In a busy suburb in Mumbai, I was waiting for the cab when a young woman approached me and inquired if I knew anybody of the Animal Welfare Board. I asked her what the matter was. She said a biker had trampled a cat’s leg, broken. She wanted to inform the Board if they could take care of the hapless stray cat. New to the town, I told her to ask others and she hurried to the person next to me, inquiring.

As she went by, I looked at her closely. She was twenty, wore salwar and kurta. She had her oiled locks of hair tousled enough for a dozen sparrows to nest in. The tattered end of her brick red salwarflapped at her paltry plastic slippers, and her rumpled blue kurta had many pea-size holes. She seemed heading from one households’ mopping, to the other. I wondered if she were possessed.

And, possessed she was!

She reminded me of Jaan Baksh – another possessed – the illiterate, poor, village simpleton I met in my search for a foot soldier who could tell me about the human elephant confrontation. He had been mahut for forty-five years when we met. He was sixty, a devout Muslim, a diehard believer that elephants were as humane as we were; and possessed he was, of elephants.

Jaan wouldn’t eat before feeding his ward, Shiva, the elephant. He wouldn’t miss a day to bathe and scrub it daily and fail to cut its nails each fortnight. And, Jaan wouldn’t sleep if Shiva were awake in pain.

One evening, while on a tiger-hunt episode, Jaan refused to cross a swollen river because of Shiva’s smaller size. Crossing would have wetted cushion on Shiva’s back and sickened the animal. He said he would rather wait for the boat than endanger Shiva’s health. And that wouldn’t be until next morning when the boat would arrive and ferry the cushion across. His fellow mahuts warned him of lurking tigers, and mocked his ‘madness’ about a beast’s wellbeing. Jaan laughed them off, and they left with their elephants. He slept his night away in that tiger-infested grassland, Shiva guarding snoring Jaan against roaring tigers. The man and the beast trusted each other so well!

But their friendship didn’t last long. Because of a misadventure of Shiva, authorities ordered its execution and asked Jaan to certify Shiva as insane. Jaan refused that and endorsed Shiva as normal. But they ignored his reiteration and shot Shiva dead. The image of bullet-ridden Shiva collapsing shattered Jaan’s psyche. He resolved not to work with elephants any more, resigned his post, and returned to his village. But the mahutin him wouldn’t let him rest in peace and he couldn’t keep his resolution. Six years later, he sneaked out of his home to be with elephants, again. When he returned to his family a decade and half later, they had all thought him long since dead. In the meantime, however, Jaan had revived a young female elephant from her deathbed, and trained two hundred mahuts; and as many calves.

Jaan has since retired and lives in a hut close to an elephant habitat. I wonder what a self-effacing enormous soul lies shrouded in such a simpleton. One of these days, when Jaan dies, what a treasure trove of knowledge of elephants, would die!

When the filmmaker converted the narrative into a movie, I believe, Jaan’s rare attachment with elephants moved the Jury enough to anoint the movie – God on the Edge – with a National Award. Many more laurels to the movie followed.

The honk of the cab jolted me out of my reverie. When I looked last at the girl, I saw her talking into her cell phone, agitation all over her. She had got the Board Official’s number, and got him.

Issues like water conservation, sanitation, environment protection, global warming, or agitation against the rabid rush to stockpile bombs to bomb each other, need people possessed of those issues, like Jaan and the girl, of compassion for animals.

I trust so long as such possessed ones are around we have hope.

Do we?