The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James Page B

kept us from straying on moonless nights. The outhouse door lay ajar. Empty.
    “Manu,” he said, staring at the banana tree cracked in half,its crown in the dirt. Our fishtail palm shorn of two huge fans. I knelt over a rounded depression of earth, my eyes leaping to the next and the next where they all at once disappeared as if the elephant had taken flight.
    Hoarsely, my brother shouted her name. Soon my mother came running around the house wielding a flashlight. We searched and we searched. The sky was dark and wild, trees writhing in the wind. A calm took me over. I called her name as if she were nearby, not gored or mashed or tangled in the branches of a tree. I looked, but all I could see was Raghu’s palli in splinters before me.
    At last my mother shouted us over to the trench that surrounded the rice shed. She was kneeling at the edge.
    There lay Leela on her back, her nightie twisted up around her soiled knees. The flashlight glared upon her face, but she lay still and pretty as a battered doll in the trench we had dug deep as a grave.
    Imagine her on that moonless night. She has just done her needful when she hears the splintering of timber. Dread steps softly up her spine. She stands up slow on trembling knees and, for a moment, nothing moves. She wills herself to unhook the rusty latch and exit the outhouse.
    There it is waiting, like a suitor come calling.
    The Gravedigger nods, its trunk upcurled, and lets out a breath. Raindrops slither around her bare neck, but she feels nothing. Is it panting? Is it a vision? She feels far away, a phantom among the living.
    Her heart thuds in her throat, a reminder of what she is: flesh and marrow, spit and vigor. Mother-to-be.
    How she runs.
    Blood pounds in her ears louder than the Gravedigger’s feet, but its stride is long and impossible. They are two animals locked in the ancient dance of hunter and hunted, and a small part of her considers one possible end—her end—just as the earth consumes her.

The Elephant
    The flames of tiny lamplights trembled down the road to the temple. The Gravedigger could smell the hot oil, the chili-rubbed corn, the ice cream and peanuts, the plastic of inflatable toys, the petals of flowers, marigolds and rose water, all these shifting, rippling scents, and beneath them all, a heavy silt: the smell of people.
    The Gravedigger was new to the festival season, new to parading and blessing and standing in wait. Seven months before, at the Sanctuary, he had been visited by a man who fed him a handful of caramels. Nosing through the man’s pockets, the Gravedigger found more. Old Man spoke sharply, but the Candy Man laughed and spread his arms, his knuckles stroking the underside of the Gravedigger’s trunk. His eyes were small and set deep, like seeds.
    So one day the Gravedigger was picking the Candy Man’s pockets; the next day he was trapped in an open truck bed and bumping down the road to a new home. Sudden changes disagreed with the Gravedigger. He still trembled when remembering the day he was trucked out of the forest and into the Sanctuary, when life narrowed to a pitch-black cavern, and every which way was a wall. Then, as now, he perceived little of his situation. One comfort sustained him—that Old Man had come along.
    The Gravedigger did not understand that he had been purchased by the Candy Man, who was locally known as Elephant Sabu. In addition to the Gravedigger, Elephant Sabu owned seven elephants, six of which he rented out for logging. The gentle Parthasarathi used to join them at the camp, where he had obtained a brief fame for saving a life. The story went that he had stood for five whole minutes over a ditch, holding a log in his trunk, refusing to fit the log in the ditch. Only when the forest workers looked in the ditch did they find there a sleeping dog, curled up and snug as a snail.
    Now Parthasarathi was getting old, his vision foggy and his legs gone frail, a pink swelling at his temple like the knot on