B&B for jumbos

Meet Bomman and Bellie, the on- and off-screen elephant whisperers

- LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

Far away from the cries of joy at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles following The Elephant Whisperers’ historic Oscar win, Bomman was straining his ears for a different cry inside the Palacode forest in Marandahalli in Tamil Nadu’s Dharmapuri district. Bomman, one-half of the elephant whisperer couple featured in the Netflix documentary, had spent three sleepless nights searching for two baby elephants, who had lost their mother to electrocution. “How am I going to unite them with the herd? I am worried about the little one,” he tells THE WEEK. “The little one kept crying for milk and did not eat anything for the past three days. I kept coming back to the spot where the mother elephant and a Makhna (a male elephant without tusks) were buried. How can I eat or sleep after seeing this?” As he talks about the baby elephant, he remembers Raghu and Ammu, the calves he raised with his wife Bellie, in The Elephant Whisperers.

Bellie, meanwhile, is busy receiving plaudits for the Oscar nod from her indigenous Kattunayakan community in Theppakadu, near the picturesque Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in the Nilgiris. “I am overwhelmed as the world now talks about elephants and elephant caretakers,” she tells THE WEEK.

Bomman left Dharmapuri only after Chief Minister M.K. Stalin asked him to come to Chennai. His phone has been ringing incessantly. “I have been getting congratulatory calls from everyone,” he says after meeting Stalin at the state secretariat in Chennai. “I am happy. But I will be very happy only when I am able to rescue the little one. I have to reunite it with the herd or take it to the Theppakadu elephant camp in the Mudumalai range.”