Midnight encounters with the wild

It was midnight. A waxing moon bathed the undulating forest road with its silvery rays. Our tourist bus was cruising through Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary on its way to Mysore. I was awake, huddled up in the front seat facing the left windscreen, hoping to catch a glimpse of a tiger or a bison or at least a spotted deer when there started a jingling noise. The driver brought the vehicle to a stop and got up from his seat. “What happened” I asked. “One of our rear twin tyres has a flat,” he said and asked me if I could lend him a hand in replacing it with the stepney. The prospect of changing a flat tyre of a bus in the heart of a big jungle on a moonlit night appealed to my sense of adventure. “Why not?” I said and got up from my seat.

We were about to get off the bus when the driver noticed a solitary elephant majestically walking down the road towards us, its tusks glistening in the moonlight like silver swords.

The elephant came to a halt right in front of the bus and started sniffing the windshield with its trunk. It probably smelt the humans inside the bus as it started circling it. One sideway nudge from the hill of muscles that the elephant was, our bus would have toppled on its side. The conductor asked the driver to hide his Veerappan-style mustache as ‘it would enrage the elephant’. This drama took place when the notorious sandalwood smuggler and ivory poacher, Veerappan, was alive and active. The sight of that grey giant in the dead of the night in the middle of a forest chilled my spine. As we were discussing in hushed tones the pros and cons of blowing the horn to scare away the big beast, the animal took a pre-emptive step.

A rattling noise came from behind the bus. When we tiptoed down the aisle and peered through the rear glass the elephant was standing over an open fruit basket which it had pulled out from the luggage boot. Even as we watched, it finished the contents of the basket and started ambling away, down the road. We waited till it disappeared in the far distance and got out of the bus to inspect the crime scene. The door of the boot, ripped from its hinges, lay on the road littered with trampled bananas and pears.

We stayed awake and alert without a wink inside the bus till the following morning when we replaced the flat tyre with help from a truck driver and cleaner, and resumed our journey. Even now, after so many years, the hair on my nape rises whenever I recall how the enormous head of that bull elephant with mighty and menacing tusks looked at us from such close quarters through the windscreen of the bus.