I shook my head at Teddy. “He doesn’t wanna hear this.”
“What makes her so excellent?” Ravi asked. A brittle note had entered his voice.
“Well, generally speaking, people tend to spill their guts around her.”
“Jesus, Teddy, you’re making me sound like an operator.”
“She’s a master of the pregnant pause, for example. People always feel the need to fill a silence, so they end up saying more than they mean to. And there’s this other tactic: at the end of an interview, she usually goes, Is there anything else you think I should know?”
“It’s an honest question,” I said.
“It’s all in the tone — like, Hey, you can trust me. But also, I know there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“So she manipulates people,” Ravi said.
Teddy shrugged. “All film is manipulated to some degree. It’s a way of cutting closer to the truth.”
“Yes, well. Too close and you get a girl cutting her wrists.”
Teddy’s spoon hung in the air for a moment, before lowering to the table. He looked at me, then Ravi. The silence was a vise, tightening with every second.
“I’m done,” Teddy said, tossing his spoon on the plate, and left to wait in the car.
I shook my head at Ravi.
“What?” he demanded.
“I can’t believe you.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“I’m sorry …”
Ravi rose.
“I didn’t tell Samina you told me.”
He waved me off and left to rinse his hand at the sink.
I’d been on a string of endless plane trips and car rides, but no voyage had ever felt as long as the thirty minutes it took to get home. I kept glancing at Teddy in the rearview, thinking that if I could just catch his eye, we’d be all right. But Teddy was turned toward the window, his blind gaze fixed on nothing.
The Poacher
We drove Leela to the hospital in Synthetic Achan’s car. On the way she began to bleed. She braced her arm against the car door, her face flushed and ugly with pain. My mother gripped her hand. Jayan hugged the wheel.
A hemorrhage, the doctor called it. She had bled out nearly a quarter of her womb’s supply. The baby was alive, but there was a high chance that in two weeks’ time she would deliver a thing too small to survive. Even if the baby lived, he would be too soft in the head to know his father from a fence post.
They fed tubes into Leela’s arms and kept her for the night. In the waiting area I watched Jayan run his thumb along the edge of the car key, up and down and up and down, his face betraying no feeling. At some point he went in to see her alone. He emerged even more sunken than before and said she wanted her underthings and toothbrush.
Leaving Leela with my mother, I drove through the murky dawn. Jayan sat very still in the passenger seat. I was dazed with fatigue, but his murmur roused me instantly.
“I should have killed that elephant. I should have killed him when you came and asked me.”
“I was asking you to find someone else—”
“It thinks it can trample my farm and family, end my life as easily as snipping a thread …”
“It’s an animal. I doubt it has a strategy.”
“Then you don’t know a thing about elephants.”
“But what will Leela say?”
He turned a fierce eye on me. “Who will tell her?”
We passed empty houses painted in the color of cake icings, a church helmed by a huge neon lady sprinkling lights from her fingers. This was the Virgin Mother, whose picture Leela kept in her mirror, a white woman with eyes glassy and mournful for her son.
Our silence lasted until I pulled up to the house. As the engine died, we stared at the scene, same as we had left it, and suddenly it seemed that the whole horrible night had been a dream.
“She thinks the baby is dying inside her,” Jayan said.
“She is emotional. Any mother would be.”
“Who would know better than her — you? The doctor?” He hung his head, his voice no more than a rasp. “A mother knows these things.”
Refusing my comfort or counsel, Jayan scrubbed the wet from his eyes with the heels of his hands and squinted hard at our broken palm. The set of his jaw declared his intentions as did the muscle twitching under his eye. He would inflict an equal pain. He would bleed the creature white.
I asked him if he had an extra green half pant.
He looked at me. “Are you sure?”
My heart was speeding. I was sure of nothing. Yet I could not let him walk alone.
For a wage of five thousand rupees Jayan enlisted Alias, a fellow who knew the forest as if he had designed it himself. As a bonus he came with his own homemade gun. He was famous for his rosewood muzzle-loaders, five feet long, a height nearly reaching his own. He was equally famous for having only eight fingers. It was said that he had lost his last two digits while scrambling up the side of a mountain. Having wedged his hand between two rocks, he pulled and pulled, then pulled out his knife.
Was he Tamil? Tribal? Superhuman? In regard to Alias, my brother advised me to know less.
Synthetic Achan furnished his own gun for Jayan, a piece he said was specially crafted in Germany. He introduced me to the German in the privacy of his rice shed, carrying on about her origins, unaware that the rifle and I had already met. I thought of Raghu aiming the barrel at my enemies—Take a bet, pussy man. With sad affection, I traced one of the rabbits that leaped between the iron leaves.
“Are you listening, boy? Hold out your hand.” My uncle dropped a pouch of heavy bullets into my palm. “Use what you need but don’t waste. In the sixties, a bullet cost five rupees; now it’s seventy. What do you think a gun like this cost?” I nearly spat when he told me: thirty-five thousand. “And that was back then.”
All throughout this presentation, my uncle kept fiddling with his nose — scratching, twitching, scrunching — so obvious in his anxiety that, in seesaw effect, I was lifted to a state of calm. “One more thing. Tell your brother to bury the bullet deep. Can’t let the greenbacks find it. If they find it, I am finished.”
I reassured him that all would turn out as planned.
But first I had to get the German past Leela. It was no small task to smuggle the piece from my uncle’s Maruti and into our shed. Two days had passed since Leela returned from the hospital, and surely she would have noticed our doings were she not confined to bed rest. There was a pall about her as she waited for the bleeding to start again, for the baby to vanish inside her like a drop of water. Yet her eyes remained sharp and watchful, her wifely sense undiminished.
One evening my mother had me deliver to Leela a bowl of broken-rice soup. As was my habit, I stole a salty spoonful before giving her the bowl. When I turned to go, she caught me at the threshold: “Get me another spoon. You are sick.”
In fact, my tonsils had been feeling knobby that morning. “How did you know?”
She raised the bowl and blew across the broken rice. “I know when you are hiding something.”
“Hiding?”
“Why else would you be off so quickly?”
“To find you a spoon.”
“Don’t get smart. Look at me, Manu.”
I felt I was standing before a magistrate judge, so stern was her voice.
“What is it?” she said.
“What is what?”
“This thing you are hiding. Is it to do with him?”
“Do I have to say? Mother will hang me.”
“What makes you think I won’t?”
After some song and dance I conjured up a girl I was planning to meet near the snack stall a half mile from home. Leela viewed me through suspicious eyes. “Do you want to marry her?”