By CHRIS VAUGHN
Star-Telegram staff writer

FORT WORTH -- Hemanta Mishra has never forgotten her. She is, more than anything else, the reason he wrote a love story. Her name is Aarati. It means evening prayers in the Nepali language.

She answers to it, perking her hairy ears up as she lumbers -- all 2 tons of her -- across her enclosure to eat bamboo from the hands of her keepers.

Animals come and go at the Fort Worth Zoo all the time. But the arrival of an Asian rhinoceros in Fort Worth in 1990 was unique. Aarati, the gift of a King, was a prehistoric-looking baby, a mystical beast and religious symbol to a devoted wildlife biologist in Nepal.

Mishra had captured her and a male calf named Arun in the plains beneath Mount Everest and sent them to Fort Worth. He had done it as a hedge against the species' extinction but also to fulfill the wishes of the Bass family, who had launched an effort in the 1980s to pull the zoo out of mediocrity.

"They were our first big, exciting new additions to the zoo," said Ramona Bass, who has led the Fort Worth Zoological Association for 18 years. "Before we knew it, we were one of the two or three zoos in the nation with white, black and Asian rhinos. Within the space of a year,
we were on the map."

Anyone who wonders how far the reach of the Bass family extends need only visit the Asian rhino exhibit at the Fort Worth Zoo or read Mishra's newly published book, The Soul of the Rhino. Ed Bass, who is given the lion's share of the credit for making it happen, can hardly believe the tale either, and he lived it. "It's one of those things you look back on and say, 'Would I even dare try it today?'" he said.

Mishra, 62, grew up in a well-to-do Nepali family and rejected a career in government for one almost entirely devoted to the forests of his homeland and the rhinos that live there.

He has lived in the United States since 1992, and despite his background in wildlife, he works with the American Himalayan Foundation on projects to benefit women and homeless children. But in writing his book, with help from retired Dow Jones & Co. Vice President Jim Ottaway Jr., he relived the magic of Aarati and Arun and their relocation to Fort Worth.

"The process was so complicated and so emotional and also a very great experience," Mishra said in a phone interview from his home in Virginia.. "Bringing the rhinos to Fort Worth is what triggered the idea for me."

But if that's the beginning, there is a prologue.

A confluence of interests In the 1970s, a young Ed Bass traveled to Nepal to help design and
build the Vajra Hotel, a pagoda-influenced building that blends Eastern and Western features.
A fair number of Americans, particularly of the artistic sort, visited Nepal at the time, but Mishra did not know then that Bass came from a family of immense wealth and status.

He only knew that he liked Bass' worldview on conservation and development. "I was quite struck with his ideas about how to reconcile animal conservation, poverty and human needs in a poor country like Nepal,"

Mishra said. "His thinking was ahead of its time."

(The Basses are not the only billionaires in Fort Worth whom Mishra knows. He is also "old friends" with David Bonderman, a financier with a longtime interest in the Himalayan region.)
By the mid-1980s, Lee and Ramona Bass and Ed Bass got involved in fundraising and planning new exhibits for the Fort Worth Zoo. Ed Bass also served on the board of the World Wildlife Fund, based in New York.

Along with well-known local conservationist Harry Tennison, they helped bring critically endangered black rhinos to Texas in 1989, putting many on Lee and Ramona Bass' ranch in South Texas and some at the Fort Worth Zoo.

It was then, Ramona Bass said, that "Ed got excited about bringing in Asian rhinos too."
Ed Bass said it was a confluence of his interests -- the zoo, conservation and Nepal -- all of which were at critical stages of their development.

"It was a magical alignment of the stars that everybody's interest came together," he said.
When Ed Bass approached Mishra about obtaining rhinos for his hometown zoo, Mishra's eyebrows rose.

He knew next to nothing about Fort Worth, did not know the city had a zoo, and most importantly, could not vouch for what the zoo looked like.

Virtually every zoo in the U.S. desperately wanted a pair of Asian rhinos, and Fort Worth's was asking to be put first in line. Plus, there were whispers to Mishra from the environmental world that the Fort Worth Zoo wasn't good enough, that it was an average mid-sized zoo that did not have enough money or expertise.

"There was concern about the enclosures," Mishra said.

And, frankly, Mishra did not care much for zoos. He worked to save animals in the wild, and at that time, the two groups belonged in very different philosophical camps. Mishra relied heavily, though, on the counsel of the World Wildlife Fund, whose leaders assured him that the animals would thrive in Fort Worth.

"We got assurance that they were going to expand the zoo," Mishra said.

Money and extinction
It is doubtful that Mishra could have blocked the request, even if he had wanted to. The Basses had connections to the royal family, and they had already succeeded in getting a formal request from the U.S. government to the Nepalese king, itself no small feat.

"Ed was friends with Prince Gyanendra," Ramona Bass said. "There were a lot of people with friendships with the World Wildlife Fund who would not be able to get wild-caught Asian rhinos. It's because of Ed that we got them. There's no question about that."

But Ed Bass believes much of the credit should go to Mishra. "It was not without controversy in Nepal," Ed Bass said. "What he had to do was amazing."

Nonetheless, Mishra ended up fully supporting the deal for two reasons: money and extinction.
Ed Bass pledged $150,000 to a fund that would finally enable Mishra to expand his conservation program in Nepal. There was also the matter of the dwindling numbers of his beloved animals.

"If for any reason they got wiped out in the wild, we would have a base in captivity," Mishra said. "We would have a right to the offspring. My real motivation was to have a gene pool in captivity."
In November 1989, Mishra shot darts into "Crooked-Nose Female" and her calf in Royal Chitwan National Park. Then workers took the calf into camp and spent days trying to tame a temperamental and angry baby.

A short time later, they captured a male calf, the offspring of "Left Split Ear," from a different area of the park.

The king of Nepal named them, and in a small ceremony in their jungle camp, Mishra performed a ritual of worship by sacrificing a goat, chicken and pigeon. He then whispered their new names into their ears.

On May 10, 1990, Arun and Aarati landed at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport in handmade wooden crates. They weighed about 400 pounds and stood waist-high on a grown man.

"They were sooo cute, those Asian babies," Ramona Bass said. Ed Bass remembers being thrilled when he saw them at D/FW. Just flying them there had been an ordeal, he said.
"It was almost unbelievable that we had pulled it off because of the complexity and the details that had go to right," he said. "All of us involved were very proud for the Fort Worth Zoo."

More than 8,000 miles away, Mishra was heartsick at what he had done and what he had lost.
Mishra had lived with the rhinos for four months. They had slept with him, had followed him around "like a pair of friendly dogs," and he had listened to their homesick wails when they were first captured. He found himself undeniably attached.

"It's not a good feeling when you snatch a baby from the forest and its mother," he said. "You feel like a kidnapper. It's such a painful experience."

A boon for Fort Worth's zoo
On Texas soil, the rhinos were trucked down Airport Freeway to the zoo with Nepalese handlers and moved into a giraffe barn near the front of the park, a building that has since been torn down. That is where they made their home for three years, until the Asian
rhino exhibit was completed in 1993 as part of a massive makeover of the Asian animal area.
By then the city no longer managed the zoo day to day. The Fort Worth Zoological Association assumed management of the park in 1991, which led to an almost complete makeover of the exhibits.

"It probably helped us privatize," Ramona Bass said of the rhino acquisitions. "Before, we were just a city zoo. But that was a huge deal in the zoo world."

The current zoo director, Michael Fouraker, said getting a pair of Asian rhinos is still a big deal.
It happens so rarely that Arun and Aarati remain two of the most valuable captive animals in the United States.

"For more than a decade, these two animals remained the most genetically valuable in the U.S. population," Fouraker said. "There were no relations whatsoever to them in the United States. Arun has sired several calves so he's come down a little, but Aarati has not had a calf so she is still at the top of the list."

Late in 1990, Mishra flew to Fort Worth for a gala in which he and the rhinos were the center of attention. Then-Mayor Bob Bolenpresented him with honorary citizenship in Fort Worth, a certificate that still hangs in Mishra's Virginia house.

It was all worth it to him, hurt and all.

"One, it provided me to get the financial support from the World Wildlife Fund, without which I could not have moved rhinos to" the other national park, Mishra said. "Two, it did generate a lot of publicity, which helped me in fundraising with Ed's friends and other supporters.
"It was a pragmatic tradeoff."

Mishra has changed his mind about zoos too.

"The whole process made me realize the value zoos have," he said. "They provide a kind of insurance."

It's been seven or eight years since Mishra has dropped in on his "babies" in Fort Worth. But they are never far from him. "It's something in my mind all the time," he said. "Fort Worth has
done a really good job with them."

Asian rhinos
There are three types of Asian rhinos: Sumatran, Javan and Indian. The Fort Worth Zoo has the Indian species. There are an estimated 2,400 left in the wild of Nepal and northern India, and their future relies heavily on conservation efforts. They are mostly solitary animals and quite comfortable in the water or on land. As with all rhinos, they are extremely agile and quick and have very good hearing.

Arun, the male, was transferred to the San Diego Wild Animal Park in 2001 because he would not breed with Aarati. Zoo Director Michael Fouraker said the pair only fought at breeding time, perhaps because they had been raised together like brother and sister. He has sired close to 10 calves in San Diego with other females. He will return to Fort Worth later this year with a female mate.

Aarati, the female, is due to transfer to the San Diego park later this year to see if she can successfully breed. She may need help, and the park has a reproductive physiologist on staff. She weighs a bit more than 4,000 pounds but is a gentle soul, her keepers said. "She's
spoiled," said Jason Barr, the elephant manager. Asian rhinos are still not completely safe in Nepal, which has been wracked by political unrest and violence in recent years. But Hemanta
Mishra is encouraged that the population in Royal Chitwan National Park is still strong, probably because of the benefits of environmental tourism. "In any country with political instability, the ones who suffer are children and wild animals," he said. "That is exactly what has happened in Nepal. I feel awful at times, but in our business, you have to be optimistic. Saving animals like rhinos is never over."

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