Toomai of the Elephants

Little Toomai is ten years old, the son of Big Toomai and the grandson of a long line of mahouts — men who handle government elephants at the khedda camps. He is small and quick and has grown up around elephants his entire life, which means he moves among them without fear and they treat him as part of the furniture. His particular elephant is Kala Nag, a great tusker nearly sixty years old who has been in the Toomai family's charge for three generations. Petersen Sahib, the white officer who runs all elephant-catching operations in the region, notices Little Toomai and asks what he wants to be when he grows up. A mahout, says Toomai. Petersen Sahib says: you can be a mahout when you have seen the elephants dance, which no human has ever seen. It is not a kind joke, but Petersen Sahib does not mean it unkindly; he simply does not expect it to be fulfilled.

That night, during a festival in the camp, Kala Nag pulls his picket chain from the ground — a thing he has not done in years — and begins walking into the jungle. Toomai, waking to the sound, sees him going and climbs onto his back. He does not know where they are going. The jungle is dark and full of sound. Kala Nag walks for hours, deeper into the forest, until he reaches a clearing where the moonlight comes through. Every elephant in the region is there: wild elephants, camp elephants, old elephants with tusks worn down to stumps. They dance — not gracefully, but terribly, stamping the ground flat, turning and turning in the moonlight. Toomai watches. He is the only human present. He falls asleep somewhere in the middle of it.

He wakes on Kala Nag's back at the edge of the camp at dawn. The ground where the elephants danced is perfectly flat — every stump flattened, every root exposed. Petersen Sahib, hearing the story, looks at Toomai for a long time. He calls him Toomai of the Elephants. He acknowledges him as a mahout. The story's argument is not about courage or cleverness. Toomai was carried; he did not choose. But he was the one who loved the elephants enough to stay on Kala Nag's back in the dark jungle rather than climbing off and running. The love was what made the difference, and Petersen Sahib knows it.