The Wildings (16 page)

She sped out of the park, feeling light and happy inside. Mara hovered over the trees for a bit, watching the squirrels play, and it was only when a baby squirrel chittered in dismay at seeing a cat so far up that she hastily moved on. Over the Golf Course, she had to adjust the height: she was moving far too high, and she startled several crows and an indignant pair of bulbuls before she managed to come down to a relatively more sedate level.

She seemed to be moving faster, and Mara gave her whiskers free rein, inadvertently moving onto the bandwidth of the Supreme Court cats for several moments before she could readjust. The colony of stately cats at the Court was unpleasantly surprised when she whizzed by. “Did you see an orange cat go past, by any chance? At a very fast and, if I might say so, unseemly clip?” Affit, a plump black cat with a neat white ring of fur around his neck, asked his colleague.

Davit considered the question. “The problem,” he said, “is that your question ignores the salient facts. The aforementioned
cat is a kitten, and it appeared to be moving at speed through the air. As your learned self will agree, since it is unlikely that a cat qua cat (or a kitten qua kitten) would sail through the air, my learned self concludes that the kitten qua kitten is a hypothetical kitten.”

Affit raised a paw. “We are agreed. Unless we see sufficient proof, to be submitted in triplicate at the office of the Bigfeet Registrar before tea time today, our conclusion will be that there is no such cat or kitten thereof.”

“Quite,” said Davit, resuming his slow, magisterial stroll around the lawns of the Supreme Court. “Though it made my ears twitch when it brushed by—too damn close, even for a hypothetical kitten, Affit, too damn close.”

Mara was grappling with other dilemmas as she hovered over the zoo. Instead of going blindly in, as she had the first time, she wanted a better feel of this new territory. She entered cautiously and was immediately overwhelmed by a cacophony of sounds and smells.

The kitten shimmered in confusion. Back in her home, Mara had to catch herself before she fell off the bookshelves, and relocated herself more securely at the back of the top shelf. The zoo was almost too rich in scents and life, the images and odours swirling in her tiny head, making her feel dizzy.

The zebras whispered in her ear, singing long poems about the hills and plains of Africa. The bears rumbled as they thought of the fruits they missed so much, the apricots and peaches of the Himalayas. The orangutans scratched their bellies and tails and dreamed of their homes high in the trees of the jungles of Borneo.

And in the middle of all of this, the roars, the chitterings and chatterings, the miaows and the bird-calls, Mara heard a small, clear voice. “I know you have a tail, Tantara, and so do I, but I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I just can’t hang upside down from the bars the way you do.”

Mara took a deep breath and shot past the cages, past the birds, past the sambar deer, past the sinister snakes who were sunning themselves on the rocks in their enclosure, past the eland antelope and the scaly anteater, past the leopards, who were glaring at a family of Bigfeet who were making loud comments and offering them popcorn.

She almost skidded into the tiger enclosure, but at the very last moment, the memory of Ozymandias’s massive face and gigantic whiskers (and large, sharp teeth) came back to her. She slowed and cautiously peered into the enclosure.

Rani and Ozzy were nowhere to be seen, but from the scent markings they had left, which stood out in Mara’s head like flashing lights, she guessed the two big cats were sleeping in the small cave towards the back of the enclosure. The grass was green only in patches, and near the artificial river that flowed through the middle of the tigers’ domain, Rudra sat on the grass, talking to thin air.

Up on the bookcase, Mara cycled her paws in the air, mewing happily. “Hello, RudraTheGreatAndPowerful—I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten the rest. How’re you? Why are you talking to yourself?”

The tiger cub raised his tail and roared cheerfully. “It’s Justamara, isn’t it? I wondered where you’d disappeared. Would you like to meet—Tantara, stop that at once!”

The langur had sneaked around silently behind the kitten and was glaring at Mara from the branches of the large silk cotton tree. The kitten had her back to the monkey, and what Rudra saw was Tantara’s tail whipping out to curl around the kitten’s neck.

“Gotcha!” said Tantara, ignoring Rudra and tightening her tail into a noose. The young langur didn’t like the idea of an intruder, and was hoping that the kitten would be so scared that she would leave. But to Tantara’s surprise, her tail slid harmlessly
through
the kitten’s shoulders. Mara didn’t seem to have noticed.

“Who’s Tantara?” asked Mara.

“What manner of beast is this?” asked Tantara, who was trying to smack the kitten over the head with her tail and finding it very disconcerting when the tail simply slid to the ground each time.

“Tantara, I said ‘stop that’!” said Rudra, baring his small fangs in a growl. “This is my friend, Justamara. She’s a kitten, and she came to visit me the other day. Justamara, this is Tantara. She’s my best friend in the zoo.”

The kitten turned and watched in surprise as Tantara was caught in the middle of trying to pat her own orange tail. The langur was chittering to herself as her paw went through Mara’s tail, and it didn’t sound as though she was very happy about it.

“Could you stop doing that, please,” said Mara politely, following Rudra’s example and switching to Junglee when she spoke to the langur. “I can’t feel your paws, but it makes my whiskers go wobbly when you do that.” She got a good look at Tantara, who had a beautiful black face crowned by soft,
almost-white fur, and blinked. “How pretty and silvery your fur is!” she said. “And how beautifully long your tail is! And what a lovely plume it has at the end of it—mine is so short, I wish it would grow, but it hasn’t. And how perfect your paws are! I’ve never met a langur before, but I expect you meet cats all the time over here. Please, call me Mara. That’s my real name.”

Tantara scratched her head, more than a little dazed. She peered at the orange kitten and realized that in addition to being apparently permeable, Mara was hovering a few feet off the ground. The langur didn’t know what to make of this—but Mara’s flattery, however, was very welcome. She preened and twirled her tail round and round.

“It is a lovely tail, isn’t it?” she said.

Rudra let out a long, tigerish sigh. “You’ve got her started,” the cub said wearily. “Now we’ve had it.”

Tantara ignored him, happy to show off in front of a new audience. “I’ve been trying to teach Rudra how to do the ballet,” she said, “but he refuses to try. He insists you cats can’t use your tails properly, the way they were meant to be used.”

Mara’s eyes were worshipful as she looked up at the langur. “But how are tails meant to be used?” she said. “I use mine all the time, for balance, for curling up to sleep in, to listen to the way the wind is blowing and who’s coming my way.”

“Oho!” said the langur. “But can you do this?”

And she hooked her tail onto a branch, and swung upside down from it. “See?” she called. “Look, Mara, no hands!”

Rudra settled down morosely. “Now she’ll never stop,” he said to Mara.

“But it’s wonderful watching her!” said the kitten.

The langur was swinging from branch to branch. She used her long elegant hands to do dazzling aerial loop-the-loops while her tail acted as a balance; she went all the way to the tops of the trees, and trapezed from one to another; then she used her tail to help her rappel back down the massive trunk of the silk cotton tree.

“Wow!” said Mara.

“Thank you, thank you,” said Tantara, grooming herself modestly. “I’ve been working on that trapeze act for some time. Any old monkey can use their hands to swing around, but it takes a langur to use your tail with real grace.”

Before Rudra could grumble some more, Mara looked at her two new friends and said, “Do you think we could play a game of Hide-and-Seek? You’re so fast on the ground, Rudra, and Tantara is so quick in the branches, and I’m sort of in between. It might be fun.”

Passing by the tiger’s cage, the zookeepers were surprised to see what looked like a langur and a tiger cub playing a complex game. It seemed almost as though they had a third companion, but of course there was no other animal inside the cage. The oldest keeper watched for a while and then shrugged. In the jungle, langurs always called to warn other creatures of the perambulations of tigers, and tigers sometimes killed the beautiful grey monkeys. But being in the cages changed animal behaviour, and he wasn’t surprised to see the unusual friendship. Stranger pairings had happened in the zoo, and he personally remembered a time when a very young nilgai antelope had imprinted on the rhinos, and spent a year walking around thinking it was three times its size.

The youngest keeper watched for a while, entranced. It was the oddest thing, but as the white tiger cub and the silvery-grey langur played together, he could almost swear he saw a small orange kitten flash in between the two of them from time to time. The muggy heat of the monsoon made one see the most peculiar visions, he reflected, before he moved on to see how the great Indian bustards were doing.

That visit marked the first of many, and over time, Mara became quite a fixture in Rudra’s enclosure. Tantara often joined them, and the three became close friends, as Ozzy and Rani watched the younger generation contentedly. The only problem was caused, inadvertently, by Mara’s Bigfeet: if they picked her up or cuddled her or moved her from one spot to another while she was sending, the connection broke. It was often hard for Mara to come back, if the Bigfeet wanted to play with her (or more ominously, to brush her fur or clean her ears or feed her cod liver oil pills), but the tiger cub and the langur got used to her sudden departures.

One evening, as they lay sprawled out under the cool shade of the banyan tree, Rani watched her mate’s tail twitch back and forth, back and forth, and said, “Out with it, Ozzy. What’s gnawing at your mind?”

The tiger brought his tail to a halt, and rubbed his giant head fondly against his mate’s shoulder. “Is it that obvious, Rani? I’m just concerned about where this friendship will lead, that’s all.”

Rani indicated the happy pile of striped fur, where the langur and the tiger were rolling around in the mud while Mara’s red fur shimmered above their heads.

“It seems to be going well, Ozzy,” she said. “They’re all good friends, and while it may be unusual to be friends with a kitten who’s not really here, Rudra seems so much happier, much less lonely.”

“What about Mara?” said Ozzy. “She’s coming here to play with a tiger cub and a langur—shouldn’t she be prowling her own territory, hunting and playfighting with other kittens? And besides, Rudra’s growing up.”

The tiger turned his great head, and his amber eyes looked deeply into Rani’s questioning face. “Do you remember how long it took the two of us to fight back the urge to eat Tantara?”

Rani began washing her long whiskers. “We were jungle-raised, Ozzy,” she said. “Rudra came here when he was so young—he barely remembers the forests.”

Ozymandias rose to his feet and padded around their part of the enclosure, trying to explain what had been going through his mind. “You and I carry the jungle with us in a way Rudra doesn’t, that’s true,” he said.

“Rudra knows only the zoo,” Rani said. “Here, we become friends depending on who’s in the next cage—so the snakes have to get on with the turtles, and the hyenas talk to the jackals, even though they would be at each other’s throats outside the bars. So perhaps Rudra will always see Tantara as a friend—never as a langur, really, never as prey.”

Ozzy shook his great head in dissent, and the stripes on his fur rippled.

“Rudra’s not a tiny cub any more,” he said quietly. “His instincts will begin to kick in one of these days. And then we
had better be prepared to handle that. For Tantara’s sake, not for our little cub’s sake, Rani.”

Though he was aware that it was against his nature, Ozzy had become surprisingly fond of both the kitten and the langur. The kitten reminded him of a cub he and Rani had lost many years ago. And Tantara made him laugh. In the days when Ozzy had prowled the jungles, ruling the night, ruling the ravines, king of the gullies and thickets of Ranthambore National Park, he had enjoyed the company of the langurs and often secretly watched them, marvelling at their quick intelligence and liking their loyalty to members of their troupe. He might sometimes growl at Tantara when the monkey’s antics went too far, but he would never harm her. But Ozzy remembered how his own blood had leaped and tingled at the prospect of a kill—any kill—when he had begun to learn the ways of a hunter, and he wondered how Rudra would respond when he grew up.

There was no easy way out that the tiger could see. He agreed with Rani that their cub had been much happier since his two companions had lightened his time in the cage, but Ozzy had a deep respect for the silent songs of instinct, the calls that ran in the blood. He worried about the future of this friendship between his son and the langur, but for the moment, he let them enjoy this season of play and untroubled contentment.

AND THEN, JUST A WEEK LATER
, the tigers received a surprise.

The large grille door of their enclosure opened with a clanking, whirring sound that made Mara, Tantara and Rudra look up from their exhilarating game of chase-the-dried-leaves. The
keepers usually opened the smaller grille, and while they kept a cautious eye on Ozzy and Rani, they didn’t often go through the full drill.

Ozzy growled, an ominous “hoooom” that throbbed through the enclosure, when the keepers moved towards Rani and him. He guessed from the nets and tranquilizer guns they carried that they meant business, and while he was normally a very co-operative, easy-going tiger, he growled and growled until one of the keepers realized what was bothering him.

“HALOOM!” Ozzy roared. “HALOOOOOM! HALOOOOOM!” “Quick,” the keeper said to his colleagues, “bring the cub back to him. The father’s worried that we might take the cub away.” Tantara bounded up into the branches, emitting alarm calls, when the keepers moved in their direction, and Rudra, imitating his father, growled menacingly too.