Tania James - The Tusk That Did the Damage

Regarding gossips, Leela said there was no use listening to every twit with a mouth. She knotted a cloth around her head, picked up a sickle, and labored in the fields alongside the adiya women who eyed the way she whacked at the stalks, sweating, cursing, cutting nothing. Eventually they showed her how to sharpen the blade against bamboo, then shear. She found the money to buy chickens and a cow named White Girl, earning us income from the eggs and milk. The chicks she guarded as fiercely as if she had laid them herself, but the predators were many. One day a vulture whisked a chick in its claws but lost its grip upon takeoff. Belly up, the chick lay cheeping in the dirt, a glistening string of its innards plucked out. Finished, I thought, and all the eggs it would have laid for us.

But Leela did not waste a second in telling me to bring needle and thread. I had threaded her many a needle by then, but never had I seen her do what she did: carefully cradling the chick in her palm and fingering the innards back inside as if stuffing a pastry puff. Like a surgeon, she stitched the belly whole again, then patted a paste of turmeric over the wound.

In the end that stitched-up chicken outlived the others. It even followed her around like some lovesick suitor who would not take no for an answer, a behavior I might have found humorous if it did not so closely resemble my own frame of mind.

Yet I was not her only fan, so to speak.

Two fellows called me out of the house one day, asking for Podimattom Leela. One had a long face, lizardy features. He said he knew her from before, that they were old friends. Business associates, said the other, a fellow with a face all wrinkled and scarred like a halved head of cabbage. They had heard about her financial trouble. They thought they could help.

The lizard smiled with tiny teeth. She can find us at Hotel Meriya, he said and left.

I found Leela out back, standing over a massive jackfruit, one of the three Synthetic Achan had given us, knowing I favored the fried chips. She bit her lip as if angry with that spiny green boulder, its stem dribbling sap.

“Are they gone?” she asked.

I nodded. She handed me the hoe. I lifted the thing over my head and struck the fruit. I turned the jack by a degree, then hacked again. Turned it. Hacked. Turn. Hack.

She bent and used her fingers to pry the halves apart, the gluey sap fouling up her fingers. Each half displayed a daisy shape, with its pale yellow bulbs of fruit like petals around the pulpy core. With a kitchen knife she began carving the halves into quarters, still saying nothing, her mouth in a knot.

I asked why they had called her Podimattom Leela. She told me it was the place where she was born.

“No one calls me Sitamala Manu.”

She was quiet.

“They said you were business associates,” I said.

“Customers.”

“What kind.”

“Same kind as your brother.” She spoke oh so casually, but I could see the tears sitting on the rims of her eyes. I felt a small mean wish to see them fall.

Instead she tossed the knife onto the newspaper and dipped her fingers in a steel cup of oil, rubbing the white from her fingers as she brushed past me.

I caught her by the arm. “I deserve to know …”

“Know what. Spit it out.”

Heat filled my face. The question required finesse. I had no finesse. I had a hoe in my hand.

“All that honey talk about sandalwood trees …” She shook her head. “Don’t talk to me about deserve.”

I dropped my gaze. I could think of nothing to say.

After a while she spoke in a small voice. “Knowing those two, it will be all over town by tomorrow.”

“It will not. I won’t let them.”

“Oho. My hero.” She smirked at the mess of jackfruit at our feet. “Leave it, Manu, just leave it.”

Another man would have let the moment pass and put the matter out of mind. But I was not a man; I was a boy of sixteen seething with impulse and anger, and I felt it my job to defend her. Raghu refused to join me, having seen the cretins and citing very bad odds.

I found the lizard at the shappe next door to Hotel Meriya, holding court among his fellows, not a puddle’s worth of sense among them. The lizard caught my approach out the corner of his eye and threw himself wholeheartedly into a one-man show. Podimattom Leela! Like a butcher he appraised her parts, tongue by breast by thigh, and oh the things she could do with certain of them. Her menu never changed, long and all-inclusive, nothing left off the list and believe you me her mouth never tired—

“Neither does yours.”

The shiteater grinned at me. I kept my hands in the pockets of my brother’s old trousers. “Ah. Here’s her bodyguard.”

“Leela Shivaram is her name.”

“How was I supposed to know that? She didn’t invite me to the wedding.”

“Now you know.”

“I knew her differently.”

“You knew someone else.”

He shrugged. “Wash a crow all you want, it won’t turn white.”

I asked him to step out. Lazily he sucked at a fish bone before heaving himself up from the table. It was difficult to maintain my air of aggression while he rinsed every mote from his mouth.

He followed me some ways from the shappe to a stand of trees, where I turned to find the cabbage head in attendance. My heart fell. “What is he for?”

“Not to referee, I can tell you that.”

I kept my eyes on his feet while my fist grew hard in my pocket, four fingers looped in my father’s steel. I remembered the knuckles dull and deadly in my brother’s palm. The lizard asked if I wanted to rethink my opinions, to which I replied by smashing my metal fist into his snout.

He spun and landed face flat on the dirt, his arms spread in a pose that recalled my father, and for a terrible moment I thought he was dead.

The cabbage head stared at his colleague, who to my great relief struggled like a newborn to lift his head. In those few seconds of gawking, I had time enough to sling the knuckles into the trees so they wouldn’t be used against me. My fingers rang with pain.

Take Note: I did not run. Unlike my father, I knew not to rack up my debts.

The cabbage head sighed and gave me a look of almost fatherly disappointment. Then he popped me in the ear, the chin, and — with breathtaking finality — the belly.

Laid out on the grass, I braced for the final kick, one that would send me to deepest sleep, when from somewhere above came a voice: “Get off him or I will shoot you to pieces.”

The world was rocking all around me, but I made out the shape of a boy holding a rifle. A boy whose chicken-bone arms looked much like the arms of Raghu.

“That gun’s taller than you,” said the cabbage head. “Probably not even loaded.”

The young gunman leveled his barrel. “Take a bet, pussy man.”

Oh, it was a first-class performance, so convincing that the cabbage head surrendered and carried his colleague away, tossing limp threats. Soon as they were gone, Raghu hustled me home, his utmost fear being that Synthetic Achan would discover that his gun had gone missing. The barrel was carved with rabbits — this much I remember of the rifle that I would meet later on, under darker circumstances. I also remember the glow of triumph in Raghu’s face as we rode home in an auto.

“What took you so long,” I mustered through the functioning side of my mouth. “One more punch and they would have pulped me.”

“Look in the mirror, little boy — you are pulped.”

“I got one of them good.”

“Now you’re hallucinating.”

And on like that we quipped and quarreled, in place of a gratitude I knew not how to give.

I spent the next days in a fog of pain. In letters I mentioned none of this to Jayan. It was an unspoken rule that our letters should contain nothing but peaceful scenes, a home sweeter than the home he remembered.