How Ganpati Lost His Head And Became The Elephant In The Room

When Ganesha speaks, you listen.

(This story is from The Quint’s archives and was first published on 17 September, 2015. As a first person account of how Ganesha lost and found his head, this piece is being brought back as a quirky twist to the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations this year.)

Greetings puny humans,

I have 108 names, but you can call me The Big G.

Let me get straight to the point. Every day of the year you bombard me with endless voice mails, impractical requests and then dunk me in polluted waters. Then you invite me to come back next year to deal with the same treatment.

But before I became the ‘elephant god’, I used to be a celestial stud with the best abs (think round and soft) in all of heavendom. It all changed thanks to one faulty latch on the door.

Me, getting dunked in at the Juhu Beach. #DunkinDoNot

That fateful day I was almost asleep when mom came rushing in and announced that she had a date with dad. Before entering the bathroom, she told me to guard the unlatched door with my life. Little did I know how prophetic those words would become. See, we had a serious paparazzi problem up in Kailasa, and they’d bombard us with inquisitive questions about dad and his habits.

That’s where I grew up – Mount Kailash. Though they now call it Kangrinboqe Peak #MaAbode #Memories

Now the truth is that I had never seen dad, just heard many stories about him. Apparently he was the coolest dude in the universe with a penchant for mad, raving parties and a temper as erratic as a bee flying on steroids. Dad’s stories were the stuff legends were made of – like the one time he drank a tankard full of blue margaritas which turned his throat permanently blue, but that’s another tale for another time. So the point I’m trying to make is that I had no clue what my dad looked like.

As luck would have it, my dad decided to pay her a surprise visit and turned up at the main door. He came rushing inside, calling out my mom’s name at the top of his voice and rousing me out of my screensaver mode into active guard mode.

Honestly, with his unkempt hair, beads, trinkets, snakes and tiger skin attire, my dad looked more like the lead member of a death metal rock band.

Having been roused so abruptly, I too wasn’t in the best of moods. I immediately blocked his advance towards the bathroom, because of mom’s instructions. Dad obviously wasn’t used to being stopped by anyone, ever, and was momentarily surprised into inaction. When he recovered he asked me who in the world I was. Me being me, with muscular whey protein physique, I told him to go take a hike.

“Take that, protein boy!” was all he said and proceeded to lop my head off my body, kicked it into oblivion and stormed inside. My mom, on hearing the commotion came out in her dressing gown and curlers. She let out a shriek that made the ears on my decapitated head ring. Dad, in the time-honoured tradition of husbands, proceeded to apologise profusely without knowing what his fault was.

The paparazzi outside our door on D-Day #TooShocked

“Set it right! Fix it back! He is our son!” were the only sentences my mom kept screaming at him. Now my dad, in accordance to his long-standing habit of doing and saying things that he didn’t mean to, blurted out “Whatever you say dear, I’ll get him an even better head. It’s kept outside, dear”, and rushed out of the house trying to make sense of what he’d just said. Typical.

Basically he lopped off the first head he could find and screwed it back to my body. It happened to be my personal two-seater sports model elephant.

“There you go, doesn’t he look better than before?”said my dad to my mom. I got a bigger head with more volume to store the wisdom of the world, bigger ears to hear everyone and a free trunk too, at least that’s what my dad tells me.

Clicking a #selfie with my #peeps.

At this point you might ask me why didn’t I protest? Well, I tried. But no words came out. Every time I would try to say something, I’d be trumpeting like Miles Davis amplified a thousand times. My parents mistook my bawling for peals of joy, kissed me goodbye and went off on their date.

Me, I was left alone with my new toy, my own head, trying to figure out if I could scratch my new nose with my toe and what my dental bills were going to be. And that’s the story of how I lost and found my head.