The Hamilton Case (10 page)
I recognized the prelude to a sermon. “English is our inheritance too,” I interrupted. “Why shouldn’t we mold it to our needs? Grove and
palu
in the same sentence—isn’t that distinctively Ceylonese?”
Through rolling smoke, Jaya winked at me like a gargoyle. “Obey by name, Obey by nature,” he hooted. “I say, Kumar—I don’t suppose you’ve heard about the time when . . .”
Things got worse. No sooner had I launched into the rather amusing story of a match I had won in straight sets, than Jaya got up and strolled away. His manners had plainly been tailored to match his costume. He thrust himself into the circle of servants sitting by the water, and soon their noisy hilarity was drowning out my voice.
When I could bear it no longer I picked up my rifle, called for one of the trackers and set out before the light deserted us altogether. Within a quarter of an hour I had a brace of the small green pigeon whose bubbling calls had greeted us on arrival. I returned to camp to find that Kumar had joined the raucous group beside the stream. Even the cook had deserted his fire. Not a head turned in my direction. I stood there unnoticed, holding my handful of soft bodies in the dark.
T
o bring down an elephant requires a stout heart and steady nerves. One must walk boldly up to the animal and fire from twenty paces or less. Men survive the claws of leopards and bears, but the hunter who comes within range of an elephant’s legs or trunk never lives to boast of his exploit.
These things were in my mind the next morning as I shook a scorpion from my boot. I had often seen elephants in the wild, the gray arch of a back looming above the bushes, or a scattered herd feeding on a hillside. I had watched, from a distance, and contented myself with plover and pigeon, deer and monkey. But now that other death, elephant-shaped, was waiting in the shadow of the trees.
We came upon the trail almost at once. When traveling through the jungle a herd of elephants will follow each other in single file. This produces a broad, well-trampled path. Our trackers followed it with ease for over an hour. It led to a marshy area of rank, shoulder-high grasses, where the herd had broken up, leaving the mud stamped into craters eighteen inches deep. It was an empty, stagnant place. I picked my way through with rushing strides, eager to leave it behind. A glance over my shoulder showed Jaya shambling in my wake, as cheerful as a golliwog. A certain refinement of the mind is of course the
sine qua non
of sensibility to atmosphere.
In the scrub on the far side of the marsh we called a halt. The first mouthful of coffee sweetened with condensed milk was just slithering down my gullet when it sounded in the jungle to the east: a single tone followed by three ascending quavers that came to rest on a high, clear note before leaping down an octave for its resonant finale. It was repeated obligingly at intervals over the next hour as we drew closer to the herd.
The air, moist as a bath, was perfectly still. My tracker beckoned me on, signaling caution with a wave of his hand. I slid forward and flattened myself against a teak tree. The jungle ahead was relatively open, with low, scattered undergrowth. Forty paces away, a dozen elephants were feeding on bamboo. They pushed their way through the thorny clumps, snapping stems fifteen feet high as if they were stalks of asparagus.
When awake, a wild elephant is never still. One foot swings and then another, while the animal’s tail and trunk are in constant motion. Mesmerized by this lumbering ballet, I barely noticed my tracker reappear at my side. He touched my elbow. I followed his gaze and saw that a female and her calf, in search of the choicest stems, had wandered off from the rest of the herd and were scarcely twenty paces away.
Reaching skyward with her trunk, the old elephant hooked down one juicy shoot after the other for her calf. It stood less than three feet tall, that calf, and its hide was smooth and shiny, a brown so dark it was almost black. As it wandered around its mother, she caressed it with her trunk. At one point it stood directly beneath her, swinging its tail, and I thought what comfort it must draw from that massive, wrinkled belly. For the queerest moment I was conscious of an emotion akin to envy.
The vulnerable point of an elephant’s skull may be located anywhere on a horizontal line drawn around the head from the ear opening, three inches above the eye, to the very center of the bump in the middle of the face, which is really the base of the trunk and the nasal cavity. With my finger I traced the diagram on my thigh. Meanwhile, the old cow elephant had begun crushing a fallen stem of bamboo with her forefeet. The calf, now half hidden from me by the bulk of its mother, put out its trunk and stole soft fragments on which it champed.
I took a deep breath and stepped out from behind my tree. Raising the gun to my shoulder I prepared to take aim at the female’s head, adjusting the imaginary line I had drawn around it to compensate for the angle of fire.
And then a hulking, shapeless form rose in the scrub ahead. For a long, hideous instant my muscles clenched with fear. This was succeeded by a swift rush of fury. Jaya, whom I had last glimpsed somewhere to my left, had worked his way around me until he was less than a dozen rash paces from the female and her calf. I saw the glint of sun along his barrel. My skull filled with light. The cow elephant was mine, mine! I saw my sister’s delicate limbs crushed against that vile pelt. I adjusted my aim downward.
I had forgotten the tracker at my side. Now he made a sound that was not quite a sound, the merest flutter of breath. I turned my head and we gazed at each other. His mouth hung agape.
Darkness visible:
the quotation ballooned in my mind. I stared at half a dozen broken yellow columns in a black cavern ringed with crimson, and knew I had been granted a vision of the portals of hell.
When the blast ripped through the morning, the cow elephant threw her trunk aloft and shrieked. She took off into the jungle, trumpeting as she went. The herd was scattering in every direction. It is the most dangerous moment in the hunt, since you might find yourself in the path of an elephant and be crushed in the animal’s startled rush. I fell back behind my cover. Then abruptly it was over, the elephants had regrouped and vanished into the jungle beyond the clearing and all that could be heard was an iron silence.
It was broken by a shout. I stepped around my tree and there was the body, surrounded by prostrate bamboo. The calf had died where it had fallen. Jaya was making a racket beside it, grinning and slapping his tracker on the back. I went closer and saw the red hole at the base of the trunk.
It was an outrageous piece of beginner’s luck. His bullet must have passed through the female’s skull, leaving the brain untouched but deflected downward in its trajectory as it exited. And so the calf standing beside her had died. In fact I had heard it fall to the ground as I cowered behind my tree, but had mistaken the noise for the crash of bamboo.
I still have the photograph Kumar insisted on taking. The sun is a bleached starburst in the sepia sky. Jaya stands beside the fallen elephant, head thrown back to expose his massive neck, left hand on hip, right hand clasping his gun, one enormous boot planted on the animal’s flank. It is an ironic pose. The faint but perceptible exaggeration of the stance parodies all those photographs of self-satisfied Englishmen lording it over the corpses of their Empire’s fauna. Here the usual proportions are reversed: the elephant is small, the hunter looms large. Instead of evoking the noble victory of man over nature, the image suggests a shabby little coup.
Oh, Jaya was first and foremost a trickster, a past master of the conceptual sleight of hand. Having shot his elephant, he repudiates all the men who have shot elephants before him. Having claimed what was mine, he judges me for wanting it in the first place. His smile is mocking, intolerably superior. Every time I see it, I relive that moment when I had the blackguard in my sights. I squeeze my knees together. My finger tightens on the trigger.
COFFEE WITH THE KING’S ADVOCATE
O
ne afternoon as I emerged from a courtroom in Hulftsdorp brushing off the defense counsel’s reluctant congratulations, a peon in a white sarong and khaki jacket slashed with the black-and-red government sash handed me a message. It was a summons to the office of Sir George North, the King’s Advocate, where I was sounded out, over a cup of excellent coffee, about a change of direction. The magistrate of Tangalle was to retire at the end of the year. The KA, with many an allusion to my brilliant grasp of the law, wondered if I had ever considered transferring to the Bench?
I had, of course, as he very well knew; it is a prospect no ambitious young advocate ignores. There was no career more prestigious than the judiciary; and I can say without immodesty that I believed the scrupulous weighing of argument and impartial reasoning that came naturally to me would prove an asset to the Bench.
Sir George, a large red man with incongruous dolls’ feet, had crossed one knee over the other and was speaking in circumlocutions of
measured reform
and
propitious times
. His meaning was transparent. Judicial posts below the Supreme Court, which was made up of English judges, had traditionally been filled by civil servants—who were, of course, Englishmen. The police courts at the lowest level of the judicial system were presided over by magistrates, whose ranks included my countrymen. But our island boasted no judicial service per se.
Recently, however, there had been rumors of change afoot; of pressure from Westminster on the Colonial Secretary to appoint more Ceylonese to senior judicial posts, thus setting in train the process of establishing a judiciary independent of the Civil Service. Conjecture over-ran the legal community at Hulftsdorp faster than morning glory engulfing a fence. Senior advocates in black alpaca jackets and white trousers speculated in circumspect whispers behind the stout Dutch pillars that flanked the corridors of the courthouse. The scriveners who squatted at their writing boxes under the shade trees composing petitions for illiterate clients passed on speculation as certainty. The lowly bun proctors, who spent their days in the crumbling yellow hotel opposite the court where they would take on a case for the price of a cup of tea and a bun, embellished all facts with the baroque flourishes of master craftsmen. Men swore they had
reliable information
that all district judgeships would henceforth be filled from the Bar. Various fellows claimed to have heard from various other fellows who knew a
highly placed chap
that an all-Ceylonese Supreme Court was
in the bag
. Now here was Sir George tacitly confirming the foundations of such talk, if not its airier reaches. An able man embarking on a judicial career could look forward to rapid advancement: that was the gist of it.
I was flattered; who would not have been? Yet I hesitated. There were, in the first instance, financial considerations. I was already pulling in fees well in excess of a magistrate’s salary. To give up the Bar would mean a considerable drop in income. My equivocation was fueled also by a sense of injured pride. Magistrate of Tangalle: it was hardly an illustrious beginning, even if Sir George was hinting at more to follow. One would have thought that my education and reputation entitled me to a district judgeship at the least, even if my relative lack of experience ruled out a more senior appointment.
As well as coffee, Sir George’s peon had brought in a silver salver laden with sweets and pastries. The KA was known for his sweet tooth. At a cocktail party where the usual trays of deviled eggs and angels on horseback were circulating, he was said to have reached into his pocket and brought out a handful of marzipan-stuffed dates: “Do have one. They’re frightfully good.”
While talking to me he had helped himself to potato
aluwa
, milk toffee,
thala guli
, coconut rock and two cream horns. Now he produced a large, blinding handkerchief with which he dabbed his lips as I considered how best to reply. At last, while stressing my sensibility to the honor I was being shown, I asked for time in which to reflect on my position. I hinted at financial difficulties, perhaps slightly exaggerating the unenviable state of affairs I had inherited from my father.
Sir George nodded. The English understand money even if they do not always respect it; with us it is the other way around. Could my decision be postponed for a few weeks? “By all means,” replied Sir George.
Two years later the KA made a first-class ass of himself over a Mrs. Jansz, whose cardamom-scented love cake was greatly in demand at birthday parties. He was obliged to leave the service in disgrace. That morning, as we shook hands, his fingers were just a little sticky.
T
he day after my conversation with Sir George I received a telephone call from Marcus Fernando, an old friend of Pater’s who lived up-country. Marcus and his two brothers, Clifford and Ronnie, were embroiled in a testamentary case over their father’s will that had dragged on for years and long escalated out of all proportion. But we are a famously litigious people. In 1849 Major Thomas Skinner noted that our love of litigation was probably not exceeded anywhere in the world; and the major, whose relentless application of engineering and ambition over nineteen years produced the Colombo-to-Kandy road, was quite a connoisseur of obsession.
The original suit brought by Marcus had branched into a forest of countersuits and claims and writs and injunctions that outdid each other in improbability. For instance Clifford had sought damages against Marcus for allegedly sending a henchman to urinate on his wife’s dahlias, thus destroying her chances at the annual flower show. (“Ever heard such rot?” spluttered Marcus. “Why would I pay some bugger to urinate on her bally flowers? As if I’m a
godeya
who’s never heard of weedkiller.”)
Recently there had been signs that the Fernando case was drawing to a close. Whereupon, for no reason I could see (other than the prospect of being deprived of ongoing drama), Marcus got the jitters about his advocate and dumped him on the spot. Then he put through a call to my chambers and pleaded with me to take on his brief.
