Bardia
April 24, 2016
Bengals and Bardia elephants
An old woman whispered in my dreams; ‘Come to Nepal’.
Nepal, but almost India. I sat up the front with the bus driver who looked like Brad Pitt after a long summer. We were winding out of Kathmandu on the wrong side of the road, skirting cliffs and throwing smoke and dust at oncoming trucks. High-pitched music sang of life and how to treat your lover. The broken sun slid between a great gorge of grey rock. Hot air rolled in from the jungle. I moved onto a spare seat and sat next to a kickboxer who spent half his time training in Phuket, Thailand. He’d come to see his mother.
The bus creaked and hissed before ratcheting to a jerky stop. The kickboxer told me that this was dinner. That meant dal baht. Lentils with rice. At every restaurant it was slightly different. It had become my daily sustenance and it was still good at midnight.
We dozed on the bus after dinner until I was woken by breathes of star-cooled air.
The road cut straight through the jungle. Elephants, tigers and rhinos wandered out there somewhere. Their dense smells saturated the interior.
I drifted in and out of sleep, when my head smashed against the metal window frame.
The bus hissed and squealed. I shook hands with the kickboxer and he patted me on the shoulder.
The engine churned and the black night lifted to a rich blue.
Bardia.
I followed elephant prints through hardened mud.
A crocodile’s tail swayed through murky water. I forded the river behind it.
Sunlight broke through towering reeds as I hunted for a Bengal tiger. I kneeled at a fresh, glistening paw print and stretched out my hand inside it.
I pushed through undergrowth that parted like wet jeans. An explosion of grunting flesh fired out in all directions. I froze then proceeded into a churned pit of mud. Boars. The other side of a cracked pan held the crater prints of an elephant. I broke onto the bank of a river and scanned the far side for stripes.
I tracked the bank through spiny reeds then took up a position under the foliage. The earth shimmered as the sun dazzled its way across the sky.
Branches broke behind me. An elephant had snuck up. It tore down the jungle. I crept through pools of light. A heavy blast of breath pushed fine dust into the air. I caught the flash of an eye then an ear flapping in the shadows. I slunk into open ground and clambered up a high wooden lookout.
Three mahouts came walking past. I warned them about the elephant. They entered the jungle and the treetops shook as the elephant trumpeted. The men came bolting back out of the forest. They were yelling about protecting their elephants from the wild male.
The heat boiled my neurons as rhinos weaved between rocks and reeds.
They’d appeared from nowhere, swishing away into the long grass. I clambered down off my stage and headed back through the creeping shadows of grass behind me.
A herd of deer bunched tight and stared.
I crossed the river to children on bikes and the edge of civilisation.
A rhino in a pen. Green mould covered its horn. Hardened sleep jammed its orphaned eyes. It whistled at me. I gave it a coconut biscuit. I patted its horn as I became lost in the deep blue reflecting off its widening eyes.
The old woman’s voice tumbled down from somewhere high in the Himalayas:
You can take darkness, and in that darkness you can put a light. The weakest light breaks the deepest darkness. Come to Nepal, come to Nepal! There you will find the highest mountains in the world, and when you climb those peaks, from the top, you will see the first sunrise coming over the ridges, glistening… the glistening snow… the light… the orange light reflecting off the snow.
And then you will see… you will understand my words.