The Tusk That Did the Damage (10 page)

Elephant Sabu’s wife was appalled by the Gravedigger’s price. Thirty-eight lakhs? For thirty-eight lakhs, they could have bought a parcel of land, as her father had suggested, plus a car. Yet Elephant Sabu believed the tusker’s near-perfect physique would in time reap enough profit for multiple cars. After all, the elephant met every single one of the twelve auspicious traits:

Elephant Sabu was a veritable encyclopedia of pachydermal knowledge. Yet this was wasted on his wife, who didn’t even let him get to number 5 before she told him where he could stuff the rest.

§

In a thicket tucked away from the festival mayhem, the Gravedigger ate his panna, becalmed by his bath and the sluggishly munching presence of Parthasarathi. They spent most of their hours in shared company, whether standing still during a puja or sleeping in their adjacent stalls. They bathed together. They drank together. They dozed side by side. When the Gravedigger began to wring his head for dark, cloudy reasons, Parthasarathi rumbled at a frequency only the Gravedigger could perceive. He focused on the hum and the rest of the raucous world fell away.

The Gravedigger found a similar reassurance in the musk of Old Man, who sat on a low wall, his arms around his knees, watching as always.

§

With all sixteen elephants bathed and blessed, the puja began.

The priests took turns feeding the Gravedigger packed balls of rice and brown sugar, laced with turmeric. The last in line, a boy priest, sheepishly raised a hunk of brown sugar to the Gravedigger’s mouth. Still chewing, the Gravedigger plucked the hunk and kept it curled in his trunk. Awestruck, the boy priest backed away.

Women broke into riotous birdsong, backed by beating drums. They raised their folded hands, their murmurs overlapping. The Gravedigger felt a pressure inside his head, receding only when the stick paused against his trunk. The stick served as a reminder:
Stand and obey.

The people wrapped around him, parted wherever he walked, each face resembling the next, like river stones washed smooth of distinction. Someone gave three short shoves to his tusk; he knelt to allow the head priest to mount his front leg as another clambered up his flank, and the frontpiece was unfurled over his forehead in a spill of pink stitching and hot brass, and his legs were locked in baubled anklets, and the heavy gold thidambu was hoisted onto his back. Then he was led to join the fifteen others who awaited him down below, in the dusty expanse that they would have to cross, step by measured step.

The drums were deafening, but nothing compared with the barrel rockets so thundersome they skewered the heart, they passed through the body like an explosion, like the explosion that stopped his mother’s breath. Smoke threaded up the trees behind the temple. He thought of metal and gunpowder, sun and shadow, all of it throbbing in the skull. How open this sprawl of land, as empty as the uplands where his mother fell. How thick the forest of people, hundreds on the farther side.

One was a little boy, trying to hide behind his mother. She forced him out from her skirts, saying, “Look at the big one, look!” But the boy did not want to look at Sooryamangalam Sreeganeshan. He had seen enough of the beast, who had been haunting the boy’s dreams ever since the festival posters had gone up around town. The elephant’s tusks seemed to push through the surface of the poster, long and curved like a villain’s mustache, with a bubble floating over its clefted head, filled with a threat:

I AM COMING.

Fresh from the wedding, Teddy sat at the foot of my bed, where Ravi had been sitting five hours earlier. His left hand was gloved in an elaborate, effeminate henna tattoo. “Sanjay told me all the guys were doing it, like it was a tradition or something. Turns out it’s more of a girl thing.”

“Why didn’t you ask the tattoo lady?”

“I wasn’t sure she spoke English.” Without his camera, Teddy could be maddeningly shy with the locals. He sniffed his hand and made a face.

“So you had fun,” I said.

“I wish I’d been here.”

I was disheveled and tired, but no longer wallowing in nausea. I reassured Teddy that the unni appams had long left my system, that Ravi had taken good care of me.

“Ravi,” he said, supremely dubious. “Really.”

“So did Sanjay come in on a horse?”

“An elephant. He was scared shitless.” As Teddy described the scene, my phone buzzed for the third time that morning. I silenced it immediately. Ravi had already messaged me twice, inviting me to go for a drive before Teddy returned. I’d declined, eager to go but worried that the two of us joyriding around Kavanar Park might give rise to suspicion.

“Why aren’t you picking up?” Teddy said.

“Oh, it’s probably a spammer.”

“It’s Ravi.” Teddy pointed at Ravi’s
name glowing green on the top of my phone.

I feigned surprise and answered it.

Ravi was curt, all business. “I spoke with the divisional range officer, Samina Hakim. You can make an interview with her. She also suggested that you speak with two of the officers. They can take us on a tour of Kavanar.”

“When?”

“Monday. One week from today.”

“Okay, great. I’ll tell Teddy.”

“One more thing: I’m coming over tonight.”

“Yup. Got it.”

“And he’s not invited.”

Before I could reply, Ravi hung up.

I relayed most of the conversation to Teddy, who was frowning. “Are you avoiding him or something?”

“Ravi? No, why?”

“He was kind of short with you, from what I could hear.”

“Nah.” Confronted by Teddy’s questioning gaze, I was struck by a phrase from film class—
circles of confusion.
It was poetic for a technical term, meant to determine what zone of a shot would be in focus, or, as the handbook put it, “acceptably sharp.” But every lens was imperfect; the image was never perfectly sharp, merely permissible to the eye.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I said.

“Like what?”

Rule of thumb,
our professor had said.
For close shots, focus on the subject’s eyes.

“Like you’re filming me.”

He smirked and gave my knee a little shake, resting his henna-gloved hand a little longer than necessary.

On Monday, as promised, Ravi took us to the Range Forest Office, where a flamboyant gulmohar tree stood guard out front. The tree seemed plucked from folklore with its monstrous blossoms, its hunchback trunk, the roots that slithered and splayed down the steps where we stood.

Teddy ran the camera’s gaze from the blossoms to the office and back to the blossoms. I cast about for street sounds. Occasionally I glanced at Ravi, who was smoking by the curb, tuned out and gazing mildly ahead. He caught my look and returned a quick, complicit smile.

We’d gotten good at sneaking around. Back at the center, there was a guest cottage, where the walls were woven bamboo, the bed soft, the windows shuttered. It had a quaint, pastoral quality, albeit disrupted by the dotted boxers on the floor and the tongue scraper on the edge of the sink. (I found it weird and endearing that he brought his tongue scraper to our sleepovers. “You don’t clean your tongue?” he asked me, prim with shock.) It was cool whenever I stepped inside, the air humming with possibility, a sensation I carried back to my suite before dawn. I never saw Teddy on those nights, which led me to assume, with blissful indifference, that Teddy had never seen me.

Finished with exteriors, we met Ravi at the foot of the steps. “Shall we?” Ravi said, grinding his cigarette underfoot.

Teddy frowned. “Shall we what?”

“Meet with Samina Madame,” Ravi said.

“She speaks English, right? So we don’t need an interpreter.”
Teddy glanced at me. “It’s best to have some privacy during these interviews. The smaller the audience, the better.”

Ravi grinned like we were being ridiculous. “I know Samina Madame very well. What is so private she couldn’t tell me?”

There was an edge to Ravi’s voice. He looked to me, as did Teddy, awaiting my call.

“I have your number,” I said to Ravi. “You could grab a bite, come back?”

“Grab a bite,” Ravi repeated.

“A snack or something—”

“I know what it means,” he said, already walking away.

Before Teddy could muse on what had crawled up Ravi’s ass, I was climbing the steps.

Inside, an old man in green uniform sat at a desk, behind stalagmites of time cards and file folders. He seemed unperturbed by that wilderness of paperwork or maybe half blind to it, being that his right eye was glazed in white. He fixed us with his stern working eye as we introduced ourselves, then led us down the hall, past a room with an enigmatic sign over the door: wireless. The room was empty, aside from a chair that seated four cell phones in a row, all suckling from a single power strip.

We rounded a corner and entered an office to find Samina Hakim quickly blotting her lipstick on a napkin. She raised her gaze and smiled. There was a dollish prettiness to her features—bow mouth, wide eyes—planted in an ample face. She shook each of our hands, pausing briefly over Teddy’s henna before refreshing her smile.

Ms. Hakim said she had only a limited window of time, so we sprang into action. Teddy set up the camera while I softened
her up with chitchat, which she seemed happy to make. Among other things, we discussed the magnificence of South Indian coffee. “In America, coffee is not just coffee,” she opined. “You ask for coffee, they ask: What size? You ask for milk, they ask: How fatty? Here, coffee is coffee.”

“Excellent coffee,” I affirmed, clipping a lav mic between the pleats that spread fanlike over her chest. She looked at the fly-sized lav with a degree of suspicion.

“This way I can focus on you,” I explained, “instead of holding a mic in your face.”

“I see. No problem.”

After checking her levels, I asked Ms. Hakim if she’d like to begin. She straightened up, shoulders back, and clasped her hands on the desk like a newscaster, all her warmth displaced by wooden courtesy.

TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH SAMINA HAKIM, DIVISIONAL RANGE OFFICER

Just like that, her personality turned automated as she summarized her father’s work as a ranger, her own brief stint as a software engineer in Techno Park, and her quick ascent to becoming the first female range officer in India, at which point she sat back, as if she’d finished her meal and were waiting for the check.

I was caught off guard by her sudden brusqueness and, in fumbling for something to say, happened on a cliché—

—which caught Samina off guard. There was a long pause.