Free The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James

he for?”
    “Not to referee, I can tell you that.”
    I kept my eyes on his feet while my fist grew hard in my pocket, four fingers looped in my father’s steel. I remembered the knuckles dull and deadly in my brother’s palm. The lizard asked if I wanted to rethink my opinions, to which I replied by smashing my metal fist into his snout.
    He spun and landed face flat on the dirt, his arms spread in a pose that recalled my father, and for a terrible moment I thought he was dead.
    The cabbage head stared at his colleague, who to my great relief struggled like a newborn to lift his head. In those few seconds of gawking, I had time enough to sling the knuckles into the trees so they wouldn’t be used against me. My fingers rang with pain.
    Take Note: I did not run. Unlike my father, I knew not to rack up my debts.
    The cabbage head sighed and gave me a look of almost fatherly disappointment. Then he popped me in the ear, the chin, and—with breathtaking finality—the belly.
    Laid out on the grass, I braced for the final kick, one that would send me to deepest sleep, when from somewhere above came a voice: “Get off him or I will shoot you to pieces.”
    The world was rocking all around me, but I made out the shape of a boy holding a rifle. A boy whose chicken-bone arms looked much like the arms of Raghu.
    “That gun’s taller than you,” said the cabbage head. “Probably not even loaded.”
    The young gunman leveled his barrel. “Take a bet, pussy man.”
    Oh, it was a first-class performance, so convincing that the cabbage head surrendered and carried his colleague away, tossing limp threats. Soon as they were gone, Raghu hustled me home, his utmost fear being that Synthetic Achan would discover that his gun had gone missing. The barrel was carved with rabbits—this much I remember of the rifle that I would meet later on, under darker circumstances. I also remember the glow of triumph in Raghu’s face as we rode home in an auto.
    “What took you so long,” I mustered through the functioning side of my mouth. “One more punch and they would have pulped me.”
    “Look in the mirror, little boy—you are pulped.”
    “I got one of them good.”
    “Now you’re hallucinating.”
    And on like that we quipped and quarreled, in place of a gratitude I knew not how to give.
    I spent the next days in a fog of pain. In letters I mentioned none of this to Jayan. It was an unspoken rule that our letters should contain nothing but peaceful scenes, a home sweeter than the home he remembered.
    For us he painted prison in similar shades:
    At
6
we get chai in our cells. At
630
we go into compound and you can play chess or carrom or read the paper. I read the paper. There are
3
std phone booths. Nice library. One man here for
15
years he got his LLB and two other degrees in jail. I would school myself in the law if I did not hate all lawyers so much. I could get better advice from the ceiling.
    None of us believed that jail was the luxury law school of Jayan’s description. Still we were most unprepared for our maiden visit.
    In the week prior, my mother and Leela had built a feast that would fill my brother’s belly ten times over, with jars of achar, both lemon and mango, and sambar and avial and rice. Half of it spoiled in the heat while we waited to obtain security clearance. Three hours of standing for thirty minutes of staring througha metal web so thick our hands could not touch his. I finally understood why he had kept us from coming so long. To see him in this state made my mother lose her speech.
    For he was someone else, my brother, eyes bulgy as a drunk’s, collarbones so high you could snap them like pencils. Even his manner of speech had changed, rambling on and on so as to leave no room for response. All he wished to discuss was the barbarity and indecency of the Karnataka justice system. In Karnataka, 30 percent of the inmates were innocent. In Karnataka, if a man killed himself, his wife was arrested as an