It’s a curious start for an elephant story.

Rain on a hot tin roof in a time of drought, the edge of the hot season when the gulmohar trees fluff out on fire along their branches, ready for the big fry. An old retainer, graying at the edges, leads me into a long, even greyer room. Big aboriginal art pieces cart-wheel across the walls among the monsoon cracks and damp-bulged photographs of highly-bred Maharajahs of Jaipur and all points beyond. The sofas are boxy, 1930s squared-off in that ‘back off’ kind of way. The greying man asks me if I want tea, and even amid the outback colours on the peeling walls, peered at by plumed princes and princesses, he still manages to give the question an elegance that hangs damply in the corner of Ayesha Devi’s sitting-room, just around the corner from the Lodhi tombs.

The television is blaring, excited front-liners rant from Baghdad in the springtime at a time when Saddam still just stands on his pedestals around town.

Mark Shand is on the phone next door and in no hurry, hence I have all the time to suck up the above detailing and gurgle it about. An ashtray, full; cuttings from Keralan newspapers about the latest killer elephant on the rampage, I read the article, and others too, and Mark is still on the phone. So, I look through ‘brides wanted’ section, and then back to the raging elephant story. In the picture a mahout, an elephant’s guardian and keeper, is being destroyed like a doll, wound around by the trunk of a temple elephant and smashed against a wall until his ‘body parts separated’, as it is pithily put. There are other papers with the same pictures, over and over, but these reports are in the curling and indecipherable Mallayalam script.

‘Rough aren’t they?’ Mark appears from the bedroom. He paces. ‘These are the apex species. They made the earliest tracks across the earth.’ He lights a cigarette. ‘They have to be protected.’ He paces, smokes, watches the television, and talks. ‘Asia is the guardian of the last of these extraordinary animals. Tell me, go on tell me, what other animal has so many stories of life attached to it?’
I fail.

‘You know how many houses in India, America, England, everywhere, have a Ganesha, you know, you’ve seen?”

I have, across the globe, as far as the Indian has travelled and settled.

‘And they, we, all ask him for blessings on our new beginnings, for protection.’ Mark paces, then sits. One leg jiggles across the other. ‘Isn’t that ironic, the Lord Protector is under threat of extinction, hypocritical don’t you think? Ask him for protection every day but don’t do anything about protecting him?’ He lights another cigarette. ‘The governments of Asia are the keepers of the elephant and they don’t take its future seriously.’ He stretches back out over his chair. ‘Not at all.’ There is a fat pause. ‘We have to change that.’

Mark Shand is beautiful. It’s fine for a male writer to say that of a woman he is interviewing, but if it’s done the other way round it smacks of time spent beyond the text. But Mark is talking about the apex species. He is alpha male. Utterly. It’s fine to say he’s beautiful. He coils up, angry about the elephant, and then unwinds to pace, waving through his smoke, playing to his audience, whether it’s one or a thousand.

Sixteen years ago he bought an elephant to ride across India, and to write about it. Travels with My Elephant was a success, sitting Ganesha-style on the top of the bestseller list week after week in 1991. Mark won prizes and became one of the new generation of well-bred, well put together, utterly connected people who rage for a cause and make change. His is a pretty Asian elephant. S