Travels on my Elephant

by Mark Shand

  ‘With pleasure. For a small fee. But there is just one other thing. Why is the gentleman wanting an elephant?’

  Aditya whispered something into his ear. With a broad smile Mr Tripathy shook my hand before leaving the room.

  ‘What did you tell him?’ I demanded crossly.

  ‘That you are an Englishman.’

  ‘Well, so what?’

  ‘Everybody knows that the English are mad.’

  At three o’clock in the morning Aditya returned, tired but elated. They had located the elephants about sixty miles west of Bhubaneshwar in a small town called Daspalla. They were indeed begging elephants owned by saddhus.

  ‘Did they want to sell?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘We can take our pick. There are two females and one tusker. The tusker comes from Nepal and is a good elephant, or so they tell me. But what the hell do we know about elephants? We must get some expert advice …’

  ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Oh, devious buggers, they …’

  ‘No, no, not the saddhus, the elephants.’

  ‘Big. Like any elephant. I didn’t really see them properly. Now let’s get some sleep. You’ll have plenty of time to look at them tomorrow.’

  I found I couldn’t sleep. All night everything I looked at became an elephant – the shadow of a swaying branch, the moon-filled clouds or even the television set. My obsession had indeed turned to madness.

  It took most of the day to locate the zoo director who kindly agreed to lend the services of his chief mahout, Bhim. Our party had grown. There were now four of us. Myself, Aditya, Mr Tripathy, with his suitcase of elephants, and a young taxi driver called Indrajit, who had impressed Aditya with his driving skills the previous night. He was a handsome, courteous young man, who radiated energy and had dark fierce eyes – the kind of eyes that remain fierce even in jest. But I wasn’t thinking about a chauffeur, I was eagerly waiting to set eyes on my first mahout.

  In Delhi I had been lent a book on elephants entitled The Elephant-Lore of the Hindus, which had detailed the essential qualities required in an elephant driver:

  The supervisor of elephants should be intelligent, king-like, righteous, devoted to his Lord, pure, true to his undertakings, free from vice, controlling his senses, well behaved, vigorous, tried by practice, delighting in kind words, his science learnt from a good teacher, clever, firm, affording protection, renowned for curing disease, fearless, all-knowing.

  The mahout was waiting at the gates of the zoo. Bhim was a man of indeterminate age, the colour of a walnut, bandy-legged and carried himself like a wounded soldier. As we got out of the car he executed a shaky salute, his arm and leg not quite in co-ordination. From the state of his bloodshot eyes, he was clearly suffering from a hangover. He climbed into the car and yawned, exposing the remains of three yellow teeth which wobbled when he spoke. ‘Sleep now, sah. Very good. Haathi later.’ He then passed out.

  Aditya was not wrong about Indrajit. He drove with a cunning recklessness, the tropical landscape passing in a blur outside the window. We had only one accident when he swerved to avoid a bullock cart, clipping the back side-window against one of the animal’s enormous horns. The glass exploded like a hand grenade with some of the fragments embedding themselves in Aditya’s face. ‘Lucky it wasn’t my eyes,’ he shrugged stoically, picking the glass out of his cheek.

  It was late at night by the time we reached Daspalla. The town was deserted. There was no sign of the elephants. I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach. ‘Jesus!’ I shouted, ‘I just can’t believe this. We’ve lost them. They could be anywhere …’

  ‘No sir,’ Mr Tripathy announced calmly, pointing to large mounds like loaves of bread that decorated the road. ‘Now we follow shit.’

  We pushed on deeper into the night, our eyes glued to the black surface of the road, illuminated in the taxi’s headlights, searching for the tell-tale signs. At intervals the trail would run dry and Mr Tripathy and Indrajit would make enquiries. Villagers, rudely awoken by the urgent shouting, would appear in their doorways, cocooned in blankets, looking bewildered and frightened. Reports regarding sightings of the elephants became equally bewildering – anywhere between two hours and six days. We reached a toll gate, where we received more accurate information. The elephants, we were told by the sleepy toll keeper, had definitely passed through. Did he perhaps know how long ago, we asked. No. Unfortunately his watch was not in working order. But he assured us it was not yesterday.

  We were closer. The droppings were fresher and, as if on cue, Bhim woke up. ‘Haathi close,’ he said quietly, rubbing his bloodshot eyes, as he poked his nose out of the window. ‘Can smell.’

  We rounded the next bend. Three massive shapes loomed out of the night, their shadows dancing over the glow of a small roadside fire, around which lay bundles of vermilion and saffron rags.

  ‘We’ll pretend you’re a tourist who has never seen an elephant,’ Aditya whispered to me. ‘Just stare in astonishment.’

  As I got out of the car the rags suddenly billowed upwards and I found myself transfixed by three pairs of hot eyes that flashed like cash registers, curtained by matted tresses of long black oily hair. I forgot the necessity of our charade. As if drawn by a magnet, I was already moving towards the elephants.

  Then I saw her. My mouth went dry. I felt giddy, breathless. In that moment the ancient wall crumbled and I walked through. With one hind leg crossed over the other, she was leaning nonchalantly against a tree, the charms of her perfectly rounded posterior in full view, like a prostitute on a street corner. I knew then that I had to have her. Suddenly, nothing else mattered and I realised with some surprise that I had fallen in love with a female Asian elephant.

  As luck would have it, I had become enamoured with a perfect elephant, an elephant, even Bhim said, that made his heart flutter. She was young, between twenty-five and thirty years old and although in poor condition, due to mishandling and starvation, would in fourteen days in his care, turn into a lovely riding elephant. She had all the attributes – a healthy pink tongue unblemished by black spots, brown kindly eyes with no traces of white, the right amount of toenails, eighteen, five each on the front feet, four on the back, strong and sturdy joints and a perfect arc to her back. The other two elephants, he warned, were dangerous, and would quite likely kill somebody soon if they hadn’t done so already. Take her, he advised me, it would be impossible to find better.

  Anywhere between 10,000 rupees and 2 lakhs, I was told in Delhi when researching the price of elephants. A tusker is usually more expensive due to its ivory and prestige, yet a female is sometimes more desirable due to its temperament.

  The odds were already stacked heavily in favour of the saddhus. To make matters worse a crowd had mysteriously assembled and was excitedly denouncing the saddhus as robbers and urging the ‘rich firinghee’ to buy all three elephants. My diary entry for the negotiations reads as follows: ‘Their first price was 2 lakh. Our first price: 60,000 rupees. Their second price: 1 lakh 50,000 rupees. Our second price: 80,000 rupees. Their third price: 1 lakh. Our third price: 85,000 rupees. Their final price: 1 lakh. Problem. Stalemate. Holy men will not budge. Crowd now very excited. Go away and have urgent discussions over cup of tea. Tea delicious. Tripathy, Indrajit and Bhim advise stick to our price otherwise loss of face. Aditya says loss of elephant more likely. Return and offer 1 lakh. Holy men now refuse. Why? Holy men never go back on word and have hurt feelings. Aditya tells them will bring cash tomorrow. Holy men go back on word and forget about feelings but now want more. How much? 1,000 rupees. Why? In India, even numbers inauspicious, odd numbers auspicious. Bloody crooks. Agree. Crowd very disappointed.’ (£1 sterling is approximately 26 rupees, give or take a little depending on fluctuations in the rate of exchange. 1 lakh equals 100,000 rupees, or £4,000.)

  The mendicants, or beggars, told us that they would bring the elephant back to Daspalla. There they were more likely to find a suitable place to load her on to the truck
that we would be bringing the next day. Before leaving I went to see her. I watched her flapping her huge ears, the ends of which were splotched with the palest of pink dots, as if somebody had flicked a paintbrush. I felt ashamed that I had bargained for her at all. I wanted to reach out and touch her, but found I couldn’t, terrified that she might reject me. In the car on the way back I realised I didn’t even know her name.

  Mr Tripathy had forgotten about his suitcase full of elephants and now seemed as obsessed with acquiring an original elephant as we were. The next morning he and Indrajit went to organise a truck, while Aditya and I set off to find the zoo director to ask him whether we could keep the elephant there until we departed on our journey, and also if he would allow Bhim to act as mahout. We had reached the decision last night after three bottles of rum. Tripathy and Indrajit had vehemently opposed the idea, saying that he was too old, too weak and too drunk. Whether it was the alcohol or emotion I will never know, but the way that Bhim had accepted his position removed my doubts. ‘Sah,’ he said proudly, drawing himself up to his full five feet and executing another shaky salute, ‘Raja-sahib, Daddy, Mummy, my family now. Bhim look after.’

  The director was somewhat surprised and sceptical at the speed of our success. He readily agreed to let the elephant reside at the zoo, but wanted it outside the main park due to the quarantine regulations. The place he was suggesting was next to Bhim’s house, which suited us perfectly. But, he warned us, although he had no doubts about Bhim’s capabilities with elephants, he did have a drink problem. However, if we were prepared to take the risk, he would not stand in our way.

  We found our transport was waiting for us at the hotel. The truck was a machine of magnificent chaos. It was difficult to ascertain on first inspection which was the front and which the back. It was the hippies’ ultimate chariot, a relic of the Sixties and flower power, bedecked with garlands of flowers, effigies of gods, good luck charms and strings of fairy-lights that twinkled on and off prettily on application of the brakes. On the back was written, ‘USE HORN PLEASE, OK’ and underneath, ‘TATA’ which I thought was a message of farewell, but was in fact the make of the vehicle.

  We set off to Daspalla stopping for a ‘sharpener’ in a bottle shop on the way. The proprietor, an ex-serviceman, excited by our visit, took out two bottles of beer and three glasses from a cupboard. The name of the beer was printed over a picture of Mohammed Ali standing over a fallen victim with his arms outstretched – KNOCK OUT, HIGH PUNCH, STRONG BEER, BREWED IN BANGALORE. ‘On the houses, gentlemen,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘To England, India, elephants. God bless and the best of British luck.’

  ‘That makes me proud to be an Indian,’ Aditya said as we walked back to the truck. ‘You have just witnessed something quite unique. In all my travels across this country, that is the first time I have been offered a free drink. It bodes well for our journey, my friend.’

  ‘Luckily he didn’t know you are a Maratha,’ I remarked, ‘otherwise his hospitality might have been of a different nature in view of the depredations committed by your ancestors in Orissa two hundred years ago.’

  ‘Ah, the sword of the Marathas. Those were the days,’ he said dreamily. ‘You know, Mark, it was probably right here, on this very spot that my ancestors won yet another brilliant victory.’

  ‘Actually it was at a place called Barmul Gorge which is somewhere near here. It was your last stand in Orissa. The English army, led by Marquis Wellesley, wiped you out.’

  The mendicants were already sleeping by the time we found them in a deserted schoolhouse on the outskirts of Daspalla. I couldn’t see the elephants but I could hear them feeding; sharp cracks of breaking branches punctured the still night air like pistol shots. Aditya squatted down beside one of the sleeping forms and I overheard a short, muffled conversation. The mendicant pulled his blanket further over his head, rolled over and went back to sleep. Odd behaviour I thought for a man who is about to receive nearly £4,000. Aditya stood up, his face registering a mixture of anger and disbelief.

  ‘They won’t sell. They’ve changed their minds.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘I am not bloody well joking,’ he hissed. ‘You know what this bastard told me when I pointed out that he had gone back on his word and put us to a great deal of expense. He said it is our right to give people trouble. We do it all the time.’

  Indrajit and Tripathy had now joined us. When Aditya explained the situation we had to restrain them forcibly from attacking the mendicants, who were now fully awake clutching an assortment of crude axes and spears, which I realised with horror they had probably used on the elephants.

  ‘We are wasting our time,’ Aditya said. ‘There’s only one solution. We will go to the police.’

  The police station was empty apart from a bat circling a ceiling fan. From the back of the building we heard the sound of snoring. Indrajit disappeared. A few minutes later he returned followed by a disgruntled man with tousled hair, hastily tucking a khaki shirt into a crumpled lunghi. He waved us to a couple of chairs and slid behind a desk. He looked at me, as if he had just awakened from one nightmare and was now about to enter another.

  Aditya explained the situation. The policeman blinked owlishly and painstakingly scratched out a report.

  ‘In my opinion,’ he announced finally, pushing back his chair and yawning, ‘there is not seeming to be a crime committed.’

  ‘There bloody well has been,’ I shouted, losing the last vestige of self-control. ‘They’ve got my elephant!’ I threw down a visiting-card I had been given by a senior bureaucrat in the Orissa government.

  To my astonishment, the policeman’s eyes widened noticeably. In a matter of moments the entire garrison of the Daspalla Police Force were lined up in front of the desk and ordered to fetch the beggars. The posse returned with the man to whom Aditya had spoken. It would have given us some satisfaction if he had been driven at the point of a bayonet, or at least in handcuffs, but he seemed to be on excellent terms with his captors. He entered the station, helped himself to a cigarette from a packet lying on the desk, lit it from a match proffered by one of the policemen, and squatted down unconcernedly in a corner. A crowd had assembled outside the station. The majority were on our side, but a faction became demonstrative when a local quack told them I was buying the elephant in order to kill it. I would then, with the aid of a huge syringe, extract some magic potion which I would sell as an aphrodisiac. The police chief, sensing a riot, dispersed the crowd.

  Up until now the mendicant had only revealed his name as Rajpath but when one of the police advanced upon him with a bamboo cane, he broke down in a well-rehearsed fit of histrionics, and whimpered that the elephant did not belong to him but to his boss who lived in a village near Benares in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

  ‘Why in hell didn’t he tell us that in the first place?’ I asked Aditya incredulously.

  For the next two hours a strange negotiation took place, during which the police acted as go-betweens. At one moment they would be deep in conversation with Aditya, Tripathy and Indrajit, the next with Rajpath through the bars of the station cell, behind which he now reclined. Meanwhile I waited outside and spent a pleasant night discussing the merits of the English and Indian cricket teams with one of the junior policemen.

  In the early hours of the morning a solution was found. Mysteriously, Rajpath could now sell the elephant. Empowered by the owner, its destiny lay entirely in Rajpath’s hands. He would be prepared to sign an affidavit to the effect as well as the sale deeds which we had brought from Bhubaneshwar. Both these documents would be witnessed officially by the police, and Rajpath would then set out immediately for Benares to deliver the money to the owner.

  The deal was seemingly foolproof, except, I pointed out, for one salient point. In view of his previous attitude how could we trust Rajpath to deliver the money?

  It was decided that Aditya would accompany him to Benares and conclude the negotiations with the owner persona
lly. I had to fly to Delhi to sort out some visa extension problems. In the meantime, Mr Tripathy and Indrajit would keep watch over the elephant and we would meet back in Bhubaneshwar in a few days.

  Arriving in Delhi, I found an article had already appeared in a national newspaper about my intended journey. The last paragraph read: ‘more than anything else Mr Shand is looking forward to travelling at an elephant’s pace in today’s era of jet travel because it would enable him to absorb the surrounding elephant.’ I assumed the last word to be a misprint; it should perhaps have read ‘elements’.

  My work finished I called on my friend and in his drawing-room ruminated over a name for my elephant. On a table there was a collection of miniature ivory elephants. He picked one up and handed it to me. It was exquisite. The body intricately carved in a pattern of tiny stars.

  ‘In Hindi,’ he explained, ‘the word for star is “tara”, more importantly Tara is one of our goddesses. What do you think of that for a name?’

  ‘Tara, Tara, Tara,’ I rolled it over my tongue. I liked it. It was a beautiful name for a beautiful elephant. A goddess and a star. She deserved nothing less.

  A jubilant trio was waiting for me in the hotel room in Bhubaneshwar; Aditya handed me an impressive looking document studded with blue seals, a jumble of illegible signatures and a cluster of thumb prints. ‘You are now the absolute owner of one female elephant named Toofan Champa.’

  ‘Her name is Tara,’ I interrupted.

  ‘Then you are the absolute owner of one female elephant named Tara, aged about thirty years, height about seven and a half feet, with black forehead and black body, pigmentation spots on both ears, with eighteen toenails, six-inch tusks and healed wound marks on the centre of her back. By the way,’ he added, ‘Rajpath returned with me. An elephant, he tells me, takes time to get used to a new mahout. He’ll work with Bhim.’