Synopsis
Set on a remote island off the coast of Sumatra, remains of an unidentified body are found. It takes the detective work of international personalities to untangle the mystery.
This novel gives the reader the chance to ride the back of an elephant and see the world from an entirely fresh viewpoint. Glimpse yourself mirrored in the native wisdom of a wizened shaman in Medicine Village. Witness the father–son clash between Masir, the son who blindly obeys his father Crown Prince Sudman, a despot ruler. You will face an abused lower caste, personified by the wealthy Wayan-Tiger who leads a struggle for recognition.
The Elephant in the Room is a many layered novel. Read at the level of an exotic adventure tale, it captivates. Read with an eye to systematic racism, it’s an exhilarating battle against oppression. Read at the level of tyranny versus human values, wisdom versus greed, love versus betrayal. The message embodied in the book is carried by an elephant, who shows more compassion and violence than most humans. The book spearheads a campaign for open-minded learning that provokes significant individual and cultural change. Mystery and suspense reel out a triumph of human and nonhuman connection.
Frontispiece:
The expression "the elephant in the room" is a metaphorical idiom in English for an important or enormous topic, question, or controversial issue that is obvious or that everyone knows about but no one mentions or wants to discuss because it makes at least some of them uncomfortable or is personally, socially, or politically embarrassing, controversial, inflammatory, or dangerous.
THE BODY
Little remained of the body. Tropical jungles take their toll quickly. Almost all the soft tissue was gone. I pulled my wide-brimmed hat off to shield my mouth and nose from the sickly sight and odor in front of me, but my mouth instantly parched and then gagged. I turned and upchucked in the undergrowth behind me.
Wiping my mouth with a wide, moist leaf, I turned back, fascinated yet repulsed. The writs, one of the weakest bodily connections, had already disarticulated. The ankles would have done the same, but boots still protected the feet. Clothing, except a sporadic line of metal snaps where a vest might have been, was also absent. The rest of the skeleton was fairly intact, but the ribs lay in disarray, showing signs of being nibbled on. Only the back of the skull was visible, the facial bones being obscured by the ground leaf mold.
Henry, my companion on this urgent and suddenly dismaying hike to a small native village, extracted a pocketknife from his bush vest. With the knife, he expertly cuta small branch from the abundant green around us. Although there was a small faraway rustling from the canopy above, all else remained eerily quiet. He then began to poke around in the ground litter with the tip of the branch. The only sound was the soft scratching the stick made as it circled in the soft mush of the jungle floor. With our eyes hypnotized by the unexpected scene, we exchanged neither words nor looks. I shivered in the wet heat. Light only penetrated in the splotches here deep beneath the green umbrella of the treetops.
A minuscule rasping arose from the wrinkled green jungle floor near the skeleton's hip bone. Henry pivoted as he lifted the branch with scientific precision. As the tip of the branch emerged from the detritus, it hooked the broken lens of a pair of sunglasses, intact except for the missing right lens.
A huge hush shrouded his first words, "I thought so."
I frowned. "Thought what?"
"This is exactly who I'd hoped to find, but not here. Not dead. She was too well-known, too well versed in the ways of the wild." Henry's mouth pursed, and his jaw muscles knobbed, tightening his already concentrated stare at the glasses.
My heart ticked and pumped in a disturbing half-rhythm.
Di we just come across the rotting remains of a murder? A suicide?
My mind jerked with hyper-awareness and burst into a race against itself. I wanted to ask Henry what was happening, but some force built a wall of silence inside my chest and wouldn't let go. Its stranglehold muted me as I started to follow Henry's square-shouldered retreat from the scene.
We were heading back the way we'd come.
Why?
Venomous fireworks readied to burst inside me, but I couldn't pay attention to them right now. I needed to follow Henry's every step back to the lodge. This walk had turned dnger from a simple word into a menacing presence.