Tania James - The Tusk That Did the Damage

I turned away and shouldered the pack. Alias stuck his snout in my face. “You can shit a brick for all I care. We are on serious business here—”

Jayan put up a hand. “Enough. He understands.”

Alias looked between my brother and me, baffled by Jayan’s calm. I suspect my brother had intervened not in order to defend me from name-calling but because he had caught a secret wafting off me and knew pressure would best be applied in private.

Alias tossed Jayan’s hand away and said we would have to double our pace up the mountain in order to meet the Gravedigger on the slopes as planned. He trudged first, me second, Jayan last, my brother’s eyes boring into my back. I clenched my hand to keep it from shaking.

As soon as the news report ended, Teddy and I headed back to his room. He was utterly confused. He begged me to debrief him on what the hell Bobin had just told us and, more important, what he’d left out.

“So two days ago,” I said, “an elephant was killed in Sitamala.”

Teddy nodded impatiently. “And yesterday morning, Ravi started the postmortem.”

“Right, and sometime during the postmortem, this poacher, Mr. Shivaram — he was killed by a forest officer. The officers took a bullet off his body—”

“Out of his body ?”

“Just listen. The guy was carrying bullets. One of those officers must’ve taken a few and delivered them to Ravi, and he, sort of, maybe …”

“Planted a bullet? On the dead elephant?”

I nodded.

“Jesus.”

“Allegedly. We don’t know what Ravi did unless we discuss it with him.”

“Oh, we’ll definitely discuss it.” Teddy paced the room in militant strides, his hands stuffed in his armpits. “We’ll film him on his rounds tomorrow morning, and then we’ll end by asking him about the dead poacher.”

“What, like, out of the blue?”

“I also want to raise the question of corruption. Something like How do you feel about working so closely with a Forest Department that’s been accused of a massive cover-up? Which could lead to a discussion of the Shankar Timber case …”

I listened in silence, staring at the splayed Moleskine on his desk. Teddy was talking with his hands. I took a breath, braced for impact. “I don’t know.”

Teddy halted. “Don’t know what?”

“The whole gotcha approach didn’t work so well last time.”

“I thought you were all about spontaneity. This could be a pivotal scene.”

“We’ll just piss him off.”

“Better than getting a canned answer. We pissed off Samina Hakim; you didn’t care about that.”

“We don’t need her the way we need him. Seriously, I think it’ll go better if I talk to Ravi first.”

“Let me guess.” Teddy eyed me steadily. “Alone?”

“He gets defensive sometimes, when we’re both there.” Teddy snorted; I persisted. “I won’t ask for specifics. The shoot will still be spontaneous. But I think it’s only fair that we let him know we want to go down this road.”

“And if he says no?”

I shrugged. “Then no. It’s not worth hurting him.”

“How would our little film hurt him?”

I hesitated; Teddy read what I couldn’t say.

“Shelly was different,” he added quietly. “She completely misinterpreted … she thought she was in love with me.” He paused. “Or maybe it’s not that different.”

My stomach tensed.

“Emma, is there something you’re not telling me?”

That had always been my line, during interviews. At first I felt the pinned, panicky sensation I must have inflicted on others, but then the panic subsided, displaced by annoyance. What got me was the trickle of condescension, the indirectness of the approach, the sting of Ravi’s comment: He treats you like a child.

“Nothing you don’t already know.”

Teddy squinted as if he’d misheard me, until the truth seemed to crystallize, slowly, before his eyes.

“You and him,” he said.

I nodded.

When it became clear that I wouldn’t elaborate or apologize, Teddy stared hard at the ground.

“It’s over,” I said. “Obviously. We’re leaving in a few days.”

“He could tell someone. A blogger could pick it up. We’d never make a film again.”

“Now you’re being melodramatic.”

“How are you supposed to be objective now? How the hell am I supposed to trust you?”

I hesitated, unaccustomed to the scorn in his voice. “Ravi won’t say anything.”

Teddy shook his head.

“I know him, Teddy.”

“You slept with him. There’s a big fucking difference.”

A glacial silence passed as we stood there, suspended between strangers and friends.

I said I was going, but he didn’t lift his head.

In my room, I brewed black tea to stay awake; it went down in a bitter flame. I could’ve waited till morning, but my head felt so clogged with suspicion and dread I had no room for patience. I needed Ravi to tell me that what we’d heard was simply untrue, and until then I wouldn’t sleep.

Later, I found Bobin by the jeep, overseeing two keepers as they lifted a large wire cage from the back. Inside was a small macaque, munching on a banana.

“Ravi?” I asked. Bobin pointed me to the exam room.

The hanging bulb cast a sinister glow in the center of the operating table. I didn’t notice Ravi at first, sitting in the shadows, the same pose we’d caught him in the day before. Hands hanging empty, face vacant.

“Hey,” I said, causing him to bolt to his feet. “It’s just me. No camera.”

He weighed me a moment, then went to the table and unlatched the plastic toolbox, setting vials aside like a weary bartender.

“I saw the news.” I tried to sound casual. “I heard about the protests.” No answer, no sign of recognition. “We’d like to interview you about it.” More vials, more bottles. “And we’d like to interview those farmers about what happened, maybe Officer Vasu too.”

“Why them?”

“Because it’s important to show how the local community perceives you. And the center.” I felt the villagers’ accusations vying for space in the room. “Those are some serious allegations.”

“There are many sides to the local community and most of them are supportive of us. What you are trying to sniff out is a handful of rioters.”

“What happened?”

“Confidential.”

“Did Samina make you do it?”

“Make me?” His laugh came out flat and fake. “What do you think she is — a gangster?”

“Did she give you the bullet in her office? During your confidential meeting?” As I spoke, he stepped away, turning his back on me. “Is that why she hustled us out of there, why the postmortem just had to continue the next morning?”

“You people.” He locked onto me with slitted eyes. “Always hunting for a story so others can watch and feel outrage. What about my outrage? What about the outrage of another dead elephant, one I might have pulled from a ditch or a cave and brought here and bandaged and bottle-fed with my own hands? Plucked like that, easy as a weed?”

“I just want to know what happened.”

“You want to cut me open and drag it all out.” He clapped the toolbox shut, shelved it under the table. “Isn’t that what you do? Isn’t that your gift?”

“Tell me what happened to the dead guy. Shivaram.”

Even with my butchered pronunciation, the name made Ravi stare into the surface of the table, at the bright smudge of light. The whole room seemed to go still, and I kept silent, sure that one word from me would cause him to snap.

He said the poacher had been killed a few hours after the postmortem began. Officer Vasu had been involved. Some kind of confusion with the poacher, guns fired. “Vasu was frightened. He is one year from retirement. So he went to Samina Madame for help—”