An Insight into a Sighting
The group had split into two when the alarm came from the guide. I left the peloton, which included two feisty elderly ladies who could not — would not — be hurried by anything, even rapidly descending dusk, and raced around the bend in the path. I saw the guide — a soft-faced farmhand in his twenties named Mani — staring into the thick forest that the path abutted.
“Elephant!” he whispered.
In this part of rural South India, at the foothills of the Western Ghats, where humans count wild animals as neighbours, elephants are equal parts worshipped, feared, and worked. Social elephants living and working in a community of humans and other domesticated elephants are less likely to rampage than a solitary elephant in the wild.
I turned and looked deep into the dark forest. The fading light threw a veil over the shadows. And then, all at once, a large solitary male tusker flew out of the trees. He ground to a halt when he saw us standing a mere hundred metres away from him, separated only by a canal. Homo Sapiens and Elephas Maximus sized each other up from either side of the canal. His pair of tusks curved long and gleamed ivory. His hide was a magnificent shade of freshly surfaced roads. His right eye blazed. No mahout had ever named this elephant.
Further up our path, a bridge crossed over the canal and connected the forests on either side of us. If the tusker turned back or went right away from the bridge, we had nothing to worry about. If he went left, clambered onto the bridge and blocked our path, we were in serious trouble. After two long seconds, the tusker turned left and vanished into the forest with the stealth of a leopard.
Freed of the tusker’s gaze, Mani found his voice.
“Get past the bridge! Go! Now!” he shouted and turned back to fetch the stragglers.
Kamatchi and Daniel responded immediately and rushed to safety. Vijaya, a strong-willed doctor in her thirties, ran back for her husband, shouting “Arjun! Arjun!” I ran back as well, figuring Mani would need help with the grandmothers.
However, there was little we could do apart from plead with them to up the pace, a tough proposition to one who has undergone age-related surgeries. Arjun refused to leave the grandmothers’ side despite his wife’s insistence. And so, half a dozen humans plodded up the path, one fearful eye looking for a flash of grey from the dark forest, and one hopeful eye watching the bridge draw closer with every step.
We dared to breathe only after we cleared the bridge and were surrounded by the wide open fields of human activity, although we kept looking over our shoulders. The larger group reassembled and checked on everybody else. In the gathering darkness, we piled into the two vehicles that had brought us to tusker territory, a boxy SUV and an open trailer hitched to a tractor.
As we bounced back through narrow village roads to the farm we were staying at, nobody could stay quiet. We had all lived through the same moment, yet had experienced it differently. Mani said the tusker was the largest he had ever seen, and how, if the tusker had indeed blocked our path, he would have found it easier to rescue two grandmothers as opposed to five people. Kamatchi and Daniel nodded and said that was why they had immediately run past the bridge. Vijaya said she had run back for her husband without even thinking about it; it had been a natural instinctive action. Arjun talked about how he had considered the two grandmothers as his own and could not possibly have left them under any circumstances.
Mani pulled out his mobile phone and called a number of his people, issuing the warning about a wild tusker in the area with a storyteller’s flair and delight. The darkness settled. Shapes merged into each other. The village lights appeared.
“Animals connect us back to who we are, and to the purpose of why we’re here.” ― Trisha McCagh
(travelled in April 2019, originally published on World Nomads)
