I Am an Executioner

by Rajesh Parameswaran

  Mr. Jefferson Bundy has brought in as cofinancers Prakash and Akash, the Arora brothers from Mumbai, meaning I have come to America only to make a Bollywood picture in the end. So be it. My story, somewhat revised, revolves about young friends visiting New York, one of them serious, one of them happy-go-lucky, their bonds becoming tested over an American woman they both fall in love with. That woman lives in Manhattan; her parents are highly skeptical of the foreign suitors. In one grand scene, all three youths dance arm in arm through the Lincoln Center fountain—boy, what a hellish time it is shooting that, with the midnight gawkers and grumpy cops. My two lead actors, those big-headed, carefully coiffed Mumbai boys, sometimes become impatient; they try to cajole and move me, making up their own dialogues whenever fancy suits them. “This line isn’t funny,” “This scene isn’t believable,” they calmly inform me when I challenge them. “This costume isn’t smart.” Neither impressed nor intimidated, they pretend not to hear me for the din of traffic as I scream instructions through my radio; in effect they direct themselves. Later in the film (as the financers insisted), the friends get caught up in the web of post-9/11, and the suspicions, and finally in the question, Will they make a home here?

  I know enough. Even for all the acclaim that Jogesh’s first film earned, what did he really know about that village? He had grown up in a twelve-room house filled with books, and in his film were mainly thatch-roofed huts. But what a moving thing we made, perfect in every detail, even if some of those details were of our own invention.

  We are just visitors. None of it is our own. What did Jogesh and I know about the human heart? And still, we showed it.

  “We have to rewrite the ending!” Jefferson Bundy yells, after filming is over. “We have to reshoot the love scenes. We miscast the leads.” And on and on.

  Nirmala is slowly planning her move. When the servants answer the phone at her house, I use a clever pseudonym: “Mr. Shah from the grocers, regarding her order for Chinese apples.”

  “Soon,” she says. “But Barun has had his second daughter. They need so much help around the house. I can’t leave just right away.”

  “Soon,” she says. “But I am hosting a fund-raiser in my home for the Satyajit Ray Memorial Scholarship. How can I leave everyone abandoned like that?”

  “Soon,” she says. “But … Jogesh is bringing me for two weeks to Paris. And then he has gone and hired me a third housekeeper, and somebody must stay here to train her.”

  Finally she tells me: “I confronted him, Bibhuti. I told him everything. He was furious for two weeks, and I was about to leave. But now he’s contrite. He stays home on the weekends.”

  And then, when Mr. Shah calls, Mrs. Sen has gone for her tennis lesson; Mrs. Sen is taking tea with her grandchildren; Mrs. Sen conveys her regrets but would like to cancel her order for Chinese apples.

  The footage is an alarmingly tangled mess. I sit in the shadowy editing suite with the taciturn editor that Jefferson Bundy has hired for me. In that pristine, computer-filled cave, I force myself to focus on the film, to fight the nausea I feel, to postpone all thoughts of Nirmala, and stop rehearsing in my mind our every moment together, every missed signal, my grand vision that lacked so much in the particulars. The impassive editor starts by shaving a moment here, a minute there; next, convinces me to drop entire scenes. I slowly realize I wasted whole days of shooting time; the editor discards them now with one awful click of the mouse. We examine dozens of takes of the same lines of dialogue, searching for hints of emotion, anything real or surprising; we order and reorder shots and sequences in endless permutations, struggling to sift out any story or suspense, to bring this inert thing to life.

  After each day’s work concludes late in the night, I go walking, becoming lost in the big life of concrete and people. I walk gingerly, feeling an odd lightness in my feet, as if at any moment I might slip and go flying; until the sidewalks grow vacant, the checkerboard eyes of the buildings blink closed one after another. And then I take the train to the silent condominium towers of New Jersey, hoping for a little sleep; but usually end up by standing on the balcony of my cousin’s flat firing cigarettes, looking with queasy sadness out over the Manhattan skyline—straight-from-the-movies but somehow mysterious, this unreal view of the places I’ve just been.

  Sitting on the train one morning, flipping through the New York Times for some distraction, I see a capsule review for a new film, Jogesh’s latest. I truly don’t have time for the two-and-a-half-hour movie; there are only precious days left in the editing room. Nevertheless, that evening I leave the editor with her takeout Thai dinner and go stand in line with the young stylish people outside of Film Forum and buy the twelve-dollar ticket. On a splurge, I purchase a cola and a chocolate brownie and popcorn, which I squirt with lime and cover with salt, and munching loudly, I watch.

  Immediately from the opening title, I see that Jogesh has relied heavily on those storyboards I’d completed in the hotel room for the first half of the film (as I knew he might, for he sent me a check in compensation). The art direction is sloppy, and he has made some poor color choices. But after several minutes, I stop appraising the shots because so caught up am I with the story line. The aging Kolkata painter is played by one of our longtime local stars. He falls in love with his young, aloof student, played by a newcomer. A new storyboarder must have taken over at some point, but I forget to notice where. And what does it matter, honestly? Because the film is beautiful. The choices Jogesh has made are good enough. The dialogues are smart, the performances very precise, very lively. It is the work of a craftsman in its own way. I use my chocolate-stained napkin to dab off my tears when the old painter returns all alone to his studio—wearing on his wrist the watch once gifted him by his outwardly passive wife—and despite the great mistakes and disappointments of his life, stoically picks up the brush, a slight tremble in his hand. The expression in the actor’s face is remarkable—pained but dignified and unlike any performance this star has delivered in the past. I have a big realization at that time. Okay, there is framing the shots and fashioning the sets. There is editing and makeup and lighting and props, and there is even writing. But the greatest challenge always lies in how one handles the actors.

  ELEPHANTS IN CAPTIVITY

  (PART ONE)1

  I don’t have much time2 so I must dispense with the obvious.3 Helicopters clatter overhead, men with cameras4 leaning from their open doorways. Their footage must be numbingly familiar to you, and might by now be all that remains of me. Please know that the contemporaneous accounts surely will be filled with distortions.5 I write this in order to supply you with those crucial bits of history without which my story cannot be understood.

  Before I begin, I want to make something clear: I am sorry for the expense and trouble I have caused. If I have hurt anyone, even unintentionally, then I can only hope for your forgiveness.6 Many people have invested in my safety and comfort,7 have felt that they’ve had my best interests at heart;8 I have not intended to betray them.

  You must believe that I never sought to draw this kind of attention to myself. I am just one elephant, and I did not seek it, but I can sense it: my story is destined to be a part of this city’s collective memory.9 Perhaps, just perhaps, by the time you read this, my misadventure has inspired others to break free as I did.10 Perhaps we live among you now as friends and neighbors.11

  I have come far. This vast expanse ringed with trees recalls me to another green place.12 My first memories are of green—the rustle of green, its shift and sway, a thickness of thin blades that rise above my head—the grass we ate and lived in. Rushing through it, through the herd’s feet, massive, thundering feet, which in the vision-clouding dust and seeming chaos, balletically precise, never miss their mark. My elders sense my clumsy, tottering body somewhere in the dust and grass far beneath them, and always step around me. So: in, under, around the massive god bodies of my elders, I rush forward. My trunk rises up, groping for the belly that bears the odor of my m
other, Amuta, her trailing milky, musky scent. I find her, and she reaches down for just a moment, to smell my mouth, touch me on the head, to reassure me and confirm herself of my presence, and all the while we thunder forward.13 Prior, primarily I remember: Green.

  During the wet season, our old leader Ania would guide us out of our valley to graze among the upland bark and bush, to feed on the brief tender grass that sprang up along the monsoon rivers in the hills. In the dry season, she brought us back down again to the valley, where the earth’s wetness contracted to a small space of blue—our lake (I have never seen it, but I remember it)14—and where the grass was tough and tasteless but everpresent.

  Life was full of change, but our home was neverchanging. Mother became our leader after old Ania died, a solitary grazer among hostile beasts. During our more difficult times, some would complain even about Mother’s wise leadership, saying that if Ania were alive we would never have suffered as we did. (The elephants spoke, I say, but of course they didn’t. Among ourselves, we elephants did not talk in words like those with which I now write this. We made noises, a broad range of them: grunts, whispers, low rumbles, ear-splitting trumpets, but we used them not as words. We made motions with our bodies as well—with our trunks, our ears, our legs, our eyes, with the angle of our heads—but these motions did not have distinct meanings. These gestures of body and sound were the stuff of our communication, yet they did not themselves constitute our speech. The source of our understanding, the substance of our message, lay in something broader and more round, a circle of intention that surrounded each of us and the herd. When we were together in the herd, we shared an understanding, concrete and actual; each of us felt with certainty what other individuals expressed to us, and moreover, we understood as a herd what the herd thought and felt.15)

  Ania left us during the long drought, when my aunts’ skin hung loose on their jutting, angular hip bones, and the hard, ugly shapes of their skulls protruded from behind their kind faces. Ania always had faith in the old grazing fields. We all did. But one day she left us, and Mother remained the dominant female in the herd.16

  We had all seen our cousin herds stay in their old grazing fields and die, Mother reminded us. She convinced us to abandon our ancient land. She led us into distant unknown hills17 where, with less competition for the bark of the baobab trees and the sparse, sweet grasses, she promised us, we would thrive.

  Elephants died on this uncertain journey. My great-aunt Thoosha didn’t survive the climb. She was ninety-four, and one morning along the long way, awake and lolling on her side, she calmly refused to stand up.18 Manami’s nameless, still-suckling son—he had been lively once, a rambunctious boy, but during the drought, when Manami’s breasts grew shriveled and suckling became painful, when her milk dried up, this boy was the first among the children to slow his play, to reveal his weakness—he also didn’t live to see the new hills. (Poor Manami struggled to bring him along. When the calf’s pace slowed, Manami also slowed, the two of them trailing behind us a full day’s journey. Mother did not stop the herd to wait for them, nor did Manami ask her to, and when Manami finally joined us again, she was alone. We touched her face with our trunks and rubbed our heads on her haunches, but Manami would not face our gaze or return our greeting. This happened before I was born, but I remember it clearly.19)

  In our new hills, striped with slow and steady mountain streams, we struggled and lived, but the memory of our old home lingered always in our bones like an ache. I was born in this new place, and lived here in these green hills until the age of eleven.20 And although we were relieved here of the immediate threat posed by the lowland drought, the new land brought its own difficulties. There were hungry times here, too, but also new and unforeseen dangers.

  Koni discovered the first disquieting sign. Koni was older than me by seven years, a teenager on the cusp of womanhood. My mother treated her almost like her own daughter, and for many years, in fact, I believed Koni was my true sister. I followed her in everything she did. When she waded in the lake and curved her trunk back over her body to spray herself, I did the same and choked as the water flowed back down my trunk into my throat. When we grazed, I would leave my mother’s side only to follow behind Koni, to admire the deft way she handled the grasses with her trunk, nimble and precise; how she effortlessly held her own among the elders. Her eyes were larger than those of other elephants, depthless and black.21

  I did not know yet who Koni was. I could not have foretold the ways in which her actions would change my life.22

  Koni’s confidence and tendency to solitude distinguished her from the other adolescents, especially when from time to time our group was joined by a clutch of noisy young bulls from the outlying jungles. These boys would camp a short distance from us and saunter into our herd by day, draping their trunks over their small tusks in feigned nonchalance, but quickly revealing themselves as overeager novices. Fancying themselves clever, they tried surreptitiously to sniff our undersides and taste our urine, to determine who among our older sisters were least likely to reject their rude attentions. When they approached an older elephant, one of our mothers, they would be greeted with a roar or a feinted lunge, to send them scurrying back to their cohorts. Our mothers had no time for these juveniles. But the adolescents and younger cows were curious about the newcomers, and some eager girls became positively giddy with excitement. The interest of men was still a novelty to them, and so, giggling and indiscriminate, one of my cousins might follow a boy elephant into the forest for days together.23 Upon her return, her friends might surround her, cooing and fawning, eager to mark the ascension of one of their own into the ranks, they imagined, of womanhood.

  Koni, I thought, was different from the other girls. Even when she reached maturity, she stayed aloof from the attentions of boys. She held close to the elders of our group, modeling her comportment on theirs. Some of the other elephants found such behavior haughty—a cow, they thought, should behave like a cow, but a calf like a calf. They felt Koni had not earned the right to carry herself as though she were superior to other elephants her age, to dominate and command those elephants. But to my child’s eyes, Koni was not behaving as though she were superior to others her age. She simply was superior. It was abundantly clear.

  But some months later Koni surprised us. We were grazing on trees on the grassless side of a hill, eating leaves, bark, and even the thin ends of branches, stripping down the trunks. In loose and fluid order we grazed, straying occasionally out of sight of each other, keeping our bearings by bellowing out loudly and then waiting to hear the rippling replies of our sisters. But then Koni called to us from somewhere distant, and the sound of her call was unformed and open, and we could not fathom its meaning. Her voice bellied out over the forest, an implacable ululation. Our stomachs dropped, our ears pricked out rigid and quivering with alarm, and we froze. Old Iala emptied her bladder in a rush of distress, then turned around as if to flee—we all saw her. But my mother sent forth a long, deep rumble that rolled over the forest floor, flattening grass: a reassurance, a reply to Koni, and an indisputable command to the rest of us. We rushed forward then, everyone, even flustered, shame-faced Iala, her ears flapping in agitation, with children like me struggling to stay close to the dust-clouded behinds of our mothers. And we rushed as elephants rush—splintering trees, obliterating the small, unfortunate mammals who people the forest floor—until we came across Koni in a forest clearing, standing watch over a gruesome sight, a massive and familiar carcass.24

  I knew the dead bull. Once a year he would visit our group, and I dreaded this visit in the pit of my stomach. His smell preceded him by an hour: a black, pungent odor that arrived not gradually but all at once, like a wet-season cloud. My aunts and cousins lifted their trunks to sniff the air and, receiving the smell, fell into an unseemly frenzy, braying at each other, urinating excitedly into the bush.

  When he arrived, he broke through the surrounding trees without ceremony, his chin tucked in, his tru
nk extended, his eyes wild and intent. Black rheum ran down the sides of his face and along the insides of his thighs, and his penis hung low, enormous, dribbling some cloudy serum. Two massive tusks weighted his head, arcing down almost to the ground, the left one broken off and jagged at the tip.

  The younger elephants who had reached maturity could not contain themselves; they bowed at him and shuffled with nervous, eager submission. Even Manami and Iala and my other usually dignified aunts excitedly circled this powerful bull, turning their backsides toward him in embarrassingly frank invitation. But he ignored them. His interest was already focused on a muscular cow, my mother, who stood some distance away, peeling the branches from trees, nonchalantly flapping her ears, turning only a casual glance at the visitor. The bull walked toward her, but my mother only walked away. He trotted faster, but my mother outpaced him, leading him deep into the trees. I watched the shivering of the treetops that marked their progress as they receded deeper into the cover of the forest. And then the forest was still.

  About four days later my mother would return alone, weary and calm. She trotted directly to me, reassured herself of my well-being, offered me her breast, which I accepted, bewildered, but famished and grateful. My aunts reverted to their conditioned or inborn hierarchies, obeying Amuta’s commands reflexively, none of them remarking on her absence. But if my aunts didn’t resent him, I certainly did, this mysterious bull who was the only thing that could separate my mother from her daughter and her herd.