“Dumbass, stop thinking. Act. Now.”
Even this snub did not work.
She slipped further into thoughts, “Not dumbass, but numbass.”
Then her entire being shook again with the floor and the walls of the lavatory of the cabin. After three peaceful nights the fourth morning brought all these commotions.
The evening before, wood-pickers from Dhaksabandh village saw an elephant herd crossing the pebbly bed of Dhaksa River. There were three female elephants and two calves in the herd. The villagers alerted Dhaksabandh forest block office. Later in the evening, radio transmission officially alerted all the forest blocks of Dhaksa Division.
Everyone at the camp dinner table heard the bulletin. The duty officer created a vigil roster for fourteen pairs of men, pretty equally distributed for all trainee officers but one. The commanding officer being at rest in his Cabin a few miles away, there was nobody to decide over her fate.
She felt relieved by the break in the nightly show of chivalry, helpfulness, kindness and whatever. The greater question of survival, though in a probable struggle, with a lesser being, kept the men occupied. The threat of doomsnight looming at the doorstep made them oblivious of her.
She waded through the blinding darkness along a quarter of a mile long forest path to her cabin from the men’s barack and the mess. The visual union of the light bugs on the ground and the scattered stars in the night sky rejuvenated her wilder self .
After an hour the first pair on guard woke her up, “Chatterjee!”
Chatterjee left her bedding spread on the creaky wooden floor, held three feet above the ground on termite-eaten wooden posts, and muttered underneath her breath, “Foolfuckers.”
Then she stretched her hand over their head through the hollow of the missing window pane of the only bedroom of the cabin to receive the radio set. She grumbled, “Damn, Public Service. Just made custodian of a public property! Now I’m bound to report elephant sightings.”
The men left marching as soon as they finished performing their duty to their own satisfaction. She vented, “Shallah! It's a half an hour nightwatch for each of them. Whole night for me!”
Her thoughts wandered, “Men and their complexes about their shortcomings! Like Maknas, lacking tusks unable to attract female pachyderms in oestrus! The Commanding Officer, to keep me safe, made me sleep in a separate cabin with missing footboards in its hall which can bring both reptiles and rapists! For using the lavatory at night, I must cross the dark hall with my flashlight on, as only the bedroom at one end of the hall and the lavatory on the other have electric bulbs.”
She realized that she was merely ruminating what Dinesh jabbered the other night, “Everybody praises Chatterjee’s bravery. Nobody speaks of her compulsions.”
She kept the radio set by her pillow beside the flash light.
The alarm at four thirty in the morning woke her up. She needed an empty bowel to survive the daylong treks through Teak Plantations, also a bath to soak the heat, before breakfast at the barack mess by six o’clock, preceding fall in at six thirty.
Besides, bathing in daylight seemed awkward. The lavatory had a window, but no door pane. Opposite to it, a tread apart, was the bathroom with door panes, without any light. Through the opening of the imploded roof over the passage between the bathroom and the lavatory, the neighborhood children enjoyed peeping in, during daytime, dangling from the branches of the Sirish tree by the cabin.
Chatterjee turned impatient, “Numbskull dhoi. How has it become the matriarch of the herd with this much intellect? There’s no Chalta tree nearby. Can’t they find the Chalta plantation? Flocking here they’re wasting the public money, though we don’t know if they belong to us or to the country across the Dhaksa river. Their proddings to the cabin would soon throw me on a historic poop pile! (probably pulverizing tip of my backbone) My ass’ scared numb.”
Chatterjee, however, finished her business, literally restless. She uniformed herself up, rolled her bedding and stuffed her belongings in the rucksack. The intermittent shaking made it quite clear that the elephants would not leave until the cabin would rupture and bare open its secrets.
She stepped outside, rucksack on her back, clanking tree measurement equipment inside her haversack, slinged to her neck, radio set tucked to her waistband, the flashlight in hand. The early spring predawn wrapped her in grayness and chill.
She never locked the cabin in the last three days. Yet nothing went missing. With its imminent crumbling to the ground, locking the cabin appeared ludicrous.
Chatterjee pointed her flash light to the moving massive figures outside the cabin lavatory. A cry of annoyance startled the sleepy neighborhood. Chatterjee turned the light off and reported the location of the elephants over the radio.
Next she checked the hollow beneath the cabin. The light reflected from the posts and empty trashed bottles of hooch here and there.
She noticed a man crawling beneath the cabin, towards the Sirish tree, away from the elephants. She caught him as he emerged out and snatched his bottle of hooch. Then, she dropped a little hooch on the overgrown grasses in the front yard of the cabin. The elephants turned towards the hooch patch. She created a hooch trail across the street in front of the cabin to the Chalta plantation a mile away.
Approaching the mess, she met two men on watch. They whispered, “Responding to your message.”
It reminded her of the radio and the responsibility. She paged, “Left the herd at the Chalta plantation.”
Breakfast was abuzz with the trick of the hooch trail..
Later, walking towards the felling blocks, Madhav said, “Chatterjee, nobody here’s half the woman you are.”
Chatterjee replied, “Don’t even aspire ever. Because transplanted uterus, genitals, ovaries, mammaries won’t give the X chromosome pairs to your every cell. After all, it’s all in our DNA.”
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