Now the solo bull could be a very rude intruder. If one of those fellows were to pay us a visit, we were to leap out of the palli and race home. Do not be fooled by the lumps you see at the zoo — the elephant can run! Ask Raghu’s father, who was only twenty years old when a bull elephant discovered him dozing in the palli. Synthetic Achan survived because he knew the elephant has weak eyes. Run straight and you will be trampled. Cut a zigzag and you may confuse it.
Synthetic Achan felt Raghu was too young to sit guard in the palli alone, so he drafted me also. Yet I do not know where I was that night, probably testing my luck with some soft-bottomed girl. What to say. I was nineteen and had discovered that my visage had an effect on certain girls, so to speak. I pretended not to care about my visage, but Raghu needled me about the cream I occasionally raked through my hair. Sometimes he called me Styleking as in: “Eh Styleking, did you bathe in Brylcreem or stick the whole tub up your rump?”
“Yamini likes it.”
“Up the rump?”
“Do not talk of her rump.”
“I hear what I hear. And from the particulars, I would not touch her with a boatman’s pole.”
We bickered, but there was a comfort to our fuggy odors and the flash of our teeth in the dark. Other times we burrowed into the quiet, each of us privately wondering what kind of future awaited us. I had a habit of dozing, which Raghu allowed to a limit and would shake me awake only if I were to poof. “What is this,” he would shout, flapping his hands about his face, “your personal shithouse?”
Whenever he gently tapped me awake, I knew I had been murmuring for my brother, something like Where is Jayan where is he, even though Jayan had been home for six months already. To spare me the shame, Raghu would only say I had been poofing again.
Humble as it was, our palli commanded a five-star view. To the north a phone tower climbed the sky. To the east an owl glared from its bamboo perch, swiveling its head for rodents among the stalks. To the west we watched the sunset pour over the teak-rimmed forest aka Kavanar Wildlife Park.
Our people had been walking the forest long before it took that fussy name. The new laws forbid us from doing anything in the park, not walking, not even picking up a finger length of firewood without being fined for trespass and stealing. Stealing from trees that had dropped us fruit and firewood for centuries! Meanwhile, the laws looked kindly on the greenbacks and timber companies, their rows of rosewood, eucalyptus, teak.
So I had zero patience for Raghu’s ramblings when he decided to tell all about the spectacle he had witnessed one day prior, starring his brand-new hero: Ravi Varma, Veterinary Doctor. I had never seen this Ravi Varma, M.D., though I had heard of his exploits with the greenbacks, and I was no fan of theirs nor his by association.
And what heroic feats had the cow doctor performed to deserve Raghu’s worship? Pulled an elephant calf from a tea ditch, where the wee thing had tripped and fallen much to its mother’s distress.
I told Raghu my demented old mammachi could pull an elephant calf from a tea ditch.
“Not only that,” Raghu enthused. “The vet doctor got the mother to take back the baby.”
Now this part was pure lie. “A mother elephant won’t touch a calf that was handled by humans. Every idiot knows that.”
“But she did! And she thanked him after.”
“Did they shake hands too?”
“And two sayips were there, filming it all. BBC people I think.”
This gave me pause. In those days, it was rare to see foreigners in our parts, and we were neither poor enough nor princely enough to appear on Western screens. I was minimally intrigued. What did the BBC want with us?
Raghu sighed, still dazzled by the memory of Ravi Varma, M.D. “It was something, Manu, I tell you.”
Was Raghu musing about the mother and calf on his final evening? Did that sentimental memory lead him to lay down his guard? I imagine his last and lonesome hour, I see him drifting off, a breath from sleep, before he sits up quick to the snap of a broken branch.
In the silence he looks from one doorway to the other. He can open his lungs and caw and set the other pallis cawing, but what if it was only the snap of the fire? He hears me scoffing in his ears: A broken branch in the middle of a field?
Raghu hunkers beneath his blanket, hiding from the possibilities.
After a noiseless minute he can breathe again, relieved he never set to squawking like some half-brained bird. He draws deep on the comfort of woodsmoke, sure I will come. Until then, he will tend the fire alone.
The Filmmaker
Along time ago, when the mountains bristled with forest, a boy emerged from the woods and came upon a white man with china-blue eyes. The white man was a British engineer, sent to cut a royal road through the mountains, but he couldn’t find a path. He wasn’t an explorer, and this was some dense and secretive terrain. Couldn’t the boy, being a local and privy to local secrets, just show him the way?
The boy demanded cash and the watch on the engineer’s wrist.
Proffering the watch — cash later — the engineer trailed the boy into the mountains, tracing a route tamped by elephant feet. Every so often the boy stopped and said he had to go home because his mother was waiting; he hadn’t the time to go all the way to the peak. Just a bit farther, the engineer kept urging, just a bit more.
At sundown they reached the peak. The man squinted at the mountains beyond and smiled as if he’d come into some great inheritance. Happy now? the boy said. Now give me my money.
Just a minute, said the engineer, reaching into his coat pocket.
I don’t have any more minutes, the boy insisted.
True, said the engineer, leveling his pistol, and shot the boy in the face.
The engineer slipped the watch off the dead boy’s wrist. He thought about the bigger watch he’d buy once the road was built and named after the Englishman who had single-handedly found a route through the ghats.
As it turned out, the bullet gave the dead boy all the time in the world. Many years later, his spirit took up residence in the hollows of a banyan, along the road the engineer had built, and overturned cars as a means of revenge. Only when a priest wrapped the tree in chains was the spirit contained, and cars could once again barrel freely round the bend. Thereafter it was known as the Chain Tree.
§
I leaned out the taxi window to catch a glimpse of the Chain Tree. I’d heard the legend on my first day at Kavanar Wildlife Park and was expecting a hulk more twisted and mythic. In fact, the banyan looked benign, with chains dangling like party streamers from the branches.
The road itself was far more intimidating, all rubble and rollick and switchback. Our taxi driver seemed to think himself invincible, maybe even immortal, the way he dodged cars, scooters, lorries, mini-lorries, tipper-lorries, and a band of pedestrians with hankies tied round their mouths, to fend off dust. A rosary hanging from the rearview mirror spanked the back of the driver’s hand. He took no heed of the rosary, or of the road signs that every so often shot by:
BE A CARELESS OVERTAKER
END UP AT THE UNDERTAKER
I was nervous about the shoot; the signs didn’t help. Beside me, Teddy sat staring out his window, placid and daydreamy.
“We should’ve rented a second camera,” I said.
“Then who would do sound?” Teddy said.
“Mount a mic on the camera. People do that all the time.”