For Sangeetha, it felt nothing short of a second birth. As the elephant Sivam Lakshmi Ayyappan ran amok from Thekkinkadu Maidan through Palace Road and into the quiet lanes of Gandhi Nagar Colony in Cherur, she found herself trapped in its path — inside her car, on her way to work. There was barely time to react.

“A few youngsters on a scooter came rushing and shouted, ‘The elephant is coming, reverse!’ But there was no space to reverse. Another car was behind me, and my daughter was coming on her scooter,” she recalls, her voice still trembling.

In that split second, instinct took over. She honked, urging her daughter to move back. But before anything could make sense, the elephant was upon her.

“It lifted the car… just like that. I was suspended in the air for a moment,” she says. The animal dropped the vehicle back to the ground and moved on, leaving behind stunned silence.

Back again

Local people rushed in and pulled her out of the mangled car. “It feels like I got my life back,” she says. Her daughter, Shruthi, who witnessed the horror, is still shaken. “When the elephant came, I was in shock. I couldn’t do anything,” she says. But the ordeal was not over.

Moments later, the elephant returned — as if drawn back to the wreck — and struck the car again, thrusting its trunk into the crumpled metal.