Tania James - The Tusk That Did the Damage

“You plan to stay till lunch?”

“I don’t have to.” Samina Madame smiled uncomfortably and rocked a little in her seat like a hen ridding itself of an egg.

“He works through lunch.”

“And how has your husband been doing since he came home?”

“You should know that, madame.” Leela uttered madame as if it were the dictionary definition of manure. “He came by your office two weeks after his release. Yours is the office with the gulmohar tree?”

Madame nodded, her brightness turning uncertain. “I don’t remember him coming.”

“He was looking for a job with the Forest Department. No one knows the inner regions like him, so he thought he might be a watcher, help patrol in the forest. Isn’t that one of the jobs you people offer?”

“Yes, as part of a pilot project aimed to harmonize the economic needs of local people with the needs of wildlife—”

“Your peons laughed in his face.”

“Who laughed? Which guard?”

“What difference would it make? All are the same.”

“Oh, I think it obvious I am not.”

“Because you take tea with us and ask about our health? I hear you also take tea with those Shankar Timber people.”

Madame faltered, plainly surprised on several fronts — that this invalid was interrogating her, that the invalid was on a first-name basis with the scandal that had attached itself to Madame’s heel like so much dog shit. “That was beyond my control.”

“I hear you take more than tea from them, madame.”

“The working plan is approved at multiple levels — Delhi, Trivandrum. I was against the felling, but I was overruled. Of course it is easy for you to sit and make accusations. Much harder to come up with solutions.”

“I come up with them all the time.”

“Then tell me.”

“We need electric fences around the farmlands and roads,” Leela said. Madame nodded. “Not the cheap stuff, the kind a baby boar could eat through.” Madame’s nodding was hypnotic. Leela found herself talking against her will. “And another thing: you should give people like my husband some opportunity. He would be of use. People like him — they want to lead a right life, they want to listen to your advices, but advices don’t fill the belly. You have to give them some way to live right.”

“And you are sure he wants to live right?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“No need to get hot.”

But Leela was sick with self-loathing. She had succumbed to this smarmy woman, this sari-clad greenback with tricks up her sweater sleeve.

“It’s fact. Majority of poachers are repeat offenders. They make the same mistakes again and again whether they want to live right or not.”

“He paid his dues.”

“Trust me, he still has his debtors, his enemies. They keep an eye on him.”

“And you keep them in your pocket.”

“I keep them close,” Madame said. “Some of them anyway. They are like chin hairs, these people. Pluck one, and four more pop up in its place.”

“Why have you come, madame? To talk about chin hairs?”

“To see what you know about your husband.” Madame frowned. “Very little, it seems.”

“I know he fell in with some bad people. They took advantage just because he was good at shooting birds and monkeys, an elephant here and there—”

“Fifty-six.”

Leela sat back, blinking. The number stole her breath. “Four,” she insisted weakly. “Five maybe.”

“His associate told the judge fifty-six. And lately your husband has been meeting with a man who has killed even more. Now what do you think they’re discussing?”

“I … I don’t know.”

As my mother’s footsteps approached, Madame laid her business card on the side table, signaling the end of the topic. “Not the weather, I can assure you.”

Old Man had only himself to blame for the hiring of Kizhakkambalam “Romeo” Kuriakose. Romeo had a straight white smile, which Old Man had mistaken as a sign of good hygiene when in fact it was a set of false teeth. Bone disease had taken all his teeth at age twenty, Romeo claimed, a blessing in disguise as now he had the smile of a prince!

The princely smile faded as soon as Old Man put a shovel in his hands and told him to tow the Gravedigger’s poo.

An elephant won’t stand for waste in its midst, said Old Man. In the forest they never foul the same place twice. Proper as Brahmins.

Romeo turned the shovel upside down and frowned at the metal end. What does that make us?

Elephant Sabu required three pappans per elephant. For the third pappan, Old Man wanted a younger lad, someone malleable and curious about the work. Before Old Man had even begun his search, Romeo dragged in the dregs of his family: his brother and his brother’s son, a baggy-eyed boy who had failed eighth standard for three straight years and kept his eyes on his feet. The boy had the shape of an urn, burly and broad shouldered, bereft of a neck. For all his apparent strength, he flinched like a chicken in his father’s presence. His father called him a dolt, said the boy never listened to his parents no matter how they striped his backside. Wouldn’t Old Man please take the dolt under wing and tame him the way he’d tamed so many uncivilized beasts?

Your name? Old Man asked the boy.

Mathai.

Do you have an interest in elephants?

Don’t know. Never met one.

His father smacked the back of his head. What kind of answer is that? (A reasonable one, Old Man felt.)

Mathai, said Old Man, weighing the name. We will call you Mani.

A Hindu name? the boy asked. You trying to convert me?

No, idiot, said Romeo, though he’d asked the same question on his own first day. It’s so when we take the elephant to temple, those swamis won’t think you a swine-eating Nasrani.

Mani-Mathai cracked a shy smile. Only Catholics eat swine.

So the poo towing and food gathering fell to Mani-Mathai, who took the job and sponged up whatever knowledge Old Man had to offer: that an elephant always rinses its own feet before drinking water, proper as a Brahmin; that an elephant can hold ten liters of water in its trunk; that one should never bend to pick up anything that falls at an elephant’s feet, lest one’s head be used as a step stool.

Old Man was pleased with Mani-Mathai, who more than made up for the toothless drunk that was his uncle. Romeo bought the loyalty of other pappans through a steady supply of dirty jokes and bidis, an argot of girlie magazines. When not slinging abuse at his nephew, he ignored the boy, who kept to himself.

Over time, Old Man began to realize that Mani-Mathai was no dolt. His father mistook his quiet for stupidity, his mindfulness for laziness. Whereas most boys his age were as fidgety as leaves in a breeze, Mani-Mathai had a steadiness about him. For hours, he could sit with the elephants, neither bored nor drowsy, simply watching them eat.

Behind his reticence, the boy harbored strange ideas. He once described to Old Man a sound he felt, when in the company of Parthasarathi and the Gravedigger. A kind of throbbing in the air, a shifting hum he could feel in his marrow. “Not all the time,” Mani-Mathai qualified, risking a glance at Old Man. “Only sometimes.”

Old Man had never felt such a thing, but he wondered.

As soon as Romeo caught wind of Mani-Mathai’s “throbbing,” he suggested that the sensation was likely located in the boy’s chaddi pant. The other pappans joined in the ridicule. “Feel this?” said Romeo and pitched a rock at his nephew’s crotch.

Early the next morning, Mani-Mathai ran away. Early the same evening, his father restored him to Old Man’s door, clamped by the nape. There was a plum-colored bulge at the boy’s temple.