Menace and marvel on Munnar roads

To say that encounters with wild elephants in Munnar and its environs are a dime a dozen is certainly no exaggeration. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that when we locals meet, the conversation often veers round to the jumbos’ latest whereabouts, many having had at least one hair-raising experience with them over the years.

Returning home one sunny afternoon, our car all but ran into a monumental tusker on a blind corner. It was as startled as we were and advanced menacingly, trunk raised. My son backed away as fast as he could along the narrow road. Seeing us retreat hastily, the tusker stopped, to our great relief – but remained inexplicably rooted to that spot for the next three hours or so, stubbornly holding up vehicles on both sides. Finally, around dusk, local workers drove it away.

On another occasion driving down from Munnar to Coimbatore, a jeep packed with boisterous youngsters preceded us. Suddenly, a tusker burst out of the scrub jungle flanking the road and started chasing our car for no apparent reason. Trumpeting stridently, it doggedly pursued us for nearly a hundred metres – a truly scary sight – before we outdistanced it. We later learnt that the jeep’s occupants had mischievously pelted it with stones, leaving us to face the music!

Funnily enough, some encounters have been absurdly benign. My driver and I once met a tusker on a narrow stretch of road, flanked by a deep gorge on one side and a rocky hill on the other. We waited for some time, hoping it would move on, but, for some unknown reason, it stayed put. Finally, my impatient driver inched the car forward, hoping to slip past the tusker – whereupon, quite unbelievably, like a circus-trained jumbo, it clumsily mounted the parapet bordering the road to let us pass!

In another display of ‘considerateness’, a formidable tusker foraging on the roadside once obligingly turned its ample posterior towards my car and allowed me to pass untroubled. Evidently, his meal mattered more than anything else. 

Returning from a trout-fishing trip recently, however, an aggressive tusker confronted our jeep, an uprooted tree swinging in its trunk. It advanced perilously close as though it intended to club us with the tree. We hastily backtracked well away from it and took a circuitous detour back home.

Of course, I will never forget the heart-thumping afternoon in May 2022 when a monstrous tusker casually strolled right through the porch of our isolated colonial bungalow in a ‘march-past’ of sorts. Cowering in our sitting room, my alarmed wife and I had a ringside view of the behemoth as it regally sashayed past the window and across the lawn to feast on a patch of tender bamboo shoots. Never had we been so terrifyingly close to a wild elephant!

True, some wild elephant tales do seem as tall as the pachyderms themselves!