Travels on my Elephant

by Mark Shand

  Waiting in the palace courtyard were the Raja, a plump, bespectacled man, and his younger brother, tall and elegant, who spoke perfect English. The Raja performed a small puja and anointed Tara’s feet. Then he pointed to a huge, ancient frangipani tree, the roots of which were embedded in the wall, almost as if they had started life together. He told us we could chain Tara there. Bhim made a closer inspection of the tree and shook his head.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said to the Raja, ‘my mahout does not think this tree is strong enough. I am afraid my elephant will destroy it.’

  However much I appealed, the Raja insisted that it was the right place, telling me that the tree was five hundred years old, sturdy and particularly auspicious to the family, making it essential that Ganesh should rest there. As we followed the Raja and his brother, I heard the crack of the first branch being snapped off contemptuously.

  Through a narrow porchway Aditya and I were led on to a spacious lawn where the Raja suggested we pitch our tents. He then disappeared to watch television and we settled down to talk with his brother.

  I was interested to hear that Seraikella and Kharsawan, a neighbouring principality, were the only two states in all of British India that were never required to pay taxes to the British. In 1793 a friendship treaty had been signed between the ruling Raja and the East India Company in recognition of Seraikella’s protection of the Company’s salt industry, by preventing salt smugglers from entering the kingdom. Aditya was more pleased to hear that the treaty was also granted in connection with the help that the Raja’s armies had supplied to the British against the ferocity of the Maratha invasion.

  Then the Raja’s brother spoke about the Chhow dance. Seraikella is famous for this dance, which is performed in honour of Lord Shiva. Now, the Chhow is almost completely organised and financed by the Raja’s brother, himself a leading dancer, who has taken his troupe to London, Paris, Rome, Munich and New York. All the dancers are male. All wear masks. The choreography requires that the dancers should express the moods through the limbs alone, since if the mask is discarded, the face then becomes the major focus of attraction. The Raja’s brother had arranged for us to see a performance – a dress-rehearsal only, he apologised – in the village of Govindpur.

  We left the boys to put up the tents and drove with the Raja’s brother to the village. In the mud courtyard of a farmer’s simple home, the dancers were dressing for the performance. Lying incongruously among the terracotta milk urns and the cows, were big steel costume trunks covered in colourful stickers from grand hotels in Italy, England, Germany and other European countries. The dancers, all clad in costumes of exquisite finery, coloured their hands and the soles of their feet with vermilion, their faces now obscured by painted plaster masks. Surrounded by cattle stalls and lit by kerosene lamps, we were entertained to a superb display of the Chhow dance. Through the movement of the feet alone, as they leapt, turned and gyrated to the rhythms of the drums and other instruments, the dancers suggested not only the more traditional legends but also brought to life their own humble, daily occupations, such as fishing and hunting.

  In the Peacock Dance, the young dancer managed to convey all the vanity of this colourful bird by moving only the upper part of his body to emphasise the extended fan of tail feathers. Another, dressed as a bee, seemed actually to hover, vibrating the sequinned wings attached to his back, as he darted around yet another dancer dressed as a flower. Sometimes, in this particular dance, the wings are made of stone, so one can imagine the stamina required.

  What impressed me most was the avid concentration of the village audience, particularly amongst the small boys watching. I have found many times, when attending a dance in other remote areas, the audiences’ concentration centred rather on the tourist, or the click of the camera. But here Aditya and I were totally ignored. The small boys’ eyes were glued to the scene in front of them and, like young critics, they applauded a fine move or criticised a mistake.

  On returning to our tents on the palace lawn, we discovered the boys in a state of considerable excitement. They were all vying for the attentions of the maidservant to the Raja’s wife, a deliciously attractive young woman, who was heartlessly teasing them. All through the evening, I had received reports of how she had given Gokul and Khusto a ‘dipper’ and then Indrajit a ‘double dipper’. Even Bhim, distracted for a change from booze and Tara, joined in, announcing firmly, to the derision of the others, that she obviously preferred older men as she had given him a ‘triple dipper’. It all sounded somewhat pornographic until Aditya discovered that a ‘dipper’ was nothing more than a wink. The whole game was later put to an end by the Raja’s wife, who banished the girl to her room.

  Early the next morning I fetched Tara for her bath. Where once had stood a five-hundred-year-old frangipani tree and a wall, now lay a mass of splintered branches and crumbling stonework, occupied by an elephant with an innocent expression on her face. I unshackled her and headed for the river. Luckily, as it was the first time I had taken her alone to bathe, she was very quiet, almost lackadaisical, and behaved impeccably, but I was still very much on guard against her sudden pranks.

  The River Kharkai was wonderfully clean and swirled its way across smooth, round boulders, having started its journey at the waterfall at Barehipani in the Simplipals. We waded into the cool, refreshing water. Tara sank slowly down on her knees, allowing me to dismount, and then rolled over happily on to her side. For an hour, I scrubbed her from the tip of her trunk to the end of her tail. Exhausted, I stretched out on her stomach and took the sun while she lay quietly, half submerged, beneath me. Around us a group of men went about their morning ablutions without concern, speaking softly to avoid disturbing us.

  I rode her back to the palace, where I found a forlorn-looking Bhim standing nervously behind the Raja, who was surveying the damage. I apologised profusely. Although I could see he was both astounded and quite upset, he assured me that it really did not matter. In another five hundred years, he told me, another tree would stand there. After all, he added, it would be something that he could tell his grandchildren.

  He garlanded Tara with flowers from the fallen frangipani tree and we left. On our way out I noticed Indrajit looking anxiously at a high window in the turret of the palace. It opened slowly and a slim hand darted out dropping a single orange marigold. Indrajit picked it up and placed it carefully behind his ear. ‘Double dipper,’ he said happily. ‘She like me the best.’

  13

  Full Control Ceremony

  WE STARTED THE steep ascent of the South Bihar highlands, leading to the great ranges of the Chota Nagpur Plateau, which eventually wind downwards to the flatlands of the Indo-Gangetic plain and our final destination of Sonepur.

  The gradient became progressively steeper, our path often blocked by boulders which had been swept down the hillsides during the monsoons. In places we were confronted by fallen trees, which Tara threw aside like twigs. In the early morning, the narrow tracks, lined with lantana bushes, became a tunnel of sparkling cobwebs filled with fat, black and yellow spiders which, being venomous, terrified me. Tara decided that a straight line was the best approach, and I spent hours wielding the ankush, brushing the spiders out of my face and then panicking as I felt something crawling down my bare back.

  The sal forests were being systematically destroyed by the local villagers, for cash and for new fields. In deep valleys between the hills, the remaining topsoil and the trapped water yielded good rice crops and, on the peaks, where only a few trees remained, ‘Jhoom’, or slash and burn cultivation, was taking place.

  We reached the summit of the South Bihar highlands and made camp, affording a fine view of the Chota Nagpur plateau, a watery blue massif in the distance. The tribals of this area, the Bhumias, are a wild and shy people, hunters who rightly claim that the forest belongs to them. Animists with long flowing hair, they wore head and arm bands made from snake vertebrae and knotted red loin-cloths. Most of them carried axes instead of bow
s and arrows, adopting an easier form of survival. They seemed out of place in this devastated landscape.

  In the middle of the night Tara trumpeted loudly. I rushed over and found her straining at her chains, rapping her trunk on the ground and then signalling with it towards some bushes. I threw a bomb into the darkness. There was a scrabbling in the undergrowth and, in the beam of a torch, I saw the bushy back of a bear charging down the hill. I felt sorry for the creature, which must have been sauntering home, self-absorbed in the custom of bears, his belly full, to doze through the daylight hours in his lair. Confronted by this enormous and enraged elephant hissing and trumpeting loudly, he probably suffered terrible indigestion.

  The next day, at a village called Biribanki we disturbed a colony of bats that blackened the sky and then returned to hang like clusters of black grapes from the trees. The villagers were disappointed to find that we were unable to shoot them as we were not carrying firearms. In this region bats are considered a great delicacy.

  We reached a deep, impassable nullah or ravine. Indrajit coaxed the jeep carefully but when it could go no further he doubled back and arranged to meet us in a few days at Sarwada. We loaded Tara with provisions and set off, glad to be rid of the jeep and its mechanical problems. Now I could concentrate totally on Tara.

  She was refusing point blank to listen to my commands and treating me with almost arrogant disdain. In a sulk I decided to walk for the rest of the day. We had entered the Bible belt and passed neat, white-washed churches in every village. Young girls with long hair gathered in pigtails and tied with pink ribbons, wearing blue skirts, white shirts, long socks and sandals, swept the courtyards with religious fervour. Two young boys fell into step beside me. Their names were Daniel and Imai, and they told me they were converts to the Anglican Church of North India. They were on their way, they said excitedly, to attend a five-day church seminar in the town of Muru.

  ‘What religion are you belonging to?’ Imai asked me politely.

  ‘Well, I suppose Church of England, Protestant, but I don’t take it very seriously. I go to church usually once a year at Christmas.’

  ‘Once a year?’ they gasped. ‘But that is very bad.’

  ‘I don’t have the time, boys,’ I continued poker-faced. ‘You see, nine months of the year I live in England where I like to beat my wife, and when I go away I chain her up and come to visit my elephant. I never beat my elephant, though.’ (Not much, I thought.) ‘All men beat their wives in England. And drink. And do other things,’ I said suggestively. ‘Would you like to go to England?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir,’ Imai replied. ‘Very much. I would like to see the beatings and drinkings and other things. In fact,’ he continued wistfully, ‘in our village we used to …’

  ‘Imai,’ Daniel said sternly. ‘That is enough. We will make a report of this at our meeting.’ As we parted company, he turned and shook my hand. ‘Sir,’ he said sombrely, ‘you may have a fit body, but you have a cracked mind.’

  Completely out of context with the surrounding landscape, high upon a hill stood a magnificent red brick church with a high circular turreted spire. It was the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, first constructed by Belgian missionaries in 1874. As the community grew and more money became available, the church was finished in splendid style in 1910.

  The padre invited us in for tea, but banned Tara, who could easily have fitted underneath the large entrance. Instead she poked her trunk through the open window while I fed her a continuous stream of biscuits. It was light and airy in the nave, where the ceiling soared two hundred feet. The vestry walls were lined with clocks. There must have been fifteen or twenty of them, all showing different times – even a cuckoo clock which would chime wheezily and shoot out a rusty spring. As we were leaving, the padre pointed to the large collection of pouches attached to long wooden poles.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ he announced in a condescending way. ‘The people are so poor here that they are unable to give money. Instead they fill the pouches with rice.’

  ‘Alleluia,’ I said, and walked out.

  We met up with the jeep near a village called Keora, where again people were celebrating the festival of Dussehra. Revellers lay unconscious at the side of the road, in ditches and the wisest in the comfort of small paddystacks. One man, more steady on his feet than most, hung on to Tara’s tail, begging for a cigarette. Aditya gave him one which he promptly tucked behind his ear. He then stumbled forward in front of her and lay down and begged for another. Bhim shifted his feet fractionally behind Tara’s ears and she reached down to grab the back of the man’s trousers and dangled him in the air. By the perplexed look on his face, he seemed unsure of whether he actually was being held aloft by an elephant or simply having a drunken hallucination. He let out a scream of terror, whereupon she deposited him gently on the side of the road.

  We pitched camp beside a wide, marshy lake filled with wild duck and surrounded by mango trees. Before eating, Bhim approached me holding something in his hand. It was the illusive mimosa plant.

  Gently I took the plant from him, staring at it reverently. So this was what I had been anxiously searching for for hundreds of miles. I was a little disappointed. I had expected something more exotic, instead of this lifeless green sprout that resembled a common weed. But, when I brushed its tiny fern-like leaves with my finger-tips, the plant became alive, the leaves closing rapidly – touch-me-not. Excitedly, I realised that in my hand I was holding power. The power that could tame an elephant. Bhim broke into my reverie: ‘Raja-sahib. Now have mimosa. Now do “full control ceremony”.’

  The full control ceremony! This was my final puja. The puja that would turn me into a mahout! I ran down to the lake, bathed myself, combed my hair and put on my dhoti and gumcha proudly. When I returned to the camp Bhim presented me with a small ball of gur, wrapped in this precious plant.

  ‘Well, I’m ready,’ I said enthusiastically waiting for directions.

  ‘This is your puja, Mark,’ Aditya said. ‘Between you and Tara. It’s entirely up to you what you pray for, but after you have finished, feed her the offering.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Just a moment.’ I dashed into the tent and retrieved my copy of The Elephant-Lore of the Hindus. Turning to the chapters on ‘Favourable marks’ and ‘Marks of characters’ I knelt down in front of Tara and whispered, ‘Oh, beloved Tara, who trumpets with a roar like clouds full of water. With sparrow-like honey colour eyes. Whose reddish trunk tip is as radiant as red lotuses. Whose back is long and curved like a bow. Whose temporal bosses are hairy, and large, like the swelling breasts of a lovely woman. With broad ears, jaw, navel and pudenda. With copper coloured lip and palate. You, that are beautiful, who has an odour like the white water lily, sandalwood, orange tree and lotus. Whose face beams and who has the cry of the koil [cuckoo]. You are blessed with the character of the god. O princess you are worthy of a king.’

  ‘What did you recite this time?’ Aditya asked. ‘Humpty Dumpty?’

  I ignored him and solemnly placed my offering of gur into Tara’s mouth. She rolled it around inside for a moment narrowing her eyes at me, as if making a decision. Satisfied, she swallowed it, and reached out to touch my face with her trunk. Then she farted loudly. By the terms of the puja, the moment she swallowed that gur, she had accepted me as her master.

  ‘Got you, you old bag,’ I said triumphantly. ‘Now you’ll listen to me. Just you wait and see.’

  I sat down for a while and watched her. I now felt I knew her inside out. Immediately she confronted me again with my own ignorance, proceeding to do something so clever, charming and human that it left me speechless with admiration.

  She rummaged amongst her fodder and selected a suitable branch. Holding it in her trunk, she stripped the leaves away and began peeling the bark back. For a moment I thought she was simply going to feed. Instead after discarding the bark, she broke the branch into four separate lengths and laid them out in front of her. She selected one and sharpe
ned it to a point against her chains. Satisfied with the shape, she began to clean methodically between her toenails like a manicurist, digging out the dirt, then wiping the tip of the stick in the grass. Her beautification complete, she blew spittle on her toenails and buffed them with the end of her trunk until they gleamed blackly. I later found out from Bhim that there are sweat glands between an elephant’s toes. It is essential they are kept clean to prevent clogging.

  Male elephants ‘in musth’ have been known to use the same process to clear the temporal glands, which can become blocked with discharge. On occasions, certain rogue elephants that have been shot have been found to have a broken piece of twig jammed tight, like a cork, into both glands. Some experts surmised that they had been driven mad by this and, unable to remove the blockage, had turned aggressive.

  The next morning, my confidence unlimited, I decided to attempt the expert’s way of mounting an elephant – by the trunk. With a certain panache, I grabbed both her ears, placed a foot solidly on her trunk and shouted authoritatively ‘Utha! Utha!’ I don’t recall much about the next few seconds – just a slight sensation of air passing quickly under my lunghi. Then to my surprise I found myself sitting firmly on her neck.

  ‘You see,’ I said triumphantly to Aditya. ‘That’s due to the mimosa. I’m now the master.’

  ‘Except that you are sitting on her back to front,’ he replied acidly.

  ‘That’s just a small matter. I’ll correct it in time. You see, I had my eyes shut. The most important thing,’ I said smugly, ‘is that I did it. You’re going to try it next.’

  Accompanied by Gokul, we plodded down to bathe in the lake. Wading into the shallows, Tara obligingly lifted her leg so that I could climb off.