Teddy frowned at the idea. He was a purist about sound quality, though he rarely volunteered to take sound himself.
“I don’t know how we’re going to get everything with just one camera,” I said.
“We’re not going to get everything, Em. Once you accept that, it’s really liberating.”
“Are you going Buddha on me?”
Teddy didn’t answer, thus had gone Buddha. Going Buddha was central to his process, rendered him able to cruise into a frenetic situation armed only with a camera and instinct. Neither of us knew what the shoot would entail, but a rescue mission involving elephants was destined for frenzy.
We careened through plantations of coffee and tea, rows of bushes ribboning over the shallow slopes, bedazzled with bright red berries. A silver oak shimmied against the wind, its trunk a smear of marigold fungus. Easier to miss were the ditches carved around the plots, meant to keep wild elephants from snacking on the berries. From time to time, a mother and calf would loot the bushes, and the calf would slip and tumble into a ditch, out of its mother’s reach.
This was where Dr. Ravi Varma and his team would intervene. This was what had obsessed me for a year, what Teddy and I had taken three planes and a train to film.
I was the one who’d brought the idea to Teddy in the first place. Fresh out of college, we’d been looking for a subject for our first documentary feature when I learned about Ravi from an in-flight magazine. The photos of fuzzy elephant calves hooked me for the usual cutesy reasons; the description of the veterinary doctor glowed with dramatic potential.
Dr. Ravi Varma spends his days, and most nights, at the Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center in Kavanar Wildlife Park. His most prized possessions include his camouflage sneakers, his mediocre rum, and his twelve charcoal T-shirts. He prefers charcoal ever since he made the mistake of wearing white to an elephant calf reunion. The mother elephant spotted him easily, bright as a bulb amidst the green, and gave chase.
I learned that Ravi Varma was the head veterinary doctor at the Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, known for his roughrider methods at animal rescue. He had pioneered the “calf reunion,” a technique that few vets dared to attempt on stranded elephant calves.
“There is a common fallacy here that elephants will reject any baby touched by human hands,” Varma said. “What we have learned is the reunion must be instant — speed is the key.”
We tracked down Dr. Varma, and after a slew of calls, he reassured us that there would be no shortage of rescues and calamities to film. I sent off a handful of grant applications and won two. Teddy’s father, a hand surgeon, bought him a camera and sound kit that outpriced my car. In the fall of 2000, we flew to South India with equipment bags slung over our shoulders, all of which airport security examined slowly and grimly.
For the past few months, Teddy and I had been living at the Rescue Center, a period of Pax Romana in which zero calamities had taken place, resulting in footage that had all the depth and nuance of a promo video. Once or twice — and much to my dread — Teddy had suggested that we include a Morgan Freeman — esque voice-over, a tall order, as Morgan Freemans do not grow on trees. “You have a nice voice, you could do it,” said Teddy, but I’d tried voice-over once before and was mortified when the playback revealed the voice of a breathy mouse performing spoken word. No way in hell would I try that here. I wasn’t expecting perfection from the film, but I wanted to stand behind every frame, every choice. Other people my age had reels and résumés; all I wanted was a single work that could speak for me, even if that work was a little uneventful.
We were set to leave for the States in two weeks when, in a last-minute break, Ravi called us from his mobile, already on his way to the calf rescue. Here at last was the disaster Teddy had been waiting for, back when a fallen calf was the biggest disaster we could imagine.
By the time we arrived, Ravi’s team had been working for three fruitless hours. We edged through the men who had gathered to watch. Teddy raised his camera, but all I could see was a dozen lushly haired crowns, not a bald spot among them, a phenomenon Ravi proudly attributed to coconut oil.
Teddy moved through the crowd with a detached yet pleasant expression, as if accustomed to being two feet taller than everyone around him. I was just as conspicuous with my coppery bun, my yellow Windbreaker, my boom — a long-handled mic with a furry wind guard angled at the end. Whenever we filmed, I expected everyone to turn and surround us like magnet filings to steel, but at present all eyes were fastened on the cow elephant in the distance.
She was hovering over the edge of the ditch. I couldn’t see the calf, wedged somewhere inside. The elephant flapped her ears at us, as distressed by her fallen calf as by the shore of our tiny, leery eyes.
I questioned a man whose button-down shirt, a psychedelic weave of pink and orange, suggested a knowledge of English. Puffing up before the lens, the man said a baby elephant was in the ditch, and the Forest Department had already spent a battery of blanks to scare away the mother and rescue the calf. The mother was unbudgeable, kept crying out and tossing clods of dirt into the ditch, as if to build a ramp. “She is very upset, see. And if these Forest Department people get too close, she will abandon the calf. Once the human touches the baby …” He shook his head, clasped his hands behind his back. “Mother will leave it behind, no question.”
“So then what happens to the calf?”
“It will be captured, trained, and on like that.”
We watched the elephant rummage her trunk through the ditch. I’d been looking at elephants so long I forgot sometimes what a magical organ the trunk was, like an arm exploding out from the middle of the face, packed with enough muscle to knock down a tree, enough control in its tiny, tapering finger to grip a lima bean. But even that miraculous limb couldn’t save the baby. The mother stood there, withering before our eyes. Huge and forlorn, pugnacious and bewildered.
I managed to say thanks before Teddy hustled me toward the crowd near Ravi’s van. He was sitting in the back, hefting onto his lap a caboodle of vials and jars, needles of nightmarish length. Teddy scooched into the van and swung the camera onto the oglers at the bumper, while I extended my mic, adjusted the dials on the DAT at my hip.
“Aha,” Ravi said, without looking up. “The media.”
Months of almost daily filming had put Ravi at ease with the camera, attuned to the sort of information we needed, the sound bites that would pop on-screen. He lectured, unprompted, while plugging a syringe into a small jar of clear fluid. “This is xylazine-ketamine, for the tranquilizer gun. Tranq is only the backup option. First we try the rubber bullet.”
“Why not start with the tranq?” I asked. Teddy homed in on his hands: deftly twisting, injecting.
“She could fall, break a leg. And what if she is still asleep when we get the calf out? We can’t babysit the thing; she won’t take him back.”
The crowds parted for Ravi, their reverential eyes on the tranq gun. He summoned a huddle of forest officers and Bobin, his assistant. (At first, the name “Bobin” had sounded to me like a clerical error, but as Ravi’s wiry sidekick, Robin to his Batman, Bobin sort of made sense.)
With Ravi in the lead, the team waded into the aisles between the bush rows, guns raised. The crowd had turned quiet. Teddy had flipped out the camera’s LED screen, glancing up and down between screen and ditch.
The elephant swung her body around, squaring herself with us, and at once her fear and fury plunged through me, something buried in the bones, whetted on years of running from men with guns. She growled low, whipping her ears; the men closed in. Only Bobin moved unarmed, some rope contraption coiled around his shoulder, a badge of sweat on his lower back.