By afternoon, I found Leela rinsing her feet at the pump. She drank a palmful and wiped the glisten from her chin. Her gaze came to rest on the laundry line where the wind was billowing into Jayan’s blue mundu, the one she had been holding as he was carried off by the Karnataka police. I waited for her to speak of what she had seen, but she was preoccupied with the mundu, staring so hard her gaze could have burned a hole through it.
Then she sighed, as if giving up. “Manu, help me with that thing.”
I limped to the laundry line and took up one edge of the mundu while she stepped back, holding the other. The fabric was damp and pliant, not yet stiffened by sun.
We tugged opposite corners as she had taught me years ago when I was her household deputy. “There were three men,” she said finally. “Drunks. Dancing on the body.”
“Of the Gravedigger?”
“As if you don’t know. Right corner.”
I nearly dropped my end. “You think we—” She thinned her lips. “But we weren’t in the forest last night, not anywhere near it! Ask anyone, Sabu, Shaji …”
“A clever couple. You could’ve been tumbling in the belly of a whale for all they’d remember.”
“Believe me—”
She tugged so hard, the fabric jerked from my grip. “Just give it here.” She took up the mundu and brushed off the small stones, then folded it by half and half again. “What kind of place is this, where men dance on the back of a god?”
I withheld the answer, knowing she was in no mood to hear it.
A place where the gods dance on ours.
Later that day, Leela told my mother she was going to church, an alibi my mother accepted with sympathy due to her own history as a young and unhappy wife.
Leela took her time pinning the pleats of her polycotton sari just so. Usually she kept her plastic mirror canted at the ceiling, reluctant to be reminded of her sun-speckled face. Dabbing kajal under her eyes, she felt something shift in her belly. She had felt no such motions since the Gravedigger’s attack. Now her hand went to her middle, searching and hoping until a belch escaped her — gas and nothing more.
She had not expected to get pregnant so quickly. During her years as Podimattom Leela, she had done abortion three times, and that was after a slew of home remedies — long peppers, papayas, mutton-marrow soup, running her belly into the back of a chair. No woman’s womb could survive such abuses unharmed, which was what she told Jayan after he proposed marriage. He laughed and said his soldiers could survive any terrain.
Back then, she was what they called “a family girl”; she only made hotel visits as arranged through her agent, an aunt in Kottayam. Jayan was the first she had brought to her home, the first to compliment the cushion covers she had sewn, the first to meet her gaze when she spoke. How strange to think she had yielded her heart simply because he had looked her in the eye, yet this smallest of gestures made her feel important and even a bit powerful. Where was that power now? She was shackled between land and sky, always looking down at the soil or up for rain.
And then she saw the dying elephant, which was not the Gravedigger, which was smaller than the tusker she had faced. Touched its grainy skin and inhaled the rot. Stood mere feet from the flaccid trunk, the enormous arm of a god outstretched. Not her god but a god all the same.
Fifty-six gods. As far as they knew.
Leela told herself she had made the appointment with Madame in order to seek out a job for Jayan — that was all. In her mind she dressed him in the greens of the greenbacks, pictured him proudly patrolling the forests and taking people on tours, the sort of job where cameras were the only things capable of shooting.
Leela stood face-to-face with an old fossil of a greenback. He looked up from his desk and fixed her with one wide hawkish eye, the other a milky slit.
She drew an important breath. “I have an appointment.”
The fossil showed her to Madame’s doorway and retreated to his post. Madame had a phone clamped against one ear; in the other she was digging a bobby pin, routing out the wax with a militant look. Noting Leela, she tossed the bobby pin aside and gestured to the seat opposite.
Maps of the region sprawled across the wall behind Madame, bristling with red and yellow and green pushpins. Leela twisted the corner of her handkerchief around her finger till the tip went cold.
“Hah, sir, thank you, sir.” Tired, impatient, Madame dropped the phone into its cradle. “An elephant was slaughtered in Sitamala. I’m sure you smelled the carcass before I did. Shot in the chest, shoulder, leg, they made a bloody sieve of that creature — eh eh! Hallo?”
Leela had closed her eyes through a sticky wave of nausea. She nodded as Madame hollered for water and tea.
“Isn’t this your second trimester? The nausea should have passed by now.”
“It comes and goes,” Leela managed. Secretly she was glad for the sickness. It served as reminder that the baby was alive.
The fossil provided them with two paper cups of hot water, a tea bag in each like a dead fish, bleeding brown. Madame took up the tea bag and dipped it thrice. “So. Your husband.”
Her husband, her husband, that ever-present subject. Couldn’t they start with any other topic — childhood, children, her nausea even? Leela had spent so many days alone with her worries, praying that her baby would survive untouched, dreaming of giving birth to a stone. Some chitchat would have offered fleeting relief.
But Madame was not interested in relief. “Your husband has an associate by the name of Alias. Have you heard that name?”
“Never.”
“Slippery fellow. Remarkable aim. He once shot an elephant here”—Madame pointed to the space between her own eyebrows—“and the force was so great the animal fell back on its haunches. Usually the animal falls forward, but this one died sitting up.”
As she spoke, Madame opened a drawer and removed the few photographs that lay on top. “Somehow Alias and his associates climbed up and did their work, and when they were done, they left this memento.”
Leela lowered her face to the photograph Madame had laid on the desk. It took a moment for the shapes to resolve, for her heart to gather speed.
Slowly she made out the twin gray hills that crowned the head, the flaccid ears on either side, but where there should have been a face was a cavity yawning wide, a maw of cut cords and rutted surfaces, a mulch of crimson and bone. Madame traced two pale ridges that met in a V shape. “Those are the bottom jaws. The back teeth were worn down. He must have been eighty years old. And another time, we found an elephant with only the tusks cut out. That fellow was still breathing when we found him.”
Leela pushed the picture away. “My husband is a farmer, not a butcher. Not anymore. He fell in with bad types. He made some mistakes, he has paid.” There was a bad weight growing dense in her chest. “Why are you showing me this? You just happened to have it in your top drawer, this picture?”
“Open your eyes.” Madame’s face was pleasant, her voice of steel. “Your husband was involved in an ivory route that went from here to Dubai, the details of which I am still trying to learn. He killed fifty-six elephants single-handedly—”
“Who gave you that number? The two-faced idiot who turned him in?”
“—but you see, his last kill is the one that fascinates me. He was perched in a tree when he shot an adolescent male of roughly eight years. A bullet to the back of the head, a clean kill, but not clean enough. Because the mother is there. The mother goes to her dead son. The mother touches her trunk to his. They do that, the mothers, to check for breath. But there is no breath. Your husband waits for her to leave, but she won’t. She simply stands there very still from day to night to dawn. All the while your husband waits in the tree. And when it’s clear she will never leave, Jayan shoots her too, cuts out his five-kilo tusks, both their tails, and leaves. But here is what I will always wonder — why did she stay? Surely she knew your husband was in the tree. She gave him ample target of herself for one full day. So what was going through her mind?”