The Misunderstood Elephant

 Kuvalaypida

Hello,

My name is Kuvalaypida. Many of you know me as the big, bad elephant that tried to kill your beloved Krishna. The story you know, however, is very one sided. Today, I will clear my name so this history can no longer follow me.

My story starts back many years ago when I was just a child. Rumors had been going around the elephant herd that King Kans had shown a recent interest in our kind. As the days went on we started noticing the young elephants from our herd were starting to go missing. My mom became very scared that she would lose me. I was unable to go anywhere without her.

One evening when I was laying down with my mother I heard a noise from the bushes.

I whispered, “Mama?”

My mother did not wake. I wanted to know what was making the noise, so I walked towards the bush. When I peaked my head inside the bush, I found myself staring straight into the eyes of a man. Before I could make a sound him and a few other men grabbed my trunk and took me away. I would never see my mother again.

I tried to break away, but I just wasn’t strong enough. He took me to his place tucked away in the kingdom and threw me into a barn. When I turned around I saw all of the other elephants that had been stolen over the past few weeks. At least I had friends.

Every day the evil man would come and beat us with a whip.

He would yell, “YOU MUST BE TOUGHER AND MEANER.”

Once I began to show these qualities, he began to pair me up with other elephant to have us fight. I was the strongest elephant from the bunch, and won every time.

The evil man trained the rest of the elephants and I for years, until we were mean, fighting machines. One day after training he grinned at us and said “You all are ready.”

He marched us to the kings castle where we were to prepare for battle. It had turned out that the king wished to have an army of elephants to battle against his enemies, and that he had hired the evil man to create his army for him. Battle after battle we fought and won. The elephant army could not be defeated, and everyone was afraid of us.

My friends were tough, but I was tougher. The king quickly took notice of this and began to show me favor. After the last battle, the king went up to the evil man and asked to take me back to his palace to be his personal elephant. It had turned out Kans was afraid of being overthrown and wanted to have me to protect him. The evil man agreed to let me go away with Kans.

It was at the palace that I had more training. The king hired people to look like Krishna and attack me so that I would see him as an enemy. By the end of that training I was ready to destroy Krishna if he ever made his way to the palace.

One day the king looked at me and said “Kuvalaypida, the time has come. Krishna is here to destroy me. You must protect the kingdom!”

So I went to the gates of the palace and waited for my enemy. When he arrived I tried to hit him, but he grabbed my trunk and threw me out of the way. I took a second run at him and thats when he punched me so hard that I blacked out.

I was defeated and so was the king.

See, now that you know my story you understand why I attacked your beloved Krishna. I was mistreated and trained to be a killer. It’s not my true character or being. After Krishna defeated Kans he actually took me in as his personal elephant and retrained me to be kind and caring like I once was.

If Krishna can forgive me for trying to kill him, I hope you can forgive me as well.

So that is the true and full story of the great Kuvalaypida.

Author's note: In the story Krishna Kills Kuvalayapida, Kans tries one last effort to kill Krishna. He created an evil plan to put an elephant, Kuvalayapid, at the gates of the palace to stomp on Krishna and Balram. When Krishna and Balram arrived at the gates, Kuvalayapid tried to attack Krishna, but Krishna grabbed its trunk and flung it out of the way. Refusing to give up, the elephant ran back at Krishna, but one blow from Krishna knocked the elephant down. Krishna had defeated him. 

I decided to create a story from the elephants perspective. I didnt really like how the elephant was just an evil, uncontrollable animal that killed people, so I decided to give him more of a backstory. One thing that I did change from the original is that Krishna kills the elephant. I didnt want the elephant to die, becuae then it doesn't make sense why he would be clearing his name. So instead I added in that Krishna retrains the elephant and make him good instead of evil.