Read The Tusk That Did the Damage for Free Online

on-screen, all sixty-two pulsing seconds, the heart of our film. During the moment of mother-calf reunion, Teddy hadn’t fiddled with the zoom, had let the action unfold, giving wide berth to those twining trunks, whose ministrations seemed to suggest comfort and tenderness and yet seemed somehow private, primal, on a plane of communication we could glimpse only indirectly.
    I started logging the tape, marking time codes, jotting impressions.The camera followed Ravi through the crowds, into the van, pulled in on his hands. There was something I hadn’t noticed at the shoot, amid the commotion and confusion—how calm he was throughout. The showdown could’ve been set to Morricone, with Ravi as Eastwood moving through the green, arms around the gun. Wolfish, deliberate. I felt myself ambushed by awe.
    So when Ravi knocked on my door, around nine, I was slightly starstruck. There he stood, the hero at rest.
    “You missed dinner,” he said.
    “Teddy went to a wedding. I just thought I’d get a head start on today’s stuff.”
    “He left?” Ravi asked, almost hopefully.
    “Yeah, he gets back day after tomorrow.”
    “Then let me take you to dinner.”
    “Oh.” The offer seemed fraught. “Well, I already had noodle soup …”
    Ravi peered over my shoulder.
    “Is that Dev?” On my laptop, an elephant calf filled the screen. Dev was easy to spot with his signature mini-mohawk. “You have more footage of him? Can I see?”
    It seemed an innocent request at the time, though, I can admit to myself now, I didn’t want it to be.
    I stepped aside, and easy as that, Ravi walked into my life.
    Ravi had rescued Dev from a cave where a female elephant had gotten herself stuck between boulders. By the time the team found her, she was starving to death, Dev tiny against her ankle, sore spattered and weak. Ravi shouldered Dev like a sack of riceand carried him out. At the center, Dev was too weak to stand, so they propped him over belly slings.
    Ravi explained all this from the foot of my bed. We had just watched a sequence of Dev nudging a soccer ball with the other calves, the keepers weaving among them, egging them on.
    “What happened to Dev’s mother?” I asked.
    “We had to leave her. Eventually she starved to death.”
    “Jesus.”
    He surveyed my room, his gaze remote, illegible. Maybe he was dismissing my foreign brand of sentimentality; maybe he was a little grossed out by the ganglia of ramen still in the pot. Landing on a thought, he lit up. “Dev will leave for Manaloor in two weeks, to be reintegrated into the park. It’s six hours away, but you should go. You should film it.”
    I envisioned the perfect final shot: three little calves sauntering like cowboys into the sunset. “So we’d spend our last week in Manaloor?”
    “Oh, you’re leaving.” He paused, barely hiding his disappointment. “Already.”
    “Why don’t you come along? To Manaloor, I mean.”
    “You don’t want me there.”
    “Sure I do.”
    “No, no, it’s the villagers. They would run me out, even though I have nothing to do with that mess …” He raked a hand through his hair, deciding whether to tell me or not. I didn’t press. I didn’t have to. He just started talking.
    The villagers were upset—enraged, really—that the Forest Department had subsidized Shankar Timber Company to fell the trees on their forestland. Technically, it wasn’t the villagers’ land;all forestlands belonged to the Forest Department (as inherited from the British raj, who had previously claimed all forestlands for the queen). But the villagers of Manaloor felt they deserved some say over the lands where they’d been harvesting firewood and honey long before Queen Victoria was in diapers.
    “Mostly they blame Samina Hakim. She is the Divisional Range Officer, the face of the Forest Department.” He shrugged. “Ah well. It will pass.”
    I wanted to know more, but Ravi stood up. I felt a pang of dismay, thinking he was on his way