Only when he entered the lake did his mind go still. Underwater, a hush entered his body. His limbs cycled freely, almost as though he had never worn the chain around his ankle, as if he had never known that weight.
The Filmmaker
On Friday, the villagers stormed the Forest Department. They came by the hundreds, they came with their kin, blocking the highway, shaking their fists and shouting at a pitch that pummeled the speakers of our twelve-inch television.
Teddy and I were nesting in a mangy love seat with our tiffins of rice and dal. For the last half hour, Bobin had been filling out monthly reports, sickle-bent over Ravi’s desk. When the news story began, his gaze darted up. He hadn’t blinked since. The anchorwoman spoke in a breathless stream from which I caught one word—Sitamala. Bobin squinted, leaned forward, shushing me every time I asked for a translation. His pen hung in the air as if he were frozen whole, aside from his thumb, which kept clicking the tip.
“A poacher was shot by forest officers,” Bobin explained, still squinting. “The same poacher who killed the elephant from the postmortem. There was some kind of scuffle …” Bobin paused to listen, his whole face scrunching up. “The officers say they shot him in self-defense.”
“So why are the villagers protesting?” I asked.
“The villagers say that poacher was not responsible for the Sitamala elephant. They say he was unarmed when he died.” Bobin snorted, shook his head. “Even though he was carrying the same type of bullet we found on the Sitamala elephant.”
“So what’s their theory?” Teddy asked.
“They say we are conspiring with the Forest Department. They say we planted the bullet on the man’s body. What kind of nonsense …”
Planted: the word sent a jolt through my gut. I turned back to the TV, where the anchorwoman sped through the rest of her report. Several times, she mentioned a “Mr. Shivaram” beneath a shot of a sweaty, disheveled man leading the others, the cords in his throat pulled taut.
“Who is that?” I asked.
Bobin glanced at the screen. “Must be the dead man’s brother.”
The Poacher
Wednesday, well ahead of sunrise, we commenced our journey as a party of three, sidling through an opening in the tree line. We wore green half pants and black undershirts so as to camouflage our bodies and elephant shit on our arms so as to camouflage our smells. Jayan and Alias moved nimbly but I was burdened by a pack crammed with too many items: a tarpaulin, four clean shirts (to blend into the public posthunt), cartridges, bullets, binoculars, torches, matches, bidis, gram, rice, sambar masala, meat masala, black pepper, chili pepper, and salt.
I had accused Jayan of overpacking: Why so many masalas? Should we bring cinnamon and saffron too?
“Have you ever had plain wild meat?” he shot back. “Goes down like wood pulp.”
Already I was dreading our meals and was reminded of that dread each time a monkey shrieked. These were the milky hours of morning when the howlers and prowlers were scuttling in the trees, cicadas hissing like a lit fuse. All my life I had known such sounds, yet now they rang eerie and foreign in my ears.
How strange then to see my brother so sure of himself. He moved with the silky certainty of a panther stalking prey, the way his feet never faltered, the way he plucked his shirt off a snagging branch so as not to leave evidence of his presence. His face was sharp and intent, hardened by heartache. To his mind there was only one way the hunt would end.
Alias led the way, carrying his trusted rosewood and a pack much lighter than my own. His eyes swooped in on every dropping and pug mark. He knew the paths of the patrollers and the crackle of their walkie-talkies, the location of the antipoaching camps. He caught every breakage of branch, whose pure green heart meant the snap was fresh and recent. The fellow did not know dental hygiene but truly he knew his business.
We skulked through rattling thickets and phantoms of mist, a slice of raw pink at the sky’s beginning. Tall towers of tiger bamboo leaned over us, some brown and dying and scribbled over by vines. The damp earth muffled our steps. Had it been a dry day, any crackling leaf could have betrayed us.
At times we heard a shudder among the bushes, and we froze, barrels leveled at the noise before moving on. It was morning and the herds were on their way down the mountain and into the valleys to drink and bathe at the lake. By afternoon they would trail back up the slopes to the golden open scrublands, a higher altitude where only a scatter of bush and evergreen still grew. There we would stalk the Gravedigger.
Several hours passed, and my back begged relief of its burden. The silence suited me even less as it set my mind wandering toward my performance from the prior night. Sometimes the memory crept up — sticking my nose in her neck like some lecherous mutt — and made me spasm with self-hatred.
So I was grateful for the distraction of a morning snack. We shared a tube of biscuits and a flask of water, which sent me in search of a private spot, my business being of a substantial nature. My brother called after me unkindly, “Don’t get lost.”
I wove around a few trees, plucking a handful of leaves for hygienic purposes. In my desire for privacy, I ventured a bit far.
I found a discreet little clearing and lingered over it a moment. I had never voided myself upon forest floor, and for the tenth time that day I asked of myself, How in hell did Jayan do these things?
I dropped my half pant and squatted. Instantly my bowels went on strike, demanding better conditions. I imagined my brother aflame with impatience, tromping through the forest in search of me. I doubled my efforts. At last, in sore defeat, I yanked up my half pant, preparing myself for Jayan’s ridicule, though what came first, what froze me tip to toe, was the throaty rumble rising behind me.
I turned by degrees.
The Gravedigger stood a few yards away, its body obscured by bamboo, its tusks reaching white through the vines, its head looming and vast as a cliff.
Sweat stung my eyes yet I would not blink. I stared at one of the tusks, the tip that had long ago gored a man’s galloping heart.
Running seemed pointless and beyond my power. My legs were limp, my hands empty, aside from a fistful of sanitary leaves. I prayed to the tusker as had every numbstruck luckless clod to face a rogue thusly unarmed. Finish me quick.
Aside from an ear twitch, the tusker did not move. Its legs were granite columns, supporting such a spectacular bulk. It regarded me with its honey-hued eyes as if to take my measure, my potential for harm. As I stood there, I felt an odd calm settle over me. Fathoms deep, those eyes, small inside the cliff sides, close to the color of my own. Remote and ancient. Eyes that had seen the wild and not-wild, eyes that knew things.
The whole forest seemed to hold its breath. All at once the Gravedigger came to a conclusion that caused it to turn and saunter off, thrashing aside a tree as if it were of no more consequence than a weed. Thus the Gravedigger departed, quiet as it came, a cool gray moon. It had let me live.
I ran.
Branches slashed at my arms, vines whipped me in the face. Surely I was making a show of myself, gasping and huffing through the trees. When Alias reached out of the green and snatched my shoulder, I nearly yelped. He and my brother looked most incensed, Alias going so far as to bare his black gums. “What were you doing out there — giving birth?”
Jayan said he had gone looking for me. “Where were you?” he demanded.
I took a long trembling breath and imagined the tusker standing in judgment, weighing my fragile self, and something inside me shifted. Jayan’s gaze roved over me like a torch. For reasons I could not discern at the moment, I skirted the truth and mumbled instead: “Constipated. I am constipated.”