The Elephant Flora-dor

by Viraj Circar

Being a planter’s child meant that each time I would go back to boarding school from my summer or winter vacations I would have an interesting ‘animal story’. Most of my friends in school never believed them, but I never stopped telling them. Thinking back now, as an urban resident, perhaps they did sound a little fanciful. But, well, enchanting things do happen in enchanted places.

The Sylee Tea Estate Manager’s residence was a massive two storied edifice. A fair amount of the weight of the top storey was supported by about nine fairly slim columns, a design often referred to as a ‘Chang Bungalow’. It allowed for a bottom area that contained a high ceilinged veranda, and to my mother’s delight, ample sun and space for her many, many flower pots. My mother cared deeply for her assortment of flowers and one of her pleasures and quandaries was always how and where to arrange them. Like an artist, delighting in their myriad pigments and shapes, she would try all manner of permutations and combinations depending on the season.  

Sylee lay in an elephant’s corridor. It was their forest habitat that had been cleared by tea entrepreneurs over a hundred and fifty years ago and the herds continued to make their territorial claim by marching over the estate premises with scant regard for the carefully laid sections of tea bushes, labour lines, fencings and drains. When this happened, an ‘elephant squad’ was called in, which as I remember consisted of a 4X4 jeep with a carrier or ‘machaan’ on top, on which sat quite a number of people hooting, whistling and throwing ‘chocolate bombs’ to change the locus of the herd and send them back to the forest. I was once given permission by my parents to join the forest officials on the machaan. If I heard myself talking about being smack-bang in the middle of a herd of about twenty elephants, on a golf course fairway, trying to trumpet as loud as them, I wouldn’t believe me either!

Often when we sat in the veranda in the evenings, the cacophony of frogs and crickets would be accompanied by the snorting and sneezing of elephants thrashing about in the foliage behind the hibiscus hedges that formed the perimeter to the bungalow compound.

There was one evening though, that they decided to invite themselves in.

It had been a rainy day and we were sitting in the veranda having tea with my father who had just come back from work. The frogs had turned up their volume, but in that special way it is in the wild, it was as if the silence had been amplified too, and you could hear the dripping, shuddering leaves from my mother’s carefully manicured garden all around us.

Suddenly Somra the chowkidaar ran up, steel flashlight and lathi in hand, and told us with a curious mixture of respectfulness and impatience that we should run upstairs because the elephants had come into the malibari (vegetable garden). Food supplies were always short in the forests and herds regularly came into the estate areas in search of ‘makkai’ (corn) that the tea pluckers grew in their spare time. Apparently some intrepid elephant had just discovered our malibari.

Upstairs, from the room directly above the veranda, we waited and watched with bated breath. The elephants didn’t keep us waiting too long and before we knew it about six or seven giants lumbered onto the front lawn. I noticed my father watching with pursed lips as a tusker grazed the Gypsy parked in the porch, rocking it like a boat on choppy water. Maybe it was our imagination, but for a few moments after this the tusker seemed to be looking around, searching for something. My eyes met my father’s. This display of the consequences of their sheer size had got both of us thinking the same thing. The nine columns! What if the tusker had developed an itch on its side and was looking for something to scratch it against? A light rub would bring the whole bungalow crashing down.

We looked at my mother who was standing behind us, rigid, her hands covering her mouth. Had the same thing occurred to her? It must have, because she looked terribly frightened. I reached out for her to put one of her hands in mine. As it turned out, she had a different fear in her mind. Her hands came away from her face and both my father and I heard her whisper, ‘Those animals will destroy my flower pots!’

The herd left as peacefully as it had come. In the morning we surveyed the damage to the bungalow compound. There was surprisingly little, apart from a tangle of wires where a fencing used to be and a slight dent on the side of the Gypsy. They seemed to have stepped gingerly around most of my mother’s plants and flower beds too. As my father and I continued our survey, we noticed my mother in the front lawn gesticulating excitedly to Biru the headmali (head gardener). We walked up to her and she pointed out how the wet earth had been neatly depressed with alternating circles from the elephants’ footsteps.

We looked around to see Biru and a few of the other malis walking towards us, each with a flowerpot in their hands. They placed them as per their instructions in the alternating holes, making a pleasant symmetrical, if somewhat meandering, pattern.

‘Isn’t it great?’ she exclaimed excitedly. ‘I noticed the pattern last night from upstairs and I was wondering what to do with the extra pots!’

The writer, Viraj Circar