It was a quiet afternoon in the spring of 2018, and a young giraffe named Sachi was just coming into her own.
The little girl, weighing just a few ounces, was living a peaceful life with her family in the mountains of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
The family’s home was small and sparsely furnished, and Sachi loved it.
She liked to sing and play with the other giraffes.
Sachi would sit on a chair next to the fire, or she would sit next to a tree, or sometimes she would just hop on her back and climb onto the branches.
Every once in a while, she would jump down and run away from the fire.
That’s how Sachi learned to play the giraffe’s songs.
She loved it, and she wanted to do it for all her friends.
When Sachi’s parents asked her to leave, Sachi did not say no.
They had come to celebrate the birthday of her grandfather, a village chief who had died in a road accident years earlier.
Sashi had been given a new home, and the family was happy.
But Sachi had to find her way around the village, and soon, she was becoming quite the troublemaker.
SACHI LIES IN THE RAIN AND WALKES BY A RAINBOW.
“You can tell when Sachi is lying, because she will get into trouble,” her grandfather’s son, Anil, told me.
“She has to be careful.”
Anil and his wife, Vashishtha, lived in the same village, near where Sachi and her siblings lived.
The two boys would spend hours and hours on the mountain to sing to Sachi, or they would spend time in the forest to practice their singing.
At times, they would climb into the trees to sing, or walk.
They would come to their house to sing.
At other times, the brothers would climb up and down the mountain.
When they were bored, they might come back to their homes and start singing again.
At one point, Anile and Vashis son, Vijay, also came to visit.
It was in this moment that Sachi started to feel lonely.
But it was not because she had been abandoned or left alone in the jungle.
It wasn’t because she was too old to go to school.
“It’s because she is shy,” Vijay said.
“There is something in her.”
The brothers were very shy, too.
Anil had grown up in a very conservative family.
His father was a farmer, and he taught his sons to behave well.
As an adult, Anildil had left his village to become a school teacher in Madhya and began to raise a family of his own.
But when he was 20, he was asked to go out to a new village and teach in the old-style village.
“I got very excited about it, because I wanted to go and live with my grandfather and see what he was like,” Anil said.
He and Vijay returned to their village with their new-found confidence.
“We used to have a big house and a big courtyard,” Vijaya told me as we sat on a bench in their home.
“And I was really happy to live in such a small place.
It meant that I could sing.”
The next day, Vijaya, Anal and Sashi sang in the courtyard of the house.
They were surrounded by friends and neighbors, and they sang to Sachis ear.
The music was beautiful, and Anil loved it so much, he had to start singing it again.
Sachi LIES BY A RIVER.
“This is the first time I have ever heard the giraffas song,” Sachi told me one day as she walked in the water.
“They sing so well,” said Anil.
The girls sang to each other, and now, in the middle of the afternoon, Aniles voice rose.
“So, what are we doing?”
Anil asked.
“Oh, we are doing what we always do,” Vijayan replied.
“Sachi loves us, Sachs father,” Anile replied.
Then Anil noticed something.
Sashishtha and Vijaya were standing on a tree next to an empty house.
AnIL walked over and hugged the two girls.
“Why are you hugging Sachi?”
Anile asked.
The sisters laughed.
They told Anil that they had found a way to live with Sachi.
SCHITI LIVES IN A RAILROAD.
Sakhya’s mother, Sushil, and her sisters, Sheshana and Soha, lived on the edge of town, near a bridge.
Their house was surrounded by a lush forest, and it was home to two young girls.
The forest was very quiet, and there was no one around.
When the sisters heard a noise