No room for elephants

To children, the animal symbolised power and supreme benevolence

Woods, lovely, dark, and deep, are perhaps best represented by the grandeur and gravitas of elephants. Behold an elephant, and see the splendour and fullness of the forest moving right in front of your eyes.

“Ana”, or the Elephant, always had a powerful impact on the Malayali psyche and imagination. Adoration, applause, abuse, toil, and torture are all elements of our complicated relationship with these gentle giants. As children, we village boys used to keep our ears open for the elephant’s whispers (yes, the animal is unusually reticent for its size). In the summer, when the schools were shut, the musky smell of elephant dung in the air would herald the temple festivals. Back then, elephants were also widely used for loading timber into trucks.

The animal would first drag the cut trees all along the ground to the trucks waiting on the unpaved road. It would then push the wood onto the inclined planks to load them up in the truck. The mahout sitting on top would goad and use his toes to control the animal. For the onlookers, the elephantine struggle was a spectacle to watch. When one end of the wood is pushed up, the other will slip, extending its harrowing grapple. The animal has to do a tough balancing act with its trunk and tusks and even use its forelegs to support the log. To us children, standing Ana’s knee high, the animal symbolised power with supreme benevolence. The wronged animal, Ana, always wore a poignant look. Teary fluid streamed out of the corner of its eyes as it flapped its ears in distress to find some solace.

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In the evening, after a hard day’s labour, the elephant is taken to the nearest pond for an elaborate bath. The massive animal would splash down and relax before us, and we children now get an easy angle of sight to examine the pachyderm’s soft mannerisms as mahouts rub its back and ears. The elegance of an elephant is in its silence and slowness. Unlike other wild beasts, it doesn’t get provoked easily and screams only when the torture becomes too unbearable. “Eat like an elephant” does not mean quantity but a bite at a time, even when one is dead hungry.

Its disproportionate size is the elephant’s fatal flaw. Nature cleared off all other ferocious behemoths roaming the planet before the arrival of humans and probably left the mild-mannered elephants on Earth as companions for us. But we often accuse the wild elephants of trespassing on human settlements. We forget that even our expert panels with better intelligence and satellite imagery have struggled to determine the margins of ever-shrinking forest lands. Yet, we expect these beasts to respect and restrict themselves to their boundaries. If not, we call them rouge and translocate them, or even worse, cage them to domesticate.