“What money!” Leela railed at me, as if I stood in for all of society. “He shot four or five elephants, that is all. He swore to me. How can they lock him away on account of four elephants?”
Okay fine, I let her believe it was four. I told myself this was not my business but theirs. Here is the truth: I would have sworn nonsense on her King James Bible if only to prevent her from leaving us, leaving me.
Most strenuously, my brother insisted that there was no need for us to come to the trial in Karnataka. Surely the jury would deem the fat-neck a faulty witness on account of his record, blotted by the petty felonies of an idiot. (Once, he attempted to burgle an office building and got himself locked in the entry.) It was too far to travel for a case that would be over in minutes. And if we were to come, who would mind the farm?
Jayan knew — how could he not, with his front-row seat — that the magistrate court would find him guilty. His was a sorry gift, the one and only he could give: an excuse not to see him with his slim wrists in the irons, to continue our days as if nothing were different.
Four years my brother was gone from us. My mother spent most of this time confined to the house, held hostage by the belief that gawkers and gossips were waiting outside our door, their whispers burrowing through the walls. A bad husband was a misfortune. A bad son was her fault, and she felt she deserved every word said against her.
Regarding gossips, Leela said there was no use listening to every twit with a mouth. She knotted a cloth around her head, picked up a sickle, and labored in the fields alongside the adiya women who eyed the way she whacked at the stalks, sweating, cursing, cutting nothing. Eventually they showed her how to sharpen the blade against bamboo, then shear. She found the money to buy chickens and a cow named White Girl, earning us income from the eggs and milk. The chicks she guarded as fiercely as if she had laid them herself, but the predators were many. One day a vulture whisked a chick in its claws but lost its grip upon takeoff. Belly up, the chick lay cheeping in the dirt, a glistening string of its innards plucked out. Finished, I thought, and all the eggs it would have laid for us.
But Leela did not waste a second in telling me to bring needle and thread. I had threaded her many a needle by then, but never had I seen her do what she did: carefully cradling the chick in her palm and fingering the innards back inside as if stuffing a pastry puff. Like a surgeon, she stitched the belly whole again, then patted a paste of turmeric over the wound.
In the end that stitched-up chicken outlived the others. It even followed her around like some lovesick suitor who would not take no for an answer, a behavior I might have found humorous if it did not so closely resemble my own frame of mind.
Yet I was not her only fan, so to speak.
Two fellows called me out of the house one day, asking for Podimattom Leela. One had a long face, lizardy features. He said he knew her from before, that they were old friends. Business associates, said the other, a fellow with a face all wrinkled and scarred like a halved head of cabbage. They had heard about her financial trouble. They thought they could help.
The lizard smiled with tiny teeth. She can find us at Hotel Meriya, he said and left.
I found Leela out back, standing over a massive jackfruit, one of the three Synthetic Achan had given us, knowing I favored the fried chips. She bit her lip as if angry with that spiny green boulder, its stem dribbling sap.
“Are they gone?” she asked.
I nodded. She handed me the hoe. I lifted the thing over my head and struck the fruit. I turned the jack by a degree, then hacked again. Turned it. Hacked. Turn. Hack.
She bent and used her fingers to pry the halves apart, the gluey sap fouling up her fingers. Each half displayed a daisy shape, with its pale yellow bulbs of fruit like petals around the pulpy core. With a kitchen knife she began carving the halves into quarters, still saying nothing, her mouth in a knot.
I asked why they had called her Podimattom Leela. She told me it was the place where she was born.
“No one calls me Sitamala Manu.”
She was quiet.
“They said you were business associates,” I said.
“Customers.”
“What kind.”
“Same kind as your brother.” She spoke oh so casually, but I could see the tears sitting on the rims of her eyes. I felt a small mean wish to see them fall.
Instead she tossed the knife onto the newspaper and dipped her fingers in a steel cup of oil, rubbing the white from her fingers as she brushed past me.
I caught her by the arm. “I deserve to know …”
“Know what. Spit it out.”
Heat filled my face. The question required finesse. I had no finesse. I had a hoe in my hand.
“All that honey talk about sandalwood trees …” She shook her head. “Don’t talk to me about deserve.”
I dropped my gaze. I could think of nothing to say.
After a while she spoke in a small voice. “Knowing those two, it will be all over town by tomorrow.”
“It will not. I won’t let them.”
“Oho. My hero.” She smirked at the mess of jackfruit at our feet. “Leave it, Manu, just leave it.”
Another man would have let the moment pass and put the matter out of mind. But I was not a man; I was a boy of sixteen seething with impulse and anger, and I felt it my job to defend her. Raghu refused to join me, having seen the cretins and citing very bad odds.
I found the lizard at the shappe next door to Hotel Meriya, holding court among his fellows, not a puddle’s worth of sense among them. The lizard caught my approach out the corner of his eye and threw himself wholeheartedly into a one-man show. Podimattom Leela! Like a butcher he appraised her parts, tongue by breast by thigh, and oh the things she could do with certain of them. Her menu never changed, long and all-inclusive, nothing left off the list and believe you me her mouth never tired—
“Neither does yours.”
The shiteater grinned at me. I kept my hands in the pockets of my brother’s old trousers. “Ah. Here’s her bodyguard.”
“Leela Shivaram is her name.”
“How was I supposed to know that? She didn’t invite me to the wedding.”
“Now you know.”
“I knew her differently.”
“You knew someone else.”
He shrugged. “Wash a crow all you want, it won’t turn white.”
I asked him to step out. Lazily he sucked at a fish bone before heaving himself up from the table. It was difficult to maintain my air of aggression while he rinsed every mote from his mouth.
He followed me some ways from the shappe to a stand of trees, where I turned to find the cabbage head in attendance. My heart fell. “What is he for?”
“Not to referee, I can tell you that.”
I kept my eyes on his feet while my fist grew hard in my pocket, four fingers looped in my father’s steel. I remembered the knuckles dull and deadly in my brother’s palm. The lizard asked if I wanted to rethink my opinions, to which I replied by smashing my metal fist into his snout.
He spun and landed face flat on the dirt, his arms spread in a pose that recalled my father, and for a terrible moment I thought he was dead.
The cabbage head stared at his colleague, who to my great relief struggled like a newborn to lift his head. In those few seconds of gawking, I had time enough to sling the knuckles into the trees so they wouldn’t be used against me. My fingers rang with pain.
Take Note: I did not run. Unlike my father, I knew not to rack up my debts.
The cabbage head sighed and gave me a look of almost fatherly disappointment. Then he popped me in the ear, the chin, and — with breathtaking finality — the belly.