To the Elephant Graveyard

by Hall, Tarquin

  Amu replaced the receiver and reached across his desk, picking up a silver bell which he twisted around on its plastic base, thereby winding the spring inside. Then he released it and the bell rang.

  I had come across similar contraptions before. They were standard government issue, the prized possession of India’s bureaucrats, used to summon subordinates in thousands of offices across the land. Yet whenever I had seen them used they never seemed to have the desired effect. On this occasion, Amu gave the bell a couple of tries and then reverted to old-fashioned lung-power. That soon brought his assistant running.

  “Sir!” bawled the lackey, standing to attention by the desk.

  Amu gave him instructions in Assamese. The man turned and backed out of the door.

  “That phone-call was from one of my informants,” said Amu. “Some poachers have infiltrated the park. We are mounting an operation against them. We leave immediately.”

  Outside there was a sudden commotion as the guards prepared to move out. Amu had only a few minutes to spare.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked briskly.

  Mr Choudhury showed him the warrant for the rogue’s destruction and explained that the elephant had escaped into Kaziranga.

  As the hunter had predicted, Amu would not allow anyone to hunt the elephant inside the sanctuary. All weapons, except those carried by the park’s guards, were banned.

  “Last week three jeep-loads of army people drove into the park illegally,” Amu told us, as he stood up and made for the door. “They shot a whispering deer and tried to smuggle it out. Later, we arrested their commanding officer. His men came here last night and threatened us. They want us to drop the charges. But we do not take kindly to threats. I am talking to their superiors in Guwahati. I have many contacts. They will face many problems.”

  We followed the ranger out of the office. His men were lined up outside the bungalow, ready for a briefing. Amu kept it short. Two poachers had entered the park to the east, he said. The guards were to lay an ambush along their projected route.

  A senior officer handed out ammunition, four or five rounds for each man, a pitiful amount considering that the poachers, funded by rich smuggling syndicates, were armed with the latest automatic weapons, silencers and Russian night-vision equipment, readily available on the open market.

  “Tomorrow, I will organize guards to take you into the park to find your tusker,” he promised, although he warned that it could take time to locate the animal. The park covers one hundred and sixty square miles of jungle and swampland, much of it inaccessible by road.

  “Come and see me in the morning,” he said. “By then I should have dealt with these poachers – one way or the other.”

  The ranger jumped into the passenger seat of the lead jeep and sped off into the park, his guards following behind.

  ♦

  After the exertions of the elephant hunt, I was privately overjoyed when Kaziranga’s administrators ruled that, as a foreigner, I would not be allowed to sleep inside the park along with the elephant squad. Mr Choudhury and I checked into the Wild Grass Hotel nearby.

  That afternoon I rediscovered the joys of a four-star establishment – a comfortable bed, room service, a hot bath, fresh towels and a long and untroubled sleep.

  Going downstairs in the evening, I found Mr Choudhury seated on a couch in the lounge, talking to an elderly Englishman with a rotund, smiling face and bushy eyebrows.

  “Stewart Keegan. Me friends call me Stew,” he said, introducing himself.

  “Tarquin Hall,” I replied, somewhat surprised to meet another Brit so far from home.

  “Tarquin!” he blurted out, spraying the table with a mouthful of Kingfisher lager. “Bludy hell! You’ve got to be jokin’?”

  I couldn’t help smiling at his outburst. My name has been a source of amusement to people the world over.

  “That’s my nickname,” I joked. “I’m really called Bob.”

  Stew laughed even harder, blowing the froth off the top of his pint as he held it to his lips.

  “Well, good to meet you. No hard feelings, like. Just never met a Tarquin before.”

  “What brings you to Assam?” I asked.

  “Oh, bit of a walk down memory lane, like. I was here during the war, I’ve come back for a look-round. You know, see what’s happened to the old place.”

  “Where did you fight?”

  “At Kohima. Helped push back the Japs, didn’t I?”

  I sat up straight in my chair. Kohima was where my godfather Charles had fought. Had the two of them met, I asked with a sudden swell of anticipation.

  “No, name don’t ring a bell. Not like Tarquin. Now there’s a name I won’t forget in a hurry.” He collapsed into laughter again.

  “So what was it like, Kohima? It’s been described as one of the worst battles of the Second World War.”

  “It was bad, all right. Never seen anything like it in me life. Bodies, there were, everywhere. Rats, too, thousands of ’em. See, the fighting was mostly hand-to-hand, like, with us dug in on the hills, desperate to hold on to our trenches, and the Japs not more than a breath away, the lot of them willing to fight to the death.”

  The battle for Kohima in Nagaland had taken place in April 1944 when 12,000 men of the Japanese Fifteenth Army swept into India from Burma and tried to capture the eastern gateway to the subcontinent. Pitted against these ruthless jungle veterans was a force of no more than 1,200 British and Indians.

  “It was do or die, really,” continued Stew. “If those Japs had got through, well, there’s no tellin’ where they would have stopped. I was just a lad at the time and scared half out of me wits. But the bravery of me fellow-soldiers and officers…well, put it this way, they gave it all they had – and more.”

  The old man’s eyes clouded with tears as he took another sip of beer and sat back in his chair. Fifty years on, he said, the faces of his fallen friends still came to him in dreams. At night, he sometimes woke up with the bitter taste of the battlefield in his mouth.

  “Some of the officers were right extraordinary,” he continued, clearly embarrassed about showing his emotions to two complete strangers. “There was one lad who was said to be able to do the whole Times crossword puzzle in his head. Apparently, he didn’t write down a word till he’d solved the whole thing. Another officer, he would sit in his trench with shells and mortars goin’ off all round ‘im and he’d read classical Greek and the like.”

  During research on Kohima some time later, I was to read of the bravery of the handful of men who, cut off from the rest of the British Fourteenth Army, held back an entire division of the Japanese army for four weeks. In some of the most savage and intense fighting of the war, they battled it out with Bren guns, grenades and bayonets.

  Yet the British and Indians, fighting side by side, refused to yield. Their bravery became the stuff of legend: one officer was awarded a VC after he took out several Japanese trenches single-handed and got a bullet in the spine for his trouble. A certain sergeant-major, injured by shrapnel in the head, refused to leave his post and demanded that the signallers bring some pliers to remove the pieces of metal from his skull. Indeed, such was the spirit of defiance that one young private is quoted as saying to his commanding officer: “When we die, sir, is that the end or do we go on?”

  “There was next to no water,” Stew went on, “and not much tiffin. We all had malaria, and just about everything else too, come to think of it. Don’t know how we carried on, really. The stench of the bodies was bloomin’ awful. The Japs blared propaganda at us night and day, wanting us to surrender. As if we would have surrendered to the likes of them!

  “I remember this one officer. One day, he sees this Jap charging towards him with a fixed bayonet. Pretty cool, like, he raises his tommy gun and fires. But the gun jams, doesn’t it, and he gets the bayonet right here.”

  Stew indicated where the blade had made contact just above the waistline.

  “Luckily for him, he has o
ne of them thick army belts on and that saves ‘im. Then he gets up, unjams his tommy gun and empties all twenty-five rounds into the Jap – poor bastard.”

  “So how did you all survive?” I asked.

  “Well, by the time reinforcements knocked through, there was hardly any of us left,” said Stew. “But we gave ’em a good hiding and eventually they turned and fled, like.”

  The Japanese defeat at Kohima put an end to their attempts to invade India.

  “‘Course we don’t hold it against ’em now. The Japs, I mean. Just had to teach ’em a lesson, that’s all.”

  I asked Stew whether he had met any Nagas.

  “Oh yes, plenty of ’em. Nice lot, the Nagas. All wear colourful shawls and the like, and plenty of jewellery,” replied Stew. “‘Course a lot of ’em were head-hunters back then. I remember when a few Yanks crash-landed their plane into one of them backward tribal areas. Ended up with their heads on a stake, poor blokes.”

  He smiled over the top of his glass.

  In the annals of history, Kohima had been a small battle. Did his grandchildren remember the words on the memorial in Kohima that read:

  WHEN YOU GO HOME

  TELL OF US AND SAY

  FOR YOUR TOMORROW

  WE GAVE OUR TODAY

  Had the sacrifice been worth it, I asked.

  “Oh, don’t know about sacrifice,” he replied, trying to make light of it. “Did what we had to do, really. But of course it was worth it. Like I always say: every generation has its battles, like.”

  Stew rose from his armchair, draining his glass. Behind him, Flo, his wife of more than thirty-five years, was ready by the door with their bags.

  “Better be off then,” said Stew. “We’re going to Kohima. See the war graves and memorials and all that. Show the Missus where I gave the Japs what for.”

  He winked at me, put his arm round his wife and turned for the door.

  ♦

  The squad’s tents were pitched about a mile inside Kaziranga. It was here that the twenty or so mahouts employed by the Forest Department to look after the park’s resident kunkis lived with their animals. The place was a sea of mud, a flat open area littered with piles of fodder, the ground pitted with elephant footprints of all sizes.

  Wherever I looked, there were elephants – baby makhnas with fuzzy tufts of hair and delicate eyelashes, proud mothers with protective trunks, gigantic Ganeshas with enormous tusks, and a couple of old-timers with worn ears, greying hides and an air of wisdom.

  Down in the river, a stone’s throw from the squad’s new camp, a playful female was having her tummy washed as she squirted water at a group of admiring children. On the far bank, a mahout was teaching a young male with pink freckles how to stand on his hind legs, while a young mother tramped towards us, her two calves clutching her tail with their trunks as they trotted behind.

  In the middle of the camp stood Raja and Jasmine, happily munching on some banana trees, their chains attached to two posts driven into the ground. The squad’s apprentices were chatting with their counterparts amongst the Kaziranga team, boasting of their adventures with rogues and wild herds.

  We found Churchill, Badger and the others helping to tend a female elephant who had been attacked by a wild tusker. The wounded animal had deep gouges across her back where her assailant’s tusks had done their work. The night before, she had been left in the jungle in the hope that a passing wild male would impregnate her. A suitor had appeared and made the usual elephantine advances. But the kunki had played hard to get and had infuriated the male, who was less than delicate during their subsequent coupling.

  A wizened old mahout called Baba was preparing a herbal mixture for the wounded elephant in a pot over a charcoal fire. His back was hunched and where his right eye should have been was a patch of scaly skin. The hairs on his head had been dyed with henna, but the tufts that sprouted from his ears were grey. Unlike the other mahouts, he wore no shoes, revealing hideously deformed toes, six on one foot, four on the other. Nevertheless, he clearly commanded the respect of all the other mahouts.

  While the tar-like concoction in the pot spat and bubbled, Baba gazed into the vessel, muttering strange and incomprehensible incantations.

  “Very special thing, no?” said Churchill, warming his hands over the fire as the air temperature dropped by degrees. “Hathi medicine. He go to jungle and choose.”

  I didn’t quite follow but Mr Choudhury came to my rescue.

  “When kunkis are sick,” he explained, “the mahouts take them to the forest where the elephants pick the herbs or plants they need. Somehow, they’re able to prescribe their own medicine. It is then up to the mahout to prepare them.”

  Baba stirred the potion, inhaled its fumes and nodded to himself. At last, the peculiar mixture was ready. He ladled it out into a clay pot. As it continued to bubble like lava, he crushed a fistful of dried herbs in his hands and sprinkled them over the surface. The injured elephant was brought forward. She was clearly in considerable discomfort, but she allowed the mahout to climb up on her back, where he smeared the smoking substance on to the wounds.

  Churchill stood watching Baba in awe.

  “Legend mahout, no?” he said, when I asked him why he was so impressed. “Very good, this man. Knowing all thing. He has no mother, father. Live in forest with hathis only. Knowing everything, no?”

  Mr Choudhury, too, knew of Baba, although this was the first time he had met him.

  “Some say he’s a saint. He lives in the forest and knows elephants better than any man alive,” said Mr Choudhury. “He is the only person who knows the Hastividyarnava by heart.”

  The Hastividyarnava, I knew from my reading, was the ancient Assamese treatise on elephants. It had originally been written down on strips of bark from the agar tree, and later versions were illustrated with exquisite miniatures. It sets out everything you might need to know about managing a kunki, giving numerous homeopathic remedies for typical pachyderm afflictions and tips on how best to look after the animals.

  “It even gives details on how to judge an animal’s character by looking for certain physical signs and attributes,” explained Mr Choudhury.

  An elephant normally has five nails on each forefoot and four on each hindfoot, making a total of eighteen. Any animal with less is considered unlucky; those with more are deemed special.

  “The tail is also considered very important,” he continued. “One that touches the ground is unlucky. A good tail ends just above the hocks of the hind legs, has a glossy look and crescent-shaped hairs.”

  One of the worst signs of all is a black tongue.

  “I have noticed that the rogue has one. It is a very bad omen,” he said.

  ♦

  That evening the mahouts crouched round the campfire, their faces framed by the glow from the flames, as Mr Choudhury recounted our adventures with the rogue.

  By his own admission, the hunter was not a natural narrator, nor was he one for theatrics. But his description of how the killer tusker tore his victims apart and trampled them into the earth captivated his audience, who listened with rapt attention.

  He explained how the elephant had appeared in the darkness, how he had laid an ambush for the guards, and how he had half buried the farmer’s body in the rain forest. He told them how the rogue had given us the slip and swum across the Brahmaputra. As he talked, not one of the mahouts or apprentices stirred. They sat with their mouths agape, listening intently to every word. Only Baba appeared indifferent to Mr Choudhury’s narrative. Sitting on a grimy blanket, he smoked a bidi and gazed into the distance.

  However, when Mr Choudhury had finished talking, the mahout made it clear that he had been listening to every word.

  “The elephant is injured, is he not?” said the mahout in Assamese, Mole translating his words.

  “Yes,” replied the hunter. “He appears to have a bad leg.”

  Baba cleared his throat and spat, the saliva landing on Rudra’s boots.


  “I know where he is going,” he announced with a flourish of his hands, his thick rings catching the light of the fire.

  He was beginning to sound like a fortune-teller at a fair. And like all soothsayers, he made it clear that his services did not come free of charge. A small token would be required if he was to share his knowledge with us.

  “The generosity of friends can make life so much easier,” he said, staring down at his filthy feet.

  Mr Choudhury fished out a one hundred rupee note and handed it to the mahout. The money was snatched away and quickly disappeared down the front of Baba’s trousers. The mahout drew on his bidi and exhaled, the smoke passing through the gaps in his rotting teeth. Then, with a sigh, he made his revelation.

  “The elephant you are chasing is dying. He is going to the place where all elephants go when they feel the end coming near. He is going to the elephant graveyard.”

  The elephant graveyard. Something in my memory stirred. Hadn’t I heard the myth as a child? It was said to be a secret place of bleached tusks and bones where the animals went to die.

  Sinbad, during his last voyage in The Arabian Nights, is taken by a herd of elephants to this cemetery, and in one of the Tarzan films, a group of evil white explorers try to find the sacred spot, hoping to cart off a fortune in ivory.

  It was a wonderful legend, but surely there was nothing in it?

  “Believe me, it exists,” continued the mahout, scratching his crotch. “It is a sacred place, created by Brahma, the wisest of all gods.

  “After creation, the god came down to earth in human form. He wanted to see the world for himself. Eventually he came to Assam and the banks of the Brahmaputra.”

  According to local legend, the deity was reluctant to use his supernatural powers to cross the river, so he called upon the animals to help him. The monkeys were the first to offer their assistance, but they fooled around and accomplished nothing. Then came the bears, but they were too clumsy.