An hour later, Ravi, Teddy, and I were strolling through Kavanar Wildlife Park behind Officer Soman and Officer Vasu. Teddy took sound, and I filmed as we filed through the green, all of it undulating just beyond our reach. I’d missed the cool of being behind the camera, hyperattuned to our surroundings and yet detached. There was so much to capture: frothy white bursts of Communist green, so named, Ravi explained, because of its tendency to spread. Macaques rattling the highest branches of the teaks. Nests of silky white orchids sprouting from the branches of trees with roots like lava spills gone solid; red ants threading through a spewage of buffalo dung.
And then there was Officer Vasu and Officer Soman, both of whom had the quaint, bulbous features of garden gnomes. I paid more attention to Officer Vasu, only because he seemed the friendlier of the two. Through Ravi, I asked him about the giant rifle that hung from his shoulder, how often he’d had to use it against poachers. Officer Vasu received each question with a bashful smile and a lift of his nearly hairless eyebrows. “Once or twice,” he said. “But not directly at a poacher.”
“Why not?”
“If we kill someone, the media gets involved, then the Human Rights Commission. We can lose our jobs. There are many barriers for us.”
Without elaborating on the barriers, Officer Vasu walked on. I noted the laces of his shoes were tied haphazardly, woven through random holes and wrapped threefold around the ankles so they wouldn’t slip off. What did a poacher have to fear from a guy with oversized camo shoes and putty lumps for brows?
Farther along, Officer Soman pointed out the leaning wreckage of bamboo, thick as elephant bones, thirty years old and weeks away from decay. “Elephants love the bamboo,” Ravi added, “so the shortage is drawing them to the farms. And the Forest Department isn’t replanting, so—”
What followed was a volley of heated voices, passing so rapid fire we could only film and ask for translation later:
SOMAN: Everyone blames the Forest Department.
RAVI: I’m not blaming—
SOMAN: You know well as I do any decision like that must come from Trivandrum.
RAVI: I just say how I see it. The farmers say the same thing about the bamboo.
SOMAN: Hah! Bunch of IIT geniuses, those people! They also say we should build a Great Wall of China around the park. What is this — a zoo?
VASU: Calm yourself, Soman. They’re filming.
SOMAN: They don’t care what we say. We won’t be in their film.
VASU: Why not?
SOMAN: People like them don’t make movies about people like us.
VASU: How would you know? You don’t even watch movies.
SOMAN: I know that piece of grass in your mouth doesn’t make you Sunil Shetty.
VASU: People can cry and fight all they want, but there will come a time when the bamboo will disappear, then the elephants, then us, and all will be as it was before we arrived. Or maybe it will be something different.
SOMAN: So?
VASU: The world is changing. If it was not changing, it would not be the world.
(Silence.)
SOMAN: Someone give this man a Filmfare Award.
After the hike, our hosts took us to rest at their quarters, a two-level bamboo dwelling on stilts. An officer was perched in the lookout tower. We passed by a small garden, displaying neat rows of beans, curry leaves, and cabbages, staked in the center with a strung-up can of Shakti mustard oil, bouncing sunlight as it swung.
Officer Vasu led the tour. Here were the mosquito nets rolled up over the cots; here were the beige shirts hanging from the wall pegs, the bullet shells on the bed, the walkie-talkies spitting sounds, the calendar on the wall with a young girl shyly fondling her braid. And here was the small shrine by the doorway, on a shelf nailed to the wall, with propped pictures of Ganesh and a blue cherubic Krishna, boxes of incense and burnt matches planted in balls of wax. Here they prayed before entering the forest.
As we filmed, it came out that Officer Vasu was from a poor family, same as Officer Soman, who saw his own family once a month. Officer Vasu pulled out a wafer-thin wallet, and from it he extracted what seemed to be a single puzzle piece.
“Me,” he said.
And it was him, albeit a younger him, trim and proud in his beige uniform, his foot hitched on the bumper of a jeep. He had cut around his own shape and that of the jeep attached to his foot, as if they were one. I pulled focus on the photo, held delicately in his fingers, dirt under the nails. There was something so humble, so heartwarming, about both Vasus, large and small, now and then, neither of whom seemed capable of harm. Yet two days later, Officer Vasu would shoot a poacher dead. At first I wouldn’t believe it; the shooter had to be some other Vasu, not our Vasu, not Vasu of the clown-sized camo shoes. Even in the space of a few hours, I thought I’d come to know him. Had he been playing to the camera? Or had I cast him as the sweet, clumsy native before he’d even opened his mouth?
The jeep trundled us homeward in the late afternoon. The moon made an early cameo, a translucent scoop of vanilla melting into the blue. Ravi had mellowed toward me, and riding beside him, I almost forgot about Teddy in the backseat, wearing that sated look he always got at the end of a good day. Ravi steered with one hand, pointing out the cotton silk trees, the sals, the white pines, and the occasional aanjili, guarded by thuggish monkeys.
We came to idle behind an open lorry, four boys crammed in the back, heels bopping against the bumper. Three of them were chatting; the fourth was distracted by a silky seed floating past. I thought of that Helen Levitt photograph: four girls walking down a street, distracted by passing soap bubbles. Helen Levitt had been twenty-five, around my age, when she bought a Leica. She fit a winkelsucher to her camera, a device that let her point herself in one direction while the photo snapped from the side, so the subject was oblivious to being photographed.
I have almost no photos of our time in India. I told myself I didn’t want to be that tourist, snapping exotica for the benefit of friends back home, who’d get bored after flipping through a dozen or so. Teddy and I saw our India only in terms of the film, admittedly a narrow lens. We made up for our insecurities by being dogged in purpose: to get everything we could, and get it right.
And yet there were unexpected moments I still wish I could have captured somehow, in a medium more lasting than memory. Like the boy in the lorry, reaching for the silk seed. Or Ravi reaching over the gearshift and squeezing my hand, before Teddy could see.
For dinner, Ravi took us to his favorite restaurant, Y2K, a cryptic name belied by perky flower settings and plastic gingham tablecloths. Our server brought three “home-style meals”—a hillock of rice accessorized with various stews and curries — and diplomatically set spoons beside two of the plates. Ravi ate with nimble fingers that never seemed to still, always tossing or crushing or rounding up a bite, leaving little room for talk.
We were halfway into the meal when Teddy said, “Okay, Em, fess up.” My stomach dropped, knowing where he was headed. I’d forgotten to warn him, neglected to explain. Now my signals — beseeching eyes, rigid head shake — were all too late. “Where’d you get that stuff about Shankar Timber?”
Ravi’s head snapped up.
Slowly I spooned more pickle onto my plate. “I don’t remember.”
“You asked her about Shankar Timber?” Ravi said.
Teddy turned to Ravi. “Have you heard about this? There’s a village called, what was it—”
“Manaloor,” Ravi said.
“Right. Anyway, the discussion got pretty tense, but Emma didn’t back down. She’s an excellent interviewer, way better than me.”