By Rajesh Parameswaran

ELEPHANTS IN CAPTIVITY (PART ONE)¹

I don’t have much time² so I must dispense with the obvious.³ Helicopters clatter overhead, men with cameras⁴ leaning from their open doorways. Their footage must be numbingly familiar to you, and might by now be all that remains of me. Please know that the contemporaneous accounts surely will be filled with distortions.⁵ I write this in order to supply you with those crucial bits of history without which my story cannot be understood.

Before I begin, I want to make something clear: I am sorry for the expense and trouble I have caused. If I have hurt anyone, even unintentionally, then I can only hope for your forgiveness.⁶ Many people have invested in my safety and comfort,⁷ have felt that they’ve had my best interests at heart;⁸ I have not intended to betray them.

You must believe that I never sought to draw this kind of attention to myself. I am just one elephant, and I did not seek it, but I can sense it: my story is destined to be a part of this city’s collective memory.⁹ Perhaps, just perhaps, by the time you read this, my misadventure has inspired others to break free as I did.¹⁰ Perhaps we live among you now as friends and neighbors.¹¹

I have come far. This vast expanse ringed with trees recalls me to another green place.¹² My first memories are of green — the rustle of green, its shift and sway, a thickness of thin blades that rise above my head — the grass we ate and lived in. Rushing through it, through the herd’s feet, massive, thundering feet, which in the vision- clouding dust and seeming chaos, balletically precise, never miss their mark. My elders sense my clumsy, tottering body somewhere in the dust and grass far beneath them, and always step around me. So: in, under, around the massive god bodies of my elders, I rush forward. My trunk rises up, groping for the belly that bears the odor of my mother, Amuta, her trailing milky, musky scent. I find her, and she reaches down for just a moment, to smell my mouth, touch me on the head, to reassure me and confirm herself of my presence, and all the while we thunder forward.¹³ Prior, primarily I remember: Green.

During the wet season, our old leader Ania would guide us out of our valley to graze among the upland bark and bush, to feed on the brief tender grass that sprang up along the monsoon rivers in the hills. In the dry season, she brought us back down again to the valley, where the earth’s wetness contracted to a small space of blue — our lake (I have never seen it, but I remember it)¹⁴ — and where the grass was tough and tasteless but everpresent.

Life was full of change, but our home was neverchanging. Mother became our leader after old Ania died, a solitary grazer among hostile beasts. During our more difficult times, some would complain even about Mother’s wise leadership, saying that if Ania were alive we would never have suffered as we did. (The elephants spoke, I say, but of course they didn’t. Among ourselves, we elephants did not talk in words like those with which I now write this. We made noises, a broad range of them: grunts, whispers, low rumbles, ear- splitting trumpets, but we used them not as words. We made motions with our bodies as well — with our trunks, our ears, our legs, our eyes, with the angle of our heads — but these motions did not have distinct meanings. These gestures of body and sound were the stuff of our communication, yet they did not themselves constitute our speech. The source of our understanding, the substance of our message, lay in something broader and more round, a circle of intention that surrounded each of us and the herd. When we were together in the herd, we shared an understanding, concrete and actual; each of us felt with certainty what other individuals expressed to us, and moreover, we understood as a herd what the herd thought and felt.)¹⁵

Ania left us during the long drought, when my aunts’ skin hung loose on their jutting, angular hip bones, and the hard, ugly shapes of their skulls protruded from behind their kind faces. Ania always had faith in the old grazing fields. We all did. But one day she left us, and Mother remained the dominant female in the herd.¹⁶

We had all seen our cousin herds stay in their old grazing fields and die, Mother reminded us. She convinced us to abandon our ancient land. She led us into distant unknown hills¹⁷ where, with less competition for the bark of the baobab trees and the sparse, sweet grasses, she promised us, we would thrive. Elephants died on this uncertain journey. My great-aunt Thoosha didn’t survive the climb. She was ninety-four, and one morning along the long way, awake and lolling on her side, she calmly refused to stand up.¹⁸

Manami’s nameless, still-suckling son — he had been lively once, a rambunctious boy, but during the drought, when Manami’s breasts grew shriveled and suckling became painful, when her milk dried up, this boy was the first among the children to slow his play, to reveal his weakness — he also didn’t live to see the new hills. (Poor Manami struggled to bring him along. When the calf’s pace slowed, Manami also slowed, the two of them trailing behind us a full day’s journey. Mother did not stop the herd to wait for them, nor did Manami ask her to, and when Manami finally joined us again, she was alone. We touched her face with our trunks and rubbed our heads on her haunches, but Manami would not face our gaze or return our greeting. This happened before I was born, but I remember it clearly.)¹⁹

In our new hills, striped with slow and steady mountain streams, we struggled and lived, but the memory of our old home lingered always in our bones like an ache. I was born in this new place, and lived here in these green hills until the age of eleven.²⁰ And although we were relieved here of the immediate threat posed by the lowland drought, the new land brought its own difficulties. There were hungry times here, too, but also new and unforeseen dangers.

Koni discovered the first disquieting sign. Koni was older than me by seven years, a teenager on the cusp of womanhood. My mother treated her almost like her own daughter, and for many years, in fact, I believed Koni was my true sister. I followed her in everything she did. When she waded in the lake and curved her trunk back over her body to spray herself, I did the same and choked as the water flowed back down my trunk into my throat. When we grazed, I would leave my mother’s side only to follow behind Koni, to admire the deft way she handled the grasses with her trunk, nimble and precise; how she effortlessly held her own among the elders. Her eyes were larger than those of other elephants, depthless and black.²¹

I did not know yet who Koni was. I could not have foretold the ways in which her actions would change my life.²²

Koni’s confidence and tendency to solitude distinguished her from the other adolescents, especially when from time to time our group was joined by a clutch of noisy young bulls from the outlying jungles. These boys would camp a short distance from us and saunter into our herd by day, draping their trunks over their small tusks in feigned nonchalance, but quickly revealing themselves as overeager novices. Fancying themselves clever, they tried surreptitiously to sniff our undersides and taste our urine, to determine who among our older sisters were least likely to reject their rude attentions. When they approached an older elephant, one of our mothers, they would be greeted with a roar or a feinted lunge, to send them scurrying back to their cohorts. Our mothers had no time for these juveniles. But the adolescents and younger cows were curious about the newcomers, and some eager girls became positively giddy with excitement. The interest of men was still a novelty to them, and so, giggling and indiscriminate, one of my cousins might follow a boy elephant into the forest for days together.²³ Upon her return, her friends might surround her, cooing and fawning, eager to mark the ascension of one of their own into the ranks, they imagined, of womanhood.

Koni, I thought, was different from the other girls. Even when she reached maturity, she stayed aloof from the attentions of boys. She held close to the elders of our group, modeling her comportment on theirs. Some of the other elephants found such behavior haughty — a cow, they thought, should behave like a cow, but a calf like a calf. They felt Koni had not earned the right to carry herself as though she were superior to other elephants her age, to dominate and command those elephants.

But to my child’s eyes, Koni was not behaving as though she were superior to others her age. She simply was superior. It was abundantly clear.

But some months later Koni surprised us. We were grazing on trees on the grassless side of a hill, eating leaves, bark, and even the thin ends of branches, stripping down the trunks. In loose and fluid order we grazed, straying occasionally out of sight of each other, keeping our bearings by bellowing out loudly and then waiting to hear the rippling replies of our sisters. But then Koni called to us from somewhere distant, and the sound of her call was unformed and open, and we could not fathom its meaning. Her voice bellied out over the forest, an implacable ululation. Our stomachs dropped, our ears pricked out rigid and quivering with alarm, and we froze. Old Iala emptied her bladder in a rush of distress, then turned around as if to flee — we all saw her. But my mother sent forth a long, deep rumble that rolled over the forest floor, flattening grass: a reassurance, a reply to Koni, and an indisputable command to the rest of us. We rushed forward then, everyone, even flustered, shame- faced Iala, her ears flapping in agitation, with children like me struggling to stay close to the dust- clouded behinds of our mothers. And we rushed as elephants rush — splintering trees, obliterating the small, unfortunate mammals who people the forest floor — until we came across Koni in a forest clearing, standing watch over a gruesome sight, a massive and familiar carcass.²⁴

I knew the dead bull. Once a year he would visit our group, and I dreaded this visit in the pit of my stomach. His smell preceded him by an hour: a black, pungent odor that arrived not gradually but all at once, like a wet-season cloud. My aunts and cousins lifted their trunks to sniff the air and, receiving the smell, fell into an unseemly frenzy, braying at each other, urinating excitedly into the bush.

When he arrived, he broke through the surrounding trees without ceremony, his chin tucked in, his trunk extended, his eyes wild and intent. Black rheum ran down the sides of his face and along the insides of his thighs, and his penis hung low, enormous, dribbling some cloudy serum. Two massive tusks weighted his head, arcing down almost to the ground, the left one broken off and jagged at the tip.

The younger elephants who had reached maturity could not contain themselves; they bowed at him and shuffled with nervous, eager submission. Even Manami and Iala and my other usually dignified aunts excitedly circled this powerful bull, turning their backsides toward him in embarrassingly frank invitation. But he ignored them. His interest was already focused on a muscular cow, my mother, who stood some distance away, peeling the branches from trees, nonchalantly flapping her ears, turning only a casual glance at the visitor. The bull walked toward her, but my mother only walked away. He trotted faster, but my mother outpaced him, leading him deep into the trees. I watched the shivering of the treetops that marked their progress as they receded deeper into the cover of the forest. And then the forest was still.

About four days later my mother would return alone, weary and calm. She trotted directly to me, reassured herself of my wellbeing, offered me her breast, which I accepted, bewildered, but famished and grateful. My aunts reverted to their conditioned or inborn hierarchies, obeying Amuta’s commands reflexively, none of them remarking on her absence. But if my aunts didn’t resent him, I certainly did, this mysterious bull who was the only thing that could separate my mother from her daughter and her herd.

Now this same bull lay mangled on the forest floor, massive and bleeding.²⁵ Pink cavities marked the spots on his face where once his tusks grew, and his belly pulsed with the movement of maggots.

The sight of the carcass had an instantaneous effect on our herd. My aunts and cousins screamed in distress. They nudged the body with their feet, and when this did not wake it, they thrashed the ground with their trunks and threw dirt violently on their own backs. Some of the younger of us ran hysterically away from the site and back again, repeatedly, as if hoping each time to be greeted by some less terrible scene, while Koni, her breath gone, her screams reduced now to whimpers, shook her head with continued disbelief while her trunk evinced a growing acceptance, softly caressing the decayed body.

Amuta, my mother, stood at some distance from the others, and from this terrible elephant that she had loved, absorbing the herd’s dismay and Koni’s familiar caresses. Finally she approached the body, nudging Koni aside. With her trunk, my mother probed gently the wounds in his belly, the bloody craters in his face, smelling and occasionally tasting his blood. She voiced no emotion, but these attentive explorations of her trunk, I see now, revealed her profound care and patient concern. When she had completed her investigations, my mother turned to the herd and spoke.

Now, when my mother “spoke,” more often than not she articulated the intention of the herd, voiced our collective mind, crystallizing it, giving it form and direction. The herd had a mind and intention, true and plain, constituted by each of us, yet larger than our individual selves, and mother’s voice would give body to this intention. And when she spoke thus, we understood her without effort, immediately. But this time, when my mother stepped Koni aside, we did not understand at first what she was trying to tell us.

This bull was not a member of our herd, Mother tried to convey, and so we needn’t mourn him as if he were. She told us simply to return to our grazing.

Manami and the others pawed the ground uncomfortably, not knowing what to do. Our instinct, once we understood the new danger signified by this death, was first to mourn the bull, then to flee this country, to return at once to the relative safety of our old and original grazing land.

As the elephants moped in passive confusion, Koni responded aggressively. She did what not even the oldest and most revered of cows would think to do. She turned and trumpeted defiantly at my mother. Then she approached the bull and laid her trunk over him, taking mother’s place, as it were. Koni would not leave without mourning this bull, for this bull, her actions clearly stated, had been her mate.²⁶

Now Iala fluttered her ears and emitted a nervous whistle. The rest of the herd pawed the ground and lowered their heads as if to escape association with Koni’s unprecedented insolence. And my mother, indeed, spread out her ears and widened her eyes in response to the insult implied by the younger cow.

It did not matter that Koni had only expressed the truth. My mother knew — they all knew — that a bull does not mate with only one cow. But to voice this one truth was to violate another: the necessary wisdom of my mother’s leadership, the unquestioned and unquestionable unity that guaranteed our survival.

We waited to see if Amuta would reestablish her dominance, if Koni would suffer for her thoughtless impudence. Mother stepped toward Koni, and the younger elephant turned to face what she may have believed would be her bloodying.

But instead of charging Koni, my mother relaxed her posture. She paused and considered the younger elephant. Then she lifted her trunk to Koni, and we all drew our breath, fearing an attack. But Mother only made soft noises, flicking her ears, lifting up her feet and placing them back down softly, firmly.²⁷

Mother spoke to Koni, but Koni didn’t respond. She couldn’t. I could see in her face the intensity of her emotion; her grief — and her anger at Amuta — was too much to bear. By her posture, it was apparent that Koni was still prepared to fight, eager to show her mettle, come what may; but Amuta refused to engage her in this way. Then my mother edged closer to Koni, touching her from the side, laying her head and neck against the smaller cow and draping her trunk over her back, and although Koni tried to move aside, bridling at my mother’s caress, my mother would not let her go, until Koni finally calmed down.²⁸

Then Amuta looked to see if any others wished to express themselves. No one did. And just like that, it was settled. Amuta began to walk back toward our grazing field, with Manami and Iala and all the others falling with easy obedience into line, Koni’s small moment of rebellion forgotten, her very opinions seemingly altered by the redirected consensus of the herd. Koni’s insurrection had not, in fact, been real. Mother had not allowed it to be.

And so we lived again content in our new hills. The rains that came thereafter were dense, cooling. In the mornings we fed on the new thriving of greenery, and in the afternoons we wallowed in mud, we sank under the shade of trees and slept. New bulls visited our camp, and my aunts played gladly with them, and there was no new sign of danger; and Koni never mentioned — nor even seemed to remember — the moment when she voiced an opinion different from Amuta’s. That incident seemed, by the evidence of the herd’s behavior, not an actual difference of opinion, but only and completely a misunderstanding — of each other, and of our own intentions. Those peaceful days were the last of my first green life.²⁹

*   *   *

My second life began with a hole.³⁰ No, wrong, that’s in retrospect. A lush expanse. Fallen branches and leaves, torn twigs. The ground it was. Just the ground under my feet. Then not.

I was nearly eleven now and fed on grass, not milk. I pulled my own food from the ground. I tussled with my cousins and ran with the exuberance that we had during those full times. I ran to keep close to my fast- moving mother in the bright sun. And then there was pain and darkness.

I was in pain and felt the weight of something large upon me. It was dark and there was nothing I could see. I smelled my mother and there was another there, and the world was gone.

My mother stood up now, tall (and as she rose, I heard the cracking of bones — not hers but those of the body on which she was lying). I felt my way with my trunk, seeking to cower beneath her, but she swung her body in frantic movements and did not recognize my form, and her seeming confusion terrified me.

As the light returned to my eyes, I saw that there were three of us here, myself, my mother, and my youngest brother (he lay still on the ground, his eyes rolled up in his head). My mother calmed down and recognized me now, and arched her trunk to sniff the air. The sky had risen high above us, a small blue circle in the middle of darkness.

We heard the rumble of the returning herd in the earth and blackness that surrounded us, coming toward us from all around.³¹ And then we saw their faces in the space of sky above, looking down at us, bewildered. They kneeled on the ground and reached with their trunks but they could not nearly touch us. Iala wept and thrashed the ground. Others ran off to pull down branches and came back and held them down to us, hoping somehow to pull us up. And my mother pawed up the walls, unclimbably steep, only to slip back onto her haunches. One of my frantic little sisters tried to leap into the hole to join us, but another caught her by the tail, just barely.

I don’t remember how long we stayed here, what other efforts the herd made in trying to rescue us.³² After some time (hours? days?), all returned to quiet. I slept, and awoke in a delirium, hungry. In the circumscribed space of sky above us, my family members continued to gaze down, despairing.

And in the quiet, my mother spoke.

She gave the others an order. She told them to go away and leave us to our fate. She ordered them to leave.

The elephants responded by scratching the ground uncertainly. They looked about as if dumb, as if they hadn’t heard; because what they heard would require them to do what could not be countenanced.

Go away without me, Mother told them again; you must survive now on your own. She knew that whoever set this trap would surely return. The only thing to do was to leave, and leave immediately. Mother was already as good as dead; and for the herd to remain with her to the end would mean the herd’s end as well. To drive home her point, Mother rammed the side of the hole with her head, sending the ground above into shivers, bringing a shower of dirt on our own backs.

But the elephants only exchanged frightened glances. They looked down at us³³ and bellowed incoherently, and then looked to each other again. And still they did nothing.

Perhaps they did not know how to move, how to translate even the simple command from head to legs, to turn around and walk away, without Amuta physically there to guide them. Their confused faces ringed the circle of blue. My cousins, playful youngsters and graceful young women; my stately aunts, strong and imposing, reduced now to an extreme of helplessness and agitation; my younger brothers and sisters pawed the ground madly and shook their heads, calling out to us, tears streaking their faces.³⁴

My mother was resolute. She understood the situation perfectly. She bellowed to them and spoke clearly, she tried to persuade them in a hundred ways, but they would not listen.³⁵ For Mother was the herd. Without her, they could not function.

Did they finally leave? I didn’t know. Their sad, beautiful faces receded from view, away from the circle. I was thirsty. My brother, my unnamed infant brother, lay still, barely breathing. My mother sat on her haunches in the darkness as the quiet of night set upon us.

We would never see the herd together, alive, again.

In the final stillness, Mother was quiet, making noises only on occasion. It was a hopeless time, and Mother, so powerless, could only try to comfort me.³⁶ She believed we would all die; she no longer resisted it. Her despair had become quieter but also more total. Our chance for choice was over, our fates clear, our actions fit for judgment; and it was obvious to her that she had failed. I feared her hopelessness more than I feared my own personal doom; I feared her grief, her final, unassailable sorrow, palpable even in its silence, in the darkness of that hole during those last hours.³⁷

The light came in the morning, and the sounds were like the morning sounds. And as we did in the morning, I emptied my bladder, moved my bowels, there on the ground where we stood, on the body even of my dying brother. I could not help myself. The cries of alarm came first, then the pounding of our sisters’ feet vibrating through the earth. These sounds told us they had not traveled far during the night, had not really traveled at all. Confused, chaotic gallops. And then came the screams. From a distance and close by: terrified, pained screams. We could not, of course, see what was happening, what the danger was, who was dying. We could only imagine.

For seeming hours it lasted, their horrible, helpless cries. These were the most terrifying moments of my life; I was more frightened than I am even now. Mother stared down, her eyes bearing a terrible intensity, fully attuned to the destruction of her herd and her own inability to stop it.

When the screams finally quieted, we heard indecipherable noises, footsteps of elephants or of other animals, calls and cries of beasts unknown to us.

Rough vines were thrown down into our hole, maneuvered with sticks around my body and my mother’s. The vines were hoisted about us and pulled tight, cutting sharply into our hides, and we were lifted bodily upward until we rested on our hind legs alone, our front feet dangling helplessly. Then a rain of dirt came down on us, great heapfuls, from all directions, on us and around us, covering my brother’s body even as he slept. For hours the dirt fell until the ground filled up to the level of our feet, and we were able to stand squarely again. And then the vines again were tightened, and again we were lifted painfully up, and again the dirt began to fall.

For days this process repeated itself, until the dirt in our hole had filled up nearly level with the ground. I was famished and delirious, almost too exhausted to be afraid, to be curious any longer about what was happening and who was doing this. But when we could glimpse finally over the lip of our hole, I was excited and comforted to see that the world was filled again with elephants. Not our family, no one we could recognize. Elephants fitted out in strange coverings, pulling at the vines that lifted us, accompanied by strange gibbering animals. But the world was filled again with elephants.

1. My discovery of this document establishes, despite your most vehement protests, the existence of Englaphant, that strange tongue native to all places of elephant-human contact, which I understand now intuitively, having spent most waking hours for the past twenty-three years in conversation with elephants in captivity. My translation — of which eventually there will be thirty parts — is therefore precise, placing Shanti in a long line of great Englaphant writers, starting with the master Ganesha, who wrote the entire Ramayana in an Indo-European precusor of Englaphant, with the ink-dipped, broken-off tip of his right tusk. [↩]
2. Unless one is well grounded in Shanti’s main tale, this bottom text might seem bumptious. I suggest you stop reading these footnotes, and instead give the above story a read, straight through. On your second run, allow yourself a lot of time. Better prepared to appreciate them, let your eyes wander down to these elucidating asides. [↩]
3. The obvious? We will never forget the images of the magnificent beast, seated on her haunches in the middle of our great park, her head bent intently down, seemingly oblivious to the commotion she was causing. In the middle of the park she sat! Nothing could have been more “obvious,” or at the same time more incomprehensible. It is indeed the obvious that merits our most intense scrutiny. Shanti knew this, and so, despite this alarming disclaimer, she does not dispense with that which is most important to her narrative, which is to say that which is in the center, which is to say that which is right before our eyes and which yet we cannot see. And so at the outset already we know one thing which we saw and yet did not see, the answer to the question: What was Shanti doing there for so long, calmly, in the middle of a meadow meant for sheep, while all around the world people watched transfixed, while all around her crumbled a city she had inadvertently reduced to chaos? The authorities have been afraid to share it with us, this simple yet amazing truth: she was writing. [↩]
4. And guns, Shanti! [↩]
5. “Jumbo on the Run,” quipped the News. “Rampage!” screamed the front page of the alarmist Post. “Had an elephant escaped?” worried the foolish Bengal Ming, remembering. [↩]
6. “Rampage!” screamed the Post, see footnote 5 supra, beneath a full-page picture of Shanti’s enormous self. To capture his dramatic snap, the photographer from the Post dashed into Seventy-second Street just inches from her feet, looking up and clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking. Alas — that lump under your feet, Shanti, that squirming, screaming, unexpected, far-beneath-you thing — did you feel it? Reading this we have to assume, sweet unassuming creature, that you didn’t. [↩]
7. It is hard to get comfortable, because my left foot always feels like it’s asleep. Elephant tranquilizers are not to be trifled with. [↩]
8. I hope you hadn’t forgotten, Shanti, the least of those people, who had observed you from the very beginning; who cared for you and loved you when you were at the most hopeless point on your hopeless journey. Why couldn’t you have mentioned him here by name? [↩]
9. But will her story be a singular and bizarre anomaly, a blip in the stream of popular culture, a moment of pure novelty? Or will her tale bear a meaning beyond its facts? Will it become a culture-shifting event, a watershed in the conjoined histories of our two species? [↩]
10. “Break free” suggests incorrectly that freedom can be found simply by escaping captivity — Shanti sadly stands corrected. Neither is it true (as she also should have known) that all circus workers and zookeepers are intent on enslavement. There are some who work within that world in order only to subvert it. At any rate, have others “broken free”? The recent evidence:

    • In Houston, this past October, a 700-pound Balinese wild boar unlatched the door of an improperly locked zoo vehicle with its tusk. It roamed the finer residential districts, entered a large, air- conditioned shopping mall, slid across the mall’s indoor ice- skating rink (scattering skaters but harming no one), exited through the ladies’ department at Saks, and disappeared for four days, until it was shot and killed while snacking on a stray dog behind a 7- Eleven.

    • A gibbon in Cincinnati stole keys from its sleepy keeper, escaping its enclosure only to take up residence in the glass well of the popcorn maker at the zoo concession stand. It was captured and returned to its confines; the popcorn was discarded.

    • An ostrich in San Diego disappeared without explanation; it was found three days later hiding in the back of an automotive store, having garlanded itself evidently in a stack of radials.

    • A Galápagos-style Komodo dragon turned up in a swimming pool in Los Angeles. The owner of the pool failed to report the wonderful lizard, hoping to keep it as a pet. Sanitation workers discovered it in the trash weeks later. It had died of what was later determined to be a vitamin D deficiency attributable to the sudden absence of rodents from its diet. The owner of the pool had attempted to raise the dragon as a vegan.

    • Recall, again, that infamous tiger, Ming, who terrorized another city for days. Man-eater and murderer, he ruled that city as his kind has always thought was its right, until he was, like all the others, tranquilized. He lay on the asphalt, tongue lolling, black lips pried back into a mock snarl for gums to be examined, the deadly ivory of his daggered teeth as vital now as unhammered nails, tapped and tugged by emboldened, human fingers; the very killing room of his mouth mute and empty, and violated by a plastic tongue depressor; his insensate, soggy mattress of a body, lifeless, unwieldy, shoveled finally onto a caged truck; and, dull eyes blinking, head pounding, awoke— sad groggy hungover Ming, erstwhile king— right back where you started, in the zoo again.

    There is more anecdotal evidence (see Jason Hribal, “Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance,” Counter Punch and AK Press, 2010). But did any of these animals, Shanti, achieve freedom? I have found not one example of an elephant escaping to live happily and with dignity in the city. Disregarding isolated instances, ill-conceived experiments, and unsubstantiated rumors, dear Shanti, your dream remains pending. [↩]

11. See above. What did you expect, Shanti? That people wouldn’t bat an eye to see a tusker careening down Broadway? That the city would build elephant lanes on the West Side Highway, double-wide, for your slow-moving sisters? That your calves would study with our children side by side in the same schools, and play with them? That they would be popular in the playground, your elephant children, tossing balls with their trunks, spraying water of a summer’s day at their bipedal friends? Did you ever fear, Shanti, that they would instead feel, for the first time, fat, naked, ugly, and odd? That they might fortify themselves in angry elephant enclaves? That they would stand in corners and cower, instead of flapping their ears against the city air and trumpeting out their freedom? [↩]
12. Elephants never forget. I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase. Here we see that, for good or ill, it’s true. Everything Shanti has seen, heard, tasted, and smelled, she remembers. It is a burden. In this city, dogs wander the streets noting the smell of every beast who has been there before them, treading a landscape invisible to the rest of us, a landscape whose urine-marked boundaries we will never comprehend. Similarly, for Shanti every inch of life, every color or shape, bears a unique and pulsing resonance. Show her a face, say a name, make a sound, name a thing, and she could name you another that preceded it, whose memory rises unbidden in her mind, to press up against the present thing with its own painful force and reality. Every corner of the world she turns reveals to her a new vista haunted by an old one; every door opens into a new house whose furnishings seem stolen from a long-ago home. Elephants don’t enjoy those simple Freudian-type luxuries humans take for granted: aphasia, repression, sublimation, omission. Memory for them is an edifice, a fixed and growing thing, enlarging itself brick by brick with each passing hour. It is a burden. In writing this, Shanti shares her burden, for a spell, with us. [↩]
13. Rushing underfoot, clumsy but eloquent in her own way, now straying from, now returning to the herd, in contrapuntal gallop with those above — an intuitive anticipation, dare we say, of her future editor’s trotting underfootnotes? [↩]
14. Hm! [↩]
15. The language of words would come only later — when she needed to communicate with humans. (Shanti’s somewhat romantic faith in language — both elephant and Englaphant— must be distinguished from the attitudes of other literate beasts, particularly the German- speaking ape Red Peter [1883–1924], brutal truth- teller, joyless [though not humorless] genius, gifted imitator of humans, altogether remarkable creature, who started off his speaking career with a hoarse “Hallo!” not because of an idealistic desire for interprimate communication; not because, in conjoined existence with people, he perceived new possibilities of freedom [Red Peter mocked the idea of freedom]; but only and merely because, held captive by humans and at the end of his short rope, he needed “einen Ausweg” [“a way out”]. Language released him from a cage — nothing more.) [↩]
16. Elephants are a complex species. Their herding instincts are counterbalanced, if not contradicted, by the deep-running passions of their individual psychologies. For example, pachyderms may harbor personal grudges for years, remembering the beatings inflicted by a particular mahout, or the pokes and thrown pebbles of a mischievous young circus visitor; and on encountering the person by chance years, yea decades later, kill him.

    A narrative, to be completely true, must plumb these dark depths. But keep in mind that Shanti, for all her perspicacity and eloquence, is at heart an innocent, as reluctant to suspect malice in her relatives as in the kindest of her captors. And she was short on time. Wouldn’t she be regretful if the one person most intimate with her life and her tale, well studied in elephant culture and psychology, a writer not untalented in his own right, and who moreover enjoys exclusive access to her text, did not fill in for her those voices and details that she would have felt, on further and deeper reflection, were crucial? While the editor’s job is normally to clarify, when duty calls, he must not shy from the role of a sort of Shamspeare in love. I humbly comply. Imagine, if you will, a scene, exterior, a jungle, daytime. Enter Shanti’s mother, Amuta, a spry, keen-eyed young woman.

    AMUTA: The herd trusts her implicitly, respects her fundamentally. But don’t let misplaced respect and false sentiment cool your purpose. When the young among us are dying, there is no time to indulge fond old age. Enter Ania, an old elephant, ears frayed from many battles, eyes rheumy with wisdom, kindness, or fatigue.

    AMUTA: (Aside) Here she comes. Steady yourself. See how fat she is? For too long we have indulged her with portions of our grass while our own calves have gone hungry. If that ponderous cow had to seek her own food, she would starve. She lived her youth in fuller times, but since I was born we’ve had only lack. See her eyes? She was the sharpest among us once, the lithest and most fearsome. This is how we become when we live too much of our lives in prosperity, dull and clouded, susceptible (just watch!) to truism and flattery. How sad to see a bright star go dim. Better to put it out entirely. This morning I heard a tigress stalking a nearby valley. (Even the tigress has more logic than Ania— seeing the drought, she has left her home and invaded ours in search of meat.) I’ll give Ania one more chance to change her mind and take the herd away from this dead land. If she stubbornly refuses (as I’m sure she will), then I’ll lure her with this bit of fruit I found, buried in the den of a long- dead ape. I’ll send Ania to pasture in the tigress’s valley, and let her learn the jungle’s logic. By herself, the fat old dam stands no chance. I’ll flatter Ania and feed her. I’ll play on her greed to seal her downfall!

    ANIA: We are here. Why have you called us?

    AMUTA: (To Ania) Have I made you walk far, Ania? I apologize. Rest under the shade of this tree. Here is some fruit I found and saved for you.

    ANIA: Fruit? How rare, how delightful.

    AMUTA: It’s not so fresh.

    ANIA: Don’t be silly. These rotting bits might seem foul. These might be the undigested pieces picked from some far wandering monkey’s shit. No matter. In times like this, such bits are as refreshing as heavy rain and a roll in the mud. We don’t see fruit these days much anymore.

    AMUTA: No, we don’t. This season has been a poor one yet again. We have not had the rain we’d hoped for.

    ANIA: Yes, but there is always next spring. We have lived through many more seasons than you, Amuta. Some are dry, but others are wet.

    AMUTA: Your experience has made you wise. But surely this drought is unlike any you have seen before. Some in our position might consider seeking out a new grazing land.

    ANIA: Leave? This is our home. There is no way to leave, no sense in the thought.

    AMUTA: (Aside) That was your last chance, old dam. You’ve lived a full life, so there’s nothing to regret. I’ll not allow you to kill us out of respect for your empty years.

    (To Ania) Your years have served you well, old Ania, and under your leadership we can only hope for fullness and increase. Have you enjoyed the fruit?

    ANIA: Yes, young one. There is only one thing, they say, better than a bull on your back, and that’s a banana in your mouth. You seem brighter than your cousins. We have enjoyed the fruit very much.

    AMUTA: I know where you can find more of it.

    ANIA: What?

    AMUTA: Old Ania, I don’t want to seem like I have kept hidden from the herd something which of right belongs to the herd. I only this morning discovered it and have eaten none of it myself.

    ANIA: Either you are making a poor joke, Amuta, or you must tell us right now where you found it.

    AMUTA: Old Ania, there is not enough for us all, and that is the only reason I didn’t wish to disclose this in front of the herd. There is enough, I am afraid, only for you, and it is right that you alone should have it, because your survival is our survival. A body is nothing without its head.

    ANIA: Don’t worry about all that. Just tell us where you found it.

    AMUTA: In the small valley nearby that was once shaded by evergreens. Some new type of tree has grown there, some windblown seed from elsewhere has sprung up a drought- loving tree that needs no water. It gives bananas much sweeter than what you’ve just tasted — in my rush, I picked only the rotting fruit that littered the ground beneath it. But it also gives mangoes and jackfruits and figs.

    ANIA: All from one tree? It seems fantastic.

    AMUTA: It must be a reward, old Ania, for your wisdom and patience. Soon many trees just like it will spring up, and all our worries will end. But now there is only one. Go and find it and eat your fi ll.

    ANIA: This tree is too improbable, Amuta. It’s a hunger- borne mirage. I’m sure you’re mistaken.

    AMUTA: I, too, thought so, until I touched the tree and smelled its fruit. Was that banana you just enjoyed a mirage, Ania?

    ANIA: It was not. Then guide me to the tree. Right away, let’s go.

    AMUTA: No, Ania! The herd will grow confused and restless in your unexplained absence. I will go and feed them an excuse. You need only walk to the very center of the valley, raise up your trunk, and sniff the air. Try to detect a smell something like a tiger — one of the oddities of this wonderful tree is that it gives this most obnoxious scent. Be patient if you don’t see it at first. Wait there patiently and surely you will find it.

    ANIA: Very well. You are a bright young elephant and will go far. You have done a good thing. Be assured, you are acting on behalf of the herd.

    Exit Ania.

    AMUTA: Is it this easy? Has it always been this easy? With so little effort could I at any time have dispatched the unquestioned leader of our herd? Treachery in name alone is daunting. But her kind old eyes almost did make me doubt myself. Poor, befuddled cow! She is a slave to her stomach, and at her age she’d die if we didn’t feed her first. But isn’t this alone reason to replace her with a younger leader? Survival is not a gift for the frivolous or soft. I didn’t invent this law, and bear no responsibility for it.

    Now I hear the tigress growling. She must have spotted old Ania. Those snarls make even my strong bones shiver. God allows only such animals as this tigress to thrive in a time of drought: animals whose hunger makes them not weak, but more fearsome — animals for whom lack itself is fuel. Hear that? Ania is trying to fight the beast. Ha? Can that be Ania’s war cry? Still so loud and violent, no fear in it? The tigress’s blood will go cold at the sound. My plan will be ruined! But no, listen — Ania’s cry is of no avail. The tigress also knows no fear, and she screams her attack. Ania is shouting for my help! Steady yourself and hold your ground. Don’t let old instinct lead you to her aid. Hear the anguish in Ania’s voice? Sounds of gnashing and of chewing, crunch of bone and gurgle of blood, unheard-of and unnatural elephant cries. Oh, close your ears! It is a gruesome, noisy death. But Ania’s gathered a dying wind, and slurs out a scream. What? “Treachery!” does she yell? Does she yell “treachery”? Does she realize, as she dies, that her death was by design? Oh, but why let it worry you, Amuta? What weight does an accusation carry that echoes in the empty air, and falls on the ear of no elephant but me? Now Ania’s words are garbled, her moans weaken. There remains only the sound of that ravenous tigress glutting herself on the meat of an elephant, an elephant like me, one of our beloved. Why, what is it I have done? And having done it, can I still call myself elephant? Or does this act show that my veins run with the cold blood of some other creature? I am alone in this, and afraid, for this is treachery that goes against nature! But then, treachery always does. Every leader must act alone, challenging her very nature that her nature may be realized. Go on now, wipe the distress from your eyes. Walk proudly back to the herd. You have done well by them. When Ania’s fate is found out, and her absence makes them feel the lack of strength and guidance that actually they lacked even in her presence, then they should look only to you for its fulfillment. [↩]

17. Shanti’s precipitate excursion into our city occurred, of course, following her escape from the Silver Brothers Circus, the outfit which every year pitches its dirty tents in a distant borough of our city. The Silver Brothers Circus was founded in 1871 by Amar Selvaratnam, more commonly known as Amar Selva (or sometimes Silva or Selvar or Silvar), and even more popularly as Amos Silver. Selvaratnam/Selva/Silva/Selvar/Silvar/ Silver was a dusky man of unknown origin, various versions of whose name began appearing in the inmate rolls of jails and prisons in cities as far-flung as San Francisco, California, and Chicago, Illinois, in the mid-1850s. From time to time, usually to escape creditors, Silver tried to pass himself off as his own twin brother, “Andy Silver” (thus, “Silver Brothers”). The existence of Andy Silver was never, of course, confirmed, and Andy was commonly assumed to be another one of Amos Silver’s many frauds and hoaxes, until Amos’s death in 1928. At that time, in a little-visited windowless car of the Silver Brothers’ traveling conveyance, hidden among a family of cruel and filthy chimpanzees, was found a narrow cage holding a withered, naked, and equally aggressive old man. He bared his teeth and threw his shit like a chimp; he beat his chest like a gorilla; and he clutched with one hand a seemingly inexhaustible erection, like a gibbon. The chimp family among whom the naked man lived seemed to regard him, alternately, as God, fiend, whipping boy, pampered child, idiot — a source of irritation and awe and hilarious entertainment.

    The discovery of this unidentified and unidentifiable man was heralded (by the circus’s new management) as the discovery of the long- rumored “real” Andy, and he was quickly promoted as the star of the revamped and under-new-ownershiped circus. “Andy the Man Monkey” survived a scant fourteen months under the glare of the gas flares and flashbulbs, but it was a frenetic and productive fourteen months. He left behind a rumored legacy of twenty- seven children, all conceived during that hysterical time, born of various acrobats, contortionists, bearded ladies, soothsayers, midgets, and clowns, as well as (reportedly) the females of several nonhuman species (chimpanzee, yes; also giraffe, hippopotamus, alligator). These supposed, hybrid, half- human children would become, in turn, the stars of their own freak show attractions. [↩]

18. AMUTA: Thoosha, Great-Aunt, you are old, and may feel your age entitles you to some indulgence. But in fact it gives you greater responsibility. You have no right to delay the herd. Get up. Remember that I am leader now.

    THOOSHA: Yes you are, Amuta. Therefore lead your herd ahead. New journeys are not for me. I am tired. If I find strength, I will go back home and rest among familiar trees, and let my bones dry among the bones of my mothers. The old life is all I know and want to know; one generation of hardship is not enough to make me abandon our memories. But now I am tired. I will wait for sleep, and I will find my way alone.

    AMUTA: Even if you make it back, Thoosha, three weeks’ journey alone, as you say, it will only be to die. And in dying you will again have left. Why do you welcome that unknown journey, but fear this one?

    Now stop drawing attention to yourself and get up, old coward! We have no time for this. Baboon-livered mistake! Skinny, short-trunked, unlucky heap! I don’t ask you anymore, I order you. The herd itself is your only home, Thoosha. You seem to forget that the old place was full of pain.

    THOOSHA: It’s not an unknown journey. I see the way clearly. It’s a simple place, dark and cool. My body aches for it.

    ELEPHANTS: Is it so, Thoosha? Can you see the new place also? Amuta tells us it will be cool and green, not dry. There will be water and sweet grass.

    THOOSHA: Better than water and grass is absence of thirst and hunger. I’m headed for our only home. You’ll join me there, one by one.

    AMUTA: Leave her, elephants. If a lonely death is all she wants, she’ll get it. Let’s move. [↩]

19. What? See also footnote 14 supra. [↩]
20. Not long past the age of eleven, your humble editor was a student at the Dolphin Cove Middle School, where he had certain experiences and conversations that may elucidate the claims made in footnote 17 supra, regarding the alleged hybrid progeny of “Andy Silver.”

    The history of animal-human love (let us avoid the anthropocentric term bestiality, and the politically fraught miscegenation) is clouded by popular misconception and mythology. For instance, among children at the Dolphin Cove Middle School, it was widely believed that chickens were the most easily accessible, manageable, and therefore personally satisfying of animals with which to copulate. Although cows were also desirable and abundant, they were rather large for our boys’ frames, and known to kick at inopportune moments. Among the watery beasts, our mascot and namesake, the dolphin, was widely reputed to have the most human and snug- feeling of recesses, and moreover was considered so intelligent that you could maybe have a conversation with it afterward. But while there was much talk of arranging a nocturnal break-in at SeaWorld, the nearest one was six hundred miles away, and so, practically speaking, none of us knew how to get hold of the delightful fish. Little did we understand, reader, and less still could we have imagined.

    Does such conversation disgust you? Keep in mind these were the lunchroom digressions of twelve- year- olds, and none of my acquaintances in that school ever actually copulated with any creature — chicken, cow, dolphin, or human — until several years later.

    Which brings me to the subject of my penis — a subject, I daresay, similarly clouded by popular mythology and misconception. I still remember the first time I realized I was, shall we say, different — perhaps tragically, perhaps magically — different. As I stepped up to the urinal in the boys’ room at our Dolphin Cove school, and my friend Brian — in truth, not a friend, but one of the boys known in our class for his uncensored mouth framed by shapely lips, his pretty hair, and his consequent popularity with the little ladies of our hallways— this bold Brian stepped up to the urinal next to mine, unzipped his pants, and began to guide his tiny dolphin out of its little cove. As he was doing so, Brian turned to glance at my own boy’s bud. Then his eyes widened, his grin spread, and as I was about to set loose my stream, the shameless fellow grabbed me by the shoulder and swung me around to face him. “Your thing,” he said. “It looks like an elephant’s trunk!”

    My face crimsoned. My ears pounded with the internal pulse of my own horrified heart. I then looked down at what I held in my hand and saw that it, too, was beating with its own pulse, and, like the pouting, pointing prick of evil Andy Silver, it was unaccountably and uncontrollably aroused.

    And Brian was right. It looked like an elephant’s trunk. Not that it was especially large, but it had a particular cast and curl, wrinkled and narrow and (having been spared the knife) flaring somewhat at the end— perfect, you might think, for grasping a peanut.

    But of course this message was obscured, and by the time I got to high school, I was routinely greeted in the hallways with mocking elephant noises, and referred to as “Dumbo,” the boy with the disgustingly deformed appendage. I was called, also, various other sexually aggressive epithets. I could never again piss, in that school, in peace. But perhaps this is neither here nor there.

    To return to our subject, I have found historical evidence for the early and widespread occurrence, in our own country, of the love that dare not moo or trumpet its name. “The Autobiography of William Blacktusk Souldier, Esq., an Elephant Escaped from the American South,” written by Himself (a text not yet fully translated, and available only to a small group of scholars, namely myself) begins with an accounting of Blacktusk’s own heterogeneous parentage. Blacktusk makes the fantastic claim also that a human boy on his plantation, who grew up to become one of the preeminent members of Southern Society, who even held a Seat in Congress, is his own human Brother. William Blacktusk’s autobiography begins thus:

    My father was a human. It was a truth never spoken but generally known. Indeed, one hardly had to be told of it to know it, with the evidence of my own countenance to betray me, my wide, light- colored eyes, my taste for curd rice and other human delicacies, my nearly inborn understanding of human language. My father was none other than the man who had taken my mother from the wild, years before I was born; who had locked her in his compound and used her to clear his fields and fell his trees, to drag his lumber. I was this man’s own son, indisputably, and yet was allowed to live only half the life of his acknowledged, human child, the boy who sat inside the house under fans, in rooms built too small for elephants to even enter; that boy who had the privilege of study and of leisure, of working one day to build his own house, harvest his own feed, not someone else’s. That lucky boy, my own brother, who in early days to pass the time would come to my newborn’s corral and poke me with a stick; who would ride me for sport when I was larger; to whom I was bound as playmate and enforced companion while I was small enough to have no say in the matter, while I was innocent enough even to enjoy it — that lucky boy and I were brothers, and yet we were foreclosed from feeling for each other, as we grew, that natural love and respect, that mirrored feeling that finds in the other the reflection and complement of one’s own virtues, that joys in the other’s successes and struggles in his sorrows as if they were one’s own, and even more so, which as brothers should have been our birthright. Conceived as brothers but raised as enemies were we: not Ram and Lakshmana, but Vali and Sugreeva, Cain and Abel. [↩]

21. The pachydermological distinction was not just in my nether regions. It was also in my face. My uncle Gustaf recognized the deformity in my features, and would come back from his travels with bags full of elephant-themed trinkets from Thailand, South Africa — wherever his work had taken him. He gifted me with articulated wooden elephants from Sweden, stuffed elephants from Vietnam, elephant- headed idols from India. These things amused me, I suppose, but no more so than animals did in general.

    I always knew there was some concern for my well-being implicit in Uncle Gustaf’s attention; and also, I suspected, some implicit association of the elephant’s unwieldy, exaggerated features with my own odd countenance, some hope he hoped I would find in the elephant’s ability to bear herself regally despite these apparent deformities.

    Whence the real source of Uncle Gustaf’s fascination with the fat beast, of course I had no idea at the time. Uncle Gustaf was the brother of my mom, Katharina. They were German, the children, I believed, of Holocaust survivors; and my father, Burt, was a Chicago- born African American. My parents met — true story — when they both worked as stewards for American Airlines. Their romance therefore took place in airline bars and in curtained- off cabins high in the air, and also, I guess, in overnight airport hotels in various cities all around the world. They married in a small ceremony in Memphis and had their honeymoon the same day, then moved to a nearby state and settled down in the wishfully and weirdly named town of Dolphin Cove, and I arrived in 1978. And the first picture of the three of us together in front of the new house in Dolphin Cove is the happy picture that I keep, even today, so many years and so many rooms, apartments, and houses later, Scotch-taped above the table in the room in the northern city where now I sit, and outside which two drunks are currently having vociferous intercourse.

    Here’s a memory: Hovering over me to tuck me in at night, Katharina, my mother, stares into my face like she wants to cut me up in little stars. It is a look of sad affection. As I close my eyes and start to drift away, I cling to her hand to keep her from leaving.

    She looks like she is about to cry, and all because of how ugly I am.

    “What’s wrong?” Burt asks her, peeking into the room as she sits there sniffling, thinking I’m asleep.

    “His nose,” she’d whisper. “His forehead. His whole face.” It’s hard, of course, to distinguish between real words and dreamworlds, but these were the conversations I thought I heard, as I drifted off to sleep.

    “Nonsense,” Burt would say. “Just wait till he grows into himself. You can never predict how handsome a boy’s going to turn out to be.”

    If Uncle Gustaf were there, he might add, helpfully, “It looks like he has a little Chinese in him. Could he have any Chinese in him?”

    “Let’s go downstairs,” Burt would say, cutting short the nonsense. “Katharina, Gustaf. Leave the boy alone.” He’d lean over me and kiss me on the cheek, a smoky, whiskery, wonderful kiss. And then, lights out.

    They were a nervous pair of siblings, Gustaf and Katharina (although they were perfectly mellow compared to their mother, the tragically, grotesquely and quite literally high-strung Nana Marina, who hanged herself when I was fourteen, using the long cloth cord of the new electric iron my parents had gifted her on her seventieth birthday.)

    Burt was always the calm one, but there was also poison in the well of his family. His brother Jerry jumped off the ——— Bridge one broke, drunk, frozen December, at the age of thirty- five, bursting through the mulchy ice into the black water.

    And it used to occur to me, maybe that’s what the whole family was searching for in my face so worriedly those evenings: some visible trace of the oblivion gene, the mark of future self-annihilation on “my nose, my forehead, my whole face.”

    And they were searching also (Burt and Katharina) in each other’s faces. They carried a secret, the two of them — a secret, I often believed, that revolved around me. One could see it in their sad eyes, the way they looked at me, and then at each other, knowingly. And one could sense the vigilance with which they guarded each other, lest one of them slip away from the world and leave the other to bear the burden — of me, and of the secret — all alone.

    There were many reasons for Uncle Gustaf’s eventual falling-out with my parents. I got inklings from Katharina that Gustaf had been less than enthusiastic about my parents’ marriage, and that while Burt had been willing to forgive and forget, Katharina held on to the prickly pear of pride (from a sense of fierce marital loyalty, and probably to balance out Burt’s forgiving nature) and thenceforward was quick to find fault with her kid brother Gustaf.

    “It’s because he never was friends with a black man before in all his life,” Katharina said once, a note of forgiveness in her voice, and that was good enough an explanation for me.

    Burt and Katharina, my parents, died tragically five days before my twelfth birthday. It was a car accident: they parked their car in our closed garage and accidentally left the engine running (as they sat in the front seat clasping hands). And I was left in the hands, henceforward (until her own eventual demise), of Nana Marina. [↩]

22. Exterior, jungle. Enter Amuta, now a strong, older elephant, followed by Koni. Jointly, they push down a large tree. It falls with a thunderous crash. They begin to strip it of leaf, branch, and bark.

    AMUTA: When Ania left us, and left you a motherless runt, Koni, we never thought you’d live to see maturity. But now look at you. Without your strong help, this herd would starve. We’d not have enough to feed our young ones. If only the others could be like you, eighteen years old, lithe and determined. You are brave. You are also foolhardy sometimes, and often you don’t take the direction of your elders; but these unappealing traits will be tempered with age. Strength is everything for an elephant — it is all we can rely on — and this you have. If you learn to discipline your strength, Koni, there will be few beasts to match you.

    KONI: Thank you, Amuta. If not for your kindness, I would have died an orphan, untouched and unfed. Your nurturing made me strong.

    AMUTA: We are elephants, Koni, so we are all related. It was a duty, not a favor that we did for you, so you shouldn’t thank us. We look forward to the day you find a mate and multiply yourself.

    KONI: Men are strangers to me, Mother, and I’d like to keep it that way.

    AMUTA: We’ll see how long your shyness lasts. But if it lasts much longer, be warned, we’ll tell the strongest, ugliest bull we can find to pin you down and pump you up with child. Your increase is in the herd’s favor. Maidenly virtue is charming only in children. Womanly beasts must practice womanly virtues. Now strip the last of this bark, and I’ll take these branches up to our camp.

    Exit Amuta.

    KONI: Why did she needlessly bring up my past? “When Ania left us,” she said, “and left you a motherless runt.” It’s almost as if she takes pleasure in retelling it. She does it so often, although it pinks my ears with shame, and now I wonder if that is her very purpose. It still stings me, years later, the anguish of that time. My mother deserted this herd and died a mindless death. If it’s a sin to curse your mother, then I am bound to hell. I wish that senile cow had never given birth to me, to make me bear the mark forever of her shame.

    I have heard the stories — how my old mother was a kind and gentle leader who grew confused and weak and could manage only to fill her own belly; and how, finally, her hunger and senility led her alone into unsafe territory. She muttered aloud about magical trees and drought-loving fruit, and would not heed Amuta’s entreaties. Instead of trees and fruit, my mother met the fangs of an outland tiger and died an absurd, unnecessary death. I went with the others to grieve what remained of her body. I smelled its decay from a distance and brayed and tried to flee, but my new mother pushed me forward. My mother’s eyes had come unhinged and lay next to her body, staring upward in undiminished terror.

    I have always strived to be as unlike the dimly remembered character of my mother as my muscles and mind would allow me. Everything I have done for sixteen years has been to separate myself from her image, and mirror myself to the image of my new mother. Amuta has been kind to me, favoring me sometimes equal with her own kin; and her favor has given me status among my peers. True, she always notes my past, never lets it slip far from view. But maybe she does it for my own edification. She has been a mother to me and more; she has instilled in me qualities to cherish. So why do I feel a lingering discontent? True, I could have been a princess, being born of a queen. But since that queen was no queen worthy of the name, I should count myself lucky to have been fostered instead by one who is.

    Ho! But who moves there in the brush? Some predator or ape? Show yourself!

    Enter Manami.

    MANAMI: Forgive me, Koni, I was only grazing. I did not mean to intrude on your solitude.

    KONI: Elephants don’t enjoy solitude. We think as herd, move as herd. We don’t know solitude.

    MANAMI: Don’t we, Koni? Forgive me, but I heard your lament. You’re a young elephant, but like me, you have experienced the loss of that thing you loved most, and so you understand solitude. You were a child once, grieving for a mother, as I was a mother grieving for a child. Did the other elephants share in our grief, Koni? Did they understand it even distantly?

    KONI: Any grief I felt, Manami, for the elephant I once called “Mother,” was only the instinct of a child. We are grown elephants now, and although bound to remember our losses, must not linger over them. In these difficult times, many elephants know loss, not just us.

    MANAMI: “We are grown elephants now,” eh? How mature you’ve become. My boy, too, would have been almost your age. He would have begun to feel his manhood, and to think about seeking his living in the forest, alone. I know you remember how well the two of you used to play as children. You treated him like a little brother, pulling him along in everything that you did — I have never forgotten it. Many elephants know loss, Koni, but you and I share a special bond. Our losses were unnecessary and were caused by that elephant we both call our leader.

    KONI: Manami, you are elder to me, so I speak with deference. But you, too, must be careful what you say: slander without substance is like burping on an empty stomach. It’s true, the sayings: Rumors sprout most thickly where grass is sparse. And: Empty stomachs produce only fumes. These are old accusations you’re making; like all elephants, you complain about Amuta every time our fortunes diminish. With respect, Manami, you still resent the choice we made, moving here from our old place. But finally, it was you who lost your child and not Amuta.

    MANAMI: Of course these truths resurface when times are hard, because we are reminded again of our leader’s poor judgment in bringing us here. But forget my case for a moment. Forget for a moment the tragic death, which was no fault of mine, of my innocent, toddling boy. Think only of the violence done to your own family.

    KONI: Violence done by a tiger, Manami. You might as well blame the grass for being green.

    MANAMI: The tiger was only the tool. I have never uttered word of this before, but I was there.

    KONI: You lie.

    MANAMI: It is true. I always used to follow Amuta in her grazing, discreetly, from a distance. She knew the best places for grass — she would find unfamiliar spots, and I would track her because I admired her and wanted to learn her techniques. And so it was that I heard Amuta luring old Ania into a dangerous valley, promising her a harvest of strange fruit. I heard your mother’s cries of “Treachery! Treachery!” and saw Amuta ignore those cries. I myself fled to your mother’s aid, but saw from a distance that I was too late.

    KONI: How dare you put words into the mouths of the dead? And if it’s true, you should be ashamed only of yourself, first of all for following after stronger elephants, to save yourself work and graze on their leavings; second for not going faster to my mother’s aid. But I don’t believe you. If you were there, you would have mentioned it sooner.

    MANAMI: I didn’t mention it because I admired Amuta. Forgive me, I thought she might have made a better leader than your mother, who was old and weak. When Amuta led us on this stupid quest, when in the process she killed my son, I realized what a misjudgment I had made. We were better off with old Ania.

    Ever since that time I have waited. The herd thinks I am grief- stricken and bitter. They don’t trust me and would never have believed me. So I have held close this bloody bit of knowledge. I have waited for you to grow mature and strong, for these facts concern you most of all. I knew that you alone would believe me and have the strength to act.

    KONI: Elephant, what makes you think I also don’t consider you bitter and mendacious? What makes you think that I alone am simple enough to believe such tales?

    MANAMI: So don’t believe me. Use your own common sense: Do you think it was a coincidence that Amuta was the last elephant to see your mother alive? That Ania would wander by herself through a deserted valley reeking of fresh tiger shit without being somehow deceived?

    If we elephants were not so subservient, we would not stand for injustices such as this. We would not have clung to Amuta, ignoring the evidence of her guilt, simply because we believed she was the only one with the strength of will to show us what to do. I tell you, most elephants are born slaves. They never learn to think for themselves. They know only to listen to a leader. I include myself in this characterization — I will never do anything to avenge the death of my own child because I lack the power and the will, and because I know that my actions would not be respected by the herd. But remember, you are not like other elephants. You were born a princess. Therefore think with the mind of a princess and not of a slave.

    KONI: Go on, Manami, you sad thing. If it were any other elephant listening to this treason, you’d be begging for forgiveness before Amuta herself right now. Go and finish your grazing. Stop wasting your breath on this pointless prattle.

    MANAMI: You won’t tell Amuta what I’ve said, I know. You wouldn’t want her to stop me from telling you the truth. You know how to use your head, Koni, and when the time comes, you’ll know how to use your tusks, too.

    Exit Manami. Koni lifts onto her back a bundle of leaves and bark, and begins to wander back toward camp.

    KONI: That cow gives me the creeps. She walks about so dourly, red- eyed and muttering to herself, as if trailed at all times by the ghost of her dead little boy. Poor insomniac wretch. Half the time she makes me want to cry for her misfortune, and half the time I want to scream at her, Get over it!

    And yet I find it hard to deny her, everything she says pulls so hard at my soul. Determined to remember her loss, she does have a dignity and a power all her own. Perhaps it is only this that gives attraction to what she says.

    Is an elephant capable of murder? Not a bull crazed by musth, but a normal cow, bound by all that is natural to the protection of her sisters? It shouldn’t be possible. After all, what are our lives about? Grass, water, and sleep; and when these things are unavailable, the fretting over their absence. A constant seeking for safety and food, for time to enjoy the company of our sisters and our children. What could be more straightforward?

    Yet how we complicate the seeking of our so- simple desires! I think it is because we are born into families, bound already at birth into a knot of disappointed affections, blood-strong desires. Our families breed in us our elephant and inelephant qualities both.

    Look, there plays little Shanti, such a sweet calf. But a daughter already to Amuta, a cow so parsimonious in her affections, inspiring but also demanding, a leader battle- ready and hard. A beast capable of doing anything to protect her herd.

    Look how affectionately and uncritically Shanti follows her mother. That affection is sure one day to be disappointed. Shanti’s not the brightest calf but an earnest one, trying always to please. Other calves her age are embarrassed to be seen with their mothers, but not her. Look at them clinging close in the river, look at Shanti throwing mud at her mother’s rump, the parts she cannot reach. The softening in her eyes when her mother touches her, that pure gaze of gratitude and joy. The motherly touch is a supersweet pleasure, an impossible bliss. All the sweeter when it comes from an elephant as usually hard as Amuta. For all the favor she has bestowed me, Amuta has never touched me in that way. The kindness she has bestowed on me, in fact, is only one tiny part of the kindness my own mother would have shown. Amuta has conferred me with status, but it is nothing like the status I would have enjoyed if my own mother were queen. Why, I would have been the apparent heir, and not this clumsy infant Shanti, poor thing. I’ve played with her often, taught her to fell small trees. It’s a joy to watch her grow, but she’s no born ruler. She’s a submissive calf, nothing like the little me. Yet she enjoys Amuta’s truest love and is the favorite one day to lead our herd. It is a logic that makes no sense.

    But what if it’s true that Shanti’s the daughter of a murderer, and I the daughter of a courageous queen? Then her qualities would be accountable, and mine as well. To rule would be my natural lot, and I have lived a life of unwarranted shame.

    Only by bitter happenstance are we the children of our mothers, so how can I resent Shanti for it, that simple- minded, blameless calf? Yet our identities come from our mother’s lives, either with them or against them we must be. We are implicated in our parents’ choices regardless of our own choosing. Shanti’s privilege is unearned. My sorrow is unearned. If we are to distance ourselves from our parents’ evil and its effects, mustn’t we also discount their good? Let Shanti renounce her mother and her right to the throne; let her fight me for it when she comes of age! Or, let her mother account to me for all she’s done. Let her make amends by declaring me heir.

    Deep down I know it’s true: My mother’s death was not her own doing. But to know this truth is far too painful. Everyone whom I have loved turns ugly in my eyes. Every clear elephant memory becomes questionable. Every close-held shame reveals its falsehood, yet makes me guilty for having held it. I see a world now where the young have no innocence, the old possess no necessary wisdom, our leaders merit no respect, belief in the herd is lost.

    Such knowledge is a lonely-making thing. My own mother, Ania, how I miss you! I remember everything about you, every time you cradled my infant body in your trunk’s embrace, and fed me food chewed in your own mouth. The memory of your scent makes me weak with longing. My own sweet mother, I’ll never be forgiven for every time I’ve cursed your loving soul. I’ll have to find a new way somehow, all on my own. [↩]

23. How well do you remember your first time? I sat in an empty, late- night parking lot with a young woman I believed to be my friend, drinking shots of some purple-orange liquid she offered me. When we were both slump- eyed and slurring, she began to kiss me. And then, closing her eyes, and with a deep breath and a bitten lip, she popped open the buttons of my fly. Then she screamed. With her eyes still closed, with all her might she screamed. Then she fell asleep facedown on the pavement. [↩]
24. Finding the massive and familiar carcass of my grandmother dangling by a cord from the lighting fixture in our own garage, was, I think, one of the events that precipitated my entry into manhood, and into the world, eventually, of elephants. Nana Marina was a severe caretaker to me, after my parents’ untimely departure, and life was a bit of a living heck, broken by those brief respites when Uncle Gustaf came home from his overseas travel and temporarily took over the caretaking.

    Nana Marina hated animals, and I had always suspected her of poisoning the stray cat that I fed secretly on the back porch, and which I discovered one morning frozen in a pool of its own piss, its tongue stuck out in a perpetual postmortem raspberry. With Nana’s passing, I felt free to leave home, travel to the city, and pursue my own passions.

    Yes, I had always had a way with animals. Cats could understand me. Dogs respected me. But it was in the city that I discovered I could speak with elephants. [↩]

25. On January 4, 1903, for the crime of trampling a succession of trainers, Topsy the Elephant was executed in spectacular fashion on the Coney Island boardwalk, wired to thousands of volts of alternating current — a spectacle devised by none other than Thomas Alva Edison. On September 13, 1916, for flinging a man against a building and then taking a stroll over his head, Mary the Elephant was hanged by the neck from a hundred- ton crane, before an enraptured crowd. (Hribal, footnote 10 supra.)

    The roster of elephant executions is long; but few historians have been able to explain the murky death, on October 10, 1954, of the peace- loving elephant Clarabel, discovered in her corral in the Senaloca, Florida, winter quarters of Carlos Hermosilla’s Authentic American Circus, strangled by a loose length of chain that had been crudely looped around her neck and hoisted over the ramparts. Her body was found — forelegs lifted into the air, asphyxiated — by the only night watchman on duty at the time, who was lame in one arm, but with twenty arms would still not have had the strength to hoist Clarabel’s four tons of flesh. It must be noted that Clarabel had recently witnessed the tragic death of her own newborn calf and was moreover despondent from months of beatings by the circus’s new trainer, a man known even to his friends as Angry Jim. Historians, biologists, veterinary psychologists, much less circus workers have been loath to draw the obvious conclusion regarding Clarabel’s demise. Not even Hribal mentions it.

    Elephants are one of those rare species (along with humans and dolphins) known to recognize their reflections in mirrors as reflections. Self-consciously reflective (you might say), they see themselves as discrete individuals. Is it too far of a stretch to consider that they are also capable of obliterating themselves as discrete individuals? Of growing weary of the burdens of self- conscious existence and the heavy hopelessness of life in captivity? Of acting on that despair?

    Consider the great elephant Jumbo, P. T. Barnum’s star attraction. Despite the inconsistencies in the competing accounts of her death (see, again, Hribal), one thing is clear: after years of exhausting and mind- numbing work, Jumbo stepped forthrightly into the face of a speeding freight train.

    Elephants (like the great bull of Shanti’s tale) have long been subject to murder. It is a queer sort of vindication for me to point out that they are equally capable of suicide. [↩]

26. KONI: You loved this man, yet you say his death is inconsequential? That we should blithely continue to graze in these foreign hills, not fearing the predator who killed him? But you aren’t the only one who loved this bull. He was father to many of our children. He is father to the child whom I now carry. His blood runs in ours, and whatever killed him will be hungry for more. We must mourn him properly, and then we must leave this place.

    Wrath rises in Amuta’s eyes. But then Amuta’s face calms; she seems cool, calculating. [↩]

27. AMUTA: Koni, in your young life you’ve seen many elephants die. But this bull’s death, like your mother’s, is nothing to be frightened of. We’re better off without this bull, just like we’re better off without old Ania.

    Rage rises up in Koni now; bitter tears sting her eyes. But she holds her tongue. [↩]

28. Or seemed to! [↩]
29. Oh life, oh fate, oh Shanti! Would that you had died then, and not endured the hells to come! [↩]
30. Have you ever left home and moved to the city? How I longed for my Dolphin Cove, that ugly home I so often hated. What would I have done, alone in the city, if I had not discovered the zoo, that inexhaustible comfort and solace? So many afternoons I stood outside the elephant enclosure in that vast, decrepit menagerie in that distant borough, eating someone else’s discarded caramel corn, gazing into the elephant enclosure and watching, with keen eye, the flicks of tail and flops of ear, which, to the casual watcher, were simply random tics; listening to the hiccups, harrumphs, trumpets, and brays which I knew to be clear and intentional messages from the elephants to each other and (more pertinently) to me — the first buds of a blossoming Englaphant. For twenty years of invisibility, we slowly developed our inchoate language of mutual despair. It was my solace, my refuge, my real life beneath my “real” life. It was the zoo that saved me, in my deepest despair, from rendering my own self null and void, a fate which I often felt I couldn’t avoid.

    My unusual family history led me, recently, to do extensive research into the history of auto-oblivion. My findings with regard to elephants are alluded to in footnote 25 supra. But that history is nothing as to the rich chronicle of human suicides. I don’t have space here to go into great detail, but allow me to summarize my findings:

    “A Brief History of Oblivion”

    Human suicide was invented in 1492 by Romeo Montague, with these words: “Here, here will I remain with worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here will I set up my everlasting rest, and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death!”

    Romeo’s beautiful demise inspired countless generations of the world-weary and disaffected to slip their mortal coil, but none quite so beautifully. Not that they didn’t try: After Romeo started it, across Italy there spread a cult of sorts, the Association of Beautiful Suicides, who tried to outdo each other in doing themselves in, with tales of pathos and of woe each more gorgeous than the last, as they slipped onto their bare bodkins, or dangled tragically by their gosling necks from the banisters of Florentine balconies. They killed themselves in the highly questionable hope that suicide could be more than an act of despair, or a coward’s escape from an inhospitable world; that it could be a creative act, a gesture of life transcendent. The problem, however, was of genius and originality: After Romeo had done it best and first, everyone else came off as a pallid imitation. It was a secondary, creative death on top of the intended actual one.

    As time went on, young men and women tried to surmount this problem by moving beyond mere verbal flourishes, to astonish and inspire with the means of death itself: thus, the five young men who swallowed lit fireworks — dazzling.

    During his travels to the East, Marco Polo brought with him news of suicide, and it caught on like Venetian measles. In India, the mystics, ascetics and seers took up the challenge of the young Italian lovers, reaching sometimes new levels of the sublime. One woman skewered her tongue and tits with long needles, and spent sixteen months bleeding. A man covered himself with honey and sat silently on a bed of fire ants. It took sixteen hours, and he swelled up like a pumpkin squash. Another kneeled down before (yes) the temple elephant.

    It became an annual event, a Maha Mela, the Festival of Beautiful Suicide. Men and women ate diamonds and shat blood; hired surgeons to thread their hearts with razor wire, one end of which they’d tie to the top of the temple gopuram before diving: “heart flossing”; they bought vicious dogs and pasted their bodies with chicken gizzards; they tied themselves to kites and lofted themselves over shark-filled oceans.

    These suicide artists were ultimately stumped by the prime paradox of beautiful death: that is, its very creation was its destruction (or was its destruction its creation?). The subject of the act was the object of its obliteration. There was no way to improve a bad performance, and there were no second chances. In the end, what was so beautiful about death, anyway?

    So the more far-thinking of them began to consider things more broadly. Could self-elimination be accomplished while still, at least technically, living?

    The answer: sort of. The sage Babhuvallavar was the first to try it. He sat perfectly still for forty-four years — almost like dying, but more boring, frankly.

    Taking the concept further, an offshoot of the Beautiful Suicides prescribed a yet more elaborate route to self-abnegation. “Imitation is suicide,” said someone famous once, or was it me? Accordingly, the followers of this school set out, in a sense, to perfect and make intentional what the derivative Italians had stumbled upon unimaginatively. Recruited in their youth or early adulthood, they would each pattern their lives on another person’s, studying the other’s habits, adopting his behaviors, his clothes, his accent and manner of dress; then the imitator would go so far as to murder this other person, to clear the ground for the performance to begin (a difficult moment, as you can imagine —to eliminate the object of one’s utmost attention and care). The suicider then became, as far as possible, the other person — taking his job, sleeping in his bed, answering to his name — so that the suicider himself was nowhere, any longer, to be found. This form of “suicide” in its purest form consumed decades of incredible effort, and still butted up most profoundly against a central irony: when it was successful, it became invisible. Other people wouldn’t even know it was happening.

    But it was seldom successful. In attempting this particular form of invisibility, the suicider achieved not exactly oblivion, but another kind of existence; by trying so minutely to inscribe his life upon another’s, the practitioner of living suicide found that he inevitably and repeatedly deviated, and each deviation, however minor, signified the particular and unique life of the actor. The very thing which he had sought to render invisible became highlighted, offset, more pronounced. The act of self- annihilation became a (rather weird) act of self-creation. In other words, no one was fooled.

    Incidentally, please do not mistake any of this for a defense of suicide. The preceding sentence, while sincere, is also a paraphrase of my dear Charles Kinbote, in whose footnotes my own footsteps suicidally follow. For while imitation might aim toward suicide, it often begins as love. [↩]

31. When the menageries of the Silver Brothers Circus enter the city, the first thing you sense is the rumble — not the familiar rumble of motoring vehicles, but a vibration of a slower, more deliberate frequency — through the soles of your shoes, into your tarsals and up through your heel, tickling your humeruses, until it is somewhere inside you. Through the darkness of Lincoln’s Tunnel, at the farthest end, there is a distant disk of light, a view, as it were, into another land. Suddenly, that light is blotted out, and one has only the sense that a large and inevitable blackness is approaching.

    And then, when you have been lulled into a certain stupefied awe by this blackness and vibration, as if you had been tucked inside the world’s own body, from out of the darkness burst forth the bright and dark visages of all the world’s fauna. The tigers, ostriches, giraffes, and rhinoceri; the black bears and Koala bears and polar bears and grizzlies; the pronghorns and prairie dogs and parakeets and hawks on string; the snakes, turtles, crocodiles, and lizards; the orangutans and gorillas, the gibbons and monkeys (the tiniest of which were tethered to little chains, decorated with purple fedoras, and made to twirl and jump); and finally, bringing up the rear, what all deep- souled watchers were waiting for: the elephants on parade. [↩]

32. “I don’t remember,” Shanti says, but surely what she means is that she remembers, instead, other things from that chaotic time. Whatever she doesn’t remember, she didn’t see in the first place. Cf. footnote 19 supra. [↩]
33. They came toward me, tail in trunk, tail in trunk, linked in that humiliating way circus elephants are always linked, each one moreover individually hobbled by a heavy chain leading from rear left to front right ankle. And I saw something distinct in the eyes of each one. Not just the watery sadness one finds in the eyes of all elephants in captivity, but something more specific, more familiar. And when she approached, I knew immediately that we, too, were linked; that somehow, across space and across time, my trunk was curled round her tail; that somewhere else, wherever I really came from, we had been kin. Once I saw her, I could not part myself from her, each year that the circus was in our city. How could I allow her to live in captivity? Her large ears flapped open, as if to say, Speak to me! Her truthful eyes spoke more directly, begging for a way out, yes, but more than that, for freedom. [↩]
34. Whose face is not seen, whose name is not mentioned? Which elephant was smart enough and had every motivation to lead Shanti and Amuta into this trap, to collaborate, as it were, with whomever dug this hole? Which elephant? Shanti doesn’t tell us, but we know. [↩]
35. AMUTA: (Aside) I must loosen momentarily the ties of loyalty that keep these idiots from leaving.

    (To the herd) Fools! Imbeciles! Think of yourselves, and flee! Don’t just stand there! Morons! Iala — you suckled me as a child, but I am not a child anymore, so don’t stand there cowering! Weak old woman, a burden to this herd. No man wants you so you wish to bring the herd to the grave along with you? You would allow them to die as you let your own children once starve? [↩]

36. It is the “final stillness.” Amuta speaks quietly, coldly.

    AMUTA: Why do you run close to me, Shanti? Hm? (pause) Why do you cling to me as if you were a baby? (Amuta’s quiet rage is unmistakable.) If you were not so attached to me, if you ran freely with the other elephants of your age, you would have been safe now.

    (Shanti shakes her head. Tears stream from her eyes.)

    AMUTA: You are a coward and an infant, and so we will die together. [↩]

37. In the dark, quiet corral of the Silver Brothers Circus, a frequent visitor, enthusiastic volunteer, accused impostor peeks from behind a pile of hay: It is deep night; the circus murmurs only with the occasional snoring hippopotamus, or drunken midget weeping softly over an old loss. In the shadows, the visitor senses the rustle of the greatest of beasts, chained in their sleeping quarters, doubly chained by the fatigue of the day. Slowly, he makes out the quivering silhouette of one particular elephant, not asleep but swaying from side to side, tail twitching from anxious loneliness.

    In the interloper’s backpack is a giant bottle of Gitranquizol (“elephant keeper’s friend”) pilfered from the house veterinarian’s poorly padlocked cabinet. The mysterious fellow mixes half of the powerful tranquilizer into a bottle of orange soda he has brought with him for this purpose. He edges toward the elephant, sits down near to her.

    Shanti extends her trunk to sniff at his strange concoction.

    Would you like some too? he asks. It is a way out.

    But she withdraws her trunk, detecting the drug’s unpleasant odor.

    The man quaffs the bottle, emptying it entirely, and burps. Then he curls up at Shanti’s feet, awaiting the inevitable.

    The man notices his toes and fingers begin to numb (indeed, his left foot will never again recover full feeling). His eyelids quiver. The ground feels cold; his tongue grows stiff; the world is filling with beautiful lights, a side effect of the medicine.

    But just as his vision begins sprouting with impossible patterns, the precursor to death, he feels a nimble trunk opening his mouth, a stiff scrap of hay inserted into the back of his throat, tickling him there, until he is vomiting uncontrollably. And then the gentle press of an elephant’s foot upon his breast, massaging his heart back to action.

    In the clouded midnight of my near death, she bends her face close to mine, pinches me awake with her trunk. I cough and splutter, returning to the world of living animals.

    When I am finally able to speak, I ask her: Why have you done this? Why have you brought me back to life?

    In response, she speaks her first fully formed words of fluent Englaphant: Why should you die alone on the ground, she asks, when you may die through me?

    Then her trunk finds its way into my knapsack and discovers there an extra, untainted bottle of orange soda; tucking it into her mouth, she crushes it until it bursts, then flings the empty broken plastic onto the ground. Orange is my favorite, she adds — pausing to belch in stentorious elephant fashion. The man’s ears quiver, elephant- like, in surprise; his eyes widen in wonder at his understanding, before narrowing again with cunning.

    That moment of mutual recognition puts me in mind of another such instance, again from the memoir of William Blacktusk, the famous (or soon to be) birth scene:

    From the moment I spilled onto the blood sotted ground of this dimly lit world, I wanted only to crawl back inside the endless warmth I had left behind — the loving soft source of infinite benignity, the single memory of which today is all that remains to me of Mother. I tried to stand and fell; tried and fell. (And still do we try and fall.) There on the periphery, two individuals stood distinct even to my newborn’s eyes: one human figure casually stern, granted deferential berth by all those assembled; and on his shoulders a bouncing, excited, and awestruck toddler, whose face would become so familiar to me. These two stared with mute regard at the bloody wonders of nature, but would not touch me: I was wonderful but too grotesque. (Did they believe I had naught to do with them? Or did they recoil because they knew my wrinkled massive lump was flesh of their flesh?) But now comes the gnarled mahout, someone who in his old age had evidently earned my mother’s trust, and was allowed to touch and to bathe me, spilling cold waters into my mucus- clotted ears, my sticky eyes. I coughed and spat and out came the tube of soft white mess glutting my throat, and now I mewed and cried and heard my own voice calling. (The cold shock of that mahout’s brusque efficiencies notwithstanding, the sureness of his human touch was somehow fortifying, and my instinct tells me retrospectively that this was a man whose place of trust was well earned; but after that night, the silent old man disappeared as suddenly and irrevocably as my mother, whom he served.)

    And long will I remember the little looking boy’s final exclamation. He had sat a long time in speechless wonder, straddling the strong shoulders of his father, staring in witness of the moving spectacle of my elephant birth, when finally the powerful emotions building up in him those silent minutes broke forth. His small face screwed up like a knot in a tree, and bursting into sobs, he squealed, “I love him! I do, I do!” Then he buried his face in the neck of the human who held him, his alarmed confession bringing a disquieting smile to the lips of this man, and sending a bristle of unease through all the elephants assembled round me. [↩]