The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James

lifting away. My sole defense was to hoot and bang a spoon against a tin pan, but the pretty thieves had already fled for the trees, where they would pick at the rice just as crows pick at a dead man’s eyes.
    The parakeets were unusually quiet when Synthetic Achan came up beside me. “Your little ribbon didn’t work.”
    “There’s not enough wind.”
    “I don’t care about the birds,” he said. “I have a bigger problem.”
    I snuck a glance across his face and wondered when the hair at his temples had gone gray.
    “Guess who came to pay respects,” he said. “Forest Department.”
    “When?”
    “Some days ago. They said they would give me ten thousand rupees for damages, so long as I filled out some form. ‘An Application for Compensation,’ they called it. The pigs. I said,
What should I do with it? Buy another son?
But then I had an idea.” He turned to me. “I could give it to you and Jayan.”
    “You don’t owe us anything.”
    “I know that. It’s you who owes me.”
    How smooth and cold the claim. How heavy the hand on my shoulder.
    “You want us to kill the Gravedigger?”
    “Louder, boy, the greenbacks didn’t hear you.”
    I shook my head. “Jayan will say no. He will not go to jail again.”
    “Just listen. Your brother made the mistake of working with some no-name ruffian. This time we are all on Jayan’s side, all us farmers. No one would fault him or name him to the police.” I had trouble picturing this second family of farmers—where had they been for the past four years? “All our people want some safety for our fields, our harvest, our children …”
    Am I not your child?
I wanted to ask. But the mere mention of children had stolen his voice. He turned away and repeatedlyrubbed his nose with his finger as if to give his face something to do.
    “If they accuse your brother or you or anyone else, I will confess to it. I will stand trial; I will take it all on my head, I swear it. No difference between living out here and living in a cage.” He paused and added softly, “Not to me.”
    He had never looked so old, and yet in his ruined face I saw an echo of my cousin.
    “He listens to you, Manu.”
    I stood in silence, yet what choice did I have? I look back at the young man I was and see a boy, powerless before the only person he had yearned all his life to call Father.
    I tried to approach my brother, but it was impossible to find him alone what with his wife around every corner. Leela put no trust in Jayan and kept one ear always tilted in his direction lest he should slip into his old ways. A pretty warden she made, but a warden all the same.
    At last I found him in the courtyard. He was raking a fat pile of harvest, forking and fluffing the stalks, sweating as he went. In two more days the stalks would dry and he would steer the cattle-drawn plow around the pile, threshing the rice to loosen the hulls.
    All I desired was a pause to precede our discussion, but Jayan kept talking as if to avoid it. That day his chosen subject was the tractor-tiller. “Kunjappen said the tractor-tiller can do in thirty minutes what the plow takes hours to do.”
    “We used his contraption last year. More bugs in that rice than lice on a stray.”
    “What is that to do with the tractor-tiller?”
    Back and forth we bickered on the merits and follies of the tractor-tiller until I blurted, “I talked to Synthetic Achan.”
    “Talking now, is he?”
    I relayed Synthetic Achan’s request. Jayan listened in silence, doing more stabbing than fluffing.
    “How much is he offering?” Jayan said finally.
    “Ten thousand at the least.”
    “And he wants me to do it.”
    “Not you,” I said quickly. “We thought you would know someone else for the job.”
    “Someone eager to go to jail? There’s a rare species.”
    “No one would go to jail. Uncle swore it.”
    “Who made him chief minister?”
    “He watched over us while you were gone.”
    “And for that I give him my thanks. But