The Poacher
Twenty minutes into the forest, I was lost. Each trick my brother had taught me of tracking seemed to bend and blur in my head. What seemed elephant scat one moment seemed bison droppings the next. Did the circular track belong to females and the ovals to males or the other way around? I found a heavy stone — weak defense against an elephant — and upon storing it inside the pocket of my half pant, found something there already.
The bullets.
My stomach fell. I could not go back now and return the pouch to Jayan. Likely he had enough on his person. He had said to me once, A good hunter needs only one.
Still. It would give him cause to harangue me upon his return. Of all my possible futures, this was the brightest: Jayan swaggering through the doorway, bloodshot eyes full of triumph and ridicule. And so we would return to our bickering selves.
The longer I wandered, the likelier it seemed I would spend the night in the forest. I fought my own panic. I focused on my surroundings: a parakeet streaking through the air, a red spill of orchid on the side of a sal tree. At its base grew a froth of white mushrooms. I knelt to pluck a handful, a sorry offering for the women waiting at home.
It was then I heard him. A rustling behind me, so brief I would have assigned it to a monkey had I not heard the same rustle earlier that day, as sharp a threat as the squeal of a knife.
I did not risk a breath. Instinct flowed hot and fast as current from my brain to every edge of my self.
I slid my hand into my pocket, closed my fingers around a stone the size of my heart. Shivering leaves. Sunlight. Life moves at such speed, and yet that moment held the whole world still.
I spun about, arm cocked.
What came next is not so clear, for even the brightest mind is terribly slow.
I did not hear the greenback yelling.
I did not feel his bullet pierce my brain, easy as thread through a needle. Only after the bullet burst the back of my head did the tissues, strained to their limit, tear.
With that pure rush of freedom, I left myself.
And then I was running running through the green daze of the forest leaping over grassland in flying strides stopping only to look upon my brother who at the crack of the bullet had dropped out of the tree and screamed my name. Alias held him back—be sensible, he said — claiming the greenbacks would never wander so far up the mountain. For a long time my brother squinted into the tree line and my love for him filled the whole of my being.
Yet I could not stay. On I ran and suddenly I knew the way to the stream. I followed it out of the forest and through the farms, over our rice fields where my feet left no tracks and into the house and through the curtain of the room where Leela stood at the window, searching for us.
To meet her eye again. To thread her a needle, to help her fold a sheet. To turn back the days and unmake my mistakes.
I laid my hands on her belly as I should have the night before, with reverence.
I am sorry. I felt the child stir to my touch as did she. This one, I will never leave. I will watch him always.
Her hands searched the surface of her belly. The baby nudged her palm.
And now, dear girl, I ask your forgiveness as well. For we speak of boy children before the baby is born as if to bend fate to our favor. Everyone prays for a boy child, but what we needed was you.
I would be there when you were born into a house of mourning; I would be there to watch my brother hold you for the first time, towel wrapped and tight as a loaf in his arms; I would watch everyone carry you around on their hips. You would spend so much time in the air, your mother would fear you might never learn to toddle. But toddle you would, and I would be there to see it. Night and day I would watch you, unable to shield you from the arrows of grief, as when your mother would grow soundless at the thought of me or when your grandmother would stop her own heart as one would still the hands of a clock because she deemed it her time, she being a woman of great authority.
All these things had yet to pass. For now, Leela kept her hands in place, her palm still glowing from that tiny sign. She would name you Manusri — Manu for short — a name that no one could bear speak aloud in your early days, so they called you by other, sweeter names.
§
Now does your mind ever drift back to me? Or am I only the skinny fellow in the portrait that hangs in the sitting room? That photo does my visage no justice — I appear flat-faced and doomed, when in truth I was annoyed to be late for school. What to say. There is no telling what tales and traces will survive us.
Time to time you pause in passing, your gaze yearning up the wall to my face. Maybe you picture me following your father through the fields or milking the cow or sitting in the palli. There are only these glimpses like a fire that sparks but will not catch.
Someday you may come across the news articles that my brother clipped and collected in his mission to clear my name. What a great hoopla he made. In the reports, I was called Victim. Suspect. Poacher. My death became a cry of protest, something to put on a sign, severed from the whole of my life.
Still I have no hatred for the elephant. Time or man will hunt it down, though few have seen the creature of late. It wandered into one village where the women hurried onto a roof and welcomed it with pots of scalding water. A deaf girl saw the Gravedigger bashing a jackfruit against a tree. She and the elephant met eyes before it dipped its trunk into the flesh, indifferent to her presence.
Among the last to meet the Gravedigger was my brother, but most people think his story too fanciful for truth. This was the Ottayan after all, the beast whose name once appeared in a Western film, who had passed through the rhymes and nightmares of a village entire. Surely Jayan Shivaram had been bewitched by a dream, easy to believe when spending a night in the wild.
All day long, Jayan and Alias searched the forest for the Gravedigger. Jayan struggled under the weight of my pack and his gun, but these burdens were nothing next to the dread in his gut.
As the light began to die, Alias could no longer see the Gravedigger’s tracks. My brother refused to quit or go home. I suppose he knew what awaited him there.
So the two spent the night in the forest. They tended a small fire and slept some paces from its dwindling warmth. An old trick: if the greenbacks were to glimpse the fire, they would shoot at the flames, giving Jayan and Alias the chance to escape.
Unable to sleep, Jayan thought about the gunshot. He thought of the fear and pleading in my face when last we parted.
In time, he fell into a restless sleep.
In the middle of the night, he felt the brush of something coarse across his cheek. He blinked to find a pile of branches and leaves drawn across his body. He caught a hint of the swampy breath. He knew.
Before him rose the Gravedigger, sudden and silent, enormous. It was pulling a palm frond over Jayan’s chest just as it had done for the still-sleeping Alias, whom the tusker had mistaken for dead.
At last the Gravedigger stopped and hovered over my brother, its tusks dimly aglow. Jayan barely breathed. He could read nothing in the Gravedigger’s eyes, aside from the moonlit glint. What did its silence mean? Was it stayed by the smeared scent of dung on Jayan’s arms or the sourness of skin and sweat not unlike the scent of my own?
See him there: my brother, buried and breathless at the base of a tree with only a thought in his head. So Manu was right.
And with this thought comes another, a realization that chokes him slow. The rest of his life is coming for him with all its grief and bitterness. He closes his eyes and wills the elephant’s foot to take him first.