—6—
Not long after we spied the tiger in the trees, she attacked a woman doing laundry at the river and dragged her into the forest. Her husband found her empty sari on the banks, and tracked a trail of blood into the forest, where it disappeared. Her body was not found.
A party of villagers arrived at the maharaja’s palace, demanding the tiger be hunted. My father was invited.
It was distantly horrifying that it had killed another person, but the tiger was a hundred times more real. I’d seen her. When I heard, I marched to my father’s study, where he was preparing himself. I said, “You can’t kill the tiger!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Elsie,” he said. “It’s killing people. You could very well be next. Would you want that?”
“No!” I thought of what Tanveer had said. “But it’s her land. She was here first.”
“Progress has brought us here now.” He dropped his booted foot to the floor, shook down his trouser leg. “God gave man dominion over the beasts, and at times they must be subdued.”
He stood and made to pass by, but I grabbed his arm. “No, please, Father! I saw her. She’s so beautiful.”
“Many beautiful things must die,” he said more gently. “This tiger will not halt until she’s brought down. How many people would you agree were enough to trade for her death, hmm? Twenty, fifty? There’s a tiger to the east who has killed hundreds. Would that be cause enough?”
I wept, pulling on his arm, aware that I was out of control, but unable to rein myself in. It seemed so brutal to hunt her. “No, please, don’t!”
“Enough,” he said, and yanked away harshly. “When you grow up, you’ll understand that nature must be subdued.”
He left me collapsed in a heap on the floor, unsubdued and unwilling to be.
The maharaja, along with other ICS members, formed a party with my father, and the maharani brought Tanveer and Gurdaya to our villa to wait. The children gathered in the nursery, quiet in our games but taking comfort in each other’s company.
“When do you begin school?” Gurdaya asked. The hunt didn’t bother her, and she was plainly attempting to distract her brother and me.
“Not long. I think in September.”
“As will I,” Tanveer said, shading the stripes of the tiger on his page. Unable to bear drawing the tiger, I focused on sketching his hands against the page. He had long fingers and oval nails. The angle of thumb to wrist was quite elegant, and I tried to decide why.
I looked up. “Will you go to the Diocesan Boys School?”
“No, I must travel to Ajmer.”
“Boarding school?”
“Of course.”
I stared at him, gutted a second time in two days. “When will you be back?”
“At the winter holidays.”
“But that’s months from now!”
“I will be in school with you here,” Gurdaya said.
I looked at her, and swallowed the searing disappointment in my chest. “That will be nice.” But I looked back to Tanveer, head bent over his paper. I’d grown used to his easy company. Gurdaya was pricklier, harder to please, and I didn’t always know how to meet her mercurial moods.
He looked up and must have caught something in my expression. “It will be all right,” he said. “You shall see.”
Later, Gurdaya deserted us to sit with the women.
Tanveer and I escaped to the grand lawn behind the villa and set up a game of bowls.
The air was quite still, sunlight so bright its weight scorched the grass.
Cicadas whirred in the trees, off and on, off and on, and the mountains were so washed out, they seemed as if they’d been watercolored against the horizon.
I could not think of anything but the tiger fleeing from the hunt, and then of Tanveer leaving for school, just as my brother had several years ago.
My chest ached, but to be a good sport, I desultorily hit the balls, taking my turn and watching as he took his.
“Well done,” I said, pulling my braid off my neck to let air get to it.
“Not really,” he replied. “You hardly played.”
“It’s hot.”
He gestured toward the grove of trees nearby the back wall, where a collection of chairs sat in the shade. The adults often sat there in the cool of the evening. “You should have lemonade and a snack.”
I nodded. It was often the case when my mood fell—I forgot to eat, forgot to drink. A servant named Champa polished a soup tureen just inside the door, and Tanveer spoke to her in Hindustani. She bowed and hurried away.
We settled, and in the shade, the temperature was not so exhausting. A breeze swept over us. His gaze fixed on the horizon, his mouth sober.
“I shall miss you,” I said. “I did not know you would be leaving.”
He bumped his sandaled foot against mine. “Will you send me drawings?”
“Yes, if you will write back.” I frowned. “My brother never writes back, ever. I have only ever had one letter from him in all this time. He barely writes to Mother.”
“Do you miss him, your brother? I never hear you speak of him.”
I shrugged. “Not as much as I did. It seems a very long time since he left for school.” The servant returned with a tray holding a pitcher of lemonade, a bowl of small apples, dal vadas, and a hefty slice of cake.
“Cake,” Tanveer cried. “Your cook makes the best coconut cake in the world.”
“He sent it to you, I’m quite sure.” I disliked the cloying taste of coconut very much. I poured glasses of lemonade and took a deep drink, feeling the cooling sensation all through my throat and belly. I sighed in relief.
Next to me, Tanveer dug into the cake with great intent, pausing to wash it down. “I will write.”
I nodded. It wouldn’t be the same, but it was better than nothing.
I watched him finish eating, carefully scraping up the very last bits of icing from the plate. “Do you like school?”
“Yes,” he said. “I get lonely because it’s far from home, but I like my studies. Do you?”
“Sometimes. Not maths, but history and literature please me. Poetry, art, all those lady things.”
He grinned. “You like astronomy.”
Warmed, I smiled back. Then paused and blurted out, “I shall hate when you go to school! I have not had a real friend before, Tanveer.”
“Nor have I.”
“That must not be true,” I said. “You have your sister, your many cousins.”
“Not the same as this,” he said, moving his finger to indicate our bodies.
“Truly?”
He pressed a hand to his heart. “Truly. Perhaps we have been friends in other lives, and in some part of ourselves, we remember.”
I was not unfamiliar with the concept of rebirth. It permeated the cultures around us, but I had never considered that perhaps I might have had other lives. It opened something in my heart, giving spaciousness to my thoughts.
Narrowing my eyes against the bright light, I tried to imagine our friendship in some other time, perhaps in some other land, like Egypt. “Perhaps we built the Pyramids.”
“You are a girl!”
“Perhaps I was a boy in another life, and you were a girl.” My spirits lifted, and I leaned forward, apple in hand. “Perhaps we were both girls, or both boys!”
He frowned. “I do not think I was ever a girl.”
“Why not? If people can be oxen or birds, why not boys or girls?”
His scowl deepened. “I have not been a girl.”
I laughed at him, but when he didn’t soften, I allowed his myth. Chewing another apple, I thought to myself that men never wanted to be women, but I wanted—deeply—to be a man. To have that power, that choice. “I don’t like being a girl,” I said.
It surprised him. “Why?”
“Why don’t you want to be one?”
“Because girls—” His forehead beetled. “Because.”
“Because everyone tells girls what to do!”
He measured me for a long moment. “That is the way of things.”
“Why?” I said back to him.
“Because you are small and weak and need protection.”
I snorted. “Your sister doesn’t need protection from anyone.” And when I saw his recognition that I was right—Gurdaya was a fierce girl, and her father indulged her, to a point—I said clearly, “Neither do I. I am your equal, Tanveer Singh, and you know that’s true.”
He continued to look at me, the waters of his dark eyes roiling with his thoughts, light and dark. At last, he took a breath. “I fear I must admit you are correct.”
I laughed. “That is why we are friends!”
It took them three days to track the tiger down.
By the time the party returned, grimy and still half drunk on both Scotch and bloodlust, it was twilight.
We saw them from the roof, the motley group with the body of the tiger strapped to a long wagon.
I cried out, seeing her, and Tanveer gripped my hand.
We shared a moment of deepest grief, both of our faces streaming with tears.
“We should go down and pay our respects,” he said.
“I cannot bear it.”
He said, “She died. We can manage to bear witness.”
Nodding, I followed him down. By the time we reached the yard, others had poured out of the palace, eager to see the slain tiger. Tanveer and I ducked between them until we stood by the wagon.
She was so much larger than I had imagined, her paws the size of my entire belly, her nose as long as the body of Tanveer’s cat.
Her golden eyes stared sightlessly out at us.
A terrible pain rose in my chest, through my throat, and poured through my eyes, a stream of hot tears that did nothing to ease the sorrow of her loss.
I looked at Tanveer, and his jaw was set hard against his tears, tears he dared not shed in this company, but he looked at me, and gave a faint nod.
I looked back, took her in, tried to truly see her, this creature of infinite beauty, her fur thick and even more orange than I had imagined, the stripes clearly defined. A wound on her chest showed the death mark, and I hoped she had died quickly and without pain.
“May we touch her?” Tanveer asked.
My father nodded. We moved as a unit and each of us placed a hand on her head. Her ear was soft and flexible, the whiskers long and magnificent. Tanveer tilted his head, feeling under her jaw, around her nose. “She is just like a cat.”
One of the hunters snorted. “A cat that would eat you like a mouse, tearing you bit by bit.”
I shuddered, looking at her big yellowed teeth.
I stroked her shoulder, realizing that my fantasy of her seeing me and letting me be was only that, a fantasy.
She would have eaten me, too, and that seemed both terrifying and fair.
It had been her world and we invaded it.
Surely she was right to kill invaders? “I’m sorry,” I whispered, then kissed her and fled to a hidden place in the garden where I could weep my sorrow out properly.
Tanveer found me there a little while later.
I had worn myself out sobbing, and rested my face on my arms at the small table.
He touched my shoulder, and I looked up.
He was silently weeping, and I stood up to embrace him, letting him cry on my shoulder, taking comfort in our shared despair. “She was so beautiful,” he said.
“She was,” I agreed.
“We shall never forget her.”
“Never.”