Francis, who serves us our meals at the camp, is warm and gentle, tall and discreet, always impeccably turned out in crisp white shirts. He too speaks to us about the erosion of the Maasai culture. His father is the chief of his village. He says that a man who loses his culture is like a zebra without its stripes – an ass. His father has several wives and, as a result, Francis has close to a hundred siblings. He feels deprived as a monogamist, he says with a twinkle of his eye. I ask him if he remembers the names of all his siblings. He says, ‘Yes, of course, why wouldn’t I?’
The Maasai believe that all the cattle in the world belong to them. The Maasai are cattle herders – and raiders – by tradition. While the raiding has largely come to an end, cattle is still their unit of wealth.
The Bovine Price of Wedding
Simon, also a Maasai, tells us that he is not yet married because he has not been able to put together enough cattle to pay the bride price.
I call out loud at twilight as well as in the morn
I the warrior with the black cloak
After our game drive, one evening, we experience a ‘sundowner’. We stop at a clearing in the savannah where the camp staff have made a bonfire and a barbecue for us. Over glasses of white wine and mouthfuls of barbecued meat, we watch the sun set and the moon rise. The incandescent satellite reaches out to us: Fleshly apple. Bitten into, now a crescent. The glass of wine, bathed in its light, tastes like original sin.
I call out at twilight as well as in the morn
I the warrior of the long thin spear
So that neither the heavens nor the earth should say
I am arrogant for not calling out loud enough
Snarling Hyenas
We cross the Talek by a footbridge: A rudimentary one, planks lashed together with rope. We can hear it strain under our weight, which worries me. To unnerve me further, Shoma shakes the rope railings.
She throws back her head and laughs.
Snarls greet us, loud and vicious. Two hyena cubs and their mother are feeding on a carcass. The cubs are fighting over the food. The mother tries to keep them apart. Their faces are soaked in the blood of the carrion they devour. Simon says that hyena cubs often fight each other to the death, so there is more food left for the survivor.
The scavenger status of hyenas tends to make them ignoble to human eyes. Their looks too are unprepossessing. Even the cuteness Nature normally bestows on the young is absent in this breed. Quite unlike lion cubs: We see one playing with a bat-eared fox. It pretends to sleep and lets the fox come close, only to chase it away. A game repeated again and again.
When we come upon a large herd of impala in the tall grass, Shoma is so enchanted that, for the first time, she decides to operate the camera herself. She says they remind her of the deer in Shakuntala, a legend from ancient India.
Lonely Trees of the Masai Mara
The trees of the Masai Mara must feel lonely. Each one stands solitary, stranded in a sea of grass. They are happy when a bird decides to drop by, delighted when one decides to nest in its branches; elated when a giraffe comes by, even though it bites off its twigs. The tree distracts itself by pondering the giraffe’s peculiar shape. If ever one of god’s creatures stood as proof of the theory of evolution, it is the giraffe. Its impossibly long neck has to have evolved to allow it to eat its favourite food, acacia twigs.
The red letter day is when the tree hosts a leopard. The leopard carries its meal up into the branches. It uses one branch as a dining room, another as its bedroom. It alternately eats and slumbers, eats and slumbers.
The tree feels the pride of having royalty as its guest.
One morning, the tree has a new sort of company: Us. We have a picnic breakfast under it. Of course, only after checking that it does not currently have any spotted guests. We spread out a red chequered ‘table’ cloth on the ground and tuck into apples, croissants, boiled eggs and ham, washing it down with tea. As we drive off after our Enid Blyton picnic, the branches of the tree sway in a gust of wind. Is the acacia waving goodbye? In 1901, Dr Jagadish Chandra Bose proved that plants feel pain. Today, I too see the evidence: Our tree clearly feels the anguish of imminent separation from us, its fair weather friends.
The horizon is a train of wildlife. It reminds me of Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. In that story, the king of Shundi holds a music contest. And a train of musicians wend their way to his court, stretching across the horizon. As do the wildebeest in this story. They make their way from the Serengeti, crossing the human-made border from Tanzania into Kenya, crossing the nature-made river Mara: an epic migration, in search of fresh sweet grass.
Against the backdrop of these murals, Shoma and I toss a coin. Ashish captures it. In Murals, it represents the randomness of the choices we make, the arbitrariness of paths we take. ‘If we had done this, life would have turned out like that.’ But, what we do not know is that, perhaps, both alternatives ultimately take you to the same place. And if you are lucky, that is a beautiful place. A paradise. Like where we are now.
Though it is for a time that is all too short.
Saying Goodbye
On our last night at the camp, the staff decides to give us a send-off dinner. Not in the regular dining area, but in a thatched pergola away from the tents. The path is lit by red lanterns. The pavilion is festooned with white muslin that billows in the breeze. Good old Francis serves us a slap-up meal.
The next day, as we drive out to the airstrip, we ask Simon about the giant cactus near the gate, the one that towers above our heads. He says its sap is poison. If it enters your eyes, you go blind. It reacts severely even if it touches the skin. When he was young, he and his friends had applied it to their arms – thankfully not their eyes – as an act of machismo. They thought that the scars that the sap left would mark them as men.
The Maasai talk of guardian spirits. Each person has one. It protects you from evil, as Simon’s did. And when you die, if you have led a good life, it transports you to a place where you have a lot of cattle and lush pastures: Simon’s hope.
As we climb into the sky aboard the Cessna – our bags full of footage and memories – Simon, Francis and other friends stand below waving goodbye. They keep waving till they vanish.
Till we vanish.
And still upon the plains
like laminas of the planet
beneath a fresh hamlet of stars,
the ombú tree, king of grasslands
halted the free air in its murmurous flight…
**Note: The verses quoted are from Emily Dickinson’s A Spider Sewed at Night, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott, Pablo Neruda’s Canto General and traditional Maasai songs.
(This is the final and third of a series on shooting a movie in the Maasai Mara. Click to read part one and two.)
(Sumanto Chattopadhyay’s day job is that of a creative director with Ogilvy, South Asia, where he’s won many international awards for creativity. Sumanto is also an actor. He has worked with celebrated directors like Gurinder Chadha, Kumar Shahani and Buddhadeb Dasgupta. His other passions include photography and writing – short stories, poetry, articles on advertising, culture, language and travel.)
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