THE BEGGING ELEPHANTS OF BOMBAY

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/24/news/elephant.php

India's elephants pay high price for their honors

*By Anand Giridharadas*

International Herald Tribune

 

Published: September 24, 2006

 

*MUMBAI, India* She traveled perhaps a thousand miles from India's

bleak, lawless heartland to this steaming metropolis. And now, lying

listless on the bed of a truck with a rope circling her feet, the migrant

quit this alleged city of dreams.

Every day, hundreds of migrants, maybe thousands, arrive in Mumbai, and her

life unfolded not unlike theirs. She lived on the streets, got around on

foot and toiled for survival. She pestered street vendors for free

vegetables, rice and bread. She begged for coins, sometimes pulling in $12 a

day, even $15. She even had a brief brush with Mumbai celebrity: She played

a bit role in the 2004 Bollywood film " Hulchul. "

Everyone called her Lakshmi, and only Lakshmi. Elephants seldom have last

names.

Before dawn on Friday, Lakshmi died in a heap of hay and sugar cane at a

veterinary hospital in the heart of Mumbai. She was a part-time elephant

entertainer, doing weddings and religious festivals, and she had been struck

by a vehicle, whose driver was said to have been drunk, as she lumbered home

from an evening gig a few nights earlier. Her spinal cord was injured

irrevocably, and her hindquarters paralyzed.

In Mumbai, formerly Bombay, where many human migrants die alone and

unremembered, the elephant's passing stirred deep anger about the unintended

consequences of animal worship.

* " Religion is doing much cruelty to animals in the name of sacredness, " said

J.C. Khanna, the local chapter head of the Society for the Prevention of

Cruelty to Animals, which runs the veterinary hospital. " Walking on the

streets of Bombay is difficult for a person, " he said, without exaggeration.

" Imagine what it's like for an elephant. " *

Animal-rights groups contend that elephants, cows and snakes are not made

for large cities, least of all Indian cities. Yet animals are inextricable

from Indian spirituality and religious custom, and the demand for them is as

strong in town as in the country.

On many a Mumbai sidewalk, you will find a woman in a sari sitting besides a

tied-up cow. She will have a bucket of greens, and passersby will pay her a

few rupees to buy a handful of greens to feed the cow. Even those who do not

pay partake in a silent prayer as they walk past.

Meanwhile, elephants evoke for Hindus the widely beloved Ganesh, a god who

is said to be a remover of obstacles and who bears a human body, a flurry of

arms and an elephant head. Politicians hire elephants to lift garlands onto

their necks at election rallies. Worshippers hire elephants to bless them at

festivals. Entrepreneurs hire elephants to split open a coconut at the

inauguration of a new store.

Moreover, at a moment in India when class is coming to rival caste as the

determinant of status, elephants are prized guests at ever more glamorous

weddings. Paying up to $350 per animal for a two-hour séance, many families

will plant two elephants outside the entrance as symbolic guards. Others

arrange for the groom to be ferried from his home to the wedding on an

elephant, in lieu of the horse counseled by Indian tradition.

" In the marriage of so and so, they had two elephants, so I'll have four, "

said Khanna, the hospital administrator, describing the mentality that fuels

elephant rentals. " It's a status symbol. It's basically about competition. "

 

The death prompted calls for a blanket ban on elephants in Mumbai. And if

the event was treated with more gravity than would be expected, it may be

because Lakshmi's life so neatly mirrors the lives of many human beings

here.

Mumbai, a finance and entertainment hub, is known throughout India as a city

of gold. More than perhaps anywhere else, it is the place that Indians come

when they spurn someplace else to seek their fortune.

" This city belongs to the entire nation, " Amit Badaskar, a taxi driver here,

said.

There is some disagreement about where Lakshmi came from. Was it the eastern

state of Bihar, one of the poorest places on the planet? Was it Assam, a

northeastern state in the throes of an insurgency? Either way, Lakshmi was

brought hundreds of kilometers - some say on foot, her owners say by truck -

to this city on the theory that if you want to be the marquis elephant

entertainer in India, you have to be in Bombay. That is how many migrant

stories begin.

Those stories often end with dashed dreams and empty musings on whether it

would have been better to stay home.

In Mumbai, Lakshmi found a life less glamorous than what her owners might

have envisioned from their small hamlet.

The commutes were brutal: six or seven hours from one gig to another, with

the hot tarmac pressing stones into her feet. Slumped in the back of the

truck on Friday, her feet bore the hallmarks of endless walking. Deep

crevices ran through her dark, leathery soles, and coin-size flakes of skin

around her ankles had begun to peel off as on a fish being scaled.

During two decades in the city, Lakshmi had been forced off her customary

diet, made to eat whatever people would give her free. Her owner would take

her to local street markets to eat scraps of human food, like oven-baked

flatbreads and rice. There was not enough water for an elephant in a city

where even the humans get too little.

" The cities are not good for them; the jungles are better, " said Aniruddha

Kadam, a 16-year-old student who had come to see the dying elephant.

By this time, a crane had lifted her into a large truck, and she was leaving

Mumbai for burial in the distant suburbs.

Behind the truck, a woman in a saffron-colored sari covered her head with

the fabric and began to sob. She was the owner's wife, and she cried out to

Lakshmi like a mourning mother, touching her feet in blessing. Then she

squatted behind the truck, and her sobs expanded into wails.

Khanna, the conservationist, had little sympathy for the woman. He had

traded bitter words with her earlier that day.

" I said, 'Don't take out your bloody crocodile tears,' " he recalled. " Why

are you taking it at 1:30 in the morning from Chembur to Panvel? " He

referred to the neighborhoods between which Lakshmi was walking when she was

hit.

" The driver is responsible for the death of the animal, " Khanna added. " But

the owner is also responsible. "

**

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