The elephant in the police room

Elephants in the room are famously invisible but supposedly palpable, so an actual one should be as large as life and twice as discernible. Yet, the fact that Delhi Police had failed to locate 37-year-old Laxmi — now Jasmine — for over two months, was the elephant in the room no one wanted to acknowledge.

A high-ranking police official may find it easy to simply disappear into thin air even as India’s best sleuths scour Kolkata, but an elephant managing to elude Delhi’s finest khakiclad Sherlocks is surely a matter of some embarrassment.

It is not as if she could simply melt into the underbrush — elephants have neither the size nor the weight to do so without considerable commotion. Even so, Laxmi remained on the run — figuratively speaking, of course, because an actual elephant at full pelt would be hard to hide — with her supposed owner in a big city. That she was finally ‘rescued’ is not something the police should trumpet.


Elephant jokes, they say, posit absurdity as a possibility rather than resolve a query. However, given that the answer to a basic query in that genre — “Where do you find elephants?” — is “Depends on where you lost them,” the joke was clearly on the police as Laxmi was found ‘hidden’ on the banks of the Yamuna in Delhi, not far from where the police lost track of her. Perhaps they mistook her for a Ganapati idol.