CHAPTER ONE

India, January 1854

The elephant's brass holy ornaments glared in torchlight. They'd painted his trunk with red and blue flame shapes. Silver bells hung from the aging tips of his tusks, whose points had long since worn round and yellow as a monkey's skull.

Most days he spent hauling logs in the jungle behind the village, but for festival nights, like tonight, they decked him in sacred trappings and fed him a sedating mixture of betel nuts and rice. He was the only elephant on the island.

The clearing where he stood formed the hub of a network of grassy lanes and whitewashed clay walls. Pink mimosas hovered above the huts at the edge of the clearing. Water burbled on all sides. Any of the lanes would lead within a few steps to the bay, except for one, almost a road, which went to the British governor's house a mile to the south.

This fishing village of twelve families had lived for generations on the islet in the warm waters of southern India's Malabar Coast. You could get to the mainland by boat in half a morning, but why bother? A third of the village had never been off the island other than to course over its surrounding waterways for fish. By standing on the governor's dock you could see the mainland; the alien trees, the clove and cardamom warehouses bigger than life.

The coming of the Dutch colonials in the seventeenth century, and then the British, had hardly disturbed the villagers' lives. Sea breezes, mild and sweet smelling, filled their days and nights.

Tonight was the festival of Shiva the four-armed destroyer. The elephant stood patiently, and occasionally shifted his crusty feet, leaving plate-sized craters in the yellow dust. Lost now in a stupor of betel, he hardly heard the wailing tumult from the festival musicians perched on his back and standing around him.

Their own trance held them. Two drummers, brothers, had sounded out the same sixteen-beat rhythm countless times since sunset. They'd keep it up until dawn. The versatile and sinewy boat maker, cousin to the drummers, played a long reedy shanai, like those used to charm cobras from under the brush of ruined buildings. Three sons of the most prosperous farmer swayed to the beat, intoning the same five-note melody over and over, with the whole group joining in as often as their trance allowed.

White dhotis around the musicians' waists looked dazzling in the torchlight against their chocolaty skin. The watching women, including the plump wife of the fishing-net maker and her shy, pockmarked sister, set off their dark southern beauty with cotton saris of blue brighter than a kingfisher's wing and of the green of new-sprung rice.

Everyone in the village, even the children, took part. Adults who couldn't make music, or weren't needed to feed the elephant his palm fronds, sat cross-legged on coconut mats by the fire, the men drinking strong arak thinned with water. All chewed the special festival sweets made with milk and sugar, delivered that morning by boat from the mainland. The older drummer's small sons played behind the elephant's legs. A rising full moon showed over the edge of the clearing.

The younger drummer, standing in front of the elephant, eased himself out of the rhythm to stop for another drink of arak. Only his brother was left hitting the steady sixteen beats against the shanai and the singers. He increased his volume, pummeling at the drum he'd fashioned himself out of hide and rosewood. The complex refrain had persisted so long that the whole village had altered their movements, their speech patterns, even their breathing, to synchronize with the plangent beat.

Suddenly, the pulse stopped. All heads, even the elephant's, looked up. The rest of the musicians went on for a few beats before colliding into silence. Every eye fixed on the drummer.

He bent himself double, clutching at his stomach and the drum, and sank to the ground in a grotesque embrace with his instrument. He convulsed in a sudden spasm of vomiting. A puddle, viscous in the firelight, spread from his mouth and widened around him. His face faded to the color of ashes.

For seconds, nobody moved. Then the victim's youngest son peeked out from behind the elephant's leg and toddled over to the writhing man, shouting, "Baba! Baba!"  But before he'd gone three steps, he fell, grabbing his belly like his father.

The village scattered in chaos. Three by the fire collapsed like the drummer. The drummer's wife tried to help her husband and their boy, but within minutes she too fell.

The drummer was the first to die. The rich farmer's sons fled the clearing in terror, but shame soon overwhelmed them. In half a mile they turned back to help their neighbors. And they, too, died.

By the time the moon sank behind the coconut trees, all human life in the village was extinguished except for two babies and an ancient grandmother. The matriarch had watched her sons and grandsons die with their faces more colorless and shrunken than her own. She then lay on her mat with crossed arms, waiting for Shiva to take her as he had all the others, but she fell asleep instead. Even though the babies cried through the night they didn't wake her.

At dawn, the hungry elephant, still weighted with festival garb, broke loose from his tether and pushed his way through the tamarind forest to the governor's house. Startled servants came upon him in the east garden. Trailing debris from the swath he'd trampled through the roses and dahlias, he contentedly munched a potted fern whose clay container he gripped with his trunk.

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