I took off from Calcutta to participate in the inaugural celebrations of Kaziranga?s centenary. My dog had just bitten off my face. The stupid vet in trying to clip Toby?s nails, cut him to the quick and then in tying his mouth while giving him a bath, cut straight through his cheek until he bled. That night when I got home after midnight, I took a shower and then went straight to Toby (name changed to protect his loving identity) who was lying on his bed, fast asleep. I stooped to give him a goodnight kiss and, startled at the prospect of the vet having returned to torture him, poor little terrified Toby, in his stupor, snapped at my face and sank his teeth around my chops.

And so, with a gamocha wrapped around my face that looked like a misshapen gourd or banglar paanch as my delirious wife pointed out, and an Australian hat on my head, I checked through security at the airport where everyone including uniformed women frisking gentle ladies stared at me as if I were a Muslim transvestite with the sort of headscarf that governments around the world were banning, with motives to divert the Jorhat flight to Islamabad. I was reluctantly let on board but a suspicious package that I held close to my chest came under constant scrutiny and probe until I was finally able to shove the damn anti-rabies vaccines that I would need to shoot into myself while shooting rhinos, in the aircrafts freezer.

The following morning, before sunrise, as we rode into the sanctuary on huge elephants, there were tourists from all parts of the world and two curious gents from the Taj Group in Mumbai ? the only ones with long lenses in their cameras and interested in my covered face. Being guests of the government we had the tallest Elephas Maximus so everyone beneath and around us watched as we led the small convoy of Elephantidae through the tall grass.

As I rolled from right to left above the colossus? spine, peering through the grass to look for animals, a serpent eagle eyed me from a blooming simul tree and then suddenly out of the mists a huge fishing eagle, with its talons bared, swooshed past my face and in throwing my head back to escape the attack, my scarf fell to the ground far below and revealed my swollen lips that looked like a boar?s snout under a proboscis that my family laughed at anyway.

I heard the motors run on the Taj cameras and as I whisked around saw Camilla Parker Bowles? brother Mark, jealous because he wasn?t ruling over us all on a tall Loxodonta africana, pull his khaki safari hat down over his lobster face while he chuckled and spluttered behind its brim and his shoulders bobbed up and down as he choked. Rather than have a regiment of cheap tourists guffaw like wild asses from Kutch at me, I asked our mahout to let the other elephants go through and decided to bring up the rear.

First came each elephant that turned to see if I was some kind of tapir, then their mahouts and then the riffraff on their backs. It took ages for just four elephants to pass us while I simply sat in my howdah and looked each rude animal and man in the eye as it passed by, with the laid-back indifference of someone used to the inquisitiveness of plebs. As Mark waltzed by on his elephas midgetus, he doffed his hat and said: ?Terribly sorry; feel okay ?? I was about to eat his head off when my giggling wife shut me up and quickly replied: ?He?s fine, thank you?. Stupid convent upbringing that never begat a feline that could kick sand in the face of dirty Englanders.

After the wagging bottom of the last elephant was five minutes ahead of us, I nearly fell out of my skin. Right there in front of us was a gorgeous Royal Bengal tiger, a massive horned rhino and three huge buffalos with large sets of horns sniffing the air and looking up at us. An egret flew in and sat on the back of one of the buffalos and a pair of jungle mynahs came and settled on the rhino. Fantastic. I jabbed my wife in the ribs and asked her to take pictures with her point ?n? shoot Samsung digital and ruined the shot she was quietly taking of a pair of very rare collared Scops Owls (that I later discovered hadn?t been seen in these parts for over 25 years) scowling down at us from a pipal. It was unbelievable. Then, out of the bushes in front of us leapt a wild boar. It stared and strolled closer and looked up at me, sat back on its haunches, knit its brows and dug its tusks once, twice, three times in the dirt that sent a cloud of white powdery dust into the rhino?s eyes, then rolled over to one side and went to sleep in the first rays of the rising sun. The rhino blinked and snorted. The mahout said he had never seen a spectacle like this ever before and the guard, who sat at our elephant?s tail end, with a rifle across his knees, had thankfully stopped chewing his stinking tambul betel nut. By now I had fractured my wife?s ribs; elbowing her nonstop to take pictures of now this now that, and, of course, she was bloody well missing all the right moments and getting still shots of a somnambulant pig.

As I looked up to thumb my nose and cock a snoot at those tourists who had laughed at my mauled face and were now missing it all, I saw a ring of four elephants that had crept back up and were busy capturing the rear ends of all these animals and shooting vertical frames to get us in the picture as well. ?Hey!? I screamed, ?get lost! Find your own!? Our guard went ?shush? and the mahout went ?shush? and they looked at each other, nodded and went tut tut in an Assamese dialect that suggested ?here was a wet neck that had never been in a game sanctuary before?. To tell you the truth, I was a bit embarrassed and can only excuse my unusual behaviour on the grounds that a movie star, such as I am, is stared at for his charming good looks, usually, and not, his morphed snout.

That evening, when I stood on stage to deliver my welcome address, I made sure that the light on the podium would be dimmed to the minimum. I had made such a song and dance about the lighting on my face that the electricians and lighting experts would have murdered me, and I could see that in their ruddy eyes, if it were not for the fact that I was a friend of the chief minister and the forest minister and the power minister and any member of the working classes could be jailed if they so much as breathed heavily around me. Anyway, after I had thrown as many fits as an entire ward of epileptics rolled into one, I discovered, five minutes before I was to go on, that someone had pinched my script. Stolen it. As my name was announced and the polite applause died down, I walked up to the dimly lit podium and placed a laptop on it from which I would have to read my speech. As I turned it on, its bright screen bathed my face in a bluish green light that made my admirers sigh and someone at the back stifled a shriek.

Down in the audience I saw Gayatri Devi lean over to her friend Mark-of-the-khaki-hat and whisper something that made them both giggle, the Taj?s scout duo were fidgeting with their portrait lense, Lord Ravensdale, Curzon?s what-you-may-call-it, Lady whachyemaycallher also related to Lord Curzon, minister from all over the North-East, Delhi and the chief minister, forest minister, power minister, all stared mesmerized by? by what I was saying ? When I ended my speech with the revelation that the world famous Lady Curzon turtle soup was in fact a recipe she pinched from mahout Nigona Shikari in 1905, in Kaziranga, I got a standing ovation from the only person that walked with two sticks for support, Lord Ravensdale. The others sat and clapped forever and the chief minister told his PA to remind him about a citation for me.

The following morning when the swelling on my face had reduced to my looking like a squash instead of a twisted gourd, I sat alone in the Wild Grass Inn with an old school buddy called Manju who was five when I left school and now looked like the twice-removed forty-second grand nephew of our Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, with a pepper ?n? salt beard to prove it. He had pulled up a chair next to mine and spoke hesitantly: ?Hey. I?m told you were great last night?. I looked at him. He meant it. Then from under his sweater he pulled out a book called Travel on my Elephant, by Mark Shand. ?He left very early this morning and told me I should give this to you personally?. I opened the book to read, ? With love, from Mark?.

So, life doesn?t suck after all. And hey, some of those Brits are really nice guys. ?Did he leave you an address? Phone number?? I asked. Manju grinned quietly and shook his head. ?Listen,? he said, ?I want to invite you to come back here in the summer when there are no damn tourists. We can chat or? and perhaps you can write a book too.? Manju was a gem of the sort that is difficult to find. I thanked him.

As I drove through the jungles on my way back to the airport I wondered what it would be like to attend Prince Charles? wedding on the 8th of April. I was excited and had to find a way to get hold of Mark and ask him to invite us to his sister Camilla?s register-signing nuptials. I turned to ask my wife what she would wear. Her head was bobbing against the windowpane and her Samsung camera hung ready for action around her neck. She was fast asleep after having had to mollycoddle a demented husband whose narcissism had taken quite a knock. I gazed out of the window and felt the wind in my face. Tea leaves were sprouting in the gardens and the mallards and pintails and bar-headed geese in the sky had begun to head back to where they came from in Europe and Siberia. I loved Assam.

Then I caught the driver grinning and staring at my face in the rear view mirror?