So every other month Jayan and his fat-necked associate drove their spoils to Kottayam and I returned to my studies quite happily. I was only fifteen years old, yet I had mapped the course of my life — to do my pre-degree in Commerce and attend college and someday be chief manager of a bank, with my own glass-walled office where visitors had to wait their turn. Jayan may have been our lifeboat in those days, but I would build a great ship of myself. I would keep the sea so calm my mother would hardly feel it shift beneath her feet.
But ships take a long time to build, much longer than it takes to build a dream. In the meantime Jayan would give her no peace.
One dull gray morning, the mini-lorry came up the road and stopped before our house. My brother stepped out, followed by a woman who kept her apologetic gaze on the ground.
She had dainty toe rings on each of her dusty feet, the sort of ornament that seemed to me both ridiculous and intriguing. I tried not to look too hard at her face, at the lashes that grazed her cheeks. I tried to appear calm when Jayan introduced her as his wife. Leela. A woman he had found and then married in a Kottayam courthouse.
Oh, the fit my mother threw. How could Jayan do such a thing? Elope with some Christian no-name without even a hello-goodbye to his mother? What kind of loose shameless beef-eating she-dog would run off with a Hindu, no engagement, no dowry, no nothing? (The indecent kind, that’s what — the taking-advantage kind!) And why did Jayan think the beef-eater would never run from him?
From the look of her, Leela seemed the kind of woman who had been fed an exclusive diet of pomegranate and almonds and milk, by which I mean she was fair and softly built, her features made to fill a movie screen. “World class, mangoes like that.” Raghu sighed. I smacked his head. He smacked me back, claiming she wasn’t his sister.
Leela had lived her life on the coast and had never seen the forests and valleys and ghats my brother had promised her. Once she asked me: “Is it true the tribals are so dark because they are partway African?”
“Partway who?”
She toyed with the tip of her braid. “I heard the tribals married the African slaves that the Britishers brought with them. That is why the tribals are so dark. Because of the Africans.” Hesitantly she added, “There are no tribals in my village.”
I stared at her, much conflicted with thoughts. You are simple and silly. You are the most beautiful thing I have seen. You are married to my brother. Why? My brother has the brain of a wall lizard. I am sharp in school. I am sure to make something of myself, sure as calves become cows. But will Mother let me find a Leela of my own? No. Because every family only allows itself one mistake. You are that beautiful mistake. And now I will marry some cross-eyed callus-hoofed heifer with whom my stars align.
“Not because of the Africans,” she concluded, a blush warming her cheeks.
All the facts we knew of Leela could have fit on the side of a toothpaste box. Her people hailed from some flyspeck village she neglected to name. She had no schooling or training. Her father was a bricklayer. How she and Jayan had met was a mystery my mother titled Their Filthy Beginnings and refused to read a single page.
If the world according to my mother was out of joint, the crop showed no sign of it. The stalks were growing strong, nodding strands of rice fine as seed pearls. Leela survived my mother’s silence behind a wall of politeness, swift to melt out of sight if my mother was in a mood. No sooner had my mother finished her morning tea than Leela whisked the cup away to rinse it. She took up the washing and ironing and sweeping while my mother pointed out every stain and crinkle and crumb, as if she had personally invented the art of housewifery.
All this abuse Leela bore with a steady temper. Jayan’s puppy love seemed sustenance enough. She basked in his stinky presence whenever he returned from the fields, and he was no less infatuated, his hand always grasping her waist, her braid, her bottom, handful upon handful and never enough. He only took such liberties at what he presumed were private moments, but in a three-room house few moments are private.
Sometimes I heard the tight murmur of an argument through the walls, likely to do with his continued visits to the forest. The wild was always reaching for Jayan, noisy and glowing with adventure. No matter how they fought, she always stood by the door in the sullen dawn and watched him leave for the fields.
“I worry about him,” she said to me once, after Jayan had gone away.
Get used to it, I thought.
“He says there is no reason to worry. What’s so wrong with cutting a tree, he says. But there must be something wrong if there are laws against it.”
“What tree?” I asked.
“Sandalwood. His side business. Isn’t it?”
I stared directly into those simple eyes. My silence made the answer plain, did it not? Yet I could not betray my brother completely; I could give no further answer than this: “Ask him.”
She hadn’t the chance to take my advice, for the day Jayan returned from his final trip, he was all Later later not now. The day passed without the mini-lorry coming up the road, and by noon the next day my brother was in a black mood. I knew what had him pacing — there was ivory in the shed, the marrow drying, the weight lightening, the price lessening with every passing gram.
By dusk my brother secured a car for the following morning and vowed never to work with that irresponsible bastard ever again. Little did he know the bastard had already taken the same vows.
For that very night the Karnataka police punched at our door and clomped through our sitting room and took my brother from his bed before he had a shirt on his back. They yapped a mix of Kannada and Malayalam, something about crossing state lines with weapons. They retrieved the ivory from the shed, piece after piece wrapped in newspaper and nested like eggs in the cauldron never to hatch a penny. By the time Leela went running out into the yard with a blue mundu, the policemen were leading my brother to the jeep.
See the spectacle of us standing outside our house in the night. Leela holding a blue mundu. My mother shouting at the police. Me at fifteen, watching my brother in nothing but his chaddi between two brutes who have not the decency to let him put on a shirt.
It is difficult to place faith in a man who tells you during a ten-minute phone call from prison not to worry. But Jayan convinced us that Communist Chacko would post bail as he had done twice before. “Twice? What twice?” demanded Leela. My brother said he had no time to explain. He promised there would be no trial.
But Communist Chacko failed to provide bail on account of my brother’s previous debts, which I suspected were to do with those previous bonds. And so the trial would go on. Old fat-neck would play witness for the prosecution.
Their relations had curdled of late, ever since the fat-neck had demanded his turn at the gun and the doubled wage that went with it. My brother felt he could not be trusted, neither with his aim nor with the splitting of the money, another task that fell to the gunman. So Jayan refused him, and the traitor went straight to the police to feed them a fable about his U-turn of heart and his fresh respect for the law. Judge and jury would fall upon the fairy tale like crows on a carcass.
Whereas once my brother had won praise for being a perfect shot, now he was cast out by public opinion. Rumors ran loose that he had made big money off elephant game — why else had the Karnataka police crossed their border to collect him? Most everyone, Christian and Muslim and Hindu alike, believed killing elephants for money was a sinful pursuit, and worse that he should profit from it, hoarding untold sums, when everyone else accepted whatever skinny salary this life afforded them.