The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James

streaked his legs from standing calf-deep in mud. He followed my father’s right-hand man on morning rounds, learning how to sow seeds and replant the shoots stalk by tender stalk, to read the crop by its color and posture, when tofeed nitrogen to sallow plants, when to set out magnesium cakes for the rats who sucked the juice from the base of a broken stalk. Whether by mistake or misfortune or a savage flock of doves, the first two plantings suffered. In the meantime, my brother kept up his side business.
    He learned to read the crop, and I learned to read him. The day before a hunt, he was always glancing at the trees, listening for his omen, the woodpecker. If the woodpecker called from the east, I would glimpse my brother the next morning slipping past the house in his hunting uniform—green half pant and black T-shirt. If, the day after he returned from the forest, a blue Maruti drove up to the shed and my brother stuffed a fertilizer sack in the trunk, the hunt had gone well. If the driver haggled with my brother at length, Jayan would assume a foul mood for the rest of the day.
    As a new policy my mother turned her gaze elsewhere, for she believed Jayan might abandon us forever if pressed too hard. I never shared her doubt, yet Jayan was Jayan, and he had his days. Some nights he drank with his feckless friends, and as the hours went on, he turned his frustrations onto the nearest bystander and came home fat lipped and dented. Easy to forget he was but twenty years old.
    On hunts, I would come to learn, Jayan led a gang of four. Among them he was the gunman, making twice as much as the others who carried supplies. He was careful to keep these associates apart from me out of embarrassment. He said I was fragile as a flower when it came to physical tasks, a theory he based on my love of books. (He rarely read anything longer than a receipt.)
    So I was unpleasantly surprised when Jayan invited Raghu and me on a business trip to Kottayam. Jayan would be meeting with his boss, a man by the name of Communist Chacko, with whom he hoped to deal directly instead of haggling with that driver over every ounce of ivory.
    “Why can’t you ask one of your other colleagues?” I said. “That one fat-necked fellow you’re always running with.”
    “I cannot trust him for a thing like this, and I cannot go alone, I’ll look like a nobody.”
    “But we have school.”
    “We can skip it,” Raghu volunteered. This was Raghu—quick to answer even if no one had asked him a question. He was eager for adventure and adulthood, a moment of glory in his otherwise inglorious life. He was also eager to skip class.
    “Good,” said Jayan, and to me: “We will save you a seat.”
    By “seat,” he meant a sliver of space in a mini-lorry that pummeled my hind parts for most of the five-hour journey. All throughout Raghu asked questions about hunting and guns as if studying for a job interview. Jayan told of the time he went for a five-day hunt and found himself having to eat a dinner of boiled black monkey. “I begged them to cut off the head before cooking it, but they said the brain was the best part.” Jayan shook his head. “All curled up and tail cut. Looked just like a baby boiling in a pot.”
    Not a second too soon we reached Communist Chacko’s house, a stucco hulk with stone dolphins on the gateposts. Raghu thought it all folly and waste (“What is the point? A house can’t feed a man”), but Jayan told him to shut up and say nothing until we were back on the road.
    Communist Chacko had been trained as a lawyer—he always attached “Esq.” to the tail of his signature—but he was the picture of a politician with that smile, as slick and white as his marble floor. Framed photos claimed every wall, his sons Lenin and Stalin featured in most. The boys were poor in school but no matter, said Communist Chacko, Lenin-Stalin would follow him into the family business. Names like theirs they wouldn’t find a job that easy.