The Years of Rice and Salt Read online

  THREE

  Tiger Mercy

  Kya the tiger moved through elephant grass, stomach full and fur warm in the sun. The grass was a green wall around her, pressing in on every side. Above her the grass tips waved in the breeze, crossing the blue of the sky. The grass grew in giant bunches, radiating out from their centre and bending over at the tops, and though the clumps were very close, her way forward was to find the narrow breaks at the bottom between clumps, pushing through the fallen stalks. Eventually she came to the edge of the grass, bordering a parklike maidan, burned annually by humans to keep it clear. Here grazed great numbers of chital and other deer, wild pig, and antelopes, especially the nilghai.

  This morning there stood a lone wapiti doe, nibbling grass. Kya could imitate the sound of a wapiti stag, and when she was in heat, she did it just to do it; but now she simply waited. The doe sensed something and jolted away. But a young gaur wandered into the clearing, dark chestnut in colour, white-socked. As it approached Kya lifted her left forepaw, straightened her tail back, and swayed slightly fore and back, getting her balance. Then she threw her tail up and leapt across the park in a series of twenty-foot bounds, roaring all the while. She hit the gaur and knocked it down, bit its neck until it died.

  She ate.

  Ba-loo-ah!

  Her kol-babl, a jackal that had been kicked out of his pack and was now following her around, showed his ugly face at the far end of the maidan, and barked again. She growled at him to leave, and he slunk back into the grass.

  When she was full she got up and padded downhill. The kol-bahl and ravens would finish the gaur.

  She came to the river that wound its way through this part of the country. The shallow expanse was studded with islands, each a little jungle under its canopy of sal and shisharn trees, and several of these held nests of hers, in the matted undergrowth of brake and creepers, under tamarisk trees overhanging the warm sand on the banks of the stream. The tiger padded over pebbles to the water’s edge, drank. She stepped in the river and stood, feeling the current push her fur downstream. The water was clear and warmed by the sun. In the sand at the stream’s edge were pawprints of a number of animals, and in the grass their scents: wapiti and mouse deer, jackal and hyena, rhinoceros and gaur, pig and pangolin; the whole village, but none in sight. She waded across to one of her islands, lay in the smashed grass of her bed, in the shade. A nap. No cubs this year, no need to hunt for another day or two: Kya yawned hugely in her bed. She fell asleep in the silence that extends out from tigers in the jungle.

  She dreamed that she was a little brown village girl. Her tail twitched as she felt again the heat of a cooking fire, the feel of sex face to face, the impact of witch-killing stones. A sleeping rumble, big fangs exposed. The fear of it woke her up and she stirred, trying to fall back into a different dream.

  Noises pulled her back into the world. Birds and monkeys were talking about the arrival of people, coming in from the west, no doubt to the ford they used downstream. Kya rose quickly and splashed off the island, slipped into thickets of elephant grass backing the curve of the stream. People could be dangerous, especially in groups; individually they were helpless, it was only a question of picking one’s moment and attacking from behind. But groups of them could drive animals into traps or ambushes, and that had been the end of many tigers, left skinned and beheaded. Once she had seen a male tiger try to walk a pole to some meat, slip on a slippery patch, and fall onto spikes hidden in leaves. People had arranged that.

  But today, no drums, no shouts, no bells. And it was too late in the day for humans to hunt. More likely they were travellers. Kya slipped through the elephant grass unobtrusively, testing the air with ear and nose, and moving towards a long glade in the grass that would give her a view of their ford.

  She settled down in a broken clump to watch them pass. She lay there with her eyes slitted.

  There were other humans there, she saw, hiding like she was, scattered through the sal forest, lying in wait for the humans to arrive at the ford.

  As she noticed this, a column of people reached the ford, and the hidden ones leapt out of their hiding places and screamed as they fired arrows at the others. A big hunt, it seemed. Kya settled down and watched more closely, ears flattened. She had come upon such a scene once before, and the number of humans killed had been surprising. It was where she had first tasted their flesh, as she had had twins to feed that summer. They were certainly the most dangerous beast in the jungle, apart from the elephant. They killed wantonly, like kol-bahls sometimes did. There would be meat left here afterwards, no matter what else happened. Kya hunkered down and listened more than watched. Screams, cries, roars, shouts, trumpet blasts, death rattles; somewhat like the end of one of her hunts, only multiplied many times.

  Eventually it grew quiet. The hunters left the scene. When they had been gone a long time, and the ordinary shush of the jungle had returned, Kya shifted onto her paws and looked around. The air reeked of blood, and her mouth watered. Dead bodies lay on both banks of the river, and were caught on snags against the banks of the stream, or had rolled into shallows. The tiger padded among them cautiously, pulled a large one into the shadows and ate some of it. But she was not very hungry. A noise caused her to slink swiftly back into the shadows, hair erect on her back, looking for the source of the sound, which had been a cracked branch. Now a footfall, over there. Ah. A human, still standing. A survivor.

  Kya relaxed. Sated already, she approached the man out of no more than curiosity. He saw her and jumped backwards, startling her; his body had done it without his volition. He stood there looking at her in the way hurt animals sometimes did, accepting their fate; only in this one’s face there was also a little roll of the eyes, as if to say, what else could go wrong, or, not this too. It was a gesture so like that of the girls she had watched gathering wood in the forest that she paused, unhungry. The hunters who had ambushed this man’s group still occupied the trail to the nearest village. He would soon be caught and killed.

  He expected her to do it. Humans were so sure of themselves, so sure they had the world worked out and were lords of it all. And with their monkey numbers and their arrows, so often they were right. This as much as anything was why she killed them when she did. They were a scrawny meal in all truth, which of course was not the main consideration, many a tiger had died trying to reach the tasty flesh of the porcupine; but humans tasted strange. With the things they ate, it was no surprise.

  The confounding thing would be to help him; so she padded to his side. His teeth chattered with his trembling. He was no longer stunned, but holding his place on purpose. She nosed up one of his hands, rested it on her head between her ears. She held still until he stroked her head, then moved until he was stroking between her shoulders, and she was standing by his side, facing the same direction. Then very slowly she began to walk, indicating by her speed that he should come along. He did, hand stroking her back with every step.

  She led him through the sal forest. Sunlight blinked through trees onto them. There was a sudden noise and clatter, then voices from the trail below, in the trees, and the hand clutched at her fur. She stopped and listened. Voices of the people-hunters. She growled, then coughed deeply, then gave a short roar.

  Dead silence from below. In the absence of an organized beat, no human could find her up here. Sounds of them hurrying off came to her on the wind.

  The way was now free. The man’s hand was clenched in the fur between her shoulderblades. She turned her head and nuzzled his shoulder and he let go. He was more afraid of the other men than of her, which showed sense. He was like a helpless cub in some ways, but quick. Her own mother had held her by biting the same fold of skin between the shoulderblades that he had seized, and at the same pressure — as if he too had once been a tigress mother, and was making an unremembered appeal to her.

  She walked the man slowly to the next ford, across it and along one of the deer trails. Wapiti were bigger than humans, and it was
an easy trail. She took him to one of her entrances to the big nullah of the region, a steep and narrow ravine, so precipitous and cragbound that its floor was only accessible at a couple of points. This was one, and she led the man down to the ravine floor, then downstream towards a village where the people smelled much like he did. The man had to walk fast to match her gait, but she did not slow down. Only a few pools dotted the ravine floor, as it had been hot for a long time. Springs dripped over ferny rockfalls. As they padded and stumbled along she thought about it, and seemed to recall a hut, near the edge of the village she was headed for, that had smelled almost exactly like him. She led him through a dense grove of date palms filling the floor of the nullah, then still denser clumps of bamboo. Green coverts of jaman fruit bushes covered the sides of the ravine, mixed with the her thorn bush, dotted with its acid orange fruit.

  A gap in this fragrant shrubbery led her up and out of the nullah. She sniffed; a male tiger had been here recently, spraying the exit from the nullah to mark it as his. She growled, and the man clutched the fur between her shoulders again, held on for help as she climbed the last pitch out.

  Back in the forested hills flanking the nullah, angling uphill, she had to nudge him with her shoulder — he wanted to contour the slope, or go directly down to the village, not up and around to it. A few bumps from her and he gave that up, and followed her without resistance. Now he had a male tiger to avoid too, but he did not know that.

  She led him through the ruins of an old hill fort, overgrown with bamboo, a place that humans avoided, and that she had made her lair several winters running. She had borne her cubs here, near the human village and among human ruins, to make them safer from male tigers. The man recognized the place, and calmed down. They continued on towards the backside of the village.

  At his pace it was a long way. His body hung from his joints, and she saw how hard it must be to walk on two feet. Never a moment’s rest, always balancing, falling forwards and catching himself, as if always crossing a log over a creek. Shaky as a new cub, blind and wet.

  But they reached the village margin, a barley field rippling in the afternoon light, and stopped in the last elephant grass under the sal trees. The barley field had furrows of earth into which they poured water, clever monkeys that they were, tiptoeing through life in their perpetual balancing act.

  At the sight of the field, the exhausted creature looked up and around. He led the tiger now, around the field, and Kya followed him closer to the village than she would have dared in most situations, though the afternoon’s mix of sun and shadow provided her with maximum cover, rendering her nearly invisible to others, a mere mind-ripple in the landscape, if she moved quickly. But she had to keep to his faltering pace. It took a bit of boldness; but there were bold tigers and timid tigers, and she was one of the bold ones.

  Finally she stopped. A hut lay before them, under a pipal tree. The man pointed it out to her. She sniffed; it was his home, sure enough. He whispered in his language, gave her a final squeeze expressing his gratitude, and then he was stumbling forwards through the barley, in the last stages of exhaustion. When he reached the door there were cries from inside, and a woman and two children rushed out and hugged him. But then to the tiger’s surprise an older man strode out heavily and beat him across the back, several heavy blows.

  The tiger settled down to watch.

  The older man refused to allow her refugee into the hut. The woman and children brought out food to him. Finally he curled up outside the door, on the ground, and slept.

  Through the following days he remained in disfavour with the old man, though he fed at the house, and worked in the fields around it. Kya watched and saw the pattern of his life, strange as it was. It seemed also that he had forgotten her; or would not risk the jungle to come out and look for her. Or did not imagine she was still there, perhaps.

  She was surprised, therefore, when he came out one dusk with his hands held before him, a bird carcass plucked and cooked, it appeared — even boned! He walked right to her, and greeted her very quietly and respectfully, holding out the offering. He was tentative, frightened; he did not know that when her whiskers were down she was feeling relaxed. The offered titbit smelled of its own hot juices, and some other mix of scents — nutmeg, lavender — she took it gently in her mouth and let it cool, tasting it between her teeth as it dripped hot on her tongue. A very odd perfumed meat. She chewed it, growling a little purr-growl, and swallowed. He said his farewells and backed away, returning to the hut.

  After that she came by from time to time in the lancing horizontal light of sunrise, when he was going off to work. After a while he usually came out with a gift for her, some scrap or morsel, nothing like the bird, but tastier than it had been, simple uncooked bits of meat; somehow he knew. He still slept outside the hut, and one cold night she slunk in and slept curled around him, till dawn greyed the skies. The monkeys in the trees were scandalized.

  Then the old man beat him again, hard enough to make him bleed from one ear. Kya went off to her hill fort then, growling and making long scratches in the ground. The huge mohua tree on the hill was dropping its great weight of flowers, and she ate some of the fleshy, intoxicating petals. She returned to the village perimeter, and deliberately sniffed out the old man, and found him on the well-travelled road to the village west of theirs. He had met several other men there, and they talked for a long time, drinking fermented drinks and getting drunk. He laughed like her kol-bahl.

  On his way home she struck him down and killed him with a bite to the neck. She ate part of his entrails, tasting again all the strange tastes; they ate such odd things that they ended up tasting peculiar themselves, rich and various. Not unlike the first offering her young man had brought out to her. An acquired taste; and perhaps she had acquired it.

  Other people were hurrying towards them now, and she slipped away, hearing behind her their cries, shocked and then dismayed, although with that note of triumph or celebration one often heard in monkeys relating bad news — that whatever it was, it hadn’t happened to them.

  No one would care about that old man, he had left this life as lonely as a male tiger, unregretted even by those in his own hut. It was not his death but the presence of a man-eating tiger that these people lamented. Tigers who learned to like manflesh were dangerous; usually they were mothers who were having trouble feeding their cubs, or old males who had broken their fangs; so that they were likely to do it often. Certainly a campaign to exterminate her would now begin. But she did not regret the killing. On the contrary, she leapt through the trees and shadows like a young tigress just out on her own, licking her chops and growling. Kya, Queen of the jungle!

  But the next time she came to visit her young man, he brought out a morsel of goat meat, and then tapped her gently on the nose, talking very seriously. He was warning her of something, and was worried that the details of the warning were escaping her, which they were. Next time she came by he shouted at her to leave, and even threw rocks at her, but it was too late; she hit a trip line connected to spring-loaded bows, and poisoned arrows pierced her and she died.

  FOUR

  Akbar

  As they carried the body of the tigress into the village, four men working hard, huffing and puffing under its weight as it swung by its tied paws from a stout bamboo bouncing on their shoulders, Bistami understood: God is in all things. And God, may all his ninety-nine names prosper and fall into our souls, did not want any killing. From the doorway of his older brother’s hut, Bistami shouted through his tears, “She was my sister, she was my aunt, she saved me from the Hindu rebels, you ought not to have killed her, she was protecting us all!”

  But of course no one was listening. No one understands us, not ever.

  And it was perhaps just as well, given that this tigress had undoubtedly killed his brother. But he would have given his brother’s life ten times over for the sake of that tiger.

  Despite himself he followed the procession into the village ce
ntre. Everyone was drinking rahkshi, and the drummers were running out of their homes with their drums, pounding happily. “Kya Kya Kya Kya, leave us alone forevermore!” A tiger holiday was upon them, and the rest of the day and perhaps the next would be devoted to the impromptu festivalizing. They would burn its whiskers to make sure that its soul would not pass into a killer in another world. The whiskers were poisonous: one ground up in tiger meat would kill a man, while a whole one placed inside a tender bamboo shoot would give those who ate it cysts, leading to a slower death. Or so it was said. The hypochondriacal Chinese believed in the efficacious properties of almost everything, including every part of tigers, it seemed. Much of the body of this Kya would be saved and taken north by traders, no doubt. The skin would go to the zamindar.

  Bistami sat miserably on the ground at the edge of the village centre. There was no one to explain himself to. He had done everything he could to warn the tigress off, but to no avail. He had addressed her not as Kya but as madam, or Madam Thirty, which was what the villagers called tigers when they were out in the jungle, so as not to offend them. He had given her offerings, and checked to make sure that the markings on her forehead did not form the letter “s”, a sign that the beast was a were-tiger, and would change to human form for good at the moment of death. That had not happened, and indeed there had been no “s” on her forehead; the mark was more like a birdwing in flight. He had kept eye contact with her, as one is supposed to do when coming on tigers unexpectedly; he had stayed calm, and been saved by her from death. Indeed all the stories he had heard of helpful tigers — the one that had led two lost children back to the village, the one who had kissed a sleeping hunter on the cheek — all these stories paled in comparison to his, although they had prepared him as well. She had been his sister, and now he was distraught with grief.