Tania James - The Tusk That Did the Damage

“Breathe,” said a voice, a simple order that split the fog.

Ravi stepped forward. He cupped my head with a hand practiced in the art of calming the frantic and the feral. It occurred to me then that he had the jawline of a film star, or at least a prime-time anchorman. It also occurred to me that my panic was optional and that I could expel it, at least partly, with one shaky exhalation.

I watched the IV fill my limb with fluid. The baby grew calm, and her stained face made me want to wipe my own, but Ravi was holding my good hand, and the other lay limp as a glove on my chest.

Guilt made a martyr of Ravi. After we returned from the clinic, he brought me coconuts stuck with flimsy straws. On most Saturday evenings, he had dinner with his mother, but this time he told her there was an elephant calf that needed round-the-clock monitoring. Somehow he got her to make him dinner anyway, a soup of rice with green mango chutney. This he delivered to my bedside, waiterlike, a cotton towel over his arm.

Sunday morning, while Ravi snuffled into my hair, I texted Teddy: Got sick yesterday. Had to go to hospital. Don’t worry.

Moments later, my cell phone jittered on my desk. Teddy. Ravi stirred, tightened his arm around my waist.

“Are you okay?” Teddy said. “What hospital? Why didn’t you call?”

“I’m totally fine,” I croaked.

“Was it the dal? Or no — those grease balls!”

Just then, Ravi’s cell phone burst into song: the theme from James Bond. He made a lowing noise and rolled out of bed. I flapped a hand at him, pointed at my phone, mouthed Teddy.

“Is someone there?” Teddy asked.

Bleary, Ravi trudged to the bathroom and closed the door, answering the call with his usual, “Hah, tell me.”

“Uh no, I’m watching a movie.” I grasped at vaguely familiar names: Goldeneye, Goldfinger …

Thankfully, Teddy didn’t care for specifics. He said he’d be back by evening, or possibly earlier if he could catch the bus. After we hung up, I wiggled down into the warmth of my covers, listening to the murmur of Ravi’s voice. I’d never seen him stay on the phone this long.

At last Ravi emerged and shut the door, slowly, behind him.

“Teddy’s coming back,” I said with a twinge of disappointment. I brushed a black comma-shaped curl from my pillow. “You’re off the hook.”

Ravi leaned against the door. “An elephant killed someone,” he said. “In Sitamala. Near to my mother’s place.”

“What? That’s terrible.”

He nodded, absorbed in thought. There was the distant, drifting silence again, the indecipherable knit of his brow.

“Did you know the person?”

He was speechless so long I thought he hadn’t heard me. “I know the elephant,” he said finally. “Everyone does.”

By morning, the palli was strewn about as if exploded. Roof smashed, legs snapped. At the calm center of this chaos: a pile of thatch laid with care across the body of my cousin.

Raghu’s mouth was a hollow of astonishment. From the chest up and hip down he looked unharmed. The middle of him looked like something the elephant had tried to erase.

There were five or six greenbacks on the scene, doing nothing of note. One of them knelt by the elephant’s footprint. I expected him to come up with some advanced tracking device, but he pulled a length of string from his pocket and gently laid it round the border of the footprint as if to take the murderer’s shoe size.

Those who came to watch pushed in with all manner of theories.

“This is the Gravedigger’s work. Who here would forget it? Buries its victims just like this.”

“But it hasn’t come round in ten years!”

“It feasts on human flesh.”

“Are you stupid? Elephants eat greens.”

“I hear it eats jackfruit by the bushel, so much you can smell it coming. Death never smelled so sweet.”

Raghu’s mother was removed from the premises for fear she would scream herself insane asking the same question over and again: What kind of father would send a child of seventeen, seventeen, to sit in the palli alone?

“Not alone,” he said quietly. His sunken eyes found mine.

My mouth felt dry, my tongue a lump of clay. I saw he blamed me for deserting his only son and the pain of it went through and through me.

Later we cast my cousin’s ashes in the Stream of Sins behind the temple. The mountains sat gaunt and blue on the opposite side, watching, as they had done for all time, us grievers and bathers and sinners.

I had thought the ashes would sink with grace. Yet Raghu sat in a stubborn clump on the surface as if to say, You guilty wretch, you will not be rid of me so easy.

A wailing went up from the women, though my aunt did not cry; her grief had turned hard and silent. I watched from the banks where Raghu and I had once set sail a boat of string and sticks while our mothers prayed in the temple. There went my friend, my boyhood entire.

I loved my brother equally, but we were not equals, as he was elder to me by five years. Little creature, my mother used to call him, for the pelt of hair he had worn from birth. And there was something creaturely too about the man he became, all sinew and scruff, the way he looked through you like a cool-eyed cat. Being a hunter, Jayan knew things — how to tell between the slots of a sambar and the pug of a tiger, between cow pie and buffalo turd and elephant scat. He had a botanist’s knowledge of wild plants, though he had not studied botany or anything else since age fourteen. To him, the forest was the only school worth attending.

Jayan might have made a so-so student had my father shown any interest in discipline. What to say. I suppose my father was too busy making his own mistakes.

By day my father was a farmer; by night, an accomplished drunk, well known to finish a whole bottle of rum and still find his way to another. The drunken part of him we could have managed, shouldering him home on night after stuporous night, thinning the yogurt concoction that would have him back and bloodshot on his feet next morning. Yet he also suffered an unholy weakness for betting on cards, dogs, local elections, anywhere he might turn a note into two. You would not think him weak by his broad back and his woolly beard and his godlike gaze turned inward as if trying to make sense of the world. But it was a weakness of will that made him empty his pockets each night and sell off two of our acres to finance his madness. Weakness that made him swipe my mother’s wedding gold, a necklace so long she had looped it thrice around her throat.

“Maybe he needs the money for an investment,” I said.

“Maybe someone wants him dead,” said Jayan.

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know he is no saint.” From his pocket Jayan pulled a strange piece of metal shaped as four connected loops. He slipped the loops through his fingers and faked a punch at my nose, grinning at my flinch. “This I found in his cabinet.” Jayan gazed at his fingers as if admiring a fine piece of jewelry. “I could give you a brand-new face with it.”

I tried but could not reconcile this steel-fisted father with the one I knew. This is the power of the drink: it can split a man into two different people, each a stranger to the other. The father I knew had never even lifted a hand to beat us, as if to do so were beneath him. His voice was warning enough: rich and deep and hollow. After he died I tried to remake his sound by murmuring into a rolled-up newspaper, until my mother finally grabbed the tube and smacked me senseless.

You see, I was his favorite. One morning he took me to the field and taught me how to guess that season’s yield: eye a square meter, count the plants, then take the average beads of rice per plant. It was only a guess, he said, for to farm was to surrender control, to suspect but never know. We used maths and omens and traced our fortunes among the stars but — he shrugged—“Some signs are misleading. And none are any use to you.”