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

you like a cool-eyed cat. Being a hunter, Jayan knew things—how to tell between the slots of a sambar and the pug of a tiger, between cow pie and buffalo turd and elephant scat. He had a botanist’s knowledge of wild plants, though he had not studied botany or anything else since age fourteen. To him, the forest was the only school worth attending.
    Jayan might have made a so-so student had my father shown any interest in discipline. What to say. I suppose my father was too busy making his own mistakes.
    By day my father was a farmer; by night, an accomplished drunk, well known to finish a whole bottle of rum and still find his way to another. The drunken part of him we could have managed, shouldering him home on night after stuporous night, thinning the yogurt concoction that would have him back and bloodshot on his feet next morning. Yet he also suffered an unholy weakness for betting on cards, dogs, local elections, anywhere he might turn a note into two. You would not think him weak by his broad back and his woolly beard and his godlike gaze turned inward as if trying to make sense of the world. But it was a weakness of will that made him empty his pockets each night and sell off two of our acres to finance his madness. Weakness that made him swipe my mother’s wedding gold, a necklace so long she had looped it thrice around her throat.
    “Maybe he needs the money for an investment,” I said.
    “Maybe someone wants him dead,” said Jayan.
    “You don’t know anything.”
    “I know he is no saint.” From his pocket Jayan pulled a strange piece of metal shaped as four connected loops. He slipped the loops through his fingers and faked a punch at my nose, grinning at my flinch. “This I found in his cabinet.” Jayan gazed at his fingers as if admiring a fine piece of jewelry. “I could give you a brand-new face with it.”
    I tried but could not reconcile this steel-fisted father with the one I knew. This is the power of the drink: it can split a man into two different people, each a stranger to the other. The father Iknew had never even lifted a hand to beat us, as if to do so were beneath him. His voice was warning enough: rich and deep and hollow. After he died I tried to remake his sound by murmuring into a rolled-up newspaper, until my mother finally grabbed the tube and smacked me senseless.
    You see, I was his favorite. One morning he took me to the field and taught me how to guess that season’s yield: eye a square meter, count the plants, then take the average beads of rice per plant. It was only a guess, he said, for to farm was to surrender control, to suspect but never know. We used maths and omens and traced our fortunes among the stars but—he shrugged—“Some signs are misleading. And none are any use to you.”
    “Why not?”
    “You will grow into something greater than a farmer, my boy. Sure as calves become cows.”
    There was such magic to his words, the way he pressed a finger like a wand to my chest.
    Jayan, meanwhile, had his own aspirations. He helped on the farm from time to time but mostly retreated to some shady corner of town with his friends, strays and idlers we never met.
    Raghu had spied my brother with a rough bunch at a shappe, trading Tamil over toddy and fish. I said nothing of this to my mother, who would have thrown a great thumping fit on account of the fish eating.
    As for me I much preferred spending my school-free hours with Raghu on his father’s farm. Raghu’s father was day to my father’s night, two years older and temptation-proof. We called him Synthetic Achan (though not within earshot) due to his constant refrain: “Cola? What do you want to drink cola for? Colais
crawling
with synthetics.” The same went for boxed juices, white sugar, candies, chocolate, and most every other good and delicious thing.
    And yet I loved Synthetic Achan, for he was the same man every hour of every day, begun with a glass of warm milk and finished off with a thimble of