It is almost nine on an early January morning, and the day has begun in earnest in Sakleshpur, a town located at the edge of the Western Ghats in Karnataka’s Hassan district. Sachin Gowda, a planter, is getting his 10-year-old son ready for school. It’s the land of coffee—in the front yard of Gowda’s estate home laid out to dry in the winter sun are coffee berries from the first pickings of the season, which will stretch till February. Soon, the plants will blossom and clothe the undulating terrain in a sea of white, stringy flowers. By now, the picking of berries should have been in full swing. But Gowda has given the day off to his workers, fearing for their safety. A herd of 26 elephants has moved into the plot abutting his house—for the umpteenth time in the past three years. The manager of a neighbouring estate momentarily drops by to enquire whether the elephants have crossed over. “Leave me a message when they have moved, brother. I have workers in my field,” he says. Since morning, most neighbours in the vicinity of Kirehalli, where the matriarch, locally known as Beetamma, and her herd are camping, have asked the same of Gowda.
When the pachyderms first came to this part of Sakleshpur taluk years ago, the residents venerated their footprints with a ‘puja’. Elephants hadn’t been spotted in Kirehalli village in about 30 years. Their arrival, thus, was a fortuitous occasion brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic that ground the traffic on the busy Hassan-Mangaluru highway to a halt, which let herds from the reserve forests in the south cross the road and venture out towards new pastures. The landscape around Kirehalli, interspersed with coffee plantations and agricultural fields, proved to be a fine camping ground for the elephants. And so, rather than heading back into the forests, they stayed on, moving from estate to estate, feeding on the paddy, millets, banana and jackfruit. “Now, we pray for them to leave,” says Gowda.