No mahout can stop them
No mahout can stop them.”In case all this sounded too cosy and anthropomorphic, Parbati wanted me to have no doubt that raising an elephant was not like keeping goldfish. Elephants, she told me, also have an excellent memory for sounds. But her world is now that of the mahouts, the men who taught Parbati the elephant love songs which are used to soothe and tame a newly captured beast; a good mahout will spend 16 hours a day, singing to the elephant, feeding it, bathing it, caressing it. Parbati has this knowledge, too.” In many ways, Parbati has surpassed the mahouts. Most can only make the elephant respond to 30 verbal commands Parbati’s vocabulary stretches to 42 commands. These are not, she told me, such simple instructions as “Lie down” and “Roll over”, but “Take this letter in your trunk, go through the forest and deliver it to the other camp.” She was relaxed now, happy with her favourite topic, prepared even to joke. “If I found a pen big enough, I could probably teach an elephant how to write.”As she talked, the lantern caught the glow of her large diamond ring, an heirloom of her regal past.
Even if it’s something as straightforward as a dog bite, the elephant will probably die unless it can find the right plants for itself. Mr Bist, the forestry official, agrees: “Vets can’t do much with elephants. Parbati claims that an elephant’s knowledge, passed down through the herd, takes in nearly 1,000 medicinal plants. She learnt that if an elephant fell sick, the best cure was to let the creature wander off into the forest and find its own medicinal herbs. Then I feel sad that I’ve separated this elephant child from its mother.”Being Lalji’s daughter helped Parbati to enter the all-male fraternity of mahouts. When I’m trying to lasso a wild elephant, I’m concentrating so hard that I’ve probably forgotten my own name Hours go by and you forget everything else,” says Parbati.
“That exhilaration stays with me for two or three days after the chase. “My family knows that if they try to block me, I’ll kick away the blocks,” she says.”Without adventure, life is too dull. As a housewife, you make tea and food, serve it and send the children off to school That is all Every step of what I do involves a risk. Parbati married him only at her father’s insistence, but her misery was so apparent after one year that even Lalji, known for his stubbornness, had to admit that he had made a mistake. She spoke of how, before she could even walk, her father gave her a baby elephant to ride, of how she preferred the company of elephants and mahouts to that of princelings and princesses, and of how, when she was immured in boarding-schools, she yearned to rejoin her father in the jungle “My father enjoyed going to London and all these places. But for me, three or four days in a city is the maximum I can bear.” Indirectly, she also spoke of her unhappy arranged marriage to the Assamese banker.