“Nice. I get top billing.”
He gave me a quick wincing look. “You’re taking this seriously, right?”
I was startled by his sincerity and offended and guilty, all of which added up to an exasperated, “Yes.”
“Sorry. I just had to say it.”
Technically I hadn’t lied, merely tiptoed around the truth, given him the literal outline rather than the messy essentials. And yet. That doomful sort of feeling. The sudden, itchy need to seek refuge elsewhere, anywhere. I told Teddy I wanted to shoot some B-roll, and before he could mount any serious objection, I whisked the camera away.
On my way to the calves, I stopped by a keeper bent over a steel tub and filmed him hand-sifting rice and mung beans. The brown and the white filled the frame in granulated waves, sliding and mixing, mesmerizing.
I looked up to meet the skeptical gaze of the keeper, whose duck mullet deserved equal skepticism.
“Ana kutty,” the keeper said, nodding over his shoulder, in the direction of the elephant calves. He mimed feeding himself from the pail, as in Feeding time, or Don’t you have anything better to chronicle for posterity?
I knew the way to the calves, which turns to take, a sharp left at the bale of new-cut grass, wire fences trailing ahead on either side. But once I reached the calves, I lost the will to film. Instead I rested the camera on a fence post and watched them, for the first time, without any equipment attached to my ears or eyes.
Two keepers held spouted jugs of milk. The younger ones went first, trunks lofted, mouths around the spouts. Milk dribbled onto the wiry hairs of their chins, giving them goatee beads. The bigger calves gurgled mutinous cries, draped their trunks on the drinkers’ backs, begging for a turn. The keepers pushed their trunks away while the lucky ones sucked and sloshed.
We’d filmed the feeding before, but I felt the shots could’ve been tighter, framing out the keepers, focusing on eyes and tongues and trunks, heightening the sounds of snuffle and whimper, as if to enter their circle instead of observing it. I envisioned a film that included patient, lyrical sequences like these, the absence of human voices opening a channel for a more intimate, visual language.
As the calves fed, my phone vibrated against my hip. r varma. Just the sight of his green-glowing name erased the bitterness of yesterday’s spat. All I felt was a dangerous elation.
I turned my back on the glaring keepers, jogging away from the calves before answering: “Hey, where are you?”
“Driving,” Ravi said, a smoky rasp to his voice.
I waited for more, presuming he was calling to make amends. Maybe the fine art of reconciliation was not his forte. “I should’ve checked with you before mentioning the timber case. I’m sorry.”
He grunted.
I entered the empty main office, set the camera on his desk, collapsed into his chair. I would not be the one to speak next. I swiveled and studied the back shelves, which seemed a pencil’s weight from buckling, loaded with dusty ledgers, binders, logbooks, old keyboards choked in cords. “About Shelly.” No reply. I soldiered on through the silence. “Please don’t bring that up again. It’s been awkward all day between Teddy and me, and maybe he knows about me and you, or at least has an inkling …”
If the conversation were a seesaw, I was stranded at the high end, legs dangling, ridiculous.
“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s talk tonight.”
“I will be home in the morning only.”
“Why, what’s going on over there?”
“Nothing. The training.” His voice trailed off; I could hear him breathing. Ravi wasn’t one for meditative pauses, at least not over the phone.
“I received a call,” he said finally. “There was a tusker found dead on a farm, in Sitamala.”
“The same elephant who killed the kid?”
“No idea. I will do the postmortem in the morning. You can come, if you want.”
“Was the elephant killed, or did it die naturally?”
“Killed.”
The elephant took shape in my mind’s eye, heaped and riddled with holes. I didn’t know what to say.
“Tomorrow will be messy,” Ravi said. “Wear your ugly shoes.”
He hung up before I could ask which of my shoes he considered ugly. I scanned the wall behind the desk, where a goatish creature stared dolefully from the collage of newspaper clippings. The headlines held me captive: “Wild Buffalo Rehabilitates in Dibru Saikhowa.” “Displaced Rhino Calf Reunited with Mother.” “Man Spears, Man Saves.” “First Elephant Calves Released.”
Beneath the last headline, this highlighted paragraph:
Four adolescent elephant calves were released to the wildlife park yesterday, wearing radio collars and ear tags. Used to track the vulnerable calves, the radio collars will fall away after several weeks. “The tags will stay for years,” says Ravi Varma, head veterinary doctor at the WRRC, “so we can collect long-term data as the calves age and mate and eventually produce calves of their own.”
The quote sounded like the sorts of answers Ravi used to give me in the beginning, sanded clean of all personality. I tried to stray from the bases he usually hit during interviews, avoiding a prewritten checklist of questions, but sometimes a question would strike me later, the one I’d neglected to ask. Such a one occurred to me now, what I should’ve asked him over the phone, what would likely gnaw him all night — was the dead elephant wearing a tag? Was it one of his own?
The Poacher
On Tuesday, the day before we embarked on our hunt for the Gravedigger, an elephant was found dying on Old Raman’s farm. It had likely stumbled out of the forest and folded at the edge of the field, felled by its numerous wounds. The shooter had shown little mercy or skill, for the beast died slow, bombarded to the end by so many squinting human eyes.
The greenbacks would suspect Old Raman as accessory in the elephant’s death, lumping him with those farmers who had baited bothersome elephants in the past. One had even lodged a firecracker in a jackfruit, thus making a crater of his enemy’s mouth. But Raman was cut of a softer cloth. He brought water in a plastic bucket, and when the elephant was too weak to lift its trunk, he crept forward and every so often scooped water over the foamy slab of its tongue.
When first I heard of the dying beast, I hoped it was the Gravedigger. Jayan wanted the opposite; the hunt was all he ever thought about, even when he took me out with his friends. He spent the evening sitting over his glass with shoulders rounded, nostrils aflare, eyes so dark and intent I could see him rehearsing the kill in his head.
Yet his friends made up for his sullenness. We drank and smoked, and they dubbed me Wee Shivaram after I choked on a peg of fuel-flavored booze. I decided to accept the name even if it was lightly demeaning. To be demeaned by those fellows was to be taken under wing, and the more I laughed along, the more it seemed these boys could in time be my boys, Jayan among them. On the way home I fell, twisting my ankle, and had to limp against my brother. We flung our way forward while Jayan howled rubbish at the dark: Here he comes — the Undertaker, we’ll make of him a vulture’s dinner!
But the vultures were already dining by morning. The greenbacks burned sandalwood and ramacham to cover the dead elephant’s rot; still it stewed and spread in the heat.
Leela went on foot to see the elephant. She had not spoken one word to us since dawn, when we returned with liquor on our breath and guilt in our faces. My brother went to work in the fields, and I would have liked to do the same, but my ankle was paining me, so I was forced to stay home and suffer the lively abuses of my mother, all lazy this and rascal that.