Mahout Read online

  “She kicked a bit and that was all; see, that thing choked her to death right quick.”

  — Sam Harvey, train engineer

  1857. The smell of attar, the humid, moist taste of death, surrounded Jaipur. A bad year for you when you could not be near elephants. You had nightmares. The Sepoy Revolt, starting outside Mekut, spread until even the maharajahs seized at chances for independence.

  One summer day you glanced up from the lake below the Amber Palace and saw elephants trudging across the ridge, fitted out in full battle dress.

  Arjun, your teacher now, rode the lead elephant, and he too was dressed for war.

  Your parents had told you the plans last night, but you hadn’t believed them. A show of strength, your father said. They would not fight, only bring luck to the maharajah. Your mother frowned, shook her head.

  Regardless, to send elephants against the British was madness. How could elephants match rifles and cannon?

  You watched for a long time, while trumpets sounded and peacocks gave their mating calls. To the west: smoke and vultures. The battle. All day, after the elephants had faded from sight, you watched the trail of smoke, the circling vultures. So many vultures. So much smoke. Sometimes you imagined you heard cannon recoil, a tremor beneath your feet.

  The lake waters turned a darker and darker blue, shadows long and distorted. You fell asleep. When you woke, the smoke was closer, the vultures identifiable by species. Along the ridge, the sun’s rays driving like spikes into their backs: the mahouts and their elephants. Some mahouts upon litters, bodies stretched out, others slumped across their elephants. You counted. Thirty elephants had gone out. Twenty had returned. You could hear their moans, could feel their pain, even from the lake. Your heartbeat quickened. Disaster

  You ran up the road to the Amber Palace, breathless. Through the quiet courtyard, the gardens, to the stables, there to meet a tired, wounded Arjun, death reflected in his eyes. He reeked of smoke and gunpowder, had burns on his face and arms. All around, elephants screamed, some with shrapnel wounds, veins laid open; others on their knees, their mahouts pleading with them to get up.

  Your jaw dropped and the pain twisted your joints. Not real. A nightmare.

  Where was Arjun’s elephant?

  “Lakshmi, master?” Your voice shook.

  For the first time, Arjun was an old man to you, back bent, movements slow.

  “Lakshmi is dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes! Please. Go away.”

  And you left, too shocked to cry.

  Ganesh dead? How could a god be dead?

  “We did not sit in judgment on her fate and I don’t believe any of those who witnessed the event felt it was inhumane under the circumstances.

  She paid for her crimes as anyone else would.”

  — Mrs. Griffith, eyewitness

  Blood drips onto the grass; the Lady Who Drank Blood laps at the widening pool. They have hoisted Mary upside down from the derrick. Her head hangs three feet from the ground, shadow small in the early morning light.

  You crouch beside her, the clowns behind you. Mary’s eye is open again, the wrinkles and long lashes and the reflectionless black. You wave the flies away. You are crying. You cannot help yourself. Your throat aches.

  Ganesh

  You touch the bristly hair, the rough skin. Cold. Much too cold.

  You will not work the booth today. Or ever again. The clowns weep but you feel nothing. Just your own grief. Just the chill wind blowing through you, and you so light and heavy at the same time. Burnt out. Now what will you do? Take away their pain, you said.

  But, like your old mahout, you know you will never be whole again.

  Quotes adapted, with permission, from the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, Vol. XXXVII, March 1971.

  Afterword

  I got the idea for “Mahout” from a story someone told me about Mary, an elephant that was hanged for killing a person. The idea that an elephant would be hanged for a crime struck me as absurd and sad simultaneously.

  When I thought about it, hanging an elephant also said something about human beings in general. So I researched the story, not even sure it was true, and I came across an article in the Tennessee Historical Bulletin about the incident.

  The more I read, the more it haunted me. But I couldn’t think of a way to approach the subject which wouldn’t be melodramatic or sentimental. Then, one day, I was staring at a photograph of myself as a child on an elephant outside the Amber Palace in Jaipur, India. Standing by the elephant was the elephant’s mahout. Instantly, a synergy occurred. The story wasn’t just about the elephant—what about its trainer? Its mahout. This was the person who suffered the most from the animal’s death. This was the person I had to write about.

  But when I sat down and started to write the story, it just didn’t work.

  Everything I wrote about the elephant was sentimental and insanely melodramatic—bathetic. Everything about the mahout seemed remote and unconnected to emotion. So I thought about it for awhile and I came up with a solution. The story of the elephant’s hanging would be told using the newspaper quotes to provide some distance from the events and to provide irony. The story of the mahout would be told in second person, to make the reader almost be the mahout, thus removing the distance. The problem, of course, is that second person is rarely used in fiction, so some readers might react in the opposite way to what I desired—they might feel more removed from the character than if I had used third person.

  (First person wasn’t even an option—how could I possibly use first person for a 67-year-old Hindu man and get away with it?) But I didn’t feel like I had any choice, so I stuck with second person. And then I decided that the flashbacks should not necessarily be chronological but instead thematic. Finally, I used my own memories of Jaipur, and being atop an elephant there, to create the flashback scenes—as well as my further studies in Indian/Southeast Asian religion and culture to frame the beliefs and viewpoint of the mahout in his maturity.

  The result was the most complex story I’d yet written, and at the same time, I hoped, the most involving emotionally and intellectually.

  (Complexity is not always a good thing in fiction.) All of the elements with regard to chronology, structure, voice, that I used in “Mahout” I’ve since used in my most recent work, which is one reason I’m so fond of the story.

  Š Jeff VanderMeer 1995, 1998

  “Mahout” first appeared in Asimov’s SF Magazine in 1995 and was reprinted in Jeff’s collection, The Book of Lost Places, in 1996.