The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James Page A

The names had been Dolly’s idea. His wife’s people were total Marxists. Communist Chacko didn’t mind. “You know the best part of being a Marxist? You don’t have to go to church.” For one who never went to church, the man liked to preach.
    Communist Chacko led us out the back door, bypassing a shed that hummed with machinery. At the foot of a steep metal staircase, he kicked up his mundu and squinted at the summit. “Come. The birds are waiting.”
    What the hell kind of code was he speaking? Were “the birds” his associates awaiting us in that tarp-lined chamber on the roof? I was the last to clang up the wobbly rungs and emerge into a small space that contained Communist Chacko, Jayan, Raghu, and seven wire cages of fowl.
    There were two to each cage, husband and wife, most of them feathered in red, yellow, and green. Communist Chacko puckered his lips at a nearby parrot, who clung to the wire with dainty taloned feet. He raised a fingertip to its beak; the parrot bit gently and released. “She’s a sweet one,” said Communist Chacko. “The others will snip your switch off.”
    “What are they for?” Raghu whispered to me.
    “Breeding and selling,” said Communist Chacko. “You should see the cockatoos mate, it’s quite charming.”
    I would have sooner watched a dog make turds, but in the spirit of pleasing our host, I peered into a cage of small parakeets. Four whites and two grays flicked their necks this way and that.
    “I had a macaw,” Communist Chacko said wistfully. “He flew off. Can you imagine—watching one whole lakh dissolve into blue sky?”
    “Maybe not a whole lakh,” said my brother. “But I know what it is to lose hard-earned money.”
    Communist Chacko grinned at one of the switch-snippers. “You had a falling-out with Babu.”
    “He takes too great a cut and for what? For his car? We have a mini-lorry.”
    “Yes, I saw. Not the most inconspicuous vehicle.” The fat man gazed into another cage, where a diseased-looking parakeet perched alone, ragged and balding in patches, eyes like milky bulging marbles. It held itself perfectly still, wings folded tight around a tortured heart.
    “He is inconsistent,” my brother went on. “Haggling like a fishmonger, wasting my time. And who is he to judge the grade? The man has cataracts for god’s sake.”
    Communist Chacko sighed as if all this backbiting were undignified. His breath ruffled the blind bird’s breast.
    “Will it die?” I asked, forgetting my brother’s no-talk policy. He gave me a look that said he would bury me in my books.
    “Fairly soon I would think,” said Communist Chacko. “Do you like animals?”
    “None I would like to see mating.”
    Communist Chacko laughed. “I am not a sentimental person, you know. If you told me tomorrow their feathers were precious in China, I would be out here plucking the lovelies myself.”Communist Chacko stepped back from the cages and resumed his preacher voice: “And God said unto Man, Be fruitful and multiply and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Raghu nodded along like a born-again.
    “OK, do this,” said Communist Chacko. “Deliver the tusks directly to me. I will give you two thousand more per kilo. But this is on a one-month trial basis only. Any little problem and we go back to the old way.”
    After taking specific directions on protocol—where to drop off and when and to whom—we left the preacher to his fowl and emerged into the swollen heat. I trotted down the last few steps, somehow uplifted by my brother’s success and my hand in it. And perhaps I would have forgotten all about the shed had it not shrieked at me as I passed. My brother and cousin walked ahead, unhearing. The door was ajar.
    How well I recall the world in that narrow room. Two long tables covered in a forest of white figurines. A troop of tiny elephants. Bangles smooth and stacked. And in