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Old Man was a magnificent snorer, able to sleep through any storm. Mani-Mathai, meanwhile, sought refuge beneath his own pillow. Even a slender, plipping leak in the roof could keep the boy wide-eyed for hours, so the elephant’s shrieks brought him running. And what he saw and heard stopped him dead in the darkness.
Is that what you want? Is it?
With every question, his uncle speared the elephant’s side.
His mind gone blank, Mani-Mathai let two stabs pass in this manner before he rushed forth and kicked his uncle in the back of the knees. Romeo drunkenly flung his arms and elbows, but an easy blow to the ribs reduced him to a fetal position, hands over his face.
Mani-Mathai stood up and was flooded by the old fear of fathers and whippings.
Romeo rose, stooped, his hand on his side, his voice shrill with disbelief. You broke my rib, you stupid ape!
I’m telling Sabu Sir. In the morning, I’ll tell everything.
Go on! his uncle sneered. He’ll tell you that’s how we do things! We break the animals! You think we charm them with caramels? You think Old Man did it any different?
He wouldn’t.
You would defend him to the death. But who will defend you when the beast comes charging?
The boy looked to the elephant. It was either heaving or nodding, he could not tell which.
Romeo took a deep, pained breath before he spoke. Let me tell you something. You want the elephant’s friendship, but you cannot be both friend and master. An elephant is not like a cow or a horse, you cannot tame it fully. Some part of it will always be wild. That is the part you cannot trust, the part you have to break again and again.
Mani-Mathai stared at the pitchfork lying on the ground. Secretly, he had always wanted his uncle to speak to him thus, as an equal, not a nuisance. But these were not words he wanted to hear, even if they carried a glint of truth; they stung.
This is our job, said Romeo. This is what we do. Now who is in charge — you or him?
The boy picked up the pitchfork, weighed it in his hands. Go, he said.
Go what? Are you even listening to me?
Go! said Mani-Mathai, and took a swing at his uncle. He missed by inches, but it was enough to send Romeo fleeing into the night.
The Filmmaker
The rot reached for miles, penetrating windows, breaching walls. It wormed into the nose and burrowed deep, no match for mouth breathing, as we drove straight to the molten core.
Teddy rode shotgun, camera fixed on Ravi, who slouched in the opposite corner. Bobin sat in the middle, knees all pinned and prim as if contact with my boom mic would be unseemly. I asked an obvious question just to get them talking—“So where are we going?”—from which Bobin abstained by leaning back.
Ravi wore the slack, haggard expression of an inmate. He was in no mood for questioning, let alone a question he’d answered not two minutes before while the camera was unfortunately off. “We are going to the postmortem of a dead elephant in Sitamala. The goal is to ascertain the cause of death and, if it was a poaching, to recover the bullet and file a case with the police.”
“What if you don’t find the bullet?”
“Police will not even look twice at the case. Everyone is depending on me to find it: DFO. ACF. Chief Wildlife Warden.” I waited, letting Ravi’s mind leap ahead to other tangents. “The worst thing is when the bullet is in the head. The inside of the head is all tunnels and cavities, like a honeycomb. It can bounce this way and that, go anywhere …”
“Do you think it’s the same elephant who killed the boy in Sitamala?”
“No. I told you already.” He dragged a hand over his face. “The Gravedigger is a tusker over three meters high at the shoulder. This one is smaller — we can tell from the circumference of the footprint. There is no connection.”
“But the Gravedigger definitely killed the boy in Sitamala.”
“It seems so, but …” He shook his head. “It’s strange for the Gravedigger to come back here, after so many years.”
“The bamboo might have something to do with it. Like you said.”
“Could be that. Could be he knows you want to film him and it’s making him crazy.”
Bobin cracked a rare smile. Teddy held on Ravi’s face for a moment, about to lower the camera until I asked, “Have you ever seen the Gravedigger?”
We were rounding a bend where a hank of long grass, growing almost horizontally from the hillside, reached through Ravi’s open window. Absently, he ran his fingers through the strands. “Long time ago. Back then he was called Sooryamangalam Sreeganeshan. He was the most famous temple elephant. They put his picture on calendars, postcards; there was even talk of putting him in a movie.
“My whole family went to see him at a festival. All these nine elephants they squeezed into a temple that could fit only three. There was so little room, the elephants were leaning against one another, and because Sooryamangalam Sreeganeshan was the tallest, he was in the middle. All through the blessings and the prayers, he was nodding and nodding, at nothing. I asked my mother why he was doing that. She said he was happy, he was hearing a song in his head. Can you imagine? Only a bhranthan would be nodding like that.”
“Bhranthan?”
Lost in thought, Ravi squinted at the window, as if all nine elephants were nodding in the distance.
“Madman,” Bobin clarified.
The dead elephant loomed huge and unreal, like a parade float partly deflated and collapsed on folded, rubbery limbs. Its chin lay on the dirt, its trunk outstretched, the corners of its mouth drawn up in a perverse little smile.
Ravi and Bobin began by zipping up their raincoats. They slipped on rubber aprons, wriggled fingers into gloves. Another assistant, taking extra precaution, clamped on a motorcycle helmet.
They found and photographed the burnt, black spot of the bullet hole on the elephant’s side, behind the left shoulder. But the bullet was far deeper, a baby dragonfly buried somewhere in that bulk of flesh.
Teddy closed in as Ravi wormed a stick into the burn hole, trying to assess the vector of the bullet. Bobin brandished a metal detector, sweeping the air around the wound until it began to bleat frantically. Across that spot, Ravi traced a T.
With an X-Acto knife, Ravi sliced away a square of dermis, thick as a house mat, and peeled it back. Beneath was a shiny layer of fat and muscle, marbled with pink, and in the center, the burn hole like a black star that had bored its way through the flesh, spiraling, widening a contrail as it went. Teddy and I stepped closer. The stench of pus filled my mouth.
They took a saw to the animal’s side, the sound like a zipper going up and down. With pliers, they pinched and sheared the muscle beneath in great, gleaming swaths, blood pooling up. They cut around the huge wet balloons of organs, searched the medusal knots of the small intestine, cauliflowers of calcified fat.
Hours passed, and still no bullet.
By four o’clock, the heat had baked the stench to new heights. Teddy and I stepped away from the carcass, taking a break to switch out tapes, when Ms. Hakim came striding down a narrow berm, a handkerchief held to her mouth, followed by a forest officer with glinting badges and a mustache thin as the swipe of a knife. She surveyed the scene — carcass, Ravi, Bobin, guards — until her colorless gaze came to rest on us. I waved. She ignored me.