Three Ways to Disappear

by Katy Yocom

  “Which itself is a bit simplistic,” he said. “Animals plan. They remember; they strategize. I wonder if we like to think of them as living in the eternal now simply to convince ourselves we’re different from them.”

  They rolled into the village, and Sanjay parked near a scrubby young tree—Sarah hadn’t seen a tree in this village that wasn’t scrubby and young—and a pack of children came running to meet the vehicle, calling out “Ramram!” When they saw Sarah, the shouts changed to “White lady! White lady!” and one of the girls asked, “Aap ke nam kya hai?”—what’s your name? When she told them, the children pounced on the name like a new toy, confusing the sounds with delighted abandon as they buoyed their visitors like two corks to the tidily whitewashed home of the sarpanch, the village’s leader. His wife was bent over a jug of water near the door. She straightened, drew her dupatta over her head, flapped the indigo-and-gold hem of her lehenga to shake off the dust, and offered a wide smile that included them both. Sanjay had advised Sarah that Vinyal women were generally easier to get along with than the men.

  The sarpanch’s wife greeted Sanjay, then glanced over at Sarah and asked a question in the local dialect.

  “A new colleague,” Sanjay said. Sarah had come on this visit partly to observe but mostly to become a familiar face to the villagers. She was certainly making an impression among the children, several of whom were petting her hair. One of the girls caught hold of a lock and gave it an experimental yank. Sarah returned the favor quickly but lightly, making the children laugh. A girl of six or seven in a red gingham dress offered her a shivering newborn goat to hold. Sarah took it, marveling at the heat pouring off the little body and the strength of its slamming heart. She wanted to say something but couldn’t come up with the Hindi word for goat. Fortunately, she knew how to solve that problem. “Kutta?” she asked innocently—dog?

  The children threw their heads back and roared with laughter. The sarpanch’s wife gave Sanjay a sidelong glance.

  “Come on now,” Sanjay said. “She was making a joke.”

  Next the sarpanch’s wife asked the inevitable question. “She wants to know where your husband is,” Sanjay said to Sarah, not quite meeting her eye. No one at Tiger Survival had ever asked about her marital status.

  “Tell her I’m traveling solo,” Sarah said. But the woman smiled at Sarah and asked the question herself in the local language. For clarification she pointed to the red-dyed line at the part in her hair, then to her heavy silver bangles, the marks of a married woman. The girls craned their necks to see Sarah’s response.

  Sarah answered, “Nehi,” and bore it like a soldier when the sarpanch’s wife clucked her tongue in pity. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” Sarah said in Hindi. “I like it this way.” The woman laughed, clearly both amused and unconvinced.

  Sarah caught Sanjay’s eye and gave him a private grin, an invitation to laugh with her, but he turned away. It caught her off guard. Maybe she’d been too friendly.

  Earlier, on the drive to Vinyal, Sanjay had told Sarah the village originally existed on a beautiful site below the cliffs of Ranthambore, with an enormous banyan tree at its center and plentiful firewood, fodder grass, and water all around. The government had taken the land in the process of making Ranthambore into a national park and unceremoniously plopped the villagers down on this flat, treeless, all-but-riverless plain. True, the government had dug a well, paid what it thought was adequate compensation, and built sturdy houses on the new site. Still, it was the principle of the thing. And then the livestock ruined the ground cover, everything turned to dust, and resentment in Vinyal became about more than just principle. Things had improved five years ago when Tiger Survival built a lake, but even so, the sarpanch had little use for governmental agencies or NGOs. Lots of promises, not much action seemed to be his opinion.

  “Unfortunately, he’s not entirely wrong,” Sanjay had told Sarah. “I’m forever tracking down the supervisor of thus-and-so who won’t return my calls, filling out forms that turn out to be the wrong forms. You can’t get a permit because you don’t have an order form, but you can’t get an order form without a pending permit. The bureaucracy is maddening. People think Indians are fatalistic. This is why.”

  The sarpanch stepped from the house just then, a small, grizzled man in white homespun. “Please, sit,” he said, indicating a rough bench liberally spattered with crimson paan stains.

  His wife disappeared inside and emerged a moment later with glass cups of tea for the three of them. Within seconds Sarah and Sanjay found themselves surrounded by several dozen men and children curious to know their business. Apparently, conversation qualified as a spectator sport. Sarah sipped her tea and did a quick assessment of the crowd over the rim of the glass. No girls over the age of ten or so.

  The discussion took place half in the local dialect, half in Hindi. The sarpanch asked about government compensation for Sunil’s widow. Ten thousand rupees, Sanjay told him, being processed now. Among the audience, the atmosphere shifted at the mention of money. Ten thousand rupees was about $450, and cash—like firewood, water, and every other resource with the notable exception of cow dung—was a scarce commodity in the village.

  “But the money won’t come,” the sarpanch said. “It never does. And even if it did, eventually it runs out. Better if they offer her a job.”

  “I’ll ask my contact if he can arrange something,” Sanjay said. “Are the men wanting to kill the animal that did this?”

  The sarpanch gave a noncommittal reply. Sanjay asked him to remind the men that the tiger controlled the population of boar and other crop-destroying animals.

  “I think as long as there’s not another accident, no one will do anything stupid,” the sarpanch said.

  Sanjay scanned the faces in the crowd. “Achchha.” He didn’t look convinced. Sarah shot him a question with her eyes.

  “The villagers have a lot of respect for the tiger,” he told her in English. “Mostly they pray to Durga, the mother goddess, but they also pray to him.”

  “But still they’ll try to kill him if the price is right,” Sarah said. “Like Sunil did, before he ended up on the other side of the equation.” She knew that, in the villagers’ orthodoxy, he had met with an enviable fate. A person killed by a tiger escaped the cycle of rebirth and became one with God. Moksha was the word for it. Nirvana. She wondered how the belief had arisen. Probably as most beliefs do, she decided: out of the need for comfort and a hedge against terror.

  When she and Sanjay finished their visit with the sarpanch, a young boy led them toward the village well, down a wide dirt road where two white cows stood chewing cud, their horns painted blue. On the way, Sanjay said he felt sure there wouldn’t be another accident. “In my fifteen years as a naturalist at Ranthambore, Sunil is only the second tiger accident victim,” he said. “It’s true that every year a body or two is found inside the park, and family members try to blame it on a tiger, but that’s never the case. The rumor is that certain villagers know how to make a murder look like a tiger accident, although they would hardly need to. A day or two in the park, and the ants and vultures and jackals will dispense with ninety percent of the evidence.”

  Sarah raised an eyebrow. “How convenient for the murderer.”

  “The villages can be a little lawless,” he said.

  At the well, they found Padma, Sunil’s widow, washing her youngest child, who stood shivering and clutching her wet clothes. They waited while Padma dried the girl and hefted her in her arms, all with the half-gone expression of the recently bereaved. When Sanjay offered condolences, she nodded dully, her eyes coming into focus only when he spoke of the compensation. Piya sucked her fingers and stared with serious eyes at Sarah, whom she seemed to remember.

  “You’re staying at your sister’s?” Sanjay asked. “Everything going okay there?”

  Padma moved her head in a way that could mean anything. Sa
rah surmised that okay might not be the right term when your husband was six days dead.

  They walked with Padma to her sister’s house. Piya stretched her arms toward Sarah. “She likes you,” Padma said, handing her over.

  “I like her, too,” Sarah said. The little girl rested her chin on Sarah’s shoulder and played quietly with her hair as they walked.

  At the house, a silent moment passed as they considered the storage shed where Padma and her children were staying. A small patch of floor had been cleared out for their string cot and a few possessions; the rest of the shed was given over to a teetering pile of firewood, discarded odds and ends, and cow dung patties for burning. A junk slide in the making.

  Sarah set Piya down. “Let’s at least organize it a little,” she said, wishing for a pair of thick gloves. This was going to be dirty, splintery, spidery work, but there was nothing to do about it except dive in. Padma’s white sari, the traditional widows’ garb, got filthy. Sarah muttered about snakes until she scratched her forearm on a piece of rusty barbed wire. She and Sanjay exchanged a glance. “Thank God for tetanus shots,” she said. She pushed her sweaty hair out of her eyes with a filthy hand. This was definitely not journalism.

  In an hour’s time, they transformed the heap into something more like stacks, smaller and less wobbly: wooden things against one wall; plastics in the middle; rope and twine as the bookend. When they finished, they stood back and considered their handiwork. “Go, team,” Sarah said brightly. She held up her hand to see if Sanjay would grasp it as he’d done on their first drive in the park, but he merely glanced at her and nodded.

  Still, they’d done good work. You couldn’t call it neat, but they’d lowered the junk heap’s center of gravity to a presumably nonlethal level.

  “Do you need anything else, Padma-ji?” Sanjay asked.

  Padma stared at him and laughed in disbelief.

  .

  By Sarah’s second week in India, it had become clear that Geeta had neglected to arrange a proper welcome dinner. William stepped into the breach with an invitation to dine with him. (She emailed Quinn: “My ten-year-old self is freaking out!”)

  When he opened the door, she stood grinning, a bottle of Kingfisher in each hand. “My mother told me never to show up empty-handed.” She handed him the bottles and pulled off her shoes. They sat down to an expertly prepared dinner of rice, dal, saag paneer, chapatti, and small bowls of onion chutney. He poured the beer into glasses. “The last time I drank beer from a bottle,” he said, “I swallowed a bee. It was rather an emergency. It stung me on the way down, and my throat swelled nearly shut.”

  “I can see where that would put you off bottles,” she said. “If it happens again, I’ll give you a tracheotomy with my Swiss army knife.”

  “You’d do that?” He sounded immensely pleased.

  “Sure I would. One quick jab—you’d hardly even feel it.”

  The right side of his mouth curled into a smile. “Well,” he said. “To the large-hearted gentleman. Cheers.”

  Sarah touched her glass to his. “To the large-hearted gentleman.”

  “Do you recognize that phrase?”

  “Jim Corbett,” she said. “I’ve got a 1944 first edition of Man-Eaters of Kumaon upstairs.”

  “Do you?” he asked. She was beginning to find his lopsided smile charming. “When I was a boy, I’d sit up beneath my sheets with a torch, reading it.”

  She found it lovely talking with William about Corbett’s memoir, exchanging favorite tidbits of a tale they both knew. Too smart to be fearless (they agreed), Corbett was nonetheless extraordinarily brave. Tall and lanky, dressed in khaki hunting garb and accompanied by his faithful beagle, Robin, he tracked man-eating tigers into box canyons in the Himalayan foothills, following trails of bloodied clothing and human body parts, knowing every moment that the beast he stalked may have been stalking him. Yet he harbored an abiding respect for the tiger, even before his transformation from hunter to conservationist.

  Sarah raised her glass and quoted her favorite passage from the memoir: “‘The tiger is a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage and … when he is exterminated—as exterminated he will be unless public opinion rallies to his support—India will be the poorer, having lost the finest of her fauna.’”

  They touched glasses again. “To Jim Corbett,” William said.

  “To Jim Corbett.” Sarah set down her glass. “So, I’ve been wondering. How did you end up here, working for Tiger Survival?” She scooped up a bit of dal and watched him consider his answer.

  “The short version is that I’d been filming lions in the Okavango Delta and I came down with malaria. I spent eight weeks in hospital. I ended up in a coma and pretty far down the road into organ failure. The doctors didn’t expect me to live.” He paused. “And then I rallied. No one can say why.”

  She made a sympathetic sound. She supposed that explained his facial paralysis.

  “I stayed on in Botswana for a time with a friend, a man named Taft who runs a big-cat rescue operation. Geeta suggested I come to India to finish recovering.”

  “So you knew her before you came here.”

  “Indeed I did. We were married once,” he said dryly, surprising her. Her research hadn’t uncovered the fact of their marriage, but she supposed it explained his familiar form of address. “We met when we were both living in Kenya. We moved in the same circles. After we divorced, we kept in touch through the years. When she offered me this position, she told me my primary qualification was that I knew how to build a lake.” He smiled. “My first in India was at Vinyal, actually.”

  “That must have been satisfying work,” she said.

  “Less so than you might think,” he said. “You would have thought the villagers would welcome it—the women spent half their days hauling water—but the men would sit and watch us, paring their fingernails with enormous knives and offering unhelpful commentary. We’d come to work in the mornings to find the track hoe and excavator had been stripped overnight. Bolts, nuts, any little part they could pry off to sell for liquor money. We’d show up for work, and they’d watch to see if we could figure out what they’d done. Usually we did, and dealt with it, but occasionally not, and then the equipment would break down and the tribesmen would laugh all the harder. In the end I had to hire armed guards.”

  “Talk about working against their own interests,” Sarah said. “The wives, at least, must have been on your side.”

  “The married men would have left us alone, I think. It was the younger men doing the damage.”

  “Isn’t that always the way?”

  “Here, pass me your glass.” He filled it with the last of the beer. “You know, you’re quite a curious person, Sarah DeVaughan.”

  “Curious nosy or curious odd?”

  “Nosy’s a harsh word.” He set the glass down. “As for the latter, I don’t know you well enough to draw that conclusion, do I?”

  She smiled. “Guilty as charged on the nosiness front.”

  “Not a bad quality in a journalist.”

  “When I was little,” she said, “four or five, I had this assumption that I’d get to switch bodies with people every so often. I thought that was how the world worked.” She paused. “I also thought I would eventually learn everything there was to know.”

  “Must have been a nasty shock to find out otherwise.”

  “I was outraged,” she said. “Stuck being one person forever.”

  “One must admit it’s a flawed system,” he said. “I like your way better. I’d rather fancy being a cheetah for a day. Or a black-shouldered kite. Were animals part of your scheme?”

  “Oh, absolutely. I was four, remember.” She ran a piece of chapatti around her plate. “I still want to know what life is like for other people. Like Hari, for instance. I can’t figure him out.”

  “He doesn’t
have much English.”

  “But he doesn’t say much in Hindi, either.”

  “He does if you get him going on birds. He says it’s mad to go driving about stalking the elusive tiger when there are beautiful birds to be seen everywhere you look.” He sat back and looked at her curiously. “So why not still be a journalist, if you’re so keen on understanding people?”

  So he could give as good as he got. She liked that. “I spent ten years telling stories about wars and environmental disasters. In the end, I felt I wasn’t really doing much good. As a journalist you’re not supposed to influence the story or get involved. You must have faced the same thing with your films, surely?”

  He considered it. “Yes and no. My films were opinion pieces, really. Built on the belief that wildlife and wild places are worth saving.”

  “You made a believer out of me,” she said. “Young girl grows up on nature documentaries, becomes itinerant journalist. Those two things are not unrelated.” She said it casually, her glass halfway to her lips, but she meant it as a gift. Though, come to think of it, she’d probably just made him feel shockingly old. “I do feel a little guilty for giving up on journalism,” she added. “I’m a believer, always have been. I’ve always thought the journalist’s job was to keep the citizens informed, and the citizens’ job was to hold the politicians accountable. But now I’ve decided, for essentially personal reasons, to bow out.”

  “You feel you’re shirking your duty, is that it?”

  She let go an exasperated sigh. “The entire news industry is shirking its duty. No one’s bothering to do real journalism anymore. Twenty-four-hour news cycle, fragmentation of the audience, blah blah blah. You know.”

  “But here you are instead. Cutting out the middleman, aren’t you? Working to influence the policymakers directly. One could consider that the opposite of bowing out.”