Man Tiger (6 page)

His feet brought him to the cell. He stood by the door, watching Margio shiver on the mattress, hoping that the secret would be revealed with a simple question. But bitterness and pity weighed on him, preventing him from speaking, and as he struggled Margio turned to him and understood his unspoken question.

“It wasn't me,” he said calmly and without guilt. “There is a tiger inside my body.”

The tiger was white as a swan, vicious as an ajak. Mameh saw it once, briefly, emerging from Margio's body like a shadow. She would never see it again. There was one sign that the tigress was still inside Margio, and Mameh didn't know if anyone else had spotted what it was. In the dark, the yellow glint of a cat's eye shone in Margio's pupils. At first, Mameh was scared to look into those eyes, terrified that the tiger might actually reemerge. But with time and frequent exposure to Margio, she grew used to seeing those eyes light up in the dark, and she stopped worrying. The tigress wasn't her enemy and wouldn't hurt her; maybe it was there to protect them all.

Margio himself chanced upon it one morning, waking up from a solitary sleep in the surau, weeks before he ran away. The tiger's dancing tail brushed his bare feet and disturbed him, and for a moment he thought it was Ma Soma patting him awake so they could perform Subuh prayers together. He opened his eyes to see not steaming coffee on a tray or a plate of fried rice, but a white tiger lying next to him, licking its paws. It was past daybreak. The sky presented to the world an endless wet grey countenance. It had plainly been raining hard all night, and no one had emerged to do the prayers. Naturally Margio was stunned. All he could do was stare in awe at the stout beast as it contentedly groomed itself.

He knew the beast wasn't really alive. In his twenty years on the planet, he had gone in and out of the jungle on the outskirts of town and never seen such a thing. There were boars, small clouded leopards, ajaks, but no white tigers nearly the size of a cow. It reminded him of his grandfather, who had passed away years ago. He teared up and slowly extended a hand, reaching for the tigress's front paw. It was really there, with fur as soft as a feather duster. Its retracted claws signaled friendship, and as the paw rose up, Margio's hand reached for it again, and the tigress gave him a playful, kittenish tap. Margio tried to grap the animal's paw, but it rolled away from him, and then crouched, set for attack. Before Margio could dodge, the tigress lunged, and the pair started wrestling. He was laying flat on his back, breathless, when the tiger backed off, sat down next to him, and resumed licking its paws. Softly Margio patted its shoulder.

“Grandpa?” he said.

His grandfather had lived in a village far away. Margio would take a motorcycle taxi to the edge of the jungle, where a row of small shops known as the Friday Market was a terminus for various vehicles that made the journey up the ascending dirt path. An ox cart might be able to push its way farther uphill, but motorcycles would have a hard time of it, and the taxi drivers were reluctant. To visit Grandpa, Margio had to trudge up the hill through albizia trees and clove woods, on paths lined by mahogany trees, deep into the wild jungle known only to hunters. It took an hour to cross a stretch of hill as familiar to Margio as it was to the boars who would one day become his quarry. Behind the hill was a hamlet, bordering a madrasa with rice fields and fishponds. His grandfather didn't live there, but it was a place where Margio could unwind. He had come to know several locals after passing through time and again, but he couldn't hang out for too long. He had to continue his journey before evening fell and the ferry service stopped. The ferry was a raft of bamboo poles, attached to a wire stretched across the river. The steersman stood by the prow, pulling on the wire, dragging the raft slowly to the other side. If the current rendered the raft unsteady, he would use a long pole. The river was deep and the current gentle. There were no crocodiles, but there was the River Spirit, a great rolling wave, never seen but greatly feared by children. The raft cost a mere ten pennies per crossing and could carry dozens of people, as well as cows and sheep and sacks of rice and other crops. Getting off the raft was not the end of Margio's journey. He had to go up another hill on a truly slippery path. From the summit he could see a wide expanse of paddy fields below. In the middle of the vastness was a hamlet, full of greenery and houses, like a desert oasis, with coconut trees almost touching the sky. This was where his grandfather lived.

Margio first made the journey on his own when he was eight. Afterward he took every opportunity to go there, to see Grandpa, despite the journey taking half a day. He always had a good time, and always would come home with a bunch of bananas or a basket of langsat and durian fruit, which would definitely make Mameh happy, as well as his mother and father. Sometimes, if he badly wanted to go but had no money for the motorcycle taxi, he would walk to the Friday Market and keep walking until he arrived at Grandpa's house, happy despite the exertion. So often did he take the path that he changed his route at times, quickly making friends with the villagers and the genies who inhabited the jungle. Later, his fellow boar hunters would never have to worry about getting lost so long as he was with them.

Despite his head of silver hair, Grandpa was not crook-backed but fit and vital. He was healthy right up to the moment he passed away in his bed, leaving a contented-looking body to be found later in the hut. Every day he took care of a rice field and a plantation, until the whole lot vanished without a trace in a transaction made by Margio's father. Margio really loved his grandfather. The old man would take the boy to a rivulet he called the Kingdom of Genies. Never ever tease a girl genie, he always said, but if one of them falls in love with you, take her, for that is a blessing. His grandfather said that girl genies were very beautiful. Margio always wished that one day he would meet one and that she would fall in love with him, but that promise hung tauntingly in the future no matter how many times he visited the rivulet.

More astonishing than the genies was the story of Grandpa's tigress. According to Ma Muah, the village storyteller, many a man in the hamlet had a tigress of his own. Some married one, while others inherited a tigress, passed down through the generations. Grandpa had one from his father, which before had belonged to his father's father, and so on right on up to their distant ancestors. Nobody remembered who was the first to marry the tigress.

On warm nights, Ma Muah would tell tales on her porch. Children huddled around her legs, and the girls took turns to massage her shoulders. If she was spinning a yarn late in the afternoon, the girls checked her hair for lice. She was always ready with a new story. She didn't have to make anything up, she would say; they were all true. Like the tigresses, many stories were passed between successive storytellers across the generations. But some were about the present and understood only by the chosen ones, and of course Ma Muah was the chosen granny.

As far as Margio could remember, Ma Muah didn't have a husband or a child, and had no work to do either, other than endlessly reeling off stories. She could go to anyone's kitchen and eat there, or someone would come to her shack bringing food. People loved her, especially children. She had a story about a blind woman with snakes and scorpions in her hair instead of lice, and who ate only the tubers of the purple nut sedge. There was the story of genie princesses who abducted handsome young men and brought them to their realms. They were not malevolent so long as no one barged into their dwelling place. Margio had come to know these places, namely springs, river pools, the peaks of hills, large trees, and the minarets of mosques. Still, nothing appealed to Margio's curiosity more than the protective white tigresses.

According to Ma Muah, the tigresses lived with their owners and guarded them against all dangers. She said that Grandpa was among those who kept a white tiger. But he would never talk to his grandson about the tiger because, he said, Margio was too young and couldn't possibly tame such a savage animal. It was bigger than a clouded leopard, bigger than the ones people saw at the zoo or circus or in school-books. If a man couldn't control his beast, it could turn so violent that nothing could restrain it once enraged.

“But I just want to see it,” said Margio.

“Later! Maybe then you will own it.”

He had often heard of his grandfather's prowess, and that of elders in other hamlets: how they resisted Dutch efforts to abduct the best young men for forced labor in the Land of Deli. Bullets had no effect on them, nor did the samurai swords of the Japanese, who came later, and if they got angry, their white tigresses came out from their bodies to attack. They even expelled the gangs of Darul Islam guerrillas roaming the jungle. Ma Muah said that this was all because of the elders' elemental friendship with the tigresses, who became family through wedlock.

It was never clear to Margio what such marriages meant. He couldn't imagine a man sitting on a wedding dais beside a tigress wearing tassels on her head, powder on her befurred cheeks, and lipstick on her mouth, while the master of ceremonies prayed that the marriage of Mr. So-and-so to this tigress be blessed by the Almighty. As a teenager, he thought it would be very strange for a man to have sex with his tiger wife, and wondered what kind of children such a union would produce. Ma Muah would show off her toothless gums in laughter, chuckling every time he told her about his notion of the marriage between a human and a tiger.

“Only men marry tigers,” Ma Muah said, “but not all the tigers are female.”

His grandfather of course had a wife, a human woman, and clearly that made the tigress a kind of co-wife. Grandpa never married the tigress, because he inherited her from his father, but still for the family she was another spouse, loved and revered, sometimes more so than the human wife. Grandma was the first to die, succumbing to the pitiless onslaught of tuberculosis. The disease ruined their nights with nonstop coughing and an interminable fever as her body shrank toward the grave. His grandfather never remarried. Maybe the tiger wife was enough, although he didn't live much longer, too grief-stricken by Grandma's departure.

One evening, on Margio's last visit before his grandfather's death, the old man said firmly: “The tiger is white as a swan.”

He wanted Margio to recognize the tigress if she came to him. Grandpa added that if the beast wished it, she might go to Margio's father and become his. Margio would then have to wait until his father died to take possession of the tigress. But if she didn't like his father she would someday come to Margio, and she would be his.

“And if she doesn't like me?” Margio asked anxiously.

“She will go to your son, or your grandson, or she might never reappear if our family forgets her.”

The tigress had come to him, lying beside him on the surau's warm rug, while the universe outside froze. As his grandfather had said, the tigress was white as a swan or a cloud or cotton wool. How unbelievably happy he was, for the tigress was more than anything he had ever owned. He thought about how she would hunt with him, helping to corral the wild pigs that ruined the rice fields, and, if he ever got slack when one or two boars charged, she would protect him from the worst. It had never occurred to Margio that the tigress would turn up on such a damn cold morning, surrendering herself to him like a girl. Look how the tigress lay down, still licking the tips of her paws, tongue flickering. For a moment she seemed like a giant domestic cat, grandly aristocratic and huge. Margio looked deep into her face, so lovely to him, and the boy fell profoundly in love.

He wrapped his arm around her neck, embracing her and feeling the warmth of her fur against his body. It was like sharing an embrace with a girl on a cold morning, stark naked in bed, the most tender intimacy after a night of love-making. Margio closed his eyes, ecastatic after his long wait, free from yearning, reassuring himself that the tales he'd heard as a child were all true. But of a sudden he felt an abrupt pang of loss. The beloved had left without a word and warmth vanished with her. Margio opened his eyes, and saw that the animal had gone.

He was more surprised now than when he first saw her. The boy stood up and searched, but the surau was small, and he could soon tell that not a trace of her was left. Not even one scrap of fur. The rain still fell hard enough to make children on their way to school outside complain. In downpours such as this banana leaves would be cut from the trees, becoming disposable umbrellas, but Margio was not thinking about any of that. He thought of nothing other than his tiger. Standing still, he opened his mouth to call but not a sound emerged. He didn't know what to call the tiger. Grandpa never told him her name; neither did Ma Muah. Maybe he was supposed to name her himself, but there was little point in that when the animal was nowhere to be found.

He might have had his heart broken eleven times over by girls he loved dearly, and still the pain he felt now would surpass all of those rejections rolled into one. He struggled not to weep. No, it wasn't a dream, he said to himself. She had come to him because she was his. He had felt the softness of her fur, and they had played together. It was too real to be a morning's silent dream. Having searched and searched, and feeling sure that she had gone, his heartache grew into resentment. He shivered and his fingers clenched. Never had he felt so ruthless and vengeful a rage, and he couldn't evade it; he had to bear the pain. She had made him fall in love, the climax to years of longing, and he would not be deserted in this way.

He pounded on the door, scratched it, until the dark green paint peeled off its mahogany planks, and out of his mouth came a heavy growl that shattered the air. The deep scratches shocked him. Margio stood still and silent while his anger abated. He stared at the three parallel scratches, blistering wounds had they been on someone's back, then checked his hands. His fingernails weren't long. He kept them short so they wouldn't be a nuisance when he held his spear for pig hunting. His nails couldn't have etched marks like these into the door. Still, he saw paint and timber flakes under his short fingernails. For some time Margio was frozen in awe and puzzlement, until he understood what must have happened. She hadn't left him. The tigress was there, a part of him, the two of them inseparable until death. He leaned against the wall, rubbed his navel, below which he sensed the tigress now resided. She wasn't tame after all.