Trophy

I.

I knew a hunter, a great great great uncle of mine, who hunted elephants in colonial India, during the final brutal unwinding of the British Empire. At the time my uncle was young. It was the nineteen-thirties. Hunting, however big and beautiful the prey, made life to him like nothing but a game the world around him played which he happened to play too; though with far smaller rules and far more objective. A pastime of sorts. One day, in long grass that the sun had turned to living, swishing hay, he shot the biggest elephant he’d nearly ever seen. Its skin was firm and clumsy, folded uglily like bedding, the great thing uselessly moaning, and its eyes full of sad fervent ink. It fell heavily. Suddenly my uncle could see the top of its bruised-like, tender head; the two small bumps that sprouted hair like a dumb baby’s, the strangely papyrus ears so limp. The difference between an elephant dying and any other animal dying is that an elephant understands death has as much reason as life. There is never hatred on an elephant’s face. They are kindly animals, chubby, uncoordinated but playful, and my uncle said once he would like to see each one in heaven if heaven has room (given an elephant’s size). At the time of the shoot, however, he only smiled, dissected the ivory, packed it like pencils of yearning, considered the game done, and left for England, his wall awaiting him. And now I am his blood.

II.

When I am taken as a whole by God and revived like an authentic tiger rug removed from a rich man’s floor and filled with blood, I will rise through grass blades quietly, a screeching freight yard’s gaping black mouth on the hill. The people will not understand the terror of the noise; they will be accustomed to it by then, they will consider it typical, but I will have tiger ear artistry, a wildness pocketed, which will recognise the agonising intrusion of all unnatural sounds. I will be alive again. I will gift you a trophy for witnessing me, on my four fast legs, seeing excitedly the crowish wings of dawn when black is mopped from the sky like soot from a working child. It will be an escapist’s heirloom, a realisation of senses and finality, a mother yelling at a father wearing a raincoat and marching from door to car to never ending world. To never ending absence.

III.

One late night in July, when my uncle was older, wiser and calmer (and more wrinkled), he left his work at the bureau for affairs-everybody-regretted-but-nobody-could-resolve. He walked alone to his car. It was the late sixties by then. Earlier in the evening, an IRA member had planted a bomb on his car’s undercarriage. My uncle sniffed the air and thought, for a moment, almonds and motor oil, then opened his door. With his pull the lock snapped a string. The vehicle exploded. It was a brick of dynamite the size of an elephant’s heart, lying inches from the exhaust. As my uncle lay there on the pavement, with fifty percent of his body departed, his limbs dissembled like caved in rivers, his blood like crimson paraffin lit by an emptying, a desertion, a drying, he thought again on his younger days hunting elephants in almost-colonial India.

And briefly – only briefly – he considered himself to be a handsome trophy, a shaving of ivory; for a wall, for a piano, or perhaps just for the sport. For the game inside the game.