“Wasn’t it dangerous?” I had asked.
“Not for Vipal, Boss,” he’d replied. “Maximum peoples are liking me.”
“I am from Brahmin caste, but I grew up in poor village only,” he told me humbly, the first time we met. “No education. No money. Only little food. Maximum hardship. Even we are having none of the modern teengs.”
Considering his impoverished background and lack of formal education, Vipal had done extremely well for himself. His stories appeared regularly on the BBC’s international satellite channel and, in his home city, he was something of a celebrity. Even in Bangladesh, where he had made several documentaries, he had become a household name, and recently he had been a special guest of the Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina.
By Indian standards, he earned a fortune and his salary afforded him the luxury of travelling abroad. Only a month earlier, he had gone to France as the guest of Dominique Lapierre, author of City of Joy. The year before, he had stayed in Berlin with the Bangladeshi dissident Tasleema Nasrin.
“Soon I am going to United States of Amrika,” he said, as we sat in the restaurant eating breakfast. “New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, the total cities. But Boss, I want to meet one man too much only.”
“Who’s that?”
“I am maximum fan of Frank Sinatra. I love the song, ‘I am going it my way’.”
He began to sing, but this was too much even for Mr Choudhury.
“Please, not at breakfast,” said the hunter politely.
Vipal looked a little hurt but soon recovered.
“So. You teenk I can see Meester Frank?” he asked.
From what I had read in the newspapers, Sinatra was on his deathbed. Still, Vipal had a knack of persuading famous people to meet him and his sheer stubbornness invariably paid off.
“Somehow I have a feeling you’ll manage it,” I said.
“Yes, I’m sure you will too,” added Mr Choudhury, who seemed to find Vipal amusing, although I could tell that he was vaguely irritated by the Bengali’s incessant chatter.
“So, will we shoot the total eleey-pant today?” asked Vipal.
“No, no shooting today,” replied the hunter. “The rogue is in Kaziranga.”
I asked Mr Choudhury if he thought Baba had really turned into a tiger.
“No, I don’t believe he turned into anything,” he replied. “But sometimes these people can see things that we cannot. They are in tune with nature and have certain powers which we do not understand.”
Did he think Baba would find the rogue?
“Perhaps,” replied Mr Choudhury. “Stranger things have happened, is it not so?”
“Yes, very strange,” interrupted Vipal. “Once, I saw one man turn into snake only.”
The Bengali paused, hoping one of us would press him for more details. But neither Mr Choudhury nor I took the bait and, having paid the bill, we made for the hotel’s front door before Vipal had a chance to say another word.
♦
The watchman who guarded Kaziranga’s main gate was a lonely figure, armed with only a lathi which he tapped on the ground as he made his rounds. He hummed an Assamese folk-tune and rubbed his hands together, trying to keep warm, his boots splish-splashing through puddles of rain-water. He wore a dark green poncho, woollen mittens and a balaclava which obscured most of his face.
As we waited by the Land Rover on the far side of the gate for our rendezvous with Baba and the others, the guard sat down on his charpoy by the roadside. At his feet there burned a wood fire over which a whistling kettle was heating. He took off his mittens and warmed his hands over the flames. Then, once his tea was ready, he poured the liquid into a clouded glass and took a sip, the steam rising up around his face.
A piercing wind whipped across the stretch of no man’s land on the edge of the park. I stuck my chin into my chest and tugged my coat collar over my ears. Grimacing at the sky, I tried to locate the sun, but it had vanished behind a canopy of brooding clouds which, even now, were preparing for another assault on the defenceless ground below.
To the south, the steep slopes of the Karbi Anglong hills were lost in a bank of swirling mist, the tops of the fern trees reaching towards the sky like the arms of drowning mariners. To the north, the jungle looked drab and uninviting, all the colour washed out of its flora as if, overnight, it had been bleached by acid rain.
Even India’s ever-present crows seemed depressed by the weather. A row of these ominous-looking birds sat huddled on an overhead telephone wire, silent and bedraggled. Rudra sat in the driver’s seat of the Land Rover complaining that the damp was doing little to help keep his stash of betel-nut fresh and crunchy. And for once Vipal was subdued.
Only the hunter seemed to be enjoying what appeared to be the onset of winter. Standing on the edge of the road, wearing sandals with no socks, he surveyed the vast expanse of grassland that stretched out before us, breathing in the clean air with the bearing of a man who truly appreciates nature.
Now that the pressure was off, Mr Choudhury was visibly more relaxed. He and the rogue had both won a reprieve. Still, the hunter was not letting down his guard.
“We must keep a close eye on him. Who knows what he is planning? Perhaps he will stay in the park. Or perhaps he will go back across the river and make more mischief. We must be careful not to allow him to escape. If Baba is not able to help, then we must pick up his tracks from the river and follow them into the park using the kunkis.”
“Will you try and lure him out of Kaziranga?” I asked.
“No, no. Let him stay here. Perhaps he will reform.”
“But how long will you wait?”
“Let us see. This is like a game of chess. We will wait for him to make the next move,” he said. “Then we will see what tactics are required.”
“So it’s not over yet?”
“No,” replied Mr Choudhury. “I’m sure we will be hearing from this elephant again. He is the most extraordinary fellow I have ever come across.”
As we waited by the gate, he told me about his time in Malaysia where he worked during the 1970s and of his passion for rifles.
“Have you ever been to Holland and Holland?” he asked. “I believe it is in London. I have their catalogue – the most beautiful rifles in the world.”
“You should come to London to visit and I will take you there,” I suggested, expecting him to jump at the idea.
“I am not in any hurry to leave Assam,” said Mr Choudhury.
His brother, he pointed out, had emigrated to Kenya three years before and he had yet to visit him.
“This is my home. I am happy here,” he said. “But one thing I would like is some back copies of The Shooting Times. It is impossible to get hold of it in India. If you could send some copies, I would be most grateful.”
A minute later two Maruti Gypsies pulled up packed with people. Faces peered out at us from the cloudy windows of the lead vehicle, their features warped by the glass. Even so, I recognized Churchill, Mole and Badger crammed into the front seat. The three of them had spent the night in the park and, given the sudden change in temperature, were none too happy.
“This weather really sucks,” complained Mole. “We hardly slept a wink.”
“Very bad rain, no?” said Churchill as I introduced them to Vipal. “Too much water coming. Even hathi not liking.”
“So what happened to Baba?” I asked Badger. “Is he still a tiger? Or did he turn back into whatever he’s meant to be?”
“Oh ‘e’s sleeping it off back at the camp,” laughed the Gurkha. “He stumbled in in the middle of the night with scratches all over ‘is face, muttering something about your elephant.”
According to Churchill, the old mahout had located the tusker at the far end of the park and had given us directions as to how to find him.
“He’s marked the rogue’s position on the map. But I’ll believe it when I see it,” added Badger.
Mr Choudhury and Vipal climbed into the lead vehic
le. Anxious not to have to spend the next few hours listening to the Bengali, I clambered into the back of the second jeep where I found four forest guards sitting face to face on narrow benches fixed to the jeep’s outer walls. I squeezed in next to them.
“Hang on to this,” said one of them in English, indicating a leather strap attached to the roof support. “It’s a rough road and the driver doesn’t use the brake pedal much.”
The driver turned the vehicle and floored the accelerator, heading back into Kaziranga, the radials slicing through shallow puddles and causing water to surge up against the windows. I peered out through the black smoke belching from the exhaust. The road behind us appeared to be alive with frogs, hundreds of them hopping around amidst the splattered remains of those unfortunate few who, just seconds earlier, had been flattened by our tyres.
Looking up, I spotted an eagle circling the sky, surveying the landscape. With wings stretched wide, he hung there, gliding on the thermals. Then, quite suddenly, he plunged to earth, only to rise again a few seconds later, a struggling kaleej pheasant pinioned between his talons.
The driver, who would have done well at Brands Hatch, sped through lush grassland where an Indian bison stood grazing. Startled by our engines, it turned and thundered off into the tara grass, disturbing a family of swamp deer who darted behind a wall of thorny rattan cane. Further on, we passed a lake where otters played in the water.
The grassland soon gave way to jungle. Moss-covered trees hung with sodden creepers lined the way. The road turned to liquid mud, and as we slid and skidded, the driver shifted into four-wheel drive. The tyres spun through the muck, splattering my knees and shoulders, while the jeep in front covered our windscreen with mud, the wipers smearing it across the glass.
Then, with a crash of thunder that sounded like Semtex exploding, the sky finally gave way. Hailstones the size and consistency of ball bearings bounced off the bonnet and smacked on to the muddy road. Huge raindrops followed, pummelling the foliage on either side of the road and humbling even the largest leaves which bowed under the onslaught.
“At least the rain’s slowed down the driver,” shouted the oldest of the four guards over the sound of the downpour. “We should be thankful for that.”
The guard’s name was Dinesh and, like his namesake Mr Choudhury, he was in his mid-fifties. He had spent the past thirty-five years protecting the wildlife of Kaziranga and probably knew more about the park than anyone else.
“The rhino is very special to the Assamese,” yelled Dinesh over the roar of the motor. “He was brought here by our god Krishna to fight against an evil king. Once the battle was over, the rhino decided to stay and make this his home.”
The guard wore an egg-shaped crystal around his neck. Like all Assamese children, he had been taken at birth to the sacred Temple of the Nine Planets in Guwahati, the only astrological temple in the world. There, the priests had drawn up his chart, predicting the course of his life. His family’s astrologer had given him the crystal to help combat the negative influence of Saturn.
“Every Assamese has a chart. It has helped me make the right decisions throughout my life,” he told me. “And this crystal has prevented destructive influences.”
Judging by the amount of action Dinesh had seen in Kaziranga, and the fact that he had emerged unscathed, his talisman seemed to work. However, some of his colleagues had not been so fortunate. Three months earlier, two of his closest friends had been shot dead by poachers during an encounter on the banks of the Brahmaputra. In that incident, the guard sitting next to me had been wounded. Proudly, he lifted his shirt and showed me the scar where the bullet had passed through his side, just missing his liver by a hair’s breadth.
“Some poachers won’t give up,” said Dinesh. “They get about ten thousand dollars for each rhino horn. That’s enough for them to retire on – if they survive.”
The road narrowed into a track, the trees closing in all around us. Low-lying branches brushed against the canvas roof. Thunder rumbled in the distance as flashes of lightning lit up even the darkest recesses of the jungle. As the jeep slid across the road, the back wheels going in one direction and the front ones in another, I began to feel sick.
“You know what makes lightning, don’t you?” asked Dinesh.
“What’s that?”
“Elephants,” said the guard.
“How?”
“Well, they say that when two tuskers fight, their ivory clashes together and it creates flashes of lightning.”
I asked Dinesh if he’d heard of the elephant graveyard.
The guard knew the Brahma legend, though in his version the deity was also assisted by a cow, to whom he gave the secret of immortality, and a chameleon, to whom he revealed the secret of prophecy.
So did he think the graveyard existed?
“Even in Kaziranga, I have never seen an elephant carcass,” he said, his voice wavering in time with the shuddering of the jeep. “This has often struck me as strange. What happens to the bodies? How can such a big animal simply disappear? It is a great mystery.”
The guard knew of another legend, told to him by his grandfather: “It is said that some elephants have pearls in their skulls. Even to this day, some poachers look for them. They are called gaja-muktas. They are said to be enormous and worth millions of rupees.”
“Have you ever seen one?”
“Oh no,” smiled Dinesh. “They don’t exist. Otherwise, the elephant would have been extinct a long time ago.”
♦
The jeeps churned on, heading south according to Baba’s directions. In places, torrents of water raged across our path; in others, the road disappeared into flooded gullies. Shortly after midday, as the rain began to slacken, I spotted a line of men tramping towards us, their rifles slung over their shoulders, their faces camouflaged with oil. As they drew nearer, I recognized them as Amu and his men, returning from their operation on foot.
Caked in mud, their uniforms soaking wet, the guards had spent the night in the park with only their ponchos to protect them from the elements. Yet their efforts had paid dividends and, once again, the lives of more innocent rhinos had been saved.
As for the poachers, they had met with a violent end. The limp bodies of a couple of notorious Nagas, allegedly responsible for numerous elephant and rhino killings, lay on two stretchers. One had been shot through the heart and his shirt was caked in blood. His colleague had been hit twice in the stomach and had taken nearly twenty minutes to die.
“We knew the route they would take. They had to pass over a certain bridge. That’s where we laid our ambush,” said Amu, as he showed me their captured weapons, awesome-looking automatic things with telescopic sights and night-vision scopes. “We ordered them to throw down their weapons, but instead they opened fire on us. That was a big mistake.”
The guards, conscious as ever of conserving their valuable ammunition, fired only six or seven times.
“We will take the bodies back to headquarters and make an exhibition of them there. It helps deter other poachers,” said Amu.
Looking down at the blanched faces of the dead men, I thought how absurd it was that they had lost their lives because of a few inches of rhino horn. After all, modern science has proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the substance does nothing to increase man’s virility. And yet millions of Asian men are still prepared to pay through the nose for just a few ounces.
“The poor rhino’s cursed, man,” said Mole, as we stood in the drizzle. “If it wasn’t for that horn of his, everyone would leave him alone. Perhaps then he wouldn’t be so grumpy.”
I wondered if Viagra would lessen the demand for rhino horn.
“Could be,” said Amu, as he and his men prepared to set off again. “But I’m not taking any chances.”
♦
An hour or so later, we pulled up next to a raised concrete platform that was used by tourists to spot animals. At last, we had reached the area where Baba said he had seen the rogue.
One by one, we climbed up the ladder. From the top, the view was breathtaking. Behind us, the jungle spread out towards the Brahmaputra, while to the north it gave way to a vast expanse of rugged grassland where a dozen rhinos were grazing. Like prehistoric tanks, they moved slowly yet purposefully across the terrain, lonesome animals that seemed to prefer their own company.
Mr Choudhury stood on the edge of the platform, searching the horizon through his binoculars. But there was not an elephant in sight.
“I knew it,” scoffed Badger. “This is a wild-goose chase. There’s no bloody way you’re goin’ to find the elephant with the help of that Baba bloke. Let’s go to the river and we’ll pick up ‘is tracks there.”
“It’s been raining,” pointed out Mole. “They will have been washed away.”
“We stand more chance finding him my way than like this,” retorted the Gurkha.
“Hathi will come, no?” interrupted Churchill. “Better to wait some time.”
The hunter decided to give it an hour and so we sat on the edge of the platform and tucked into some packed lunches prepared for us by the Wild Grass Hotel.
As I ate, I questioned Mole about Amu. Though most Indian institutions seem horribly inefficient, riddled with corruption and crippled by bureaucracy, the average Indian is generally unwilling to kick up much of a fuss. And yet, from time to time, I came across individuals like Amu who had taken matters into their own hands and wanted to make a difference.
“Yeah, you’re right. Not a lot works around here because there’s no accountability. Politicians can get away with murder, quite literally in some cases,” responded Mole. “But some people are just different, I guess. They don’t like things the way they are so they try changing them.”
“But most officials in India are corrupt,” I said. “What’s so different about the Assam Forest Department? You all seem to be very honest blokes.”
“Yeah. That’s a funny thing, man,” smiled Mole, who enjoyed filling me in on how things worked in India. “See, there are three sections in the Forest Department: Wildlife, Forests and Administration. Now there’s plenty of money to be made in Forests, taking back-handers for turning a blind eye when someone hacks down the jungle. And Administration, well, those are the guys who control all the money, so all they have to do is skim off some for themselves. But the sort of, men who go into Wildlife tend to love animals, so the department’s pretty much clean.”
To the Elephant Graveyard Page 16
