And perhaps that laid the groundwork for the most important elephant, Ambika. She entered my life on an otherwise uneventful day in 1952 when my father was reading "Le Voix de l’Est" (the Voice of the East) our local French daily. I was five; we lived in Granby, a town of twenty thousand, of whom ninety per cent were French. Dad read out an article to me, translating into English as he went. The article said that Prime Minister Nehru of the newly formed country of India had said that if “the children of Granby wanted an elephant for the zoo, he would try to dig one up.” Our mayor had just founded the Granby zoo, and had travelled to India to solicit contributions, I suspect that Nehru was looking for good publicity in commonwealth countries for his new state. But back in 1952, all I heard was the offer of an elephant, so I said, “Can I write to him?”
Dad typed my letter from dictation, which included my observing that, “I didn’t know elephants lived underground.” (I was puzzled by the digging up part of Nehru’s offer.) It turned out that there was an attempt to coordinate a collective letter from Granby’s French school children, but long before their letter got organized, (ah, educational bureaucracy!) I received a letter with the official seal of India (in red sealing wax!) from Nehru, explaining that he would send me an elephant, which were large creatures that did not live underground, but roamed through forests. Worthy of note were his hand-written grammatical corrections on the letter, and that the answer was received two weeks after we had mailed the original letter. Dad and Mom notified the Mayor of Granby; he notified the press, and I became an instant celebrity.
The story spread across Canada, and through the north-eastern US west to Chicago, south to New York. It was my first lesson in media distortion; my age ranged from five to twelve, sometimes there were two elephants, sometimes the elephant had already arrived. My parents decided that appearing on national TV was not what I needed, so I missed out on that. But it was still very heady stuff, as it was again two years later when a four year old elephant, Ambika, arrived in Granby complete with her mahout to help her initiation into this land of snow. I had to officially present her to the zoo, and made my speech. I was relaxed about the speech part, but nervous about standing next to Ambika; even though she was three years younger than me, she easily outweighed me by a factor of ten. My parents reassuringly explained that elephants were vegetarian, and only ate vegetables. I thought this and then responded with, “But how does the elephant know that I’m not a vegetable?” Maybe she didn’t and just wasn’t hungry but she seemed very friendly, and I still have the photos of us in the family’s official elephant album.
