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
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
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