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Authors: Tania James
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trial.
But Communist Chacko failed to provide bail on account of my brother’s previous debts, which I suspected were to do with those previous bonds. And so the trial would go on. Old fat-neck would play witness for the prosecution.
Their relations had curdled of late, ever since the fat-neck had demanded his turn at the gun and the doubled wage that went with it. My brother felt he could not be trusted, neither with his aim nor with the splitting of the money, another task that fell tothe gunman. So Jayan refused him, and the traitor went straight to the police to feed them a fable about his U-turn of heart and his fresh respect for the law. Judge and jury would fall upon the fairy tale like crows on a carcass.
Whereas once my brother had won praise for being a perfect shot, now he was cast out by public opinion. Rumors ran loose that he had made big money off elephant game—why else had the Karnataka police crossed their border to collect him? Most everyone, Christian and Muslim and Hindu alike, believed killing elephants for money was a sinful pursuit, and worse that he should profit from it, hoarding untold sums, when everyone else accepted whatever skinny salary this life afforded them.
“What money!” Leela railed at me, as if I stood in for all of society. “He shot four or five elephants, that is all. He swore to me. How can they lock him away on account of four elephants?”
Okay fine, I let her believe it was four. I told myself this was not my business but theirs. Here is the truth: I would have sworn nonsense on her King James Bible if only to prevent her from leaving us, leaving me.
Most strenuously, my brother insisted that there was no need for us to come to the trial in Karnataka. Surely the jury would deem the fat-neck a faulty witness on account of his record, blotted by the petty felonies of an idiot. (Once, he attempted to burgle an office building and got himself locked in the entry.) It was too far to travel for a case that would be over in minutes. And if we were to come, who would mind the farm?
Jayan knew—how could he not, with his front-row seat—that the magistrate court would find him guilty. His was a sorry gift, the one and only he could give: an excuse not to see him with hisslim wrists in the irons, to continue our days as if nothing were different.
Four years my brother was gone from us. My mother spent most of this time confined to the house, held hostage by the belief that gawkers and gossips were waiting outside our door, their whispers burrowing through the walls. A bad husband was a misfortune. A bad son was her fault, and she felt she deserved every word said against her.
Regarding gossips, Leela said there was no use listening to every twit with a mouth. She knotted a cloth around her head, picked up a sickle, and labored in the fields alongside the adiya women who eyed the way she whacked at the stalks, sweating, cursing, cutting nothing. Eventually they showed her how to sharpen the blade against bamboo, then shear. She found the money to buy chickens and a cow named White Girl, earning us income from the eggs and milk. The chicks she guarded as fiercely as if she had laid them herself, but the predators were many. One day a vulture whisked a chick in its claws but lost its grip upon takeoff. Belly up, the chick lay cheeping in the dirt, a glistening string of its innards plucked out. Finished, I thought, and all the eggs it would have laid for us.
But Leela did not waste a second in telling me to bring needle and thread. I had threaded her many a needle by then, but never had I seen her do what she did: carefully cradling the chick in her palm and fingering the innards back inside as if stuffing a pastry puff. Like a surgeon, she stitched the belly whole again, then patted a paste of turmeric over the wound.
In the end that stitched-up chicken outlived the others. It evenfollowed her around like some lovesick suitor who would not take no for an answer, a behavior I
But Communist Chacko failed to provide bail on account of my brother’s previous debts, which I suspected were to do with those previous bonds. And so the trial would go on. Old fat-neck would play witness for the prosecution.
Their relations had curdled of late, ever since the fat-neck had demanded his turn at the gun and the doubled wage that went with it. My brother felt he could not be trusted, neither with his aim nor with the splitting of the money, another task that fell tothe gunman. So Jayan refused him, and the traitor went straight to the police to feed them a fable about his U-turn of heart and his fresh respect for the law. Judge and jury would fall upon the fairy tale like crows on a carcass.
Whereas once my brother had won praise for being a perfect shot, now he was cast out by public opinion. Rumors ran loose that he had made big money off elephant game—why else had the Karnataka police crossed their border to collect him? Most everyone, Christian and Muslim and Hindu alike, believed killing elephants for money was a sinful pursuit, and worse that he should profit from it, hoarding untold sums, when everyone else accepted whatever skinny salary this life afforded them.
“What money!” Leela railed at me, as if I stood in for all of society. “He shot four or five elephants, that is all. He swore to me. How can they lock him away on account of four elephants?”
Okay fine, I let her believe it was four. I told myself this was not my business but theirs. Here is the truth: I would have sworn nonsense on her King James Bible if only to prevent her from leaving us, leaving me.
Most strenuously, my brother insisted that there was no need for us to come to the trial in Karnataka. Surely the jury would deem the fat-neck a faulty witness on account of his record, blotted by the petty felonies of an idiot. (Once, he attempted to burgle an office building and got himself locked in the entry.) It was too far to travel for a case that would be over in minutes. And if we were to come, who would mind the farm?
Jayan knew—how could he not, with his front-row seat—that the magistrate court would find him guilty. His was a sorry gift, the one and only he could give: an excuse not to see him with hisslim wrists in the irons, to continue our days as if nothing were different.
Four years my brother was gone from us. My mother spent most of this time confined to the house, held hostage by the belief that gawkers and gossips were waiting outside our door, their whispers burrowing through the walls. A bad husband was a misfortune. A bad son was her fault, and she felt she deserved every word said against her.
Regarding gossips, Leela said there was no use listening to every twit with a mouth. She knotted a cloth around her head, picked up a sickle, and labored in the fields alongside the adiya women who eyed the way she whacked at the stalks, sweating, cursing, cutting nothing. Eventually they showed her how to sharpen the blade against bamboo, then shear. She found the money to buy chickens and a cow named White Girl, earning us income from the eggs and milk. The chicks she guarded as fiercely as if she had laid them herself, but the predators were many. One day a vulture whisked a chick in its claws but lost its grip upon takeoff. Belly up, the chick lay cheeping in the dirt, a glistening string of its innards plucked out. Finished, I thought, and all the eggs it would have laid for us.
But Leela did not waste a second in telling me to bring needle and thread. I had threaded her many a needle by then, but never had I seen her do what she did: carefully cradling the chick in her palm and fingering the innards back inside as if stuffing a pastry puff. Like a surgeon, she stitched the belly whole again, then patted a paste of turmeric over the wound.
In the end that stitched-up chicken outlived the others. It evenfollowed her around like some lovesick suitor who would not take no for an answer, a behavior I
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