Death of an Elephant

By Brij Mohan

Death of an Elephant is an allegory of existence. Pran Dubey, a professor failed by avowed social institutions, is a conflicted man torn apart by his strife and Diaspora neurosis in the ambiguities of past and present, tradition and modernity, and life and death. Human incompleteness and lifes absurditieshope and despair trapped in the paradox of pain and pleasureare dramatized through an Eastern soul with a Western mind and a pen dipped in the ink of reflecti ve reality. Death of an Elephant is a harbinger of the neo existential genre.

Brij Mohan entices the curiosity of his book with the piquant title, Death of an Elephant....[It] is really boundless in scope and meaning and of having significance for all who read it....Mohan plumbs the lives of his characters beyond the academic dimensions. They are human beings caught in the web of life and who struggle to extricate themselves with honor from their problems.

- Joseph V. Ricapito

I only exist, but I want to live...I was back where I began: A basterdized Shangri-La in search of a lost identi ty...You can run away from your past but the past will never run away from you.... The man in gray flannel suit has disappeared from our comity.... I wasnt born an American; I became one. I love history.... I love truth even more.... Academia, by and large, looks like a gigantic machine designed to commoditize education for unprincipled success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475994803

Brij Mohan

The author, most recently of Society and Social Justi ce (2012), Development, Poverty of Culture and Social Policy (2011) and Fallacies of Development (2007), is Dean Emeritus at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA. His debut novella marks a new milestone in a distinguished academic career that spans over half a century.

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Copyright © 2013 by Brij Mohan.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-9479-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9480-3 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013911059

iUniverse rev. date: 07/19/2013

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PROLOGUE

ONE

The Last Ordeal

TWO

The Death of an Elephant

THREE

Silent Echoes August 2010

FOUR

The Mantras of Mayhem

FIVE

The Island of Circe

SIX

Arc of Life

MAIN CHARACTERS

SELECTED PASSAGES FROM THE BOOK

In memoriam:

R. Shree & Gopi

FOREWORD

Joseph V. Ricapito¹

Brij Mohan entices the curiosity of his book with the piquant title, Death of an Elephant. The reader can’t imagine that the death of an elephant can be the subject matter of a novel. But the fetching title is the hook with which Mohan captivates the curiosity of the reader who insists on knowing what the death of an elephant can have with the lives of humanoids. It is clearly a symbol.

This work, called a novella, is really a novel, if by a novel we understand it to be a narrative that is really boundless in scope and meaning and of having significance for all who read it. By genre, it is an academic novel, but only superficially. Mohan plumbs the lives of his characters beyond the academic dimensions. They are human beings caught in the web of life and who struggle to extricate themselves with honor from their problems.

The main character is an academic, a distinguished scholar who falls from grace. From this perspective Mohan can construct the life of this distinguished individual. It is a narrative in the pseudo-autobiographical mode so that the novel is destined to speak from the authenticity of experience.

The character jumps from his origins in India to his change of locale in the United States. In certain senses, it is also the novel of the hyphenated, transplanted person who ceases being strictly Indian and has assimilated some of the ways of the adopted country. In this there is a reversibility of roles and attitudes; i.e., sometimes he reacts as an Indian and sometimes he displays he characteristics of his newly found culture.

Basically, the character, who has a history of accomplishments, is no longer useful to his university. I say this in the sense of the opportunism of certain institutions to use a person, but when that person is no longer of particular use he/she becomes disposable. Some wags have called this the Kleenex principle, you use it, then you throw it away. This is how the character feels. He is no longer the distinguished scholar that the university points to but when circumstances change he/she no longer is the prized person.

The term magic realism, used with respect to the work of García Màrquez, perhaps best explicates aspects of this fine novel. In the parts devoted to India, we sense all the smells, colors, the tastes of India, its folklore, its history, and above all, its sociology in its attitudes and habits. The prose here is lyrical in that it attempts to retain the lilt of the translated Hindi speaking patterns. It is present in the homes that the character describes directly and indirectly. Mohan is reconstructing for the reader his recollection of his life in India, his family, his friends, his chums at the university, he loves.

Love plays a major part in the life of the character. He loses his wife but he realizes the transcendent nature of his love, in spite of less lasting relationships. The character is caught in a turbulence of feelings throughout the novel: exuberance, disappointment, disillusion; the sense that the purpose of his life is now in jeopardy. Feelings of accomplishment are crushed by feelings of disloyalty.

This novel is the sad realization that all is not what was. And this is all wrapped in a philosophical covering that embraces the whole work. The mind of the narrator is prepared by certain philosophical attitudes. In this there is a supra-natural dimension that transcends both India and the United States.

Mohan has expertly charted this voyage from early urges for permanence in an impermanent world. The author has initiated his mind and his world to the reader in all its raw authenticity.

We shall expect more work of this kind.

Joseph V. Ricapito

Yenni Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Louisiana State University

PROLOGUE

Debuting a novella stems from evolutionary events and their unintended consequences. I have written and published extensively but I never felt fully fulfilled. When I first conceived of this project in the depressing summer of 1993, the world around me seemed to crumble. I wrote nearly half of Echoes of Nothingness; I read and reread—again and again—and almost completed a novel re-entitled Mantras of Mayhem. Finally, I gave up and decided not to publish any. You can never bury your past. It assumes a ghostly power that haunts you in the dazzling darkness of solitudes.

About two decades later the remnants of a notion that I had subconsciously repressed, began to bubble up again. A hidden wound is like a dormant volcano. Truth simmers underneath. I nourished the idea of rewriting Echoes but chose to abandon the exercise as a fruitless passion. A novel is best designed to fictionalize the deconstruction of experiences. Fictional reality is free from writer’s inhibitions and social liabilities. Writing must be free of strong malevolent emotions too. After 65, Camus wrote, every day is a stay on execution. As I enter into the realm of seventies—I just turned 73—I find myself at relative peace. Pran Dubey’s meltdown is fictional.

Unlike Sartre, I don’t loathe my past and all that remains of it. Hence a modest attempt to historialize reality remains fragile and immutable at the same time. I believe this is what fiction is all about. Silent echoes reverberate ordeals, which one must eschew and live at the same time. You become the prisoner of a past that does not exist. An unpublished novelist, like an undead zombie, wanders in the alleys of a creepy town full of sounds signifying something to be spelt out.

Life’s absurdities characterize the human condition as a multi-linear trajectory of strife and hope. Protagonist Pran Dubey has lived in the United States but he can’t detach himself from his nativity that he despises. Pervasive angst forced by events—emigration, death, accident, bigotry and a perpetual desire for ‘what is not’—mold his world as an unjust place where innocents (like the elephant who was poisoned by one of his own keepers) succumb to a mantra of predatory culture: No good deed ever goes unpunished. Should it be so?

Metaphors echo the spirit of their times. Death of Ramu, an elephant, is an allegorical reality. A conflicted man torn apart by his existential strife with an Indian soul and Western mind swims like a live fish against the muddy waters and triumphs over the alien barriers. You can run away form your past but the past will never run away from you. There has to be a didactic outcome of suffering; else, all human experience boils down to feckless absurdity.

Andhi Nagaria is epiphanous product of art; it embodied a microcosm of an undead past. Nagaria is a suffix to many a village community in India. The one I refer to is a repressed invention of my imagination. It represents a fictional self-resurrection with partial semi-autobiographical substance. Likewise, Luciando’s pseudonymity is obvious in the Dixieland. I had initially named this place as New White Plantation but, after a second thought, I found the choice rather impolite.

As Flaubert would say, a fiction is depiction—rather than Freudian interpretation—of the past wounds. Sartre went to an extreme when he wrote Flaubert’s pathography as if his subject was a dead corpse. Past, though dead, remains animate. Fictional imagination gives a purpose to an otherwise meaningless world. This novella is a unification of innumerable wounds and touches, thorns and roses, abuses and gifts that colored my psyche with anxiety, ecstasy, pain and restlessness.

Progress is essentially a multi-linear quest toward perpetual social transformation against the dangers of new atavism and other regressive human proclivities. A binary view of human conditions is a fascist fantasy. Fictional creativity, I think, should bring out manifestations of human complexity, which are otherwise difficult to comprehend. There is no explicit or implicit prescriptive trapping of this approach; it is an honest exploration of metaphysical characters so ubiquitously represented by universal feelings. All my characters are fictional; any similarity to a particular place, event or person is totally accidental. Though I have subconsciously used some ink of reality, the manuscript is truly a work of art. It’s a painting, rather than a photograph in black and white.

Banality of nothingness lives in the gray zone between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ i.e. the ambiguity of hope shrouded in a cloudy reality. Death of an Elephant (DoE) is a quilted collage of neoexistential vignettes sowed in together by intersections of life, its uncertainties and absurdities. A frequent juxtaposition of past over present is an intended outcome of a stream of subconsciousness. I make no pretense, but DoE may be a small step toward inventing a whole new genre.

With a neo-Sartrean penchant for despair and hope, this novella allegorically alludes to a nauseous paradox of pain and pleasure. Pran Dubey, a university professor in retirement, is a conflicted man. DoE depicts the saga of a man failed