The Elephant Chaser's Daughter Page 2

  My feet turned numb. I tried to stand up but my legs felt weak. Sitting down again, I stretched my legs but my body was stiff with anxiety.

  It felt strange that I had survived this far. The odds were stacked against me and yet my path had been a charmed one until now. There was nothing I had done to deserve it. I couldn’t explain fate having taken me in a different direction.

  It all began one day when I was four years old and a blue jeep pulled into my village.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE BLUE JEEP

  For years, Amma couldn’t get over it. Without me in her daily life, everything was very painful to her—the stillness that had settled like dust in our small hut; the steel trunk containing my faded clothes that Grandmother had carefully sewn from her old saris; my two-year-old brother, Francis, looking around everywhere for me, convinced that I was at our usual game of hide and seek; and most of all, the emptiness on the floor where I had slept between my parents. These memories had reduced her to a sullen, bitter woman, empty of what had been her usual energetic spirit. In the middle of a meal, she’d push her plate away saying she wasn’t hungry, or sit lost in thought in front of the kitchen fire, allowing the rice to turn into an overcooked fudgy paste.

  ‘Bring Shilpa back or I’ll kill myself,’ she’d cry late into the night, refusing to let my father console her. Nor would she give in to his threats of beating her until she behaved herself.

  Many a time Appa walked over to Grandmother’s house asking her to come put some sense into Amma’s head. ‘She’s acting like her daughter has died. I can’t handle her anymore,’ he’d complain, letting out a helpless sigh.

  Grandmother would try to console Amma, though both hated Appa for what he had done to me. They hung on to the hope that somehow I would be brought back home for good. What transpired between those two women in the months following my leaving home and how the entire family took to my absence were narrated to me years later when I was old enough to understand. The arrival of the blue jeep that fateful morning changed everything for my family and me. It stirred up a storm in our lives and, when it all finally settled, nothing was ever the same again.

  No one could be blamed for what happened that day. After all, it was hard to go against the family’s beliefs. In this part of the world, they believe that Vidhiy-Amma, or mother fate, inscribes the destiny of each child upon his or her forehead at birth. In Kannada we say: haneli barediddu—‘what is written on the forehead.’ My future was laid out for me, and I was expected to fulfill my role as a woman.

  My thoughts settle and surrender to the day of my birth, entering the tiny room where I was born. I crane my neck to catch a glimpse of the baby. I discover the new-born on the birth-attendant’s lap, in my grandmother’s poorly lit hut. The path my life has taken since then—the way it has veered and branched—seems devoid of reason.

  Looking out through the window, I see a different world. My days are now spent at Shanti Bhavan, a residential school named ‘Haven of Peace,’ where children from families who cannot afford even one proper meal a day are well cared for and given a good education. Within its walls are orphans who otherwise would have been trafficked, and the children of construction workers and rag-pickers. I, Shilpa Anthony Raj, the daughter of an elephant chaser and a maid, have been one of these privileged few—children of poverty growing up in a world unrecognizable to those from the one we left behind.

  To be here in the present seems unreal. There is no convincing explanation for it. If my good fortune in life is the reward for what my parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents lived through and suffered, why did it take so long? And why me?

  It was November 2, 1997—All Soul’s Day. The villagers had risen early to fetch water from the lake and to collect firewood for cooking and bathing. Dirty-looking children who would usually be playing marbles on the narrow, muddy streets were not to be found. Men who ordinarily smelled like sweat and liquor, and servant boys who usually reeked of cow dung, had scrubbed themselves clean. Women had tamed their unruly hair with long black braids, adorning them with white jasmine flowers. Even the poorest were wearing their finest and looking their most respectable to honor and pay homage to their ancestors. On this day, a fateful one for me, the monotony of daily life was broken by the festive atmosphere of the church ceremony. It didn’t matter whether it was for the dead or the living.

  Everyone had gathered at the church graveyard, a long, narrow patch of land bordered by wild shrubs, at the village’s entrance. It looked more like an unkempt field than a place to lay the dead to quiet rest. Candles and cheap incense burned at the heads of earthen tombs covered with wild grass and weeds. Fresh flowers had been placed on the muddy mounds as offerings to the dead.

  Out of a sense of reverence, landlords from the Gunna community joined everyone else in prayer at the burial ground. They were dressed in new cotton lungi —the traditional garment tied around the waist—and striped shirts, along with glimmering gold rings and chains that displayed their elevated status in the social order.

  The few landlords in the village belonged to upper castes. They owned most of the cultivable land and employed people from the lower castes as laborers on their farms and servants in their homes. This was seen by all as the natural order of things. But on this day, they and their beautifully dressed wives and children placed themselves at the front of the crowd at a tolerable distance from the excited coolies—unskilled laborers hired cheaply only when needed—who worshipped with them. Everyone stood, at least in appearance, as equals before God.

  The priest wore a white cloak delicately accented with gold. He led the cowherds, the coolies, and the brewers of illegal liquor in cries of ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘Hail Mary,’ and a hymn for the dead. Everyone but the landlords, who displayed their privileged status through silence, joined in this spirited show of worship.

  Suddenly, the noisy hum of a motor vehicle disturbed the reverent atmosphere. Flocks of goats by the muddy road bleated in panic at the sight of the vehicle speeding towards them. Their master frantically raised his stick and swung it in the air, making animal-like sounds that drove the flock to one side. The goats scattered off the stony road just as a blue jeep sped past them and came to a screeching halt by the gate to the graveyard.

  The jeep looked exactly like the vehicles the local police would use to conduct raids for illicit liquor. It was common in our village to see rows of police vans advancing on the village like an army of invaders, honking incessantly to drive the cattle away from the narrow, nameless road, and stop by the huts of the poor. Often on drowsy afternoons when women were cleaning rice or singing lullabies to their infants sleeping in sari-cradles hanging from low rafters, the police would appear without warning. No one could predict when they would come sniffing like hounds for liquor. Was this one of those surprise visits?

  ‘Please, Anna, think of me as your sister. I swear on my son’s life, we won’t do it again,’ desperate mothers would cry, after cans containing liquor were found hidden under the soft, clay floors of their huts. Shouting insults at them, the policemen would leave with a warning that they would come back for their husbands.

  Any man who was taken later by the police would not be seen for a month, and only after he returned would the village learn what had happened to him. He would have only grave cautions to share with his neighbors. ‘Continue making sarayam and you will spend your nights in a cold cell. You’ll stay warm only from the thrashings you get.’

  His message might hit home for a moment but it wouldn’t last in anyone’s mind for long. Making alcohol was the only way to survive. In no time, men would be back in the woods scraping bark from the chakki tree and mixing it with jaggery in steel barrels for fermentation—the local way of making sarayam, a country liquor. Contracts were verbally agreed between suppliers and buyers. Life was a business, and risks were a part of living it.

  The families who depended on the translucent liquid for their livelihood were especially unnerved by t
he jeep’s arrival that morning. There was considerable anxious fidgeting in the crowd. Prayers were forgotten, the dead receded to their graves, and the concentrated look of worship vanished from the faces of the congregants. Panic took its customary place. Appa was afraid that the police might be looking particularly for him. Like many others, he too distilled sarayam illegally to support the family, and lived in constant fear of getting caught. No doubt, Thattaguppe was a place where moonshine and God sat side by side.

  It was also where I began my life.

  Over a century ago, Thattaguppe was a barely inhabited patch of forest. Huge rocky hills rose like a wall around it. No road had ever been carved into its earth, and few even knew of the settlement’s existence. In time, its scattered residents found a haven there, safe from outsiders. They lived a meager existence, taking refuge in their faith, Hinduism. Faded pictures of Lord Krishna and other gods hung precariously from nails in the mud walls of their homes. In worship of the many gods who reign in their religion, they built a stone temple with carvings made from simple tools.

  In 1896, a plague outbreak in India killed hundreds of thousands of people. Thattaguppe wasn’t spared. Its people prayed to their gods, but the deaths kept coming. In their grief, they abandoned the jungle for what they hoped would be more merciful land. All that remained were crumbling huts, the decaying carcasses of cattle, and the stone temple, all of which were soon overtaken by weeds and rats. No incense would be lit in the village for many years.

  Not long after, three French missionaries descended on this part of the country looking to convert people to Christianity. They went to villages in many pockets of rural South India seeking the souls of the poor—beggars, coolies, servants. One of the priests, Father Philip Sigeon, went to Somnahalli, a small village adjacent to what was then the wild jungle of Thattaguppe. No one could understand his French, and he couldn’t decipher their Kannada. He was a complete stranger to the locals, whom he saw as uncivilized humans, as dark as the rich humus soil they gathered from the lake to build the walls of their huts.

  Despite the cultural differences, and after many false starts, Father Sigeon learnt to communicate with the villagers. In time, he gained their friendship and, slowly, with their help, he began to clear away the forest of Thattaguppe. Eventually, a small part of the jungle was cut down to make way for civilization and, as the priest’s message began to take hold, a stone church was constructed. Huts were built on the previously abandoned land as people from other villages began to arrive on bullock carts, carrying with them a few bundles of clothes—all they possessed. Little by little, the land came back to life.

  The villagers who lived at the farthest end of the rolling contour were nearest to the lake. There lay the furrowed land, rich with jamuns and coconuts, none of which belonged to any rightful owner other than God. Farmers cultivating ragi, wheat, rice, and sugarcane depended on the lake for water during the dry season. They carried water for their little farms in large mud pots until newly constructed concrete canals made life easier. When the monsoons arrived, the very lake they revered brought them much sorrow as it often flooded the ragi and rice fields, taking away their staple food crops and the income earned from them.

  The growing vegetation eventually brought cattle breeders to adopt this no-man’s-land as their own. The cattle were content with the fodder and water available. Soon, with its abundance of fish, the lake drew fishermen to establish dwellings near the cattle breeders. Without the lake, no life would have existed in Thattaguppe. Liquor brewers, farmers, cattle breeders, and fishermen all settled down in a natural progression to pursue their livelihoods. Nobody outside the village cared about the residents of Thattaguppe as they went about their isolated lives in a forgotten corner of the world. Poverty had humbled them; they were as raw as the afternoon sun and as wild as the partheniums that grew aimlessly in the fields.

  My family’s ancestors had played their part in reclaiming the land and consecrating it to a Christian god. But though we are of a Christian family, we were once of low Hindu caste—part of the social order that has existed in India for over one thousand years. I discovered from my mother that my maternal great-grandfather was considered below a shudra, the lowliest position in the caste system that still divides Indian society. I am said to have inherited this dalit, or untouchable, status—far below the priestly, warrior, merchant, and labor castes. Over time, the caste system assumed a religious character through a belief that God assigned humans to the roles they deserved. My great-grandfather earned his living doing menial jobs like skinning animals, making leather shoes, and burying carcasses—tasks despised by higher castes. I first heard about the caste system during my history lessons at school, and learnt that my family is officially among the ‘Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes’ that comprise over twenty-five percent of the Indian population. Without an education or opportunities to acquire new skills, tens of millions of people like my parents remain where they have always been—in poverty.

  The landlords took great pains to avoid any form of bodily contact with the sub-humans who worked for them and lived in squalid, crammed huts with roofs made from coconut leaves. My great-grandfather understood that the only escape from this terribly unjust social order was to convert to Christianity, setting aside years of prevailing traditions and beliefs. Though his wisdom saved me from a life of total indignity, I was still doubly undesirable from the start, being not only poor, but female.

  From early on in my life, my parents insisted that my siblings and I pray every night. Grandmother would often gather us around the framed pictures of saints and light candles on evenings when my uncles returned early from work. Still, Jesus wasn’t the only God to whom many of the villagers prayed. For favors or mercy, they continued to worship the cooking fire, the full moon, and the ghosts of their ancestors. Divine and human ideals of fraternity didn’t seem to have much in common in the day-to-day life of the village.

  Long after Father Sigeon had settled in his grave, the stone church lived on as a reminder of the new faith, its toll calling on worshipers to cross themselves in the afternoon and recite the rosary in the evening. Yet on this day, when the entire village had gathered to pray for the souls of the departed, attention quickly shifted to the blue vehicle parked outside the small gate of the graveyard.

  Memories of that morning remain etched in my mind like ink blots on sparkling white paper. Parts of the day’s events that I couldn’t actually remember were retold by my parents so many times that they have become as real as the cobwebs that are a part of our household.

  No one had forgotten the jeep. Sister Stella, the elderly nun of the Dona Paula Convent, made her way towards the gate to find out who the intruders were. A woman with short hair and dressed in a colorful sari could be seen descending from the jeep to greet the nun. Shielding her face from the blazing sun with her hand, Sister Stella exchanged a few words with the strangers in the jeep and pointed them in the direction of the village. The visitors smiled, looking genuinely pleased.

  The jeep erupted with loud grunts and belches of smoke and headed in the direction Sister Stella indicated. The worshippers returned their attention to the priest. In single file, one head after another bowed to receive Holy Communion from the young women of the convent. Families walked about the burial ground, lighting candles and pressing thin sticks of incense into the covers of the graves that held those with whom they had shared a personal connection.

  After paying their respects to the dead, many worshippers surrounded Sister Stella, eager to find out who the visitors were. Appa and I were packed in among them, his arms sealed tight around me. Soon, Amma appeared in the chattering crowd with her hand placed protectively upon her pregnant belly, her eyes searching anxiously for us. She caught up with us just as Appa turned away, his dark face now gleaming with a wide smile. She reached for me over his shoulder, but he kept on walking briskly.

  ‘What has made you so happy?’ she asked.

  ‘We must take S
hilpa to the hospital immediately,’ he replied.

  Confusion swept across Amma’s face. ‘Why the hospital? Shilpa isn’t sick.’

  ‘Those strangers have come looking for children to admit to a school they just started. It is free for people like us. The hospital is where they are testing the children for admission.’ He was referring to the two-room medical clinic run by the nuns of the convent.

  Appa halted in his steps and turned to Amma. ‘Shilpa will go to this special school. It is called Shanti Bhavan.’ The tone of his voice conveyed what he had decided for me. ‘Look, Sarophina,’ he said, calling her by her full name as he did when he was upset with her, ‘already so many are rushing to the hospital with their children. You better hurry.’ Having lived with him for years, Amma knew when he wanted something very badly. She sensed the urgency in his voice and knew it was not the time to argue.

  Word that the visitors were screening children had spread fast, and by the time Amma and I reached the hospital, a large noisy crowd of women was already seated upon the muddy ground outside. It was a chaotic scene, with children crying and playing or sleeping in their mothers’ laps.

  The three visitors from the blue jeep had set up their station in a stand-alone room outside the hospital. Amma pulled her sari tight around her narrow legs and sat on the ground, with me positioned in her lap. As she caressed my scraggly, shoulder-length hair, which was pulled back with a tight cloth band, she listened to the many mothers already seated around her. They appeared unconcerned about the education their children could receive, but were happy that they could live and study in a school without having to pay any fees.

  Every so often, Sister Stella would come to the door and call out a name, and a woman would emerge from the crowd and rush in with her child. When the nun called out ‘Mary Sarophina,’ Amma smoothed my hair with her thin fingers and hoisted me onto her hip.