When they reached the banks, the girl calf trotted into the lake and stopped a few feet shy of Old Man, who took a wide stance on the rocks. Murmuring gently, he tossed water on her back. Occasionally he scooped a handful into his own mouth and gazed out over the breeze-pleated currents. The girl calf glittered in the sun, her hair bejeweled with droplets, her eyes drowsy with pleasure.
The Gravedigger was miserable. They kneed him into the water and tugged on his ear. Again and again they doused him with water, and again he was at the lake with his clan, and there was the tusker tossing water and there was his mother spraying him in the mouth. He burrowed his face into the girl calf’s side, but there was no escaping what all he remembered.
§
Twice a day, the adult elephants nodded past the anakoodu on their way to the lake, clanking chains. The pappans rode on their backs or walked alongside.
The first time the Gravedigger had glimpsed all the giants together, he thrust his trunk through the bamboo bars and keened. Cows and cousins of varying browns and grays. He thought he scented his mother among them.
He cried out as they passed, but not a one turned her head, as if they were less than strangers, not even the same kind. Yellow-green urine stained their hind legs. An alarming absence in their eyes.
Every night, the Gravedigger escaped. He closed his eyes and saw himself swimming steadily across the river, led by the scent-seeking periscope of his trunk. He saw himself break the surface and climb onto the opposite bank where his mother was waiting. There he was, his trunk wrapped in hers. Whatever hurt or sorrow befell him was not really happening to him. He was on the other bank with his mother. He was not here.
§
So began the Gravedigger’s second life, a tale that would remain incomplete without a proper portrait of Old Man. In the end, the newspaper stories would ignore almost entirely the late T. S. Mahadevan; some would neglect to mention his name. Yet he would live for another decade in rumors and rhymes, summoned like a spirit that would never know rest.
At the Sanctuary, most of Old Man’s days were the same. As overseer, he sat on a bench outside the shack he shared with three others and watched the calves. Two at a time, the calves passed through his anakoodu, where he coaxed and bullied them from the brink of despair. His was an arsenal of soft words and soft blows, plus the odd nugget of sugar. Soon as he roused a calf from near dead, it was yanked from his anakoodu, another pair of needy eyes in its place.
In his lap lay the logbook. His tiny script crawled over every corner, defying the faint blue lines. He turned the crackling pages and scanned the names of his former orphans. Each flickered brief as a firefly in his memory: Asha, Arjuna, Balram, Balachandran, Ramachandran, Kamini, Ashwini, Saraswati, Omprakash, Ramprakash, Babu Prakash. So many names and nowhere among them his own.
His father had been pappan to only one elephant, Kannan, for the whole of his life. What Kannan taught Appachen he passed to his son on slow, humid nights such as these. If an elephant tosses dirt on his back, he is comfortable. If an elephant stands utterly still, he is troubled. An elephant will only lie down to sleep if he trusts the company he keeps.
T. S. Mahadevan was sixteen years old when he and his father first walked Kannan through the gates of the Sanctuary, after the elephant had been cast off by the temple that had housed him for twenty years. To Appachen, the Sanctuary was hardly an improvement, with its camera-crazy tourists and elephant-shaped trash cans and so-called pappans. Few had learned the trade from their fathers. Most hopped from one job to the next as easily as hopping a bus. All they saw in a grown elephant was its awful strength, enough to split a man in half were he too slow to strike the first blow.
Appachen had long stopped using the pronged ankush on Kannan. They spoke their own private language: a mere word and Kannan would knee him onto his back. One afternoon, they were walking along a highway when Appachen was dizzied by heat and fainted. He later awoke to the living hull of Kannan’s chest, contracting and expanding. Kannan had been standing over him to guard against passing cars, a view Appachen would remember forever, as he lay enchanted by the rhythm of that huge, flexing heart.
Stories like these led the pappans to believe that Appachen had something divine about him, some extraordinary talent derived by dark art. Some said he had once stumbled across the fabled elephant graveyard, the field of tusks and skulls no man had seen, and there obtained the gift of elephant insight. Some said he had been an elephant in some long-ago life. Young Mahadevan knew his father to be a vivid storyteller and the likely source of these theories.
But there was no contesting the depth of Appachen’s knowledge, which he put to good use in the anakoodu. In those days, half the babies lived briefly, casualties assigned to grief.
It was Appachen’s concoction of baby formula, thickened with ragi and jaggery, that roused most of the calves from near dead, though nothing could be done for the babies that had already begun to recede, limply eating and drinking while the light leaked from their eyes.
The newest calf had come to the Sanctuary with that same draining gaze. The Forest Department had found it on a mountainside, starving beside the dead bulk of its mother. Only her tail had been cut, to be sold as a talisman.
For two weeks, day and night, Old Man watched the calf. It ate little. It was always grasping for Old Man’s arm. If Old Man were to step away and trade talk with the field director, the calf would climb up the bamboo slats and cry until Old Man clucked softly, What is it, child?
These days, the calf made not a sound, as if its previous plaintive self were buried somewhere inside this silent creature. How could one so small have the stillness of an older elephant? And why did it cower from the smell of pineapple?
Appachen could not be consulted, having died ten years before, a few months after Kannan. Cardiac arrest, the doctor had called it, but Old Man knew the truth. Appachen had spent most of his life as Kannan’s pappan, so many years it was no longer clear who was leading whom.
The Filmmaker
Ravi handled the reporters like a pro. Hands in pockets, he fended off praise with an enigmatic smile, ducking further questions. The bystanders practically cheered as he cut to the van, where he ceded shotgun to Bobin in an act of magnanimity.
Here the pleasantries ended.
“What were you thinking?” Ravi said, turning on Teddy. “You make your shot and get out. You don’t wait around and get the elephant’s autograph.”
Teddy offered a blithe apology, still riding high from the shoot. “It was worth it, though, you’ll see.”
“And if she had crushed you, still it would be worth it?”
“You know she wasn’t going to crush me. She wouldn’t leave her calf a second time.”
“I know elephants. It’s you people I don’t know, and yet you are my responsibility. So next time I say run, you run.”
Teddy looked to me for backup. I took some satisfaction in saying, “Ravi’s right,” to which Teddy gave a petulant snort—you always take his side.
I was used to playing referee. Teddy and Ravi were prone to bickering, ever since their first and only interview session. The conversation quickly had turned combative, so much so it had pained me to type the transcript: