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.