By Rajesh Parameswaran

ELEPHANTS IN CAPTIVITY (PART ONE)

I don't have much time so I must dispense with the obvious. Helicopters clatter overhead, men with cameras leaning from their open doorways. Their footage must be numbingly familiar to you, and might by now be all that remains of me. Please know that the contemporaneous accounts surely will be filled with distortions. I write this in order to supply you with those crucial bits of history without which my story cannot be understood.

Before I begin, I want to make something clear: I am sorry for the expense and trouble I have caused. If I have hurt anyone, even unintentionally, then I can only hope for your forgiveness. Many people have invested in my safety and comfort, have felt that they've had my best interests at heart; I have not intended to betray them.

You must believe that I never sought to draw this kind of attention to myself. I am just one elephant, and I did not seek it, but I can sense it: my story is destined to be a part of this city's collective memory. Perhaps, just perhaps, by the time you read this, my misadventure has inspired others to break free as I did. Perhaps we live among you now as friends and neighbors.

I have come far. This vast expanse ringed with trees recalls me to another green place. My first memories are of green — the rustle of green, its shift and sway, a thickness of thin blades that rise above my head — the grass we ate and lived in. Rushing through it, through the herd's feet, massive, thundering feet, which in the vision- clouding dust and seeming chaos, balletically precise, never miss their mark. My elders sense my clumsy, tottering body somewhere in the dust and grass far beneath them, and always step around me. So: in, under, around the massive god bodies of my elders, I rush forward. My trunk rises up, groping for the belly that bears the odor of my mother, Amuta, her trailing milky, musky scent. I find her, and she reaches down for just a moment, to smell my mouth, touch me on the head, to reassure me and confirm herself of my presence, and all the while we thunder forward. Prior, primarily I remember: Green.

During the wet season, our old leader Ania would guide us out of our valley to graze among the upland bark and bush, to feed on the brief tender grass that sprang up along the monsoon rivers in the hills. In the dry season, she brought us back down again to the valley, where the earth's wetness contracted to a small space of blue — our lake (I have never seen it, but I remember it) — and where the grass was tough and tasteless but everpresent.

Life was full of change, but our home was neverchanging. Mother became our leader after old Ania died, a solitary grazer among hostile beasts. During our more difficult times, some would complain even about Mother's wise leadership, saying that if Ania were alive we would never have suffered as we did. (The elephants spoke, I say, but of course they didn't. Among ourselves, we elephants did not talk in words like those with which I now write this. We made noises, a broad range of them: grunts, whispers, low rumbles, ear- splitting trumpets, but we used them not as words. We made motions with our bodies as well — with our trunks, our ears, our legs, our eyes, with the angle of our heads — but these motions did not have distinct meanings. These gestures of body and sound were the stuff of our communication, yet they did not themselves constitute our speech. The source of our understanding, the substance of our message, lay in something broader and more round, a circle of intention that surrounded each of us and the herd. When we were together in the herd, we shared an understanding, concrete and actual; each of us felt with certainty what other individuals expressed to us, and moreover, we understood as a herd what the herd thought and felt.)

Ania left us during the long drought, when my aunts' skin hung loose on their jutting, angular hip bones, and the hard, ugly shapes of their skulls protruded from behind their kind faces. Ania always had faith in the old grazing fields. We all did. But one day she left us, and Mother remained the dominant female in the herd.

We had all seen our cousin herds stay in their old grazing fields and die, Mother reminded us. She convinced us to abandon our ancient land. She led us into distant unknown hills where, with less competition for the bark of the baobab trees and the sparse, sweet grasses, she promised us, we would thrive. Elephants died on this uncertain journey. My great-aunt Thoosha didn't survive the climb. She was ninety-four, and one morning along the long way, awake and lolling on her side, she calmly refused to stand up.

Manami's nameless, still-suckling son — he had been lively once, a rambunctious boy, but during the drought, when Manami's breasts grew shriveled and suckling became painful, when her milk dried up, this boy was the first among the children to slow his play, to reveal his weakness — he also didn't live to see the new hills. (Poor Manami struggled to bring him along. When the calf's pace slowed, Manami also slowed, the two of them trailing behind us a full day's journey. Mother did not stop the herd to wait for them, nor did Manami ask her to, and when Manami finally joined us again, she was alone. We touched her face with our trunks and rubbed our heads on her haunches, but Manami would not face our gaze or return our greeting. This happened before I was born, but I remember it clearly.)