Elephants On Parade

Word about the nerscha—or ‘festival’—started off as a rumor, pieced together through scraps of broken English and a picture in the local newspaper.

As Jenna and I were headed towards the market Sunday, we passed the barbershop where I have gotten my haircut a few times. My barber—sitting idly in a chair usually reserved for customers—waved us over. The man speaks very little English and typically resorts to grunting and smiling when he converses with me.

He smiled this time and picked up a crumpled newspaper. The paper was in Malayalam, so I had no hope of reading it, but a giant picture dominated the front page. It showed a large crowd packed shoulder to shoulder on a sun-dappled field, looking towards a line of several elephants that were wearing colorful, bejeweled headpieces.

“Tooo-day!” the barber announced, emphatically tapping the picture with his finger. “Fest-vull! Tooo-day!”

“This? A festival? In Tirur?” I asked. The barber nodded, smiled, and grunted. He pointed at the picture again.

“Fest-vull. Go. You…go! Cam-RAH!” me mimed the action of taking a picture with an invisible camera.

A man sitting in a plastic chair behind the barber looked up and said, “Two terty.”

“Two-thirty?” I asked.

“Yes. Two terty.”

The barber smiled and tapped the picture again. “Fest-vull. Too-day. You go. Cam-RAH!”

Jenna and I bought groceries and came back home, but I could not get the barber’s command out of my head: “You go! Cam-RAH!” So, with the camera slung over my shoulder, I set out for the center of town.

I heard it before I saw it. Near the train station, the percussive cacophony of drums and cymbals reverberated loudly. I stalked through a back alley and crossed the train tracks and came up on a small grassy knoll overlooking the street the runs in front of the train station.

I saw a seen of ecstatic chaos, the likes of which you might see on a PBS documentary about India hosted by some effete British journalist. (“And here, we have the astonishing spectacle of an Indian festival! Quite fantastic, isn’t it?”)

People thronged in the streets, shoulder to shoulder, as they had been in that newspaper photo. Other onlookers crowded along the curbs and stood atop idled jeeps and trucks and hung from balconies and grasped tree branches for a better look. Somberly overlooking the whole procession was a troop of elephants.

The elephants slowly made their way through the crowd, gently nuzzling past pedestrians and spectators. Each elephant had a team of four men on its back. The beastst legs were shackled in heavy chains and clanked with each step. Another man stood out front of the elephant with another chain guiding the elephant through the parade like a horse on a bit. The elephants each wore ornate headpieces made of shimmering silk and twinkling sequins.

I reached the parade just as it was taking off. A phalanx of musicians led the march, banging drums and clashing cymbals in rough unison. The elephants and their handlers came next. And a division of smartly dressed police officers in khaki uniforms all carrying lathi sticks brought up the rear.

I stepped into the street with dozens of other onlookers and followed the procession as it grindingly made its way down Tirur’s main drag. The crowd became denser as we got further from the parade’s origin. People must have been lining up for hours. The curbs and street stalls were blanketed with staring faces.

A man fell in beside me, “You like?” he said, pointing forward to where we had a good view of three waving elephant asses.

“Uhhh…yeah. Nice,” I said.

“Good, nain?”

“Yeah, impressive.”

He clapped me on the back and walked on, determined to get closer to the elephants.

The parade ebbed and flowed with the size of the crowd. At more tightly packed junctions, the march stopped and the drumming would increase and the elephant riders would wave more vigorously. One went as far as to stand up on his elephant and stretch his arms out high like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.

I eventually worked my way up to the back elephants’ flanks. I heard the beasts grunting and breathing, shooting their hot breath piston-like out of their nostrils. They clomped along the asphalt, an odd anachronism amidst Tirur’s shops and businesses.

I found another small hillock away from the road that was less populated by spectators. A man nearby was shooing some boys away from a crumbling brick wall on which they were trying to perch themselves. He noticed me taking pictures and walked over to me.

“Good shots?” he said, glancing at my camera, a clear indication he wanted me to show him some of my images. I obliged.

He nodded, smiled and sighed. “Very good.”

“Where is this going?” I asked, pointing towards the parade, which had passed us and was headed further along the road that headed out of Tirur.

The man said a name of a nearby district. “Three kilometers,” he said.

“Are people watching the whole way?”

“Of course. People will follow.”

I decided I would not be one of them. I had already walked from one side of Tirur to the other and my sandaled feet were getting sore. After all, if you’ve seen one elephant parade you’ve seen ‘em all.