale marvel by twilight. He considered it their buried potential, a seed that would split and spread with plenty. His stepmother planned to ask her brother about where to sell the ivory, but she warned the boy to keep his sweet mouth shut, so as not to attract unfriendly elements.

  Enchanted with her silvery future, the stepmother barely heard the boy complain of an aching head. Early in the evening, the boy took to his bed. He touched his temple to find there a thin channel of fluid, stickier than sweat.

  Over the next few days, other changes began to assert themselves. He could not draw a breath without tasting all its flavors, as if the air were rendered clear and specific, as if he could peel away its layers, as if he had lived his whole life with cotton up his nose and now, only now, were his nostrils flushed out. His stepmother was onion and sweat, tempered with fennel. His mother, he remembered, carried a glaze of burnt brown sugar.

  And he began to receive flashes of memory, snapshots from a time of life so early no one would believe the memories were his. He remembered the first bewildering time he hiccuped in his mother’s womb. He remembered the watery glug of his mother’s heart, a slow bass to his frantic ticking, and the metallic scent that met him when he emerged into the world. He remembered her face, haggard and doting, with eyes the shifting hue of a stormy sky.

  He shared these developments with his stepmother, who had little use for his tales. Quit stalling, she said, and take the ivory piece to my brother.

  But the boy was frightened by his body and mind, how they seemed to be writhing outside their natural, known borders. The next morning, he dug up the tusk and tucked it under his arm. Across forest and field he walked in pursuit of the elephant graveyard. But the yellow-toothed witch had vanished, along with her directions, and he found himself wandering in circles.

  Upon returning home, the boy buried the marvel in a place unknown to his stepmother, who retaliated by withholding his supper and calling him son-of-a-whoremonger. The boy had other concerns. There was his skin, which began to thicken and toughen in places, forming dark, leathery patches across his back, his legs, his forehead. There were his fingernails, growing into hard, yellowish tiles. And every night, there was the ache that pulsed from the roots of his top two canines. They felt strange to the tip of his tongue, a pair of ungainly impostors. In the mirror, they looked whiter than the rest.

  Was he boy or elephant? he wondered. Could he be both things at once?

  Don’t be silly, said his stepmother. No one can be two things at once. For now you are a boy, more or less. But obviously you are turning into an elephant.

  This is because of that tusk, the boy said, his eyes watering. It was the tusk that did the damage. What if I return it? Can’t I reverse the curse?

  Oh, my sweet stupid son, there is no reversing a curse, everyone knows that. But who says we cannot turn this curse into a blessing?

  Gently at first, she urged him to try to remember the location of the elephant graveyard. She suggested that he return there, with a wheelbarrow in tow, and take what else he could. You will do the taking, the stepmother said, being that you are already cursed and also my back has been paining me lately, so I will stay home. Think of it, sugar lump! One trip and your poor stepmother would never have to work again. No more work for you either, only a lifetime of mangoes and bananas and rest, free to come and go as you please.

  That night, the boy lay awake, sifting through his memories for the location of the elephant graveyard, not to fulfill his stepmother’s request but to return what he had thieved. He refused to believe his stepmother’s claims about curses. He was the hero of his story; he swore to decide his destiny, his end, no matter what happened to his body.

  To this oath, his body answered full force.

  Before the boy could cry out from the pain, his two long teeth dove and rose into tusks of molten white, so white they glowed in the dark. His spine buckled and rounded; his nose dropped heavy and thick, so much power pent up in each accordion fold. His toes merged, his soles grew soft and sensitive. There was a pleasant kind of twitching at his tailbone. He sneezed.

  He rose, instantly falling onto all fours, and shouldered a hole in the roof. With two strikes of his head against the mud wall, he saw his way out into the yard, to the mulberry bush. He learned quickly how to wield his trunk, how to toss away the dirt, how to pinch an occasional berry for his own brief pleasure. At last he found the marvel, glowing against the velvet dirt. Just as he shook it clean, he smelled her on a breeze. Onion and sweat, tempered with gunmetal.

  He turned to face his stepmother. She was aiming his father’s rifle at him. Her eyes were round and easy to read as they traveled over his tusks, her fear and revulsion sliced with greed.

  Take me to the graveyard, she said.

  There are wants that change from month to month, and then there are yearnings so permanent their power and shape remain hidden from us save for a rare but terrible moment. How much time he had wasted in pursuit of a mother’s love, how much effort given to the woman on the other end of that gun. Sorrow overcame him, sorrow and failure and fury, and he roared from every corner of his chest. He took a few charging steps toward his stepmother, and she did as he expected her to do—she fired into his chest.

  With the pain came another flash of memory, a recollection that seemed both his and not his, to which his feet responded by thundering into the depths of the wood.

  All night he wandered, feeling the life leak out from his chest, feeling his boy memories melt away from him, replaced by others. There were flying elephants, spinning and cresting against blue skies; there was the Sage and the pinch of fateful powder; there was the Rajah, the custard, the cage. All the while, his legs moved of some long-buried volition. A waterbird rode his back, though he saw no water in the vicinity. When his steps began to drag, the bird flew ahead, lone and white against the gold-stained dawn.

  Hours passed, or maybe minutes; the elephant could not be sure. All he knew for certain was the smell, which greeted him before the graveyard did—the ghosts of older elephants. His eyes had weakened, but he could just make out the blue haze of lake and sky, the hard white ruins. He sipped from the water and went to lay himself down in the shade cast by the largest skull.

  From the hollows of the skull came the All-Mother’s smell, ancient and mineral, swelling his lungs. The smell brought other memories: the seams in her trunk, the column of her leg, the leg he used to lean against. He could no longer tell if the light were fading from behind his eyes or from the sky beyond, but all that seemed unimportant now. He circled round a single thought: So this was what it was all about! Of course he had to end precisely here, surrounded by her smell and by white on all sides, white as the inside of an egg, as the beginning of another life.

  The Filmmaker

  On Tuesday, the day after dinner at Y2K, Ravi was called to the eastern side of the park for keeper training, leaving ample tim
e for an argument with Teddy.

  “When did you tell him about Shelly?” Teddy demanded.

  We were walking back to our rooms after a lukewarm shoot of a keeper bottle-feeding a tiger cub. All morning, I’d been formulating an apology. As soon as I began, he cut me off. “When?”

  “When I got sick, I guess, I don’t know. We spent a whole day together.” Teddy lengthened his stride, making it hard to keep up. “I shouldn’t have, I’m sorry.”

  I followed him into his suite. Whatever room Teddy inhabited, he managed to suffuse it with an air of artistic struggle—the open Moleskine like a flattened bird on his desk, the cryptic note cards across his bed (example: VULTURE SEQUENCE—THEY HATE BEING CAGED), the Batara matchbox on the sill, next to the incense holder/toilet-paper tube that could have, at any given moment, fragrantly burned down the room. Within that chaos of strewn clothes and notes was one corner of order: the suitcase of mini-DV tapes, each of which he had cataloged and kept with persnickety care.

  Teddy shoved some note cards aside and sat on his bed, detaching the lens. “Did Ravi tell you about that Shankar Timber stuff?”

  I nodded. “I don’t think I was supposed to tell you.”

  “So you two are buddy-buddy now, huh?”

  “I guess, yeah.” I paused. “He’s comfortable with me.”

  “For obvious reasons.”

  “Because we’re friends.”

  “I’m your friend. You never used to wear lip stuff around me.”

  I was surprised, and dismayed, that he’d taken note of my tinted lip balm. “You’re being ridiculous. This is how it always happens—they get attached, we get attached.” Don’t get too close to the animals, Ravi had told me, taking gentle hold of my elbow while I stood by the elephant nursery. We don’t want them getting attached. “How’s he supposed to open up if he doesn’t trust us?”

  “All I’m saying is be careful. You have a way of encouraging people. Whether you mean to or not.”

  My cheeks went warm. I sensed that Teddy was verging on some sort of confession, something that would capsize our friendship entirely. Clichés ran like ticker tape through my head—need to be on my own … just don’t see you that way …

  Teddy let out a sigh. “My dad’s cutting me off in two months.”

  “From what?”

  “He’s been sort of spotting me some cash here and there, when times were tough. But now he has Bev and her whole litter, so pretty soon, that’s it. No more loans. No more health insurance.”

  I sat beside him. “So you’ll freelance. You’ll move to Greenpoint. You’ll eat at McDonald’s every Wednesday.” I’d been the one to inform him of Fifty-Cent Wednesday, when, for three dollars, you could buy a week’s worth of flaccid burgers. “You’ll get by like everyone else, until you can’t. And then you’ll tutor rich kids or whatever.”

  He nodded, a sad little smirk on his face. “It’s just, I’ll never have time like this again. Uninterrupted. Financed. At least not anytime soon.”

  “So?”

  “So I need this film to count. This is our chance to make a name for ourselves. A film by Emma Lewis and Teddy Welsh.”

  “Nice. I get top billing.”

  He gave me a quick wincing look. “You’re taking this seriously, right?”

  I was startled by his sincerity and offended and guilty, all of which added up to an exasperated, “Yes.”

  “Sorry. I just had to say it.”

  Technically I hadn’t lied, merely tiptoed around the truth, given him the literal outline rather than the messy essentials. And yet. That doomful sort of feeling. The sudden, itchy need to seek refuge elsewhere, anywhere. I told Teddy I wanted to shoot some B-roll, and before he could mount any serious objection, I whisked the camera away.

  On my way to the calves, I stopped by a keeper bent over a steel tub and filmed him hand-sifting rice and mung beans. The brown and the white filled the frame in granulated waves, sliding and mixing, mesmerizing.

  I looked up to meet the skeptical gaze of the keeper, whose duck mullet deserved equal skepticism.

  “Ana kutty,” the keeper said, nodding over his shoulder, in the direction of the elephant calves. He mimed feeding himself from the pail, as in Feeding time, or Don’t you have anything better to chronicle for posterity?

  I knew the way to the calves, which turns to take, a sharp left at the bale of new-cut grass, wire fences trailing ahead on either side. But once I reached the calves, I lost the will to film. Instead I rested the camera on a fence post and watched them, for the first time, without any equipment attached to my ears or eyes.

  Two keepers held spouted jugs of milk. The younger ones went first, trunks lofted, mouths around the spouts. Milk dribbled onto the wiry hairs of their chins, giving them goatee beads. The bigger calves gurgled mutinous cries, draped their trunks on the drinkers’ backs, begging for a turn. The keepers pushed their trunks away while the lucky ones sucked and sloshed.

  We’d filmed the feeding before, but I felt the shots could’ve been tighter, framing out the keepers, focusing on eyes and tongues and trunks, heightening the sounds of snuffle and whimper, as if to enter their circle instead of observing it. I envisioned a film that included patient, lyrical sequences like these, the absence of human voices opening a channel for a more intimate, visual language.

  As the calves fed, my phone vibrated against my hip. r varma. Just the sight of his green-glowing name erased the bitterness of yesterday’s spat. All I felt was a dangerous elation.

  I turned my back on the glaring keepers, jogging away from the calves before answering: “Hey, where are you?”

  “Driving,” Ravi said, a smoky rasp to his voice.

  I waited for more, presuming he was calling to make amends. Maybe the fine art of reconciliation was not his forte. “I should’ve checked with you before mentioning the timber case. I’m sorry.”

  He grunted.

  I entered the empty main office, set the camera on his desk, collapsed into his chair. I would not be the one to speak next. I swiveled and studied the back shelves, which seemed a pencil’s weight from buckling, loaded with dusty ledgers, binders, logbooks, old keyboards choked in cords. “About Shelly.” No reply. I soldiered on through the silence. “Please don’t bring that up again. It’s been awkward all day between Teddy and me, and maybe he knows about me and you, or at least has an inkling …”

  If the conversation were a seesaw, I was stranded at the high end, legs dangling, ridiculous.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s talk tonight.”

  “I will be home in the morning only.”

  “Why, what’s going on over there?”

  “Nothing. The training.” His voice trailed off; I could hear him breathing. Ravi wasn’t one for meditative pauses, at least not over the phone.

  “I received a call,” he said finally. “There was a tusker found dead on a farm, in Sitamala.”

  “The same elephant who killed the kid?”

  “No idea. I will do the postmortem in the morning. You can come, if you want.”

  “Was the elephant killed, or did it die naturally?”

  “Killed.”

  The elephant took shape in my mind’s eye, heaped and riddled with holes. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Tomorrow will be messy,” Ravi said. “Wear your ugly shoes.”

  He hung up before I could ask which of my shoes he considered ugly. I scanned the wall behind the desk, where a goatish creature stared dolefully from the collage of newspaper clippings. The headlines held me captive: “Wild Buffalo Rehabilitates in Dibru Saikhowa.” “Displaced Rhino Calf Reunited with Mother.” “Man Spears, Man Saves.” “First Elephant Calves Released.”

  Beneath the last headline, this highlighted paragraph:

  Four adolescent elephant calves were released to the wildlife park yesterday, wearing radio collars and ear tags. Used to track the vulnerable calves, the radio collars will fall away after several weeks. “The tags will stay for yea
rs,” says Ravi Varma, head veterinary doctor at the WRRC, “so we can collect long-term data as the calves age and mate and eventually produce calves of their own.”

  The quote sounded like the sorts of answers Ravi used to give me in the beginning, sanded clean of all personality. I tried to stray from the bases he usually hit during interviews, avoiding a prewritten checklist of questions, but sometimes a question would strike me later, the one I’d neglected to ask. Such a one occurred to me now, what I should’ve asked him over the phone, what would likely gnaw him all night—was the dead elephant wearing a tag? Was it one of his own?

  The Poacher

  On Tuesday, the day before we embarked on our hunt for the Gravedigger, an elephant was found dying on Old Raman’s farm. It had likely stumbled out of the forest and folded at the edge of the field, felled by its numerous wounds. The shooter had shown little mercy or skill, for the beast died slow, bombarded to the end by so many squinting human eyes.

  The greenbacks would suspect Old Raman as accessory in the elephant’s death, lumping him with those farmers who had baited bothersome elephants in the past. One had even lodged a firecracker in a jackfruit, thus making a crater of his enemy’s mouth. But Raman was cut of a softer cloth. He brought water in a plastic bucket, and when the elephant was too weak to lift its trunk, he crept forward and every so often scooped water over the foamy slab of its tongue.

  When first I heard of the dying beast, I hoped it was the Gravedigger. Jayan wanted the opposite; the hunt was all he ever thought about, even when he took me out with his friends. He spent the evening sitting over his glass with shoulders rounded, nostrils aflare, eyes so dark and intent I could see him rehearsing the kill in his head.