Travels on my Elephant

by Mark Shand

  By now a few more elephants had arrived. In front of us was a large tusker. To our right, attended by two mahouts, stood an old female with two terrible wounds in her flanks oozing a greenish pus. The owner, an overly helpful man from Orissa, explained that she had received these injuries while working in his cement factory. He was here to sell or exchange her for another. Looking at the suffering of this friendly, docile elephant I vowed again that I would never let Tara be maltreated.

  Behind us, carpenters and builders were busily erecting marquees, fenced in by impregnable bamboo enclosures. These were for the different sects of religious saddhus who would soon be arriving. Our little set-up was somewhat dwarfed by the opulence of these encampments, particularly the kitchen facilities. Huge cauldrons and stacks of tin platters were being unloaded and carried inside, in readiness for the great feast on Kartik Purnima, which would feed thousands of devotees.

  Further down the Haathi Bazaar rich zamindars had been allocated the prime sites, where entire canvas villages had been set up, in front of which stood their richly caparisoned elephants. Behind, surrounded by armed chauffeurs, their cars were parked, highly polished vehicles with blacked out windows; so the arrival of Don and Indrajit in the minibus added a certain cachet to our humble enclosure.

  Already our presence had caused a stir and groups of people had started to gather outside. It was easy to discern between those who were merely curious and the professionals. The curious, straining on tiptoes, peered over the ‘kanat’ to catch a glimpse of the firinghee mahout. The professionals, tough, bow-legged men with sun-blackened faces and shrewd eyes, sauntered casually past Tara inspecting her with a well-assumed air of indifference. They would stop to have a few words with Bhim, hoping to glean a few titbits of information on pedigree and price. They would then report back to their bosses. These momentary inspections would take place continuously over the next few days. Unlike the hustling West, where fast decisions are the name of the game, a hasty deal is considered undignified in the East, and a strict etiquette is adhered to.

  Aditya and I were worried about Bhim. He was not his usual pragmatic, cheerful self. His spirit had left him and he wandered around lackadaisically. Worst of all, he seemed to have lost all interest in Tara. Perhaps it was due to exhaustion or to thinking that once he had reached the mela his duties would be less arduous and he would have time to enjoy the fun. In fact, we eventually realised, he was simply overawed. Used to the relative quietness and routine of a zoo, he had suddenly been thrown into the lions’ den, the ‘Newmarket’ of the elephant world, where true professionalism counted and one’s knowledge was put to the ultimate test and carefully scrutinised. He was out of his depth and had lost his confidence.

  Tara, too, was affected. Whereas she should have been in her element, as carts drawn by white bullocks continuously replenished her larder, she stood listlessly, a look of total resignation on her face. I began to think this was all too familiar to her. She had been here before, I realised, and my heart stopped.

  At Gau-Dhuli (the hour of the cow dust), that quiet magic moment just after sunset, when the sky shimmered gold between the branches of the mango trees through the dust thrown up by the elephants, a group of men entered our encampment. Their faces showed a certain relief as they spotted me. The spokesman stepped forward and formally introduced himself.

  ‘Mr Shand,’ he said, ‘we are the proprietors of the Shoba Nautanki [the folk theatre]. Thanking goodnews we have found you in time. Would you do us the honour of inaugurating our first show tomorrow? Already we have sent out this gentleman in a jeep to find you’ – he pointed to a man who looked both exhausted and exasperated – ‘and he has been travelling for five days. You will enjoy the show. There are many girls. Our theatre,’ he continued proudly, ‘has the reputation of the most beautiful women. But first we would like you to garland the statue of our local freedom fighter and then we will proceed to the theatre. Our last guest of honour was a famous dacoit. Now it is appropriate that the first English mahout should open the show. We will collect you tomorrow afternoon.’

  That evening, when the muddy water was turning crimson from the rays of the setting sun, we bathed Tara in the Gandak, approached from a steep muddy bank, down which she slid on her bottom, like a child on a toboggan. She then proceeded to queue-barge into the elephant-filled shallows, much to the annoyance of the other mahouts, who were waiting their turn patiently. It was dark by the time Tara had finished her ablutions. Beneath us, elephants lay motionless, like giant prehistoric boulders. Then, as if infused suddenly by some unseen force, they erupted out of the water and lumbered towards the bank. Under the stars, we joined a silent cavalcade of returning elephants, this silence only broken by the soft shuffle of their feet, the swish of their tails and the flapping of their ears. An old mahout, riding the lead tusker, broke into song, swelling louder and louder as others joined in, then echoing quietly away into the blackness of the Gandak running swiftly beside us. I was by now so much part of this ancient brotherhood that my other world seemed like a dream as I felt the coolness of Tara’s back beneath me.

  Indrajit had built a blazing fire against the chill of the November night. We huddled round it, drinking with the owner of a big tusker. He was a landowner, but unlike most of the other zamindars, he himself rode and looked after his elephants. He was an honest straightforward man whom I felt we could trust, with a vast knowledge and love of elephants that bordered on passion. His family had always kept elephants. He remembered, as a child, coming to the mela with his father and counting over a thousand. The bridge is always closed on the day of Kartik Purnima and he remembered the latecomers trying to swim across the river. Due to the strong current, they had been washed away, mahouts and elephants drowning.

  He admitted quite openly that his tusker was dangerous and only he could control it. However, unlike almost all the owners in the mela, he did not use drugs to quieten his elephant. There were now over a hundred elephants here, but he told us that Tara was the best he had seen so far. To an expert, she was obviously naturally fed and of a good temperament. He was not surprised that we were thinking of asking two lakhs for her.

  ‘Bide your time,’ he advised us, ‘for her that is not an exorbitant price’ – adding that if we needed any assistance he would be glad to give it.

  In the middle of the night I was woken by the fierce shouts of ‘Mahout!! mahout!!’ – and running outside our encampment I found Tara, her stakes uprooted, about to escape. Bhim, who was supposed to be on watch, was fast asleep in a pile of sugar cane at the side of the kanat. I shook and reprimanded him. He apologised sheepishly and promised it would not happen again. But it was too late, the incident had been noticed. An unattended elephant, as we had been told, is an unforgivable crime in the strict mahout law of the mela and we had, as it were, lost face.

  18

  Mela Madness

  A WOKEN EARLY BY the urgent shouts of mahouts and the chanting of saddhus, I walked to the side of the kanat and peered over. Though relatively empty last night, it was now as if an army had moved in quietly during the night and surrounded our encampment. The orchard was alive with elephants, swaying, feeding and dusting, while mahouts, wrapped in blankets, squatted beside fires, watching them carefully over rims of little terracotta bowls containing their morning tea. Arcades of hastily constructed stalls, like mini-bazaars, had mysteriously sprung up, selling paan, spices, food, cheap jewellery, clothing and medicines.

  Behind us, like flowers in a desert, huddled little groups of families. When the sun rose, the women stretched languidly, turning bejewelled arms, ankles and tips of noses and ears bright gold as the first rays filtered through the smoke-filled air. Elephants ridden proudly by young well-muscled mahouts, their teeth a brilliant white against the black of their faces, raced each other down to the river. Like picadors, holding an ankush in both hands behind their elephants’ ears, they showed off their skills and their mounts to the best effect. To the casual observer it would
seem like a game but it was, in fact, in deadly earnest. Prospective buyers would be watching carefully.

  Lallan Singh arrived with an electrician who ran a cable up one of the trees in our camp to connect a large high-wattage bulb. At night it would effectively illuminate Tara and, we hoped, keep the boys awake. I watched shamefacedly, but Lallan Singh consoled me. Three other elephants, he told me, had escaped during the night. It was only a precaution.

  Our first buyer offered 70,000 rupees for Tara. This man, a magnificent actor, almost brought tears to my eyes. He told me of the wonderful elephant he had owned for thirty years, which he only rented out on very auspicious occasions. Just last week, tragedy struck when he was away on business. He had instructed his mahout to take the elephant to one of these very special occasions. The mahout, a lazy man, did not carry out his orders and when he returned he gave the mahout a sound beating. A week later the mahout disappeared, not before he had poisoned the elephant, which had just died. I declined his offer.

  After Tara returned from her bath, I went shopping. From one of the many stalls specialising in elephant decorations, I bought her a beautiful brass neck bell attached to a bright crimson silken cord. Anklets made of bells and strips of silken material to hang from ears and tusks were also available, but I wanted to keep her looking simple, elegant, like a beautiful woman at a ball, wearing a plain dress, unadorned, except for one astonishing piece of jewellery. She did not need decoration.

  I employed a specialist in elephant painting. After drawing a line that sharply demarcated the blackness of her oiled crown from the natural grey of her skin, he created with simple coloured chalks of purple, yellow, white and blue, a series of flowers and lotuses on her ears, face and trunk. In the centre, between her eyes, he traced a dazzling star. Taking down the Union Jack, we draped it over Tara’s shoulders and when prospective buyers approached, Bhim and Gokul would dramatically draw it back.

  As Don and Aditya had disappeared earlier to take photographs, I set off through the Haathi Bazaar, leaving Tara with the boys. My nostrils were instantly filled with the evocative smells of India – spices, incense, the heavy scent of the tribal women, mixed with the more pungent odour of urine and excrement, and I found myself thinking I never wanted to leave. Passing down the elephant lines, mahouts and owners alike called me over – not out of curiosity but because I was part of them, an elephant man, inexorably entwined with their way of life. I sat cross-legged by little fires and shared bowls of tea and littis, small balls of hot dough roasted over the ashes. I inspected their elephants, checking their backs for tell-tale sores and scars, and chuckled disapprovingly when, opening their mouths, I found patches of black on their pink tongues.

  Easily now, I mounted the elephants by way of their trunks and tusks. I sat caressing their ears, and barked commands to make them sit. I watched a big male having part of its tusk sawn off, for a legal sale of ivory. The mahout first carefully measured the distance from eye to lip. After marking a spot which avoided cutting into the nerve, he sawed through it quickly. In India ivory fetches about 5,000 rupees a kilo. Magically, the tusk will grow back, just like a finger nail.

  At one encampment stood a huge tusker, excessive in its ornamentation. Richly caparisoned in red brocade, bells hung round its neck and feet, yellow and red silken scarves dangled from its ears and tusks and its tail was braided with silver tinsel. The beast swayed from side to side continuously, its piggy little eyes transfixing everyone who passed, with a stare of pure venom. An old mahout warned me to keep my distance. This was a dangerous elephant, he told me. In the last ten days it had killed three people.

  I counted a hundred and ninety elephants; last year there had been more than three hundred and next year probably there would be even fewer. It is inevitable that this way of life will, in time, die out.

  Leaving the Haathi Bazaar I moved on to the other animal markets. For the first time, the sheer size of the great mela struck me. At the horse lines I watched a small snow-white arab, its pink eyes heavily kohled to highlight their dullness, its tail dyed the colours of the rainbow, being put through its paces. The rider urged him along at a furious pace, then suddenly pulled him dead on his hocks, whirling him about to perform a kind of ‘pas’ or, in military terms, ‘marking time’. The horses were even more elaborately decorated than the elephants. Some sported headbands worked in gold thread, others had their legs encircled with brass bangles. One wore a necklace of silver and gold, containing verses from the Koran. They came from Rajasthan, the Punjab, Afghanistan and even Australia, watched over carefully by their dealers, old men with faces creased like parchment paper, shrewd all-knowing eyes wrinkled against the glare of the sun.

  Beyond the horses, stretching for almost two miles, were paddocks crowded with cows, bullocks and buffaloes. Finally, I reached the bull pens, known locally as the ‘jewel market’. Apart from the elephants, the bulls fetch the highest prices.

  Making my way back to Tara I entered the shopping centres, a maze of streets lined with booths, overshadowed by the giant Ferris wheel of the fun fair and the Big Top of the circus arena. A crowd surrounded a pair of chained, moth-eaten bears. Goaded by their keeper, they shuffled miserably from paw to paw in time to a disco song. For five rupees you could dance with them.

  A discordant screeching announced the bird market. Hyacinthine blue macaws from South America sat quietly on their perches, their feathers ruffled, swivelling their heads suddenly, blinking their baleful eyes. Nepalese mynahs chuckled and laughed, and a cage of little rice birds, so gaudy in colour that the owner admitted they had been dyed, hopped nervously from side to side. Outside, a shiny black mynah loaded and fired a miniature cannon, and for ten rupees would play cards.

  The inevitable snake-charmers squatted at the sides of the streets, playing their flutes tunelessly to serpents swaying from wicker baskets. One snake-charmer, more enterprising than the rest, advertised ‘a fight to the death’ between a mongoose and a cobra. I hoped he had an unending supply of cobras, for inevitably the mongoose would win. Or perhaps he waited until he had attracted a large enough crowd to make it worthwhile.

  Jugglers ferried their way through the crowds performing with extraordinary skill considering all the pushing and shoving. As I pushed and shoved I noticed an exceptionally tall man with piercing eyes bearing down on me. I tried to move, but it was as if I was hypnotised. Dipping a long large finger in a small jar of vermilion, he stabbed it against my forehead and demanded five rupees. I christened him ‘dot man’ and over the next few days, whatever preventative measures I took, he always managed to get me. Once, seeing him approach I slipped behind Aditya as the great finger shot out like a sword. I thought I had escaped. Aditya, obviously a seasoned mela veteran, simply ducked and I received it on the end of my nose.

  ‘Your teeth pulled for only 20 rupees. Get a new set. A new look.’ Dentists did a roaring trade from padded chairs operating foot drills. Naive patients writhed in agony as the dentists dug into mouths with what looked like pairs of pliers. In intervals between the shops bold placards hung advertising eating houses, their cuisine varied to suit the tastes of every caste and creed. The smell reminded me of the observation of the old planter who wrote in his Reminiscences of Behar: ‘I cannot say the dishes look tempting while the smell of bad ghee makes you wish you had put a little extra eau-de-Cologne on your handkerchief before you left your tent.’

  Passing brassière shops and signs advertising ‘Genuine Siamese Twins’ I entered the Bombay Bazaar. The smell of bad ghee disappeared in a wave of perfume. Here was everything for the lady. Women, young and old, queued up at scent booths, in which men sat cross-legged behind a thousand different bottles. After twirling cotton-wool on to long silver sticks, they dipped them in and dabbed them on the backs of waiting hands. Glass-bangle sellers displayed their incandescent wares on long tall poles. They fought a losing battle to prevent their eager clients from shattering fragile merchandise as the women pulled and pushed them up and down thei
r arms.

  In large mirrors, the ladies coquettishly painted on different hues of cosmetics and lipstick and applied kohl to their eyes, while others tried on gold nose and ear ornaments. Baskets filled with brilliant hues of sindoor (the powder used to make the ‘tikka’) sat in rows of tiny coloured mountains and gorgeous bolts of gauze, silk and cotton to be made into saris, fluttered like butterfly wings as they were gently unfurled.

  As I moved on, persistent salesmen pressed me to buy their products; brasswork from Benares, inlaid boxes and trays and miniature Taj Mahals from Agra, enamel objects from Jaipur, beautifully embroidered shawls from Kashmir, and in one rather modern shop a Hell’s Angel’s leather biker’s jacket and a pair of co-respondent brogues.

  The ingenuity of the beggars knew no bounds. Beside a man sitting near the temple lay upright in the dust what appeared to be a human head – and it was just that. He had buried his colleague up to the neck and rubbed his face with paste to give it the colour of a corpse. Another simply walked around naked from the waist down, with a large padlock clamped through the end of his penis. Yet another had buried himself head downwards to the waist and was managing to breathe through the open ends of two bamboo tubes that just broke the surface of the ground. Unfortunately, he had neglected to hire an assistant. Passersby liberally helped themselves to his begging bowl.