The Elephant in the Rain

It was a sight that haunts me. Humans can be frightfully mean without giving it a second thought.

Last evening (yes, I know I’m writing for a weekly magazine, and I should be saying ‘the other evening’ rather than ‘last evening’, because the reader won’t know which night I’m talking about, but ‘other evening’ seems so casual, so throwaway, so matter of fact), I was driving to my home in Gurgaon, the thriving but infrastructurally crippled Delhi annexe, and an elephant stood abandoned in the drizzle on the road with the town’s heaviest traffic. The Metro rail service from Delhi to Gurgaon is slated to start operations from June, and terrifying overhead railway tracks on pillars cleave every major road. Whoever owns or uses the elephant had taken shelter somewhere to escape the rain and left it under one of the rail tracks.

The animal stood there, as thousands of cars (yes, thousands, this is peak rush hour in Gurgaon, which is home to a vast majority of all Fortune 500 companies with operations in India, and the BPO capital of the country) rushed by on either side. It must have felt frightened and confused and helpless, in an incomprehensible situation, with no knowledge of how long it would be trapped here, and why.

Three of the sights I remember as the most terrible I have seen concern animals. On a Delhi road, a mother dog licking the head of her puppy who had been knocked dead by a car. She just kept on licking it, and I don’t know how long she continued (I couldn’t bear the sight, I drove away), but she believed that her love would bring her child alive. Many years ago, I had been out for a month, and when I returned home and opened the door, I found a dead sparrow at my feet. When I locked the doors and windows and left, I had not noticed her, and she had starved to death. The thought of how long she had tried to escape her prison and what she had gone through, and the guilt over the death of such an innocent creature, was nearly overpowering. And then, five years ago, my cat Kitkat was killed by stray dogs. I didn’t know she had gone out, and by the time I found her, rigor mortis had set in, her body was stiff. I buried her the next morning, wrapped in a shawl that my daughter had placed on what was “Kitkat’s sofa” and on which she loved to sleep (she would have great ego hassles with any guest who tried to sit on that sofa).

Why had someone brought the elephant to this mall-infested, multiplex-crowded road? It must have been brought to amuse some rich people at some gathering of theirs: a wedding perhaps, or a birthday party. The money we spend, the wealth we flaunt and the pathetic lack of taste that we exhibit every day in our jaw-droppingly expensive and uncouth weddings is bad enough. But we can surely stop short of ill-treating and humiliating creatures that we have no valid right or demand over. In our zoos, tigers are kept in insultingly small cages, and giraffes are chained to posts. In the Shimla zoo, we actually have a snow leopard, not in a small cage, but in a cage nevertheless. Why would anyone want to keep such a rare, beautiful and privacy-loving creature in captivity, to be glanced at for potato chips-fuelled entertainment by hundreds of fools every day with no idea of its majesty and preciousness? 

Among choices of pet dogs, the pug is now the most popular in India, the outcome mainly of some very effective advertising by a cellular services company. But we have done horrible things to make the pug what it is today. For generations, pugs have been bred to make their faces flatter and flatter, because that makes them ‘cuter’, and that obviously fetches a higher price. As a result, pugs have all forms of breathing problems, and many die young. Our greed has ruined this harmless breed, which, tragically, wants nothing other than to be loved by humans. Why do we wreak so much havoc in the worlds of beings that have never harmed us, and who have as much right to live their own way as we have?

The elephant in the rain shamed me.

About The Author

Sandipan Deb

Sandipan Deb is an IIT-IIM graduate who wandered into journalism after reading a quote from filmmaker George Lucas — “Everyone cage door is open” — and has stayed there (in journalism, not a cage) for the past 19 years. He has written a book on the IITs.