Elephants are imprinted in my earliest memory as the first animal I ever truly saw. That great pachyderm was a temple elephant at the Rockfort, barely a hundred metres from the house in Trichirapalli where I was born.

I must have passed squirrels, dogs, goats, cows and birds on my way there countless times before — but it is the elephant I remember. She was the first wild creature to register in my consciousness, and that she happened to be domesticated made her no less magnificent to a small boy.

My early childhood revolved around her. Every free hour was spent at the temple — part playground, part pilgrimage. The mahout was a friend of my father’s closest friend, which meant I was afforded a kind of borrowed privilege: friendly taps on the head from her trunk, the occasional thrilling ride on her broad back. Somehow, in those years, I never felt her coarse, needle-like hair. That sensation came later, when we had moved to Madras — now Chennai — and my mother arranged for me to sit on the back of a baby elephant, no more than three years old. It was like sitting on a bed of pins. Much as I loved elephants, all I wanted in that moment was to get off, and I did.

Back in Trichy, life moved to a slower, more certain rhythm. My cousin Raju — two years older than me and my first role model — and I, along with the other children of the street, knew the temple’s secret passages in the way only children of a neighbourhood can. That knowledge felt like privilege: we held what strangers and tourists did not, and it gave us an uncomplicated sense of pride.

The evenings had their own ceremony. Around four o’clock, without fail, the elephant would emerge from the temple in slow, deliberate steps to drink from the community tap. A bucket sat beneath the running water, and she would dip her trunk and drink — one swig, two, three, four, and many more, well beyond the numbers we had learned at that age. We simply knew it took up a satisfying portion of our evening, and we were content to watch.

Then she would turn right from the temple and make her way back to the shed. A shorter route would have been to turn left, but the clockwise circumambulation — called a prakaram in Tamil, parikrama in Hindi — is a Hindu tradition that even an elephant apparently observed.

And this is when the real event began.

As she walked, she would relieve herself — dropping several firm, fibrous spheres of dung, known in Tamil as Ladhi. To this day, the smell remains one of the most distinctly evocative things I have encountered in my life. It is green, warm, earthy — and to a child on that street, it was an occasion. Raju had informed us, with the absolute authority that elder cousins possess, that stamping on fresh elephant dung had medicinal properties that could cure leg pain. None of us questioned this. We would make a dash the moment it hit the ground, plant our bare feet into it, and revel in the warmth and the rich, loamy scent as it gave way beneath us.

Whether I had leg pain, or whether I simply did it because everyone else did, I cannot say. But it remains one of my most joyful early memories — warm, earthy, inexplicably good.

As an adult, I have told this story many times over. Some friends cringe. Some laugh. I have stopped trying to convince anyone. All I can say is: don’t take my word for it. If the medicinal claims seem far-fetched, set them aside — you would still have experienced something that few people have, and something you would not forget.

Whenever I find myself in Corbett or any other forest, my eyes instinctively search for dung. I find it, of course — that dark green fibrous mass, some still fresh, others long since dry — and each time, the thought surfaces unbidden: would it still feel the same? The urge rises: kick off the shoes, make the run, and for one unguarded moment, become a child again on a temple street in Trichy.

I haven’t done it yet. But I haven’t ruled it out either.

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Fun facts:
1) Elephant dung is most commonly referred to as boli (specifically the individual fibrous balls) or simply as elephant manure, poop, or dung. Due to its high fiber content and, at times, its golden-brown color after drying, it is sometimes referred to as “brown gold.” elephantjunglesanctuary.com

2) Baboons are known to sift through elephant dung in search of undigested seeds and fruit — proof that one creature’s waste is another’s meal.