This night is interrupted by a
lion near the water hole not more than a hundred years adrift of the tent. Dad
awakes in a panic but cannot find his voice loud enough to wake me up. So I
sleep on and dad panics on! Monkeys are chattering as they do when they
anticipate action, the single old buffalo that is rejected by his herd is
somewhere in this mix... possibly the victim and there is obviously a carnivore
or two on the prowl in the moonlight. In the morning we find out that a herd of
elephants passed by not to far away and we breakfast as we watch zebra and
wildebeest graze past the watering hole. This is surreal.
Today is a rest day for some of us
like Pat, Dad and I only take one short game drive. Ali, Susan, Jim and Nahid
have gone back to the Kenya border to try their luck at photographing the
elusive river crossing.
Later in the day we witness real
drama. As we approach several cars parked near an acacia we see a leopard
sleeping on a horizontal tree limb about 20 feet off the ground, its legs and
paws hanging down toward the earth. Looks to us like it might have just
consumed its kill and was resting. However, even as we watched, it awoke,
gracefully descended the tree, walked a few hundred yards and crossed between
our cars to the other side of the road. And with a dozen zoom lenses trained
upon it, it ducked in the short grass and disappeared. Up ahead in the distance
we watched a lonely antelope pick up its head to smell the air as his eyes
darted from side-to-side and he stood deathly still while the wind whipped
everything around him. The hunt was on. For five very slow minutes leopard
spots faintly appeared and disappeared in the grass as we tracked the predator,
who tracked the antelope. After a complete stillness in which we (and the
antelope) worried about where the leopard was, it pounced from the undergrowth
and leapt at the antelope. The antelope was alert and he kicked into a flying
start. The chase lasted all of ten seconds and the antelope got away. Soon
after, the leopard walked back to his tree, found another nice branch and lay
down for part-2 of this nap!
As we lie in
our beds the winds whip up in the Serengeti as they do every night
between 10pm and dawn. Travellers across the endless plains, they are
here and knocking at the door of our tent. Zippers taut and the fabric
flapping loudly the tent strains to hold its shape as gusts finds
passage thru openings in the structure.
I
go outside to bring in the wash off the clothesline after dad tells me
he doesn’t want to search the camp in the morning looking for his safari
clothing. Hmm…I wickedly wonder, how hard will it be to find camouflage
clothing when it blows off into the woods! Probably harder than finding
the American Indian sniper dude who spent three days camouflaged in
the Vietnam countryside without moving or eating just waiting for his
target! Fern told me about this hero of his during our morning game
ride! As I fold the fresh dried clothes, dad mentions that its been a
little under a hundred years since his mother (dadiammi) was born a few
miles from here in Kenya! Coincidentally, dad was able to visit his
mother’s land earlier today during the afternoon game safari with Fern
and Phillips.
’The
claim of belonging to’ and the 'right to belong to' a place and a
culture and to adopt it and call it your 'own' or you ‘home' …has in my
opinion become one of the fascinating questions for people of our time.
Increased mobility of people across the globe and human migrations with
no return has displaced people and their descendants. While immigrants
like Dad who came here as adults self-identify as ‘Indians’ or
‘Hyderabadis’, the next generation is not Indian. They self identify as
Americans. However, there are other families where global educations,
jobs at multinational companies and frequent family migrations have left
the young ones trying to answer the question of where is home for them.
I have a close friend who has spend his entire professional career
working in Europe and Asia all the while raising his children. These
children have not spent a substantial part of their lies immersed in any
one culture or country to call it their own…comfortably. What do they
call home? How do they self-identify? Do they feel as strongly about
their ‘home’ and what is means to them as they parents did?
There
are Middle eastern counties where many of us work for years and indeed
entire lifetimes without earning the right to settle down there and
call it home. Our kids in these countries have to be schooled and
educated elsewhere giving them insufficient years and immersion in any
one place to call it home. This maybe an age old issue that migrant
labor has always created.
While the immediate and smaller question is about what one calls home…
the larger question asks, Is there a need for a human being to have a home-town or home-culture?
Is
this a strengthening, nurturing and inspiring influence or a
psycho-social construct that is rendered irrelevant with the advent of
social media, globalization and mass migrations?
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