As if guessing my thoughts, Jayan said, “Raghu is dead. And if you had been with him that night, you would be too.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. You run like an old woman.”
He gave a demonstration, amusing only himself.
“What do I tell Synthetic Achan?”
“Tell him you have other duties now.” A smile tugged at his mouth. “Tell him you will soon be an uncle yourself.”
Hard to believe I had not realized Leela was five months pregnant. Indeed I had noticed she was plumping in places, but I had assumed she was gaining weight the way many young wives pack their middles and behinds, trading their slim-waisted skirts for house gowns.
After Jayan disclosed her secret, I could notice nothing else. Though Leela had barely a bump beneath her house gown, suddenly it seemed to me that her attributes were growing by the minute. Twice she caught my ungallant eye and began a habit of tossing a towel over her bosom whenever I approached with a glass of warm milk or a boiled egg or whatever my mother had me bring her.
Intent on building a life of substance for his child, Jayan worked long days, drank much less, and even took Leela to temple for some baby-blessing ceremony. He enlisted my help in digging a trench around the shed where we kept our rice bureau locked. Other farmers had reported elephant raids to their sheds, where a single beast could sniff out and swallow a year’s worth of food. We hired a few more hands to help with the digging and bolstered the side walls with timber. Over it we laid down a plank for crossing.
My mother filed many a complaint against the plank, but my brother thought it the only solution. What would she have him do — plant a bitter hedge around the shed like Kunjappen had done? One bull had braved the taste, then suffered loose motions all over the walls and bushes.
Speaking of smells, I suppose the outhouse is not a topic of dignified discourse, but let me indulge because as you will see the toilet and its placement would alter the course of our lives.
When Jayan was in jail, Synthetic Achan undertook renovations on his house and offered a few to ours, partly out of generosity and also out of shame that his own brother’s family should still be living under a paddy-grass roof. My mother installed a gas stove, which she never used unless guests were in the house; she much preferred the smoky infusions of a wood-burning stove. She had the paddy-grass roof switched to tile. I missed the look of the grass when it was fresh and sun dazzled, but I did not miss the way it grizzled and grayed over the months until we had to haul fresh grass onto the frame.
The single modernity my mother would not accept was a toilet inside the house. “But no one has an outhouse anymore,” I told her. “Ours is an inconvenience.”
“What,” she said, “to take ten steps outside for your business?” Neither Leela nor I could persuade my mother. She plainly refused to suffer the sounds and smells and squalor of a toilet spreading through our rooms.
Now that Leela was pregnant, my mother regretted her prior stance. She had not considered the burdens of pregnancy, one being that every ten minutes the pregnant woman is on her way to do the needful. In the middle of the night Leela would slip out without turning on a light. Between the churning notes of Jayan’s snore, I listened for her footsteps to make sure she had not fallen.
On a night such as this, her footsteps fading, I drifted off and later awoke to the hushed hiss of rain.
I peeked into my brother’s room. Her side of the mattress lay empty. I shook him until he turned and saw her gone, the scowl fading from his face.
Without waking my mother, we rushed into the drizzle. I had to feel my way along the clothesline strung between our back door and the outhouse, which kept us from straying on moonless nights. The outhouse door lay ajar. Empty.
“Manu,” he said, staring at the banana tree cracked in half, its crown in the dirt. Our fishtail palm shorn of two huge fans. I knelt over a rounded depression of earth, my eyes leaping to the next and the next where they all at once disappeared as if the elephant had taken flight.
Hoarsely, my brother shouted her name. Soon my mother came running around the house wielding a flashlight. We searched and we searched. The sky was dark and wild, trees writhing in the wind. A calm took me over. I called her name as if she were nearby, not gored or mashed or tangled in the branches of a tree. I looked, but all I could see was Raghu’s palli in splinters before me.
At last my mother shouted us over to the trench that surrounded the rice shed. She was kneeling at the edge.
There lay Leela on her back, her nightie twisted up around her soiled knees. The flashlight glared upon her face, but she lay still and pretty as a battered doll in the trench we had dug deep as a grave.
Imagine her on that moonless night. She has just done her needful when she hears the splintering of timber. Dread steps softly up her spine. She stands up slow on trembling knees and, for a moment, nothing moves. She wills herself to unhook the rusty latch and exit the outhouse.
There it is waiting, like a suitor come calling.
The Gravedigger nods, its trunk upcurled, and lets out a breath. Raindrops slither around her bare neck, but she feels nothing. Is it panting? Is it a vision? She feels far away, a phantom among the living.
Her heart thuds in her throat, a reminder of what she is: flesh and marrow, spit and vigor. Mother-to-be.
How she runs.
Blood pounds in her ears louder than the Gravedigger’s feet, but its stride is long and impossible. They are two animals locked in the ancient dance of hunter and hunted, and a small part of her considers one possible end — her end — just as the earth consumes her.
The Elephant
The flames of tiny lamplights trembled down the road to the temple. The Gravedigger could smell the hot oil, the chili-rubbed corn, the ice cream and peanuts, the plastic of inflatable toys, the petals of flowers, marigolds and rose water, all these shifting, rippling scents, and beneath them all, a heavy silt: the smell of people.
The Gravedigger was new to the festival season, new to parading and blessing and standing in wait. Seven months before, at the Sanctuary, he had been visited by a man who fed him a handful of caramels. Nosing through the man’s pockets, the Gravedigger found more. Old Man spoke sharply, but the Candy Man laughed and spread his arms, his knuckles stroking the underside of the Gravedigger’s trunk. His eyes were small and set deep, like seeds.
So one day the Gravedigger was picking the Candy Man’s pockets; the next day he was trapped in an open truck bed and bumping down the road to a new home. Sudden changes disagreed with the Gravedigger. He still trembled when remembering the day he was trucked out of the forest and into the Sanctuary, when life narrowed to a pitch-black cavern, and every which way was a wall. Then, as now, he perceived little of his situation. One comfort sustained him — that Old Man had come along.
The Gravedigger did not understand that he had been purchased by the Candy Man, who was locally known as Elephant Sabu. In addition to the Gravedigger, Elephant Sabu owned seven elephants, six of which he rented out for logging. The gentle Parthasarathi used to join them at the camp, where he had obtained a brief fame for saving a life. The story went that he had stood for five whole minutes over a ditch, holding a log in his trunk, refusing to fit the log in the ditch. Only when the forest workers looked in the ditch did they find there a sleeping dog, curled up and snug as a snail.
Now Parthasarathi was getting old, his vision foggy and his legs gone frail, a pink swelling at his temple like the knot on an old kindal tree. So he and the Gravedigger were assigned to work the festivals.