Watched The Elephant Whisperers recently. It is beautifully shot and shows the loving bond between elephants and their human caregivers eloquently. A bereaved mother (Bellie) feels comforted by the elephant she tales care of - he reminds her of her now deceased daughter when she was his age. She is bereft when that elephant is separated from her to be given to another caretaker. I grew up in India very close to indigenous people and it is probably the best thing that happened to me in my childhood. I remember these folks as being hard-working, carefree and centered to something the rest of us not even see. You could think of their lives as "simple" but that would be wrong. They lived in a world apart from ours that was always alluring and mysterious to me. We may have had more and better things than they did but we but that was all we had.
Watching Bellie and Bomman in the movie tending their blended human and elephant family took me back in time. Bellie reminded me of a tribal woman, P who came to our house to work in the garden sometimes. She came when she thought the time was right - there was something to plant or harvest. She expected we would do the tending between those times. I was always eager to watch P at work and had endless questions. She taught to recognize edible plants that grew wild in our garden like weeds. P would also know where to dig for mushrooms - we learned to eat mushrooms thanks to her. She had a grandbaby that would bring along sometimes. The most remarkable things about P was her smile. She had a few missing teeth and a wrinkled face but it did not diminish the brilliance of the smile. I always thought P was a wise woman but in ways that could not help people like me who inhabited a different world.
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