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LAUACHAPRA

Looking for the Elephants
called Ronald Halder to tell him about the civet caught at Ramna Park. He gave me a different piece of information. He was in Gazni to watch a herd of elephants roaming the forest. It took us a few minutes to rent a car. Luckily, Dr Reza Khan was in city. He said he would love to join us. So, in the morning we set off on the elephant trail.
As with Reza Khan, any journey is always an eventful one. Every few minutes he would cry out: "Stop! Stop!" and then rush out with his antique camera. Often, it would be a common bird like a shrike or a kingfisher. But his interest would never die. He would then go on to explaining why the shrike is called 'Kosai Pakhi’ in Bangla -- because of its habit of piercing its prey, usually a geco or a small insect, into a stick and then slowly tearing it
shutter. Thick mist was blowing across like blizzard and it was chilling to the bone. We asked the local people and they said it had been like this for the last two days. How the weather differs! Dhaka has become a bland fast food, its language has no specialty, its weather, people, culture - everything so bland and
undifferentiating. It is once you go out that you feel the difference in topography and people and climate and environment.
After crossing Sherpur, we hit a narrow metal road. It went on and on for miles to make us drowsy again. We passed a rubber plantation and then came in view the resort. The big iron gate opened to let us
in to the sprawling lawn of the resort in the middle of the forest. The rooms run like barracks at the end of the lawn.
We were startled by loud clucking coming from the lawn. We found three purple moorhens in a cage, their brilliant colours reflecting in the sun. The caretaker unlocked the door of the cage and the moorhens stepped out. They flapped wings for a while and fluttered on to the rooftop. From there they flew off somewhere over the forest.
"Do they come back?" I asked the caretaker.
"Oh, yes. They go to the river and in the evening come back to the cage," the man smiled.
We were hungry and cold. And the aroma of khichuri and chicken was proving too much to wait.
After lunch we wanted to take a look around and ask the locals about the
elephants. On our way here we had seen large signboards instructing people what to do in case of elephant attacks. So elephants must be a menace for the locals.
The winter afternoon light glowed brilliantly on the hills and their trees. The light cascaded down the foliages, creating strange layers of light and shade. Suddenly you would feel that these are not trees but some green and dark clouds floating in the air. We trotted up a yellow dirt road that had snaked through the hills. It is a land of the Garos, the indigenous people with distinct features and culture. We could see their villages, on hilltops. We walked up to an assembly of Garo houses -- they were simple mud houses with a yard in the middle. Children played in the yard and seven puppies lay snug and warm together by an
oven dug in the ground.
We talked to them about the elephants. They said the tuskers w'ere here only a few days ago and might have wandered off to the east. They offered us their local drink Chu. This is the kind of hospitality of the Garos that had always touched me, their simplicity and warmth, their friendliness and big-heartedness.
We thanked them and got down to the trail. It was getting dark and we just wanted to scout around a little. Tomorrow' we would go on the trail again. But for now, we were attracted by a flurry of activities along a row of trees bearing red flowers. We went nearer and were dazzled by the display of colours --hundreds of small birds in all kinds of colours. The pale green White-eye with rings round their eyes. The purple sunbirds with dazzling red and the
crimson sunbirds. The beautiful grey-headed myna. They were hardly 15 feet away and did not care. They flew in and out of the trees, twittering all the time. They were so close that we felt we could touch them.
We were watching them all the time while the sun slid down over the hills and the darkness clamped down on us with a repressing cold. The wind blew hard and we shivered.
On the way back, a halfmoon escorted us all the way. The jackals had come out of their daytime dens and were baling. It was a strange setting here - this garo land, the hills, the baying, the cold and the moon. We felt like walking in a dream.
Story: Inam Ahmed Photo: Syed Zakir Hossain
& Inam Ahmed