| A mahout in Nepal honors the Hindu god Ganesh by touching both hands to his elephant, then to his own forehead. Ganesh is often reincarnated as an elephant, these drivers tell me, because soon after he was born, his head was destroyed--turned to ash I think, but can't be sure because their English is so broken and my Nepali is almost nonexistent. Ganesh's father, Shiva the Destroyer, found him an elephant head as a replacement. "Gee, thanks, Dad," I picture Ganesh saying, "you think anybody will notice?" I keep thoughts like this to myself now. These days I imitate the gestures of the mahouts, touching the cold, grey skin of Shana-Kali and then touching my forehead. The Nepalese watch this from the corners of their eyes. I am the only one to touch the elephant they have named Shana-Kali, the elephant they think is a demon. It may be months before I make them understand. The mahouts, who drive the elephants, and the elephant trainers have a word for me, too, another Hindi word, though the majority of Nepalese are Buddhist Pandu, they call me, "the pale one," for my blonde ponytail and light brown beard. The rest of the world calls me Hank Goldman. Sometimes I get the odd impulse to put the whole bizarre situation down in a letter to my mom. The reclamation project, the culture shock, ideas for finishing touches on my thesis. Then like a kick in the gut I remember. A part of me still insists that the body working at that chemical plant somewhere near Tucson is my mother. It's crazy; I know it's crazy, but I still imagine it. Yeah, I could write her a letter, but why send it off? The words wouldn't mean a damn thing to that microprocessor in her brain. Not a damn thing. It was nearing the end of the monsoon season the day I brought Reclaimed Subject Seventeen to the Royal Chatwain Wild Game Preserve. The flight to Kathmandu had been rough, the challenge of getting a necropachyderm into the country made even harder by news of another Chinese deployment in the northwest. I hired a truckdriver and got Subject Seventeen into a bobtail lorry. The driver was a wiry older man, almost toothless, who wore a leather bombadier's jacket over his green cotton lungi. "How can you stand it this warm and wet?" I asked him. "I feel like I'm in a dog's mouth." He just grunted and started the truck. It was about ninety miles from Kathmandu to the preserve. We drove through cramped streets packed with people, past Buddhist and Hindu temples. Finally, the town behind us, we passed small farms with rows of cabbage like green buds on the black earth. The closer we drew to the preserve, the twitchier I got. To distract myself, I pointed the grassland of the Terai out to the truckdriver. "That's elephant grass over there, where most of the game lives." He just nodded. The grass on the flood plain grew almost twenty feet high, tall enough to get a person on foot hopelessly lost, and too thick to drive through in a Land Rover. The grass itself had razor edges that could cut a person to ribbons, and anyone on foot ran the risk of stumbling onto a rhino and being gored to death. The grass made working in this part of Nepal a singular problem. "They have the elephant," the driver told me after a while in his old man's lisp. "The elephant walk good through the grass." I slapped his leather shoulder. "Absolutely right, my man!" An elephant was the only thing that could hack the grassland of Nepal. He nodded and grinned. "Elephant bery expensive. To take revenge on an enemy, we say, buy him an elephant." We rolled up to the gateway of the park where a guard typed us into her clipboard and passed us through. As we approached the largest of the rain-damp porticoed buildings of the office complex, Ida and an immaculate small man in a turban and grizzled beard came out to meet us. Lagging behind were three or four Nepali men in lungis and sandals. "Namascar!" Ida stomped up in her stiff bird-boned way, her grin so big it deepened all the wrinkles in her neck. Dr. Ida Sapperstein had been at Chatwain for the past twenty years, a key player in the reestablishment of its animal population. "Gonna check out life in the wild, eh, Hank? Get down outta that truck and let's see her." Her enthusiasm did a lot to calm my nerves. But still, it seemed pretty deserted for one of the last three game preserves left in the world. "Where is everyone?" I asked, sliding off the high truck seat. Ida wore glasses on a chain around her neck. It was like her not td have her vision laser corrected. "Oh, the Rapti River's come out of its banks with all the rain," she said, gesturing with those glasses. "The crew is out making sure none of the tigers were cut off." The small man in the turban cleared his throat. He was obviously a devout Hindu; I saw the tilaka painted on his forehead. Ida turned to him. "Oh, Vish. Sorry. Hank, you've never met Dr. Vishnu Chandra. He acts as manager of the preserve, in addition to his research." Ida touched my shoulder. "Dr. Chandra comes to us from the University of New Delhi." "New Delhi?" I said. "Really? I've been working out of their Shankara Research Center--" "For the reanimation process, I know," said Chandra in excellent Oxford English. "I am most interested in how this is done. Keeping an animal corpse in stasis as the fetus comes to term is one thing. Many, many tigers we have placed back into the wilds of Chatwain that were whelped by these females reclaimed from the dead. Also rhinos, gaur, antelope. That program is a great success, but I must ask you, sir. Why do you do this other thing?" He steepled his fingers and narrowed his eyes at me. I looked from his crisp, white cotton to my wrinkled, sodden khakis and wondered how he did it. "Chandra," Ida said in a warning tone. | |