I have the head of an elephant; a big belly and my friend is a rat.  Many people pray for me to remove obstacles and solve problems. For this reason, I am the patron of students and merchants. One of my tusks is broken because I used it to write parts of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata.

Why do I have the head of an elephant, you ask?  Well, my mother Parvati gave birth to me while my father, the god Shiva, was away. When he returned, we didn’t recognize each other and when he found me keeping watch as my mother bathed, he got so jealous that he cut off my head. Mother was so upset that she made father promise to replace my head with the head of the first creature he saw. Guess what it was?