“I once had to shoot a tusker known locally as the Gravedigger who always buried his victims,” said Mr Choudhury. “He would sometimes carry them for up to a mile, and if you moved the body, he would come looking for it.”
♦
Rajesh and Ashok were assigned the task of taking the farmer’s body to Mole’s headquarters while the rest of us went after the rogue. It was mid-afternoon and the shadows in the forest were growing longer. The latest murder had left the elephant squad tense and jittery, and we proceeded with caution. Every bamboo grove now appeared as a potential hiding-place, every blind corner a possible trap. Sudden sounds startled us – a deer jumping out from behind a thicket, a crow’s caw, a ripened mango falling from a tree. Only Mr Choudhury seemed unconcerned as he walked ahead of the kunkis, his Magnum rifle held tightly across his chest.
What was the hunter thinking now, I wondered. Did he value the life of an elephant above that of a human being? How many more lives was he prepared to sacrifice before doing the Forest Department’s bidding?
As I considered his motives we came to a clearing where the elephant’s tracks turned south. At first, the squad imagined that the rogue had taken a detour. However, after a mile or so, it became clear that, rather than heading north into the sanctuary of Arunachal Pradesh as Mr Choudhury had hoped, the elephant was making for the edge of the rain forest.
Clearly disappointed, the hunter called a halt, kneeling down on the earth and running the palm of his hand over an impression of one of the elephant’s footprints. For a few minutes, he seemed lost in thought, his eyes closed as if he were making a wish. By now, it must have dawned on him that beyond the forest to the south lay more villages and homes. Once the rogue reached the area, he would wreak death and destruction – unless, of course, he could be stopped.
The hunter opened his eyes and straightened up. I could see the anguish on his face as he stared ahead. He sighed deeply. Then, at last, he appeared to make up his mind on his course of action. Standing up, he turned and faced the elephant squad.
“I have given him a chance and he has shown that he is a truly bad elephant. Therefore, I have no choice but to award him capital punishment,” he announced, the resolve sounding in his voice. “We must catch up with him – and quickly.”
Surprisingly, I was beginning to agree. Just three days earlier, the thought of killing this elephant had filled me with regret; I had felt nothing but pity for him. Now it was clear that he was out of control and would go on killing more and more people. I had become more comfortable with the idea of Mr Choudhury completing his contract.
However, the hunter still had misgivings about shooting the rogue and hoped providence would intervene.
“Do you know the story about the man who tried to teach a horse to talk?” he asked, as we set off once again.
I shook my head.
“Well, there was once a man who was sentenced to death. But as he was about to have his head cut off, he pleaded with the King to be given one more chance. ‘Give me a year and I will teach a horse to talk.’
“The King was intrigued by this idea and granted his wish. Afterwards, a friend said to this man: ‘You’re mad. You’ll never teach a horse to talk and you’ll be killed.’
“But the man replied: ‘Don’t be so sure. A lot can happen in a year. The King might die. I might die. The kingdom may be invaded. Or the horse might actually learn to talk.’”
“So, what’s the moral?” I asked.
“No moral. I just hope something intervenes,” replied the hunter. “The elephant might still disappear, we might find a way of helping him – or, if it is his time…well, then, it is his time. Only God knows.”
He sighed, looking pensive, and for the first time I began to feel sorry for him.
♦
The squad tried to make up for lost time. Churchill and Chander urged the kunkis to move faster, driving them on with harsh, uncompromising commands, and we began to make good progress. But by the time we reached the edge of the forest, we still lagged behind the rogue whose tracks disappeared into a river from which they did not emerge.
Mole, who was growing frantic, ordered everyone to fan out along the banks and search for tracks. But it was now dusk, and as hard and as long as we looked, we found no clues to indicate the direction the elephant had taken. Clearly, he had walked along the river-bed, thereby masking his trail.
“This elephant is really beginning to piss me off!” shouted Mole. “The son of a bitch is going to kill someone again! I’m calling in more guards.”
He got on the walkie-talkie and ordered his remaining men back at headquarters to meet us in the nearest village. From there, he planned to send search parties into the surrounding area.
“He’s bound to show himself soon,” said Mole.
Churchill agreed.
“This hathi just like Mrs Mahout,” he joked, endeavouring to raise everyone’s spirits as we plodded towards the village. “Like her he is very angry and has big stomach. Soon he will need food, no? He will be crop raiding.”
“You have a wife?” I replied, somewhat surprised by this news.
“Yes. She like female hathi. After children making, she push male away. Then male live in forest. Like me.”
“Is that what the matriarch elephants do? Push the male out?”
“Yes. But it is good. I prefer. Life of elephant and mahout is same. Is free, no?”
“How many children do you have?” I asked.
“Five, six, seven, maybe. I not remember. Too many.”
The light was fading fast, and as the sun set over the valley, farmers hurried home, driving their lazy water buffalo before them. Goatherds skipped along pathways running between the paddy-fields, the sound of their laughter and the bleating of their animals carrying for miles in the still air. In the distance, smoke from brick kilns drifted horizontally across the sky like broken spider webs. Heat rising from their ovens distorted the horizon, creating a mirage in which trees bent and rippled, and houses appeared to melt.
As we approached the small settlement, smells of baking chapatis and roasting kebabs wafted out to greet us, and pi-dogs barked and growled in protest at our presence. One brave hound ran snarling towards us but backed off quickly as soon as he saw the kunkis.
Fortunately, the villagers, who were tea labourers, were more welcoming. Dozens gathered along the way, watching our slow but steady progress with expressions of awe and interest. Many showered the way with flowers, small coins and fruit in the hope of receiving a blessing from Ganesha, the elephant-headed god.
“I feel like Jesus entering Jerusalem,” I said to Churchill, as a banana landed in my lap.
“Jesus, he no ride hathi,” replied the mahout. “He ride donkey, no?”
“Yes, I know. But…oh never mind,” I said, too tired to explain.
On the edge of the village, we passed a fish market, the stalls spread out in the shadow of two banyan trees. Vendors crouched on squares of plastic sheeting, selling their catches by the light of dozens of candles. Amidst patches of mellow light, which shimmered on the ground like reflections of the moon on water, I caught glimpses of carp flipping about in shallow basins, their tails beating in desperation. A freedom-loving turtle tried to make a break for it, but he was soon caught and placed on the chopping-block where he paid the ultimate price for his lack of speed.
Plump, silvery hilsa fish were pulled from buckets and held up by their tails for closer inspection by discerning housewives. Freshwater shrimps were peeled by nimble fingers and then packed in boxes with lumps of ice. Tiny fish no larger than paper clips were weighed on scales and sold by the pound for use in tenga mass, a stew made with tomatoes.
Outside the village meeting-house, a circle of men watched a cockfight, all urging the birds on with shouts as they swilled down bottles of home-made booze. We stopped to watch as a fierce-looking red cockerel clawed his scrawny white opponent, who was trying desperately to escape from the ring. As feathers flew an
d sharp beaks drew blood, money changed hands, amidst much raucous cheering.
With all the commotion, we went virtually unnoticed as we made our way into the centre of the village, until we stopped near a temple where men with less than perfect pitch were chanting mantras through a loudspeaker. We dismounted, and a crowd gathered round us, all staring at me.
Being stared at in public was one aspect of travelling in India I found hard to cope with. As a child, I had always been told that it was rude to stare. So when ten people stood just a foot from my face, looking straight at me with numb expressions, I had to remind myself that they meant no offence. Like moths drawn to light, they were attracted to anything out of the ordinary – and a strange white man riding on an elephant was about as out-of-the-ordinary as you could get in northern Assam.
Mole and Mr Choudhury went to talk with the head of the village to ask for help in recruiting messengers. Rudra was called by walkie-talkie and told to bring the Land Rover to the village. Meanwhile, the rest of us unloaded the kunkis, watched by an ever-increasing crowd whom the mahout apprentices tried, in vain, to shoo away. Fortunately, a local man soon came to our rescue, dispersing the spectators with an appeal for them to respect our privacy.
Our saviour was called Shankar, a mild-mannered Assamese in his late twenties. He had studied engineering at Guwahati University and spoke English with a heavy accent. “It’s impossible to get a good job these days,” he complained, as we stood at a cigarette-stand, drinking tea out of disposable clay cups and eating stale Nice biscuits. “Now I work as a lifeguard at the public swimming-pool in Guwahati. It’s the only work I can find – apart from joining ULFA.”
Shankar, who was visiting his brother, a local doctor, hailed from Majuli, the largest river island in the world which lies in the Brahmaputra in Upper Assam. The island, hundreds of square miles in size, can only be reached by ferry and is virtually cut off from the outside world.
“You must come and visit. You will be my guest,” he said. “Every year, most of the island floods, so no one lives in a permanent home because you never know when you’ll have to pack it up and move.”
We took a stroll along the main street. Passers-by stopped to greet Shankar.
“You seem to be popular,” I commented.
“Yes, I’m famous,” beamed the lifeguard. “Everyone knows me. I am the man who swam the Brahmaputra River. I was even on TV…”
“Did you swim across it or down it?”
“Across it? That’s nothing. I swam down it, all the way from the very top of Assam, near the Burmese border, to the bottom, where it meets Bangladesh. It took more than a month. No one had ever done it before.”
Indeed, as Shankar explained, most Assamese, even the local fishermen, dare not dip so much as a toe in the water as they believe the Brahmaputra is infested with crocodiles, monsters, evil mermaids and giant whirlpools.
“No one thought I would survive. But I don’t believe in these things.”
“Why not?”
“It is bullshit only.”
“How do you mean?”
“These things do not exist. Monsters, mermaids – it’s rubbish. Only these ignorant uneducated people believe in all that.”
I told him some of Mr Choudhury’s superstitious beliefs about elephants. Did he think there was anything to them?
He dismissed them out of hand.
“Superstition is the source of all evil,” he said.
I didn’t agree. Much of it struck me as fascinating.
“No. It keeps people blind, makes them scared.”
I changed the subject. Were his river-swimming days over?
“I want to do the Mississippi and the Amazon. But it is difficult to get sponsorship. No one in India wants to give money for swimming rivers. What to do?”
♦
By the time I checked in with the others, Mole and Mr Choudhury had dispatched a dozen messengers and seven teams of guards to search for the rogue. The moment they reported anything, the squad would move out.
“In the meantime, chill out,” advised Mole.
On our way into the village, I had noticed a temple that housed an effigy of Kali, the goddess of destruction. I asked Shankar if he would take me to see the place and we strolled over to the cone-shaped building, positioned across the way from an off-licence that stocked only Knock Out Beer.
Inside the temple stood a giant statue of Kali. Black-faced, with bared teeth and a protruding scarlet tongue, she held, in her four hands, a severed head, a sword, a shield and a garotte. Her naked body was smeared with blood and around her neck hung a garland of skulls.
However, it was the congregation and not the statue that really interested me. Unlike the other villagers, these people were very short, with coal-black skin. I asked Shankar where they were from.
“They are Biharis,” he answered.
Bihar is a state in eastern India notorious for its lawlessness, caste wars and dacoits, who regularly hold up trains at gunpoint. So what were a group of Biharis doing in the middle of Assam?
“You Britishers brought them here to pick tea,” he said.
I wanted to know more, so, after making inquiries, we went to meet the local schoolteacher, Mr Yadhav. He was a spindly character, only five foot tall and with great welts on his chin.
He showed us into his humble shack where we sat on two cracked plastic garden chairs, the only other furniture being a stained mattress on the floor, which constituted his bed, and a table made from a tea-chest. A single light-bulb lit the room. Yet despite Mr Yadhav’s evident poverty, he was not lacking in hospitality and insisted on fetching us tea and rice-cakes.
His family, like thousands of others in the area, had originally lived in northern Bihar, he told me. They were Harijans, or Untouchables, Gandhi’s so-called Children of God. Thanks to the age-old Hindu system that has at its core the belief that people born into the lower castes have sinned in their past lives, they were considered to be unclean, or untouchable, and laboured all their lives as rat-catchers.
Then, one day, they were visited by an arcuttie, a professional recruiter, who was hiring labourers for the recently established tea estates on the North-East Frontier.
“He promised my family lots of money, good conditions and cattle if they came to work in the gardens. He promised to make them rich.”
The British, he said, badly needed tea labourers, as the Assamese had refused to work in the new gardens, preferring to remain independent. Thousands of arcutties were sent into impoverished, drought-ridden states such as Bihar and Orissa, where they persuaded tens of thousands of peasants to sign on as coolies.
“It is said that the water of Assam, a land of tea leaves, is very sweet,” went a song the British lackeys circulated at the time. “Friends, let us go to Assam! There, we shall pluck leaves and pass away our time in pleasure and in happiness.”
When the coolies arrived in Assam, however, they were anything but happy. Health care, sanitation and housing were non-existent. Of almost 85,000 men and women transported between 1 May 1863 and 1 May 1866, more than 30,000 perished.
“Our people became slaves,” continued Mr Yadhav. “We were bought and sold by different estates and we were unable to leave. Those who tried were dealt with harshly and sometimes killed by the ‘coolie catcher’.”
Today, conditions have vastly improved. Companies are required to supply proper health facilities and schools. Yet the tea-workers, or adivasis as they are known, remain underprivileged. Ninety-five per cent of the tea-garden population is illiterate, and very few have aspired to much more than farming or plucking tea leaves.
“None of my family has ever returned to Bihar,” said Mr Yadhav. “In over a hundred and fifty years, none of us have been able to afford the 300-rupee train fare to Patna.”
So did they now consider themselves to be Assamese?
“That is a good question. But the answer is difficult,” he said, as we went for a walk outside. “The sahibs kept us isolated
from the local population and we never integrated with them. Even today, we live in our own communities and have no contact with the local Assamese.”
This isolation, Mr Yadhav explained, had created a unique tea-garden culture in which representatives of hundreds of different Indian tribes and castes had been thrust together, thereby mixing and corrupting ancient traditions and practices. Each group had forgotten their original language – some did not even know where their ancestors came from – and a new lingua franca had evolved called Sadani, a mix of Hindi, Bengali, Bihari and Ariya, with a smattering of Assamese.
“Do you know what is really strange, though?” asked Mr Yadhav, as we sat outside the Kali temple, watching devotees filing in and out. “We adivasis make up half the population of Assam. But we are not considered to be Assamese, we have not been assimilated into the local population, and most of us don’t vote.”
It was as if the Blacks in America still lived on cotton plantations, segregated from the rest of society and speaking only bastardized West African dialects.
I wondered whether the original natives were concerned that eventually, when the tea labour population grew too large for the estate, they would go looking for more land and come into conflict with the original inhabitants.
“Maybe it will happen. But my people are timid,” said Mr Yadhav, as we thanked him for his time. “They have lived on an island all their lives and are too scared to leave.”
♦
The elephant squad had set up a temporary control-room in a grubby eatery called the ABBA Restaurant. It was owned by a fan of the Swedish pop sensation and the walls were plastered with faded posters of the four Scandinavian performers decked out in glittery Seventies disco outfits. From the cobweb-covered speakers up on the wall boomed the song ‘Super Trooper’, followed by ‘Money, Money, Money’. The young waiter sang along with the lyrics, except he had the words wrong and, as he moved from table to table, sang instead ‘Bunny, Bunny, Bunny’.
To the Elephant Graveyard Page 12
