It is my good fortune to have seen elephants from childhood. Many would imagine I had grown up near a sanctuary, but that wasn’t the case. We lived by an iron-ore mine, and forests surrounded every colony we lived in. The townships we lived in were made by cutting through forests and hills. The roads consisted of ups and downs. Walking with our heavy school bags always felt cumbersome. Life was difficult but enjoyable before internet culture swiped the whole earth inside itself.
The truth is, I lived among elephants since my early days, from when a child begins to pile moments as memory alive, still breathing. We lived in a lowland house. It took about fifteen cement stairs to reach the front garden of our house. In the autumn, when the festivities began, the mahouts came riding, asking for money, rice, potatoes in exchange for the elephants to raise their trunks. And to give rides, especially to the little children. What everyone knew was that the mahouts came from some far state of India. One sweet thing was that each elephant had a name. The mahouts called them by it like humans. Usually they came in numbers of three or four. Every mahout had his own elephant.
I was maybe seven or eight years old. My mother had everything prepared, along with vermilion to smear on the elephant’s trunk, for doing so was considered to bring good luck to the family. Maa asked me to accompany her, though I was very scared of its large, large size. Maybe Maa was trying to remove the fear from me. I went along with her till the lowest stair and stood there unable to go closer. I watched her apply vermilion to its trunk. Then she descended and handed me the bowl containing the jute bag she brought to give the mahout, and returned, forwarding the bag towards the elephant. The elephant understood this and raised the bag to the mahout. After the mahout emptied the bag, the elephant brought it down, placed it in Maa’s hands. The mahout kept exhorting me to have a short ride, saying it won’t harm you. It loves children. I kept nodding my head, no. After the elephant left, I felt relieved, the way a climber feels hugging a tree that still stands stoic after a storm has passed by. One thing that attracted me was the elephant’s small eyes and what I felt were dried tears. This made me ask my mother, does it cry, because its body is tied? Maa must’ve answered something to pacify me. I don’t remember her words. That incident then, now a memory, is as precious to me as light is to a pane of glass.
I was probably ten when, one evening during summer vacation, we heard chaos. We lived in double-lined, single-family detached quarters. The quarters were on either side of the roads, and faced each other. The houses were in a seesaw pattern, ours on the lower end, the road running through the middle. Each quarter had enough space to grow tropical trees and plants. Ours was filled with guava, blackberry and mango trees, many plants like hibiscus of different varieties, and marigolds and common day flowers. In the rainy seasons, the rose balsams filled up whatever space was left vacant.
Between our quarter and another ran a pitch road through which the elephants passed. Following my brother, we both sisters mounted on the iron gate to get a clear view of the road ascending to another colony as they walked through it. In the middle of the elephants’ course was a home that had a huge jackfruit tree with ripening harvest. The elephants broke its tall branches so easily, one wouldn’t believe it if not witnessed. This was very new to us. Our whole colony was stunned by this adventurous happening. No one dared to close in on the elephants until two motorcyclists, being oversmart, passed them at a close distance. Something thrilling always has a risk factor. This angered the female elephant, for the way she turned to face them was quicker than two blinks. Slowly, after eating whatever they could find from the quarter gardens, they moved onwards, on their way to their home: the forest surrounding our place.
As the elephants discovered our colony could provide food to satisfy their hunger, their visits became frequent. They went where they chose with a large number of human eyes on them. Something strange happened: the dogs began barking at the elephants whenever they came. It was believed that this was an instinctual anxious response for the perceived threat from those tall and heavy animals. Another belief was that dogs bark out of excitement. Whatever the reason, the commotion heightened and took time to quieten down.
Often we planned outings to the local bazaar to buy things or to visit the small eateries present here. This place in its smallness contained everything at a walkable distance, one small market and every shop confined at a single place. The news of the elephants’ arrival at any corner of the town spread very fast. We had to cancel our plans for the elephants’ presence here and there.
After several visits with his mate, the male elephant began coming alone. Who was there to tell us what fate had the female elephant met? Or had it gone to some other forest? The male elephant would eat what it found and then leave; this occurred so often that everyone’s interest dwindled, only remaining cautious of its presence for safety.
After the long vacation of almost two months, our school reopened. We saw a house wall broken down on our way to school. The hole on it seemed like a big, unrefined O. Our friends told us the family that lived there made rice beer in large quantities. The elephant had broken into the stock room and drunk all of it. We had the knowledge that rice beer made people drunk. This was a common phenomenon here. Sadly, many families suffered ill health, poverty and anxiety because of it. Our young minds contemplated how the elephant must’ve walked drunk. We laughed beyond our bodies. Now after years, I feel the horror of what could’ve happened that didn’t. The elephant’s large trunk encroaching on the room—what if someone was sitting inside and the elephant got hold of the person? These kinds of incidents made us learn to adjust to their arrivals, though the elephants were not mentioned in the newspapers, only in pamphlets circulated by the company’s head among the employees, requesting them and their families to be wary of the elephant’s presence.
Eventually, the people began cutting down trees that bore fruits the elephants loved. How this process of cutting down trees began I don’t know. Maybe the way the elephants disheveled the tree branches inspired someone to cut down the entire tree. And then this became a common reaction to the elephants’ intrusions. With no food supply to settle its hunger, the male elephant lessened its visits. This continued for a span of four or five years, and then its arrivals ceased. We sometimes talked about it, and then we forgot in life’s busyness.
With time, my siblings and I had to relocate to nearby towns for our higher education. Once, returning, we happened to hire a car. It was noon in the hot month of May. Suddenly, we saw a large male elephant reaching into the back of a truck. We saw it was pulling out gunny bags filled with potatoes. This had created a traffic jam. Baba told the driver and us to close the car windows. Power windows were not very common in those days. The driver had little experience regarding this, as he was coming down from a city. We did, and began sweating, but there was no other way. Baba told us, it’s the same elephant that roamed in our colony. We saw the truck’s driver and the helper standing on the sidewalk cutting sad faces. We felt bad for them, and simultaneously for the elephant? How hungry he was. His hunger had forced him out of the receding forestline. We humans have a composite architecture. We desire almost everything, and at the same time we want nature to achieve compatibility with our actions. How is a balance possible when one is stretched beyond the margins?
My brother asked, “How do you know, Baba, it’s the same elephant?”
Baba answered, “Here, these days, a forest officer has been appointed.” He had told someone my Dad knew. This male elephant leads a solitary life. It roams, eats whatever it finds and then returns back to the forest. It is not harmful, but it’s better to take precautions, the forest officer had added to his advice for common people.
The next day, the newspaper headlines read, “New traffic police in town. What dedication!” The photograph was of the elephant eating potatoes. Accompanying it was another photograph of the gunny bags scattered around the vehicle. This kind of news became frequent, so we began to make our journeys by train.
In my sophomore year at senior college, one day the newspaper headline read, “The traffic police has been electrocuted”. There was no nearby utility pole, just a tall bamboo stalk dug into the earth. This narrated the whole story. The headline broke our hearts. Many days of our lives which the elephant had filled now felt emptied in a moment. The elephant’s tusks had been removed. Overnight, the poachers had taken them. Maybe it was they who had frightened it, to fulfill their malicious plans.
I don’t know where the tusks are now, what artifacts have been made out of them. If it was a cold-blooded murder, are the people who committed it behind bars? Or are they still roaming in search of another innocent animal to die in their trap just so that they can make a few more bucks. Bugs? Yes, actually bugs, not the hard-earned money people earn legitimately. Criminals such as them have minds filled with poisonous bugs.
Of course, we have stayed in close proximity to nature. We have seen wild boars, various kinds of snakes, velvet spiders, to name a few. Now too, a wide ground lies before the quarters of the flat we stay in, though there’s no wilderness. Grasses grow in their own way, then fawn, and then again in monsoons they turn green; a cycle to which the eyes, the body have got habituated. Some days, we go for walks along it. It’s nice and soothing, but not what it used to be in childhood, the forestline and the magic of living around it. The varieties of black-colored bird, carnivorous, feed themselves termites from the holes present at one end of our garden. The others were the large-sized cranes that stayed in the high-altitude trees: what did they eat? From where had they arrived in our township? No one had any idea. They just arrived and settled at my place. We didn’t have a camera, so after several Google searches, we couldn’t find out. Now, they are nowhere to be seen.
But more than anything we have seen or encountered, the elephants were the most memorable part of our lives since childhood. Seeing any elephant on the screen or in sanctuaries conjures up the ones we saw.