AGAINST A FLURRY of protests I enforced a mandatory early-morning dip in the sea for everybody, to clear away the effects of last night’s excesses. Only Tara was excluded after she had expressed great suspicion and then terror at the sound of beating waves and had run up the beach trumpeting, causing a group of amazed fishermen to drop their nets and dive for safety behind their boats.
As we entered Konarak the first rays of a glorious sunrise were illuminating the Black Pagoda, a temple of such solitary grandeur yet of such sensuality that my first impression was one of shock. I had been fortunate once, many years ago, to have visited an empty Taj Mahal on a bright moonlit night and had thought that nothing I would ever see could surpass it for its beauty. But the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum, a tomb, silent in its splendour while Konarak is alive, a constant motion of stone – celestial nymphs with swelling breasts and rounded hips, the rhythms of the lovers and the ecstasy on the faces of the erotic statues. Its energy is manifest in scenes of royal hunts and military expeditions, with infantry, cavalry and elephants marching in full regalia, speaking of the dream of an ambitious and mighty monarch.
Conceived as a celestial chariot of the Sun God, pulled by seven exquisitely carved horses and supported by twenty-four monolithic wheels, each of which represents the division of time, the temple was constructed by King Narasimha Deva the First of the Ganga dynasty of Orissa in the mid-thirteenth century ad. Twelve thousand men toiled ceaselessly for twelve years to complete this masterpiece, and it was named the Black Pagoda by the captains of coastal ships who used it as a landmark. Konarak is the peak of Orissan architecture about which it was said that the artisans ‘built like Titans and finished like jewellers’. On the north side stand two lifelike elephants, their flesh rendered with wonderful realism. Between these stone elephants, dwarfed by their size, Tara made her ceremonial ‘pranam’ by lifting her trunk in salute. The head priest of Konarak came out to bless her.
In the shortening shadows of the Black Pagoda we set off triumphantly on our journey, applauded by a laughing crowd, many of them poking fun at the ridiculous figure striding out ahead, wearing a hat that had become a bonnet under its weight of garlands.
The countryside was lush, sensual and green (similar to Indonesia). Paddy fields dotted with clumps of bamboo and palm trees stretched for miles. Flashes of brilliant colour suddenly emerged as men in bright lunghis of emerald green, azure and saffron that had faded to salmon-pink stood up, gazed for a moment and then waved and shouted in greeting, their dark muscular bodies black against the green. Kites wheeled on thermals overhead and piebald and blue kingfishers hovered stationary above the fields. Then, wings pulled into their sides, they dived like arrows into the water and reappeared with frogs, fishes and small snakes in their beaks.
‘What are those?’ I said to Aditya, pointing to slim, glossy black birds with long, deeply forked tails that perched in lines on the telegraph wires, looking like a selection of chic little black hats displayed in a milliner’s window.
‘Drongos,’ he said excitedly. Aditya was a keen amateur ornithologist and seemed relieved that my conversation was not going to revolve exclusively around Tara. ‘They are clever birds,’ he continued. ‘They ride on the backs of grazing cattle and capture the insects that are disturbed by the animals’ feet. With any luck, we’ll see a racket-tailed drongo. They are much larger and have two long spatula tipped feathers like streamers in the tail. I have always longed to own one. They are superb mimics.’
Passersby stopped in amazement. Some just stared, open mouthed. Others turned their bicycles round to follow us and I overheard snatches of conversation with Bhim. ‘Haathi-wallah, Konarak.’ Then they smiled shyly clasping their hands together in greeting. But it was the children who went wild. At every village out they came, screaming and laughing and shouting. ‘Haathi, haathi, haathi, haathi,’ they cried and chased after us. One or two of the braver ones moved up in front of Tara and fed her bamboo and sugar cane.
At other villages we stopped and took tea, the best tea I had ever tasted, sweetened with sugar and cardamom. Tara was surrounded and paper bags of ‘ludoos’ (sweet yellow round cakes) were produced. She would delight the crowd by consuming the entire paper bag. Then she helped herself liberally to the piles of sweets and cakes laid out in trays in front of the shop. Sometimes her greed annoyed the owners and Bhim would smack her trunk smartly, reproving her, whereupon she would squeeze her small brown eyes shut like a naughty little girl. ‘Mummy learn proper manners,’ he told me seriously. ‘She too greedy. She have bad habits. She Raja-sahib haathi now. She behave like one.’
Worryingly, Tara’s foot did not seem to be getting better. She was walking with a pronounced limp, and it was Bhim who discovered the cause of this lameness – an infection caused by a wicked metal leg shackle with small spikes which pointed inwards that had been used on her by Rajpath. One of the spikes had caused a deep-rooted ulcer, but, Bhim told me, with hot-water compresses mixed with salt applied nightly she would soon be better. Until then, nobody was to ride her except him. The howdah, due to its weight, was abandoned. His knowledge of elephant ailments reassured me, but I fussed about like an expectant father.
It was a glorious day as I watched her plodding along in front of me, her tail swishing and her trunk shooting out from side to side, plucking at branches from overhead trees, flapping her great ears and munching with contentment. I felt wonderfully happy and patted her on her big, fat bottom.
‘She really is lovely, isn’t she, Aditya?’
‘Yes, Mark.’
‘No, I mean she is the most beautiful elephant in the world, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, Mark.’ I could see I was going to drive him mad.
Considering it was our first day on the road, and that Tara was lame, we stopped and made camp by a wide river on the outskirts of a village called Nimpalla after covering a distance of only twelve miles. There are two basic requisites for a camp-site when travelling with an elephant: one is water, for bathing and drinking, and the other is a stout, thickly leaved tree to which one can safely chain the elephant, to provide shelter from the sun and perhaps obtain fodder. We were lucky to find both. Beside the river, a row of ancient Peepul trees stood like sturdy oaks. In a few minutes Gokul, with the agility of a monkey, and armed with an axe, had disappeared into the upper foliage and soon Tara’s dinner came crashing to the ground.
For my benefit camps were, if possible, to be set up away from villages in the future. I had not yet become adjusted to the huge crowds I knew our entourage would attract. I realised I had no right to complain. I was travelling in their country, probably camping on their land. An elephant with a foreigner was understandably fair game, but I was still too much of a tourist to tolerate such human curiosity. As countless pairs of eyes scrutinised my every move while I struggled with Aditya to put up our ridiculously complicated tent, I was not in the most charitable frame of mind.
‘Go away,’ I roared, waving my hands like a demented marionette. A hundred pairs of eyes blinked once, my tormentors settled themselves more comfortably on their haunches and waited patiently for the show to go on.
‘They won’t go,’ Aditya remarked quietly. ‘Just ignore them.’
‘Well can’t you frighten them or something?’
‘Perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘if you removed those white socks and covered up those ridiculous blue underpants they might think that you’re a human being instead of a creature from outer space.’
‘I’m going to take a bath with Tara,’ I added grumpily, noticing Bhim leading her towards the river.
‘That, my friend, will probably cause a riot.’
Watching an elephant take a bath is a delight in itself, but bathing with, or washing an elephant is something close to experiencing paradise. When I reached the river she was lying at full length with a contented expression on her face. Bhim and Gokul were busily scraping her with stones and the normally grey skin on her protruding backside was already turning black and shiny. Occasionally the tip of her trunk emerged like the periscope of a submarine, spraying them playfully with water before disappearing again and blowing a series of reverberating bubbles. I grabbed a suitable stone and, forgetting my self-consciousness, joined in the fun.
After half an hour my arms were aching, my fingers were bleeding, but I felt absurdly proud. Bhim, sensing my eagerness, gave me the honour of cleaning her trunk, her ears and around her eyes, something which usually only the mahout, who is most familiar to the elephant, will undertake, due to the extreme sensitivity of these areas. However, he made sure that the ankush was hooked around the top of one of her ears at all times.
‘If Mummy feels that,’ he explained, ‘she give Raja-sahib no trouble.’
She didn’t, except at one moment when she took a liking to my underpants (I’m glad somebody did) and dragged them half down. This caused hilarity among the crowd, now squatting on the side of the river bank. The whole process was then repeated on the elephant’s other side. By means of a sharp command from Bhim, she lumbered to her knees and rolled over, creating a small tidal wave. Taking to my new job as a mahout’s assistant too zealously, I found out the hard way that Tara did not like to be scrubbed on the soles of her feet. She was extremely ticklish, and being winded by the kick of an elephant was not an experience I would care to repeat. I still had a lot to learn, I realised, or rather she had a lot to teach me.
After feeding Tara we sprawled around a blazing fire, bloated from an evening meal of corned beef, lentils and rice, spiced with a few chillis. This was to be our staple diet, unless we could find the odd chicken or goat. None of us, it seems, were great chefs. Perhaps Indrajit might fill the position. Mugs were filled with carefully measured tots of rum and we drank each other’s health, banging the tin mugs together and solemnly uttering the words, ‘Jai Mata’ (victory to the Goddess).
His inhibitions softened by the liquor, Bhim began to reminisce in a mumbling voice. ‘Haathi, nicer than people. Only hurt if you trick. Never eat until haathi eat. If feed well always faithful. But not not steal haathi food. Haathi always know. Haathi wait. Then haathi attack. Many mahouts bad, steal haathi food. Bad mahout, dead mahout.’
I asked him why he had become involved with elephants. ‘In blood,’ he replied.
Many years ago his father was the chief mahout to the Maharaja of Mayurbhanj, so he had grown up with the elephants. But there was one incident that changed his life, and from that moment on he knew that his destiny was to work with the haathi. He was involved in a tiger shoot in the forest of Mayurbhanj organised by the Maharaja for some visiting dignitaries. His father and the other mahouts were riding the main elephants while he and another younger mahout, who were riding the supply elephants, became separated somehow from the main party. They ended up camping alone at night in the jungle. Bhim woke up to the sound of a tiger close by and then listened in terror as the tiger killed and dragged away the other mahout. His own elephant with instinctive protection had grabbed him by its trunk, pulled him between its legs and stood guard all night, trumpeting fiercely as the tiger stalked around. In the morning Bhim had ridden back to safety.
‘Haathi, like Mummy. Guard child.’
Later as I lay in the tent I thought about what Bhim had told me. Even above Aditya’s stentorian snoring I could hear Tara happily feeding – the crackling and crunching of branches followed by a contented munching. There was something reassuring about an elephant close by. It was like being guarded by a huge jovial nanny, and I fell asleep dreaming of tigers and temples.
A torrential rainstorm in the night was just a foretaste of the kind of weather that was going to dog us for the next two weeks. All the tents were blown down and the ground was ankle-deep in water. When I went to retrieve my air mattress from the mass of sodden canvas, it floated happily towards the river. In the half-light we struck camp quickly, cursing as we tripped over our tent pegs and guy ropes, serenaded by a deafening chorus of belching frogs which seemed to be laughing at our discomfort.
As another day’s march began, Aditya and I walked gingerly. Blisters, or ‘water bottles’ as he more aptly described them, had begun to appear on our feet. Both of us were lame, and Bhim and Gokul had fever, shivering under umbrellas.
‘Water bottle coming up under left big toe,’ Aditya barked as he splashed along.
‘Two water bottles under heel on right foot,’ I replied wincing. ‘God, they’re painful! Do slow down, I can’t bear it any longer.’
‘Don’t be so feeble. Crush them, forget the pain. Imagine what my ancestors had to endure.’
‘Your ancestors,’ I pointed out crossly, ‘were generals and commanders. I bet they never walked anywhere; rode in great comfort on horses, I should imagine.’ I turned to look at Bhim enviously, wondering whether I was ever going to ride Tara.
Our misery turned to laughter at the chaos Tara caused as we passed. Goatherds frantically tried to control their animals as they scattered bleating and panicking into the paddy fields. Bullock cart drivers on their way to the market, their ramshackle contraptions piled precariously with their wares, stood up and shouted, ‘Hut, Hut,’ mercilessly whipping their cattle like charioteers, urging them to pass us quickly. Sometimes they dismounted and covered the animals’ eyes. It was to no avail. The bullocks, big enough in themselves, and sensing that something much bigger was threatening them, charged away uncontrollably foaming at the mouth, scattering their loads on the road. Three young men riding a small moped passed, whipping us in a fine spray. All three turned simultaneously, as if to double check that what they had seen was not a dream. The moped, out of control, snaked off the road and crashed into a muddy ditch. They were not put out in the slightest, laughing uproariously as we helped them out of their messy predicament.
Near the village of Hirapur we came across an exquisite and seemingly forgotten temple, surrounded by verdant paddy fields. We approached it by skirting a small lake in the centre of which stood a tiny, overgrown shrine, like a little gazebo in an English country garden. The temple was quite empty and of a curious design – a perfect stone circle about nine feet in height, standing open to the sky. Access was made by a narrow, low entrance way, which was no more than an interruption of the surrounding wall. Inside sixty-four perfect goddesses, carved in black chlorite, each about a foot high, sat in little niches facing an open pavilion in the centre. It held a beautifully seductive atmosphere and I imagined music, incense, flesh, colour, laughter, accompanying orgiastic love. The wall was built at just the right height so that people could not peep in. Later I found out that it was the Chausath Yogini Temple, one of only four in the whole of India, built in the ninth century ad. The goddesses or Yoginis were attendants on the goddess Durga, an image of whom at one time sat on the open pavilion in the centre. It was a place of worship exclusive to Orissa’s kings.
On the main road we passed a tourist bus which screeched to a halt and reversed up alongside us. Excited cries of ‘Slon, slon’ poured out from the opening windows as I realised it was full of Russians. ‘Slon’ is Russian for elephant, and curiously the only word I know in that language. Tara, never one to miss an opportunity for food, worked the bus like a professional. Her long trunk dipped into every window emerging with oranges, bananas and apples, and finally a bottle of vodka which, before I could grab, she inserted into her mouth and sucked dry. Bhim reprimanded her fiercely by rapping the blunt end of the ankush on top of her bony head. This had about as much effect as hitting a hippopotamus with a lollipop, but I could see from the mournful expression on his face as he looked at the empty bottle, where his anger really lay. Luckily another was produced and we toasted each other uproariously.
‘Do dra’ (to the bottom literally, or bottoms up) came from the Russian contingent. ‘Jai Mata,’ from the Indians, a strange rumbling belch from Tara, and from the lone Englishman, ‘Up yours.’ With the aid of an elephant I had done my bit for ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’.
For a while the hot snap of the vodka warmed our bones and we swung along at a grand pace, forgetting about the rain. Bhim, looking like a cheerful, drowned water rat, sang a strange hooting melody that was muffled by the hood of the raincoat I had lent him. Tara now considered anything moving – whether a truck, a bus, a car or a cyclist – as meals on wheels and wandered, waving her trunk, into the path of these oncoming vehicles. Gokul hung on to Tara’s tail giggling squeakily, performing an odd little jig. Aditya and I discussed blisters. I struggled to keep up with him as he demonstrated what he called ‘the loping gait’ of a Maratha foot soldier.
Through the driving rain we could just make out the blurred outline of the Dhauli hills. On top of a prominent hillock, blinding white against a black sky, stood the Vishwa Shanti Stupa, the domed Peace Pagoda the Buddhists built in this century with Japanese collaboration, to commemorate the conversion to Buddhism of the great Indian Emperor Ashoka.
We took a short cut across some open fields to the River Daya, a river which was said ‘to have run red with blood’ during the horrifying slaughter of the battle of Kalinga, a massacre so enormous that Ashoka flung away his bloodstained sword and embraced the path of peace. It was on these very fields that the great battle had been fought. Under the black rainclouds, it was a bleak and eerie place. The wind moaned soulfully, pushing into us and making us shiver, less from cold than from something else, perhaps from the spirits of the one hundred thousand souls that had been slaughtered here. Tara sensed it too. She moved forward reluctantly, her trunk in the air, sensing, probing. Finally she came to a halt. Bhim tried to urge her and she let out a loud reverberating roar which I could only imagine was of terror. With her ears extended fully forward, she backed hurriedly away, then turned and fled.
‘Mummy no like here,’ Bhim yelled over his shoulder, struggling to gain control.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I muttered to Aditya.
‘God knows how many elephants perished on this spot,’ Aditya replied, shivering. ‘This is an elephants’ graveyard. After two and a half thousand years how is it possible Tara still senses that?’
Somehow I believed it possible, just as I believed the legend about the Emperor’s conversion to Buddhism.
On these fields he had stood with a bloodied sword, gloating over the carnage around him. The skies opened and the Buddha appeared in a shaft of pure white light, holding in his arms a dead child. ‘Give life back to this child,’ the Buddha had pleaded. ‘How can I perform such a miracle?’ Ashoka had asked. ‘You have taken so many lives,’ the Buddha had replied. ‘Cannot a man as noble and great as you give back just one life?’
We headed for the road that led to the Stupa where Khusto and the jeep were to meet us. There was no sign of Khusto. We waited an hour in the gathering dusk. Tara was fidgety and nervous, and her foot horribly swollen. We had to find shelter for the night and decided to head for the monastery, where the monks would certainly welcome us. We reached a wide, covered veranda with a large, shady tree conveniently near by.
‘Perfect,’ I said, jingling a brass bell attached to an iron grille. A faint smell of incense emitted from inside. There was silence. I rang again.
‘Who is there?’ called a nervous voice as a young Indian pressed his face up against the other side of the grille.
‘Could I speak to the monks?’ I asked politely.
‘They are Japanese,’ he replied.
‘Well, that’s very nice,’ I said, ‘but can I speak to them?’
‘Gone away, in Calcutta.’
‘Perhaps you could help us then. We need shelter for the night. We are all very cold, very wet and my elephant is sick.’
‘You cannot stay here,’ he stated firmly.
‘Are you a Buddhist?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Buddha Shuranam Gachami’ (may the peace of the Buddha be with you), I greeted him.
‘You cannot stay here,’ he insisted.
‘But we are weary travellers. We are not asking for much, just a roof over our heads and a tree to tether the elephant.’
‘You are a foreigner.’
‘Yes, but so what,’ I shouted, starting to get angry. ‘Buddhism is universal.’
‘You cannot stay here. Please. It is a bad place. There are no lights and murders take place.’
Aditya shrugged. We limped off into the rain and several hours later found a deserted schoolhouse in the dark. After applying a hot poultice to Tara’s leg, fashioned out of sanitary towels which had mysteriously appeared from Bhim’s pocket, we collapsed in exhaustion, oblivious of our damp misery.
Early the next morning, as we were entering Bhubaneshwar, Khusto caught up with us. Through a paan-filled mouth, which did not conceal the smell of rum, he mumbled that he had had a puncture and got lost. Aditya and I decided that Indrajit could deal with Khusto. Tara’s leg was our main concern and we pushed on to Nandankanan, which was on our route northwards, to consult the zoo vet. Bhim did not seem at all happy about our decision. Pouring scorn on the modern methods of medicine, he stated that it was he who always cured the sick elephants at the zoo. I was adamant; I could not bear to see her in such pain any longer.