By PRIA ANAND
The elephant-headed boy was born with the head of a boy.
“I had been expecting you for years,” his mother told him. “By the time you were born, you could practically walk.”
To the boy, this seemed true. He could not remember a time before he was tall enough to rest his head against his mother’s waist when he tired, before he could pull himself into her bed with his dimpled arms at night and reach his small hand into hers as they walked into the jungle each morning. Like the rest of her body, his mother’s hand was coated with a brittle, dry membrane of red mud that spared only her eyes. The boy did not think he had ever touched her skin.
“You were fully baked almost right away, but I didn’t want some fragile, mewling kitten,” his mother told him. “I wanted a little boy, and so I waited until you were ready, and then out you came. Took long enough.”
The boy remembered the time before he had been born only vaguely. At first, his mother’s body had seemed vast, and he flipped and swam within it like the seals who rimmed the island, weeping and playing in the surf. His limbs trailed behind him like boneless fins, his feet splayed into a weak tail. He swam like this for years, his sea dwindling as he grew. At the end, he was surrounded by dark and wet, fibers of muscle pressing tight against his skin. His eyes were born first, and all he could see was green.
The island was impossibly green, a mound of bush and tangled trees rising from the sea like the mossy hump of a kneeling giant. It was bisected by a serpentine river; crusted in algae, even the water was green. When the boy and his mother walked into the jungle, tree branches entwined overhead, flowers and fruits mixing in a lusty embrace.
The boy’s mother had always told him that he could eat anything he could reach. When the water buffalo was sweet-tempered, the boy could reach her underside, and he squirted her milk in creamy jets into his mouth until it flowed down his chin and clung to his chest in a sticky sheen that would draw the ants when he curled into the brush to nap. When the water buffalo was hungry, or tired, or when she longed for her calf, long ago picked bare by jackals, the boy went hungry, falling asleep with emptiness blooming in his stomach as if it, too, took up space.
The island had a particular smell, somehow both sweet and fetid: dirt mingling with the vinegar of overripe mangoes, the cloying musk of coiled pythons with the floral stink of honeybee pupae. When he woke each morning, the boy inhaled deeply, sucking the island into his memories and aching for more.
“If you keep huffing like that, one day you’ll blow up like a balloon and float away,” his mother warned him. “Your nose will swell up like a baboon’s bum, and you’ll smell every rotting carcass and piece of garbage in this place.”
The boy longed, too, for the fruits overhead—mangoes in bunches of round gold, the green weight of ripe papayas. But he was small, with a round head that weighed him to the ground like an anchor. The skin of his short fingers was too soft to climb the rough bark of the trees, and he could eat only those melting fruits that fell to the ground, sharing their fermented flesh with the insects that swarmed across the dirt in armies, hauling hunks of mushy gold home to their queen.
“If you would only grow,” his mother reminded him, “you wouldn’t have to be so hungry.”
Parvati was struggling to remember. When had Shiva left, and when had the boy arrived? For so long—maybe even forever—it had been just her and Shiva and the creatures, but now it was as if it had always been her and the boy, as if Shiva were a thing she had imagined, or maybe even one of her creations. Were the pads of Shiva’s fingers soft or rough? she wondered. His voice—was it deep or reedy?
Worst of all was the slippage of those memories that existed, not in words, but in gestures. In Parvati’s hands were the memories of every baby creature: the curve of a marble-sized head, or the careful point of an infant beak. Without them, without the instinctive twist of her fingers, she found herself leaving the horns off the goat’s kid, or forgetting the hooves from the tender feet of twin fawns, so that they could barely cross the jungle floor without pricking themselves, dripping twin trails of blood in their wake.
The island was full of seal pups and cuckoo-bird chicks and hatchling lizards, each tapping her way out of her soft-shelled womb with an ephemeral egg-tooth. It was too much, Parvati thought, to remember which hatchling smelled its world with a forked tongue and which with shallow, flat nostrils. The egg-tooth, the forked tongue, these details seemed vague beside the physical immediacy of the boy, who always seemed to materialize just as she was on the cusp of remembering something essential.
When he first came out, a wide, heavy head balanced precariously on a small, soft frame, Parvati found herself watching him compulsively, worried that he would topple with every step he took. Sometimes he fell, the sound of a branch cracking or the water buffalo bellowing startling him until he tumbled to the dirt and began to bawl. Parvati knew that he wasn’t hurt, cradled as he was by the jungle floor, but she could feel his wails deep in her abdomen, in the place where she had made him. She would pick him up and press him close to her, the fat of his thighs giving against hers, holding him for just an instant before she pushed him away and told him to please work on his balance. The boy was an unfillable, bottomless pit of needs, consuming Parvati’s time and focus and keeping her from her vigil.
She had made the boy to keep her company, and because making baby creatures was her habit. She made him like she had made a calf for the she-elephant, who had been aching for one ever since her udders had swollen with enough milk that they hung almost to the jungle floor, catching on branches and tree stumps. The boy and the calf began as a single lump of clay from the riverbank, red and supple. Parvati had split the clay in two, the larger half—the half with more potential, she thought—for the calf and the smaller for the boy, and under her hands the clay felt warm and alive, began to pulse. One lump she stored in the elephant’s womb, the other in her own. She got the boy mostly right, she thought. His eyes were the exception, golden and rimmed with coarse gray lashes. Elephant eyes. She couldn’t remember what kind of eyes she had made for the elephant’s child.
Before the boy was born, Parvati could invoke the prickle of Shiva’s stubble against her neck, his warmth against her back. It was enough to make her lonelier, with no one but the water buffalo to talk to. The water buffalo offered little solace, chewing her cud and thinking only of her calf, small, warm, suckling, even after the infant was slaughtered moments after it took its first steps, the ragged red remains spread across the jungle floor in damp piles. The water buffalo asked Parvati for another calf, but instead Parvati made the boy, growing him inside of her until she thought he might be able to keep her company, to share in her memories and in the laborious, grimy work of making life.
Instead, the boy was useless. His hands lacked dexterity, were too small to shape the clay into lumps. Somehow, he could not imbue the clay with life, only with his small, sharp fingerprints.
“I’m hungry,” the boy bleated when he woke in the morning; “I’m tired,” when they walked down the mountain to the river; “I’m cold,” at night, curled against her in the bed, back against the wind beating the mountain. He slowed her down, his steps shorter than hers and his hand persistently reaching toward her.
Days Parvati sent him into the jungle alone, he returned delighted by phenomena that had centuries ago ceased to surprise her. “Did you know,” he’d ask her, “that the cuckoo-bird lays her eggs in the wrong nest?”
“Did you see that the red fox had a white pup?”
“Did you hear the monkeys howling? I could hear them from the other side of the island!”
Even as Parvati forgot, even as she fruitlessly felt for the gestures of life in the flick of her wrist or the pressure of her fingertips against wet clay, she could still remember each of the boy’s plaintive questions. The boy’s voice was insidious, filling crevices in Parvati’s brain until she couldn’t remember how she had lived before the boy. When she dreamt, memories drifted and ebbed from her mind, and when she woke, each one was weaker, one sense shy of complete. Were the python’s snakelets born with scales, or were their skins smooth? What did it feel like when Shiva was there, and what had it felt like when she last missed him?
That winter was the hottest the boy could remember. It seemed that the sun shone even at twilight, drying the jungle into brown twigs and parchment leaves. The tiger lay in the shade of the mountain, swatting lazily at the boy as he passed, and the boy’s mother remained in their bed, ignoring plea after plea for new life to replace the withered.
One night, the boy dreamed of his elephant-twin. He rarely saw the elephants, only the occasional seductive sway of a gray rump or the twitch of a ropy tail catching his eye between gnarled jungle trees. In the winter, though, the elephant-smell was relentless, seeping in at the edges of his consciousness, the rich soil smell of rutting cows and the sharp heat of bulls in musth. The bulls rumbled like earthquakes, rustling leaves and shaking the mountain, and it was this sound the boy fell asleep to. In his dream, he was the elephant-boy, heat rising from the fragile edges of his wide ears, his gaze met by dozens of gray legs like stone pillars. He lifted his head against the weight of his face—the weight of a trunk, coiling in front of him like a fifth limb, tasting the air, the tip as fragile as his pinky finger. He curled the trunk to his lips and sucked, rhythmically, until he woke in his bed, his thumb between his teeth, knees bent to his chest. It was light out, and his mother was shaking him awake.
“We’re going to the river,” she announced, “but not for that making-life nonsense. I’m in desperate need of a bath.”
In the time he’d been alive, the boy had never known his mother to bathe in the river, only to gather clay by its banks. The mud she wore had hewed to her body until it cracked like eggshells when she moved or spoke. He had never seen his mother without her second skin.
The jungle was dense and layered, vines and brush at eye level and a canopy of trees above, shading them from the sun. It was hard for the boy to walk. He tripped over roots that jutted out of the poor soil like fingers and caught at his knees and ankles.
“Keep up,” the boy’s mother called over her shoulder. “Quit falling! My goodness, you’re slow.” She walked with long, even strides, sure-footed and careless.
The river had carved a steep path into the side of the mountain, slick red clay giving way at its banks. The water was green and thick with algae, curling into ripples at the surface. The creatures on the island orbited the river, never straying far, rarely drinking too long at its edge.
When they reached the edge of the river, the boy’s mother walked in, never breaking stride. She walked as if the water were air, the mud solid beneath her feet, the current still. The boy watched her head disappear beneath the oily surface like a dark stone.
His mother called something over her shoulder before she sank, and the boy thought it might have been “keep watch,” but he couldn’t be sure, and anyways, he had no idea what he was watching for.
The boy had never sat by the river alone, and now he searched for higher ground from which to escape the uncertain footing of the muddy bank. He settled on a tree stump, roots washed clean and coiling above the wet ground, and watched for his mother. The water was still, but the boy could see a pair of nostrils breaking the surface, twin golden eyes floating like leaves.
“Hello!” called the boy. The eyes turned to him, and he thought they might belong to a creature as old as his mother, if that was even possible. He could see its shadow beneath the water, a long, woody tail and horned back. The eyes sank almost imperceptibly, disappearing millimeter by millimeter until the boy could see only a shadow, until even that faded into the dark water. The boy wondered whether the creature was what he had been watching for.
“It’s an alligator.”
The boy turned to see a beast at the top of the riverbank, squinting down at him.
“That’s not a creature you should trust.”
This new creature was short and broad-shouldered. Its paunch strained the front of its tunic, and its beard was as full and coarse as the jungle canopy. The boy had never seen an animal with a true beard, only the mountain goats, with their fistfuls of straggly chin-hairs. His own reflection in the river was smooth-faced.
“Why not?” the boy asked.
The beast considered, then shrugged. “You don’t know him,” it said. “I heard there was a woman in the river. Do you know her?”
Now the boy shrugged. He thought that this beast might have been what he was supposed to keep watch for, but he wasn’t sure to what end. He turned back to the river. “I know all the creatures on this island,” he said, though it was not quite true.
“You’re a stranger, too.”
“Where did you come from?” the bearded beast asked. “I was once on this island, too, and I don’t remember you.”
“From my mother,” the boy explained. “She made me.”
The beast raised its knotted eyebrows. “And who,” it asked, “is your mother?”
“The mud-woman,” said the boy. “She makes life, and she made me.”
“I think I know her,” said the beast, scratching its beard. “I think I knew her a very long time ago.” Its voice was louder, deeper. The boy looked back to see that the beast had inched forward. It was halfway down the riverbank, almost at the boy’s stump.
“And who are you?” the boy asked, scooting farther back on his stump, hoping the beast wouldn’t notice. It took a wide step forward, heels sinking into the mud. Its foot swung like a spider unraveling silk, landing squarely at the foot of the boy’s stump.
“That’s the right question,” the beast said. “You’re nobody. The question is: Who am I?”
The boy felt a sharp pain, the tangle of a beard in his hands, a breeze against his chest. He felt mud beneath his feet and emptiness in his stomach. He smelled nothing, tasted nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing.
Parvati was finally clean, centuries of life-mud scrubbed from her skin. Some particles had hardened within her pores, crystallizing her skin into armor. These she did not try to loosen. When she emerged, Shiva was wiping his scimitar, and the boy’s body stood headless in the mud, arms groping the air. The sight of his tiny body burrowed into her abdomen. When Shiva saw her, he dropped the scimitar and walked to the edge of the river.
“I think you put the brain in the wrong place,” he said.
“What the hell did you do?”
“You can make another.”
“I don’t want another.” Parvati knew she was being petulant. She could, in fact, make another child, could make hundreds of others, calves and pupae and hatchlings and infants. She had been waiting for Shiva to return, but now he seemed like a stranger. Instead, she missed the boy’s heavy, ill-balanced head and drunken walk. The headless boy turned in a circle, his arms outstretched, hands opening and closing like tiny pincers. Without his head, the boy seemed impossibly small. Parvati could imagine his mewling cries, damp tears against her neck, knotted vertebrae heaving beneath her hands.
She wanted to stretch out her own arms, to rub his back and hold his hands, but instead, she turned to Shiva.
“Find him a new head,” she said. “I don’t care what creature. The first beast you come upon.”
“You want me to kill one?”
“Well,” she said, “you are the god of war.”
Parvati had always been the careless one, had made baby creatures without worrying that they might experience pain, might toddle out of their nests and be eaten or drowned or worse. She was the one with power, and he was the god of petty skirmishes. On the island, Shiva fomented wars between rival colonies of ants, columns of soldiers in pitted armor colliding into a mass of swarming black bodies. After the carnage, he would cradle the fallen between his fingers, crisp exoskeletons littering the ground. Off the island, it was soft-skinned humans who fought, and there were too many fallen to number or cradle. He was sick of humans, annoyed that Parvati had replaced him with a plaything, a soft child without the loyalty of an ant or the memory of an elephant. In the world, humans were made without care or thought, and they died pocked with holes, unremembered and alone.
Shiva had returned to the island because he ached for the days when Parvati was the only other, the only other voice, twin powers, the lone body beside his. A world full of people was too many; it made it impossible to love each the way he had loved Parvati in the beginning. With each death, he felt less, until his breath no longer caught in his throat, his chest no longer filled for those left alive. That Parvati had made a human child who took his place on the banks of the river meant that Shiva, like the fallen humans, was expendable, just one of many. It meant that if he fell, no one’s chest would fill for him.
Shiva turned away from the river. His eyes were sharp, and he could see gibbon-lovers caressing one another in the trees. He did not want to kill one and leave the other alone. In the mud, he could see flatworms burrowing. He ignored these, too. He climbed the riverbank and walked into the forest, following the smell of beasts.
He passed the water buffalo, udder distended, womb empty.
He passed the python, thick as his forearm, greenly coiled in a tree, stalking her prey.
He passed a peacock, tail feathers fanned, scratching the dirt.
He heard the moaning before he saw the elephants, a cluster of creased gray hides in a clearing. In the middle was a heap of bones, ribs like the frame of a boat, femurs like felled tree trunks. The elephants caressed the heap with their trunks. Shiva thought they were weeping. The elephants grieved, though Shiva no longer could.
At the edge of the circle was the elephant’s child, craning to see the bones. His hide was fragile, his ears wispy. The elephant’s child did not yet know to grieve. He had the eyes of a human, and he shed no tears. He was incomplete, Shiva thought, only partially formed. His head would fit the boy’s body.
Shiva raised his scimitar and left a second corpse for the elephants’ grief.
The elephant-headed boy fanned his ears. He could see his mother in front of him, still brittle with a thin armor of mud. He unfurled his trunk to reach for her hand, and he breathed the smell of the island into his memories.
Pria Anand is a neurologist and the author of The Mind Electric, out from Simon & Schuster (US) and Little, Brown (UK) in June 2025. She is an assistant professor at Boston University, and she cares for patients at Boston Medical Center.
