Elephants, Netaji's treasure and my grandfather

Supriya Roychoudhury's piece Hathi on FiftyTwo.in is clear in my memory both because it was excellent and because it was one of the few bright spots during the second wave of Covid in April-May 2021.

(https://fiftytwo.in/story/hathi/)

It told the touching tale of Hathi, an elephant presented by India to the Kabul Zoo in 1973.

As Roychoudhury mentions in her piece, the gift of Hathi was continuing in the tradition of elephant diplomacy established by Jawaharlal Nehru. The first of these pachydermic gifts was named Indira, after the Prime Minister's daughter, and handed over to the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo shortly after Independence.

This elephant, and how it became a part of modern Japanese life, is also a snippet from my family history. Nehru intended the elephant to be a gift to the children of Japan. My grandfather, KK Chettur, was independent India's representative and subsequently first ambassador to Japan. My mother, as a 10 year old, represented the children of India in the handover ceremony. When I lived in Japan in the 1990s, an ageing untenshu san (taxi driver) mentioned Indira the elephant to me as a symbol of the bond between India and Japan.

In the early 1950s, my grandfather became one of independent India's first whistleblowers, raising concerns about two shady characters lurking about in Tokyo. They had been accused of misappropriating treasures recovered from the plane crash in which Subhas Chandra Bose was killed. In a series of letters to the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi, he complained bitterly about the manner in which the situation was being handled. The declassification of official documents have shed some light on this fascinating tale, though much still remains shrouded in mystery.

(https://frontierindia.com/mystery-the-lost-treasure-of-subhash-chandra-boses-indian-national-army/)

Indira the elephant died in 1983, a year before her namesake was assassinated.