ILLUSTRATION: PAPERLILY STUDIO
The Memory of an Elephant
Angshu Dasgupta
After my grandmother died, my mother and I went for a month-long holiday to a village near Kalimpong. It was a tiny village high up on a mountain, an accretion of small houses huddled together. A narrow footpath led away from the huddle, climbing, dipping, then climbing again. In a glade at the end of this path was a cottage, our home for the month, rented from a family who had moved away to Darjeeling.
I was a little over twelve years old, and until then, I had led a sheltered life under my mother’s watchful eye. I was shocked when she declared that I was old enough to wander on my own, as long as I was home before dark.
It was confusing at first, this newly conferred freedom to roam untethered from my mother. It took me some time to get a sense of how far I could go without causing alarm. My first foray was down to the village, where I bought myself some snacks. When I returned after more than an hour, Ma didn’t so much as look up from the book she was reading. I offered her the bag of salted peanuts I brought, which she took from me without a word.
The next day, I rigged a tent in a copse of trees within shouting distance from the cottage. I told her where I was going to be, but Ma didn’t call out to me even once in the hours I spent there. I ventured farther every day, stayed away for longer and made myself dirtier, but she didn’t seem to notice. I claimed the mountain for myself, drawing maps in ruled sheets torn from Ma’s notebooks, giving names in crooked font to the tree with the beehive, the glittering monastery on the far side of the valley, the derelict gazebo at the very top of my world.
In hindsight, I was an inconsiderate explorer, a marauder, even. I picked with my newly acquired penknife at shingles of bark until the resin oozed like golden blood; I kicked up a dreadful rustle among the undergrowth, startling entire colonies of cicadas into silence; I poked with sticks at weird-looking insects and watched them scurry awkwardly to safety.
It was a summer of sparkling memories that I can still recall at will — the clouds that rolled in without warning, casting an eerie shroud over the forest and the hillside and me; a film of gossamer grown overnight; the night sky alight with more stars than I had ever seen, so close, so close.
Among these indistinct memories is one that has a definite chronology — a beginning, a body of infinite wonder, and a gut-wrenching end. This memory has the visual quality of a carelessly shot video, the frame panning wildly across blue skies and towering trees and hillsides tied up in shimmering ribbons of asphalt. It’s a cloudless day, the air perfectly still, the leaves on the trees limp like socks hung out to dry. I’m near the crest of the mountain, looking down at the valley below. Out of the corner of my eye, I see something that doesn’t belong — a blotch of grey amidst the familiar forest hues of silver and brown and green.
It’s an elephant, standing perfectly still, as if carved from an outcrop of the mountain itself. It’s the smallest elephant I’ve ever seen. I think it’s a boy, although I couldn’t say why I think this.
My first instinct is to turn and run, but I find myself walking towards him until we’re so close that I could touch him if I wanted to. He notices me at last, turns the seeing side of his head toward me. I see his enormous jowl, his watery eye. I reach out to touch him; he meets me halfway, finds my wrist. He holds on for the longest time, then raises his trunk as though greeting a long-lost friend. His lower lip curls in a smile, and I feel a rush of moist, warm breath the smell of which I would recognise anywhere but cannot find the words to describe.
I never told anyone about the elephant. Earlier that year, my teachers had been so worried about me that they summoned my mother to school. I had been telling wildly inconsistent stories about my father, they complained — in one, he was a mountaineer lost in the Andes; in another, he was an astronaut orbiting the earth in the International Space Station; in yet another, he was a modern-day Robin Hood, in jail for robbing a bank to help pay for a stranger’s heart transplant. No-one was going to believe that I saw an elephant up high on a mountain — a habitat entirely unsuitable for a creature of its size.
I dreamt of him, so often that I began to expect him every night. Every dream made new memories, revealing minute details that had escaped me at first — the unexpected smoothness of his skin; the little hairs that grew in patches around his armpits (if one might call them that); his scraggly tail with a tuft like the loose end of my mother’s plait; a patch of bubblegum pink on the lobe of his ear. Dream after dream collided with the original memory, breaking it down and mingling with the fragments. I began to doubt myself, growing less and less certain that I had seen an elephant on the mountain that day.
If the elephant were mere confabulation, it was easy to locate the seed of its conception. On top of our fridge was an idol of Ganesh, tarnished brass, about six inches high. My mother fed the idol every morning, four globules of nakul-dana, a sickly sweet confection made entirely from powdered sugar. She spoke to Ganesh casually, as if they were siblings or childhood friends. She asked him questions — should she break that fixed deposit? Where on earth did she put those keys? Will it rain today?
My father left us when I was ten years old. I was told that he was taking a new job in a foreign country; I knew from overheard conversation that it was another woman he was leaving us for. I don’t remember how I felt about him leaving, only that Ma was not her usual self in the months that followed. She let her hair go wild, uncombed and tangled, then cut it all in a fit of anger. She often forgot to pack me lunch, pressing a five-rupee coin in my palm before I left to catch the school bus. At night, she would gaze blankly through the window above the kitchen sink, a cigarette smouldering between her fingers. Smoking was bad for her asthma, I would remind her. ‘Yes, yes,’ she would say before flicking the half-smoked cigarette out through the dark window. I slept in her bed for those unsettled months, more for her benefit than mine. She told me a story every night, stories that I still remember in paraphrase — Baba Yaga in her chicken-legged house; the baby Achilles held upside-down by his heel and dipped in the river of death; The Happy Prince, desolate on his perch in a nameless city square.
And then, there was the story of the elephant-god born on a mountain — the legend of Ganesh, rendered with an irreverence that is sure to anger men of religion:
Shibthakur and Parboti were a childless couple living a charmed life high in the Himalayas. They were gods, both – he of ghosts and destruction, she of power, love, and motherhood. Shibthakur would routinely take off for years on end, leaving Parboti alone in their home on Mount Kailash. During a long period of separation, Parboti moulded a lump of earth in the shape of a boy, then breathed life into it. This was Ganesh, and at first, like any other boy, he had a human head. When Shibthakur returned from his wanderings, Parboti was in the bathroom, with the adolescent Ganesh guarding the entrance. Shibthakur was eager to reunite with his wife, but Ganesh wouldn’t let him pass. In a fit of rage, he lopped off the boy’s head, which rolled all the way down the mountain and was lost forever. The devastated Parboti demanded that her son be restored to life. Shibthakur sent off his army of ghosts to bring back the head of the first creature they laid eyes upon. As luck would have it, it was an elephant they found, foraging in the forest, with no inkling that he was about to become a god.
Elephants express grief, repeatedly touching the bodies of their dead, standing vigil for days in the hope that they might come alive again. When my mother died, I discovered that I was impervious to the emotion. At the crematorium, I cried for barely a minute, right after her body disappeared into the electric furnace. I refused to observe the customary period of mourning: I ate meat with a vengeance, even the forbidden beef; I refused the garments of death that my relatives foisted upon me; from the crematorium, I went straight to the cinema where I sat in the dark among strangers whose mothers hadn’t died the previous night.
My extended family read my insouciance as a symptom of unexpressed grief. They phoned me at odd times, asking if I had eaten, what I had eaten, when, and where, and with whom. They invited me to dinner, during which they tried to coax tears out of me — they wept openly while speaking of my mother as if she were an exalted being with angel wings. I nodded quietly, driving from my mind her shouting matches with my grandmother, her sneaky habit of smoking in the bathroom, her despair when these very same relatives whispered behind her back that it was she who drove my father to those other women.
After one of these dinners, I resolved to sever all ties with my family. It was easy, really — I neglected to pay the phone bill, and after a few months, the line was disconnected. My father wrote me letters from the foreign country where he lived at the time, always just a few lines, asking how I was and if I needed money. I never wrote back.
I was in a brief relationship with a classmate, but I failed to form any real attachment with her. I had a secret fling with one of my professors, but he broke it off when his wife began to suspect that he had a woman on the side. I sleepwalked through the remaining year of college, after which I drifted from job to job, only a few of which I quit of my own accord. I grew apart from my closest friends, thwarting their interventions with uncharacteristic belligerence. On the third anniversary of my mother’s death, I realised that I had been completely alone for more than a year.
The elephant returned to my dreams. These new dreams were replete with sensation, made incandescent in waking by a fathomless desire to inhabit them. I was in mourning at last — for my mother, and inexplicably, for the elephant I had met on the mountain so many years before. It’s easy to see that I’m my mother’s son — I have her sharp nose, her weak chin, her father's eyes, the right eye smaller than the left. My kinship with the elephant is tenuous — our last common ancestor was Juramaia sinensis, a rodent-like creature bearing little resemblance to human or elephant, extinct for more than a hundred million years.
I spent long hours on the Internet, looking, I don’t know for what. ‘Elephant, eastern Himalayas’, the search began, as if, by some miracle, I would find a picture of us standing side by side, his foretrunk wrapped around my wrist. Instead, I found news articles — three of an itinerant herd run over by a train; a tusker who made a sport of destroying motorcycles parked by the side of the road; a young one who had fallen into a pit and was rescued by tea-garden workers. I read that female elephants live in close-knit matriarchal families; young males remain with their natal family until they attain sexual maturity.
I, too, was brought up by a family of females. It was an ad-hoc family, but a family nonetheless — my mother; my grandmother; Bina-mashi, the woman who cooked for us and minded me when my mother was away; Mrs George, who taught me English, the only one among my teachers who didn’t take me for a blithering idiot. They taught me survival skills, like elephant mothers teach their young — words, their meanings, and where they went in a sentence; the tables of 17, although that took some doing; that I should always look right, then left, before crossing the road; that the bitter of a cucumber is neutralised by slicing off an end and rubbing it against the exposed flesh. They were dead, all four of them — in an accident; of a heart attack; from cancer, uterine, and of the stomach. I was left without family, an unattached male, a misanthropic rogue floundering in an interminable fog of musth. Only, my condition had nothing to do with the biological need for a mate — I felt no desire for woman or man, not even in the abstract. What I wanted, really, was to return to that tremulous moment in which a twelve-year-old boy was skin-to-skin with a creature who should never have been there, in a pine forest high on a mountain.
In an ill-considered moment precipitated by a week of sleepless nights, I decided to go find him. It was a fool’s errand, but I saw no other way out of the morass in which I found myself. I borrowed a cousin’s disused motorbike without disclosing my intentions. I set out for the Himalaya, riding resolutely past industrial wasteland and ramshackle towns, stopping only for tea and fuel. I reached Siliguri early in the morning, from where I turned on to Sevoke Road, straight as an arrow pointed at the foot of the Himalaya. For the first few kilometres, on both sides of the road are military establishments — neatly painted buildings among manicured lawns, signboards emblazoned with the propaganda of patriots, olive-green trucks parked in neat clusters like platoons of mechanical beasts. The forest begins without warning, short stubby trees close to the road, taller ones farther away. The signboards are green now. ‘Go slow,’ they instruct. ‘Elephant crossing.’
Riding through the forest, I was haunted by the ghosts of elephants. More than 50 had met horrible ends that year, electrocuted by fences erected to keep them out of tea gardens, mowed down by trains as they travelled silent in the night, stranded without food by the annual flooding of the Brahmaputra. They were here before we drew imaginary lines across the land and erected barbed wire fences along them, long before we learned to harness the electricity that we now weaponised against them. They’re sentient beings, with lifespans comparable to ours. We think ourselves superior on account of our opposable thumbs, our spacecraft, our smartphones, and our weapons of mass destruction. And yet, who among us can say for certain that the gigantic brain of an elephant is incapable of devising poetry?
From the dead, my thoughts turned to the living: where was my elephant now? How did he come to be on the mountain, alone, without his herd, without his mother?
As I waited at a railway crossing, I remembered a scholarly article I had read a few nights before, about the British building the railway that led east through the Dooars and into Assam. It suggested that this was the first, and deadliest, disruption of the elephant corridor that had once stretched along the entire length of the Himalaya. Before the railway, elephants roamed unhindered from Myanmar in the east to Arabia in the west. They flourished in our tropical peninsula, and there was a time when they could be found across the length and breadth of it. Now, they’re locally extinct in Pakistan. A baby was sent to Afghanistan once, a diplomatic gift from a misguided president to the mayor of a city under siege. She remained chained to a post at the Kabul Zoo, where she perished from the shrapnel of a rocket launched by the Hekmatyar. A handful remain in Nepal, many of them captive, used as vehicles by eco-tourists who come in droves to experience while they still can the fragmented forests that remain. In my own country, elephants pick their way across high-speed railway tracks and six-lane highways, often straying into villages where they’re loved and loathed in equal measure. Recently, a pregnant fifteen-year-old died when she ate a pineapple laced with explosives — a device in common use among farmers in Kerala, meant to frighten wild boars who come to raid their fields.
My train of thoughts was brought to a halt by the warning horn from the approaching locomotive. It passed sedately through the intersection, hauling behind it the Rajdhani Express from Tinsukia. A boy stood at the door of a sleeper coach, waving enthusiastically at the crowd gathered before him. The gates swivelled up in a crisscross. Stopped engines coughed to life in a fog of half-burnt diesel. On the other side of the tracks, the road lost its arrow-like character, curving languidly along low foothills to the left, the blue-green Teesta to the right. I came to the familiar fork in the road — straight to Darjeeling, and right, over the Coronation Bridge, towards Sikkim and Kalimpong. As I closed in on a convoy of slow-moving trucks, I remembered another article I had read bleary-eyed at my computer — wild elephants being transported from faraway Arunachal Pradesh, in trucks just like the ones before me, intercepted at this very same bridge by forest officers. They were five males, three females, and a calf, less than a year old. The calf hadn’t survived.
While crossing the bridge, I began to feel a distinct loss of purpose. I was tired — I had been on the road for more than 16 hours. Tears began to come, just a welling at first, casting a thin blur on the green mountainside before me. Then, it was a quiver in the pit of my stomach, a tremble, a rush that filled my chest and took my breath away.
I don’t remember parking the motorcycle, I don’t remember climbing off it. I found myself bent over the safety rail, weeping, for whom I still don’t know.
Angshu Dasgupta lives in Kolkata, India. His first novel, Fern Road, was published in 2019 by UWAP in Australia and by Speaking Tiger in India. He is presently working on a novel in which an elephant plays a pivotal role. Since beginning work on the novel, Angshu has spent many weekends riding his motorcycle through the elephant corridors of north Bengal.
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