by Tania James
How strange then to see my brother so sure of himself. He moved with the silky certainty of a panther stalking prey, the way his feet never faltered, the way he plucked his shirt off a snagging branch so as not to leave evidence of his presence. His face was sharp and intent, hardened by heartache. To his mind there was only one way the hunt would end.
Alias led the way, carrying his trusted rosewood and a pack much lighter than my own. His eyes swooped in on every dropping and pug mark. He knew the paths of the patrollers and the crackle of their walkie-talkies, the location of the antipoaching camps. He caught every breakage of branch, whose pure green heart meant the snap was fresh and recent. The fellow did not know dental hygiene but truly he knew his business.
We skulked through rattling thickets and phantoms of mist, a slice of raw pink at the sky’s beginning. Tall towers of tiger bamboo leaned over us, some brown and dying and scribbled over by vines. The damp earth muffled our steps. Had it been a dry day, any crackling leaf could have betrayed us.
At times we heard a shudder among the bushes, and we froze, barrels leveled at the noise before moving on. It was morning and the herds were on their way down the mountain and into the valleys to drink and bathe at the lake. By afternoon they would trail back up the slopes to the golden open scrublands, a higher altitude where only a scatter of bush and evergreen still grew. There we would stalk the Gravedigger.
Several hours passed, and my back begged relief of its burden. The silence suited me even less as it set my mind wandering toward my performance from the prior night. Sometimes the memory crept up—sticking my nose in her neck like some lecherous mutt—and made me spasm with self-hatred.
So I was grateful for the distraction of a morning snack. We shared a tube of biscuits and a flask of water, which sent me in search of a private spot, my business being of a substantial nature. My brother called after me unkindly, “Don’t get lost.”
I wove around a few trees, plucking a handful of leaves for hygienic purposes. In my desire for privacy, I ventured a bit far.
I found a discreet little clearing and lingered over it a moment. I had never voided myself upon forest floor, and for the tenth time that day I asked of myself, How in hell did Jayan do these things?
I dropped my half pant and squatted. Instantly my bowels went on strike, demanding better conditions. I imagined my brother aflame with impatience, tromping through the forest in search of me. I doubled my efforts. At last, in sore defeat, I yanked up my half pant, preparing myself for Jayan’s ridicule, though what came first, what froze me tip to toe, was the throaty rumble rising behind me.
I turned by degrees.
The Gravedigger stood a few yards away, its body obscured by bamboo, its tusks reaching white through the vines, its head looming and vast as a cliff.
Sweat stung my eyes yet I would not blink. I stared at one of the tusks, the tip that had long ago gored a man’s galloping heart.
Running seemed pointless and beyond my power. My legs were limp, my hands empty, aside from a fistful of sanitary leaves. I prayed to the tusker as had every numbstruck luckless clod to face a rogue thusly unarmed. Finish me quick.
Aside from an ear twitch, the tusker did not move. Its legs were granite columns, supporting such a spectacular bulk. It regarded me with its honey-hued eyes as if to take my measure, my potential for harm. As I stood there, I felt an odd calm settle over me. Fathoms deep, those eyes, small inside the cliff sides, close to the color of my own. Remote and ancient. Eyes that had seen the wild and not-wild, eyes that knew things.
The whole forest seemed to hold its breath. All at once the Gravedigger came to a conclusion that caused it to turn and saunter off, thrashing aside a tree as if it were of no more consequence than a weed. Thus the Gravedigger departed, quiet as it came, a cool gray moon. It had let me live.
I ran.
Branches slashed at my arms, vines whipped me in the face. Surely I was making a show of myself, gasping and huffing through the trees. When Alias reached out of the green and snatched my shoulder, I nearly yelped. He and my brother looked most incensed, Alias going so far as to bare his black gums. “What were you doing out there—giving birth?”
Jayan said he had gone looking for me. “Where were you?” he demanded.
I took a long trembling breath and imagined the tusker standing in judgment, weighing my fragile self, and something inside me shifted. Jayan’s gaze roved over me like a torch. For reasons I could not discern at the moment, I skirted the truth and mumbled instead: “Constipated. I am constipated.”
I turned away and shouldered the pack. Alias stuck his snout in my face. “You can shit a brick for all I care. We are on serious business here—”
Jayan put up a hand. “Enough. He understands.”
Alias looked between my brother and me, baffled by Jayan’s calm. I suspect my brother had intervened not in order to defend me from name-calling but because he had caught a secret wafting off me and knew pressure would best be applied in private.
Alias tossed Jayan’s hand away and said we would have to double our pace up the mountain in order to meet the Gravedigger on the slopes as planned. He trudged first, me second, Jayan last, my brother’s eyes boring into my back. I clenched my hand to keep it from shaking.
The Filmmaker
As soon as the news report ended, Teddy and I headed back to his room. He was utterly confused. He begged me to debrief him on what the hell Bobin had just told us and, more important, what he’d left out.
“So two days ago,” I said, “an elephant was killed in Sitamala.”
Teddy nodded impatiently. “And yesterday morning, Ravi started the postmortem.”
“Right, and sometime during the postmortem, this poacher, Mr. Shivaram—he was killed by a forest officer. The officers took a bullet off his body—”
“Out of his body?”
“Just listen. The guy was carrying bullets. One of those officers must’ve taken a few and delivered them to Ravi, and he, sort of, maybe …”
“Planted a bullet? On the dead elephant?”
I nodded.
“Jesus.”
“Allegedly. We don’t know what Ravi did unless we discuss it with him.”
“Oh, we’ll definitely discuss it.” Teddy paced the room in militant strides, his hands stuffed in his armpits. “We’ll film him on his rounds tomorrow morning, and then we’ll end by asking him about the dead poacher.”
“What, like, out of the blue?”
“I also want to raise the question of corruption. Something like How do you feel about working so closely with a Forest Department that’s been accused of a massive cover-up? Which could lead to a discussion of the Shankar Timber case …”
I listened in silence, staring at the splayed Moleskine on his desk. Teddy was talking with his hands. I took a breath, braced for impact. “I don’t know.”
Teddy halted. “Don’t know what?”
“The whole gotcha approach didn’t work so well last time.”
“I thought you were all about spontaneity. This could be a pivotal scene.”
“We’ll just piss him off.”
“Better than getting a canned answer. We pissed off Samina Hakim; you didn’t care about that.”
“We don’t need her the way we need him. Seriously, I think it’ll go better if I talk to Ravi first.”
“Let me guess.” Teddy eyed me steadily. “Alone?”
“He gets defensive sometimes, when we’re both there.” Teddy snorted; I persisted. “I won’t ask for specifics. The shoot will still be spontaneous. But I think it’s only fair that we let him know we want to go down this road.”
“And if he says no?”
I shrugged. “Then no. It’s not worth hurting him.”
“How would our little film hurt him?”
I hesitated; Teddy read what I couldn’t say.
“Shelly was different,” he added quietly. “She completely misinterpreted … she thought she was in love with me.”
He paused. “Or maybe it’s not that different.”
My stomach tensed.
“Emma, is there something you’re not telling me?”
That had always been my line, during interviews. At first I felt the pinned, panicky sensation I must have inflicted on others, but then the panic subsided, displaced by annoyance. What got me was the trickle of condescension, the indirectness of the approach, the sting of Ravi’s comment: He treats you like a child.
“Nothing you don’t already know.”
Teddy squinted as if he’d misheard me, until the truth seemed to crystallize, slowly, before his eyes.
“You and him,” he said.
I nodded.
When it became clear that I wouldn’t elaborate or apologize, Teddy stared hard at the ground.
“It’s over,” I said. “Obviously. We’re leaving in a few days.”
“He could tell someone. A blogger could pick it up. We’d never make a film again.”
“Now you’re being melodramatic.”
“How are you supposed to be objective now? How the hell am I supposed to trust you?”
I hesitated, unaccustomed to the scorn in his voice. “Ravi won’t say anything.”
Teddy shook his head.
“I know him, Teddy.”
“You slept with him. There’s a big fucking difference.”
A glacial silence passed as we stood there, suspended between strangers and friends.
I said I was going, but he didn’t lift his head.
In my room, I brewed black tea to stay awake; it went down in a bitter flame. I could’ve waited till morning, but my head felt so clogged with suspicion and dread I had no room for patience. I needed Ravi to tell me that what we’d heard was simply untrue, and until then I wouldn’t sleep.
Later, I found Bobin by the jeep, overseeing two keepers as they lifted a large wire cage from the back. Inside was a small macaque, munching on a banana.
“Ravi?” I asked. Bobin pointed me to the exam room.
The hanging bulb cast a sinister glow in the center of the operating table. I didn’t notice Ravi at first, sitting in the shadows, the same pose we’d caught him in the day before. Hands hanging empty, face vacant.
“Hey,” I said, causing him to bolt to his feet. “It’s just me. No camera.”
He weighed me a moment, then went to the table and unlatched the plastic toolbox, setting vials aside like a weary bartender.
“I saw the news.” I tried to sound casual. “I heard about the protests.” No answer, no sign of recognition. “We’d like to interview you about it.” More vials, more bottles. “And we’d like to interview those farmers about what happened, maybe Officer Vasu too.”
“Why them?”
“Because it’s important to show how the local community perceives you. And the center.” I felt the villagers’ accusations vying for space in the room. “Those are some serious allegations.”
“There are many sides to the local community and most of them are supportive of us. What you are trying to sniff out is a handful of rioters.”
“What happened?”
“Confidential.”
“Did Samina make you do it?”
“Make me?” His laugh came out flat and fake. “What do you think she is—a gangster?”
“Did she give you the bullet in her office? During your confidential meeting?” As I spoke, he stepped away, turning his back on me. “Is that why she hustled us out of there, why the postmortem just had to continue the next morning?”
“You people.” He locked onto me with slitted eyes. “Always hunting for a story so others can watch and feel outrage. What about my outrage? What about the outrage of another dead elephant, one I might have pulled from a ditch or a cave and brought here and bandaged and bottle-fed with my own hands? Plucked like that, easy as a weed?”
“I just want to know what happened.”
“You want to cut me open and drag it all out.” He clapped the toolbox shut, shelved it under the table. “Isn’t that what you do? Isn’t that your gift?”
“Tell me what happened to the dead guy. Shivaram.”
Even with my butchered pronunciation, the name made Ravi stare into the surface of the table, at the bright smudge of light. The whole room seemed to go still, and I kept silent, sure that one word from me would cause him to snap.
He said the poacher had been killed a few hours after the postmortem began. Officer Vasu had been involved. Some kind of confusion with the poacher, guns fired. “Vasu was frightened. He is one year from retirement. So he went to Samina Madame for help—”
“And she came to you.”
“She said to suspend the postmortem. That same night, I came to her office, as she asked. She explained the situation and gave me the bullet.”
“Where’d she find the bullet?”
With difficulty, Ravi said that Vasu had gotten it off the body. The man had been carrying a pouch of bullets but, mysteriously, no gun. “She gave me the bullet. She said it was up to me.”
“To frame a dead man,” I said.
“He was not an innocent. Whatever he was planning to do, Vasu stopped him from it.”
“He was unarmed! He hadn’t done anything!”
“What would you do? Throw old Vasu in the street, let these human rights people make a meal of him?”
“I wouldn’t falsify evidence, sorry to disappoint you. That’s just fucked up. That’s some LAPD shit.”
I’d lost him at LAPD. “You cannot put this in your film.”
“Why not? Everything you just said is already in the news.”
“So why blow it up even further? For your film? So you can parade around and pretend your art is of help to anything but your own career?”
I’d been calm this long, but now rage sprung up in me, hot and quick. “You never had a problem with my art when it made you look good.”
He hovered a moment, uncertain. “Forget about me, then. What about Samina Hakim? We never had a DRO like her before. We work closely with her department. Why go after one of the good guys?”
“Her track record isn’t exactly spotless.”
“Shankar Timber was one case—”
“Sure, until the next timber company comes along or mining company or mill …”
“Oh, spare me the lesson, Emma. No one here is a saint, not even you.”
“I’m not trying to be a saint. I’m trying to be objective.”
“Are you? Then what about the watch on your wrist? You think it appeared out of nowhere? You think that metal didn’t come from a mine like the one you’re talking about?”
“What—” I glanced down at the ten-dollar Casio I’d gotten from Walmart and crossed my arms. “What’s your point?”
“There has been no one better than Samina. I did twenty postmortems in ’97. This year I have done two. You want to go backwards now?”
“Oh, for god’s sake, the whole future of the species doesn’t hang on me.”
“No. Nor me.” With his thumb, he rubbed at a scratch on the steel table. “I know I am bailing water from a sinking boat with only my hands. You can either help me bail or make another hole.” He looked up at me. The scratch was still there. “Which will it be?”
I turned away, but he stepped closer, so close I could feel his breath on my shoulder. I could sense him willing me to yield, not unlike the night he put his hands on my waist. It had happened two weeks ago, but nearly every hour since, I’d hoped it would happen again.
“Please, Emma.”
He took my hand. He rubbed his thumb over the knot at my wrist, and for a few moments, we stood like that, avoiding each other’s eyes.
Once, in an interview, Ravi had told me he’d never marry, or, at least, he’d never find a woman willing to accept what he called his first wife—the Rescue Center. At the time, I’d thought he was joking. But I saw now that he was committed to something larger than the center, to a panoramic sense of peace, even if it meant painting over certa
in patches.
Maybe I yielded because I saw the logic—ugly but necessary—in that peace. Maybe I thought I was doing my small and noble part, protecting the species. That’s what I’d like to believe, though it seems equally possible that, at twenty-three, I gave in solely because my hand was in his.
I said I was tired, that I’d speak to Teddy, though I sensed Teddy wouldn’t be speaking to me anytime soon. Ravi offered to walk me back to my room, but I shook my head, thinking there would be other nights, that this wouldn’t be our last.
The Poacher
As we walked on through the forest, I could not rid myself of a certainty—the Gravedigger had let me live, but next time it would not. Every step up the hillside was a step in the wrong direction. My terror mounted; my heart jumped at each twitch and swish of leaf. Time to time I whirled about, surprised yet relieved to see the suspicious face of my brother.
“What is it?” he hissed at one point. “What did you see?”
How I wanted to tell him and would have, had we a moment alone. Even then he would have thought me soft and sentimental as a drunk. He would have guessed the Gravedigger, being weak-eyed, had not seen me, that the smeared scat on my arms had kept him from sniffing me out. Or that I had merely faced a dim-witted elephant, not the Gravedigger itself.
But I had looked into the creature’s eyes. Dim it was not.
“Manu,” Jayan whispered. “Tell me.”
Over his shoulder Alias cast a wary eye. I ignored my brother, my fearfulness, recalled the oath I had made to my mother. I kept an eye on the trees around me, the secrets behind their leaves. The birds gibbered invisibly.
Once we reached the uplands, Alias and Jayan climbed trees, hoping to catch sight of the animal. I stood at the foot of Jayan’s tree, scanning the yellow smears of grassland surrounding us, the tiles of farmland down below, the hostile peak up above. Where was the creature? I felt a muscle jumping in my jaw, my mind aswirl.
