Lady Ganesa (Part 2)

DISCLAIMER: I absolutely love elephants. If you do too, and you have a faint heart, do not read below. You were warned.

Skip down farther for part 2, if you have already read the first part.

I felt the sting with every lash as the whip rose and snapped behind the man's head. As the whip came down piercing my skin, I watched the sweat dribble down his nose. It pooled into a small bead in his left nostril. During the split second he reached to wipe the sweat from his nose, I regained my composure to take the next assault. But how long would I survive? My body thrashed in pain, and I hung my trunk low to the ground. It seemed the lower I bent my head, the safer I was, but there was no escaping this, no matter how close to the ground I was. There was no escaping the belittling, abuse and inherent torture that life had handed to me. Again and again, as I was whipped, I cried in agony. I stayed like this for months. For months, I was lost. Not only was I lost, I was hungry, and I was tired. I was scared.

When I was eleven months old, I was taken from captivity.  I was ripped away from my mother violently.  The only good in my life slashed in half right in front of me. As I think back to my training period, I remember how faint the good days were in my mind.  In the very beginning, I saw my mother in my head often. I saw nature and the mountains, and lots of lakes to bathe, swim and play in. As the beatings got tougher, and the elephant hook prodded deeper, those pictures of goodness and happiness faded. I lost myself, I lost the pictures of my mother in my head. I surrendered. I was defeated. I surrendered to the beatings. I surrendered to the men, and I surrendered to ever disobeying again. I was now a trained circus elephant.
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Six months had gone by. I had endured six months of hell. Did I have any idea what I'd been dragged into? Did I have any idea of what I had survived? I would never know. All of the brutal training days blurred together in an endless journey to the center of hell. Each horrid memory a step closer to a burning frenzy, where my body evaporated with every thought, like a flesh eating disease. And to think, that it was just the beginning. At least my hind legs were no longer tied to tree trunks. They were now loosely chained to a pen the size of a small automobile. When I tried sitting, the chains sat uncomfortably underneath me, so that my skin grew tough on my upper thigh region on both sides, as the months progressed. In my show days, they would cover my rough skin and scars with colorful paint and capes as to hide all of the inhumane acts I received.

My heart was shattered. Destroyed. My mind. I had absolutely no idea who I was. I was lost and my life had been reduced to nothing. There were other elephants. I watched them from my pen as I stood motionless. Half of them were dazed, stoned like teenage pot smokers. They stood with their trunks hanging low and mouths closed. Their eyes squinting, focusing on everything but nothing, all in the same moment. Others you could put in an insane asylum. I watched as the elephants bobbed their heads up and down, up and down, up and down. Uncontrollably, they swayed back and forth in an uneven rhythm. Whether I was crazy or not. I was unsure. It had become evident that all of us were in a trance, stuck in a life of fogginess that we couldn't break. The humans robbed us of our good spirits and replaced it with gloom.