by Tania James
Yet his friends made up for his sullenness. We drank and smoked, and they dubbed me Wee Shivaram after I choked on a peg of fuel-flavored booze. I decided to accept the name even if it was lightly demeaning. To be demeaned by those fellows was to be taken under wing, and the more I laughed along, the more it seemed these boys could in time be my boys, Jayan among them. On the way home I fell, twisting my ankle, and had to limp against my brother. We flung our way forward while Jayan howled rubbish at the dark: Here he comes—the Undertaker, we’ll make of him a vulture’s dinner!
But the vultures were already dining by morning. The greenbacks burned sandalwood and ramacham to cover the dead elephant’s rot; still it stewed and spread in the heat.
Leela went on foot to see the elephant. She had not spoken one word to us since dawn, when we returned with liquor on our breath and guilt in our faces. My brother went to work in the fields, and I would have liked to do the same, but my ankle was paining me, so I was forced to stay home and suffer the lively abuses of my mother, all lazy this and rascal that.
By afternoon, I found Leela rinsing her feet at the pump. She drank a palmful and wiped the glisten from her chin. Her gaze came to rest on the laundry line where the wind was billowing into Jayan’s blue mundu, the one she had been holding as he was carried off by the Karnataka police. I waited for her to speak of what she had seen, but she was preoccupied with the mundu, staring so hard her gaze could have burned a hole through it.
Then she sighed, as if giving up. “Manu, help me with that thing.”
I limped to the laundry line and took up one edge of the mundu while she stepped back, holding the other. The fabric was damp and pliant, not yet stiffened by sun.
We tugged opposite corners as she had taught me years ago when I was her household deputy. “There were three men,” she said finally. “Drunks. Dancing on the body.”
“Of the Gravedigger?”
“As if you don’t know. Right corner.”
I nearly dropped my end. “You think we—” She thinned her lips. “But we weren’t in the forest last night, not anywhere near it! Ask anyone, Sabu, Shaji …”
“A clever couple. You could’ve been tumbling in the belly of a whale for all they’d remember.”
“Believe me—”
She tugged so hard, the fabric jerked from my grip. “Just give it here.” She took up the mundu and brushed off the small stones, then folded it by half and half again. “What kind of place is this, where men dance on the back of a god?”
I withheld the answer, knowing she was in no mood to hear it.
A place where the gods dance on ours.
Later that day, Leela told my mother she was going to church, an alibi my mother accepted with sympathy due to her own history as a young and unhappy wife.
Leela took her time pinning the pleats of her polycotton sari just so. Usually she kept her plastic mirror canted at the ceiling, reluctant to be reminded of her sun-speckled face. Dabbing kajal under her eyes, she felt something shift in her belly. She had felt no such motions since the Gravedigger’s attack. Now her hand went to her middle, searching and hoping until a belch escaped her—gas and nothing more.
She had not expected to get pregnant so quickly. During her years as Podimattom Leela, she had done abortion three times, and that was after a slew of home remedies—long peppers, papayas, mutton-marrow soup, running her belly into the back of a chair. No woman’s womb could survive such abuses unharmed, which was what she told Jayan after he proposed marriage. He laughed and said his soldiers could survive any terrain.
Back then, she was what they called “a family girl”; she only made hotel visits as arranged through her agent, an aunt in Kottayam. Jayan was the first she had brought to her home, the first to compliment the cushion covers she had sewn, the first to meet her gaze when she spoke. How strange to think she had yielded her heart simply because he had looked her in the eye, yet this smallest of gestures made her feel important and even a bit powerful. Where was that power now? She was shackled between land and sky, always looking down at the soil or up for rain.
And then she saw the dying elephant, which was not the Gravedigger, which was smaller than the tusker she had faced. Touched its grainy skin and inhaled the rot. Stood mere feet from the flaccid trunk, the enormous arm of a god outstretched. Not her god but a god all the same.
Fifty-six gods. As far as they knew.
Leela told herself she had made the appointment with Madame in order to seek out a job for Jayan—that was all. In her mind she dressed him in the greens of the greenbacks, pictured him proudly patrolling the forests and taking people on tours, the sort of job where cameras were the only things capable of shooting.
Leela stood face-to-face with an old fossil of a greenback. He looked up from his desk and fixed her with one wide hawkish eye, the other a milky slit.
She drew an important breath. “I have an appointment.”
The fossil showed her to Madame’s doorway and retreated to his post. Madame had a phone clamped against one ear; in the other she was digging a bobby pin, routing out the wax with a militant look. Noting Leela, she tossed the bobby pin aside and gestured to the seat opposite.
Maps of the region sprawled across the wall behind Madame, bristling with red and yellow and green pushpins. Leela twisted the corner of her handkerchief around her finger till the tip went cold.
“Hah, sir, thank you, sir.” Tired, impatient, Madame dropped the phone into its cradle. “An elephant was slaughtered in Sitamala. I’m sure you smelled the carcass before I did. Shot in the chest, shoulder, leg, they made a bloody sieve of that creature—eh eh! Hallo?”
Leela had closed her eyes through a sticky wave of nausea. She nodded as Madame hollered for water and tea.
“Isn’t this your second trimester? The nausea should have passed by now.”
“It comes and goes,” Leela managed. Secretly she was glad for the sickness. It served as reminder that the baby was alive.
The fossil provided them with two paper cups of hot water, a tea bag in each like a dead fish, bleeding brown. Madame took up the tea bag and dipped it thrice. “So. Your husband.”
Her husband, her husband, that ever-present subject. Couldn’t they start with any other topic—childhood, children, her nausea even? Leela had spent so many days alone with her worries, praying that her baby would survive untouched, dreaming of giving birth to a stone. Some chitchat would have offered fleeting relief.
But Madame was not interested in relief. “Your husband has an associate by the name of Alias. Have you heard that name?”
“Never.”
“Slippery fellow. Remarkable aim. He once shot an elephant here”—Madame pointed to the space between her own eyebrows—“and the force was so great the animal fell back on its haunches. Usually the animal falls forward, but this one died sitting up.”
As she spoke, Madame opened a drawer and removed the few photographs that lay on top. “Somehow Alias and his associates climbed up and did their work, and when they were done, they left this memento.”
Leela lowered her face to the photograph Madame had laid on the desk. It took a moment for the shapes to resolve, for her heart to gather speed.
Slowly she made out the twin gray hills that crowned the head, the flaccid ears on either side, but where there should have been a face was a cavity yawning wide, a maw of cut cords and rutted surfaces, a mulch of crimson and bone. Madame traced two pale ridges that met in a V shape. “Those are the bottom jaws. The back teeth were worn down. He must have been eighty years old. And another time, we found an elephant with only the tusks cut out. That fellow was still breathing when we found him.”
Leela pushed the picture away. “My husband is a farmer, not a butcher. Not anymore. He fell in with bad types. He made some mistakes, he has paid.” There was a bad weight growing dense in her chest. “Why are you showing me this? You just happened to have it in your top drawer, this picture?”
“Open your eyes.”
Madame’s face was pleasant, her voice of steel. “Your husband was involved in an ivory route that went from here to Dubai, the details of which I am still trying to learn. He killed fifty-six elephants single-handedly—”
“Who gave you that number? The two-faced idiot who turned him in?”
“—but you see, his last kill is the one that fascinates me. He was perched in a tree when he shot an adolescent male of roughly eight years. A bullet to the back of the head, a clean kill, but not clean enough. Because the mother is there. The mother goes to her dead son. The mother touches her trunk to his. They do that, the mothers, to check for breath. But there is no breath. Your husband waits for her to leave, but she won’t. She simply stands there very still from day to night to dawn. All the while your husband waits in the tree. And when it’s clear she will never leave, Jayan shoots her too, cuts out his five-kilo tusks, both their tails, and leaves. But here is what I will always wonder—why did she stay? Surely she knew your husband was in the tree. She gave him ample target of herself for one full day. So what was going through her mind?”
Unsure of the question, unsure of everything, Leela shook her head.
Madame leaned forward. “Maybe she was thinking, I know what you are. And I will not look away.”
A fly settled on the photo of the headless elephant, scurrying this way and that as if trying to find a way into the carnage.
“Who can say?” Madame sat back with a shrug. “But returning to the point, yes, I agree your husband’s associate is a two-faced idiot. Too much an idiot to craft a story like that. And then there were the tusks in your shed. Five kilos’ worth. Not much, but what do you expect from an eight-year-old elephant?”
Leela drowned her gaze in the tea. “Past is past,” she whispered. “Why do you scratch at it?”
“So you won’t let it happen again. Think of your baby.” Leela shut her eyes, but Madame’s voice pushed into the dark, into her very heart. “Will he have to bear witness to his father’s deeds? Think what it will be like for your child, how it will be to meet his father behind all that chicken wire.”
“I think of nothing else!”
“Then?”
“I don’t know what you expect me to do. He makes his plans without me.”
“I am not asking you to make up a story. Just tell me when you do know something—names, buyers, locations …”
Leela’s gaze wandered to the maps on the wall. All those red and green and yellow points, a sordid constellation. Each pushpin seemed a crime her husband had committed, a sin she had yet to discover.
Leela addressed the pushpins in a murmur so low Madame had to lean in to catch it. “If I help, you will not touch an inch of him. No beating. No sentence. Just—threaten him. Scare him enough to stop. Arrest him if you must, but only for a night.”
“I don’t want any more years from your husband’s life. These poachers dwell at the bottom of the ladder; they get scraps. Throwing one in jail is of no more consequence than plucking a mushroom—” Madame broke off. “Forgive me, I spoke without thinking.”
But Leela was spent of rage. She swirled her paper cup and watched the fish swim round, as yet unaware of how rare it was to exact an apology from Madame. Madame never apologized, for she never made a mistake. Sometimes she regretted a decision, but once decided, she acted, and quick.
As the day wore on, the dead elephant gave off a stronger reek as if a wound had opened in the very air, foul and festering.
I glutted on coffee till my stomach grew upset. Nonetheless, I was determined to stay awake for our meeting with Alias. We would leave for the hunt by five the next morning.
With Leela gone, I busied myself by milking the cow. The rhythm of milk drumming tin might have calmed me at first, but White Girl kept slapping my face with her tail as if I were a vexing fly.
In the late afternoon I wandered over the land that two weeks prior had been harvested. The dirt was brittle and pocked, and soon we would have to seed again. From here I could see all five of my mother’s acres; she would will half to each son. And so would Jayan and I divy our plots for the generation to come, on and on, all of us living elbow to elbow, head to toe. I felt my future dragging me deep underground. I thought of my brother and my uncle and the greenbacks and the farmers. I thought of the elephants and the forest creatures, all their vengeful yellow eyes. Let them battle over this dirt, I thought. I was destined for elsewhere, sure as calves become cows.
But how clever can he be, the boy who fails to complete the rest of that refrain? Not all calves will be cows. Some will be supper.
That evening I could hear Leela shrilling at my brother before I had even reached the sit-out, where my mother was planted in my father’s wooden chair. Elbows on armrests, her hands hung helpless. She raised her sad old gaze to mine and asked, “Where have you been?”
“The fields. Where else?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you anymore.”
I pretended not to catch that last part. “What are they fighting about now?”
“Ah,” she said, a grunt of surrender. “He says he’s leaving. She says she will leave him first. Rice going cold.”
I made to step inside, but she took hold of my forearm. “You won’t leave, will you, String?”
I had not heard that name since I was a child, when my father picked me up and declared me equal in weight to a string. “Now why would I leave you, Ma? Where would I go?”
“Not me. Jayan. Promise to watch him once I’m gone.”
I stepped back. “Did you ask him the same? To watch over me?”
“My boy, you do not need watching like he does. He was always a rascal, always smashing things, scared of nothing. I thought prison would put him right, but there is no right for him now.” She winced at the sound of Leela shouting. “The evenings were always bad for me, the evenings never gave me peace.”
I was stilled by her words. I turned my gaze upon a gray raft of cloud, hoping she would not see the pity in my eyes. She had no patience for pity.
“Say it, child. Promise me.”
I promised to watch over my brother. But my mother’s face remained a clench of worry, her hands moving over each other like separate creatures seeking warmth.
“Am I stupid?” Leela shouted. “You think I don’t know where you go?”
I found my brother in his room, pulling on a shirt as he looked coolly at Leela or somewhere past Leela, as if she weren’t worth looking at.
“Going where?” I asked.
She answered for him. “To meet with his fellow outlaws. To plot another poaching.”
“Is it only the elephant you care about?” Jayan said. “You should join the Forest Department.”
She hesitated. “I care about my child. What kind of father will he know? A law-breaker? A liar?”
“What lies—”
“I know you killed fifty-six elephants. Fifty-six,” she reiterated to me. “Shot by his own hand. Did you know?”
I gave no reply. In truth I had not known the exact figure but had always known better than to seek it out.
Jayan turned his back on us and yanked open a drawer. “Who told you that? One of your fat-mouth church friends?”
“And that last one—a mother and child. Just for five kilos? What kind of person does these things?”
Jayan slammed a drawer hard enough to crack the almari. “The kind who won’t waste a good set of tusks. That money kept you happy.”
“Oh yes, so happy! And where are these piles of gold, where have you stashed them away? In your little shed? Up the cow’s rump?”
“Don’t talk about what you do not know.”
“I know that you are a dog to these people you work for, whoever they are. Less than a dog.”
I tried to step in. “This is not like that, Leela, this is not for those people—”
“And you”—she pierced me with a look—“are a fool to follow. You think he is doing this for us? For this family? No. He wants
to erase the past. Show everyone what a hero he is.”
I watched Jayan’s fist open and close just as my father’s used to do when at the very edge of violence. But then by degrees, the fire subsided, and he retreated deep inside of himself where her words could not reach.
“Come, Manu,” he said. “Alias is waiting.”
Leela turned to Jayan. “Alias, who is Alias?”
“Manu, let’s go.”
“Wait.” She took a step toward me with a look that said, You do not have to go, you do not have to do everything he says. We stood at an awkward distance—not close, not far—through which Jayan strode.
I met her eye. A sorry sigh escaped me.
“Go then,” she called, her voice at my back. “Follow your brother all the way to Mysore. See how you like wearing their bracelets.”
As we walked, her words rolled around my head. She’d had the face of a careworn child as she spoke my name, and what did I look to her but a traitor? Yet what did she expect? Two brothers side by side naturally fell into step. And how could I, considering the oath I had pledged my sad mother and all the years of our brotherhood, betray my own blood?
All at once Jayan plunged into a one-way discussion. “Had I shot her in the hind parts, she would have tossed dirt on her wounds and charged me. Or she might have run off.” A puzzling moment passed before I understood him to be discussing the mother elephant. “Still she would have come back while we were taking the tusks. They always come back.”
“What’s done is done,” I said or some such nonsense answer. But I could tell by his silence that it would never be done, that it would remain forever undone now that Leela knew about it.
The moon was a dead man’s eye, rolled back and white. At this hour only men traveled the road, off to meet friends or court trouble. Before Raghu died, I had been no different, light of foot, easy of mind. Bloodlusting elephants had been nowhere in my line of sight.
