The Tusk That Did the Damage (21 page)

“Make me?” His laugh came out flat and fake. “What do you think she is—a gangster?”

“Did she give you the bullet in her office? During your confidential meeting?” As I spoke, he stepped away, turning his back on me. “Is that why she hustled us out of there, why the postmortem just
had
to continue the next morning?”

“You people.” He locked onto me with slitted eyes. “Always hunting for a story so others can watch and feel outrage. What about my outrage? What about the outrage of another dead elephant, one I might have pulled from a ditch or a cave and brought here and bandaged and bottle-fed with my own hands? Plucked like that, easy as a weed?”

“I just want to know what happened.”

“You want to cut me open and drag it all out.” He clapped the toolbox shut, shelved it under the table. “Isn’t that what you do? Isn’t that your gift?”

“Tell me what happened to the dead guy. Shivaram.”

Even with my butchered pronunciation, the name made Ravi stare into the surface of the table, at the bright smudge of light. The whole room seemed to go still, and I kept silent, sure that one word from me would cause him to snap.

He said the poacher had been killed a few hours after the postmortem began. Officer Vasu had been involved. Some kind of confusion with the poacher, guns fired. “Vasu was frightened. He is one year from retirement. So he went to Samina Madame for help—”

“And she came to you.”

“She said to suspend the postmortem. That same night, I came to her office, as she asked. She explained the situation and gave me the bullet.”

“Where’d she find the bullet?”

With difficulty, Ravi said that Vasu had gotten it off the body. The man had been carrying a pouch of bullets but, mysteriously, no gun. “She gave me the bullet. She said it was up to me.”

“To frame a dead man,” I said.

“He was not an innocent. Whatever he was planning to do, Vasu stopped him from it.”

“He was unarmed! He hadn’t done anything!”

“What would you do? Throw old Vasu in the street, let these human rights people make a meal of him?”

“I wouldn’t falsify evidence, sorry to disappoint you. That’s just fucked up. That’s some LAPD shit.”

I’d lost him at LAPD. “You cannot put this in your film.”

“Why not? Everything you just said is already in the news.”

“So why blow it up even further? For your film? So you can parade around and pretend your art is of help to anything but your own career?”

I’d been calm this long, but now rage sprung up in me, hot and quick. “You never had a problem with my art when it made you look good.”

He hovered a moment, uncertain. “Forget about me, then. What about Samina Hakim? We never had a DRO like her before. We work closely with her department. Why go after one of the good guys?”

“Her track record isn’t exactly spotless.”

“Shankar Timber was one case—”

“Sure, until the next timber company comes along or mining company or mill …”

“Oh, spare me the lesson, Emma. No one here is a saint, not even you.”

“I’m not trying to be a saint. I’m trying to be objective.”

“Are you? Then what about the watch on your wrist? You think it appeared out of nowhere? You think that metal didn’t come from a mine like the one you’re talking about?”

“What—” I glanced down at the ten-dollar Casio I’d gotten from Walmart and crossed my arms. “What’s your point?”

“There has been no one better than Samina. I did twenty postmortems in ’97. This year I have done two. You want to go backwards now?”

“Oh, for god’s sake, the whole future of the species doesn’t hang on me.”

“No. Nor me.” With his thumb, he rubbed at a scratch on the steel table. “I know I am bailing water from a sinking boat with only my hands. You can either help me bail or make another hole.” He looked up at me. The scratch was still there. “Which will it be?”

I turned away, but he stepped closer, so close I could feel his breath on my shoulder. I could sense him willing me to yield, not unlike the night he put his hands on my waist. It had happened two weeks ago, but nearly every hour since, I’d hoped it would happen again.

“Please, Emma.”

He took my hand. He rubbed his thumb over the knot at my wrist, and for a few moments, we stood like that, avoiding each other’s eyes.

Once, in an interview, Ravi had told me he’d never marry, or, at least, he’d never find a woman willing to accept what he called his first wife—the Rescue Center. At the time, I’d thought he was joking. But I saw now that he was committed to something larger than the center, to a panoramic sense of peace, even if it meant painting over certain patches.

Maybe I yielded because I saw the logic—ugly but necessary—in that peace. Maybe I thought I was doing my small and noble part, protecting the species. That’s what I’d like to believe, though it seems equally possible that, at twenty-three, I gave in solely because my hand was in his.

I said I was tired, that I’d speak to Teddy, though I sensed Teddy wouldn’t be speaking to me anytime soon. Ravi offered to walk me back to my room, but I shook my head, thinking there would be other nights, that this wouldn’t be our last.

As we walked on through the forest, I could not rid myself of a certainty—the Gravedigger had let me live, but next time it would not. Every step up the hillside was a step in the wrong direction. My terror mounted; my heart jumped at each twitch and swish of leaf. Time to time I whirled about, surprised yet relieved to see the suspicious face of my brother.

“What is it?” he hissed at one point. “What did you see?”

How I wanted to tell him and would have, had we a moment alone. Even then he would have thought me soft and sentimental as a drunk. He would have guessed the Gravedigger, being weak-eyed, had not seen me, that the smeared scat on my arms had kept him from sniffing me out. Or that I had merely faced a dim-witted elephant, not the Gravedigger itself.

But I had looked into the creature’s eyes. Dim it was not.

“Manu,” Jayan whispered. “Tell me.”

Over his shoulder Alias cast a wary eye. I ignored my brother, my fearfulness, recalled the oath I had made to my mother. I kept an eye on the trees around me, the secrets behind their leaves. The birds gibbered invisibly.

Once we reached the uplands, Alias and Jayan climbed trees, hoping to catch sight of the animal. I stood at the foot of Jayan’s tree, scanning the yellow smears of grassland surrounding us, the tiles of farmland down below, the hostile peak up above. Where
was the creature? I felt a muscle jumping in my jaw, my mind aswirl.

“Eh! Wee Shivaram!”

I startled, and looked up.

Jayan was frowning down at me. “Binoculars.”

“I cannot.”

“Cannot what? I know I packed them.”

I took off my pack and set it on the ground. “I cannot kill the elephant.”

Jayan glanced at Alias, who was glaring all owlish from his perch, close enough to sense a disturbance, too far to hear details. “No one is asking you to kill it.”

“I cannot face it again.”

Jayan dug deep into my gaze. “What do you mean
again
?”

Alias thunked out of his tree like an overripe fruit, making his way to us.

“What if it knows,” I whispered quickly, “what if it knows we are coming for it? They say an elephant can sense when it’s being hunted. Maybe it will hide. Maybe it will wait for nightfall, hunt for
us.
”

How to describe Jayan’s disgusted expression? As though I were a leper, as if the tip of my nose had dropped off.

“What is the shitter saying now?” Alias asked. He struck a casual pose and lit a bidi.

“He wants to leave,” Jayan said.

What I wanted was to take the second chance the tusker had given me. What I wanted was to live, to work, to know the weight of a wife on my lap, to watch my children tumble down mounds of rice if life would so bless me. I had never stood in
such intimate company with a wild bull elephant or felt its breath steaming upon my face, had never watched the ground beneath my feet fall away until all that remained was the small patch on which I stood trembling. How could a man survive such a thing unchanged? How could he glimpse that unholy omen, a warning as ancient as the oldest of fables, as obvious as a black-bellied cloud, and ignore it?

“Let him,” Alias said. He lifted his bidi into the air so the smoke could tell him the wind’s direction. “Although you may meet the Gravedigger on the way home.”

“How the hell is he to go home? Should he ask a greenback for directions?”

“You could come,” I said. “Part of the way. Or the whole way.”

Alias shook his head. “I can shoot the beast, but I cannot butcher the thing alone.”

“What butchering …,” I said. Jayan sighed with exasperation and looked away.

The truth gored me slow.

“But there are no blades in my pack,” I said.

“Check mine,” said Alias, flicking his chin at the tree where his smaller pack dangled from a branch. “You’ll find a kitchen knife, an ax, a handsaw …”

“But you told her,” I started and stopped. Still Jayan would not meet my gaze. “Where will you hide it? And if she finds it—”

“Enough questions!” Jayan said. “Why must you always be itching and whining,
what if this, why that
? If you are going, then go!”

I looked away, brimming with hurt and fury. Jayan was the type who did not know the difference between humbling and humiliating another. I was fed up with both.

“Then I am going,” I said.

Jayan nodded as if he understood this to be the only way. “Go,” he said calmly this time. “Go safely.”

He offered the rifle, but I refused it. I pretended to remember the route we had taken and promised to carry stones in my fist, lest the Gravedigger should discover me.

“Don’t take chances now,” Jayan said.

Spent of advice, he bit his lip—how like a boy he seemed then! We had no words, and so we simply looked as we had not looked in a very long time. Think of the last time you looked on someone you loved, merely looked without speaking, a face more familiar to you than your very own, a face that holds such mysteries.

“Our guest will be here any minute,” Alias said.

Abruptly I turned and walked away, fleet of foot without the pack. And yet every step felt heavy.

To hunt is to read a hidden language. Inside the forest, I was hunting for a way out. My plan was to take an eastward path, following the kinks of the stream all the way back to the split banyan where the ranger cousin would allow me safe passage. And yet no matter how hard I strained I could not hear the hum of the stream.

I minded the signals: the heaped hill of scat, the sever of a green-hearted branch. I tried not to think of my brother (thereby thinking of him constantly), and thus distracted I lost my footing and snapped a thick twig underfoot. I had snapped several by then, so I thought nothing of it—a sound one would only hear if listening precisely for this.

By now you know: someone was.

I barely saw Ravi in those last few days at the center. The middle ground of friendship was strange and swampy terrain, so we kept to our separate banks. I didn’t think we would ever be pen pals. His e-mails had the brevity of a haiku, the bluntness of a road sign.

As for Teddy and me, something had ruptured between us, irreparably. He went quiet in my presence, ate alone. We skated by on silence and small talk. I told myself some time apart would be cure enough, but deep down I sensed that our friendship wouldn’t survive these final days. Nor would our film.

The day Teddy and I left for Manaloor was a hectic rush of goodbyes. Ravi had insisted on trucking the calves in the evening, which left Teddy and me to fret over the fading light. We filmed the calves trailing the head keeper, Tarun, who backed up the ramp and into the truck bed, dangling bananas. Dev seemed especially agitated, immune to the sedative that Ravi had administered, a shot behind the ear. Only when Tarun lowered his head, allowing Dev’s trunk to fondle his neck, did the calf grow calm.

Once the calves were shut into the truck bed, Ravi stepped back, ducking to catch a glimpse as they nosed the slats, desperately flexing their nostrils. Something in the way he bit his lower lip reminded me of the way Juhi stuffed her trunk tip into her mouth. His theory was that she did it to keep ants from running
up her nostrils at night. I thought it was her version of thumb sucking, a means of reassurance. “Always looking for a story,” Ravi had said, not without affection.

Later, I would think of a dozen other ways to say goodbye, jokes about Dev’s soccer stardom or genuine words of gratitude, but when Ravi approached I simply took the hand he offered me—a dry, priestly grip, as meaningless as the handshake he’d given to Teddy.

“Emma Lewis,” he said. He’d never spoken my name before, first and last, tender and taunting, and the sound of it closed the space between us. I don’t remember what I said; all I know for certain is the way he spoke my name, and suddenly it seemed possible that I could return to this very spot, years from now, and all would remain unchanged.

Of course, the illusion lasted only as long as the handshake. As we rolled away, Teddy cranked down the window on the passenger side and adjusted the side-view mirror. It was the perfect parting shot, with Ravi shrinking from view, lost to the swarming green.

In Manaloor, another rescued calf joined the three, a burly number named Bhim. Over the course of two weeks, the calves were taken for daily walks at the edge of the wildlife park, groomed to grow accustomed to the area, taught which berries and leaves to eat. All the calves were fastened with radio collars. Each day, they roamed a bit farther from the rangers, even so far as the watering hole, but always returned.

Teddy let me shoot more than usual during our time in Manaloor, maybe because he knew he wouldn’t be using very
much of the footage. It was Teddy who would edit the film, Teddy who would score and sound mix the final cut. At first, we tried to work side by side from his apartment, but by then the bitterness between us had grown roots, and rather than fight him every day for reasons far messier than aesthetics, I withdrew myself from the film. I let him have everything. Another six months passed in a pointless blur, the price of surrendering a whole year of my life.