§
Two days it took for the Gravedigger to recover from musth, ten minutes to load him into the open truck bed, thundering toward another destination. As evening fell, the smell of his fellow elephants flowed over him from a hundred yards away. He was almost home.
Relieved, he thought of the days to come, the order restored. How he would sleep to the sounds of Parthasarathi’s snoring. How he and Parthasarathi would lie beneath the sun as Old Man hosed their sides and legs and bellies, how the pappans would rasp at his skin with a coconut hull, how he would fall into a bottomless nap.
As the lorry rumbled up to his stall, the Gravedigger caught a strange smell leaking from Parthasarathi’s stall, where Parthasarathi was not. The pappans leaped out of the cab, stretched. The Gravedigger reached his trunk in the direction of Parthasarathi’s stall and recoiled from the foreign odor. A stranger’s reek.
The Gravedigger went still beneath a mud slide of realizations. They had taken Parthasarathi away. They had put some other elephant in his place. Parthasarathi was no more.
Down came his trunk upon the lorry’s cab. He struck with all his eight tons, deaf to the shouts of the pappans and the rumbles of the other elephants, his screams filling his lungs like water until he had no breath left.
§
They locked the Gravedigger in the lorry for hours, without food. When he was hollowed of energy, they maneuvered him into his stall, Elephant Sabu watching, Old Man leading the way and making gentle sounds.
At some point, impatient, Romeo yanked the chain.
The Gravedigger swatted him to the ground. For the elephant, the gesture was little more than a tap; for Romeo, a blow that dropped him like a sandbag. All the pappans stood dumb with dread. The Gravedigger felt a dim flare of distress until Old Man began his lowing again, as if no harm had been done, no punishment looming.
Elephant Sabu mouthed something at Romeo, baring his teeth in threat.
Romeo slunk away, wretched and low to the ground.
§
Unable to sleep, Old Man rose from his cot and went to check on the Gravedigger.
The elephant stood in still silhouette within the four sides of his stall. Old Man kept his distance, unable to say whether the Gravedigger was dozing. Like a nursery rhyme came his father’s advice: An elephant asleep on its feet is an elephant ill at ease.
He could have smacked Romeo for rattling the Gravedigger so, but what was the point in railing against the toothless buffoon? Elephant Sabu was to blame for the Gravedigger’s state. It was Elephant Sabu who had assigned them so many events, stringing one against the next as smoothly as blooms on a garland. He was intent on making back what he’d paid for the Gravedigger, and what he had lost on his beloved Parthasarathi.
Old Parthasarathi had been riding in the back of a lorry, whose usual driver was home with the flu. In his stead, the driver sent his reckless, rum-soaked sons. The boys sped over a pothole that caused the elephant to slam its head into the cab. After some time, a taxi pulled even with the lorry, the driver yelling out the window, “Pull over, pull over! Something is wrong with the elephant! It is stumbling about!”
Soon as they braked, Parthasarathi fell to his knees, fell asleep.
Putting another elephant in Parthasarathi’s stall had been Elephant Sabu’s idea, a possible antidote to the Gravedigger’s loneliness. Elephant Sabu, too, was saddened by the loss of his favorite elephant, whose photo appeared each time he flipped open his mobile. He canceled Parthasarathi’s remaining engagements, returned all deposits. He brought suit against the rum brothers and braced himself for the investigations of animal cruelty brought by the Forest Department.
In purchasing the Gravedigger, Elephant Sabu had anticipated a gilded future, but now each loss seemed a stone in his pocket. His wife urged him to assign the Gravedigger more work. What’s the point, she said, of keeping such a handsome fellow at home?
So Elephant Sabu hired out the handsome fellow to temples and churches and wedding processions, even to political rallies, both Congress and Marxist, wherever the organizers would pay a fee. Some of these hucksters shirked on the amount of panna and water they were meant to provide, and there were times when even the pappans went without proper meals. Mani-Mathai made no complaint though his belly gurgled in protest. Romeo regularly threatened to quit.
Anytime Old Man tried to reason with Elephant Sabu, he got a long speech about the costs of being in the Elephant Business — the water, the medicines, the veterinarian’s bill alone! Thirty bottles of glucose for Parthasarathi’s intestinal obstruction plus four bottles of Hermin infusion … not even trying to make a profit … simply trying to survive …
Meanwhile, the elephant had taken to nodding more than usual, to the tune of some dark, swirling rhythm.
Some of the other pappans took precautions, sneaking opium into their elephants’ feed to dull the animals during musth. Old Man would not go so far, not yet, though the Gravedigger’s silence reminded him of those early, delicate days in the anakoodu, when the calf flickered between this life and the next. Back then, the calf had latched onto Old Man, and over time, they became two halves of a single conversation. Now the elephant seemed locked inside a separate room.
The memory of Appachen’s advice descended on him from time to time, to seek another job, any job. But Old Man had refused; this was the tradition to which he’d been born, a known road that had been cleared for him by previous generations. He had meant to maintain the way, even if no one else did.
Fool’s talk, his father had said. No one wants to be a pappan anymore, not even the pappans. A toilet wiper makes more than us. And a toilet can’t kill you.
§
The sky above him wild with stars, and still the Gravedigger could not sleep. He felt a smoldering under his skin, an ache in his tusks, until the breeze brought him the scent of Old Man. That invisible presence, however brief, was a steady palm to the Gravedigger’s side.
In time, Old Man’s smell receded, his footsteps rasping away.
Moments later, another smell spilled through the darkness. The Gravedigger caught the chemical smog, the liquored stink that filled the mouth like bad fruit.
Romeo emerged from the shadows. He entered the Gravedigger’s stall and went about some mysterious business. The Gravedigger felt himself being clamped forefoot to hind foot. Something was wrong — the Gravedigger was chained this way only during musth, and in the presence of Old Man. Where was Old Man?
Finished with the chains, Romeo stood before the Gravedigger. His dark shape swayed. The Gravedigger could not see Romeo clearly, nor the pitchfork in the pappan’s grip, yet he sensed the world tightening around him, a pressure building inside his head.
The pappan stabbed the Gravedigger’s leg. Pain blazed up his flank, hot and stunning.
The same pain shocked him where the skin was most tender, behind the ear and under his tail, then his side, and his belly. There was no room between one pain and the next, no time to let the hurt breathe, only pain and pain again while the pappan barked nonsense, the aroma of liquor and sourness pouring off his skin. The Gravedigger shrank from the pappan, growing smaller and smaller until he was but a calf again, trying to hide from the hands that were yanking him from his mother’s side. Forever on it went, that blur of barking and stabbing until, at last, the Gravedigger smelled hope blooming up from the darkness.