by Tania James
An express bus came thundering through the dark, high beams ablaze, and though I have stood aside for many such buses, this one charging and bellowing down the road and bearing a sign in the windshield—PARUMALA THIRUMENI PRAY FOR US—chased my heart to a gallop that did not ease until the headlights washed me in whiteness and left me stiff in its wake.
“Manu.”
I realized that Jayan was staring at me. He stood some paces ahead, confused. “What the hell are you standing there for?”
“Is the Gravedigger fast as that?” I asked.
“As what?”
“The bus.”
Jayan searched my face for meaning. “Maybe. How would I know?”
“I thought you knew everything.”
He expelled a sigh as if rueful already for the mess he would put us in. (Ah, if he had known the half!) “You have us confused.” He aimed a finger at my chest. “You were the genius. On your way to great things, sure as calves become cows.”
The phrase made me smile.
“On your way out of here. Just as he wanted it.” It was rare to hear Jayan raise our father from the ashes without an insult attached. “You were his best bet. Only one that would have made good.”
I looked away from my brother, glowing in the light of his words. Eventually, as always, we fell into step.
“Remember what he used to say of me? That Jayan has fewer uses than a pile of shit.”
“At least shit can make a thing grow.”
Jayan chuckled, the two of us oddly warmed by our father’s abuses. We drifted into our private thoughts against a rasping riot of night frogs.
“I remember the time you taught me to shoot,” I said.
“Did I?”
“In the forest. You set a plastic bottle on a log. You had me fix the back part …”
“The stock.”
“The stock against my shoulder. You told me to inhale, hold my breath, then pull the trigger. Inhale, hold, pull. I forgot all about fixing the stock. Next second I was on my back and staring up at the trees and you were all You hit it you hit it!”
This was one of the happiest moments in all my life, not the moment I realized what I had hit but the second my brother spoke my name. He called me with surprise and pride, called as if to claim me as his.
Jayan snorted. “From what I recall, you had the aim of a blind man.”
“I’m telling you, I hit it!”
“I doubt that very much.”
“I remember,” I said. “I remember it all.”
The Elephant
The Gravedigger would never grow comfortable with the lorry. It jolted him over roads that led to festivals and functions and weddings and rallies, while cars and motorcycles swerved about in a red streak of horn. In the lorry, the ground was always grumbling through his soles, as if a storm were nearing.
Sometimes, when he passed through a village on foot, people came to the door with sweets and fruit. These he did not mind, but the crowds, the churning crowds, they swallowed him into their scrum, shoved treats in his face. Tap, tap, tap went the Gravedigger’s trunk, blessing every bald spot and pomaded dome that approached. Parents nudged their children forward, fearful little things thin as saplings, who came with a feral scent.
Shoals of people pressed in with their awe, their need. The Gravedigger would have borne them better with Parthasarathi by his side, but the elder elephant had disappeared three days before, carted off in a lorry. At every new place, the Gravedigger searched the air for a trace of Parthasarathi, who was nowhere to be smelled or seen.
Heavy the heart and the load, now shouldered alone. The whereabouts of Parthasarathi became the Gravedigger’s constant preoccupation, plunging him to anguish during musth.
Musth was the dark time. Every few months, the Gravedigger was thunderstruck, his body vivid with rage, panting with the urge to run and crush all, down to the last man or sapling. The Gravedigger was fifteen years old, the age at which, in the forests, he would have parted from his clan and taken up with the bulls, who would have taught him how to charge and when to retreat, how to draw a cow from her clan (or read her rejection), and how to cope with musth.
At Elephant Sabu’s place, when the Gravedigger was stricken by musth, the pappans kept him shackled between trees. These were tighter chains than the changala that usually hugged his leg; tethered forefoot to hind foot, he could not take a single step. Food appeared in a trough or was tossed to him from a distance by the pappans, who stayed beyond the Gravedigger’s line of sight.
On the road, the Gravedigger was ambushed by musth more often than usual. Once, it happened at a wedding. One minute he was carrying a groom through a raucous parade, the next minute he was ripping out a stand of lemon trees, the drummers and dancers scattering like ants, while the groom clutched at the sides of his howdah and squealed.
With front leg and back leg chained between trees, the Gravedigger watched the sun creep across the sky. The trees leaked shadows. He sniffed the rubber of passing tires, the dusty musk of the bird that sat on his spine, snapping up gnats. In the old days, Old Man would squat on the ground beneath the Gravedigger, his back turned as the elephant twisted leaves into his mouth. Over time, the Gravedigger had learned the shape of Old Man’s spine, each stone descending from the last. Every so often, Old Man would hum.
But Old Man no longer turned his back on the Gravedigger. His eyes were wary; he had dropped weight, but a bird on the Gravedigger’s back.
With no one to soothe him, the Gravedigger resorted to memory. His mind roamed over the faces and smells he had known as a calf, the flick of a cousin’s tail, the sour-milk smell of his sister’s breath, a pile of elephant ribs still echoing a faint fleshy scent. For hours he could stand quietly, falling into the past like a leaf drifting to forest floor. Such thoughts detached him from the two trees, drew him inward, drew him home.
§
Two days it took for the Gravedigger to recover from musth, ten minutes to load him into the open truck bed, thundering toward another destination. As evening fell, the smell of his fellow elephants flowed over him from a hundred yards away. He was almost home.
Relieved, he thought of the days to come, the order restored. How he would sleep to the sounds of Parthasarathi’s snoring. How he and Parthasarathi would lie beneath the sun as Old Man hosed their sides and legs and bellies, how the pappans would rasp at his skin with a coconut hull, how he would fall into a bottomless nap.
As the lorry rumbled up to his stall, the Gravedigger caught a strange smell leaking from Parthasarathi’s stall, where Parthasarathi was not. The pappans leaped out of the cab, stretched. The Gravedigger reached his trunk in the direction of Parthasarathi’s stall and recoiled from the foreign odor. A stranger’s reek.
The Gravedigger went still beneath a mud slide of realizations. They had taken Parthasarathi away. They had put some other elephant in his place. Parthasarathi was no more.
Down came his trunk upon the lorry’s cab. He struck with all his eight tons, deaf to the shouts of the pappans and the rumbles of the other elephants, his screams filling his lungs like water until he had no breath left.
§
They locked the Gravedigger in the lorry for hours, without food. When he was hollowed of energy, they maneuvered him into his stall, Elephant Sabu watching, Old Man leading the way and making gentle sounds.
At some point, impatient, Romeo yanked the chain.
The Gravedigger swatted him to the ground. For the elephant, the gesture was little more than a tap; for Romeo, a blow that dropped him like a sandbag. All the pappans stood dumb with dread. The Gravedigger felt a dim flare of distress until Old Man began his lowing again, as if no harm had been done, no punishment looming.
Elephant Sabu mouthed something at Romeo, baring his teeth in threat.
Romeo slunk away, wretched and low to the ground.
§
Unable to sleep, Old Man rose from his cot and went to check on the Gravedigger.
The elephant stood in still silhouette within the four sides of his stall. Old Man kept his distance, unable to say whether the Gravedigger was dozing. Like a nursery rhyme came his father’s advice: An elephant asleep on its feet is an elephant ill at ease.
He could have smacked Romeo for rattling the Gravedigger so, but what was the point in railing against the toothless buffoon? Elephant Sabu was to blame for the Gravedigger’s state. It was Elephant Sabu who had assigned them so many events, stringing one against the next as smoothly as blooms on a garland. He was intent on making back what he’d paid for the Gravedigger, and what he had lost on his beloved Parthasarathi.
Old Parthasarathi had been riding in the back of a lorry, whose usual driver was home with the flu. In his stead, the driver sent his reckless, rum-soaked sons. The boys sped over a pothole that caused the elephant to slam its head into the cab. After some time, a taxi pulled even with the lorry, the driver yelling out the window, “Pull over, pull over! Something is wrong with the elephant! It is stumbling about!”
Soon as they braked, Parthasarathi fell to his knees, fell asleep.
Putting another elephant in Parthasarathi’s stall had been Elephant Sabu’s idea, a possible antidote to the Gravedigger’s loneliness. Elephant Sabu, too, was saddened by the loss of his favorite elephant, whose photo appeared each time he flipped open his mobile. He canceled Parthasarathi’s remaining engagements, returned all deposits. He brought suit against the rum brothers and braced himself for the investigations of animal cruelty brought by the Forest Department.
In purchasing the Gravedigger, Elephant Sabu had anticipated a gilded future, but now each loss seemed a stone in his pocket. His wife urged him to assign the Gravedigger more work. What’s the point, she said, of keeping such a handsome fellow at home?
So Elephant Sabu hired out the handsome fellow to temples and churches and wedding processions, even to political rallies, both Congress and Marxist, wherever the organizers would pay a fee. Some of these hucksters shirked on the amount of panna and water they were meant to provide, and there were times when even the pappans went without proper meals. Mani-Mathai made no complaint though his belly gurgled in protest. Romeo regularly threatened to quit.
Anytime Old Man tried to reason with Elephant Sabu, he got a long speech about the costs of being in the Elephant Business—the water, the medicines, the veterinarian’s bill alone! Thirty bottles of glucose for Parthasarathi’s intestinal obstruction plus four bottles of Hermin infusion … not even trying to make a profit … simply trying to survive …
Meanwhile, the elephant had taken to nodding more than usual, to the tune of some dark, swirling rhythm.
Some of the other pappans took precautions, sneaking opium into their elephants’ feed to dull the animals during musth. Old Man would not go so far, not yet, though the Gravedigger’s silence reminded him of those early, delicate days in the anakoodu, when the calf flickered between this life and the next. Back then, the calf had latched onto Old Man, and over time, they became two halves of a single conversation. Now the elephant seemed locked inside a separate room.
The memory of Appachen’s advice descended on him from time to time, to seek another job, any job. But Old Man had refused; this was the tradition to which he’d been born, a known road that had been cleared for him by previous generations. He had meant to maintain the way, even if no one else did.
Fool’s talk, his father had said. No one wants to be a pappan anymore, not even the pappans. A toilet wiper makes more than us. And a toilet can’t kill you.
§
The sky above him wild with stars, and still the Gravedigger could not sleep. He felt a smoldering under his skin, an ache in his tusks, until the breeze brought him the scent of Old Man. That invisible presence, however brief, was a steady palm to the Gravedigger’s side.
In time, Old Man’s smell receded, his footsteps rasping away.
Moments later, another smell spilled through the darkness. The Gravedigger caught the chemical smog, the liquored stink that filled the mouth like bad fruit.
Romeo emerged from the shadows. He entered the Gravedigger’s stall and went about some mysterious business. The Gravedigger felt himself being clamped forefoot to hind foot. Something was wrong—the Gravedigger was chained this way only during musth, and in the presence of Old Man. Where was Old Man?
Finished with the chains, Romeo stood before the Gravedigger. His dark shape swayed. The Gravedigger could not see Romeo clearly, nor the pitchfork in the pappan’s grip, yet he sensed the world tightening around him, a pressure building inside his head.
The pappan stabbed the Gravedigger’s leg. Pain blazed up his flank, hot and stunning.
The same pain shocked him where the skin was most tender, behind the ear and under his tail, then his side, and his belly. There was no room between one pain and the next, no time to let the hurt breathe, only pain and pain again while the pappan barked nonsense, the aroma of liquor and sourness pouring off his skin. The Gravedigger shrank from the pappan, growing smaller and smaller until he was but a calf again, trying to hide from the hands that were yanking him from his mother’s side. Forever on it went, that blur of barking and stabbing until, at last, the Gravedigger smelled hope blooming up from the darkness.
§
Old Man was a magnificent snorer, able to sleep through any storm. Mani-Mathai, meanwhile, sought refuge beneath his own pillow. Even a slender, plipping leak in the roof could keep the boy wide-eyed for hours, so the elephant’s shrieks brought him running. And what he saw and heard stopped him dead in the darkness.
Is that what you want? Is it?
With every question, his uncle speared the elephant’s side.
His mind gone blank, Mani-Mathai let two stabs pass in this manner before he rushed forth and kicked his uncle in the back of the knees. Romeo drunkenly flung his arms and elbows, but an easy blow to the ribs reduced him to a fetal position, hands over his face.
Mani-Mathai stood up and was flooded by the old fear of fathers and whippings.
Romeo rose, stooped, his hand on his side, his voice shrill with disbelief. You broke my rib, you stupid ape!
I’m telling Sabu Sir. In the morning, I’ll tell everything.
Go on! his uncle sneered. He’ll tell you that’s how we do things! We break the animals! You think we charm them with caramels? You think Old Man did it any different?
He wouldn’t.
You would defend him to the death. But who will defend you when the beast comes charging?
The boy looked to the elephant. It was either heaving or nodding, he could not tell which.
Romeo took a deep, pained breath before he spoke. Let me tell you something. You want the elephant’s friendship, but you cannot be both friend and master. An elephant is not like a cow or a horse, you cannot tame it fully. Some part of it will always be wild. That is the part you cannot trust, the part you have to break again and again.
Mani-Mathai stared at the pitchfork lying on the ground. Secretly, he had always wanted his uncle to speak to him thus, as an equal, not a nuisance. But these were not words he wanted to hear, even if they carried a glint of truth; they stung.
This is our job, said Romeo. This is what we do. Now who is in charge—you or him?
The boy picked up the pitchfork, weighed it in his hands. Go, he said.
Go what? Are you even listening to me?
Go! said Mani-Mathai, and took a swing at his uncle. He missed by inches, but it was enough to send Romeo fleeing into the night.
The Filmmaker
The rot reached for miles, penetrating windows, breaching walls. It wormed into the nose and burrowed deep, no match for mouth breathing, as we drove straight to the molten core.
Teddy rode shotgun, camera fixed on Ravi, who slouched in the opposite corner. Bobin sat in the middle, knees all pinned and prim as if contact with my boom mic would be unseemly. I asked an obvious question just to get them talking—“So where are we going?”—from which Bobin absta
ined by leaning back.
Ravi wore the slack, haggard expression of an inmate. He was in no mood for questioning, let alone a question he’d answered not two minutes before while the camera was unfortunately off. “We are going to the postmortem of a dead elephant in Sitamala. The goal is to ascertain the cause of death and, if it was a poaching, to recover the bullet and file a case with the police.”
“What if you don’t find the bullet?”
“Police will not even look twice at the case. Everyone is depending on me to find it: DFO. ACF. Chief Wildlife Warden.” I waited, letting Ravi’s mind leap ahead to other tangents. “The worst thing is when the bullet is in the head. The inside of the head is all tunnels and cavities, like a honeycomb. It can bounce this way and that, go anywhere …”
“Do you think it’s the same elephant who killed the boy in Sitamala?”
“No. I told you already.” He dragged a hand over his face. “The Gravedigger is a tusker over three meters high at the shoulder. This one is smaller—we can tell from the circumference of the footprint. There is no connection.”
“But the Gravedigger definitely killed the boy in Sitamala.”
“It seems so, but …” He shook his head. “It’s strange for the Gravedigger to come back here, after so many years.”
“The bamboo might have something to do with it. Like you said.”
“Could be that. Could be he knows you want to film him and it’s making him crazy.”
Bobin cracked a rare smile. Teddy held on Ravi’s face for a moment, about to lower the camera until I asked, “Have you ever seen the Gravedigger?”