Tania James - The Tusk That Did the Damage

At Elephant Sabu’s place, when the Gravedigger was stricken by musth, the pappans kept him shackled between trees. These were tighter chains than the changala that usually hugged his leg; tethered forefoot to hind foot, he could not take a single step. Food appeared in a trough or was tossed to him from a distance by the pappans, who stayed beyond the Gravedigger’s line of sight.

On the road, the Gravedigger was ambushed by musth more often than usual. Once, it happened at a wedding. One minute he was carrying a groom through a raucous parade, the next minute he was ripping out a stand of lemon trees, the drummers and dancers scattering like ants, while the groom clutched at the sides of his howdah and squealed.

With front leg and back leg chained between trees, the Gravedigger watched the sun creep across the sky. The trees leaked shadows. He sniffed the rubber of passing tires, the dusty musk of the bird that sat on his spine, snapping up gnats. In the old days, Old Man would squat on the ground beneath the Gravedigger, his back turned as the elephant twisted leaves into his mouth. Over time, the Gravedigger had learned the shape of Old Man’s spine, each stone descending from the last. Every so often, Old Man would hum.

But Old Man no longer turned his back on the Gravedigger. His eyes were wary; he had dropped weight, but a bird on the Gravedigger’s back.

With no one to soothe him, the Gravedigger resorted to memory. His mind roamed over the faces and smells he had known as a calf, the flick of a cousin’s tail, the sour-milk smell of his sister’s breath, a pile of elephant ribs still echoing a faint fleshy scent. For hours he could stand quietly, falling into the past like a leaf drifting to forest floor. Such thoughts detached him from the two trees, drew him inward, drew him home.

§

Two days it took for the Gravedigger to recover from musth, ten minutes to load him into the open truck bed, thundering toward another destination. As evening fell, the smell of his fellow elephants flowed over him from a hundred yards away. He was almost home.

Relieved, he thought of the days to come, the order restored. How he would sleep to the sounds of Parthasarathi’s snoring. How he and Parthasarathi would lie beneath the sun as Old Man hosed their sides and legs and bellies, how the pappans would rasp at his skin with a coconut hull, how he would fall into a bottomless nap.

As the lorry rumbled up to his stall, the Gravedigger caught a strange smell leaking from Parthasarathi’s stall, where Parthasarathi was not. The pappans leaped out of the cab, stretched. The Gravedigger reached his trunk in the direction of Parthasarathi’s stall and recoiled from the foreign odor. A stranger’s reek.

The Gravedigger went still beneath a mud slide of realizations. They had taken Parthasarathi away. They had put some other elephant in his place. Parthasarathi was no more.

Down came his trunk upon the lorry’s cab. He struck with all his eight tons, deaf to the shouts of the pappans and the rumbles of the other elephants, his screams filling his lungs like water until he had no breath left.

§

They locked the Gravedigger in the lorry for hours, without food. When he was hollowed of energy, they maneuvered him into his stall, Elephant Sabu watching, Old Man leading the way and making gentle sounds.

At some point, impatient, Romeo yanked the chain.

The Gravedigger swatted him to the ground. For the elephant, the gesture was little more than a tap; for Romeo, a blow that dropped him like a sandbag. All the pappans stood dumb with dread. The Gravedigger felt a dim flare of distress until Old Man began his lowing again, as if no harm had been done, no punishment looming.

Elephant Sabu mouthed something at Romeo, baring his teeth in threat.

Romeo slunk away, wretched and low to the ground.

§

Unable to sleep, Old Man rose from his cot and went to check on the Gravedigger.

The elephant stood in still silhouette within the four sides of his stall. Old Man kept his distance, unable to say whether the Gravedigger was dozing. Like a nursery rhyme came his father’s advice: An elephant asleep on its feet is an elephant ill at ease.

He could have smacked Romeo for rattling the Gravedigger so, but what was the point in railing against the toothless buffoon? Elephant Sabu was to blame for the Gravedigger’s state. It was Elephant Sabu who had assigned them so many events, stringing one against the next as smoothly as blooms on a garland. He was intent on making back what he’d paid for the Gravedigger, and what he had lost on his beloved Parthasarathi.

Old Parthasarathi had been riding in the back of a lorry, whose usual driver was home with the flu. In his stead, the driver sent his reckless, rum-soaked sons. The boys sped over a pothole that caused the elephant to slam its head into the cab. After some time, a taxi pulled even with the lorry, the driver yelling out the window, “Pull over, pull over! Something is wrong with the elephant! It is stumbling about!”

Soon as they braked, Parthasarathi fell to his knees, fell asleep.

Putting another elephant in Parthasarathi’s stall had been Elephant Sabu’s idea, a possible antidote to the Gravedigger’s loneliness. Elephant Sabu, too, was saddened by the loss of his favorite elephant, whose photo appeared each time he flipped open his mobile. He canceled Parthasarathi’s remaining engagements, returned all deposits. He brought suit against the rum brothers and braced himself for the investigations of animal cruelty brought by the Forest Department.

In purchasing the Gravedigger, Elephant Sabu had anticipated a gilded future, but now each loss seemed a stone in his pocket. His wife urged him to assign the Gravedigger more work. What’s the point, she said, of keeping such a handsome fellow at home?

So Elephant Sabu hired out the handsome fellow to temples and churches and wedding processions, even to political rallies, both Congress and Marxist, wherever the organizers would pay a fee. Some of these hucksters shirked on the amount of panna and water they were meant to provide, and there were times when even the pappans went without proper meals. Mani-Mathai made no complaint though his belly gurgled in protest. Romeo regularly threatened to quit.

Anytime Old Man tried to reason with Elephant Sabu, he got a long speech about the costs of being in the Elephant Business — the water, the medicines, the veterinarian’s bill alone! Thirty bottles of glucose for Parthasarathi’s intestinal obstruction plus four bottles of Hermin infusion … not even trying to make a profit … simply trying to survive …

Meanwhile, the elephant had taken to nodding more than usual, to the tune of some dark, swirling rhythm.

Some of the other pappans took precautions, sneaking opium into their elephants’ feed to dull the animals during musth. Old Man would not go so far, not yet, though the Gravedigger’s silence reminded him of those early, delicate days in the anakoodu, when the calf flickered between this life and the next. Back then, the calf had latched onto Old Man, and over time, they became two halves of a single conversation. Now the elephant seemed locked inside a separate room.

The memory of Appachen’s advice descended on him from time to time, to seek another job, any job. But Old Man had refused; this was the tradition to which he’d been born, a known road that had been cleared for him by previous generations. He had meant to maintain the way, even if no one else did.

Fool’s talk, his father had said. No one wants to be a pappan anymore, not even the pappans. A toilet wiper makes more than us. And a toilet can’t kill you.

§

The sky above him wild with stars, and still the Gravedigger could not sleep. He felt a smoldering under his skin, an ache in his tusks, until the breeze brought him the scent of Old Man. That invisible presence, however brief, was a steady palm to the Gravedigger’s side.