An Elephant in the Box of Oblivion.

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Her home is Kailash, way off to the east, behind the Himalayas, and from here she surveys a world that is making her rage. Her wonderfully large and dark eyes contain within their gaze the power to melt the heart of any man and, wrapped away under the folds of the eternal brides blood red sari, her delicate body has the perfectly formed contours of everything that could be considered feminine. Some even say that she is beautiful enough to be the mother of all the worlds’ peoples and her admirers worship her as the embodiment of Mother Nature herself. But even the most beautiful have anger and sadness in their lives. For Parvati the anger is generated by her creations and the sadness came with the mistaken murder of her second son at the hands of her bad tempered husband, Shiva, whose moodiness is legendry. What really took place on that fateful day all those years ago we shall probably never know, but reports stated that Parvati, having sunk gently into a warm bath, wiped away the dirt from her body and, possibly out of loneliness, for Shiva was away once again on a long voyage, begun rubbing the dirt around in her fingers and from it she moulded and gave life too her second son. Time passed and the baby boy grew into a chubby, wise and honest young man. One peaceful morning Parvati took another bath but, as her son stood outside her door in order to keep intruders away, Shiva finally returned from his travels. Surprised to find this unknown young lad standing outside his wife’s bathroom he attacked the boy in a fit of anger and jealousy and chopped off his head. Hearing this commotion Parvati leapt from her bath and rushed outside to find her husband standing astride the headless body of her precious son. Struck down with grief she fell to the floor in sobs and Shiva, realising his mistake, set out at once in search of a sleeping creature. That animal was an elephant and when he came across it Shiva hacked off its head and carried it back to Holy Mount Kailash where he attached it to the body of his son. As soon as this was done the elephant headed boy sprung back too life and a God was born.

The Indian elephant is smaller than its African cousin, less aggressive and more amiable to domestication by humans. Large wild herds were once common throughout much of the Indian sub-continent, but, as with so many animals, plants and even the very planet itself, we humans, the most advanced of creatures, are now threatening it with elimination from the very game of existence. Elephants might be among the largest of threatened creatures but they are far from the only ones. In fact, we are entering what scientists describe as a major extinction episode. The rainforest is just one of the world’s many ecosystems, but it’s about the most diverse. Scientists estimate that there might be up to ten million different species present in the tropical forests and, that based on our current rate of destruction, we are wiping away some 20,000 to 30,000 species per year. Most of them are plants and animals that we never even knew existed. If that weren’t shocking enough just look at somewhere us surfers know only too well, Hawaii. Since mans arrival in these Pacific outcrops we have managed to eliminate 70% of the known bird species native to the islands – that’s two thousand species or 20% of the entire world’s roll call of birds.

India has always been one of those peculiar places for a surfer. We all have a dim notion that there are waves there, but even for those, like myself, who have actually ridden her shores, we’d be hard pushed to tell you much about the waves. As I could vouch from both this and a previous visit, to the far south, May to October, is, thanks to the strong monsoon generated swell, certainly consistent and there are more than enough spots to go around, but really, even in this age of mass surf travel and internet swell reports, there is very little solid information on which to base an Indian surf trip.

The elephant, whether in the guise of God or as the more humble star of every zoo, was, unintentionally, our constant companion. Everywhere we went, from smoky city to quiet village, he was there in some form or another. He became the focus of a trip that had originally had nothing more than waves as its reason for coming, but, as Ganesh, the elephant headed son of Shiva and Parvati, (who between them are the creators of the Earth and all of the creatures that run, climb, fly or swim on its surface), matched our footsteps across India we found ourselves becoming alert to something more than just waves - maybe Ganesh, the God of wisdom, education and banisher of selfishness and greed, was, before it was too late, trying to make us aware of his hidden irony?

It all kicked off amongst the filth and squalor of downtown Bombay, a city of riches for the few and poverty for the many. From that first morning, as my fellow surfers, top British underground ripper, Eugene Tollemache, wandering ozzie, Adrian Savio, French sponger, Guillaume Girbon and I, set forth to scour the Indian coast from Bombay to Goa, the elephant was already with us. Sitting as a small head wobbling doll on the dashboard of our driver, Sateesh’s, van, Ganesh kept a constant eye on us as we pulled away from the last of Bombay’s fringing shanty towns, set a course for the coast and, some weeks and many waves later, arrived at the Holy ghats, (steps leading to a Holy pool), where he finally felt able to fully reveal himself during the climax of the dressed up Chaturthi festival, which, as the festival devoted exclusively to Ganesh, turns India into a nation of elephant lovers.

In Asia, as in Africa, the number one threat to the continued survival of elephants is habitat destruction. An elephant is a big animal, the biggest of all land animals in fact, and so he needs a lot of food, which in turn means a lot of undisturbed space in which to find that food. Man, by contrast, is not such a big animal, but due to his overwhelming numbers and equally overwhelming need to consume, he also needs a lot of space. This leads to a conflict of interests between elephants and man and all the guns are loaded against the elephants. Due to their clumsy walking style and stories such as Dumbo, elephants are not seen as especially intelligent creatures. Man, by contrast, likes to consider himself the brainiest of all animals, but in this, as in many things, he is sadly mistaken. The largest brain in the world actually belongs to the elephant, which, when you consider it, is hardly surprising. After all, elephants have been clever enough to have learnt to live side by side with all the other creatures of the world, all except humans that is. This is because of mans worst traits, selfishness and greed, he really doesn’t like to share anything with any other living creature, which means that he’s more than happy to build a car park or dump a pile of rubbish on top of some other animals home.

This tendency of man to pollute and destroy all that is beautiful had quickly become apparent to us as we checked dozens of nature’s finest creations, beaches, on the coastal road south of Bombay. So much potential, not just for surfers, but beach lovers of all species, ruined with our small minded stupidity. Passing the first few spots the stench rising out of the polluted sands was so great that we didn’t even slow the car down, but after a couple of hundred kilometres things started looking up. City gave way to town and town to village and slowly, almost unnoticed, it seemed as if the villages were giving way again to nature as plant life coated buildings in branches and the houses became nothing but strange and exotic fruits. We came to an arcing bay of tropical postcard beauty with a fast left whizzing across a river mouth sandbar and couldn’t get into the water fast enough. The waves were as fun as you could ever want, but things were not as idyllic as they seemed. Like bread on a duck pond small globules of oil floated in on the waves waiting for someone to take a bite and strange smelling run-off poured out of the river. The oil, we later learnt, came from the refineries off the coast of Bombay, over two hundred kilometres away.

I once read someone describe India as a rubbish bin amongst which can be found a few gems. After our experiences along the beaches of India I could only agree, even though, with its massive coastline, India could be serving up newly discovered waves for decades to come. We are, just as with the tens of thousands of species we are sending to an early grave each year, throwing these waves into the box of oblivion thanks to unimaginable pollution levels and human selfishness. However, let us not be too hard on the Indians, because really none of us are the picture of cleanliness. The Americans, by dumping 1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage, industrial waste and storm water run-off into their waterways and oceans each and every year, have managed to make 46% of their lakes too polluted for swimming, fishing and most aquatic life and, in any one year, a quarter of all US beaches are closed or under advisories due to pollution. Asian rivers are the most polluted in the world with twenty times more lead present in them than rivers in the West. Whilst the King River in Australia suffers from a severe acidic condition due to mining operations and, just in case us Europeans thought we were superior to everyone else, well I’m afraid to say that our river and lake water quality is actually getting worse rather than better. That this makes surfing an unpleasant experience is bad enough, but the real sorrow lies with the up to ten million human deaths caused by water pollution every year. Or the hundred-thousand marine mammals, million seabirds and unknown number of fish we kill each year with the plastic we dump into the oceans. And still we believe that we are the cleverest of Shiva and Parvati’s creatures. It’s almost enough to make you think that it’s time for the Gods to leave their Kailash home and pay us a visit. They have certainly threatened to do so enough times, especially Ganesh’s mum, Parvati. Let me assure you that she gets very annoyed when we humans do stupid things and, as she keeps telling us, she’ll one day loose her temper and, transforming into the type of nasty Goddess that we really don’t want to invite around for tea, come down off Mount Kailash and teach us ignorant, short-sighted humans a lesson we’ll never forget. She’s even come up with a name for the creature she will transform into. Kali, the terrible one, and when our pointless greed and destruction of the planet leads her to that transformation she will make the oceans boil and swat us away with all those Old Testament favourites of famine, plague and war. Some say the age of Kali is already upon us.

But in amongst this rubbish bin there really are some gems and we came upon one somewhere I would never have imagined. It was my first visit to the old Portuguese enclave and former hippy haunt of Goa, previously I had always imagined it as some kind of Indian Costa Brava but with more cosmic karma. However, as so often happens out on the road, things are never quite what you expect and Panjai, our first port of call, quickly shattered such notions. Instead of self-contained tourist resorts and trinket selling dreadlocks we discovered an architectural pantry full of paint flaking Portuguese delicacies baked in the blue and whites of azulejo tiles. In the bar opposite our hotel our meals came with delicious thick Portuguese bread, a crucifix hung on the far wall and a group of elderly Goan men spoke in Portuguese. Lisbon could have been just a step outside the door. Away from the city, the road raced around in an excited fashion before returning us to the coast again, right beside another one of those gems. For three days we surfed head high, bowly shore break rights on a pristine beach that, for the moment at least, our greed had yet to destroy. It was the first place we had surfed that hadn’t left us reeling from the after-effects of pollution and, as if to celebrate, Mother Nature, known to some as Parvati, sent a stunning mermaid to join us. Slowly paddling though the line up, the manatee, thought by sailors of old to be mermaids, paused her perfect feminine form to watch us surfing through her territory. In amongst the squalor of India there was clearly still a little hope for all the brothers, sisters and cousins of the elephant.

Ganesh is the most popular God in India, for he is the God of wisdom and education and he has the power to banish selfishness and greed, but to this destroyer of selfishness, it must quickly be becoming apparent that he has his work cut out with the human species. The elephant had followed us in so many forms throughout India, sometimes he was the polished gold statue at the start of a temple and at other times he was the flesh and blood creation of Mother Nature, painted up in Royal colours and standing to attention outside a maharajah’s palace, but despite all these encounters it wasn’t until the culmination of the Chaturthi festival that he finally revealed his irony. Crowds clustered in animated groups around the Holy lake and soon, under the guiding thump of drums, the blasting of trumpets and a trail of carnival floats, came the procession, led by an elephant. After the large, bright pink statue of Ganesh had been lowered down the steps and placed on the waters edge we, like the millions of others across India who were all, at this exact moment, similarly poised beside a river, lake or the great oceans themselves, fell silent and said a prayer to Ganesh, the God of all that is good. Then, right across India, we shoved a hundred thousand or more Ganesh statues into the waters and let him decompose. By the morning, as the lead, mercury, chromium and zinc oxide contained within the construction materials and paints of these statues, had taken effect, thousands upon thousands of fish and other aquatic animals would be surfacing, dead and bloated, poisoned by a collective prayer. But it was not a prayer for wisdom or education or even one to rid the world of selfishness and greed, because, as maybe the God’s final twist of irony, Ganesh is also the God of wealth and from the banks of the Holy Ganges to the money temples of Manhattan we are all prepared to sacrifice everything for another bloody dollar.

Our surf trail didn’t end with the mermaids of Goa, but rather took us onwards to further discoveries. There were the super glassy, peaky swells of the beaches, the wedgy low tide lefts in front of the temple and, finally, a whole string of bays with reef after reef full of imploding barrels. Yet here, in front of the best waves we had stumbled upon, I could only think of words that should have been written in a book, ‘The world is a rubbish bin amongst which can be found a few gems’, because, as another thick left hander toppled over and spat a mass of spray out of its belly, we were left high and dry watching from the rocks above. Our arrival in this fishing village the night before had been with pinched noses due to the noxious smell emanating from the seashore and now, early the next morning; things were not looking or smelling any prettier. Rotten fish formed a macabre carpet as they lay strewn in masses across the streets, slowly rotting in the rising heat, rancid semi-wild dogs barked at us from the shadows, a rat scampered past our feet and a dozen children, covered in festering, fly infested wounds stared without expression. It was not these things that were keeping us dry though, but the river mouth, just around the corner, that had unwittingly carried the pollution of mans greed and selfishness from the upstream factories, past a slab of quiet forest where elephants quenched their thirst and, unknowingly, killed their future, and on out to sea, washing up poisoned fish with every tide, and destroying the enjoyment of a group of selfish surfers.

Scientists, by their very nature, talk with dry words whereas the spiritual and romantic talk in colourful stories. For the scientists we are entering a major extinction episode and for the spiritual and romantic we are approaching the day when Pavarti will lose her temper with the stupidity of humans and, her tongue dripping blood, she shall sprout ten arms and hold forth a spear and a severed demons head, around her neck she shall wear a necklace of human skulls and for earrings she shall use the corpses of children and serpents shall be her bracelets. On the day that this happens, surrounded by jackals and goblins, she shall strip naked and, covered in black soot and with dishevelled hair, she shall dance in a cemetery on the body of her husband, Shiva. When this day comes, as it shall very soon, the transformation shall be complete. Parvati will have become the fiercest of all the Gods. She will have killed the Creator and we shall have entered the major extinction episode that scientists fear, but by then it will be too late to pay heed to the elephant’s hidden message of irony. For when the plants and animals cease to exist, the last chapter in human existence will have begun and, for the scientists, the spiritual and the romantic, this period has a name. It is the age of the devil. It is the age of Kali.

An elephant never forgets to say thank you and so I’d like to thank Oceansurf (www.oceansurfpublications.co.uk) and C-Skins Wetsuits (www.c-skins.com) for helping out with this trip.

An elephant never forgets to say thank you and so I’d like to thank Oceansurf (www.oceansurfpublications.co.uk) and C-Skins Wetsuits (www.c-skins.com) for helping out with this trip.