by Tania James
The jeep trundled us homeward in the late afternoon. The moon made an early cameo, a translucent scoop of vanilla melting into the blue. Ravi had mellowed toward me, and riding beside him, I almost forgot about Teddy in the backseat, wearing that sated look he always got at the end of a good day. Ravi steered with one hand, pointing out the cotton silk trees, the sals, the white pines, and the occasional aanjili, guarded by thuggish monkeys.
We came to idle behind an open lorry, four boys crammed in the back, heels bopping against the bumper. Three of them were chatting; the fourth was distracted by a silky seed floating past. I thought of that Helen Levitt photograph: four girls walking down a street, distracted by passing soap bubbles. Helen Levitt had been twenty-five, around my age, when she bought a Leica. She fit a winkelsucher to her camera, a device that let her point herself in one direction while the photo snapped from the side, so the subject was oblivious to being photographed.
I have almost no photos of our time in India. I told myself I didn’t want to be that tourist, snapping exotica for the benefit of friends back home, who’d get bored after flipping through a dozen or so. Teddy and I saw our India only in terms of the film, admittedly a narrow lens. We made up for our insecurities by being dogged in purpose: to get everything we could, and get it right.
And yet there were unexpected moments I still wish I could have captured somehow, in a medium more lasting than memory. Like the boy in the lorry, reaching for the silk seed. Or Ravi reaching over the gearshift and squeezing my hand, before Teddy could see.
For dinner, Ravi took us to his favorite restaurant, Y2K, a cryptic name belied by perky flower settings and plastic gingham tablecloths. Our server brought three “home-style meals”—a hillock of rice accessorized with various stews and curries—and diplomatically set spoons beside two of the plates. Ravi ate with nimble fingers that never seemed to still, always tossing or crushing or rounding up a bite, leaving little room for talk.
We were halfway into the meal when Teddy said, “Okay, Em, fess up.” My stomach dropped, knowing where he was headed. I’d forgotten to warn him, neglected to explain. Now my signals—beseeching eyes, rigid head shake—were all too late. “Where’d you get that stuff about Shankar Timber?”
Ravi’s head snapped up.
Slowly I spooned more pickle onto my plate. “I don’t remember.”
“You asked her about Shankar Timber?” Ravi said.
Teddy turned to Ravi. “Have you heard about this? There’s a village called, what was it—”
“Manaloor,” Ravi said.
“Right. Anyway, the discussion got pretty tense, but Emma didn’t back down. She’s an excellent interviewer, way better than me.”
I shook my head at Teddy. “He doesn’t wanna hear this.”
“What makes her so excellent?” Ravi asked. A brittle note had entered his voice.
“Well, generally speaking, people tend to spill their guts around her.”
“Jesus, Teddy, you’re making me sound like an operator.”
“She’s a master of the pregnant pause, for example. People always feel the need to fill a silence, so they end up saying more than they mean to. And there’s this other tactic: at the end of an interview, she usually goes, Is there anything else you think I should know?”
“It’s an honest question,” I said.
“It’s all in the tone—like, Hey, you can trust me. But also, I know there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“So she manipulates people,” Ravi said.
Teddy shrugged. “All film is manipulated to some degree. It’s a way of cutting closer to the truth.”
“Yes, well. Too close and you get a girl cutting her wrists.”
Teddy’s spoon hung in the air for a moment, before lowering to the table. He looked at me, then Ravi. The silence was a vise, tightening with every second.
“I’m done,” Teddy said, tossing his spoon on the plate, and left to wait in the car.
I shook my head at Ravi.
“What?” he demanded.
“I can’t believe you.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“I’m sorry …”
Ravi rose.
“I didn’t tell Samina you told me.”
He waved me off and left to rinse his hand at the sink.
I’d been on a string of endless plane trips and car rides, but no voyage had ever felt as long as the thirty minutes it took to get home. I kept glancing at Teddy in the rearview, thinking that if I could just catch his eye, we’d be all right. But Teddy was turned toward the window, his blind gaze fixed on nothing.
The Poacher
We drove Leela to the hospital in Synthetic Achan’s car. On the way she began to bleed. She braced her arm against the car door, her face flushed and ugly with pain. My mother gripped her hand. Jayan hugged the wheel.
A hemorrhage, the doctor called it. She had bled out nearly a quarter of her womb’s supply. The baby was alive, but there was a high chance that in two weeks’ time she would deliver a thing too small to survive. Even if the baby lived, he would be too soft in the head to know his father from a fence post.
They fed tubes into Leela’s arms and kept her for the night. In the waiting area I watched Jayan run his thumb along the edge of the car key, up and down and up and down, his face betraying no feeling. At some point he went in to see her alone. He emerged even more sunken than before and said she wanted her underthings and toothbrush.
Leaving Leela with my mother, I drove through the murky dawn. Jayan sat very still in the passenger seat. I was dazed with fatigue, but his murmur roused me instantly.
“I should have killed that elephant. I should have killed him when you came and asked me.”
“I was asking you to find someone else—”
“It thinks it can trample my farm and family, end my life as easily as snipping a thread …”
“It’s an animal. I doubt it has a strategy.”
“Then you don’t know a thing about elephants.”
“But what will Leela say?”
He turned a fierce eye on me. “Who will tell her?”
We passed empty houses painted in the color of cake icings, a church helmed by a huge neon lady sprinkling lights from her fingers. This was the Virgin Mother, whose picture Leela kept in her mirror, a white woman with eyes glassy and mournful for her son.
Our silence lasted until I pulled up to the house. As the engine died, we stared at the scene, same as we had left it, and suddenly it seemed that the whole horrible night had been a dream.
“She thinks the baby is dying inside her,” Jayan said.
“She is emotional. Any mother would be.”
“Who would know better than her—you? The doctor?” He hung his head, his voice no more than a rasp. “A mother knows these things.”
Refusing my comfort or counsel, Jayan scrubbed the wet from his eyes with the heels of his hands and squinted hard at our broken palm. The set of his jaw declared his intentions as did the muscle twitching under his eye. He would inflict an equal pain. He would bleed the creature white.
I asked him if he had an extra green half pant.
He looked at me. “Are you sure?”
My heart was speeding. I was sure of nothing. Yet I could not let him walk alone.
For a wage of five thousand rupees Jayan enlisted Alias, a fellow who knew the forest as if he had designed it himself. As a bonus he came with his own homemade gun. He was famous for his rosewood muzzle-loaders, five feet long, a height nearly reaching his own. He was equally famous for having only eight fingers. It was said that he had lost his last two digits while scrambling up the side of a mountain. Having wedged his hand between two rocks, he pulled and pulled, then pulled out his knife.
Was he Tamil? Tribal? Superhuman? In regard to Alias, my brother advised me to know less.
Synthetic Achan furnished his own gun for Jayan, a piece he said was specially crafted in Germany. He introduced me to the German in t
he privacy of his rice shed, carrying on about her origins, unaware that the rifle and I had already met. I thought of Raghu aiming the barrel at my enemies—Take a bet, pussy man. With sad affection, I traced one of the rabbits that leaped between the iron leaves.
“Are you listening, boy? Hold out your hand.” My uncle dropped a pouch of heavy bullets into my palm. “Use what you need but don’t waste. In the sixties, a bullet cost five rupees; now it’s seventy. What do you think a gun like this cost?” I nearly spat when he told me: thirty-five thousand. “And that was back then.”
All throughout this presentation, my uncle kept fiddling with his nose—scratching, twitching, scrunching—so obvious in his anxiety that, in seesaw effect, I was lifted to a state of calm. “One more thing. Tell your brother to bury the bullet deep. Can’t let the greenbacks find it. If they find it, I am finished.”
I reassured him that all would turn out as planned.
But first I had to get the German past Leela. It was no small task to smuggle the piece from my uncle’s Maruti and into our shed. Two days had passed since Leela returned from the hospital, and surely she would have noticed our doings were she not confined to bed rest. There was a pall about her as she waited for the bleeding to start again, for the baby to vanish inside her like a drop of water. Yet her eyes remained sharp and watchful, her wifely sense undiminished.
One evening my mother had me deliver to Leela a bowl of broken-rice soup. As was my habit, I stole a salty spoonful before giving her the bowl. When I turned to go, she caught me at the threshold: “Get me another spoon. You are sick.”
In fact, my tonsils had been feeling knobby that morning. “How did you know?”
She raised the bowl and blew across the broken rice. “I know when you are hiding something.”
“Hiding?”
“Why else would you be off so quickly?”
“To find you a spoon.”
“Don’t get smart. Look at me, Manu.”
I felt I was standing before a magistrate judge, so stern was her voice.
“What is it?” she said.
“What is what?”
“This thing you are hiding. Is it to do with him?”
“Do I have to say? Mother will hang me.”
“What makes you think I won’t?”
After some song and dance I conjured up a girl I was planning to meet near the snack stall a half mile from home. Leela viewed me through suspicious eyes. “Do you want to marry her?”
“Maybe.”
“Would her parents be happy with you?”
“How should I know?”
“Cut the innocent act. She deserves the truth. Even if she’s too stupid to ask for it.”
Leela looked down at her bowl and stirred the soup with my infected spoon. After a while she said, “Everyone thinks I trapped your brother. But how can a mouse trap a rat? At least he knew what I was.”
“A bricklayer’s daughter.” I glanced at the door, uneasy. My mother could have stood within earshot.
“Bricklayer.” Leela snorted. “My father was no bricklayer. He never lifted a thing aside from his fist.”
After our talk, Leela began to suspect my brother of misdoings no matter the time of day. She turned about and about in bed, occasionally shuffling to the doorway on the pretense of seeking fresh air, searching for our return from the fields.
One morning the window presented my mother with a nauseating sight: a Forest Department jeep grumbling up to the front of our house. My mother found she could not move. What had Jayan done? His old sins rushed through her in a breathtaking wave.
“Who is it?” Leela called from the bed.
The car door opened, and out came a fat black shoe, mannish if not for the mud-spattered sari hem that fell over it.
“Who?”
“Hush,” was all my mother managed to say, for it was the high priestess of the greenbacks aka the lardy little Muslim aka Divisional Range Officer Samina Hakim.
Samina Madame was widely deemed an improvement over her predecessor, a weasel who wore Ray-Bans too fine for his salary and rarely left his roost. Often she was seen stepping into a farmer’s house and taking tea on the veranda and listening to the local complaints with her forehead as neatly pleated as her starched olive sari. Why she had arrived at our home was a mystery. My mother decided to parry any and all attacks with an offer of tea, which Samina Madame accepted.
“Sit, sit,” said my mother, gesturing to my father’s chair.
“Thank you,” said Samina Madame, not sitting, “but I came to see how Leela is doing.”
Samina Madame smiled winningly, her face a pleasant pie. For a heavyset woman there seemed not an ounce of extra to her.
My mother showed Samina Madame into Leela’s room and made a hasty introduction. Leela sat up straight. It was a tremendous blow to receive her enemy while prone and clad in a nightgown.
“Let me get the tea and biscuits,” my mother said and fled.
“Do I look like I need more biscuits?” called Samina Madame jovially.
She dragged a plastic chair next to Leela’s bed and sat. Here, Leela felt, was the harpy responsible for the imprisonment of her husband. The one who had snuffed him out through her sneaks and snitches, had handed him to the Karnataka police like a neat kilo of cake.
“I went to the hospital,” Samina Madame said. “They said you were here. How are you?”
“Fine. Alive. Most people who see the Gravedigger cannot say the same.”
“What luck your husband woke up when he did.”
Though it was I who had awoken first, Leela nodded.
“And,” Samina Madame said, “the baby?”
Leela stared straight through Samina Madame, who leaned back, made aware that she had crossed into forbidden waters.
Both women turned quiet. Samina Madame’s gaze casually traveled the walls. Leela ran a hand over her bedsheet, a new cool cotton scattered with sailboats. She knew the rule: Never buy gifts for an unborn baby. But she had seen these sailboats and disobeyed.
“Is your husband home?” Samina Madame asked.
“In the fields.”
“Will he come back for lunch?”
“You plan to stay till lunch?”
“I don’t have to.” Samina Madame smiled uncomfortably and rocked a little in her seat like a hen ridding itself of an egg.
“He works through lunch.”
“And how has your husband been doing since he came home?”
“You should know that, madame.” Leela uttered madame as if it were the dictionary definition of manure. “He came by your office two weeks after his release. Yours is the office with the gulmohar tree?”
Madame nodded, her brightness turning uncertain. “I don’t remember him coming.”
“He was looking for a job with the Forest Department. No one knows the inner regions like him, so he thought he might be a watcher, help patrol in the forest. Isn’t that one of the jobs you people offer?”
“Yes, as part of a pilot project aimed to harmonize the economic needs of local people with the needs of wildlife—”
“Your peons laughed in his face.”
“Who laughed? Which guard?”
“What difference would it make? All are the same.”
“Oh, I think it obvious I am not.”
“Because you take tea with us and ask about our health? I hear you also take tea with those Shankar Timber people.”
Madame faltered, plainly surprised on several fronts—that this invalid was interrogating her, that the invalid was on a first-name basis with the scandal that had attached itself to Madame’s heel like so much dog shit. “That was beyond my control.”
“I hear you take more than tea from them, madame.”
“The working plan is approved at multiple levels—Delhi, Trivandrum. I was against the felling, but I was overruled. Of course it is easy for you to sit and make accusations. Much harder to come up with solutions.”
“I come up with
them all the time.”
“Then tell me.”
“We need electric fences around the farmlands and roads,” Leela said. Madame nodded. “Not the cheap stuff, the kind a baby boar could eat through.” Madame’s nodding was hypnotic. Leela found herself talking against her will. “And another thing: you should give people like my husband some opportunity. He would be of use. People like him—they want to lead a right life, they want to listen to your advices, but advices don’t fill the belly. You have to give them some way to live right.”
“And you are sure he wants to live right?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“No need to get hot.”
But Leela was sick with self-loathing. She had succumbed to this smarmy woman, this sari-clad greenback with tricks up her sweater sleeve.
“It’s fact. Majority of poachers are repeat offenders. They make the same mistakes again and again whether they want to live right or not.”
“He paid his dues.”
“Trust me, he still has his debtors, his enemies. They keep an eye on him.”
“And you keep them in your pocket.”
“I keep them close,” Madame said. “Some of them anyway. They are like chin hairs, these people. Pluck one, and four more pop up in its place.”
“Why have you come, madame? To talk about chin hairs?”
“To see what you know about your husband.” Madame frowned. “Very little, it seems.”
“I know he fell in with some bad people. They took advantage just because he was good at shooting birds and monkeys, an elephant here and there—”
“Fifty-six.”
Leela sat back, blinking. The number stole her breath. “Four,” she insisted weakly. “Five maybe.”
“His associate told the judge fifty-six. And lately your husband has been meeting with a man who has killed even more. Now what do you think they’re discussing?”
“I … I don’t know.”
As my mother’s footsteps approached, Madame laid her business card on the side table, signaling the end of the topic. “Not the weather, I can assure you.”