It seems from the title that we have a set of images to consider, the Tusk, and the Stone. Perhaps the reader might view these as point A and point B on a timeline of Arjun's life, like momentous occasions in his life, but there is another way to treat the symbols. Perhaps the two symbols refer to a universal idea that he returns to only on those occasions. What is it that the elephants have in common with the stone carver? It is that in both encounters with those signs, he was a slave.
To a Brahmin of Arjun's time, it would not have been uncommon for him to believe that he was of a higher fate than the slaves, because slaves were the lowest pedal of the social hierarchy, and typically, when a person thinks "religious transcendence," they believe they mean upward, but ironically, the path to enlightenment takes Arjun low. Fate humiliates him and terrifies him. It makes him question why he feels better or worse than others, and it makes him finally prioritize personal mastery and self-control.
The sum total of all Arjun's correct decisions is that in his community, where he is just a slave, he is heralded as a hero and legend, like Robin Hood or something, because although he is motivated by his personal love for his sister, he helps eliminate wrongdoers from many communities, so instead of defeating the specific villains who took so much from him, he is giving back to the entire community, and though his fate takes him back to square one, back to slavery, he knows that he was always the slave of a beautiful, enrapturing fate, and he becomes a happy stone carver, a sign of his legacy (carving into stone is perhaps the most precise symbol for 'legacy' available to them in the story's setting).
