elephant 3

Elephants 

1.   Just out of my mother's womb and in my hospital crib , I sense Lord Ganesha hovering above me, notepad in hand. He looks down at my sleeping form over his tusk, and crosses out a line or two, adds a new detail here. Is my life going by his plans? May it be so, always so. Now he is holding my children when they are scared (and me too), holding us tight with his trunk.

2.    Elephants have long memories. Can they recall the trumpeting of mammoths and mastodons in the Ice Age, can they recall the sprawling paradise they once roamed and shaped? 

 3.    Elephants live as long as humans, they mourn their dead, and care for their old and ill. On summer afternoons, mothers shift their mass to block the sun, to shade their babies as they nap. You don't mess with this vegetarian giant. They take revenge. 

4.    Baby elephants have no control over their trunks. They flip flap flop to make sense of their world. With their too large ears, they charge at ducks and geese and run back to hide under their mothers when the birds squawk at them. 

5. If you gaze into the eyes of an elephant, you will feel yourself drowning in a vortex, deep and light brown alternating, speckled with star dust, going back thousands of years, pinning us with questions: what have we done with their ancestors? What are we doing to them now?

6.   I may have ridden one when I was seven, along the street outside my aunt's place in India. As a child, when i needed to lull myself to sleep, I'd call up that image. It felt so safe up there, near the crown of his head, swaying side to side on his ambling walk, his hair prickling under me. Nothing could touch me. I rode again on my honeymoon -  Thailand. Then I learnt how elephants were tamed, torn from their mothers as babies, beaten and starved till their spirits were broken. I could never ride an elephant again.

7.    I love the sprawling stone temples in India, with elephants blessing us for bananas, in Mahapalipuram, Azhagar Kovil. Now I wonder how they were trained. The abject irony if temples tamed wild elephants with sticks and stones. Can we tie up Ganesha to seek his blessings? I hope not. I am scared to find out.

8.    Elephants converse with earth and wind in a language beyond us. Born cartographers, they feel the earth's rumbles through their wrinkled skin. The earth dances in seismic vibrations when one greets the other across the plains. They trace the paths of ancient rivers to lead their herds to water. As we in turn shape the land with our crude tools, we have become crosstalk in their dialogue with earth. How do they now maneuver the land, their history, their future? The dinosaur has become a bird.  What will the elephant become?

9.    They have have fought wars for us, ridden in royal games, crushed enemies skulls, and they have danced atop colourful balls in circus rings. 

10. Elephants uproot trees with their trunks, and pick up flowers by their stems. They wash their fruit before eating, and roll in mud to cool off. They spray each other with abandon and face off in thundering battles.

11. It is said earth teeters upon the their backs, as they balance on a tortoise. Earth quakes when they shrug their shoulders. We should take note, if we push them too hard, they will slip and we will fall. 

12. Ganesha the elephant god, the remover of all obstacles, the one whom the goddess shaped from sandalwood and breathed life into, to protect and guard her, to call her own, who broke off a tusk to keep writing, ever be my muse, to keep writing.