ON OUR WAY into Bhubaneshwar, we passed many young people beating drums, singing and carrying papier-mâché images – some gigantic, some tiny and, oddly, all pink in colour, for immersion in the river. It was Ganesh Chaturti, the last of the days dedicated to Ganesh, and their songs called upon the elephant-headed god to come back early next year. But the melancholic farewells were already alternating with excited hymns anticipating the god’s return and it seemed to me that their continuity was like India itself, where the end of any event is always pre-empted by the birth of the next. The crowds turned, and it was as if they had found a new festival. To see an elephant on the day of Ganesh Chaturti was auspicious. A brass band, featuring trombone and trumpet players and a child dwarfed by a huge drum, joined us and we marched triumphantly into Bhubaneshwar like a circus parade.
At one time over seven thousand temples dominated the skyline of Bhubaneshwar, appropriate for a city that is called the ‘Abode of the Gods’. It had started to rain as we approached the temple of Lord Lingaraj (the Lord of the Universe), the largest and most impressive of the temples in Bhubaneshwar, its vaulting spire soaring to a height of one hundred and sixty feet. The priests, seeing a foreigner, uncoiled themselves like pythons from wet stone entrances and slid menacingly towards me to extract money. But the sight of an elephant, or rather the sight of a ‘firinghee’ with an elephant, caused a clash of conscience; they didn’t know whether to give to the elephant or to take from me. Being businessmen, they did neither.
At a busy roundabout a smiling policeman wearing a smart white solar topee hat and a cape saluted, blew furiously on his whistle and stopped the traffic to let us pass.
‘Why be walking, sir?’ shouted a rickshaw driver. ‘I will be taking you anywhere for half price.’
‘Patna? In Bihar?’ I shouted back.
‘Not being a problem, sir. Please be seated.’
‘But it is at least seven hundred miles away.’
‘Then I would surely die. Good morning,’ and he pedalled away, his thin legs pumping furiously.
Indrajit and Khusto drove up in the jeep. We were now back to full strength. We instructed the two drivers to go ahead to Nandankanan to inform the vet of Tara’s predicament. To rest her leg, we stopped at the Hati Gumpha cave (elephant cave) in the Udayagiri hills. Two stone elephants stand guard at the entrance. Inside, engraved on huge stone slabs, is the record of the reign of King Kharavela, the greatest monarch of Orissa, ruler of the mighty Kalinga Empire. Known as the ‘King of Bliss, His Majesty the Mighty Conqueror, Sri Kharavela, the Possessor of Invincible Armies’, it was he who pursued the Greek king, Demetrius, out of India. He came to the throne when he was fifteen years old and, in the twelfth year of his reign, led his vast army of elephants, cavalry and chariots towards north-west India, striking ‘terror into the people of Magadha while making his horses and elephants drink from the Ganges’.
I liked the sound of this gentleman; perhaps it was just the name or perhaps it was that I, mounted on an elephant, was now firmly in the tracks of the King of Bliss. Like his royal elephant, Tara would drink from the waters of the Ganges.
As if to seal this bond, Tara’s trunk suddenly snaked out and circled around the stone trunk of a guardian elephant. In elephant language this is the ultimate gesture of friendship.
At Nandankanan the vet made a perfunctory examination of Tara’s leg and prescribed a week’s course of strong antibiotics.
‘How do I give an elephant pills?’ I asked. ‘In her food?’
‘No, no, no,’ he replied. ‘This is a most serious infection. The course must be administered intramuscularly.’
‘You mean injections?’ I was terrified. ‘I’ve got to give her injections! Oh, my God! I hate needles at the best of times. How on earth do I give an elephant a jab?’
‘It is easy. Come,’ he said. ‘We will give her the first one now.’
I wished I had the confidence shown by J. H. Williams in his book Elephant Bill:
One cut out all the fuss and just walked up boldly to the animal, gave it a good smack with the left hand and exclaimed, ‘Hello, old chap.’ With the right one thrust the needle through the hide and squirted in the vaccine. Then one gave it another smack and turned away, exclaiming, ‘Come on,’ to the next elephant. Elephants will bear a great deal of pain patiently and appear to understand that it is being inflicted for their own good, but they will only put up with it when the operator is full of confidence himself and feels he is making a good job of it, for an elephant can sense the absence of self confidence quicker than any other animal in the world.
‘Can’t you give her the first one?’ I implored the vet, as I held a needle the size of a rocket-launcher in my shaking hand.
‘No,’ he replied firmly, ‘you must learn immediately. Remember, plunge it in right up to the hilt. Once firmly in place, you can attach the plunger.’
‘Which cheek?’ I asked, nervously, standing behind Tara’s enormous bottom. At that moment she turned her head and gave me a curious look.
‘Either one. Whichever you feel most comfortable with,’ he said airily.
After marking a spot in my mind I shut my eyes and plunged in the needle like a dart. With a squeal of rage she shot to her feet and trundled away with a broken hypodermic needle wobbling precariously out of her backside.
‘That was very incorrect,’ the vet remarked needlessly. ‘It has to be a firm strong blow. Place the needle in straight. Now, we will try again.’
Tara was retrieved and made to sit. She gave me a look of pure venom. I repeated the process, this time with success, and even managed to pump the sticky fluid in efficiently.
‘Repeat every evening for the next six days. You will soon find that she will become used to it. In fact, she will be grateful.’
Of this I was not convinced, especially when Bhim, who had been watching with distaste, came up and whispered in my ear. ‘Raja-sahib,’ he said slyly, ‘Mummy in pain, Mummy know who give pain. Mummy cross with Raja-sahib. Better Daddy give injection. Raja-sahib hide. When injection over, give Mummy gur. Mummy then like Raja-sahib,’ he smiled, winking at me.
As we were about to leave, after adding to our equipment a large box of hypodermic needles, syringes and glass phials, the vet pointed to two raised and hardened circles of skin on each side of her backside. ‘You know what those are?’ he said. ‘Those are the marks made by the Lohatias, the men who in the olden days, when hunting wild elephants with lassoes, would hang on to the crupper ropes and spur their elephants on with a short club faced with iron spikes when extra acceleration was needed. This type of elephant capture was called Mela Shikar and the type of elephant used was known as a Koonki. They had to be very fast elephants.’
Looking at her now, as she stuffed her face with paddy, I wondered if she could catch a bus, let alone a wild elephant.
‘Mela Shikar is now of course banned,’ he continued, ‘but it took place in north-east India, mainly in Assam. So you now have an idea where she might come from.’
Miraculously, Tara’s leg already appeared to be improving. She could bend it more and we moved at a good pace over a wide, sandy, dry river basin in the shadow of an unfinished bridge. In the distance we could see the outline of Cuttack, the old capital of Orissa which, due to its unfortunate geographical position, wedged on a spit of land between two huge rivers, had been unable to expand. The capital was transferred to Bhubaneshwar in 1948. It was over one of these rivers that we now crossed.
Trucks and buses thundered perilously close. I had not adjusted to the fact that I was travelling with an elephant rather than a dog that might slip its lead, and I became foolishly anxious that Tara might disappear under the wheels of an oncoming vehicle. To my left, over a railway bridge, the Madras–Calcutta express train chugged imperiously. We were moving faster.
Cuttack was buzzing with an air of excitement, for the Russian circus was in town. Minibuses darted in and out of the traffic, their sides emblazoned with posters of svelte young ladies dressed in scanty sequinned outfits, balancing with arms outstretched on top of charging horses. Lions and tigers snarled from advertising hoardings and bicyclists with tannoys attached to the handlebars of their rusting machines excitedly described the entertainments of the Big Top. Pale-faced Russian artistes mingled with the crowd, and the circus strongman had managed to squeeze into a rickshaw’s tiny seat. On his knee sat a dwarf. Tara and I greeted them all cheerfully but were met with a suspicious silence.
In the main square, fenced off, stood a marble statue of a splendid turbanned man with a beautifully refined face. Around his neck hung a garland of marigolds. He was the Maharaja of Paralakhemedi, a popular figure, responsible for making Orissa a state in its own right in 1936, separate from Bihar.
I was taken to meet the owner of Samaj, the oldest newspaper in Orissa. A venerable old man with exquisite manners presented Aditya and me with a wooden deity, and around our shoulders wrapped colourful appliqué-work blankets. He clasped my hand. ‘Traditions are dying fast. What you are doing is an inspiration to the youth of Orissa.’ Then he asked if I needed money. I was astonished by this genuine gesture of kindness.
On the outskirts of Cuttack we passed the ruins of the Barabati Fort. It was built in the thirteenth century and once consisted of nine courts, the first of which housed the elephants, the camels and the horses. All that remained was a crumbling stone entrance and a wide moat.
‘This place has seen some action,’ I remarked to Aditya. ‘The Moghuls didn’t behave too well, but it was your lot that really went to town.’
The invasions of Orissa had begun in AD 1205 with the purpose of securing the superior breed of elephants for which Orissa was famous. The most remarkable foray of all was made in 1360 by the Delhi Emperor Firoz Shah, who cut through the jungles of Orissa, crossed the Mahanadi river and occupied this fort, from which the King had fled. Here Firoz Shah spent some time hunting elephants, and when the terrified King sent envoys to negotiate for peace he replied, ironically, that he had only come to hunt and was amazed that the King had taken flight. The embarrassed Oriya King sent him twenty elephants and promised to do so annually as a tribute. Only then did the Emperor return to Delhi. Invaded and occupied by Mohammedans for five hundred years, the state of Orissa was plunged into further despair by the arrival of the Marathas.
‘During the famine of 1770,’ I reminded Aditya, ‘when people were dying in their hundreds of thousands, you went completely berserk and, it is recorded, “raged like wild beasts across the country”.’
‘Tell me more,’ Aditya said enthusiastically.
‘It’s not a nice story, but I must say you were efficient, in your extortionist greed.’
‘Well there you are,’ he replied. ‘Nothing better than an efficient army.’
‘Fortunately for Orissa your efficiency barely lasted a century. The British stormed the fort and the Maratha yoke was finally broken.’
‘Bloody British,’ he remarked with a laugh. ‘Always poking their noses in where they’re not wanted.’
Over the next few days we headed slowly northwards, gradually entering into rural Orissa, camping in government rest-houses and schools to avoid the discomfort of wet nights under canvas. The monsoons were still in full flow. Tara’s foot had healed almost totally due to the injections that Aditya now performed expertly each evening. Bhim’s sly plan didn’t seem to be working as she paid rather more attention to Aditya than me. I was convinced that the vet was right; Tara was grateful to Aditya for healing her pain and they had become firm friends.
In preparation for my imminent training as a rookie mahout, Bhim had given Aditya a list of basic elephant commands which Aditya had written down for me phonetically. Mercifully there were only seventeen of them, not eighty-four as I had been told, and unless I learnt Hindi they just about covered everything. In the evenings, Aditya and I would wring out our wet, bloody socks and attempt to patch up the raw holes with Elastoplast, while I practised my commands.
Agit (Ah-git) – Forward/go
Peechay (Pee.Chay, like the name) – Back
Chai ghoom (like chime, like goon) – Right
Chi (like cheese) – Left
Chhee (like cheese again, but longer) – Dirty
Dhuth (like Dutch without the ‘ch’) – Stop, the most important command, which I never quite managed to master
Maar Thode (Ma, toad) – Break
A Dhur (A like Eh, Dur like Durbar) – Get this/get that
Oopar Dhur (Oo, pa, dur) – Reach up/grab
Mylay (My, lay) – Get up
Baitho (Buy, toe) – Down/get down on your knees
Theeray (Tea, ray) – Lie down/roll over on side
Theylay Chhup (Tea, lay, chap) – Drink
Bey (Bay) – Bitch
Lay lay (same) – Eat/take food/open your mouth. This one was pointless. Tara needed no encouragement
Utha (Oo, ta) – Lift
Bowl Bowl (same) – Speak/say thank you
This is easy, I thought to myself smugly, and was soon word perfect.
‘I’ve learnt them,’ I told Aditya. ‘Test me.’ I had hardly reached the ‘Pee’ of ‘Peechay’ before he exploded.
‘For goodness sake, Mark. This is an elephant, not a dog. You sound exactly like that tweedy lady on British television who stomps around in green wellington boots saying “Sit. Walkies. Good doggy.”’
‘Barbara Woodhouse,’ I interrupted crossly, ‘was jolly successful.’
‘Well, I can tell you my friend, this is a different ball game. Rather than speaking like some la-di-da debutante, put some life into it – “Dhuth,”’ he roared.
Tara dug her front legs in and stopped dead. A mahout with lesser experience than Bhim would have fallen off. As it was, he lurched forward and buried his head in Tara’s neck, almost swallowing the cigarette he had clamped between his teeth.
‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ I said humbly. ‘I think I need a bit more practice.’
We stopped that night beside a lake surrounded by mist-veiled hills. For a change it was eerily silent; there were no people and only the soft ‘clock clock’ of wooden bells attached to the necks of the grazing cattle and the ‘pit-a-pat’ of something being thrown on top of our tents disturbed us. Tara, chained to a tree behind us, enthusiastically scooped up trunkfuls of earth and flung it over her shoulder, giving herself a mud bath. She soon resembled a giant molehill, but the coating of mud was an effective deterrent against the insects that were annoying her.
It was an evening of an old mahout’s tales. Whether fact or fiction it did not seem to matter, and as the rum took effect Bhim, with his eyes closed, began to talk, not for our benefit particularly, or to anyone – just an old man’s reminiscences because the time was right. He spoke contemptuously about the new methods of caring for elephants and of the people who claimed to understand them, but did not; of how it had been he who had been sent to capture a tusker rampaging in the jungles, causing havoc and destruction among the villages and to the people’s crops, after all modern methods of capture had failed. The tusker had not been a wild elephant but a domesticated animal that had gone wild after being deserted by its mahout, probably a mendicant like Rajpath. Bhim had been sent for and had performed an old puja taught to him by his father, cutting the ear of another elephant, taking a little blood and offering it to a deity of Ganesh. Then he had been able to approach the tusker and within five days, soothing and comforting the distressed animal, had ridden him back to the zoo. He spoke of crossing the Simlipals, now a huge wildlife sanctuary, as a child, on top of a bus. The bus had passed under a rocky escarpment and he had felt hot breath and seen a flash of yellow hair as a tiger launched itself on to the bus and carried away the man sitting next to him. And he spoke of how the Maharaja of Mayurbhanj had presented the British Collector, who was returning to England, with a baby elephant; how the little calf had been hoisted by a ‘big machine’ on to the ship; how in return the Collector had presented the Maharaja with a thousand and one balloons of all different colours, shaped like animals, and of his amazement and delight seeing them float into the air around the ship as it slowly slid from its berth.
Later that night I was awoken by a soft tap on my shoulder and a rum-laced whisper in my ear.
‘Come, quietly, Raja-sahib, you look Mummy sleeping.’
I crept outside and there, like a grey boulder, Tara lay quietly on her side, her trunk curled around her neck emitting a wonderfully soothing sound like bubbles escaping from a diver’s mouthpiece.
‘Mummy snoring,’ he whispered. ‘Mummy happy.’