Tania James - The Tusk That Did the Damage

Teddy shoved some note cards aside and sat on his bed, detaching the lens. “Did Ravi tell you about that Shankar Timber stuff?”

I nodded. “I don’t think I was supposed to tell you.”

“So you two are buddy-buddy now, huh?”

“I guess, yeah.” I paused. “He’s comfortable with me.”

“For obvious reasons.”

“Because we’re friends.”

“I’m your friend. You never used to wear lip stuff around me.”

I was surprised, and dismayed, that he’d taken note of my tinted lip balm. “You’re being ridiculous. This is how it always happens — they get attached, we get attached.” Don’t get too close to the animals, Ravi had told me, taking gentle hold of my elbow while I stood by the elephant nursery. We don’t want them getting attached. “How’s he supposed to open up if he doesn’t trust us?”

“All I’m saying is be careful. You have a way of encouraging people. Whether you mean to or not.”

My cheeks went warm. I sensed that Teddy was verging on some sort of confession, something that would capsize our friendship entirely. Clichés ran like ticker tape through my head— need to be on my own … just don’t see you that way …

Teddy let out a sigh. “My dad’s cutting me off in two months.”

“From what?”

“He’s been sort of spotting me some cash here and there, when times were tough. But now he has Bev and her whole litter, so pretty soon, that’s it. No more loans. No more health insurance.”

I sat beside him. “So you’ll freelance. You’ll move to Greenpoint. You’ll eat at McDonald’s every Wednesday.” I’d been the one to inform him of Fifty-Cent Wednesday, when, for three dollars, you could buy a week’s worth of flaccid burgers. “You’ll get by like everyone else, until you can’t. And then you’ll tutor rich kids or whatever.”

He nodded, a sad little smirk on his face. “It’s just, I’ll never have time like this again. Uninterrupted. Financed. At least not anytime soon.”

“So?”

“So I need this film to count. This is our chance to make a name for ourselves. A film by Emma Lewis and Teddy Welsh.”

“Nice. I get top billing.”

He gave me a quick wincing look. “You’re taking this seriously, right?”

I was startled by his sincerity and offended and guilty, all of which added up to an exasperated, “Yes.”

“Sorry. I just had to say it.”

Technically I hadn’t lied, merely tiptoed around the truth, given him the literal outline rather than the messy essentials. And yet. That doomful sort of feeling. The sudden, itchy need to seek refuge elsewhere, anywhere. I told Teddy I wanted to shoot some B-roll, and before he could mount any serious objection, I whisked the camera away.

On my way to the calves, I stopped by a keeper bent over a steel tub and filmed him hand-sifting rice and mung beans. The brown and the white filled the frame in granulated waves, sliding and mixing, mesmerizing.

I looked up to meet the skeptical gaze of the keeper, whose duck mullet deserved equal skepticism.

“Ana kutty,” the keeper said, nodding over his shoulder, in the direction of the elephant calves. He mimed feeding himself from the pail, as in Feeding time, or Don’t you have anything better to chronicle for posterity?

I knew the way to the calves, which turns to take, a sharp left at the bale of new-cut grass, wire fences trailing ahead on either side. But once I reached the calves, I lost the will to film. Instead I rested the camera on a fence post and watched them, for the first time, without any equipment attached to my ears or eyes.

Two keepers held spouted jugs of milk. The younger ones went first, trunks lofted, mouths around the spouts. Milk dribbled onto the wiry hairs of their chins, giving them goatee beads. The bigger calves gurgled mutinous cries, draped their trunks on the drinkers’ backs, begging for a turn. The keepers pushed their trunks away while the lucky ones sucked and sloshed.

We’d filmed the feeding before, but I felt the shots could’ve been tighter, framing out the keepers, focusing on eyes and tongues and trunks, heightening the sounds of snuffle and whimper, as if to enter their circle instead of observing it. I envisioned a film that included patient, lyrical sequences like these, the absence of human voices opening a channel for a more intimate, visual language.

As the calves fed, my phone vibrated against my hip. r varma. Just the sight of his green-glowing name erased the bitterness of yesterday’s spat. All I felt was a dangerous elation.

I turned my back on the glaring keepers, jogging away from the calves before answering: “Hey, where are you?”

“Driving,” Ravi said, a smoky rasp to his voice.

I waited for more, presuming he was calling to make amends. Maybe the fine art of reconciliation was not his forte. “I should’ve checked with you before mentioning the timber case. I’m sorry.”

He grunted.

I entered the empty main office, set the camera on his desk, collapsed into his chair. I would not be the one to speak next. I swiveled and studied the back shelves, which seemed a pencil’s weight from buckling, loaded with dusty ledgers, binders, logbooks, old keyboards choked in cords. “About Shelly.” No reply. I soldiered on through the silence. “Please don’t bring that up again. It’s been awkward all day between Teddy and me, and maybe he knows about me and you, or at least has an inkling …”

If the conversation were a seesaw, I was stranded at the high end, legs dangling, ridiculous.

“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s talk tonight.”

“I will be home in the morning only.”

“Why, what’s going on over there?”

“Nothing. The training.” His voice trailed off; I could hear him breathing. Ravi wasn’t one for meditative pauses, at least not over the phone.

“I received a call,” he said finally. “There was a tusker found dead on a farm, in Sitamala.”

“The same elephant who killed the kid?”

“No idea. I will do the postmortem in the morning. You can come, if you want.”

“Was the elephant killed, or did it die naturally?”

“Killed.”

The elephant took shape in my mind’s eye, heaped and riddled with holes. I didn’t know what to say.

“Tomorrow will be messy,” Ravi said. “Wear your ugly shoes.”

He hung up before I could ask which of my shoes he considered ugly. I scanned the wall behind the desk, where a goatish creature stared dolefully from the collage of newspaper clippings. The headlines held me captive: “Wild Buffalo Rehabilitates in Dibru Saikhowa.” “Displaced Rhino Calf Reunited with Mother.” “Man Spears, Man Saves.” “First Elephant Calves Released.”

Beneath the last headline, this highlighted paragraph:

Four adolescent elephant calves were released to the wildlife park yesterday, wearing radio collars and ear tags. Used to track the vulnerable calves, the radio collars will fall away after several weeks. “The tags will stay for years,” says Ravi Varma, head veterinary doctor at the WRRC, “so we can collect long-term data as the calves age and mate and eventually produce calves of their own.”

The quote sounded like the sorts of answers Ravi used to give me in the beginning, sanded clean of all personality. I tried to stray from the bases he usually hit during interviews, avoiding a prewritten checklist of questions, but sometimes a question would strike me later, the one I’d neglected to ask. Such a one occurred to me now, what I should’ve asked him over the phone, what would likely gnaw him all night — was the dead elephant wearing a tag? Was it one of his own?