TEDDY: We’ve been discussing human-elephant conflict, but I’m wondering about the bigger picture. What about, for example, the industrial projects — the mines, the plantations — aren’t these mostly responsible for displacing elephant populations?
RAVI VARMA: Of course.
TEDDY: And many of these projects are permitted by the Forest Department, with whom you work closely.
RAVI VARMA: Yes.
TEDDY: That seems like a contradiction.
RAVI VARMA: Life abounds with contradiction.
TEDDY: It doesn’t bother you?
RAVI VARMA: Many things bother me. Like sayips who come to India and ask questions to which they have already decided an answer. That is not an interview. That is a cross-examination.
In this instance, Ravi extended a partial olive branch: “The material was good, then?”
“Are you kidding?” Teddy leaned in. I got a noseful of coconut oil; was Teddy worried about hair loss? “I was so close, I could hear her breathing.”
As the play-by-play went on, I closed my eyes, no match for the hunger headache drilling my forehead from within. My mouth was a sand trap, my tongue coated in the orange slime of my last Tic Tac.
Ravi and Teddy, meanwhile, had forgotten their beef and were now discussing the reporters and cameras and bystanders, the public side of Ravi’s work. “More than my words,” he said, “they are looking to see how I speak, how I hold myself. People do not have such a high opinion of vet doctors. They think we treat cows and buffalos only. My own brothers used to call me cow doctor—” Glancing at me, he stopped and said with typical Varmese bluntness, “I think you are bored.”
“No, just a little weak. I haven’t eaten yet.”
“Then we will stop and take some snacks.”
Over Teddy’s protests, we pulled up to a precariously slanted stall. Ravi got out and returned in moments with a paper bag blotchy with grease.
“These unni appams are famous,” he said, pointing the open bag at me. A sweet scent wafted up from the unni appams, heaped like a clutch of warm eggs. Ravi popped one whole in his mouth.
Teddy demurred, retracting into his vest like a turtle. An elephant he could handle, but Teddy lived in fear of food poisoning, always asking for bottled water over boiled, squirting his palms with an antibacterial gel that reeked of first-world caution.
“Not a good idea,” Teddy advised me. “Your IBS?”
“IBS?” Ravi frowned, through chews.
Before Teddy could elaborate on my bowels, I reached into the paper bag.
“I’m not trying to be pushy,” Teddy said.
“I know. It just comes naturally.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Ravi’s smirk.
So did Teddy. “Have it your way,” he said and got out of the car, taking the camera with him. Bobin strode in another direction, without explanation, which meant he was off to take a semipublic leak.
The unni appam was a spongy parcel of warmth, grease, and banana-flavored sweetness, the color of maple syrup. Ravi looked especially pleased when I reached into the bag for another and matched his grease-lacquered grin.
I waited for Ravi to slip me some weirdly intimate aside. It happened from time to time, when Teddy was out of earshot. You look like the girl from Dr. Zhivago … I like that funny tooth you have … Do you have freckles all over? Once he asked me: “Why do you always wear that windbag?”
“My Windbreaker?” I said. “It has lots of pockets.”
“It hides everything.”
“That’s kind of the point.” I could feel myself blush. “I’d rather not draw attention to myself out here.”
“Too late for that.”
At the time, the banter seemed harmless, maybe even necessary to our dynamic. I conducted all our interviews, drew stories from him that he rarely shared. “You have a way of talking,” he told me once, “that makes me forget the camera is there.” I thought I could preserve the intimacy he felt around me, keep him loose and trusting, but just when I’d fool myself into thinking I had the upper hand, he’d turn on me with that cutting cobra gaze, and my resolve would go woozy. I’d have to remind myself that we had three weeks left at the Rescue Center; there was no time for crushes, no room for any emotion other than pinpoint focus on the task at hand.
A focus that was hard to maintain when he was leaning against the van, scrutinizing me. I expected him to volley a comment about “American girls” or my funny tooth.
“You and him,” Ravi said, glancing at Teddy. “You are the same age?”
“Yeah, why?”
“He treats you like a child. And you let him.”
I flinched. “Childlike” was not how I would’ve described myself. At twenty, I’d driven from Albuquerque to Asheville with only my dad’s German shepherd by my side. I resisted lengthy melodramatic relationships. My longest had lasted four months; I squashed it after Gus said that a woman driving alone, cross-country, was basically asking for it. The memory made me bristle all over again.
“What is he doing?” Ravi asked.
“Filming,” I said sharply. In the distance, Teddy was aiming his camera at a sign that said LIFE HAS NO SPARE. “He’s just protective. You don’t know him.”
“I know you. I know you have your own mind.” Ravi balled up the paper bag as Bobin approached. “Does he?”
Ravi opened the passenger door, allowing me to climb inside. The whole way home, I kept stealing glances in the rearview. I’d spent dozens of hours interviewing him, uprooting his past, editing his answers, studying every blink and pause and grimace. And yet there remained a version of Ravi I hadn’t seen until now, the guy who had all along been studying me.
Teddy and I had never been romantic, aside from one recent and regrettable fling. Ours was a loyalty born of classes and collaboration and NoDoz and nerves, and his brush with expulsion.
We had met in Intro to Film. On our first assignment, we were sent out into the wilds of Boston with only a tripod, a light meter, and a hand-crank Bolex camera. Each of us was to shoot a light journal, to capture light and shadow on black-and-white sixteen-millimeter film. It was exhilarating — the feel of the Bolex rumbling between my hands, its spring-wound arm tracing circles in the air.
I came to class burning with anticipation, sure that I’d netted a string of beautiful shots from the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Plaza. But as we screened our dailies, it was Teddy who stole the show with his time-lapsed shots of shadows fading, darkening, interlacing, pouring like ink across stone, a calligraphic symphony of lines until the film fluttered to white, leaving the whole class enchanted. All this he’d filmed in the courtyard of his dorm.
As the years went by, Teddy and I fell into step, collaborating on every film down to his junior project, for which I served as DP. It began with an exterior shoot on a day so snowy and cold the Aaton camera had to be hugged in blankets every few takes, to keep it from stuttering to a stop. A week later, we screened the dailies to find a thick river of white coursing down the left side of the film. A whole day ruined. I’d been the one to seal and unseal the camera mag, to off-load the film into its can, a process that required nimble hands inside a lightproof bag. Apparently mine hadn’t been nimble enough. I was mortified, excuseless, solely responsible.
“So,” Teddy had said, rewinding the film, “reshoot on Thursday?”
I couldn’t believe he would trust me to shoot again. I’d expected him to demote me to gaffer’s assistant, angling a bounce board by the actors’ faces.
Teddy shrugged it off. “So you shit the bed. Nothing to freak out about.”