“Maybe.”
“Would her parents be happy with you?”
“How should I know?”
“Cut the innocent act. She deserves the truth. Even if she’s too stupid to ask for it.”
Leela looked down at her bowl and stirred the soup with my infected spoon. After a while she said, “Everyone thinks I trapped your brother. But how can a mouse trap a rat? At least he knew what I was.”
“A bricklayer’s daughter.” I glanced at the door, uneasy. My mother could have stood within earshot.
“Bricklayer.” Leela snorted. “My father was no bricklayer. He never lifted a thing aside from his fist.”
After our talk, Leela began to suspect my brother of misdoings no matter the time of day. She turned about and about in bed, occasionally shuffling to the doorway on the pretense of seeking fresh air, searching for our return from the fields.
One morning the window presented my mother with a nauseating sight: a Forest Department jeep grumbling up to the front of our house. My mother found she could not move. What had Jayan done? His old sins rushed through her in a breathtaking wave.
“Who is it?” Leela called from the bed.
The car door opened, and out came a fat black shoe, mannish if not for the mud-spattered sari hem that fell over it.
“Who?”
“Hush,” was all my mother managed to say, for it was the high priestess of the greenbacks aka the lardy little Muslim aka Divisional Range Officer Samina Hakim.
Samina Madame was widely deemed an improvement over her predecessor, a weasel who wore Ray-Bans too fine for his salary and rarely left his roost. Often she was seen stepping into a farmer’s house and taking tea on the veranda and listening to the local complaints with her forehead as neatly pleated as her starched olive sari. Why she had arrived at our home was a mystery. My mother decided to parry any and all attacks with an offer of tea, which Samina Madame accepted.
“Sit, sit,” said my mother, gesturing to my father’s chair.
“Thank you,” said Samina Madame, not sitting, “but I came to see how Leela is doing.”
Samina Madame smiled winningly, her face a pleasant pie. For a heavyset woman there seemed not an ounce of extra to her.
My mother showed Samina Madame into Leela’s room and made a hasty introduction. Leela sat up straight. It was a tremendous blow to receive her enemy while prone and clad in a nightgown.
“Let me get the tea and biscuits,” my mother said and fled.
“Do I look like I need more biscuits?” called Samina Madame jovially.
She dragged a plastic chair next to Leela’s bed and sat. Here, Leela felt, was the harpy responsible for the imprisonment of her husband. The one who had snuffed him out through her sneaks and snitches, had handed him to the Karnataka police like a neat kilo of cake.
“I went to the hospital,” Samina Madame said. “They said you were here. How are you?”
“Fine. Alive. Most people who see the Gravedigger cannot say the same.”
“What luck your husband woke up when he did.”
Though it was I who had awoken first, Leela nodded.
“And,” Samina Madame said, “the baby?”
Leela stared straight through Samina Madame, who leaned back, made aware that she had crossed into forbidden waters.
Both women turned quiet. Samina Madame’s gaze casually traveled the walls. Leela ran a hand over her bedsheet, a new cool cotton scattered with sailboats. She knew the rule: Never buy gifts for an unborn baby. But she had seen these sailboats and disobeyed.
“Is your husband home?” Samina Madame asked.
“In the fields.”
“Will he come back for lunch?”
“You plan to stay till lunch?”
“I don’t have to.” Samina Madame smiled uncomfortably and rocked a little in her seat like a hen ridding itself of an egg.
“He works through lunch.”
“And how has your husband been doing since he came home?”
“You should know that, madame.” Leela uttered madame as if it were the dictionary definition of manure. “He came by your office two weeks after his release. Yours is the office with the gulmohar tree?”
Madame nodded, her brightness turning uncertain. “I don’t remember him coming.”
“He was looking for a job with the Forest Department. No one knows the inner regions like him, so he thought he might be a watcher, help patrol in the forest. Isn’t that one of the jobs you people offer?”
“Yes, as part of a pilot project aimed to harmonize the economic needs of local people with the needs of wildlife—”
“Your peons laughed in his face.”
“Who laughed? Which guard?”
“What difference would it make? All are the same.”
“Oh, I think it obvious I am not.”
“Because you take tea with us and ask about our health? I hear you also take tea with those Shankar Timber people.”
Madame faltered, plainly surprised on several fronts — that this invalid was interrogating her, that the invalid was on a first-name basis with the scandal that had attached itself to Madame’s heel like so much dog shit. “That was beyond my control.”
“I hear you take more than tea from them, madame.”
“The working plan is approved at multiple levels — Delhi, Trivandrum. I was against the felling, but I was overruled. Of course it is easy for you to sit and make accusations. Much harder to come up with solutions.”
“I come up with them all the time.”
“Then tell me.”
“We need electric fences around the farmlands and roads,” Leela said. Madame nodded. “Not the cheap stuff, the kind a baby boar could eat through.” Madame’s nodding was hypnotic. Leela found herself talking against her will. “And another thing: you should give people like my husband some opportunity. He would be of use. People like him — they want to lead a right life, they want to listen to your advices, but advices don’t fill the belly. You have to give them some way to live right.”
“And you are sure he wants to live right?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“No need to get hot.”
But Leela was sick with self-loathing. She had succumbed to this smarmy woman, this sari-clad greenback with tricks up her sweater sleeve.
“It’s fact. Majority of poachers are repeat offenders. They make the same mistakes again and again whether they want to live right or not.”
“He paid his dues.”
“Trust me, he still has his debtors, his enemies. They keep an eye on him.”
“And you keep them in your pocket.”
“I keep them close,” Madame said. “Some of them anyway. They are like chin hairs, these people. Pluck one, and four more pop up in its place.”
“Why have you come, madame? To talk about chin hairs?”
“To see what you know about your husband.” Madame frowned. “Very little, it seems.”
“I know he fell in with some bad people. They took advantage just because he was good at shooting birds and monkeys, an elephant here and there—”
“Fifty-six.”
Leela sat back, blinking. The number stole her breath. “Four,” she insisted weakly. “Five maybe.”
“His associate told the judge fifty-six. And lately your husband has been meeting with a man who has killed even more. Now what do you think they’re discussing?”
“I … I don’t know.”
As my mother’s footsteps approached, Madame laid her business card on the side table, signaling the end of the topic. “Not the weather, I can assure you.”
The Elephant