Pa and the Elephants

 

My father demanded peace. New clothes, with their authoritative tautness and showy bickering, pinched his skin, burdened his bones and ruffled his philosophical demeanor. ‘New clothes are very hard on the skin. They put a kind of weight on you,’ he would complain. ‘They pinch and intimidate you,’ he would add. So the new set of clothes would go into watery deluge for three or four days to beat out their pinch, showmanship and gimmickry.

As the clothes would wear down with usage and mellow down to old age softness under the rigorous scrutiny of hundreds of washings, he would get in groove with them, finally accepting their presence in sync with the repose inside. ‘The only problem is that when a pair of clothes is really worth wearing in softness, it’s the time to discard it,’ he complained. My mother and sisters won’t allow him to feel at his best and go decked up in extremely soft, read it tattered, kurta-pyjama just because he found them suitably soft and non-pinchy.

Pa loved smoking, first huge cigars during dandy youth, cigarettes in the slowing-down middle age and coming to a chain-smoking spree of beedis in the later part of life. But ganja was a strict no. Once while visiting Rishikesh, he got inspired to taste the unfamiliar substance. An old sadhu was taking majestic draughts at his ganja-filled chillum. Pa followed as a well-obliging newly hatched disciple. Then standing at Ram Jhoola swaying over the watery sprawl of Ma Ganga and a cold wind buffeting down the valley, he saw philosopher Plato walking over the Ganges waters. Many will term it as hallucination. But to me these are the realities belonging to a different dimension. Pa loved the works of ancient philosophers and had thoroughly read Plato’s works. So maybe Plato decided to give him a darshan, albeit when Pa was a bit tipsy on the swinging bridge.   

Father felt it best when he visited Rishikesh. ‘I feel it so light in my being when I’m there,’ he told us. Once Father returns from his Rishikesh trip. The bag isn’t yet on the floor before he tells the biggest news spinning out of his time by the Ganges. ‘Elephants would have eaten us!’ he reads out the scary news. Maybe still under shock because elephants don’t eat humans, they trample them. ‘Oh did they attack you?’ Ma is concerned. We prepare ourselves to listen to the hair-raising episode. ‘Yea, very near to that!’ Father builds up the momentum of the scary news. ‘How?’ Mother is serious. ‘We were going in the forest and there we come across them!’ Father stops as if still haunted by the biggest land animals on earth. ‘How many?’ Mother wants to judge the scale of danger on the numerical ladder. ‘Well, must be a big party because there were many heaps of dung on the path. We were saved just by a whisker!’ Father’s eyes are wide open with fear. ‘You guys got scared of the elephant dung,’ Mother laughs in her simple ways of a hardworking woman. Pa is irritated, ‘They were just couple of minutes away because the dung was still steaming.’ It was winter and fresh elephant poop let out vapors as a proof of its freshness and hence the just recent presence of the elephants. Mother has to accept the gravity of the danger. ‘What did you people do?’ she asks innocently. ‘We took a U turn and tried to run to the capacity of our lungs and legs,’ Father seems tired like he has been running all the way from Rishikesh to our village.