‘Should we take it in a truck?’ enquired a constable.

‘We could cut it into little pieces,’ suggested the inspector who had shot the elephant. When he noticed the disapproving faces looking at him he shook his head and waved his arms.

Govinda imagined them cutting off the ears, feet and trunk of the elephant and then piece by piece loading it onto a truck. All the while, the elephant lay there, irresistible to the eyes of the onlookers. Govinda stood transfixed. He didn’t say anything. He heard the men talk about the elephant who was called Ganesh and belonged to a travelling circus where it had been cruelly treated. It had struck and killed its handler, stomping his head into the ground.

‘No! Impossible!’ Sunil Seth cried. ‘Why don’t we burn it?’

The police agreed it could not be removed any other way so they built a pyre to burn the elephant. The headmaster supervised as the servants felled a banyan tree and sawed its branches. The tree was at one end of the school compound and the elephant was at the other. The tree was wide and the branches were heavy. To compromise they built the pyre near the elephant, which lay near the school gate.

Within the compound, shadows were falling and gradually getting longer. The school building and five large trees loomed over the playground. Govinda’s apartment on the second floor of the school had lit up. Light fell out the windows and onto the balcony, in between the potted plants, reflecting off the tall trees, all the way down to the compound below. Around his apartment, beneath it, on the sides and above, on the third floor, the classroom windows were shut, and the building was in darkness. Nearby, under the neem tree, stood his father’s curvy Ambassador. Based on the Morris Oxford, it was the car driven by headmasters and politicians. Along the edge of the compound were the servants’ quarters. There were various shades of bougainvillea growing against the compound wall.

As the servants, teachers and students sadly collected wood for the pyre, Govinda stood near the lifeless body of the elephant. The enormous animal looked peaceful. It had long eyelashes. He looked closer. Its eyes were wide open but there was nothing behind them, just a dark cave amidst a pool of blood. Govinda dipped his foot in the elephant’s blood, which stuck to his shoe.