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Elephants are nearly universally admired, often loved, and frequently revered as animals with depths of feeling and understanding of which humans are only partially aware. They mourn their dead, sometimes reverently taking the tusks from an abandoned carcass to some distant and hidden elephant graveyard, a place to which those in the wild are known to go when they sense the …

Both my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather fed me a formidable feast of nourishing stories when I was a child. I have written about my maternal grandfather, Hassanali Gwaderi, in the section on this website entitled The Khyber. I have written about my paternal grandfather, Gulamhussein Ajania, in the section on this website entitled Shooting an Elephant. Both my grandfathers were …

Lakaji the Elephant Elder, was the oldest elephant that lived and strode along the dusty pathways and brittle woods and tall tree forests of the twelve villages the princely province of Nawanagar, overlooking the Gulf of Kutch, north of the Arabian Sea, in the Indian state of Gujarat. Randhava the Elder, was the venerable chief of the twelve tribal villages …

The Bengali Brahmin General Manager of the Colonial Club, Mr. Bhattacharya, loved rules and regulations. He could at the same time be meticulous and methodical, obsessive and obnoxious, calculating and condescending, elitist and egotistical, snooty and snobby, fastidious and fussy. Mr. Bhattacharya, in the tradition of the Indian civil servant that Rudyard Kipling referred to as “more English than the …

It was inevitable that young Kumar, the adoring former student of his beloved teacher, Mr. Chatterjee would, one day, storm into Mr. Bhattacharya’s General Manager office at the Colonial Club. Both Mr. Bhattacharya and Gopal knew it would happen one day, and this happened to be the day. They knew it would happen some time, and this was the time. …

It was a hot day along the soulless and scrappy backstreets of Rawalpindi Road, where scoundrels befriended swindlers and rogues befriended rascals. Where the bahar vala (the outliers) drank beora (homebrewed alcohol) all throughout the night while sitting on the sidewalk or littering the streets, and where the bhangan (sweeper women of untouchable caste) swept the streets clean of their …

There were once three brothers and their names were Badrudin, Sadrudin and Kamrudin. They were the sons of a noble soldier who had fought bravely in the Battle of Ali Masjid. In the seedy and secretive underworld of spies and smugglers, of military mercenaries, of gunrunners and arms dealers all along the Khyber Pass, there were few who matched the …

As Kumar and Badrudin sat in the crowded compartment of the India Railway train, Kumar asked Bardrudin how he had arrived at this epiphany, which had inspired him to build this school for boys. Badrudin explained to Kumar that when we had left Mr. Warnakulasuriya’s tailor shop, he had gone to have a meeting with an arms smuggler, to purchase …

Divide and rule was the staple stratagem of the British Raj in India. Pitting tribal, religious and socio-economic sectors of society against each other, instead of allowing them to seek ways to work and live together in harmony, was the devious skill of the colonial rulers throughout the British Empire. It was how some one hundred thousand British people occupied …

When Ranjit the Elder, the Maharaja of Nawanagar grew old, he passed on his legacy to his eldest son Prakash and pronounced Prakash the Prince and ruler of Nawanagar. Prince Prakash then took over the maharaja’s palace in Nawanagar and the widowed Ranjit moved permanently to the summer palace in Shimla. By that time, after serving as a benevolent maharaja …