To the Elephant Graveyard. Tarquin Hall
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morning,’ I said, trying to decide whether to call him by his first or last name. I settled on the latter. After all, he was old enough to be my father, and in India people still set store on courtesy.
Mr Choudhury stretched and glanced out of the window, quickly recognizing the area.
‘I used to come here as a boy to watch wild elephants,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘In those days, this was all jungle for miles and miles, as far as your eye could see. There were hardly any people. Now, there are millions of them.’
His voice had a bitter edge to it and he seemed sombre. Rolling down the window, he relaxed a little, breathing in the fresh air, relishing the smell of damp moss and pine.
‘See over there,’ he continued, pointing to a wide depression in the ground where sugarcane grew in abundance. ‘That area used to be a lake. Entire herds of hundreds of elephants would come down from the hills and eat the aquatic weed. It’s their favourite delicacy. I used to sit up in a tree and watch them down below me, all trumpeting, playing and splashing about in the water. It was wonderful.’
There was a glint in his eye as he reminisced. I sensed that he was in a talkative mood and I wanted to hear more.
Had he been much involved with elephants?
‘Oh yes. I grew up surrounded by them,’ he told me as we continued along back roads. ‘We used them as transport. My father owned a huge estate, thousands of acres, and he always collected rent from our tenants on the back of Chamundi Prasad, his favourite tusker.’
In those days, elephants were the ultimate status symbol, as prestigious as the BMWs and Mercedes of today. No special occasion was complete without them. When Mr Choudhury’s elder brother married, he arrived at the ceremony riding on an elephant in a silver lotus-flower howdah, or seat, and leading twenty other beasts, each decked out with bejewelled awnings and ornate headpieces decorated with gold braid and peacock feathers. Whenever a boy was born in the family, the child would be paraded around the estate on the back of a tusker. During religious festivals, the caparisoned animals were always the star attraction.
The Choudhurys employed more than a dozen mahouts, specialists who double as handler and rider, together with fifteen or so apprentices and several phandis, or professional catchers. It was the phandis’ job to capture and train wild elephants. Every year, with a great deal of fanfare and pageantry, these men would head off into the jungle and on to the plains to hunt down promising calves. Using an age-old technique unique to Assam called mela-shikar, they would lasso the animals in much the same way as American cowboys catch cattle. The captured elephants were either kept for the stable or, once trained, were sold at the annual elephant mela, or fair, at Sonpur on the banks of the Gandak River in Bihar, to this day the largest elephant market in the world.
‘All the mahouts and phandis lived in an encampment not far from the estate where I grew up,’ continued Mr Choudhury. ‘It was an incredibly busy place. Wherever you looked, elephants were being trained and taught to do tricks. It was like having my own private circus all to myself. From a young age, all I could think about was elephants.’
But Mr Choudhury’s father did not approve of his son’s fascination and affinity with the animals and sent him away to school in Shillong, the old British capital of Assam, a threehour drive from Guwahati.
‘He wanted me to become an engineer and planned to send me to England to study at Rolls-Royce,’ he said. ‘I used to sneak back from school and spend time with the mahouts without my father’s knowledge.’
Over the years, these men taught him all the tricks of the trade as well as some of their most closely guarded secrets. Eventually, however, thanks to land reforms introduced by India’s socialist governments, the Choudhurys were forced to sell their estate. With it went the elephants and the men who had been the hunter’s mentors.
‘Throughout my life, I have continued to be involved with these animals, often working with them,’ said Mr Choudhury. ‘My first love is my family and my second is elephants.’
‘How could you love elephants and still hunt them?’I blurted out, immediately regretting having showed my feelings.
‘Believe me, there is nothing that saddens me more in the whole world,’ he replied. ‘It breaks my heart, truly it does. But sometimes it just has to be done. Sometimes I have to play executioner. Perhaps, as our journey continues, you will begin to understand more of my dilemma. It is all very painful.’
Something in his voice seemed to smack of insincerity. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I was sure he was hiding something.
‘Why do you do it then, if it’s so painful?’ I asked.
‘I am the only one in Assam who is qualified. I’m a trained marksman and an elephant expert,’ he replied. ‘Besides, when you have a rabid dog, you cannot allow it to run loose. It has to be killed. Is it not so?’
I could tell that he was growing more and more uneasy with the conversation, so I let the subject drop. But our chat left me as confused as ever about Mr Choudhury’s intentions and motives.
The Forest Department headquarters, our destination, lay near the border with the mountainous state of Arunachal Pradesh, Indian territory claimed by the Chinese. The compound was built on a low-lying hill that, during the monsoon, sat above the Brahmaputra floodwaters. Seven wooden bungalows with teak decks stood in a semicircle facing an enclosure several hundred yards across. Hundreds of tree-trunks, confiscated from timber smugglers, were stacked against a fence, each one spray-painted with a series of numbers and letters. Many had obviously been there for some time, no doubt held as evidence in ongoing prosecutions, and they were beginning to rot.
In the centre of the compound stood an ancient banyan tree, its trunk at least twenty feet in diameter, its base a mass of tangled roots that jutted out of the soil like flying buttresses. Characteristically, its branches had grown shoots that dangled down to the ground. Some had burrowed into the earth and developed into saplings.
‘DO NOT TIE YOUR ELEPHANTS HERE!’ read a sign attached to the veranda of the main office. A pile of buffalo skulls lay by the front door, while above these, hanging incongruously from a nail, was a pair of bright pink underpants.
While we unloaded our bags and equipment, the forest officers and guards emerged, still half-awake, from their bungalows. A dishevelled bunch, they greeted Mr Choudhury, whom they addressed as Shikari or Hunter, with fond smiles and hugs, as if he were some long-lost brother.
‘I call these men the Dirty Dozen,’ joked the hunter while I shook hands with them all. ‘That’s because they tell the dirtiest jokes.’
The senior officer was called Mole because as a child he used to squint through his glasses, which were as thick as the bottoms of milk bottles.
Mole was the most successful young officer in the department, having put a record number of timber smugglers behind bars and confiscated thousands of illegally felled trees in the process. Not surprisingly, as a result he had made many enemies, chiefly among the powerful timber-smuggling syndicate who were rumoured to enjoy the patronage of a number of local politicians. Mole was a man with a price on his head.
‘The bounty stands at 25,000 rupees,’ he joked. ‘That’s all my life is worth! Half as much as an elephant!’
Mole was uncouth, cocky and unpredictable. He also had the annoying habit of calling me ‘man’ every time he spoke to me – ‘Hey, man’, ‘Good to see you, man’, ‘How are you, man?’ – something he had picked up in the United States while studying environmental protection. But he was streetwise and knew how things worked in Assam.
‘The local police are in on everything, man,’ he told me once. ‘So if I arrest someone, I keep him in custody until the court hearing so he can’t escape. Then I make sure the judge gives me a conviction.’
When he wasn’t arresting teak smugglers, Mole had to deal with the local wild elephant herds. As he explained over breakfast in the mess, there was very little rain forest left for the animals to live in.
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