Once upon a time there was an elephant that lived as all elephants do, except he did not live in India or Africa, but at the end of our suburban street.

See, I have no choice but to start all of my tales with 'once upon a time, which is fair warning about their fictional fabric.

Believe what you wish, there are many on this face of our earth embracing events taken from books or television, trying to relive them in their backyards, streets, or schools. Full of themselves, swearing up and down that any story, however unlikely, could or did happen in their village.

"Hey, kids, wake up...a story's a story, let's not confuse them with real events from our everyday lives."

We don't cloak our accounts in secrecy; we are unselfish and generous with our stories.

You should know this, any attempt to reposition this account into real life will make you look silly and the subject of ridicule and humiliation. I advise you to reconcile with the thought that luck finally came, but only on the heads of children on my street. We and we only participated in the tale I'm preparing to tell.

Many years have passed since I was a little girl...now I suppose you'd consider me an eccentric, old, rich lady, but I clearly remember how it was.

Our elephant was recorded in the town's documents as Raj Kapur and he was larger than any other elephant in the world. Placed next to a normal elephant, the normal elephant would look like a baby.

If you looked down our street you could see Raj's back and bald head rising above the trees like a sad, barren hill. Anyone standing close to Raj, even the biggest and strongest man in the neighborhood, looked like a little boy. I am not even mentioning how a boy looked next to the giant elephant.

It was the greatest happiness for we kids to get close. Only a handful could reach the knuckle of his toe. And to climb up his hip? Goodness gracious. Firefighters would have to rescue you with a ladder, one of their long, long ones.

Our luck was that Raj did not mind the children who visited him; he was gentle and patient. Thus, when a kid whined and insisted on climbing to the top, Raj lowered his trunk to the asphalt and the kid simply climbed on. Grandfathers no longer appealed to firefighters for help. On top, you were high above everything, well above all the trees. At the end of the trunk raised heavenward, you realized how narrow and close our street was when compared to the streets of rest of the city.

From there, way up, at the end of a trunk raised to heaven, you finally saw how innate everything was compared to the entire view of the city.

Seeing the street from that height, you also noticed all the mess on balconies, mess that even spiders failed hiding under their web.

I want to emphasize that any boy or girl, once on top of the small world seen from the height of our elephant, became overcome by giddiness, glowing back to the heavens with the joy of being so small and yet raised so very high.

The story continues, and I promise I will come back to tell you how later on all the clutter hidden on the balconies of my town was finally organized and given a purpose