The Tusk That Did the Damage (11 page)

As we left the office, Teddy peppered me with questions, all to do with where I’d gotten my intel on Shankar Timber. I told him I’d explain later, when Ravi wasn’t waiting by the car.

I hadn’t planned to bring up the Shankar Timber case, but as the interview went on, and her answers took on the practiced cadence of a recitation (
as such … such as … as such
), I’d realized there was no other way of cracking her Teflon veneer. No way but one. The scandal was fair game; it had been in the news, after all. I hadn’t jumped her while she was at home in a bathrobe. She had to know the topic might come up.

And yet, judging by her response—the way her hands fused into a gridiron clasp—it was clear she hadn’t foreseen this turn at all.

Nor had I considered how my questions might affect Ravi, and his opinion of me. It only made sense to keep him in the dark, for the time being.

An hour later, Ravi, Teddy, and I were strolling through Kavanar Wildlife Park behind Officer Soman and Officer Vasu. Teddy took sound, and I filmed as we filed through the green, all of it undulating just beyond our reach. I’d missed the cool of being behind the camera, hyperattuned to our surroundings and yet detached. There was so much to capture: frothy white bursts of Communist green, so named, Ravi explained, because of its tendency to spread. Macaques rattling the highest branches of the teaks. Nests of silky white orchids sprouting from the branches of trees with roots like lava spills gone solid; red ants threading through a spewage of buffalo dung.

And then there was Officer Vasu and Officer Soman, both of whom had the quaint, bulbous features of garden gnomes. I paid more attention to Officer Vasu, only because he seemed the friendlier of the two. Through Ravi, I asked him about the giant rifle that hung from his shoulder, how often he’d had to use it against poachers. Officer Vasu received each question with a bashful smile and a lift of his nearly hairless eyebrows. “Once or twice,” he said. “But not directly at a poacher.”

“Why not?”

“If we kill someone, the media gets involved, then the Human Rights Commission. We can lose our jobs. There are many barriers for us.”

Without elaborating on the barriers, Officer Vasu walked on. I noted the laces of his shoes were tied haphazardly, woven through random holes and wrapped threefold around the ankles so they wouldn’t slip off. What did a poacher have to fear from a guy with oversized camo shoes and putty lumps for brows?

Farther along, Officer Soman pointed out the leaning wreckage of bamboo, thick as elephant bones, thirty years old and weeks away from decay. “Elephants love the bamboo,” Ravi added, “so the shortage is drawing them to the farms. And the Forest Department isn’t replanting, so—”

What followed was a volley of heated voices, passing so rapid fire we could only film and ask for translation later:

After the hike, our hosts took us to rest at their quarters, a two-level bamboo dwelling on stilts. An officer was perched in the lookout tower. We passed by a small garden, displaying neat rows of beans, curry leaves, and cabbages, staked in the center with a strung-up can of Shakti mustard oil, bouncing sunlight as it swung.

Officer Vasu led the tour. Here were the mosquito nets rolled up over the cots; here were the beige shirts hanging from the
wall pegs, the bullet shells on the bed, the walkie-talkies spitting sounds, the calendar on the wall with a young girl shyly fondling her braid. And here was the small shrine by the doorway, on a shelf nailed to the wall, with propped pictures of Ganesh and a blue cherubic Krishna, boxes of incense and burnt matches planted in balls of wax. Here they prayed before entering the forest.

As we filmed, it came out that Officer Vasu was from a poor family, same as Officer Soman, who saw his own family once a month. Officer Vasu pulled out a wafer-thin wallet, and from it he extracted what seemed to be a single puzzle piece.

“Me,” he said.

And it was him, albeit a younger him, trim and proud in his beige uniform, his foot hitched on the bumper of a jeep. He had cut around his own shape and that of the jeep attached to his foot, as if they were one. I pulled focus on the photo, held delicately in his fingers, dirt under the nails. There was something so humble, so heartwarming, about both Vasus, large and small, now and then, neither of whom seemed capable of harm. Yet two days later, Officer Vasu would shoot a poacher dead. At first I wouldn’t believe it; the shooter had to be some other Vasu, not our Vasu, not Vasu of the clown-sized camo shoes. Even in the space of a few hours, I thought I’d come to know him. Had he been playing to the camera? Or had I cast him as the sweet, clumsy native before he’d even opened his mouth?

The jeep trundled us homeward in the late afternoon. The moon made an early cameo, a translucent scoop of vanilla melting into the blue. Ravi had mellowed toward me, and riding beside him, I almost forgot about Teddy in the backseat, wearing that sated
look he always got at the end of a good day. Ravi steered with one hand, pointing out the cotton silk trees, the sals, the white pines, and the occasional aanjili, guarded by thuggish monkeys.

We came to idle behind an open lorry, four boys crammed in the back, heels bopping against the bumper. Three of them were chatting; the fourth was distracted by a silky seed floating past. I thought of that Helen Levitt photograph: four girls walking down a street, distracted by passing soap bubbles. Helen Levitt had been twenty-five, around my age, when she bought a Leica. She fit a winkelsucher to her camera, a device that let her point herself in one direction while the photo snapped from the side, so the subject was oblivious to being photographed.

I have almost no photos of our time in India. I told myself I didn’t want to be
that
tourist, snapping exotica for the benefit of friends back home, who’d get bored after flipping through a dozen or so. Teddy and I saw our India only in terms of the film, admittedly a narrow lens. We made up for our insecurities by being dogged in purpose: to get everything we could, and get it right.

And yet there were unexpected moments I still wish I could have captured somehow, in a medium more lasting than memory. Like the boy in the lorry, reaching for the silk seed. Or Ravi reaching over the gearshift and squeezing my hand, before Teddy could see.

For dinner, Ravi took us to his favorite restaurant, Y2K, a cryptic name belied by perky flower settings and plastic gingham tablecloths. Our server brought three “home-style meals”—a hillock of rice accessorized with various stews and curries—and
diplomatically set spoons beside two of the plates. Ravi ate with nimble fingers that never seemed to still, always tossing or crushing or rounding up a bite, leaving little room for talk.

We were halfway into the meal when Teddy said, “Okay, Em, fess up.” My stomach dropped, knowing where he was headed. I’d forgotten to warn him, neglected to explain. Now my signals—beseeching eyes, rigid head shake—were all too late. “Where’d you get that stuff about Shankar Timber?”

Ravi’s head snapped up.

Slowly I spooned more pickle onto my plate. “I don’t remember.”

“You asked her about Shankar Timber?” Ravi said.

Teddy turned to Ravi. “Have you heard about this? There’s a village called, what was it—”

“Manaloor,” Ravi said.

“Right. Anyway, the discussion got pretty tense, but Emma didn’t back down. She’s an excellent interviewer, way better than me.”

I shook my head at Teddy. “He doesn’t wanna hear this.”

“What makes her so excellent?” Ravi asked. A brittle note had entered his voice.

“Well, generally speaking, people tend to spill their guts around her.”

“Jesus, Teddy, you’re making me sound like an operator.”

“She’s a master of the pregnant pause, for example. People always feel the need to fill a silence, so they end up saying more than they mean to. And there’s this other tactic: at the end of an interview, she usually goes,
Is there anything else you think I should know?
”

“It’s an honest question,” I said.

“It’s all in the tone—like,
Hey, you can trust me.
But also,
I know there’s something you’re not telling me.
”

“So she manipulates people,” Ravi said.

Teddy shrugged. “All film is manipulated to some degree. It’s a way of cutting closer to the truth.”

“Yes, well. Too close and you get a girl cutting her wrists.”

Teddy’s spoon hung in the air for a moment, before lowering to the table. He looked at me, then Ravi. The silence was a vise, tightening with every second.

“I’m done,” Teddy said, tossing his spoon on the plate, and left to wait in the car.

I shook my head at Ravi.

“What?” he demanded.

“I can’t believe you.”

“I can’t believe
you.
”

“I’m sorry …”

Ravi rose.

“I didn’t tell Samina you told me.”

He waved me off and left to rinse his hand at the sink.

I’d been on a string of endless plane trips and car rides, but no voyage had ever felt as long as the thirty minutes it took to get home. I kept glancing at Teddy in the rearview, thinking that if I could just catch his eye, we’d be all right. But Teddy was turned toward the window, his blind gaze fixed on nothing.

We drove Leela to the hospital in Synthetic Achan’s car. On the way she began to bleed. She braced her arm against the car door, her face flushed and ugly with pain. My mother gripped her hand. Jayan hugged the wheel.

A hemorrhage, the doctor called it. She had bled out nearly a quarter of her womb’s supply. The baby was alive, but there was a high chance that in two weeks’ time she would deliver a thing too small to survive. Even if the baby lived, he would be too soft in the head to know his father from a fence post.

They fed tubes into Leela’s arms and kept her for the night. In the waiting area I watched Jayan run his thumb along the edge of the car key, up and down and up and down, his face betraying no feeling. At some point he went in to see her alone. He emerged even more sunken than before and said she wanted her underthings and toothbrush.

Leaving Leela with my mother, I drove through the murky dawn. Jayan sat very still in the passenger seat. I was dazed with fatigue, but his murmur roused me instantly.

“I should have killed that elephant. I should have killed him when you came and asked me.”

“I was asking you to find someone else—”

“It thinks it can trample my farm and family, end my life as easily as snipping a thread …”

“It’s an animal. I doubt it has a strategy.”

“Then you don’t know a thing about elephants.”

“But what will Leela say?”

He turned a fierce eye on me. “Who will tell her?”

We passed empty houses painted in the color of cake icings, a church helmed by a huge neon lady sprinkling lights from her fingers. This was the Virgin Mother, whose picture Leela kept in her mirror, a white woman with eyes glassy and mournful for her son.

Our silence lasted until I pulled up to the house. As the engine died, we stared at the scene, same as we had left it, and suddenly it seemed that the whole horrible night had been a dream.

“She thinks the baby is dying inside her,” Jayan said.

“She is emotional. Any mother would be.”

“Who would know better than her—you? The doctor?” He hung his head, his voice no more than a rasp. “A mother knows these things.”

Refusing my comfort or counsel, Jayan scrubbed the wet from his eyes with the heels of his hands and squinted hard at our broken palm. The set of his jaw declared his intentions as did the muscle twitching under his eye. He would inflict an equal pain. He would bleed the creature white.

I asked him if he had an extra green half pant.

He looked at me. “Are you sure?”

My heart was speeding. I was sure of nothing. Yet I could not let him walk alone.

For a wage of five thousand rupees Jayan enlisted Alias, a fellow who knew the forest as if he had designed it himself. As a bonus he came with his own homemade gun. He was famous for his rosewood muzzle-loaders, five feet long, a height nearly reaching
his own. He was equally famous for having only eight fingers. It was said that he had lost his last two digits while scrambling up the side of a mountain. Having wedged his hand between two rocks, he pulled and pulled, then pulled out his knife.

Was he Tamil? Tribal? Superhuman? In regard to Alias, my brother advised me to know less.

Synthetic Achan furnished his own gun for Jayan, a piece he said was specially crafted in Germany. He introduced me to the German in the privacy of his rice shed, carrying on about her origins, unaware that the rifle and I had already met. I thought of Raghu aiming the barrel at my enemies—
Take a bet, pussy man.
With sad affection, I traced one of the rabbits that leaped between the iron leaves.