The Elephant Chaser's Daughter

My Mother, Sarophina If you ever get to meet my mother, Sarophina, you’ll notice the way her accent lugs her attempt to speak English. Each word is calculated and every sentence weighs down with  her determination to get it right. She picked up a little bit of the language when she was  working as a housemaid abroad. My mother gave up on education at the age of fourteen. She was forced to join the family’s local business as a liquor hunter. At dusk, she would pick up a fairly large rubber tube and set out to fetch liquor from sellers. Dressed in her older brother’s faded khaki shorts and pants she looked like a little ruffian who meant business. But the danger of getting caught by the police always followed her like a shadow. Her charm and cunning ways at full display, older men could not turn her down. “It’s the way you approach people and speak to them that makes the difference,” she’d tell me in later years. My mother has been good at imparting advic...

My Father Hopes of a good future for me were planted the day my father – Appa as I call him -- decided to send me away to a boarding school called Shanti Bhavan. Despite my mother’s ardent protests and pleadings that she would raise me on her own, even if it meant begging on the streets, he was adamant that I study in a school that he believed would offer me a brighter future. I don’t know how a man who hasn’t had any formal education and had never seen professional success could foresee and trust that an education could save me from the poverty-stricken life he and his family had endured for generations.   Others in my family say that my father wanted to get rid off me because I was born a girl child, and hence he didn’t hesitate to give me up to strangers who came looking for children to admit into their school.  Upon my birth he had openly spoken about throwing me into the nearby garbage pit. Whatever his reasons might have been, I am grateful that he had t...

Seeds of the Datura plant My village, Thattaguppe, has a history as wild and bitter as the poisonous seeds of the Datura plant. My own past was borne from it. My grandmother loves to narrate the story of my birth. Seeing me the way I am today, she thinks my story has a happy ending. She was the one who sternly scolded my father for rejecting me when he found out that I was born a girl. She often tells me with pride, “When your father wanted to throw you in the garbage pit, I gave him a piece of my mind.” When a girl child is born, no kerosene lamps are lit to brighten the hut, no coconut sweets are distributed to the neighbors, and no meat is cooked to celebrate. Instead, there are only tears and quiet whispers on how to get rid of the baby. It was not uncommon for the midwife to be bribed with goodies of all sorts to secretly carry out the unspeakable – murder. A girl child is considered a burden to the family. She brings no wealth and the parents have to give dowry ...

Men crowding over the coffin of a man killed during a fight over water I   have always been a lover of stories. Stories fascinate me. I grew up with stories. As a little child, I chased after stories with fierce yearning. Stories were not hard to find in my home. Men and women who came to my maternal grandmother to buy liquor brought with them numerous stories of all kinds. Some days I’d hear stories of landlords taken into custody by the local   panchayat   (governing body in the village) for beating their coolies almost to death for not having repaid the money they borrowed. On other days I’d hear stories of young girls having eloped, cattle having been stolen, fire breaking out among the huts on the top of the hill, a religious ceremony being held to celebrate the coming of age of a girl, a young boy  drowning himself in the lake, a man killed during a fight over water, and on and on. In their drunken stupor, some customers even boldly confessed tales o...