“Tu nahin jaanta?” You didn’t know? Sushil asked when we had checked into a tenement in the Air Force Station in Tezpur, Assam. Sushil Sharma was then with The Dainik Hindustan (Hindi) newspaper. We had circled around Tezpur in a lumbering Antonov-32 transport plane from Bagdogra in North Bengal.

“Tezpur”, explained Sushil, “is called by the name Tez because the mirchi (chilli) is so hot.”

“Accha?”

“Tu toh Ghoti Bangali hain, sirf mishti khata hai, tereko kya maalum Bhut Jholakiya ka jhaal?” You are a Ghoti (West Bengal Bengali who allegedly put too much sweet into their recipes), how would you know the hotness of the Bhut Jholokiya, the Tezpur chilli.

Sushil – we are tall and he was handsomer – was from Rajasthan….I think from Shekhawati, married in Odisha, in Cuttack where he had a house, and was one of those perfectionist anchors in Doordarshan who insisted on getting not only the language but also the diction right.

On that trip, we were in Tezpur to cover the last outing of the MOFTU. The Mig Operational Flying Training Unit. Pilot cadets from the Air Force Academy in Dundigal near Hyderabad who qualified for the fighter stream would be seconded to MOFTU. Even the current chief of the Indian Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Amarpreet Singh, went through that drill.

The lumbering An-32 – it is a turbo-propellor, not a jet – from Bagdogra to Tezpur angled for the landing run after 40 or so minutes. It couldn’t.

There were elephants on the runway. So we went around, over the forest, we could see the ground staff firing Diwali crackers and rassi bombs to scare away the animals. They wouldn’t stir.

Then, Control asked the pilots of our aircraft to “buzz” them. Meaning, the plane would have to circle above and dive towards the herd to scatter them so we could land.

You might ask what was the hurry? We were running out of fuel. The AN-32 had enough fuel to fly from Bagdogra to Tezpur and fly back. The longer it took to circle over Tezpur for the herd on the airstrip to clear, the more fuel it would expend.

That diving and buzzing apparently worked. We landed. There were ceremonies that need not have happened.

We were escorted to the flight briefing room. Given the spiel on the MiG-21. We had lunch. And we departed. Landing time in Bagdogra where we were to spend the night was before dusk turned dark.

As we took off from Tezpur there were two herds of elephants on either side of the airstip. One among the thick Sal trees and another opposite among tall grass.

Watch Cuckoo News on YouTube for a video version of the elephant story from the deep jungles of Jharkhand and Bengal.