He said the poacher had been killed a few hours after the postmortem began. Officer Vasu had been involved. Some kind of confusion with the poacher, guns fired. “Vasu was frightened. He is one year from retirement. So he went to Samina Madame for help—”
“And she came to you.”
“She said to suspend the postmortem. That same night, I came to her office, as she asked. She explained the situation and gave me the bullet.”
“Where’d she find the bullet?”
With difficulty, Ravi said that Vasu had gotten it off the body. The man had been carrying a pouch of bullets but, mysteriously, no gun. “She gave me the bullet. She said it was up to me.”
“To frame a dead man,” I said.
“He was not an innocent. Whatever he was planning to do, Vasu stopped him from it.”
“He was unarmed! He hadn’t done anything!”
“What would you do? Throw old Vasu in the street, let these human rights people make a meal of him?”
“I wouldn’t falsify evidence, sorry to disappoint you. That’s just fucked up. That’s some LAPD shit.”
I’d lost him at LAPD. “You cannot put this in your film.”
“Why not? Everything you just said is already in the news.”
“So why blow it up even further? For your film? So you can parade around and pretend your art is of help to anything but your own career?”
I’d been calm this long, but now rage sprung up in me, hot and quick. “You never had a problem with my art when it made you look good.”
He hovered a moment, uncertain. “Forget about me, then. What about Samina Hakim? We never had a DRO like her before. We work closely with her department. Why go after one of the good guys?”
“Her track record isn’t exactly spotless.”
“Shankar Timber was one case—”
“Sure, until the next timber company comes along or mining company or mill …”
“Oh, spare me the lesson, Emma. No one here is a saint, not even you.”
“I’m not trying to be a saint. I’m trying to be objective.”
“Are you? Then what about the watch on your wrist? You think it appeared out of nowhere? You think that metal didn’t come from a mine like the one you’re talking about?”
“What—” I glanced down at the ten-dollar Casio I’d gotten from Walmart and crossed my arms. “What’s your point?”
“There has been no one better than Samina. I did twenty postmortems in ’97. This year I have done two. You want to go backwards now?”
“Oh, for god’s sake, the whole future of the species doesn’t hang on me.”
“No. Nor me.” With his thumb, he rubbed at a scratch on the steel table. “I know I am bailing water from a sinking boat with only my hands. You can either help me bail or make another hole.” He looked up at me. The scratch was still there. “Which will it be?”
I turned away, but he stepped closer, so close I could feel his breath on my shoulder. I could sense him willing me to yield, not unlike the night he put his hands on my waist. It had happened two weeks ago, but nearly every hour since, I’d hoped it would happen again.
“Please, Emma.”
He took my hand. He rubbed his thumb over the knot at my wrist, and for a few moments, we stood like that, avoiding each other’s eyes.
Once, in an interview, Ravi had told me he’d never marry, or, at least, he’d never find a woman willing to accept what he called his first wife — the Rescue Center. At the time, I’d thought he was joking. But I saw now that he was committed to something larger than the center, to a panoramic sense of peace, even if it meant painting over certain patches.
Maybe I yielded because I saw the logic — ugly but necessary — in that peace. Maybe I thought I was doing my small and noble part, protecting the species. That’s what I’d like to believe, though it seems equally possible that, at twenty-three, I gave in solely because my hand was in his.
I said I was tired, that I’d speak to Teddy, though I sensed Teddy wouldn’t be speaking to me anytime soon. Ravi offered to walk me back to my room, but I shook my head, thinking there would be other nights, that this wouldn’t be our last.
The Poacher
As we walked on through the forest, I could not rid myself of a certainty — the Gravedigger had let me live, but next time it would not. Every step up the hillside was a step in the wrong direction. My terror mounted; my heart jumped at each twitch and swish of leaf. Time to time I whirled about, surprised yet relieved to see the suspicious face of my brother.
“What is it?” he hissed at one point. “What did you see?”
How I wanted to tell him and would have, had we a moment alone. Even then he would have thought me soft and sentimental as a drunk. He would have guessed the Gravedigger, being weak-eyed, had not seen me, that the smeared scat on my arms had kept him from sniffing me out. Or that I had merely faced a dim-witted elephant, not the Gravedigger itself.
But I had looked into the creature’s eyes. Dim it was not.
“Manu,” Jayan whispered. “Tell me.”
Over his shoulder Alias cast a wary eye. I ignored my brother, my fearfulness, recalled the oath I had made to my mother. I kept an eye on the trees around me, the secrets behind their leaves. The birds gibbered invisibly.
Once we reached the uplands, Alias and Jayan climbed trees, hoping to catch sight of the animal. I stood at the foot of Jayan’s tree, scanning the yellow smears of grassland surrounding us, the tiles of farmland down below, the hostile peak up above. Where was the creature? I felt a muscle jumping in my jaw, my mind aswirl.
“Eh! Wee Shivaram!”
I startled, and looked up.
Jayan was frowning down at me. “Binoculars.”
“I cannot.”
“Cannot what? I know I packed them.”
I took off my pack and set it on the ground. “I cannot kill the elephant.”
Jayan glanced at Alias, who was glaring all owlish from his perch, close enough to sense a disturbance, too far to hear details. “No one is asking you to kill it.”
“I cannot face it again.”
Jayan dug deep into my gaze. “What do you mean again?”
Alias thunked out of his tree like an overripe fruit, making his way to us.
“What if it knows,” I whispered quickly, “what if it knows we are coming for it? They say an elephant can sense when it’s being hunted. Maybe it will hide. Maybe it will wait for nightfall, hunt for us.”
How to describe Jayan’s disgusted expression? As though I were a leper, as if the tip of my nose had dropped off.
“What is the shitter saying now?” Alias asked. He struck a casual pose and lit a bidi.
“He wants to leave,” Jayan said.
What I wanted was to take the second chance the tusker had given me. What I wanted was to live, to work, to know the weight of a wife on my lap, to watch my children tumble down mounds of rice if life would so bless me. I had never stood in such intimate company with a wild bull elephant or felt its breath steaming upon my face, had never watched the ground beneath my feet fall away until all that remained was the small patch on which I stood trembling. How could a man survive such a thing unchanged? How could he glimpse that unholy omen, a warning as ancient as the oldest of fables, as obvious as a black-bellied cloud, and ignore it?
“Let him,” Alias said. He lifted his bidi into the air so the smoke could tell him the wind’s direction. “Although you may meet the Gravedigger on the way home.”
“How the hell is he to go home? Should he ask a greenback for directions?”