The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James Read Free Book Online

around my waist.
    “Are you okay?” Teddy said. “What hospital? Why didn’t you call?”
    “I’m totally fine,” I croaked.
    “Was it the dal? Or no—those grease balls!”
    Just then, Ravi’s cell phone burst into song: the theme from James Bond. He made a lowing noise and rolled out of bed. I flapped a hand at him, pointed at my phone, mouthed
Teddy.
    “Is someone there?” Teddy asked.
    Bleary, Ravi trudged to the bathroom and closed the door, answering the call with his usual, “Hah, tell me.”
    “Uh no, I’m watching a movie.” I grasped at vaguely familiar names:
Goldeneye, Goldfinger …
    Thankfully, Teddy didn’t care for specifics. He said he’d be back by evening, or possibly earlier if he could catch the bus. After we hung up, I wiggled down into the warmth of my covers, listening to the murmur of Ravi’s voice. I’d never seen him stay on the phone this long.
    At last Ravi emerged and shut the door, slowly, behind him.
    “Teddy’s coming back,” I said with a twinge of disappointment. I brushed a black comma-shaped curl from my pillow. “You’re off the hook.”
    Ravi leaned against the door. “An elephant killed someone,” he said. “In Sitamala. Near to my mother’s place.”
    “What? That’s terrible.”
    He nodded, absorbed in thought. There was the distant, drifting silence again, the indecipherable knit of his brow.
    “Did you know the person?”
    He was speechless so long I thought he hadn’t heard me. “I know the elephant,” he said finally. “Everyone does.”

The Poacher
    By morning, the palli was strewn about as if exploded. Roof smashed, legs snapped. At the calm center of this chaos: a pile of thatch laid with care across the body of my cousin.
    Raghu’s mouth was a hollow of astonishment. From the chest up and hip down he looked unharmed. The middle of him looked like something the elephant had tried to erase.
    There were five or six greenbacks on the scene, doing nothing of note. One of them knelt by the elephant’s footprint. I expected him to come up with some advanced tracking device, but he pulled a length of string from his pocket and gently laid it round the border of the footprint as if to take the murderer’s shoe size.
    Those who came to watch pushed in with all manner of theories.
    “This is the Gravedigger’s work. Who here would forget it? Buries its victims just like this.”
    “But it hasn’t come round in ten years!”
    “It feasts on human flesh.”
    “Are you stupid? Elephants eat greens.”
    “I hear it eats jackfruit by the bushel, so much you can smell it coming. Death never smelled so sweet.”
    Raghu’s mother was removed from the premises for fear she would scream herself insane asking the same question over and again: What kind of father would send a child of seventeen,
seventeen,
to sit in the palli alone?
    “Not alone,” he said quietly. His sunken eyes found mine.
    My mouth felt dry, my tongue a lump of clay. I saw he blamed me for deserting his only son and the pain of it went through and through me.
    Later we cast my cousin’s ashes in the Stream of Sins behind the temple. The mountains sat gaunt and blue on the opposite side, watching, as they had done for all time, us grievers and bathers and sinners.
    I had thought the ashes would sink with grace. Yet Raghu sat in a stubborn clump on the surface as if to say,
You guilty wretch, you will not be rid of me so easy.
    A wailing went up from the women, though my aunt did not cry; her grief had turned hard and silent. I watched from the banks where Raghu and I had once set sail a boat of string and sticks while our mothers prayed in the temple. There went my friend, my boyhood entire.
    I loved my brother equally, but we were not equals, as he was elder to me by five years. Little creature, my mother used to call him, for the pelt of hair he had worn from birth. And there was something creaturely too about the man he became, all sinew and scruff, the way he looked through