| I ESCAPED into camp for a week-end
break, but the jungle telegraph got busy, and several patients awaited
me. One of these was an elephant, which posed a problem in bedside manners.
I had just finished a minor operation in the shade of a banyan tree, with
an unhitched bullock-cart as operating table, when a Hindu zemindar (landowner),
wearing a long black sherwani (frockcoat) and closely fitting white trousers,
approached. He asked if I would go with him to examine his elephant's right
eye, which he believed to be injured. On suggesting the elephant be brought
to me, he shook his head apologetically. The animal could not be coaxed.
Passive resistance being common in the East I did not press the matter, and we set out on foot, with two out-runners of the Hindu's retinue clad in liveries of blue and yellow and carrying halberds, to herald our coming. As we walked, I heard something of my patient's history. He had recently purchased Ganesh - so named after the common Hindu household god - to take part in occasional tiger shoots, and I suspected as a status symbol. He had previously been a working elephant employed by the Government Forestry Department in clearing log jams in the Bramaputra River in Bengal. It was believed he had there been involved in a fight and injured his right eye. He was waiting under a tamarind tree when I arrived and waived his trunk impatiently, as if he thought his doctor late. I found myself wondering which bedside manner to adopt - the sympathetic or the brusque - and approached with a certain wariness. The first problem was to get close enough to the eye to examine it. I asked the mahout (elephant keeper) to have him sit or squat, but was told he rarely did so. The last occasion had been ten years previously, and then he would not rise again till a fire was lit under him. Faced for the second time with that uncompromising nature which inspired Shakespeare's zoological observation: "The elephant hath joints, but none for Courtesy. His legs are legs for necessity; not for flexure", I had to change my tactics. Calling for a ladder, I placed it against the wrinkled elephant's cheek, wedging it behind an ear that looked odly like a map of India. Sugar-cane was brought to keep his trunk occupied and I climbed up to his eye. On examination, it looked surprisingly small for such a large animal, and was in fact smaller than the eye of a horse. But the orbit, or bone cavity in which the eye lay was exceptionally large, so the eyelids were wide and long and gave Ganesh his wide-awake, watchful look. In addition, an elephant has an eye muscle (which man lacks) which depresses his lower eyelid, enabling him to see downwards from his great height. I found a healing ulcer on the right eye, and supplied a large tin of ointment which exhausted my pack supply. I could in addition have given him a bottle of medicine, for with forty thousand tiny individual muscles in his trunk, he was clever enough to extract a cork. As I came down the ladder, I noticed his eyes watered - no, not from gratitude. Unlike ourselves, an elephant has no tear passages to drain away a normal flow of tears, which consequently just run down over his face. It only remains to add that discreet inquiries were made by the Santal villagers the next day as to the nature of the ointment prescribed for Ganesh and on learning that it was the same as had been given for their own use, they expressed satisfaction at the honour done them. Secondly, the 'elephant didn't forget'. Some weeks later, I received an urgent and distant medical summons to the same village, and had no transport. Led by his mahout, Ganesh readily obliged |