by Vaseem Khan
After dinner, Chopra went down to check on Ganesha again. The baby elephant still had not eaten anything, and had even turned up his trunk at a sheaf of bamboo shoots which some thoughtful resident had procured for him, and which Chopra had heard were a great pachyderm delicacy. He sat by the little beast and tried to imagine how he must be feeling, displaced from his home, wherever that might be, brought to this strange, clamorous place filled with curious sights, sounds and smells. And people, so many people! No wonder the poor creature seemed shell-shocked.
Chopra re-read his uncle’s letter, trying to fathom the mystery of this strange gift. What was Ganesha’s story? And why had his uncle claimed that Ganesha was ‘no ordinary elephant’?
Inspector Chopra (Retd) went to bed that night no closer to the answers to these troubling questions.
Sleep took some time to arrive. He found his head crowded with thoughts of his retirement. To avoid the unhappiness such thoughts brought with them, he found himself dwelling on the death of Santosh Achrekar. A part of him hoped that Homi’s autopsy would end the matter. But another part, the seditious part of his soul that refused to accept that he was no longer a police officer, secretly hoped that Homi’s analysis might reveal evidence of foul play.
Chopra had no idea yet what he would do if that proved to be the case.
He finally fell asleep still tossing and turning as he considered the possibilities.
A VISIT TO THE ZOO
The next day Inspector Chopra set off from his home, after forcing down another sizeable breakfast prepared for him by Poppy, in a determined frame of mind. Putting aside all other concerns he had decided that, having been vouchsafed his uncle’s trust, he must fulfil his responsibility to the young animal in his care.
‘Where are you off to?’ said Poppy as Chopra headed for the door.
‘I have some errands to run.’
‘You are supposed to be retired. You do not have to run errands.’ She walked over to him. Taking the tip of her sari she wiped crumbs of toast from his moustache.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I feel perfectly fine,’ said Chopra. He smiled at his wife. ‘What are you doing today?’
‘I am going to knock on doors. I shall build a support base before the Managing Committee convenes. Remove the ground from beneath Mrs Subramanium’s feet before she can make mischief for Ganesha.’
Chopra frowned. ‘Poppy, I do not think that is wise. Why don’t you let things take their course?’
‘Because Mrs Subramanium is wrong. And even if she is right, she is wrong.’
Chopra opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted.
‘Well, isn’t this a touching scene?’
Poppy and Chopra turned to see Poornima Devi hobbling from her bedroom. ‘So much concern for an elephant and a man who looks as healthy as an elephant to me. Why is no one concerned about my health?’
‘Because there is nothing wrong with you,’ said Chopra.
‘Nothing wrong with me?’ screeched the old woman. ‘I have been at death’s door for years.’
‘What’s stopping you from going through the door?’ muttered Chopra under his breath.
‘How many times have I asked to be taken to Varanasi so that I can bathe in the pure waters of the Ganges and be cured? But does anyone listen? Does anyone care?’
Chopra reflected that anyone bathing for their health in the waters of Varanasi had clearly not read the government’s latest pollution reports. The great river was so filthy there that even holy men had given up immersing themselves.
‘We will take you soon, Mother,’ promised Poppy. ‘Now that Ashwin is retired he has time to plan a trip for all of us.’
Chopra glared at his wife. He noted the mischievous light dancing in her eyes and his glare softened into a reluctant smile. ‘I have heard that many old people live for years in Varanasi, just so that they can die in the holy city and attain instant moksha,’ he muttered. ‘Perhaps we could leave her there.’
‘But then you would miss her, dear,’ said Poppy sweetly. She gave him another mischievous smile and swished off to get ready for her campaign of guerrilla warfare against Mrs Subramanium.
His first port of call was the new Crossword Bookstore in Juhu.
Juhu was the city’s original shining suburb. Even now, all the big movie stars maintained a fancy bungalow in the area, living cheek by jowl with pushy upstarts from the worlds of commerce and cricket. The suburb was home to a plethora of trendy new salad bars and coffee shops of the sort that the young were flocking to.
And yet, Chopra thought, as he looked out from the rickshaw at the eight-storey palace of a famed Bollywood star, even here, beggars still congregated on street corners, stray dogs with patchy fur still roamed in packs, and mounds of trash still collected in the open, a haven for flies and ragpickers.
The Crossword Bookstore, a shining, glass-fronted extravaganza that looked, to Chopra, like a giant yellow chocolate box, was the largest bookstore in the Mumbai suburbs, a five-floor emporium dedicated to the written word. In spite of himself, Chopra was impressed. Yet the sheer scale of the place unnerved him. How was anyone supposed to find anything?
His problem was solved by a very thin young man who appeared behind him like a nervous ghost. Chopra explained what he required and the young assistant, resplendent in his yellow uniform, led him through the labyrinth of the store to the correct section.
Chopra pushed his reading glasses onto his nose, and began to investigate the shelves. Diseases and Diet of the Asian Elephant; The Hidden Life of the Forest Elephant in Northern India; Population and Conservation Problems of the Asian Elephant… ah, this had to be the one! The Definitive Guide to the Life and Habits of the Indian Elephant by Dr Harpal Singh.
The book was reassuringly weighty, with a glossy cover that showed a magnificent specimen of an Indian elephant surrounded by lush vegetation. On the back cover was a picture of Dr Singh himself, an equally magnificent specimen with a glorious blue turban and a wild, angry beard.
Chopra felt reassured. Here was a man who knew his business.
He opened the book and read the first paragraph. ‘The Indian elephant, Elephantus maximus indicus, is the largest land mammal on the Asian subcontinent. The species ranges in size from 2.5 to 3 metres in height, and between 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms in weight. Indian elephants are megaherbivores, and consume up to 150 kilos of plant matter and 100 litres of water daily. They are both grazers and browsers…’ The chapter continued in this vein, with plenty of factual information and terse, clinical descriptions of every aspect of the biology, genealogy and taxonomy of the Indian elephant that one could wish to know.
After a while Chopra went back to the shelves, walking his fingers along the spines of the other books in the elephant section.
In the middle of the bottom shelf his eye was caught by a very thin volume with a plain brown cover: Ganesha: Ten Years Living With an Indian Elephant. The author was a British woman by the name of Harriet Fortinbrass who had come to India as a young girl in the 1920s with her father, Lord Hubert Fortinbrass, the then British liaison to the Nawabs of northern India. Lord Fortinbrass had been an avid hunter, a veritable one-man extinction event by all accounts. On one particular outing he had slaughtered no less than two bull elephants, a tiger and a brace of chinkara gazelles.
One day he had taken his daughter with him on a hunting expedition into the northern interior. That day Lord Fortinbrass had killed a female elephant, who died whilst protecting her newborn calf. Horrified by the senseless massacre of such a gentle creature, Harriet had insisted on taking the young calf back to their palatial mansion in Faizabad, then capital of Oudh.
Over the next ten years an astonishing bond had developed between the young Englishwoman and her ward. ‘People speak of the majesty of the elephant [wrote Harriet], its great size and strength; but what I see when I look into Ganesha’s eyes is a soul; and a warmth and intelligence that is compellingly human. It is said that el
ephants, like humans, are self-aware. They understand that they exist, and that they are individuals. An elephant can be taught to recognise itself in a mirror, just as a human child comes to this awareness. Like a human child, Ganesha trusts me implicitly. One must do nothing to betray that trust, for once an elephant’s trust is lost it can never be recovered. They never forget.’
Chopra was strangely moved by the English noblewoman’s words.
Harriet had eventually left India ten years later when Ganesha had contracted a mysterious illness and died. The book said that Harriet herself had passed away at the ripe old age of eighty-two, a lover of elephants and all things Indian until the very end.
He paid for both books and left the store.
Chopra’s second errand required him to take a taxi to the southern half of Mumbai. Rickshaws were not allowed beyond the affluent suburb of Bandra. South Mumbai was the territory of the taxi unions, and they defended their turf zealously.
Chopra alighted at the Byculla Zoo.
He hadn’t been here for nearly twenty years, back when some of the old British mills were still in operation in the area, dying off slowly like chain smokers, polluting the air as they expired. The Byculla Zoo sat inside the Victoria Gardens, originally built by the wealthy Jewish businessman David Sassoon. At the entrance to the gardens was the statue of Edward VII astride his ‘Kala Ghoda’, his black horse, moved from its previous posting in the busy Fort area when the Indian government decided that icons of the country’s erstwhile rulers should not be so prominently displayed.
He seems happier here, thought Chopra as he entered the gardens.
He made his way to the zoo office. A party of noisy schoolchildren were crowded around the ticket booth, a phalanx of harried-looking teachers attempting to keep them corralled in. Chopra went around the group and entered the door to the office.
‘You can’t come in here, sir,’ said a weary-looking man holding a bucket in one hand and a sheaf of string-tied red folders in the other.
‘I am Inspector Chopra,’ said Chopra. ‘I wish to see the manager right away.’
He was led into the manager’s office and asked to wait. Outside, the noise of the schoolchildren dwindled as they moved further into the gardens.
The manager arrived, a small man with dark-circled, sad-looking eyes, like a lemur’s, and very thick eyebrows. ‘My name is Rawjee. How can I help you, Inspector?’
‘I want to know about elephants,’ replied Chopra.
Rawjee regarded him morosely, then said: ‘They are big. They are dangerous. They do not take kindly to strangers. What else do you wish to know?’
Chopra said nothing. He looked around the office. It was very cramped, with a worn-down look, much like its owner. Filing cabinets took up much of the space, crowned by stacks of precariously leaning paper. The whitewash had peeled in a number of places as if the walls were suffering from a scrofulous infection. There was a general air of neglect.
‘The zoo is not as popular as it once was,’ said Rawjee, noticing Chopra’s scrutiny. ‘Nowadays, there are so many other distractions, malls and multiplexes and whatnot. Who wants to come to the zoo?’ He sighed. ‘Follow me.’ He scraped back his chair and led Chopra into the zoo.
They walked past the crocodile pen, the nilgai deer enclosure and the monkey cages where the schoolchildren giggled and made faces at the macaques, who howled and gibbered in incandescent fury. Chopra noticed that the enclosures were generally ill-kept, littered with discarded plastic bottles, gutka pouches and stale food items.
They arrived at the elephant enclosure, where Rawjee instructed him to wait. Then he turned on his heels and slouched away.
Chopra walked up to the rusted bars of the enclosure.
Inside were two fully grown Indian elephants with the characteristic patches of pink pigmentation around the eyes and ears. The plaque on the enclosure stated that they were called Shah Jahan and Mumtaz. They looked rather weary and long in the tooth to be named after the legendary royal lovers, he thought.
‘Please stay back, sahib.’
Chopra turned. A small man in khaki shorts and a tattered white vest walked up to the enclosure. ‘Last year, this pair killed a man.’
Chopra remembered the fuss. A drunken man had clambered into the enclosure from the lawn behind. Once inside he had begun singing at the top of his voice. The female of the elephant dyad had wrapped its trunk around him, picked him up and bashed him against the wall. After that, both enraged elephants had stomped on the man until he had expired. For good measure, the male had gored the poor man’s body with his tusks.
The zoo attendant’s name was Mahi. He was a former mahout who now worked on the zookeeper’s staff. He was a living testament to the dangers of working with animals. He had lost three fingers on his left hand to a tiger bite; his ear had been chewed off by an enraged langoor; and he walked with a limp having broken his hip when he had been playfully butted, many years ago, by an adolescent elephant.
‘They don’t know their own strength,’ he said, without rancour.
Chopra explained that he wished to know about caring for an elephant. Mahi looked at him with renewed interest. He enquired whether the police were now going to use elephants the way they used dogs. Then Chopra asked him where one would take a baby elephant that needed a home. Could the zoo take in such an animal? Mahi shook his head. ‘You would have to ask Manager Sahib. But I think he will say no. Zoo has no money. We cannot afford to look after another elephant. Elephants need too much looking after.’
That night Inspector Chopra locked himself in his study and learned about elephants. Reading from both Dr Harpal Singh’s clinical text and the more personal account of Harriet Fortinbrass, and recalling the advice given to him by Mahi at the zoo, he built up a picture in his mind of what it would mean to care for the creature that had been bequeathed to him by his uncle… ‘The elephant,’ wrote Dr Singh, ‘has been given mythical status in certain quarters, largely due to its association with the Indian god Ganesh. This status leads to the erroneous projection of supernatural and anthropomorphic abilities onto this animal. The truth is that elephants are merely very large land mammals. Flesh and blood and bone. Aside from their size there is nothing very special about the elephant.’
‘Elephants are unique,’ wrote Harriet Fortinbrass. ‘When Alexander the Great reached the banks of the Hydaspes to fight the Indian king Porus, his men were astounded and terrified in equal measure by the legion of elephants that thundered into battle against them. They returned to Asia Minor with tales of these legendary beasts. Instinctively, they realised that elephants are something greater than mere animals.’
In particular Chopra was searching for some clue as to what was currently ailing his ward. ‘An elephant,’ wrote Dr Singh, ‘has no natural predators. Consequently one can deduce that elephants do not know the meaning of fear.’ ‘Elephants,’ wrote Harriet Fortinbrass, ‘are emotional creatures. They exhibit signs of happiness, contentment, anxiety and fear. One must always be mindful of this fact. The Indians talk of a condition they call “musth”, when an elephant becomes uncontrollable, much like a drunken human. The cause for this condition is not known.’
There was an extraordinary range of illnesses and afflictions that could befall an elephant, Chopra discovered. From terrible-sounding diseases such as foot-and-mouth and elephant pox, to ones more familiar to humans such as anthrax, rabies and tuberculosis. Elephants were susceptible to pneumonia, arthritis, intestinal complications, tusk and nail infections, skin problems of all types, and a host of musculoskeletal injuries occasioned by their massive size. Elephants were plagued by the foot fly, the bot fly, ringworms, screwworms, tapeworms, ticks, ear mites, skin fleas, flukes and nematodes. Chopra learned that listlessness and a lean appearance were signs of poor health. Conversely, constant ear flapping and tail twitching were signs of good health. Chopra learned that an elephant could even suffer from heart complications brought on by old age, exactly like a human!
He woke up bathed in sweat, and spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling and listening to the thrum of the air-conditioner, which seemed almost as loud as the drumming of his heart.
THE RESULTS OF THE AUTOPSY
‘Come and see me. It’s better we talk face to face.’
Chopra put down the phone, and tugged thoughtfully at his moustache. It was not like Homi to be so mysterious. He was, after all, known for his blunt and forthright manner. At any rate, the results of the autopsy were in.
Chopra completed his breakfast, another enormous repast. He patted his stomach. ‘If this keeps up, you’ll soon be married to a very fat man,’ he said, only half joking.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Poppy, as she fiddled with the tea pan on the stove. Chopra felt deflated, like a magician whose best trick has failed to astound the audience. Poppy had been acting strangely ever since she had returned from her cousin Kiran’s home yesterday evening. It was not like Poppy to be so distracted around him. She tended to make a fuss of him, had done since the day they had married. Although Chopra had never acknowledged that he enjoyed this attention–he simply didn’t have the words to express how he felt, even if he had wished to–he instantly noticed its absence on the rare occasions when Poppy became wrapped up in something else. He wondered if she had found another of her never-ending causes to fight–perhaps her battle against Mrs Subramanium concerning Ganesha.