Joseph McElroy: Taken From Him

Shouts somewhere in the early evening traffic bearing down on you — you do not think sometimes what’s behind as you in your sometime job must know what’s ahead — out and to the northeast the slender arc of the island city once several islands reclaimed from the supposed waste of sea but there curving finely in profile now, hopelessly to mark, though only fractionally or suggestively, the bay, much less the sea it’s part of and the silvery vast light darkening now with sudden acceleration. Vespas and two quite brisk horse-drawn carriages, the body home-fabricated silver, seem to be in a race — the noise here, this country where you can raise your voice in a dispute if you know how, and the nicely protective Indian landscape designer who with his partner one was apparently crossing this grand, insane boulevard to meet joked that it was the only thing he liked about India now.

And as the girl’s call sounded behind somewhere close as one could bear, and with it for the first time the given name called, and “suhrr,” like an intimacy — begging, was it at last? — a job to do, a poorly defined job perhaps even this lissom, persistent person should show him; and as he felt her hand on his arm, there darted out from the far curb a black-and-tan-speckled dog, mongrel or a breed hard to say in this city, and, running to intercept the animal that now veered off out of reach up to the left toward oncoming traffic and the scream behind you was the girl, waving something as the rain in a dark, huge breath and steep commotion swept the coast with the sound of wings, one could wonder if the scream was for the speckled dog already leaping struck by a motorbike and rolling through the air in your face almost to land beyond them and skid splayed in the intersection, the light now having changed; or for herself nearly run down by a blinkered horse and its silver carriage, colored decorations all over it, painted plywood — no, laminated cardboard! — silver-painted Victorias for tourists — an umbrella in her hand. “I have nothing to keep from you,” the girl cried behind him, as his friends, at the approaching curb called to him. Yet when he turned to answer the girl, as he must always do — for some people you can take or leave, some you can miss — she was running back where she’d come from, umbrella unopened, her tunic drenched a blue dark as her jeans, like even these joggers along the seafront undeterred by the downpour, given a rhythm by it, the monsoon engine not finished, our loyalty to it.

One tomorrow of two or three. Sounds in a morning solitude tomorrow one could not have foreseen. Sounds so differently surrounded by sunlight and silence and so distinct they are thoughts. So welcome as, coming round a curve in the Gandhi National Park road — a burst of voices arguing wild among the cylinders of the engine of the yellow van or bus as it nearly runs you down — through those side windows it might be difficult to see quite clearly. Yet two voices almost known in this remarkable land, an almost empty vehicle it seemed, though three or four passengers — what could the voices be so exercised about? — though suspended a second or two, as he got out of the way.

The driver surely was the man from night before last; and someone shouting Stop, Stop — standing beside him one could tell, after the bus had passed — must be the girl, here a long way from the east entrance she had perhaps forgotten she had once specified, not used to being listened to.

Stop it did not, the bus its own thing here in the forest, shadowy heads looking back as it plunged away into a curve, like another language. Speaking to one — to him, to you — it came to you, of a person out here in a forty-square-mile protected area nonetheless near suburban Mumbai who had no business hiking alone. He had no words for it now.

The hopeless hue and cry he still could hear as he walked on or in his memory he understood he had been hearing also for a moment or two before the bus first came into view. It wasn’t only him the shouts were about. If him at all.

A hundred yards up the road according to the crude map, he would come to what looked like a bridge and a stream, a reservoir off to his left. An insignificant stream under the bridge hardly readable.

A trip home out of India approaching but safely at a distance. Not here for long, the girl had said of you. Presently, sure enough the road narrowed across a brief bridge with low guard barriers of cement and old stone. To be alone here at a bridge, the reservoir off somewhere through the trees to the left, which would be west.

How long could it have been before he saw the animal stretched along a tree bough some ten feet above the ground even with the bridge? Couched absorbed in the forest yet in plain view even at this distance not twenty feet off the road a fawn buff coat densely belonging to its strength; off the road yet so near where the road crossed the bridge it might easily have been visible from a passing van, if you were looking for it; visible from the road, lying along a long-elbowed bough, its eyes almost shut, one back leg coming off the branch hung halfway out easily ten feet above the ground where giant leaves and bush and some blow-down and some fugitive tall grasses kept the depth uncertain. In fact, as the strangeness issuing from the Park bus careering through the forest and the angry commotion inside it had faded a hundred yards down, hadn’t there been a blurred look to the bus in memory the sense of which now brings into focus, though it needed no greater clarity against the tangle of underbrush beyond with no clear stand of trees but some old growth and hollowing snags, the leopard there in the tree? Its presence more size than scale as one did not take one’s eyes off it in the next few moments — minutes — so relaxed its length in truth, six feet perhaps, belonging and at large here miles possibly from where it might be sometime kept, a leopard, call it a leopard, a big one, cheetah sometimes in this part of the world, but a leopard.

What was it watching?

As quick as it was strong enough to haul its kill up into a tree if it has to. A pig, a young antelope, a chital spotted deer in these woods, a barking deer said to have been heard. A hornbill’s call then, low and then low and faintly raucous; a flash of blue and yellow looked for in vain with what must be peripheral vision, commonly two birds together A hand now on the bridge cement in this direction — where the leopard lies. Move hardly at all yet you can. The cat is still, but, six feet or five and a half, it will move soon. Has it fed?

If solitary, will this one keep it that way by taking care of what else living is here, or by departing?

Alone, no guest, with no thought except not to make a move, not up the road or back down where you came from, to run away or stand the ground which is not yours. Seeing the leopard, its shoulder, its flank at rest, its three-foot tail curved not stirring above a half-hanging rear leg and spotted like the back, the haunch with a crowd of small imperfect black rings, the person thinks to step away from the bridge stone, to be further away yet without this low wall between; or to stay. To be not with the animal, but be what? The stream moving below could scarcely be heard. No sound of voice or car in the late-morning humidity.

And now, drawing its forelegs under, the leopard dropped down into underbrush out of sight along the stream, below the level of the bridge, the road. A path of half-seen leaf and bush swayings to be traced where for a moment or two one can even see yet not, and so it is time to move back from the low wall. Not to be looking directly down at the head, the hide, the eyes, the round pupils. Where is the leopard? What would it hear under the bridge? Where does it place its feet? Its sudden paws.