The Tusk That Did the Damage

by Tania James

We were rounding a bend where a hank of long grass, growing almost horizontally from the hillside, reached through Ravi’s open window. Absently, he ran his fingers through the strands. “Long time ago. Back then he was called Sooryamangalam Sreeganeshan. He was the most famous temple elephant. They put his picture on calendars, postcards; there was even talk of putting him in a movie.

  “My whole family went to see him at a festival. All these nine elephants they squeezed into a temple that could fit only three. There was so little room, the elephants were leaning against one another, and because Sooryamangalam Sreeganeshan was the tallest, he was in the middle. All through the blessings and the prayers, he was nodding and nodding, at nothing. I asked my mother why he was doing that. She said he was happy, he was hearing a song in his head. Can you imagine? Only a bhranthan would be nodding like that.”

  “Bhranthan?”

  Lost in thought, Ravi squinted at the window, as if all nine elephants were nodding in the distance.

  “Madman,” Bobin clarified.

  The dead elephant loomed huge and unreal, like a parade float partly deflated and collapsed on folded, rubbery limbs. Its chin lay on the dirt, its trunk outstretched, the corners of its mouth drawn up in a perverse little smile.

  Ravi and Bobin began by zipping up their raincoats. They slipped on rubber aprons, wriggled fingers into gloves. Another assistant, taking extra precaution, clamped on a motorcycle helmet.

  They found and photographed the burnt, black spot of the bullet hole on the elephant’s side, behind the left shoulder. But the bullet was far deeper, a baby dragonfly buried somewhere in that bulk of flesh.

  Teddy closed in as Ravi wormed a stick into the burn hole, trying to assess the vector of the bullet. Bobin brandished a metal detector, sweeping the air around the wound until it began to bleat frantically. Across that spot, Ravi traced a T.

  With an X-Acto knife, Ravi sliced away a square of dermis, thick as a house mat, and peeled it back. Beneath was a shiny layer of fat and muscle, marbled with pink, and in the center, the burn hole like a black star that had bored its way through the flesh, spiraling, widening a contrail as it went. Teddy and I stepped closer. The stench of pus filled my mouth.

  They took a saw to the animal’s side, the sound like a zipper going up and down. With pliers, they pinched and sheared the muscle beneath in great, gleaming swaths, blood pooling up. They cut around the huge wet balloons of organs, searched the medusal knots of the small intestine, cauliflowers of calcified fat.

  Hours passed, and still no bullet.

  By four o’clock, the heat had baked the stench to new heights. Teddy and I stepped away from the carcass, taking a break to switch out tapes, when Ms. Hakim came striding down a narrow berm, a handkerchief held to her mouth, followed by a forest officer with glinting badges and a mustache thin as the swipe of a knife. She surveyed the scene—carcass, Ravi, Bobin, guards—until her colorless gaze came to rest on us. I waved. She ignored me.

  Putting a hold on the postmortem, Ms. Hakim summoned Ravi aside. She conferred with him quietly, and he nodded in response until something she said made him stop nodding. He scanned her face, then the ground, seemingly at a loss for words. They hung there, suspended, no longer a scene but a freeze-frame of something vital, something we would miss entirely if Teddy didn’t hurry with the tape.

  As soon as we rose to join them, the conference was over. Ms. Hakim and Ravi parted ways, him to the carcass, her to us.

  “Teddy. Emma.” She stuck a peremptory smile on her face. “You must be tired. Let me take you back to the center.”

  I glanced at Teddy, both of us reluctant. “Oh—well, we’d prefer to stay until they’ve wrapped things up.”

  “They are wrapping things up, I told them.”

  “Then we’ll just get a ride with the team,” I said.

  “No, they must drop off the tissue samples at the lab and then they must meet with me.”

  “We could film that,” Teddy suggested. “The meeting would be an opportunity—”

  “No,” Ms. Hakim said, adding a kindly grimace, as though it pained her to cut him off. “No filming in the meeting.”

  “So that’s it then?” I said. “No bullet? We’re giving up?”

  Ms. Hakim nodded, oddly at peace with the outcome.

  I looked at Ravi, perched atop a stepladder, arms sleeved to the elbow in slush. He paused, called out: “Go ahead. I will see you at the center.”

  On camera, we got Ms. Hakim to tell us that the bullet had not been recovered, that the carcass would be guarded overnight and burned tomorrow. As soon as Teddy turned off the camera, she motioned us to follow. “Now come, please come. The smell is too much.”

  Less than a quarter mile from the elephant, Teddy insisted we stop the jeep so he could set up the tripod for one final shot—the raw, violet surge of mountains, the hill of dead elephant in the foreground. The rest of the way, he tried to bait Ms. Hakim with questions, which she met with a face flat as a wall. I kept quiet, simmering with the sense that we were missing a crucial piece of the story and that Ms. Hakim would be the last person to disclose it.

  The next morning at the center, Ravi was nowhere to be found. I left him four text messages that began cool and curious, then spiraled into urgency. I skipped breakfast and logged tapes, just to keep myself busy.

  Teddy ambled in and flung himself across my bed, poorly suppressing a belch. “Bobin’s mom made cutlets for us.”

  I tapped the space bar, freezing on a frame of Ravi midsentence, lips pursed. Normally I would have leaped at the possibility of cutlet: crisp breaded shell, warm minced meat. But today my stomach was knotted up, all nerves. “I can’t eat right now.”

  “Would you relax?”

  “I am relaxed.”

  “Your leg is having a seizure.”

  I stilled my knee. “What do you think he’s hiding?”

  “Something good, I hope. What’re you so wound up about?”

  “It would be nice to know he’s being honest with us.”

  “Maybe he’s not an honest guy. Maybe that’s what makes him an interesting character.”

  But to me he was more than a character. And I felt I deserved the truth; his honesty was a measure of his respect for me, proof that I wasn’t some forgettable chick he’d bagged during a lull at work.

  “Emma. You okay?”

  I blinked at the screen. “This shot’s a little under. Little dark.”

  Teddy rolled onto his side, squinting. “Yeah. Damn. All that white wall in the background. I should’ve cropped some of that out.”

  “This bit is gold.” I tapped the space bar, and Ravi came to life.

  … so the animal that primitive man most feared was the tusker with the broken tooth. These were the angriest, most irritated creatures, most prone to very violent episodes. So why do you think primitive man chose to worship Ganesh, an elephant with a broken tooth? Because fear and worship are two sides of one coin.

  §

  Around noon: the rusty squeal of the gates. Teddy sprang from the bed, where he’d been daydreaming behind Documentary in the Digital Age, not a single page turned in the last half hour. We grabbed our equipment, hustled out the door.

  “Exam room,” said Teddy. Before I could suggest we meet Ravi at the jeep, Teddy was off.

  The exam room was empty when we set up in the corner, farthest from the entrance. “He always stops here first,” Teddy whispered.

  “We should tell him we’re filming.”

  “It’ll be good to catch him in a private moment.”

  “But it’s kind of an ambush—”

  Teddy shushed me like a schoolmarm and told me to keep the boom low.

  We waited, and I thought of Helen Levitt, snapping her way around New York, armed with the winkelsucher that allowed her to peer over other people’s shoulders. Usually the small, frail shoulders of children.

  Ravi didn’t see us immediately. He dropped his bag on the counter. He fell into a chair against
the wall, elbows on knees, hands limp. His stare seemed to go on for miles, minutes, unblinking. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Teddy adjusting the zoom, zeroing in, a gesture that induced in me a small spasm of loyalty. I cleared my throat.

  Ravi’s eyes snapped up and caught us. There’s one Levitt photo I can recall in which a child seems to resist Levitt’s attention. A frowning girl of maybe fourteen, rings under her eyes, a stitch of contempt between her brows. She meets Levitt’s gaze, distrusts and detests it. This was precisely the gaze that Ravi was giving us. “What the hell are you doing there?”

  “We wanted to film you coming in,” I said, avoiding Teddy’s glare. “We thought it might be more authentic this way. Without you knowing we’re here.”

  Ravi went to the sink. “Turn it off. I don’t want that on me right now.”

  Ting! and the camera closed its ogling eye.

  Teddy and I stood there, bereft of purpose, a pair of sheepish wallflowers. Ignoring us, Ravi unzipped the duffel bag and removed a burrito roll of blades, which he spread across the counter beside the sink. Dull silver on scarlet felt. I looked closer; some of the blades were laced with blood.

  “Wait,” I said, though Ravi kept moving, turning on the faucet, adjusting the water to a soft patter on steel. “Did you just get back from the postmortem?”

  “Yes. We found the bullet this morning.”

  “The postmortem you were wrapping up yesterday?”

  He ran a bar of soap through his hands and nodded.

  “But Samina said you were disposing of the carcass this morning.”

  I stared at the back of his head, the thick swirl of hair. “I decided to keep looking. I told you, the bullet is very important.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I could hear my voice going shrill, too furious to care how the question might’ve sounded to Teddy. “Why didn’t you take us with you?”

  “You filmed all day yesterday,” Ravi said. “I thought you’d be too tired.”

  “Thanks for your concern.”

  “What is the problem? It’s a good thing I found it.”

  “What about the meeting with Samina? Why couldn’t we come along?”

  Teddy stepped in, his voice smooth and pleasant. “How about we shoot you cleaning the blades, Ravi? That okay?”

  Ravi consented with a shrug. He ran each blade under the water, pinching it clean with a rag. Teddy shot the red dregs swirling into the drain. Eventually Teddy got him to report that he’d found the bullet, got him to repeat that thing about the head as honeycomb. The entire time, Ravi didn’t so much as glance at me, merely slid the X-Acto knife, neatly, into its niche.

  The Poacher

  Our final task, before tomorrow’s hunt, was to meet Alias at a tea shop. Many a man slouched over the long wooden tables, a mess of crumbs and glass cups, some full of chai and some lit with candles whose light played over the ruffled tin of the ceiling. Flies spun circles around a single bulb. Below it sat a big-bellied pan, its sides blackened and whipped by flame.

  The air was close with the smell of deep-frying dough, but for once my brother had no appetite. We sat at the vacant end of a long table and spoke in low voices. I could not help but stare at our cohort’s puckered stumps, a samosa clutched in the claw of his three surviving fingers. His whiskers glistened grease as he nodded at me. “Is this the third?”

  “My brother,” said Jayan.

  “We need a fourth.”

  “No. Only us three. Manu can do all the carrying.”

  Alias gave me an up-and-down look, the same my mother would give to a traveling trinket salesman. “If you say so.”

  He detailed the point where we would enter Kavanar Park, his fingers tracing our path along the seams in the wooden table. He was in cahoots with a ranger who would allow us passage at the edge of Old Raman’s farm (unbeknownst to poor Raman), just east of the dead banyan that had been cleaved by lightning. From there, Alias could track the elephant easily and was miffed when I asked, “How, exactly?”

  “The Gravedigger walks with a limp,” he said. “His hind leg strays outside the others.” Alias reenacted the footprints on the table, crossing one hand over the other. “If the earth is damp enough, it’s easy as reading his signature.”

  “And if it’s a dry day?” I asked.

  “We keep looking. I’ve been on trips that take a week.”

  I frowned at the prospect, but my brother was nodding.

  “This is the job,” Jayan said. “We will not leave until it’s done.”

  And what if, I wanted to know, this ranger cousin was not as loyal as Alias presumed? Was he a first cousin or three times removed?

  “Jayan,” Alias said, pinning me with a stare, “have you no other brothers? Even a sister would do.”

  Jayan hissed for quiet. The samosa man was regarding us from under the hairy eaves of his eyebrows. He scooped out a sizzling clutch of samosas on a slotted spoon the size of an oar and dropped them in the colander.

  Alias asked if my brother had a gun. Jayan grunted. As for Alias, he would bring his famous rosewood.

  “What about me?” I asked.

  “You carry the pack,” Alias said. “Bedding, blades.”

  “No blades,” said Jayan. “I told you.”

  “No blades my buttocks!” Alias leaned in with a scowl he had likely perfected from birth. “Those tusks must be forty kilos at least. You want the Forest Department to add to their collection?”

  “I don’t care what they do.” Jayan looked at the table, intent on avoiding my eyes. “It’s not for me anymore.”

  “It will take thirty minutes max. Thirty thousand rupees. Tell me you couldn’t use half that.”

  Jayan sulked at the cook fire. Alias waved him off with his half hand.

  “Is that all?” I demanded. I had hoped for more of a training on tracking or baiting, not out of cowardice but preparedness, as I was in no rush to lose my own digits or anything else for that matter. “Is there nothing more to know?”

  “All you need know if something goes wrong,” said Alias, leaning forward, “is to run.”

  Something furry flicked over my feet. I jumped up, startling the glasses just as a stray cat leaped out from under the table, back arched and yowling her indignation. Someone shooed her into the night.

  Every bloodshot eye was now cocked and aimed at me.

  Alias showed his first sooty smile of the evening. “Getting an early start?” he said, and cackled so proudly at his joke it was clear he had been in the forest too long.

  After Alias left, Jayan and I went to a toddy shop where the crowd had the cumulative scent of an armpit. People clapped their hands on my brother’s shoulders, crowed his name with great affection. I could see that he was someone here; he was theirs. I was merely his brother, but that title bestowed some specialness on me, and so I basked in their smelly camaraderie.

  All night I drank from a mildewy glass. The local brew seared my stomach and made me weightless and careless. I remember the jolly cacophony of singing, saucers of belly-burning lemon achar. I remember waking on the spike of some bony man’s shoulder, feeling much heavier than when I began the evening. “We thought you were dead,” said the bony man, passionately licking sauce off his finger. “Try the pickle, Wee Shivaram, it will bring you back to life.”

  I asked after Jayan. The man pointed me to a pair of crooked trees, where my brother was relieving himself. With some difficulty, I wobbled outside and waited—he seemed to be watering the whole forest—and while waiting, I gazed on the clear navy sky, which carried so many stars at once I thought I might finally see one fall.

  “They never fall,” said Jayan, “when you will them to.”

  True and yet. It was enough to stand beside my brother, adrift in a single current of silence.

  “Shall we go home?” I said at last.

  “In a little while.”

  “We told Leela we would come home soon.”

  Jayan groaned. “You wouldn’
t remove a splinter from your own foot without asking her permission.” He took a few steps toward the toddy shop and stopped in the middle of the road when he realized I had not moved. “Come on.”

  “Get out of the road.”

  “Not until you come.”

  “But Leela—”

  “Your nursemaid? She will be fine.”

  Normally that sneer in his voice would have cut me to half size. But between my achy head and my shifty stomach, I had no interest in holding us together, the duty that always and entirely fell to me.

  “I am going home,” I said.

  “Don’t be touchy, we were having fun!”

  I began walking away; he rushed me and slung his leaden arm around my shoulder. I threw it off.

  His face cooled to indifference. “Go to her then. You are the one she wants. Always saying how smart you are, how lucky the girl who will get you.”

  I told him to stop his babbling even as I was desperate to hear the rest.

  He peered down the road as if he could see his future looming large in the dark. “My wife has no need of me.”

  “That is for her to decide. Not you.”

  “You heard her. What am I good for anymore?”

  “You work on the farm same as me.”

  “She could find another day worker for that. And a day worker would come with none of the fuss she spends on me.”

  “Enough, we have to get up early tomorrow.”

  “In jail”—Jayan shook his woolly troubled head—“I thought I would come out changed. But then I came out and I saw that the world had changed. And I had stayed the same.”

  All at once I was a child again, fearful, searching the wasteland of my father’s face, the gullies of his eyes.

  “Stop this song and dance,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “You go.”

  Unsteady on his feet, he shambled toward the distant embrace of drunken voices. He felt far from me, as unknowable as a figure in a fable.

  I staggered home.

  Obviously—and yet it must be said—I had no plan of trysting with my brother’s wife. Nothing like that. I only knew I wanted to prove something to Leela, and this intention pulled me stumbling through the moonlit roads. The liquor dragged my feet. At some point a spiteful tree lifted a root and felled me smack on my face, and I felt the whole forest itself was colluding to impede me.