It was a summer evening in 2010, deep inside an estate somewhere in Munnar. Four of us - Sony, Sherin, Nandu and I - were sitting around a rickety table, doing what overworked startup folks rarely get to do: nothing.
In the center of the table lay a bottle of Old Monk, inviting yet ignored with discipline.
It had to wait.
A few days earlier, Sherin had refactored our billing script. Our system ran on a daily subscription model, which meant every single day we had to charge our entire user base. Miss a run, and we lost money. No graceful degradation. Just unrecoverable loss of our only real revenue stream. Simple as that.
The previous version had started choking on scale. Some days it simply didn’t finish. This new one was faster, smarter - and just unstable enough to require adult supervision. It had to be run manually on production. Every night.
And the masterstroke - only Sherin, Nandu and I had access to do that. All of us now together, with no fourth person to call.
The estate was stunning - lush, quiet, and completely disconnected from the world. No mobile signal. No internet. Just an old landline and an estate manager who seemed deeply unconcerned about distributed systems or revenue pipelines.
As the night settled in, we mentioned we'd need to step out to town later.
"Why?", he asked. "Need network", we said. "At night?", he snapped back.
He then told us about the elephant. A rogue tusker was known to have a liking of that stretch of road after dark. Just days earlier, it had trampled a motorcyle rider.
These are moments in life when you expect a bunch of grown adults to collectively reconsider their choices.
This was not one of those moments.
Sony with some quick mental math exclaimed - "We are going to lose 4 lakhs! It's only a 30 minute drive, what could go wrong?". History is full of bad decision that beging exactly like that.
I briefly considered pointing out, strictly speaking, only one of us neeeded to go. Possibly Sherin. Possibly alone. But decided that was not a hill worth dying on. Teamwork, after all.
Three production critical engineers. One car. Zero signal. Known elephant on route.
Strong design.
We left close to midnight. The drive to town was uneventful, which felt like the universe was quitely setting us up. Sherin got to work immediately, staring at logs streaming down his terminal. The script, sensing the gravity of the situation, decided it was a good night to take its own sweet time.
Minutes passed. Time stretched. No one dared to say it out loud, but each minute was eating into the courage we had borrowed earlier. Then finally, the terminal flashed four letters of relief - DONE.
We packed up, got into the car and began our return journey, back through the same road - now darker, quieter and more "elephant-aware."
About halfway through, we heard it. A loud thump.
The car slowed. Silence.
We all looked at each other, collectively hoping that it was the elephant politely tapping the car instead of flipping it.
It wasn't.
Flat tyre.
The Baleno we were driving had clearly seen things. It did miraculously have a spare tyre. What it did not have was any equipment to actually use it.
So now we had:
We stepped out, because sitting inside felt worse. We walked around with our phones, trying to catch signal, while also staying close enough to the car to sprint back if something large and angry appeared. Why we believed the car would save us is best left unanswered.
The moonlight didn't help. The landscape was scattered with large black rocks, each one shaped exactly like the backside of an elephant. Every few minutes someone would freeze and whisper, "There!" - triggering a bout of collective panic - before we all agreed it was, once again, geology.
We briefly discussed walking back. Five kilometers in the dark through desolate elephant territory? That idea was archived rather quickly.
Then - another thump.
Headlights.
A van appeared, swaying slightly as it negotiated the potholes, like a being who had made peace with both the road and life. It stopped beside us.
A man stepped out. Pristine white shirt, immaculate mundu, strong notes of cheap brandy and absolute confidence.
“ഇതെന്താ കുട്ടികളെ പറ്റിയെ?” - What’s wrong, boys?
We explained. He listened, nodded and handed us the tools. I crouched down, ready to demonstrate a level of mechanical expertise I did not possess, when he gently yet firmly, took the spanner from my hand.
“ഇതൊക്കെ നിന്നെ കൊണ്ട് പറ്റുവോ?” - You think you'll really be able to do this?
Before we could defend our collective engineering degrees, he got to work. In what felt like seconds, but was probably a few minutes, the tyre was changed. Efficient. Precise. Without drama.
He stood up, brushed his hands, and said we were good to go.
We hesitated. The elephant?
"Follow the van!", he ordered. We did.
Elephants didn't manifest and the shadows didn't move. Just the steady reassurance of his tail lights cutting through the darkness, leading us all the way back to the estate gate.
He waved once and disappeared into the night.
I don’t know if angels exist. But if they do, one of them drives a van, wears a white mundu, and smells faintly of brandy.
The estate manager greeted us with a look that suggested mild disappointment at the lack of tragedy. “Ah,” he said. “You made it.”
The Old Monk was still on the table. It had never tasted better.
We didn’t talk much about the script after that. But sometime soon after, we set up a cron job. And monitoring.