by Tania James
“Why not?”
“You will grow into something greater than a farmer, my boy. Sure as calves become cows.”
There was such magic to his words, the way he pressed a finger like a wand to my chest.
Jayan, meanwhile, had his own aspirations. He helped on the farm from time to time but mostly retreated to some shady corner of town with his friends, strays and idlers we never met.
Raghu had spied my brother with a rough bunch at a shappe, trading Tamil over toddy and fish. I said nothing of this to my mother, who would have thrown a great thumping fit on account of the fish eating.
As for me I much preferred spending my school-free hours with Raghu on his father’s farm. Raghu’s father was day to my father’s night, two years older and temptation-proof. We called him Synthetic Achan (though not within earshot) due to his constant refrain: “Cola? What do you want to drink cola for? Cola is crawling with synthetics.” The same went for boxed juices, white sugar, candies, chocolate, and most every other good and delicious thing.
And yet I loved Synthetic Achan, for he was the same man every hour of every day, begun with a glass of warm milk and finished off with a thimble of toddy and two smacks of the tongue. (Toddy was the only spirit he would touch, as it came straight from the coconut.) He was careful with his money and his land, having inherited seven acres to my father’s six. At the end of each harvest he was rewarded with mountains of fragrant, golden, unmilled rice, which he stored in the shed. As children, Raghu and I would scramble up the mounds and slide down the sides until our legs itched from the husks. Itchy or not, this was the best time of my life.
But mine was a flimsy happiness, not the kind of happy that lasts.
The trouble began when my mother found a pouch of bullets in Jayan’s cabinet—thick and crude as if sawed from a steering rod—and thrust the pouch at my father. She felt it a father’s duty to straighten out a wayward son even if the father himself was wayward past hope.
That evening Jayan found my father waiting on the sit-out, sober for once. My mother and I hovered in the doorway.
“What are these for?” my father said, tossing the pouch of bullets at Jayan’s feet.
Jayan took his time adjusting the new watch around his wrist before bending to pocket the bullets. The watch was a Solex, poor cousin to the Rolex, but gold and fine all the same. “For making money.”
“Black money.”
“Least it’s mine.”
My mother gripped the doorway, all the heat gone from her voice. “Not here. Inside.”
But my father was already sailing down the steps on a wave of interrogation: Was it Jayan who had brought the gun into the house and was it Jayan who had been butchering elephants and God knew what else and was it Jayan who had so shamed his mother and father by becoming the one thing they had never dreamed he would be, a lowlife poacher, and in doing so, made them lowlives as well? Was it? Did Jayan have nothing to say for himself? Did he have a banana in his mouth?
Never before had my father spent so much breath on my brother. They had always been two lone wolves content to prowl their own sides of the mountain. Now Jayan’s lips trembled as if in fear or remorse, I could not tell.
Then he broke out laughing.
“Shamed you?” said Jayan. “Shamed you?”
“Stop laughing.”
“I used to think you were unlucky. Now I know you’re just stupid.”
In one swipe my father had him on the ground.
My mother ran to Jayan’s side, but he blocked her with his arm. His watch face caught a glimpse of moonlight. It looked suddenly huge to me, so wrong on his slim wrist.
For a terrible second, I thought Jayan would charge at my father. Instead my brother dealt a blow much worse: he looked at my father and said we all wished him dead.
The thought had crossed my own mind once or twice. Indeed I had imagined a fatherless life. Wouldn’t you, if you watched your father day by day destroy your mother and drink away your land, wouldn’t you once or twice imagine him resting in peace so you could honor what good memory of him remained and preserve what land and love were left?
Still Jayan should not have said it. To hear that truth out loud—it was a whipcrack to my heart.
My father tried to hide his hurt by spitting off to the side. But for a narrow moment his eyes met mine, and I saw the depths behind them, I saw how tired he was. Some men cannot master their many selves. My father was such a man, and he knew this just as he knew where his life would end.
One month later his body was pulled from a river. Bruises round the throat, a clump of his woolly beard torn out. My mother forbade us from speaking to the police for fear of reprisal, yet I could not rid the image from my mind—my father floating facedown on the water, all his hopes for me somewhere at the bottom.
Later I asked my brother, “You don’t miss him at all?”
Jayan considered the question for less than a second. “Do you miss having a car?”
“We never had a car.”
“That we did not.”
Jayan worked in the field till the sun striped his arms, till dirt gummed his nails and streaked his legs from standing calf-deep in mud. He followed my father’s right-hand man on morning rounds, learning how to sow seeds and replant the shoots stalk by tender stalk, to read the crop by its color and posture, when to feed nitrogen to sallow plants, when to set out magnesium cakes for the rats who sucked the juice from the base of a broken stalk. Whether by mistake or misfortune or a savage flock of doves, the first two plantings suffered. In the meantime, my brother kept up his side business.
He learned to read the crop, and I learned to read him. The day before a hunt, he was always glancing at the trees, listening for his omen, the woodpecker. If the woodpecker called from the east, I would glimpse my brother the next morning slipping past the house in his hunting uniform—green half pant and black T-shirt. If, the day after he returned from the forest, a blue Maruti drove up to the shed and my brother stuffed a fertilizer sack in the trunk, the hunt had gone well. If the driver haggled with my brother at length, Jayan would assume a foul mood for the rest of the day.
As a new policy my mother turned her gaze elsewhere, for she believed Jayan might abandon us forever if pressed too hard. I never shared her doubt, yet Jayan was Jayan, and he had his days. Some nights he drank with his feckless friends, and as the hours went on, he turned his frustrations onto the nearest bystander and came home fat lipped and dented. Easy to forget he was but twenty years old.
On hunts, I would come to learn, Jayan led a gang of four. Among them he was the gunman, making twice as much as the others who carried supplies. He was careful to keep these associates apart from me out of embarrassment. He said I was fragile as a flower when it came to physical tasks, a theory he based on my love of books. (He rarely read anything longer than a receipt.)
So I was unpleasantly surprised when Jayan invited Raghu and me on a business trip to Kottayam. Jayan would be meeting with his boss, a man by the name of Communist Chacko, with whom he hoped to deal directly instead of haggling with that driver over every ounce of ivory.
“Why can’t you ask one of your other colleagues?” I said. “That one fat-necked fellow you’re always running with.”
“I cannot trust him for a thing like this, and I cannot go alone, I’ll look like a nobody.”
“But we have school.”
“We can skip it,” Raghu volunteered. This was Raghu—quick to answer even if no one had asked him a question. He was eager for adventure and adulthood, a moment of glory in his otherwise inglorious life. He was also eager to skip class.
“Good,” said Jayan, and to me: “We will save you a seat.”
By “seat,” he meant a sliver of space in a mini-lorry that pummeled my hind parts for most of the five-hour journey. All throughout Raghu asked questions about hunting and guns as if studying for a job interview. Jayan told of the time he went for a five-day hunt and found himself having to eat a din
ner of boiled black monkey. “I begged them to cut off the head before cooking it, but they said the brain was the best part.” Jayan shook his head. “All curled up and tail cut. Looked just like a baby boiling in a pot.”
Not a second too soon we reached Communist Chacko’s house, a stucco hulk with stone dolphins on the gateposts. Raghu thought it all folly and waste (“What is the point? A house can’t feed a man”), but Jayan told him to shut up and say nothing until we were back on the road.
Communist Chacko had been trained as a lawyer—he always attached “Esq.” to the tail of his signature—but he was the picture of a politician with that smile, as slick and white as his marble floor. Framed photos claimed every wall, his sons Lenin and Stalin featured in most. The boys were poor in school but no matter, said Communist Chacko, Lenin-Stalin would follow him into the family business. Names like theirs they wouldn’t find a job that easy. The names had been Dolly’s idea. His wife’s people were total Marxists. Communist Chacko didn’t mind. “You know the best part of being a Marxist? You don’t have to go to church.” For one who never went to church, the man liked to preach.
Communist Chacko led us out the back door, bypassing a shed that hummed with machinery. At the foot of a steep metal staircase, he kicked up his mundu and squinted at the summit. “Come. The birds are waiting.”
What the hell kind of code was he speaking? Were “the birds” his associates awaiting us in that tarp-lined chamber on the roof? I was the last to clang up the wobbly rungs and emerge into a small space that contained Communist Chacko, Jayan, Raghu, and seven wire cages of fowl.
There were two to each cage, husband and wife, most of them feathered in red, yellow, and green. Communist Chacko puckered his lips at a nearby parrot, who clung to the wire with dainty taloned feet. He raised a fingertip to its beak; the parrot bit gently and released. “She’s a sweet one,” said Communist Chacko. “The others will snip your switch off.”
“What are they for?” Raghu whispered to me.
“Breeding and selling,” said Communist Chacko. “You should see the cockatoos mate, it’s quite charming.”
I would have sooner watched a dog make turds, but in the spirit of pleasing our host, I peered into a cage of small parakeets. Four whites and two grays flicked their necks this way and that.
“I had a macaw,” Communist Chacko said wistfully. “He flew off. Can you imagine—watching one whole lakh dissolve into blue sky?”
“Maybe not a whole lakh,” said my brother. “But I know what it is to lose hard-earned money.”
Communist Chacko grinned at one of the switch-snippers. “You had a falling-out with Babu.”
“He takes too great a cut and for what? For his car? We have a mini-lorry.”
“Yes, I saw. Not the most inconspicuous vehicle.” The fat man gazed into another cage, where a diseased-looking parakeet perched alone, ragged and balding in patches, eyes like milky bulging marbles. It held itself perfectly still, wings folded tight around a tortured heart.
“He is inconsistent,” my brother went on. “Haggling like a fishmonger, wasting my time. And who is he to judge the grade? The man has cataracts for god’s sake.”
Communist Chacko sighed as if all this backbiting were undignified. His breath ruffled the blind bird’s breast.
“Will it die?” I asked, forgetting my brother’s no-talk policy. He gave me a look that said he would bury me in my books.
“Fairly soon I would think,” said Communist Chacko. “Do you like animals?”
“None I would like to see mating.”
Communist Chacko laughed. “I am not a sentimental person, you know. If you told me tomorrow their feathers were precious in China, I would be out here plucking the lovelies myself.” Communist Chacko stepped back from the cages and resumed his preacher voice: “And God said unto Man, Be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Raghu nodded along like a born-again.
“OK, do this,” said Communist Chacko. “Deliver the tusks directly to me. I will give you two thousand more per kilo. But this is on a one-month trial basis only. Any little problem and we go back to the old way.”
After taking specific directions on protocol—where to drop off and when and to whom—we left the preacher to his fowl and emerged into the swollen heat. I trotted down the last few steps, somehow uplifted by my brother’s success and my hand in it. And perhaps I would have forgotten all about the shed had it not shrieked at me as I passed. My brother and cousin walked ahead, unhearing. The door was ajar.
How well I recall the world in that narrow room. Two long tables covered in a forest of white figurines. A troop of tiny elephants. Bangles smooth and stacked. And in the far corner a giant Nataraj with one sleek limb raised, all in ivory.
Several craftsmen sat at the tables, some carving with awls fine as a sparrow’s claw. A man ground a piece against a whetstone. A young boy went from table to table, using a careful cupped hand to sweep ivory shavings into a bag.
“We sell them to Ayurvedic doctors,” Communist Chacko said, causing my heart to jump. “Little ivory powder and coconut oil could do wonders for your dandruff.”
“I do not have dandruff.”
“Then I suppose that shit on your shoulder is snow.”
As I brushed at my shirt, I could feel his eyes on me, narrowing.
“You are a curious fellow, aren’t you?” he said.
“Sorry, sir, the door was open—”
“Oh, I don’t care. I have a license. Got it ten years before the ban, luckily.”
“So the Forest Department looks the other way?”
“Depends on who is doing the looking.” He pointed to a pair of tusks on a nearby table. “Those are for P. K. Kurian, the divisional range officer before that lardy little Muslim took over. She’s a tough one. Have you met her?”
“No.”
Communist Chacko ushered me out of the shed, closing the door. “Count yourself lucky.”
So every other month Jayan and his fat-necked associate drove their spoils to Kottayam and I returned to my studies quite happily. I was only fifteen years old, yet I had mapped the course of my life—to do my pre-degree in Commerce and attend college and someday be chief manager of a bank, with my own glass-walled office where visitors had to wait their turn. Jayan may have been our lifeboat in those days, but I would build a great ship of myself. I would keep the sea so calm my mother would hardly feel it shift beneath her feet.
But ships take a long time to build, much longer than it takes to build a dream. In the meantime Jayan would give her no peace.
One dull gray morning, the mini-lorry came up the road and stopped before our house. My brother stepped out, followed by a woman who kept her apologetic gaze on the ground.
She had dainty toe rings on each of her dusty feet, the sort of ornament that seemed to me both ridiculous and intriguing. I tried not to look too hard at her face, at the lashes that grazed her cheeks. I tried to appear calm when Jayan introduced her as his wife. Leela. A woman he had found and then married in a Kottayam courthouse.
Oh, the fit my mother threw. How could Jayan do such a thing? Elope with some Christian no-name without even a hello-goodbye to his mother? What kind of loose shameless beef-eating she-dog would run off with a Hindu, no engagement, no dowry, no nothing? (The indecent kind, that’s what—the taking-advantage kind!) And why did Jayan think the beef-eater would never run from him?
From the look of her, Leela seemed the kind of woman who had been fed an exclusive diet of pomegranate and almonds and milk, by which I mean she was fair and softly built, her features made to fill a movie screen. “World class, mangoes like that.” Raghu sighed. I smacked his head. He smacked me back, claiming she wasn’t his sister.
Leela had lived her life on the coast and had never seen the forests and valleys and ghats my brother had promised her. Once she asked me: “Is it true the tribals are so da
rk because they are partway African?”
“Partway who?”
She toyed with the tip of her braid. “I heard the tribals married the African slaves that the Britishers brought with them. That is why the tribals are so dark. Because of the Africans.” Hesitantly she added, “There are no tribals in my village.”
I stared at her, much conflicted with thoughts. You are simple and silly. You are the most beautiful thing I have seen. You are married to my brother. Why? My brother has the brain of a wall lizard. I am sharp in school. I am sure to make something of myself, sure as calves become cows. But will Mother let me find a Leela of my own? No. Because every family only allows itself one mistake. You are that beautiful mistake. And now I will marry some cross-eyed callus-hoofed heifer with whom my stars align.
“Not because of the Africans,” she concluded, a blush warming her cheeks.
All the facts we knew of Leela could have fit on the side of a toothpaste box. Her people hailed from some flyspeck village she neglected to name. She had no schooling or training. Her father was a bricklayer. How she and Jayan had met was a mystery my mother titled Their Filthy Beginnings and refused to read a single page.
If the world according to my mother was out of joint, the crop showed no sign of it. The stalks were growing strong, nodding strands of rice fine as seed pearls. Leela survived my mother’s silence behind a wall of politeness, swift to melt out of sight if my mother was in a mood. No sooner had my mother finished her morning tea than Leela whisked the cup away to rinse it. She took up the washing and ironing and sweeping while my mother pointed out every stain and crinkle and crumb, as if she had personally invented the art of housewifery.
All this abuse Leela bore with a steady temper. Jayan’s puppy love seemed sustenance enough. She basked in his stinky presence whenever he returned from the fields, and he was no less infatuated, his hand always grasping her waist, her braid, her bottom, handful upon handful and never enough. He only took such liberties at what he presumed were private moments, but in a three-room house few moments are private.