To the Elephant Graveyard

by Hall, Tarquin

“I can do the maximum teeng,” volunteered the cameraman, who had now taken off his ridiculous disguise and was trying to remove a glob of stage adhesive from his upper lip.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, pointing out that he did not speak Assamese. “I doubt the monks know much Bengali, either.”

  “Oh, okay. I will bring some friends. We will go and see these monk mens together.”

  I insisted that Vipal bring only one interpreter.

  “One only?” he said, disappointed. “But, Boss, I have the maximum number of friends.”

  “Yes, I know. But I only want one.”

  The man Vipal brought along was a young photographer who had taken only a few pictures in his life, knew nothing about his chosen craft and yet fancied himself as the next Carrier-Bresson. Still, Vipal assured me, he would be a ‘tiptop’ interpreter.

  We rented a car from the hotel and drove east along Highway 37 to the Nowgong district, about an hour west of Kaziranga. Here, rapeseed grew in abundance, blanketing the landscape. Trucks carrying piles of hay chugged along in front of us, shedding their loads, the straw collecting on our windscreen.

  As we turned a bend, a group of schoolchildren holding a rope across the road flagged us down, asking for contributions for Saraswati, the goddess of education. It sounded like a scam, but they assured me that the money would be used to buy school supplies. To prove it, they showed me their carefully maintained ledger accounting for all the monies they had received. Suitably convinced, I made a donation.

  “Thank you, mee-ster,” they called out as we pulled away. “Merry Christ-mast!”

  Further down the road, next to a little-used railway crossing, a local quack was hawking panaceas to cure everything from AIDS to mental deficiency. We stopped to examine his curious assortment of bottles, which were laid out on banana leaves together with good-luck charms in the form of human teeth supposedly retrieved from the mouths of saints. The vendor showed me an incisor which, he claimed, had once belonged to the Buddha himself. Local legend has it that he received Nirvana, or enlightenment, not far from Guwahati.

  Next door, another stall sold ice-cold Fruity Mango Drink, bunches of lychees and green coconuts. I asked the vendor whether he knew where we could find the monastery, but he simply held up an egg between his fingers and squinted at me.

  “Egg,” he said, in English.

  “Yes, that’s an egg,” I agreed, asking our interpreter to translate my words. “But do you know where the monastery is?”

  He continued to hold up the egg.

  “Egg,” he repeated, beaming proudly.

  To keep him happy, I bought his egg and four of his coconuts. The vendor hacked off their tops with a machete and provided us with straws with which to suck out the milk. Once we had satisfied our thirst, he cracked open the shells and we scooped out the soft flesh.

  Strolling across the railway tracks we discovered a bank that looked as if it had been gutted by fire.

  “Maybe it was robbed,” I said, as we peeked through the windows. “There’s nothing left inside.”

  Vipal had to stand on tiptoe to see through the window.

  “You know, Boss, one time I was robbing a bank.”

  “What?” I exclaimed, choking on a piece of coconut.

  “It’s true. I robbed the total teeng.”

  Somehow, I found it difficult to picture the diminutive Bengali bunting into a bank with a sawn-off shotgun and forcing everyone to hit the deck.

  “Sure, tell us another one,” I said sarcastically. “Next you’ll be telling me you were a lion-tamer.”

  “But it’s true, Boss,” he objected.

  There was something in his voice that was almost convincing.

  “When was this?” I asked suspiciously.

  “When I was young only,” he said. “I was fighting Pakistanis.”

  If he was to be believed, this had been in the early 1970s, when East Pakistan, now the independent nation of Bangladesh, was fighting for independence from Islamabad.

  “I am becoming freedom fighter when I was seventeen years,” he said. “I am not wanting to kill, not even a Pakistani. So I am joining one group and doing the maximum damages to infrastructures.”

  His unit’s main targets had been the country’s bridges, power stations and national banks. The resistance movement required cash, and taking the Pakistani regime’s reserves helped cripple their administration.

  “Did you wear a mask and tell people to stick their hands in the air?” I asked, trying to picture Vipal in a bandanna, toting a six-shooter.

  “No, we are robbing bank at night only, hitting the guards on the head. Then we are using dynamite and making maximum explosion,” Vipal told me.

  “So how much did you steal?”

  The Bengali shuffled his feet.

  “How much did you get away with?” I pressed.

  “Well, not so much, Boss,” he conceded. “See dynamite is very strong. It did the maximum damage. The total money was blown apart.”

  “So you didn’t get a single rupee?”

  “No, nothing,” confirmed Vipal, clearly embarrassed.

  I was still laughing when we reached the car.

  “But we made big problems,” he assured me. “We were all total heroes.”

  ♦

  We carried on down the road, asking for directions from passers-by along the way. Typically, no one knew the monastery’s exact location but everyone was keen to offer advice.

  “Go down that road and you are bound to find it,” suggested one bicyclist.

  “You will see it over there,” counselled a friendly buffalo herder, waving in the direction of a field.

  “It is somewhere here,” said another. “Turn around and head back where you have come from.”

  When we stopped to ask directions from two vendors at a cigarette stand, one man pointed left and the other right.

  Eventually, after asking the way from a travelling snake-charmer, a local madman, an auto-rickshaw driver who was also lost, a mendicant in the company of a five-legged holy cow and a dozen other people, we pulled up outside the entrance to the monastery.

  Pushing past the rusting gates, we made our way on foot down a sandy lane cut through dense woods. Crimson flowers from silk cotton trees carpeted the way like confetti. Bulbul birds sat in the branches, puffing up their chests and calling to one another, as if warning their friends of our approach.

  The lane brought us to the edge of a pond filled with giant turtles, their shells forming miniature islands amidst the water-hyacinths. One of these ancient creatures, which are considered holy by most Indians, surfaced near the water’s edge, his toothless mouth nibbling on floating weed, before sinking back into the murky water.

  On the far side of the pond crouched a figure wrapped in a length of white cotton. His chest and upper arms were only partially covered, revealing muscles as well developed as those of a body-builder.

  When the man looked up, however, I noticed that his features were distinctly feminine. His lips were unnaturally pink as if he was wearing lipstick, his eyelashes were darkened with what looked like mascara, and his hair came down to his shoulders, the ends curled as if they had been professionally permed. At first, I assumed he was a hijra, a eunuch. But when he stood up and walked towards us, his hands crossed piously before him, I realized he was one of the monks.

  “Welcome to our home,” he said. “My name is Pitambar.”

  Although it seemed that the monk had enjoyed little contact with the outside world and was somewhat shy, he was friendly and hospitable and offered us a guided tour of the satra, or monastery.

  “Afterwards, I will take you to see the satradhikar, our master,” he said, smiling beatifically. “It is he who knows about everything and will tell you all you need to know.”

  Like the rest of the monastery’s two dozen monks, Pitambar had taken a vow of celibacy. He and his fellow-ascetics lived in a row of bare cells constructed out of mud and bamboo. The entrances to the
ir dwellings were only a few feet high and, as we walked past them, I had to bend down in order to look inside.

  Crouched on the earthen floor, men draped in white cotton bent studiously over their scriptures. In one cell, a teenage monk was practising yoga-like contortions, his legs twisted behind his neck. Next door, a blind hermit with long silvery hair recited mantras, rocking back and forth on his haunches.

  “Okay, Boss, let’s go,” said Vipal, as Pitambar showed us around his cell, offering us handfuls of nuts and raisins and slivers of coconut. “Now you have seen the total teeng. There is nothing more.”

  “What do you mean? We haven’t seen anything. We haven’t even met the head monk yet. You stay in the car if you like,” I told him. “I’ll be at least an hour.”

  Sulking, Vipal followed several feet behind us as we approached the satra’s main building, which was guarded by two clay lions gripping bunches of flowers between their teeth. Known as the nam ghar, or prayer house, it looked from the outside more like a village hall than a temple. Yet the interior was unlike any other Hindu place of worship I had ever visited.

  Pitambar pushed open the heavy carved wooden doors and we stepped inside. The sanctum was dominated by a wooden pyramid twenty-five feet high and covered in garish red cloth. The base was decorated with carved wooden lions doing battle with ferocious elephants. At the summit of this strange edifice sat a copy of a leather-bound book which contained the cult’s handwritten scriptures, dating back five centuries. In front of the pyramid stood two wrought-iron candleholders, their pinnacles crowned by brass peacocks.

  Taking off our shoes, we followed Pitambar inside. Two kettle-drums were positioned on either side of the door next to a six-foot-high representation of Garuda, the mythical being who is said to be half man and half bird and is traditionally ridden by the god Vishnu. The only light in the room was provided by a clutch of candles and mustard-oil lamps which flickered in the gloom, lending the room a haunted atmosphere. Vapour trails of soot spiralled upwards, towards the elaborate red and gold awnings hanging from the ceiling.

  “This is our place of worship,” explained Pitambar, as several local Assamese entered behind us and, with bowed heads, approached the pyramid where they made their offerings of fruit and nuts. “This is the holiest place in all Assam.”

  I had long found Hinduism, with its myriad cults, deities, incarnations, manifestations and interpretations, virtually impossible to grasp, so I took a deep breath before asking Pitambar which particular brand of Hinduism the monks advocated.

  In the event, his explanation proved straightforward.

  The monks were followers of a fifteenth-century saint called Shankaradeva, who had reputedly lived to the ripe old age of 120. Until his coming in 1449, Tantric cults that practised black magic and human sacrifice had predominated in Assam.

  “One form of divination at the time was to examine a child cut from the body of a pregnant woman who had gone her full term of nine months,” said Pitambar. “They were dark days.”

  However, the country’s Messiah preached against such horrific practices and also sought to unite the community by doing away with caste, dowries and idols, encouraging the people to worship one god, Krishna.

  “Shankaradeva is the father of the Assamese nation,” said Pitambar. “He made us one people and brought us together.”

  As I was to discover during my travels, every Assamese village has a nam ghar, where the corpus of plays written by Shankaradeva to teach social rights and equality are still enacted during major festivals. Assamese Vaishnavism, the prophet’s own brand of Hinduism, remains the predominant religion of the Brahmaputra valley.

  “It is unique to Assam. You will not find it anywhere else,” said Pitambar. “We are the guardians of his teachings and Assamese culture.”

  But with the influx of hundreds of thousands of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, not to mention the millions of adivasis brought by the British, Assamese culture was under threat.

  “Now, more than ever, we must work to preserve it,” he said. “Without our traditions, we are nothing.”

  We walked around the back of the pyramid, where a small alcove housed another shrine containing a collection of relics of Shankaradeva. Vipal tried to take some photographs, but the monk asked him to desist.

  “Boss, what about eleey-pant graveyard? They must be having the maximum information.”

  I asked Pitambar whether he knew anything about elephants.

  “Come,” he said, “I will take you to the master.”

  ♦

  The master’s only possessions were the length of cotton wrapped around his waist, a clay bowl and a rosary of rudraksha beads. His cell, which he shared with a diverse selection of Assam’s insects, was cold, damp and unlit. A hole in the ground behind the cell served as a latrine. And yet, despite his poverty, the monk seemed serenely content.

  I had expected the master to be older, but he could not have been a day over forty. Still, despite his comparative youth, he was considered by the other monks to be in possession of a third eye.

  “I can see everything. I can see through you and inside you and beyond you,” he told me as we were introduced.

  He was said to meditate for days at a time and to live on just milk and the occasional bowl of rice. Pitambar also told me that the master had committed all the Vaishnavite scriptures to memory, an undertaking he had begun when he was seven.

  As we sat before him, crammed into the tiny room with our backs against the wall, the master leaned forward, and for the first time I was able to see his face clearly. Like those of his companions, his features were distinctly effeminate. His cheeks were heavily pockmarked, suggesting that at some stage he had suffered from smallpox. His eyes were sunk deep into his ascetic face, and nature had given him a pendulous lip.

  Through the faint light of a slit window in the wall, the master stared back at me.

  “The Western world is corrupting our culture,” he said. “We must ensure that it is preserved. It is our most precious commodity.”

  “How do you expect to stop the corruption?” I asked. Did he propose to smash television sets as the Taliban were doing in Afghanistan?

  “No. We are trying other ways,” he explained. “First, we have written to the President of the United States, asking him to stop exporting his culture to India. And second, we are spreading the plays of Shankaradeva, to enforce our traditions.”

  “Did you get a reply from Washington?”

  “No. But if they do not stop, we will take international legal action against them. In the end, our culture will predominate. It has survived for thousands of years and it will outlive America.”

  Before I could ask him about elephants, he began to lecture us on the life of Shankaradeva and the miracles he is said to have performed. I sat patiently listening to him, partly out of interest, partly out of respect and partly to infuriate Vipal who, I could see, was growing increasingly impatient.

  Eventually, however, I interrupted the master and asked whether he knew anything of the elephant graveyard.

  “Yes, there is one legend,” he said, explaining that it did not exist within the Vaishnavite tradition but had been passed down verbally by the local Assamese.

  “When an elephant knows that death is approaching, he goes to a pool. It is called the Pool of Ganesha. This pool is very deep. It is said to go down to the middle of the earth.

  “When the dying elephant comes, he first washes himself in its holy waters and then, with his last breath, he plunges into the pool, disappearing for ever.”

  “Do you know where this pool is?”

  The monk shook his head. “They say it is in the jungle not far from here in the Nowgong district. When I was a boy, one of my father’s friends said he saw an elephant walk up to the edge of the pool and disappear into it. The elephant never came out.”

  I asked whether he could give me more precise directions, but he was unable to do so.

  “If this pool shoul
d ever dry up, then the race of the elephants will die out. We pray that this day will never come. For if the elephant dies, man will forever live in sorrow.”

  Our conversation was interrupted by the sound of a monotonous clanging. It came from a cast-iron bell that hung from the branch of a mango tree by the edge of the pond. It was prayer-time. Our audience was over.

  As we stepped outside, the other priests emerged from their cells, blinking in the afternoon sunshine. With solemnity, they filed towards the namghar, their master leading the way. At the steps of the temple, Pitambar invited us inside, but it was getting late, so I thanked him for his time and made my excuses.

  We headed back down the lane to the car where the driver was waiting. Just as we were getting ready to pull away, Pitambar came running after us, carrying something in his hand which he gave to me. It was a cotton scarf, embroidered with a red geometric design around the edges.

  “My master asked me to give this to you. It is a token of his respect. Wear it always and fortune will smile on you.”

  ♦

  During our visit to the monastery, Vipal had hardly said a word. Indeed, he had seemed threatened by the monks. His body language had said as much, as had his refusal to eat any of the sanctified food offered us by Pitambar.

  As we drove back towards Kaziranga, I asked what was the matter.

  “I am not liking these monk mens,” he sulked.

  “Why not? They were very hospitable and kind.”

  “No, they are not good,” he said with finality.

  “All monks are a bit strange,” I remarked.

  “No, you do not know,” he replied sarcastically. “You are a foreigner. You are not understanding the total teeng.”

  “What have you got against them?” I asked.

  “They are maximum homosexual mens,” he said scornfully.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I am knowing.”

  “They’re not gay. And even if they were, so what?”

  Vipal glared out of the window, flicking his hands at me in a dismissive manner.

  “What have you got against homosexuals anyhow?” I demanded, the level of my voice rising.