The Tusk That Did the Damage (3 page)

At Ravi’s shout, a forest officer fired the rubber bullet. Missed.

In answer, the elephant opened her lungs and screamed. My stomach dropped; my dials hit the red zone.

Another gunshot—the elephant’s rear leg buckled. The rubber bullet had caught her in the haunch. She fled, hobbling, and the team was sprinting to the ditch and before anyone could tell us otherwise, Teddy and I were sprinting too.

The calf was on its back, stubby legs held aloft. It bleated, dazed, while Ravi and Bobin tugged a sling around its torso and, with the help of the team, dragged the calf aboveground. It lay on its side, panting. The mother bellowed from afar. As Bobin undid the harness, Teddy knelt to the level of its eye, a black magnet to Bobin’s every move.

Finally, the team propped the calf on its feet. Ravi barked at the others to flee. He grabbed my arm, the mother thundering toward us. I called for Teddy, still running, unsure if he was behind me or beside the calf, and getting no response I wrenched my arm free, even as the elephant’s thud was still hammering from beneath the earth.

I turned to see Teddy filming. The camera was fixed to his chest in order to steady the shot. His face was rigid with fear, barely breathing or blinking as the elephant trundled up to her calf. Twenty yards stretched between Teddy and the elephants, a
distance the mother could have closed in seconds. Yet he stood there, as still and spellbound as the rest of us.

The cow touched the calf on the crown, the nape, the wobbly trunk, which lifted, weakly, like a question mark. Her trunk ministered to his in ways at once intimate, familiar, mysterious.

The mother elephant raised her head, leveling her gaze upon Teddy. What happened next would become a subject of debate during an NPR interview, the question of whether the elephant’s gesture was, as Teddy would claim, a sign of gratitude. His fellow guest, a quippy animal ethologist, would dismiss the claim, accusing Teddy of “
human-
centric assumptions of animal consciousness.”

“That
wave,
as Ted here put it, could have meant anything. It could have been a sign of anger, even warning. It could have been joy. But gratitude is a human expression, learned by hand-reared creatures. I mean, look,” the ethologist would add, with so baffled a laugh it was like Teddy had claimed the elephant had curtsied, “a wild animal does not say thanks!”

I would have locked horns with that guy. Had he ever watched a calf suckle its trunk while it slept, whimpering from some secret dream? Had he ever watched Juhi, the oldest girl calf and self-assigned matriarch, drape her trunk over the youngest at a stranger’s approach? I’d witnessed these moments on my occasional solo shoots, though none would make it into the final cut. By then it was Teddy’s film, the whole thing practically shorn of my presence. I used to believe I was blindsided by how it happened, but I should’ve seen where I stood, ever at the periphery of things.

The confrontation lasted only a few moments. The mother
elephant whipped her trunk up and down, three deliberate times. Teddy held the shot long after she turned and glided on, her calf in tow, a blot barely higher than the bushes on either side. Through my headphones, I heard the shivering leaves and, beneath that, at a frequency felt only by me, a pulse of envy.

Each night the Gravedigger tossed in his sleep. He woke breathless with visions of ropes and rough hands. Rifles fired through his dreams.

His cries woke the girl calf that lay in the cell next to his. She rumbled low and testy through the dark, then fell quickly back to sleep, forelegs bundled, mouth ajar. He closed his eyes, his mother flitting across his lids, as warm and alive as she’d been not five days before. He stared at the girl calf through the web-strewn slats, the pink wedge of her tongue. He stuffed the tip of his trunk into his mouth.

The anakoodu was built of bamboo and dark mossy wood, with a high tin roof that chattered when it rained. A fence split the space into his and hers, each furnished with a stuffed burlap sack and nothing else, only the ghosts of other calves who had come before them. The air sagged with their smells.

During the day, the Gravedigger ran his trunk around the bars. He patted the ropes that bound them together. He climbed up the bamboo with his front feet, reaching his trunk through the slats. His snout closed like a fist around passing scents. Even after he grew tired of climbing, he kept tracing the knots, crisscross, crisscross. It became a thing he had to do, for buried reasons.

§

The pappans were hotheads, buzzing, restless, rotten smelling. Five were assigned to the anakoodu. The Gravedigger hated all but Old Man.

The days began and ended with Old Man, who was not the oldest and yet seemed a higher authority than the others. They worked quickly and carelessly, but Old Man took his time in his steady assessment of the calves. He chiseled their toenails with a metal file. He oiled each crack and crevice. With firm fingers, he found the knots of hurt and rubbed them until the Gravedigger purred and the girl calf whined for her turn.

He was the only pappan who bent low and let them drape their trunks along his neck. He had no trunk with which to return the gesture and staunchly refused to allow their trunk tips into his mouth. Still it was a comfort, to touch and be touched.

Yet touch could be a cruel teacher. One day, Old Man stood before the Gravedigger in the anakoodu. In his fist was a long stick, capped by a metal talon.

!! said Old Man. !!

The Gravedigger stared. Old Man wore a strange new face, hard and blank as a wall. He reached out and tugged sharply on the
Gravedigger’s left ear. The Gravedigger squealed, but Old Man kept pulling until the Gravedigger swerved to the left.

!!! said Old Man. !!!

A sharp tug to the Gravedigger’s right ear. He squealed, swerved right.

!!

!!!

!

!!!!

On and on until the Gravedigger could extract a meaning from each ugly note.
Left! Right! Stand Still! Kneel!—
the last learned by the whack of the stick across his flanks. Pain pulled his mind to a taut and terrible line, its only goal: to do whatever would prevent the pain.

Only at bathtime did the Gravedigger resist. He knew the bad hour was approaching by the tourists who thronged outside, chattering, buffooning, baring their teeth, cunning as monkeys. Their noises blurred to a hiss, coiling all around him until he could not breathe.

It began with a scraping sound; Old Man slid out two of the wooden boards, the square of sunlight parted by his shape. In the
early days, Old Man tied a rope around the Gravedigger’s middle in order to tug him to the water. Once the Gravedigger learned not to tug back, to beetle along in silence, the rope was undone.

They proceeded in line: Old Man, the girl calf, the Gravedigger, and two more pappans. There was the spitter, who continually shot red tongues of paan out his mouth, and the squat one, whose breath simmered with liquor. Every so often, either the spit or the squat would bark at the Gravedigger, for reasons beyond his knowing. Sometimes he cut a hot fart to shut them up.

The crowd followed at a distance, clucking along, as all five stumped single file across the open and down a slope. There the trail spread into the riverbank. As soon as the Gravedigger caught a murky, algal whiff, he panicked and tried to turn back, but the pappans shoved him onward.

When they reached the banks, the girl calf trotted into the lake and stopped a few feet shy of Old Man, who took a wide stance on the rocks. Murmuring gently, he tossed water on her back. Occasionally he scooped a handful into his own mouth and gazed out over the breeze-pleated currents. The girl calf glittered in the sun, her hair bejeweled with droplets, her eyes drowsy with pleasure.

The Gravedigger was miserable. They kneed him into the water and tugged on his ear. Again and again they doused him with water, and again he was at the lake with his clan, and there was the tusker tossing water and there was his mother spraying him in the mouth. He burrowed his face into the girl calf’s side, but there was no escaping what all he remembered.

§

Twice a day, the adult elephants nodded past the anakoodu on their way to the lake, clanking chains. The pappans rode on their backs or walked alongside.

The first time the Gravedigger had glimpsed all the giants together, he thrust his trunk through the bamboo bars and keened. Cows and cousins of varying browns and grays. He thought he scented his mother among them.

He cried out as they passed, but not a one turned her head, as if they were less than strangers, not even the same kind. Yellow-green urine stained their hind legs. An alarming absence in their eyes.

Every night, the Gravedigger escaped. He closed his eyes and saw himself swimming steadily across the river, led by the scent-seeking periscope of his trunk. He saw himself break the surface and climb onto the opposite bank where his mother was waiting. There he was, his trunk wrapped in hers. Whatever hurt or sorrow befell him was not really happening to him. He was on the other bank with his mother. He was not here.

§

So began the Gravedigger’s second life, a tale that would remain incomplete without a proper portrait of Old Man. In the end, the newspaper stories would ignore almost entirely the late T. S.
Mahadevan; some would neglect to mention his name. Yet he would live for another decade in rumors and rhymes, summoned like a spirit that would never know rest.

At the Sanctuary, most of Old Man’s days were the same. As overseer, he sat on a bench outside the shack he shared with three others and watched the calves. Two at a time, the calves passed through his anakoodu, where he coaxed and bullied them from the brink of despair. His was an arsenal of soft words and soft blows, plus the odd nugget of sugar. Soon as he roused a calf from near dead, it was yanked from his anakoodu, another pair of needy eyes in its place.

In his lap lay the logbook. His tiny script crawled over every corner, defying the faint blue lines. He turned the crackling pages and scanned the names of his former orphans. Each flickered brief as a firefly in his memory:
Asha, Arjuna, Balram, Balachandran, Ramachandran, Kamini, Ashwini, Saraswati, Omprakash, Ramprakash, Babu Prakash.
So many names and nowhere among them his own.

His father had been pappan to only one elephant, Kannan, for the whole of his life. What Kannan taught Appachen he passed to his son on slow, humid nights such as these.
If an elephant tosses dirt on his back, he is comfortable. If an elephant stands utterly still, he is troubled. An elephant will only lie down to sleep if he trusts the company he keeps.

T. S. Mahadevan was sixteen years old when he and his father first walked Kannan through the gates of the Sanctuary, after
the elephant had been cast off by the temple that had housed him for twenty years. To Appachen, the Sanctuary was hardly an improvement, with its camera-crazy tourists and elephant-shaped trash cans and so-called pappans. Few had learned the trade from their fathers. Most hopped from one job to the next as easily as hopping a bus. All they saw in a grown elephant was its awful strength, enough to split a man in half were he too slow to strike the first blow.

Appachen had long stopped using the pronged ankush on Kannan. They spoke their own private language: a mere word and Kannan would knee him onto his back. One afternoon, they were walking along a highway when Appachen was dizzied by heat and fainted. He later awoke to the living hull of Kannan’s chest, contracting and expanding. Kannan had been standing over him to guard against passing cars, a view Appachen would remember forever, as he lay enchanted by the rhythm of that huge, flexing heart.

Stories like these led the pappans to believe that Appachen had something divine about him, some extraordinary talent derived by dark art. Some said he had once stumbled across the fabled elephant graveyard, the field of tusks and skulls no man had seen, and there obtained the gift of elephant insight. Some said he had been an elephant in some long-ago life. Young Mahadevan knew his father to be a vivid storyteller and the likely source of these theories.

But there was no contesting the depth of Appachen’s knowledge, which he put to good use in the anakoodu. In those days, half the babies lived briefly, casualties assigned to grief.

It was Appachen’s concoction of baby formula, thickened with ragi and jaggery, that roused most of the calves from near dead, though nothing could be done for the babies that had already begun to recede, limply eating and drinking while the light leaked from their eyes.

The newest calf had come to the Sanctuary with that same draining gaze. The Forest Department had found it on a mountainside, starving beside the dead bulk of its mother. Only her tail had been cut, to be sold as a talisman.

For two weeks, day and night, Old Man watched the calf. It ate little. It was always grasping for Old Man’s arm. If Old Man were to step away and trade talk with the field director, the calf would climb up the bamboo slats and cry until Old Man clucked softly, What is it, child?

These days, the calf made not a sound, as if its previous plaintive self were buried somewhere inside this silent creature. How could one so small have the stillness of an older elephant? And why did it cower from the smell of pineapple?

Appachen could not be consulted, having died ten years before, a few months after Kannan.
Cardiac arrest,
the doctor had called it, but Old Man knew the truth. Appachen had spent most of his life as Kannan’s pappan, so many years it was no longer clear who was leading whom.

Ravi handled the reporters like a pro. Hands in pockets, he fended off praise with an enigmatic smile, ducking further questions. The bystanders practically cheered as he cut to the van, where he ceded shotgun to Bobin in an act of magnanimity.

Here the pleasantries ended.

“What were you thinking?” Ravi said, turning on Teddy. “You make your shot and get out. You don’t wait around and get the elephant’s autograph.”