Elephants too heavy to return

Gifts are always reciprocal. Elephants are huge, maybe bigger than the picture we have of them before we have seen one. What would such bigness be in reciprocation of? Tracing the path of transactions can be fun, but it takes all the time. All the time in the world (and in our tiny lives).

So I will leave this one incomplete. This transaction is not mapped out fully. What happened is that one day Daya arrived in a ship at the Tokyo port. It was accompanied with all the regalia of a new (and old) state. A state with old habits, big ambitions and strict codes of returning favours. The Tokyo bay was sleeping when the elephants arrived. Nobody was there. The elephants knocked down the walls of their container and strolled around.

Gifts become funny when they come with grand invocations, magnanimous desires, leaving options open for repeat-acts. this magnanimity sometimes asks for so much, so so much, that even a little bit received feels like something. Also when a gift is another coin than one that can be traded easily, a cascade begins. You struggle to communicate yourself and I struggle to communicate and we keep exchanging gifts.

I was actually taught not to participate in the messy politics of gifts and keep life simple. But I have missed out. With the mess comes that which becomes the reason sometimes. Warmth is constructed sometimes and when warmth is warm enough, transfers happen. A chain of gifts was triggered by Nehru by a gift of a baby elephant to Japan. This was repeated by a gift of two baby elephants by Indira, around 35 years later. They were in a way too heavy to return. Heavy with what is another story.

This story is about the elephants who reached the Tokyo port. And drifted off in some direction and found their way in a zoo amongst children. Who find them too big, too big to take them for real. Sometimes. But they love the quiet hugeness, the shock. The funny thing is being in Tokyo and going to meet the Elephants and doing an audit. Were the gifts well-received? Being the stand-in for all the elephants stood for, being the gifter all of the sudden and taking everyone by surprise.