by Tania James
“Eh! Wee Shivaram!”
I startled, and looked up.
Jayan was frowning down at me. “Binoculars.”
“I cannot.”
“Cannot what? I know I packed them.”
I took off my pack and set it on the ground. “I cannot kill the elephant.”
Jayan glanced at Alias, who was glaring all owlish from his perch, close enough to sense a disturbance, too far to hear details. “No one is asking you to kill it.”
“I cannot face it again.”
Jayan dug deep into my gaze. “What do you mean again?”
Alias thunked out of his tree like an overripe fruit, making his way to us.
“What if it knows,” I whispered quickly, “what if it knows we are coming for it? They say an elephant can sense when it’s being hunted. Maybe it will hide. Maybe it will wait for nightfall, hunt for us.”
How to describe Jayan’s disgusted expression? As though I were a leper, as if the tip of my nose had dropped off.
“What is the shitter saying now?” Alias asked. He struck a casual pose and lit a bidi.
“He wants to leave,” Jayan said.
What I wanted was to take the second chance the tusker had given me. What I wanted was to live, to work, to know the weight of a wife on my lap, to watch my children tumble down mounds of rice if life would so bless me. I had never stood in such intimate company with a wild bull elephant or felt its breath steaming upon my face, had never watched the ground beneath my feet fall away until all that remained was the small patch on which I stood trembling. How could a man survive such a thing unchanged? How could he glimpse that unholy omen, a warning as ancient as the oldest of fables, as obvious as a black-bellied cloud, and ignore it?
“Let him,” Alias said. He lifted his bidi into the air so the smoke could tell him the wind’s direction. “Although you may meet the Gravedigger on the way home.”
“How the hell is he to go home? Should he ask a greenback for directions?”
“You could come,” I said. “Part of the way. Or the whole way.”
Alias shook his head. “I can shoot the beast, but I cannot butcher the thing alone.”
“What butchering …,” I said. Jayan sighed with exasperation and looked away.
The truth gored me slow.
“But there are no blades in my pack,” I said.
“Check mine,” said Alias, flicking his chin at the tree where his smaller pack dangled from a branch. “You’ll find a kitchen knife, an ax, a handsaw …”
“But you told her,” I started and stopped. Still Jayan would not meet my gaze. “Where will you hide it? And if she finds it—”
“Enough questions!” Jayan said. “Why must you always be itching and whining, what if this, why that? If you are going, then go!”
I looked away, brimming with hurt and fury. Jayan was the type who did not know the difference between humbling and humiliating another. I was fed up with both.
“Then I am going,” I said.
Jayan nodded as if he understood this to be the only way. “Go,” he said calmly this time. “Go safely.”
He offered the rifle, but I refused it. I pretended to remember the route we had taken and promised to carry stones in my fist, lest the Gravedigger should discover me.
“Don’t take chances now,” Jayan said.
Spent of advice, he bit his lip—how like a boy he seemed then! We had no words, and so we simply looked as we had not looked in a very long time. Think of the last time you looked on someone you loved, merely looked without speaking, a face more familiar to you than your very own, a face that holds such mysteries.
“Our guest will be here any minute,” Alias said.
Abruptly I turned and walked away, fleet of foot without the pack. And yet every step felt heavy.
To hunt is to read a hidden language. Inside the forest, I was hunting for a way out. My plan was to take an eastward path, following the kinks of the stream all the way back to the split banyan where the ranger cousin would allow me safe passage. And yet no matter how hard I strained I could not hear the hum of the stream.
I minded the signals: the heaped hill of scat, the sever of a green-hearted branch. I tried not to think of my brother (thereby thinking of him constantly), and thus distracted I lost my footing and snapped a thick twig underfoot. I had snapped several by then, so I thought nothing of it—a sound one would only hear if listening precisely for this.
By now you know: someone was.
The Filmmaker
I barely saw Ravi in those last few days at the center. The middle ground of friendship was strange and swampy terrain, so we kept to our separate banks. I didn’t think we would ever be pen pals. His e-mails had the brevity of a haiku, the bluntness of a road sign.
As for Teddy and me, something had ruptured between us, irreparably. He went quiet in my presence, ate alone. We skated by on silence and small talk. I told myself some time apart would be cure enough, but deep down I sensed that our friendship wouldn’t survive these final days. Nor would our film.
The day Teddy and I left for Manaloor was a hectic rush of goodbyes. Ravi had insisted on trucking the calves in the evening, which left Teddy and me to fret over the fading light. We filmed the calves trailing the head keeper, Tarun, who backed up the ramp and into the truck bed, dangling bananas. Dev seemed especially agitated, immune to the sedative that Ravi had administered, a shot behind the ear. Only when Tarun lowered his head, allowing Dev’s trunk to fondle his neck, did the calf grow calm.
Once the calves were shut into the truck bed, Ravi stepped back, ducking to catch a glimpse as they nosed the slats, desperately flexing their nostrils. Something in the way he bit his lower lip reminded me of the way Juhi stuffed her trunk tip into her mouth. His theory was that she did it to keep ants from running up her nostrils at night. I thought it was her version of thumb sucking, a means of reassurance. “Always looking for a story,” Ravi had said, not without affection.
Later, I would think of a dozen other ways to say goodbye, jokes about Dev’s soccer stardom or genuine words of gratitude, but when Ravi approached I simply took the hand he offered me—a dry, priestly grip, as meaningless as the handshake he’d given to Teddy.
“Emma Lewis,” he said. He’d never spoken my name before, first and last, tender and taunting, and the sound of it closed the space between us. I don’t remember what I said; all I know for certain is the way he spoke my name, and suddenly it seemed possible that I could return to this very spot, years from now, and all would remain unchanged.
Of course, the illusion lasted only as long as the handshake. As we rolled away, Teddy cranked down the window on the passenger side and adjusted the side-view mirror. It was the perfect parting shot, with Ravi shrinking from view, lost to the swarming green.
In Manaloor, another rescued calf joined the three, a burly number named Bhim. Over the course of two weeks, the calves were taken for daily walks at the edge of the wildlife park, groomed to grow accustomed to the area, taught which berries and leaves to eat. All the calves were fastened with radio collars. Each day, they roamed a bit farther from the rangers, even so far as the watering hole, but always returned.
Teddy let me shoot more than usual during our time in Manaloor, maybe because he knew he wouldn’t be using very much of the footage. It was Teddy who would edit the film, Teddy who would score and sound mix the final cut. At first, we tried to work side by side from his apartment, but by then the bitterness between us had grown roots, and rather than fight him every day for reasons far messier than aesthetics, I withdrew myself from the film. I let him have everything. Another six months passed in a pointless blur, the price of surrendering a whole year of my life.
Five years later, I came across our film at the library. I didn’t recognize the title—Kavanar’s Creatures—but the DVD cover caught my attention, a still of an elephant calf with a shock of orange mohawk. I watched it alone, on a library computer, as if containing the film to a te
n-inch window could limit the impact.
There was Ravi. There was Officer Soman sparring with Officer Vasu, keepers feeding calves, and Samina Hakim pressing her lips together with muted fury. There was the dead elephant, its skin peeled back like the pages of a book.
There was no mention of the poacher, an omission that relieved and depressed me. I tried to remember his face from the news report, but it was just one of so many images floating past. I snatched at them, tried to align them with my memories.
Teddy had taken very few of my suggestions, but the one that stands out to me still is the final sequence of the film. In it, we’re tagging along with a beat officer named Vinod. He’s been charged with driving around the park for any sign of the collared calves, who have been vanishing for longer and longer swaths of the day.
One evening, we find the calves on the far edge of the watering hole, where a herd of females is drinking and bathing. It will take the calves another few weeks to detach from their keepers completely. In time, the beat officers will report sightings of Bhim, wandering on his own, while Juhi, Sunny, and Dev are foraging within ten yards of a herd. The officers will find the collars along the elephant routes, ditched like molted skins.
Vinod claims he can see the collared calves through his binoculars, but even through our telephoto lens, zoomed all the way in, the calves are indistinguishable from the rest. They seem twenty-four blots of a single herd that has gathered every evening, for ages, by the lake. And though this feeling has struck me more than once during filming, my heart lifts, open to the world, to the promise of my potential, to the beauty of our making, and I know this is where the film should end. This is it.
The Poacher
Twenty minutes into the forest, I was lost. Each trick my brother had taught me of tracking seemed to bend and blur in my head. What seemed elephant scat one moment seemed bison droppings the next. Did the circular track belong to females and the ovals to males or the other way around? I found a heavy stone—weak defense against an elephant—and upon storing it inside the pocket of my half pant, found something there already.
The bullets.
My stomach fell. I could not go back now and return the pouch to Jayan. Likely he had enough on his person. He had said to me once, A good hunter needs only one.
Still. It would give him cause to harangue me upon his return. Of all my possible futures, this was the brightest: Jayan swaggering through the doorway, bloodshot eyes full of triumph and ridicule. And so we would return to our bickering selves.
The longer I wandered, the likelier it seemed I would spend the night in the forest. I fought my own panic. I focused on my surroundings: a parakeet streaking through the air, a red spill of orchid on the side of a sal tree. At its base grew a froth of white mushrooms. I knelt to pluck a handful, a sorry offering for the women waiting at home.
It was then I heard him. A rustling behind me, so brief I would have assigned it to a monkey had I not heard the same rustle earlier that day, as sharp a threat as the squeal of a knife.
I did not risk a breath. Instinct flowed hot and fast as current from my brain to every edge of my self.
I slid my hand into my pocket, closed my fingers around a stone the size of my heart. Shivering leaves. Sunlight. Life moves at such speed, and yet that moment held the whole world still.
I spun about, arm cocked.
What came next is not so clear, for even the brightest mind is terribly slow.
I did not hear the greenback yelling.
I did not feel his bullet pierce my brain, easy as thread through a needle. Only after the bullet burst the back of my head did the tissues, strained to their limit, tear.
With that pure rush of freedom, I left myself.
And then I was running running through the green daze of the forest leaping over grassland in flying strides stopping only to look upon my brother who at the crack of the bullet had dropped out of the tree and screamed my name. Alias held him back—be sensible, he said—claiming the greenbacks would never wander so far up the mountain. For a long time my brother squinted into the tree line and my love for him filled the whole of my being.
Yet I could not stay. On I ran and suddenly I knew the way to the stream. I followed it out of the forest and through the farms, over our rice fields where my feet left no tracks and into the house and through the curtain of the room where Leela stood at the window, searching for us.
To meet her eye again. To thread her a needle, to help her fold a sheet. To turn back the days and unmake my mistakes.
I laid my hands on her belly as I should have the night before, with reverence.
I am sorry. I felt the child stir to my touch as did she. This one, I will never leave. I will watch him always.
Her hands searched the surface of her belly. The baby nudged her palm.
And now, dear girl, I ask your forgiveness as well. For we speak of boy children before the baby is born as if to bend fate to our favor. Everyone prays for a boy child, but what we needed was you.
I would be there when you were born into a house of mourning; I would be there to watch my brother hold you for the first time, towel wrapped and tight as a loaf in his arms; I would watch everyone carry you around on their hips. You would spend so much time in the air, your mother would fear you might never learn to toddle. But toddle you would, and I would be there to see it. Night and day I would watch you, unable to shield you from the arrows of grief, as when your mother would grow soundless at the thought of me or when your grandmother would stop her own heart as one would still the hands of a clock because she deemed it her time, she being a woman of great authority.
All these things had yet to pass. For now, Leela kept her hands in place, her palm still glowing from that tiny sign. She would name you Manusri—Manu for short—a name that no one could bear speak aloud in your early days, so they called you by other, sweeter names.
§
Now does your mind ever drift back to me? Or am I only the skinny fellow in the portrait that hangs in the sitting room? That photo does my visage no justice—I appear flat-faced and doomed, when in truth I was annoyed to be late for school. What to say. There is no telling what tales and traces will survive us.
Time to time you pause in passing, your gaze yearning up the wall to my face. Maybe you picture me following your father through the fields or milking the cow or sitting in the palli. There are only these glimpses like a fire that sparks but will not catch.
Someday you may come across the news articles that my brother clipped and collected in his mission to clear my name. What a great hoopla he made. In the reports, I was called Victim. Suspect. Poacher. My death became a cry of protest, something to put on a sign, severed from the whole of my life.
Still I have no hatred for the elephant. Time or man will hunt it down, though few have seen the creature of late. It wandered into one village where the women hurried onto a roof and welcomed it with pots of scalding water. A deaf girl saw the Gravedigger bashing a jackfruit against a tree. She and the elephant met eyes before it dipped its trunk into the flesh, indifferent to her presence.
Among the last to meet the Gravedigger was my brother, but most people think his story too fanciful for truth. This was the Ottayan after all, the beast whose name once appeared in a Western film, who had passed through the rhymes and nightmares of a village entire. Surely Jayan Shivaram had been bewitched by a dream, easy to believe when spending a night in the wild.
All day long, Jayan and Alias searched the forest for the Gravedigger. Jayan struggled under the weight of my pack and his gun, but these burdens were nothing next to the dread in his gut.
As the light began to die, Alias could no longer see the Gravedigger’s tracks. My brother refused to quit or go home. I suppose he knew what awaited him there.
So the two spent the night in the forest. They tended a small fire and slept some paces from its dwindling warmth. An old trick: if the greenbacks were to glimpse the fire, they would shoot at the flames, givi
ng Jayan and Alias the chance to escape.
Unable to sleep, Jayan thought about the gunshot. He thought of the fear and pleading in my face when last we parted.
In time, he fell into a restless sleep.
In the middle of the night, he felt the brush of something coarse across his cheek. He blinked to find a pile of branches and leaves drawn across his body. He caught a hint of the swampy breath. He knew.
Before him rose the Gravedigger, sudden and silent, enormous. It was pulling a palm frond over Jayan’s chest just as it had done for the still-sleeping Alias, whom the tusker had mistaken for dead.
At last the Gravedigger stopped and hovered over my brother, its tusks dimly aglow. Jayan barely breathed. He could read nothing in the Gravedigger’s eyes, aside from the moonlit glint. What did its silence mean? Was it stayed by the smeared scent of dung on Jayan’s arms or the sourness of skin and sweat not unlike the scent of my own?
See him there: my brother, buried and breathless at the base of a tree with only a thought in his head. So Manu was right.
And with this thought comes another, a realization that chokes him slow. The rest of his life is coming for him with all its grief and bitterness. He closes his eyes and wills the elephant’s foot to take him first.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to the Wildlife Trust of India for its invaluable work in the field of conservation, and especially to Vivek Menon, its founder and president, for his immense help with this book. I owe an equal debt of gratitude to Jose Louies, officer in charge of the Enforcement, Assistance, and Law Division. For more information on WTI, visit www.wti.org.in.
I would also like to thank:
The United States–India Educational Foundation and the Fulbright Program, especially Neeraj Goswami.
Abhijit Bhawal, veterinary surgeon with WTI’s Mobile Veterinary Service in Upper Assam, whose stories of animal rescue deserve an entire book unto themselves.
