Free The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James Page B

“What’s her name—Kamini? Yamini?”
    I told him to go screw a stone.
    To be clear: I did not know “screw a stone” would be my final words to Raghu, my cousin-brother and truest friend, who had saved my life not long before he lost his own. It gnaws at me still that I did not go to meet him that night, but the worst thing I did was to witness the hurt in his face and walk away.
    §
    Six months after my brother was released, my cousin was killed.
    In the days after his death, Raghu appeared at temple and in the fields and one time on the back of a lorry. I had been similarly visited by my father for a while. I once chased a public bus, sure I had seen my father inside taking the tickets.
    Work was the only wall I could lean against. Given my mother’s permission, I took to toiling in Synthetic Achan’s fields, as he was short a pair of hands. Not that my uncle wanted mine. He abominated my very presence and would not glance my way, not even when he uttered an order, not even when I said, at the end of the day, “I’ll go and come,” to which he issued not even a grunt. I poured my sweat into his soil and came up with a possible solution for the parakeets that came cackling out of the sky and into the rice. One whole morning I spent staking two poles along the eastern side of his farm and twisting a long length of whiteplastic between them, strung with bottle caps and bells. The plastic flashed and glimmered, jangling in the breeze. My uncle asked if I was scaring the little shits or throwing them a party.
    At night I lay awake thinking of the Gravedigger, a name I had known since childhood along with its other titles. Schoolchildren had set its killing spree to song:
    Here it comes
    the Ottayan, the Undertaker
    Sent its master
    to his Maker
    What had that master done, I wondered, to give his elephant such a fiending for death?
    In the days that followed, the Gravedigger took one more palli and one more soul. The palli belonged to a farm down the way, its walls crashed to kindling. The man inside escaped and lived to feed us a dubious story:
I was lying on my side by the fire lost in a daydream when I felt a sniff at my ear so gentle I half thought it was my wife, though, honestly speaking, she would sooner fart in church than show affections, so I turned and found myself faced with the Gravedigger’s big fat hose! I did not think, I drew back my fist and punched it—
dsh!
—in the nostrils. Naturally it was not expecting such heroics, for it snatched its trunk away, giving me just enough time to jump out and run.
    We could not question the Kuruva woman. She had been hauling firewood on her back, skirting the forest, when the Gravedigger found her. Dozens of women had likely done the same tokeep their cook fires burning, each convinced that
she
would not be the one to cross the murderer’s path. A whole morning passed before a lorry slowed and noticed a little cushion of a foot jutting from beneath piled wood. As in the case of my cousin, the Gravedigger had conducted its own private burial.
    And so, the Forest Department cautioned us with the obvious: to keep to our homes at dusk. It promoted the Gravedigger to rogue status but stopped short of issuing the order for its killing. Not until it would kill more of our own.
    In the meantime I kept to Synthetic Achan’s fields. I woke at 6:00 a.m., several hours before the laborers came fresh off the jeep. This was a tough half-lazy lot of men who demanded a thimble or two of Old Cask for breakfast. When they cut, I cut, and when they heaved bundles on their heads, so did I.
    In the evenings I lingered in my uncle’s fields. From the rear of his house I watched the rose-orange sky and the goats among the balsa blooms and the mountains beyond, hiding the Gravedigger in their deeps.
    Before long the parakeets interrupted my idyll, sailing triumphantly over my slack piece of plastic. Down they swooped in a green flittering cloud and clipped the beaded strands before