The Tusk That Did the Damage (2 page)

“Yamini likes it.”

“Up the rump?”

“Do not talk of her rump.”

“I hear what I hear. And from the particulars, I would not touch her with a boatman’s pole.”

We bickered, but there was a comfort to our fuggy odors and the flash of our teeth in the dark. Other times we burrowed into the quiet, each of us privately wondering what kind of future awaited us. I had a habit of dozing, which Raghu allowed to a limit and would shake me awake only if I were to poof. “What is this,” he would shout, flapping his hands about his face, “your personal shithouse?”

Whenever he gently tapped me awake, I knew I had been murmuring for my brother, something like
Where is Jayan where is he,
even though Jayan had been home for six months already. To spare me the shame, Raghu would only say I had been poofing again.

Humble as it was, our palli commanded a five-star view. To the north a phone tower climbed the sky. To the east an owl glared from its bamboo perch, swiveling its head for rodents among the stalks. To the west we watched the sunset pour over the teak-rimmed forest aka Kavanar Wildlife Park.

Our people had been walking the forest long before it took
that fussy name. The new laws forbid us from doing anything in the park, not walking, not even picking up a finger length of firewood without being fined for trespass and stealing. Stealing from trees that had dropped us fruit and firewood for centuries! Meanwhile, the laws looked kindly on the greenbacks and timber companies, their rows of rosewood, eucalyptus, teak.

So I had zero patience for Raghu’s ramblings when he decided to tell all about the spectacle he had witnessed one day prior, starring his brand-new hero: Ravi Varma, Veterinary Doctor. I had never seen this Ravi Varma, M.D., though I had heard of his exploits with the greenbacks, and I was no fan of theirs nor his by association.

And what heroic feats had the cow doctor performed to deserve Raghu’s worship? Pulled an elephant calf from a tea ditch, where the wee thing had tripped and fallen much to its mother’s distress.

I told Raghu my demented old mammachi could pull an elephant calf from a tea ditch.

“Not only that,” Raghu enthused. “The vet doctor got the mother to
take back
the baby.”

Now this part was pure lie. “A mother elephant won’t touch a calf that was handled by humans. Every idiot knows that.”

“But she did! And she thanked him after.”

“Did they shake hands too?”

“And two sayips were there, filming it all. BBC people I think.”

This gave me pause. In those days, it was rare to see foreigners in our parts, and we were neither poor enough nor princely enough to appear on Western screens. I was minimally intrigued. What did the BBC want with us?

Raghu sighed, still dazzled by the memory of Ravi Varma, M.D. “It was something, Manu, I tell you.”

Was Raghu musing about the mother and calf on his final evening? Did that sentimental memory lead him to lay down his guard? I imagine his last and lonesome hour, I see him drifting off, a breath from sleep, before he sits up quick to the snap of a broken branch.

In the silence he looks from one doorway to the other. He can open his lungs and caw and set the other pallis cawing, but what if it was only the snap of the fire? He hears me scoffing in his ears:
A broken branch in the middle of a field?

Raghu hunkers beneath his blanket, hiding from the possibilities.

After a noiseless minute he can breathe again, relieved he never set to squawking like some half-brained bird. He draws deep on the comfort of woodsmoke, sure I will come. Until then, he will tend the fire alone.

Along time ago, when the mountains bristled with forest, a boy emerged from the woods and came upon a white man with china-blue eyes. The white man was a British engineer, sent to cut a royal road through the mountains, but he couldn’t find a path. He wasn’t an explorer, and this was some dense and secretive terrain. Couldn’t the boy, being a local and privy to local secrets, just show him the way?

The boy demanded cash and the watch on the engineer’s wrist.

Proffering the watch—cash later—the engineer trailed the boy into the mountains, tracing a route tamped by elephant feet. Every so often the boy stopped and said he had to go home because his mother was waiting; he hadn’t the time to go all the way to the peak. Just a bit farther, the engineer kept urging, just a bit more.

At sundown they reached the peak. The man squinted at the mountains beyond and smiled as if he’d come into some great inheritance. Happy now? the boy said. Now give me my money.

Just a minute, said the engineer, reaching into his coat pocket.

I don’t have any more minutes, the boy insisted.

True, said the engineer, leveling his pistol, and shot the boy in the face.

The engineer slipped the watch off the dead boy’s wrist. He thought about the bigger watch he’d buy once the road was built and named after the Englishman who had single-handedly found a route through the ghats.

As it turned out, the bullet gave the dead boy all the time in the world. Many years later, his spirit took up residence in the hollows of a banyan, along the road the engineer had built, and overturned cars as a means of revenge. Only when a priest wrapped the tree in chains was the spirit contained, and cars could once again barrel freely round the bend. Thereafter it was known as the Chain Tree.

§

I leaned out the taxi window to catch a glimpse of the Chain Tree. I’d heard the legend on my first day at Kavanar Wildlife Park and was expecting a hulk more twisted and mythic. In fact, the banyan looked benign, with chains dangling like party streamers from the branches.

The road itself was far more intimidating, all rubble and rollick and switchback. Our taxi driver seemed to think himself invincible, maybe even immortal, the way he dodged cars, scooters, lorries, mini-lorries, tipper-lorries, and a band of pedestrians with hankies tied round their mouths, to fend off dust. A rosary hanging from the rearview mirror spanked the back of the driver’s hand. He took no heed of the rosary, or of the road signs that every so often shot by:

I was nervous about the shoot; the signs didn’t help. Beside me, Teddy sat staring out his window, placid and daydreamy.

“We should’ve rented a second camera,” I said.

“Then who would do sound?” Teddy said.

“Mount a mic on the camera. People do that all the time.”

Teddy frowned at the idea. He was a purist about sound quality, though he rarely volunteered to take sound himself.

“I don’t know how we’re going to get everything with just one camera,” I said.

“We’re not going to get everything, Em. Once you accept that, it’s really liberating.”

“Are you going Buddha on me?”

Teddy didn’t answer, thus had gone Buddha. Going Buddha was central to his process, rendered him able to cruise into a frenetic situation armed only with a camera and instinct. Neither of us knew what the shoot would entail, but a rescue mission involving elephants was destined for frenzy.

We careened through plantations of coffee and tea, rows of bushes ribboning over the shallow slopes, bedazzled with bright red berries. A silver oak shimmied against the wind, its trunk a smear of marigold fungus. Easier to miss were the ditches carved around the plots, meant to keep wild elephants from snacking on the berries. From time to time, a mother and calf would loot the bushes, and the calf would slip and tumble into a ditch, out of its mother’s reach.

This was where Dr. Ravi Varma and his team would intervene. This was what had obsessed me for a year, what Teddy and I had taken three planes and a train to film.

I was the one who’d brought the idea to Teddy in the first place. Fresh out of college, we’d been looking for a subject for our first
documentary feature when I learned about Ravi from an in-flight magazine. The photos of fuzzy elephant calves hooked me for the usual cutesy reasons; the description of the veterinary doctor glowed with dramatic potential.

I learned that Ravi Varma was the head veterinary doctor at the Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, known for his roughrider methods at animal rescue. He had pioneered the “calf reunion,” a technique that few vets dared to attempt on stranded elephant calves.

We tracked down Dr. Varma, and after a slew of calls, he reassured us that there would be no shortage of rescues and calamities to film. I sent off a handful of grant applications and won two. Teddy’s father, a hand surgeon, bought him a camera and sound kit that outpriced my car. In the fall of 2000, we flew to South India with equipment bags slung over our
shoulders, all of which airport security examined slowly and grimly.

For the past few months, Teddy and I had been living at the Rescue Center, a period of Pax Romana in which zero calamities had taken place, resulting in footage that had all the depth and nuance of a promo video. Once or twice—and much to my dread—Teddy had suggested that we include a Morgan Freeman–esque voice-over, a tall order, as Morgan Freemans do not grow on trees. “You have a nice voice, you could do it,” said Teddy, but I’d tried voice-over once before and was mortified when the playback revealed the voice of a breathy mouse performing spoken word. No way in hell would I try that here. I wasn’t expecting perfection from the film, but I wanted to stand behind every frame, every choice. Other people my age had reels and résumés; all I wanted was a single work that could speak for me, even if that work was a little uneventful.

We were set to leave for the States in two weeks when, in a last-minute break, Ravi called us from his mobile, already on his way to the calf rescue. Here at last was the disaster Teddy had been waiting for, back when a fallen calf was the biggest disaster we could imagine.

By the time we arrived, Ravi’s team had been working for three fruitless hours. We edged through the men who had gathered to watch. Teddy raised his camera, but all I could see was a dozen lushly haired crowns, not a bald spot among them, a phenomenon Ravi proudly attributed to coconut oil.

Teddy moved through the crowd with a detached yet pleasant expression, as if accustomed to being two feet taller than everyone
around him. I was just as conspicuous with my coppery bun, my yellow Windbreaker, my boom—a long-handled mic with a furry wind guard angled at the end. Whenever we filmed, I expected everyone to turn and surround us like magnet filings to steel, but at present all eyes were fastened on the cow elephant in the distance.

She was hovering over the edge of the ditch. I couldn’t see the calf, wedged somewhere inside. The elephant flapped her ears at us, as distressed by her fallen calf as by the shore of our tiny, leery eyes.

I questioned a man whose button-down shirt, a psychedelic weave of pink and orange, suggested a knowledge of English. Puffing up before the lens, the man said a baby elephant was in the ditch, and the Forest Department had already spent a battery of blanks to scare away the mother and rescue the calf. The mother was unbudgeable, kept crying out and tossing clods of dirt into the ditch, as if to build a ramp. “She is very upset, see. And if these Forest Department people get too close, she will abandon the calf. Once the human touches the baby …” He shook his head, clasped his hands behind his back. “Mother will leave it behind, no question.”

“So then what happens to the calf?”

“It will be captured, trained, and on like that.”

We watched the elephant rummage her trunk through the ditch. I’d been looking at elephants so long I forgot sometimes what a magical organ the trunk was, like an arm exploding out from the middle of the face, packed with enough muscle to knock down a tree, enough control in its tiny, tapering finger to grip a lima bean. But even that miraculous limb couldn’t save the baby.
The mother stood there, withering before our eyes. Huge and forlorn, pugnacious and bewildered.

I managed to say thanks before Teddy hustled me toward the crowd near Ravi’s van. He was sitting in the back, hefting onto his lap a caboodle of vials and jars, needles of nightmarish length. Teddy scooched into the van and swung the camera onto the oglers at the bumper, while I extended my mic, adjusted the dials on the DAT at my hip.

“Aha,” Ravi said, without looking up. “The media.”

Months of almost daily filming had put Ravi at ease with the camera, attuned to the sort of information we needed, the sound bites that would pop on-screen. He lectured, unprompted, while plugging a syringe into a small jar of clear fluid. “This is xylazine-ketamine, for the tranquilizer gun. Tranq is only the backup option. First we try the rubber bullet.”

“Why not start with the tranq?” I asked. Teddy homed in on his hands: deftly twisting, injecting.

“She could fall, break a leg. And what if she is still asleep when we get the calf out? We can’t babysit the thing; she won’t take him back.”

The crowds parted for Ravi, their reverential eyes on the tranq gun. He summoned a huddle of forest officers and Bobin, his assistant. (At first, the name “Bobin” had sounded to me like a clerical error, but as Ravi’s wiry sidekick, Robin to his Batman, Bobin sort of made sense.)

With Ravi in the lead, the team waded into the aisles between the bush rows, guns raised. The crowd had turned quiet. Teddy had flipped out the camera’s LED screen, glancing up and down between screen and ditch.

The elephant swung her body around, squaring herself with us, and at once her fear and fury plunged through me, something buried in the bones, whetted on years of running from men with guns. She growled low, whipping her ears; the men closed in. Only Bobin moved unarmed, some rope contraption coiled around his shoulder, a badge of sweat on his lower back.