Guwahati residents herd together to better understand the wild elephants that pay them frequent visits

Soon after an incident where a wild elephant ran amok for two hours in a Guwahati neighbourhood, local residents have got together to form a “squad” to deal with such situations.

It was her 5:30 am walk — the one she religiously does every morning — that landed 55-year-old Dr Kaberi Saikia, a resident of Guwahati’s Baghorbari area, in hospital. “She usually goes with a friend but that morning she went alone,” says PK Bora, 65, her husband. On the morning of September 14, Bora got panic calls from several unknown numbers: his wife had been injured by a wild elephant. Now as her seven broken ribs and one damaged lung heal (where the trunk of the tusker had hit her) in the Intensive Care Unit of Guwahati’s GNRC hospital, Saikia’s husband is yet to make sense of the whole story. “Because parts of her trachea have been affected too, she hasn’t really been able to narrate the entire episode to me,” he says.

At 2 am on September 14, the residents of Srimanta Nagar in Guwahati’s Panjabari area — that lies adjacent to the Narengi Army Cantonment — woke up to the sounds of people’s shouts: ‘haati haati’. “We could hear it stomping about,” says H Khatiwara, a 55-year-old government worker, who from his window, watched the pachyderm stomp around on the adjacent empty plot of land. “People were making quite a lot of noise,” recalls Khatiwara, whose house shares a boundary wall with the Army Cantonment.

By 3 am, all the residents were up on their roofs. Some had steel and copper plates which they were clanging together so as to scare the elephant away. Nearby, Bijoy Sarmah, a businessman, also on his roof, watched his car getting trampled. A few cars, boundary walls, gates and of course, the meeting with Saikia (on her morning walk) later, an intervention by the forest department led the elephant to make his way back to the forested fringes of the Army Cantonment in Narengi, where he lives.

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