When they were alone again, Hemu set the book down gently on the table between them, faceup. “Yes, my research. Everything I’ve been able to collect. The—” He had lost her name again. “The woman lets me; she thinks it’s good for me to work on something. Are you ready?”
The amnesiac nodded. Hemu had enjoyed telling him about the god of the sun, but this was something very different from the Rigveda, he could tell. It was no mythological story. It was far more important to him.
Hemu opened the cover as if it was an antique. “This is Gajarajan. Most holy of all elephants in India.” On the first page, a cutout photograph of an elephant stared back at them, a huge, dark gray face framed by a fan of equally dark ears. It was much darker than the concept of elephants had been in the amnesiac’s mind—this one looked almost black, as if carved out of charcoal. At the center, the long line of its broad forehead and muscular hanging trunk were a hundred shades lighter, like it had dipped its face and long nose into a puddle of pale satin paint.
“Oh,” the amnesiac said, transfixed. There was something almost human about its expression, the expectant posture of its head. Its black eyes were gigantic. They stared not past the camera, at whoever had been taking the picture, but directly into the lens—as if the creature understood the concept of a photograph.
“Majestic, isn’t he,” Hemu said. He turned the book back to himself, to smile lovingly at Gajarajan’s photo. “Did you know that the word that means a group of elephants together is memory?” he asked. “A memory of elephants.”
“An elephant never forgets,” the amnesiac said automatically. It was a thing people said, he realized. He wondered how he knew that. He turned and glanced at the opaque glass of the observation window for a moment, hoping Dr. Zadeh was watching them from the other side. He’d know to write that down if he saw the look—had the amnesiac ever actually seen an elephant before?
Hemu turned a few more pages. Gajarajan danced between them, dark eyes, pale curled trunk. “Not only that,” he continued. “Did you know they have the same memory?”
“Like, if two elephants experience something together?” the amnesiac asked.
Hemu shook his head. “One elephant experiences something, and another remembers it.”
The amnesiac lost a beat, and then decided to say what he’d heard Dr. Zadeh say, when he knew one of his Alzheimer’s patients had mixed something up. “I see,” he finally replied.
Hemu snorted and started flipping through his book again. “I didn’t forget this,” he insisted. “This is not one of those things, there’s documented—” He stopped suddenly at an old article. “Here.”
It was a story about Gajarajan from the 1950s, when the elephant was middle-aged. According to the clipping, he’d been born a wild elephant. But when he was a calf, hunters separated him from his family at a river crossing and kidnapped him. It was common practice at the time for nobles to gift elephants to Hindu temples, the article continued, where they would live within the grounds and be magnificently decorated to perform in rituals and parades. The royal family of Nilambur offered the young Gajarajan—named only Kesavan then—to Guruvayur Temple.
Decades after, when Gajarajan had become one of the most famous elephants in India for his almost uncanny devotion to his religious duties, several of his still-wild siblings were captured by poachers for their ivory. Before they could be killed, the locals, who kept informal watch over Gajarajan’s remaining family to honor him, ran the men off with machetes. The attacks had become more and more frequent, and the locals decided the only way to keep the rest of Gajarajan’s family safe would be to move them to a protected elephant sanctuary, hundreds of kilometers away. It was at this sanctuary that one of Gajarajan’s sisters, who had been born a few years after his capture and donation to Guruvayur Temple, met an American volunteer biologist who eventually taught her to paint after watching her scratch around in the dirt with sticks.
Gajarajan’s sister painted every Friday when the biologist came to the sanctuary and brought her another canvas and more cans of paint. Almost all of his sister’s creations were portraits of the biologist, who had long brown hair and wore a metal prosthetic leg from her left knee down—she had been born without her foreleg and foot.
Later that year, the Guruvayur priests began renovating their temple in preparation for an upcoming holiday. Gajarajan was put into the inner courtyard so they could repair part of his enclosure. According to the article, Gajarajan wandered around placidly as usual, gently examining the tools and tarps lying ready for use. But when he came upon a crate that contained paintbrushes, his mood suddenly changed. Gajarajan seized one with his trunk and then stepped on the paint cans until they puckered under his massive weight, bending open. By the time the priests noticed what had happened, Gajarajan was already halfway finished. On the concrete wall nearest to him, he’d used the paint meant to freshen up the pillars and the roofs to create a messy but unmistakable picture of a woman—with brown hair and one silver leg.