The Elephant Chaser's Daughter Read online

  A man named Dr. Venkatesh was seated at a small desk. With a gentle smile, he asked me to fit some plastic blocks together. I later discovered that he was the school psychologist. Having never encountered toys before, it was an exercise I would remember wistfully for a long time. According to Amma, another of the three, Dr. Maya, asked her several questions about my health. I started to grow restless, so Dr. Venkatesh suggested we take a break.

  Upon leaving the room, we saw a group of women excitedly questioning each other about the process. ‘They will take the children to America and sell them,’ one of the women remarked.

  Then another said that she’d heard that the strangers were planning to kill the children and harvest their kidneys and eyes. These women explained that they had come simply out of curiosity to find out what the strangers were up to. Their stories horrified Amma. She wasn’t prepared to give me away, her most precious possession, to such people.

  Amma didn’t care to wait any longer at the hospital. After all, she didn’t want to part with me in the first place. She picked me up and ran out of the gate, hugging me tightly and not looking back.

  By then, Appa was on his way to find out for himself what was happening. Seeing Amma heading his way, he snatched me from her arms, and asked her what had transpired. He rushed back to the hospital, with Amma struggling to keep pace with him and pleading. She wept in desperation, trying to tear me from his grasp. He was too strong for her even to slow him down by pulling at his shirt from the back. When nothing worked, she yelled at him, accusing him of indifference to me in the past. I was her love, her life’s greatest pleasure, and she couldn’t put me at such great risk if what the other women were saying was true. Appa was in no mood to listen to what he considered merely the usual talk among foolish women.

  Hurrying in through the hospital gate, Appa skidded to a stop, not knowing where to go. Amma stood in front of him, blocking his way, her feet firmly rooted to the ground. But she was no match for his strength. With his free hand, he pushed her aside effortlessly. She kept begging him to stop and briefly caught hold of his hand, but he freed himself with ease. Frustrated, she hit him with both her fists, but he didn’t seem affected by it one bit. Nor did he pause to calm her.

  Sister Stella saw us from inside a nearby room and summoned Appa. She asked where Amma had taken me, as the doctor had been calling for us. Drenching Amma in foul language, Appa sent us inside with strict instructions to let the strangers do whatever they needed to with me.

  I don’t remember any of this precisely, but a few memories remain as big, blurry impressions. My parents retell this story often, giving it a place of venerable myth in our household.

  The doctor, Dr. Maya, short-haired and chubby, seated me on a small wooden chair before her and examined my eyes, ears, and mouth. She had a warm smile, but the instruments she used on me were as cold as ice. She was so thorough in her inspection of me that it seemed as if she were looking for something important that she had lost. She scribbled something in her notebook, and then looked up as Amma stood in front of her. ‘Look at your little one’s oval face and pointed nose, so like her young mother.’ Dr. Maya smiled but Amma did not smile back.

  Dr. Venkatesh called us again to the broken wooden table at which he was seated. Placing coins in front of me, he asked me to count them. His voice was soft, his expression kind, and his Kannada fluent. But I didn’t answer; I just stared at him perplexed.

  Throughout all this, Mrs. Law, a lean woman with neatly styled short hair and square glasses, was observing us with a stern expression. I later learnt that she was the principal of the school, hired just two months earlier. Though she was barely five feet tall, the seriousness of her bearing gave her the appearance of special importance. Unable to converse with us in our own language, she kept asking Dr. Venkatesh to explain what we were saying.

  ‘Chinna,’ Amma said warmly, referring to me as her golden girl, ‘tell the doctor how many coins there are.’

  I dragged myself closer to the table and touched the coins, which were arranged in a tidy row, with my little fingers. ‘One,’ I said. ‘Two, three…’

  Amma exhaled with relief as, in my lilting voice, I correctly counted the coins. She wiped her sweaty palms on her sari and sat with her legs pressed tightly together. Even if the other women had terrified her with their stories of abduction, she wanted me to do well. It was important to her sense of pride.

  Afterward, we found Appa squatting on the ground outside, shoulders slouched, digging in the dirt with a twig to distract himself. He rarely did anything without a purpose, and playing with mud wasn’t his preferred manner of spending time. He was pensive, possibly dreaming of a life of good fortune for at least one of his children. He couldn’t educate me in a good school, and this would be nothing short of a miracle. Sensing our approach, he suddenly looked up, raising his hand to shield his face from the hot sun. There was no smile; his face was all anxiety. I was singing a tune my grandmother often sang to me and clutching a colorful toffee—my reward from the doctor.

  Amma walked towards Appa with slow, heavy steps. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  She didn’t answer. But soon her fears took over again. ‘Just listen to what everyone is saying. If you let our daughter go with them, she’ll never return alive.’

  Appa recalled the details vividly, especially because her outbursts were to take place again and again throughout the day. ‘Foolish woman, you ran away with Shilpa!’ he screamed, worried her panic had cost me a chance at admission to the school.

  ‘I am afraid,’ she said, sobbing. ‘I will not give my daughter to them.’

  ‘Nonsense. Give her to me, you stupid woman. These people don’t look like they would kidnap children. Those who do don’t publicize themselves in broad daylight!’

  This must have gotten through to Amma in some way because she calmed down enough to explain what had happened inside the testing room. ‘They gave two coins to her and asked which was heavier. Instead of saying that the five-rupee coin was heavier than the fifty-paisa coin, she said the other way round.’

  Appa’s face fell.

  ‘But other than that, she answered all the questions correctly,’ Amma continued, her tone a bit lighter. She surely wanted to assure herself and Appa that I was a smart girl. ‘They said they will tell us very soon whether or not they will take her.’

  Not waiting to see Appa’s reaction, she prepared to carry me herself and walk out through the hospital gate. Finding me heavy, she changed her mind, leading me by one hand while flattening the other upon her bulging belly.

  Appa appeared satisfied. Finally he had turned calm, his face relaxed. He wanted so badly to remain hopeful. Snatching me up, he walked out onto the muddy road.

  ‘When Shilpa said our names,’ Amma said, ‘the doctor started laughing. He said our little girl is very smart.’

  A big smile spread across Appa’s dark face, a sharp contrast to Amma’s tense and worried expression. For reasons unknown to me, he seemed sure that I would impress the visitors. But years later, he confessed that all through that day, he was fearful that they would reject me. He wasn’t one bit concerned about what Amma had heard from some rumor-mongering women.

  Any observant passers-by would have noticed that no cooking smoke rose from our hut that night. All thoughts of dinner had been forgotten as Appa and Amma entangled themselves in a heated argument. At one point, perhaps feeling she had screamed enough, Amma fell silent and proceeded to bang her head against the wall.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, woman?’ Appa demanded, not wanting her to hurt herself, especially since she was pregnant.

  Amma didn’t bother to reply.

  ‘Why is it you can’t think? Can’t you see what this means to us? Don’t you want her to study?’

  Amma sat still, facing the wall that had just met her head and ignoring his bruising words.

  Appa then looked at me—his little girl. I’d heard he was disappointed at my birth because I was a girl, but
he always seemed to like me more than my younger brother, Francis, who was then two years old. He had remained weak and thin since his premature birth at seven months. That evening, Appa appeared more caring towards me than ever before. He tickled me, and I let out a peal of laughter. But soon he was lost in thought. I wonder whether he was imagining a better future for me.

  ‘You will not take her away from me,’ Amma threatened, turning to face him with sudden boldness.

  ‘You think only you care for her?’ Appa shot back.

  The fight continued into the night until finally Amma, hugging me closely, resorted to desperate pleading. ‘Please don’t send her away.’

  Appa stroked my hair, releasing a sigh. ‘Sarophina, we don’t know whether she will be selected or not. But I really want her to be chosen. We can’t educate her. You know that, don’t you?’

  Amma didn’t answer. Instead she cradled me in her arms and sang to me like she did every night. On this night, she hugged me tighter than ever, as though I were all that she had.

  A few days later, a knock came on the door of our hut. Amma opened the door and found a young girl from the convent standing in the doorway. Sister Stella had sent her to deliver a message.

  I had been chosen to attend the school.

  Appa’s voice filled the hut as he thanked God—something he rarely did—but Amma burst into furious sobs, her distress running deeper than her husband’s happiness. Appa didn’t care to hear anything more from the girl, he told me, even though she looked like she had more to say. A new hope was born in him, and there was nothing further to be said. He kept repeating to himself that God had finally heard his prayers, and he ignored Amma completely.

  Amma didn’t forgive Appa for many years after that. When I was older, she told me a part of her died when she heard of my selection. Having not finished primary school or seen anyone else in the family benefit from an education, she couldn’t grasp what good it could do for me. Now, looking back at her early life experiences, I can fully understand why she felt that way. For a woman like her, living was all about serving her husband and bearing his children. In turn, her daughters would look after her in her old age.

  Amma wasn’t one to surrender without putting up an earnest fight. As they lay on the floor together that night, Appa tried again to reassure her that everything would be fine. On the mat with her back facing him, she kept her arm draped over me protectively. Appa tried to sweep Amma up in his enthusiasm, but when that didn’t work, he tried to strike fear in her heart. ‘Do you want her to grow up like us, without enough food to eat, no proper clothes to wear, and no money to go to school?’

  Amma tensed at his words, but didn’t reply, ignoring him as though she hadn’t heard him. When he pressed, she retorted, ‘We are already sending her to the village school. That is enough.’ The plan had been for me to study at Anganwadi, a courtyard shelter run by the local government.

  Appa bit his lip to contain his anger. ‘You are like a stubborn ox. That school is worthless.’ Raising his arms in agitation, he continued. ‘Half the time, the teachers don’t even show up. Look at me, Sarophina. I can’t read or write. I can’t even sign my name. Neither of us studied. Do you want our daughter to be like us?’

  ‘Maybe one day she will return to us as a great person,’ he continued, once again reversing course, to offer encouragement. ‘Maybe she will become a doctor or a lawyer,’ he said, pausing to listen to the echo of his own words. But there was no one he could point to as an example of having succeeded from the families he knew. History was against him.

  This was the first time Appa had ever spoken with confidence about anything so distant, and Amma was surprised to see what hope could do to a man as wretched as he. But nothing he could say would convince her. In her turn she called him by his formal name, a sign of outright defiance. ‘Anthony. I will work. I will even beg on the street if I have to. But I want my daughter to be with me. I won’t give her away like an orphan.’ She didn’t have any dreams for me, or even for herself, and all that was real to her was having me with her.

  That was it. Appa gave up trying to convince her. She would fight him to the bitter end, even if that meant getting beaten. She was determined to win, no matter what.

  While I could sense the tension in our household, my excitement about travelling to a distant place in the blue jeep was simply overwhelming. I was prepared to leave Amma and Appa for that reason alone. But I can now understand how my mother felt about having to hand over her first child to the care of perfect strangers. I can’t blame her for her reluctance. A woman in her situation lives for her children, and we are the only lasting joy my father ever brought her.

  Their vicious disagreement over my schooling marked the beginning of a permanent emotional separation between my parents. Appa probably sees what happened that day as simply a twist in the family’s fortune. As for me, I have been living a far more comfortable life ever since. Now I do not have to queue patiently for a bucket of water from the village well, as my mother had to. I don’t have to huff and puff through a pipe into lit charcoal to start the cooking fire at obscenely early hours of the morning, as all the women in my family have had to do.

  I think of my new destiny as pre-planned by Mother Fate, and inscribed on my forehead in the indiscernible ink of the gods. But there is no way to read it without the help of a magic mirror or a fortune teller. It holds a mystery that has haunted me all this while. If we cannot know what our destiny is, how are we to fulfill or escape it? It seems awfully convenient for the Gods and equally maddening for humans. This is Vidhiy-Amma’s cunning.

  CHAPTER THREE: A PERMANENT PARTING

  It had been drizzling all night. Despite the rain, the sun occasionally broke through, offering the promise of a bright morning. In village folklore, that is when the jackals get married—an auspicious time for everyone else.

  It wasn’t unusual to be woken by chicks walking all over me, pecking at my head. ‘Amma, please chase them away,’ I cried, raising myself from the floor and pushing the excited birds away. Hens and their chicks were part of our family, spending the night with us in the single room we shared. If Appa bought a goat, a rare occurrence, it would also join us. I didn’t think much then about animals and humans living together in such close harmony, all under the same roof.

  Over the years, Appa often recounted with great excitement what it was like taking me to school the first time. Amma would listen in while cooking dinner, interrupting to add to Appa’s version, which she said didn’t explain everything. I never got tired of listening to my story, repeated many times with the same fascination that might attend an unsolved mystery.

  Although she was terribly upset and crying, Amma set to work very early on the day of my leaving. She washed my face, combed my hair, and drowned me in a loose skirt that fell all the way to my ankles. She dressed me with great care, tied my hair with a barrette, and pinned onto my blouse a handkerchief she had cut out from one of her old saris. All the while she ignored Appa whenever he attempted to speak with her. He would have liked her to enjoy the moment, but there was nothing he could do. She was still furious and wanted him to know that without me at home they would have no happiness together.

  Appa took me to his mother’s hut right next to ours, adjoining a cowshed. I wasn’t looking forward to this visit as Arpuda Ajji, my paternal grandmother, was not someone I was too fond of. Each time I met her, she would give me a kiss, and I’d try to push her away as she reeked of tobacco and alcohol. Her long, densely matted dreadlocks were a chestnut color, similar to that of a horse I had once seen at the village fair.

  Arpuda Ajji had been sick for a while now, buckled over with severe stomach pain that kept her awake most nights. Appa explained that it was for this reason that she had taken up drinking like his father. Each night before lying down to sleep, she’d gulp down three to four glasses of liquor from a cylinder-shaped steel vessel kept behind a stack of firewood in the room.

  No one knew that Arpu
da Ajji was suffering from some sort of intestinal tumor. The family discovered it years later when Appa and Uncle Philip took her to the city to visit a proper doctor after all the home remedies and treatment by village medicine men had failed. But by then it was too late.

  Appa carried me in his arms to his mother as though he were making an offering to God. Ajji was lying on a mat on the floor in a dark room, one hand placed over her abdomen. Her eyes were sunken and lifeless. She forced herself to wrench up a weak smile for Appa’s sake.

  Arpuda Ajji would die four years later when I turned eight years old, leaving me with many unanswered questions about her life and family history. Every time I went into the room where my paternal grandfather, Joseph Thatha, slept alone, I would see her picture staring coldly down at me from within the broken wooden frame that hung on the mud wall. I would stand in front of that photo and search her hardened face, trying to understand the mystery of her past.

  One tale I heard from Amma still troubles me. It was about the unexplained death of Aunt Sagaya, Ajji’s youngest daughter, at the age of fourteen. I never knew her, as she died before I was born. Appa explained that her death was an accident, but Amma found the account too convenient to accept.

  Allegedly, in the blush of dawn one summer day, a shepherd found Sagaya’s bloated body afloat in the stone well at the farthest end of the village. Within an hour of the discovery the sharp tongues of village women had devised many stories to explain her death.

  By nightfall, Sagaya was settled at the farthest end of the graveyard. No candles were lit and no flowers placed on the grave; those were the privileges of the wealthy. All that was offered were the few sticks of incense my grandfather, Joseph Thatha, had bought for a rupee. Arpuda Ajji was crying loudly, ‘Why did she have to fall into the well? Were we going to kill her? I only beat her because she stole money.’

  Her questions didn’t remain unanswered for long. Villagers generously offered their own accounts, all rooted in the shared belief that a girl of fourteen years, barely four feet in height, couldn’t have jumped over the half-wall around the well. ‘Maybe somebody pushed her in,’ was the grim conclusion.