Tania James - The Tusk That Did the Damage

I stared at the back of his head, the thick swirl of hair. “I decided to keep looking. I told you, the bullet is very important.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” I could hear my voice going shrill, too furious to care how the question might’ve sounded to Teddy. “Why didn’t you take us with you?”

“You filmed all day yesterday,” Ravi said. “I thought you’d be too tired.”

“Thanks for your concern.”

“What is the problem? It’s a good thing I found it.”

“What about the meeting with Samina? Why couldn’t we come along?”

Teddy stepped in, his voice smooth and pleasant. “How about we shoot you cleaning the blades, Ravi? That okay?”

Ravi consented with a shrug. He ran each blade under the water, pinching it clean with a rag. Teddy shot the red dregs swirling into the drain. Eventually Teddy got him to report that he’d found the bullet, got him to repeat that thing about the head as honeycomb. The entire time, Ravi didn’t so much as glance at me, merely slid the X-Acto knife, neatly, into its niche.

Our final task, before tomorrow’s hunt, was to meet Alias at a tea shop. Many a man slouched over the long wooden tables, a mess of crumbs and glass cups, some full of chai and some lit with candles whose light played over the ruffled tin of the ceiling. Flies spun circles around a single bulb. Below it sat a big-bellied pan, its sides blackened and whipped by flame.

The air was close with the smell of deep-frying dough, but for once my brother had no appetite. We sat at the vacant end of a long table and spoke in low voices. I could not help but stare at our cohort’s puckered stumps, a samosa clutched in the claw of his three surviving fingers. His whiskers glistened grease as he nodded at me. “Is this the third?”

“My brother,” said Jayan.

“We need a fourth.”

“No. Only us three. Manu can do all the carrying.”

Alias gave me an up-and-down look, the same my mother would give to a traveling trinket salesman. “If you say so.”

He detailed the point where we would enter Kavanar Park, his fingers tracing our path along the seams in the wooden table. He was in cahoots with a ranger who would allow us passage at the edge of Old Raman’s farm (unbeknownst to poor Raman), just east of the dead banyan that had been cleaved by lightning. From there, Alias could track the elephant easily and was miffed when I asked, “How, exactly?”

“The Gravedigger walks with a limp,” he said. “His hind leg strays outside the others.” Alias reenacted the footprints on the table, crossing one hand over the other. “If the earth is damp enough, it’s easy as reading his signature.”

“And if it’s a dry day?” I asked.

“We keep looking. I’ve been on trips that take a week.”

I frowned at the prospect, but my brother was nodding.

“This is the job,” Jayan said. “We will not leave until it’s done.”

And what if, I wanted to know, this ranger cousin was not as loyal as Alias presumed? Was he a first cousin or three times removed?

“Jayan,” Alias said, pinning me with a stare, “have you no other brothers? Even a sister would do.”

Jayan hissed for quiet. The samosa man was regarding us from under the hairy eaves of his eyebrows. He scooped out a sizzling clutch of samosas on a slotted spoon the size of an oar and dropped them in the colander.

Alias asked if my brother had a gun. Jayan grunted. As for Alias, he would bring his famous rosewood.

“What about me?” I asked.

“You carry the pack,” Alias said. “Bedding, blades.”

“No blades,” said Jayan. “I told you.”

“No blades my buttocks!” Alias leaned in with a scowl he had likely perfected from birth. “Those tusks must be forty kilos at least. You want the Forest Department to add to their collection?”

“I don’t care what they do.” Jayan looked at the table, intent on avoiding my eyes. “It’s not for me anymore.”

“It will take thirty minutes max. Thirty thousand rupees. Tell me you couldn’t use half that.”

Jayan sulked at the cook fire. Alias waved him off with his half hand.

“Is that all?” I demanded. I had hoped for more of a training on tracking or baiting, not out of cowardice but preparedness, as I was in no rush to lose my own digits or anything else for that matter. “Is there nothing more to know?”

“All you need know if something goes wrong,” said Alias, leaning forward, “is to run.”

Something furry flicked over my feet. I jumped up, startling the glasses just as a stray cat leaped out from under the table, back arched and yowling her indignation. Someone shooed her into the night.

Every bloodshot eye was now cocked and aimed at me.

Alias showed his first sooty smile of the evening. “Getting an early start?” he said, and cackled so proudly at his joke it was clear he had been in the forest too long.

After Alias left, Jayan and I went to a toddy shop where the crowd had the cumulative scent of an armpit. People clapped their hands on my brother’s shoulders, crowed his name with great affection. I could see that he was someone here; he was theirs. I was merely his brother, but that title bestowed some specialness on me, and so I basked in their smelly camaraderie.

All night I drank from a mildewy glass. The local brew seared my stomach and made me weightless and careless. I remember the jolly cacophony of singing, saucers of belly-burning lemon achar. I remember waking on the spike of some bony man’s shoulder, feeling much heavier than when I began the evening. “We thought you were dead,” said the bony man, passionately licking sauce off his finger. “Try the pickle, Wee Shivaram, it will bring you back to life.”

I asked after Jayan. The man pointed me to a pair of crooked trees, where my brother was relieving himself. With some difficulty, I wobbled outside and waited — he seemed to be watering the whole forest — and while waiting, I gazed on the clear navy sky, which carried so many stars at once I thought I might finally see one fall.

“They never fall,” said Jayan, “when you will them to.”

True and yet. It was enough to stand beside my brother, adrift in a single current of silence.

“Shall we go home?” I said at last.

“In a little while.”

“We told Leela we would come home soon.”

Jayan groaned. “You wouldn’t remove a splinter from your own foot without asking her permission.” He took a few steps toward the toddy shop and stopped in the middle of the road when he realized I had not moved. “Come on.”

“Get out of the road.”

“Not until you come.”

“But Leela—”

“Your nursemaid? She will be fine.”

Normally that sneer in his voice would have cut me to half size. But between my achy head and my shifty stomach, I had no interest in holding us together, the duty that always and entirely fell to me.

“I am going home,” I said.

“Don’t be touchy, we were having fun!”

I began walking away; he rushed me and slung his leaden arm around my shoulder. I threw it off.

His face cooled to indifference. “Go to her then. You are the one she wants. Always saying how smart you are, how lucky the girl who will get you.”

I told him to stop his babbling even as I was desperate to hear the rest.

He peered down the road as if he could see his future looming large in the dark. “My wife has no need of me.”

“That is for her to decide. Not you.”

“You heard her. What am I good for anymore?”

“You work on the farm same as me.”

“She could find another day worker for that. And a day worker would come with none of the fuss she spends on me.”