In the days after his death, Raghu appeared at temple and in the fields and one time on the back of a lorry. I had been similarly visited by my father for a while. I once chased a public bus, sure I had seen my father inside taking the tickets.
Work was the only wall I could lean against. Given my mother’s permission, I took to toiling in Synthetic Achan’s fields, as he was short a pair of hands. Not that my uncle wanted mine. He abominated my very presence and would not glance my way, not even when he uttered an order, not even when I said, at the end of the day, “I’ll go and come,” to which he issued not even a grunt. I poured my sweat into his soil and came up with a possible solution for the parakeets that came cackling out of the sky and into the rice. One whole morning I spent staking two poles along the eastern side of his farm and twisting a long length of white plastic between them, strung with bottle caps and bells. The plastic flashed and glimmered, jangling in the breeze. My uncle asked if I was scaring the little shits or throwing them a party.
At night I lay awake thinking of the Gravedigger, a name I had known since childhood along with its other titles. Schoolchildren had set its killing spree to song:
Here it comes
the Ottayan, the Undertaker
Sent its master
to his Maker
What had that master done, I wondered, to give his elephant such a fiending for death?
In the days that followed, the Gravedigger took one more palli and one more soul. The palli belonged to a farm down the way, its walls crashed to kindling. The man inside escaped and lived to feed us a dubious story: I was lying on my side by the fire lost in a daydream when I felt a sniff at my ear so gentle I half thought it was my wife, though, honestly speaking, she would sooner fart in church than show affections, so I turned and found myself faced with the Gravedigger’s big fat hose! I did not think, I drew back my fist and punched it—dsh! — in the nostrils. Naturally it was not expecting such heroics, for it snatched its trunk away, giving me just enough time to jump out and run.
We could not question the Kuruva woman. She had been hauling firewood on her back, skirting the forest, when the Gravedigger found her. Dozens of women had likely done the same to keep their cook fires burning, each convinced that she would not be the one to cross the murderer’s path. A whole morning passed before a lorry slowed and noticed a little cushion of a foot jutting from beneath piled wood. As in the case of my cousin, the Gravedigger had conducted its own private burial.
And so, the Forest Department cautioned us with the obvious: to keep to our homes at dusk. It promoted the Gravedigger to rogue status but stopped short of issuing the order for its killing. Not until it would kill more of our own.
In the meantime I kept to Synthetic Achan’s fields. I woke at 6:00 a.m., several hours before the laborers came fresh off the jeep. This was a tough half-lazy lot of men who demanded a thimble or two of Old Cask for breakfast. When they cut, I cut, and when they heaved bundles on their heads, so did I.
In the evenings I lingered in my uncle’s fields. From the rear of his house I watched the rose-orange sky and the goats among the balsa blooms and the mountains beyond, hiding the Gravedigger in their deeps.
Before long the parakeets interrupted my idyll, sailing triumphantly over my slack piece of plastic. Down they swooped in a green flittering cloud and clipped the beaded strands before lifting away. My sole defense was to hoot and bang a spoon against a tin pan, but the pretty thieves had already fled for the trees, where they would pick at the rice just as crows pick at a dead man’s eyes.
The parakeets were unusually quiet when Synthetic Achan came up beside me. “Your little ribbon didn’t work.”
“There’s not enough wind.”
“I don’t care about the birds,” he said. “I have a bigger problem.”
I snuck a glance across his face and wondered when the hair at his temples had gone gray.
“Guess who came to pay respects,” he said. “Forest Department.”
“When?”
“Some days ago. They said they would give me ten thousand rupees for damages, so long as I filled out some form. ‘An Application for Compensation,’ they called it. The pigs. I said, What should I do with it? Buy another son? But then I had an idea.” He turned to me. “I could give it to you and Jayan.”
“You don’t owe us anything.”
“I know that. It’s you who owes me.”
How smooth and cold the claim. How heavy the hand on my shoulder.
“You want us to kill the Gravedigger?”
“Louder, boy, the greenbacks didn’t hear you.”
I shook my head. “Jayan will say no. He will not go to jail again.”
“Just listen. Your brother made the mistake of working with some no-name ruffian. This time we are all on Jayan’s side, all us farmers. No one would fault him or name him to the police.” I had trouble picturing this second family of farmers — where had they been for the past four years? “All our people want some safety for our fields, our harvest, our children …”
Am I not your child? I wanted to ask. But the mere mention of children had stolen his voice. He turned away and repeatedly rubbed his nose with his finger as if to give his face something to do.
“If they accuse your brother or you or anyone else, I will confess to it. I will stand trial; I will take it all on my head, I swear it. No difference between living out here and living in a cage.” He paused and added softly, “Not to me.”
He had never looked so old, and yet in his ruined face I saw an echo of my cousin.
“He listens to you, Manu.”
I stood in silence, yet what choice did I have? I look back at the young man I was and see a boy, powerless before the only person he had yearned all his life to call Father.
I tried to approach my brother, but it was impossible to find him alone what with his wife around every corner. Leela put no trust in Jayan and kept one ear always tilted in his direction lest he should slip into his old ways. A pretty warden she made, but a warden all the same.
At last I found him in the courtyard. He was raking a fat pile of harvest, forking and fluffing the stalks, sweating as he went. In two more days the stalks would dry and he would steer the cattle-drawn plow around the pile, threshing the rice to loosen the hulls.
All I desired was a pause to precede our discussion, but Jayan kept talking as if to avoid it. That day his chosen subject was the tractor-tiller. “Kunjappen said the tractor-tiller can do in thirty minutes what the plow takes hours to do.”
“We used his contraption last year. More bugs in that rice than lice on a stray.”
“What is that to do with the tractor-tiller?”
Back and forth we bickered on the merits and follies of the tractor-tiller until I blurted, “I talked to Synthetic Achan.”
“Talking now, is he?”
I relayed Synthetic Achan’s request. Jayan listened in silence, doing more stabbing than fluffing.
“How much is he offering?” Jayan said finally.
“Ten thousand at the least.”
“And he wants me to do it.”
“Not you,” I said quickly. “We thought you would know someone else for the job.”
“Someone eager to go to jail? There’s a rare species.”
“No one would go to jail. Uncle swore it.”
“Who made him chief minister?”
“He watched over us while you were gone.”
“And for that I give him my thanks. But not the rest of my life.”
A fair answer, I admit. Jayan simply wanted to make an honest living, upright and in the open. I wanted a cure for my guilt.