All the Way to the Tigers

by Mary Morris

  22

  PEOPLE THINK that being a writer is a lonely job, but I am rarely lonely when I’m writing. It is only in the morning when I first wake up and once the sun goes down that my demons revive. My demons. Where do they come from? Why are they here? That is a long story, perhaps another story, one I don’t fully understand, but it is as if every morning I must battle them back into the cave from which they emerge. When I was younger, it didn’t seem possible that a woman could be a writer and have a “normal” life—whatever that is. My model was my mother, after all, who should have had her own fashion line and instead taught my Brownie troop how to candle eggs. I imagined a life for myself not so different from hers—teaching, raising a couple of kids. Perhaps a suburban life. A country club. A life I cannot fathom now.

  For years before I marry and have a child my routine is the same. Write all day. Go out at night. During the day it is solitude I seek. I need to settle into my own thoughts or they will never come. I can’t work if someone is cleaning my house or fixing a faucet. It isn’t quiet I seek but silence. And not just silence but the profound silence that comes from being alone inside of your head.

  Recently I realized that silent is an anagram for listen. It is the voice that comes from the silence that the writer or artist must listen to.

  23

  India, 2011

  AT SIX IN THE MORNING there’s a knock at my door. A man stands there with a tray of tea and biscuits. As I thank him, once more I can see my own breath. I hand him my hot-water bottle and ask if he could fill it for the morning safari. He nods as if he understands, and I scurry back inside, ready for a shower but the water is still ice-cold. I leave it on and wait but still nothing. Finally I take a cold rinse off, throw on a pair of jeans. I put on all the layers I have—a long-sleeve T-shirt, sweatshirt, and fleece vest, much of which I’ll peel off in the heat of the day, and head out to the open-air jeep that, apparently, tigers don’t jump inside. Or at least thus far they have not, though I can’t see what is to stop one.

  My driver, Sudhir, is waiting for me. With his handlebar mustache, khaki fatigues, safari hat, and vest he looks as if he walked out of The Jungle Book. As I fling myself into the jeep, scratchy horsehair blankets are tossed over my legs. Then someone runs back into the inn and returns with my hot-water bottle, which is piping hot. I slip it onto my lap. I am coughing, hacking, sneezing, and trying to control it. And I am swallowing, one after the other, the Halls cherry cough drops that Dinesh bought for me on the road.

  It can’t be much above freezing as we head out into the darkness before dawn. In the distance there is the first hint of sun, a sliver of light in the sky, but it is not enough to warm the air. We bounce on the furrowed dirt road for about half an hour until we come to what seems to be a small village, and there ahead of us in the predawn light I can see the gate that is the entrance to Pench. Near the gate dozens of men in green uniforms sit in folding chairs. These are the mandatory guides. Every jeep going into the reserve must have a driver and a professional guide. Here Sudhir pulls over. He bounces out of the jeep and tells me to wait. I nod, huddled beneath the horsehair blankets, gazing into the morning mist.

  To my left in the field stand tall platforms upon which men sleep on straw pallets. Some of the men are waking, stretching. Beneath them the small fires that warm them at night are now no more than embers, sending smoke into the air. These men are hired to guard the fields and keep the wild animals away. A long rope extends from their platform into the fields. If an animal comes through their area, the rope will pull and the man somehow is supposed to chase the creature away. Now, as we wait for our guide, it is a strange sight to see these half-naked men, warming their hands at the waning fires.

  For almost an hour we are motionless. I keep a scarf wrapped around my throat and the hot-water bottle, which is growing tepid by the minute, in my lap, but I can’t seem to stop coughing. I’m popping cough drops and I’m going to be running out soon. From the thermos at my feet I sip warm tea—nervous not to sip too much because I’m not sure where the first pit stop will be.

  The sun rises and a thin line of scarlet appears in the east, but everyone is freezing. The men on the platform, the guides, children riding their bikes to school, everyone is chastened by this chill. It’s almost seven-thirty when a bespectacled young man jumps into our jeep. He has a woman’s bright pink wool scarf wrapped around his head, and Sudhir seems very happy to see him, but the man barely nods at me.

  24

  THERE ARE MANY FORMS of camouflage in nature. The stick insect, the squid’s ink, the tiger’s stripes. Her stripes have evolved so that she can blend in with the grasses in which she crouches during the hunt. The tiger is speedy for only a short distance. She is built to pounce, not to race or climb. She can rarely outrun her prey, so she depends upon the element of surprise. If the tiger cannot hide, she will starve. The tiger is a very patient animal. She knows how to wait. She knows how to allow her stripes to blend in with the reeds and grasses that surround her. What she lacks in speed, she makes up for in stealth. Still, she is successful only about 30 percent of the time.

  25

  I START MANY THINGS that I never complete. My studio is littered with scraps of paper, tidbits, articles torn from newspapers and magazines. A note about a man driving with his family, who takes a wrong turn in the snow. A list of the warning codes aboard cruise ships. Random titles without stories. Pages without direction. A genealogy chart for the characters in a novel that has stalled. On the floor are piles of drafts for novels and screenplays. About a third of these will ever see the light of day. The rest will linger and eventually fade. Still, I can’t help scribbling down any idea that comes my way. A flash of something that otherwise might elude me. I write to remember.

  “Hold on to your hunger,” my friend, David Lehman, once wrote. “It’s your greatest asset.”

  26

  THE PAINTER Joan Mitchell was once married to my cousin Barney Rosset (the famed publisher of Grove Press and the black sheep of my family). Barney and Joan grew up together in Chicago, and she was perhaps the love of his life. Something I read in a biography about Joan has stayed with me. When she was a sad little girl, Joan used to pull back the yellow curtains in her family’s living room and stare at Lake Michigan. The lake brought her solace from a lonely and perhaps abusive childhood. Years later, many of her canvases contained blue and yellow. All of her paintings, it is said, began with the curtains and the lake.

  I also grow up on the shores of Lake Michigan and we also have yellow curtains. My mother has an innate love of blue and yellow. Recently I learned that those are the most soothing colors to go together. To me it was always an interesting combination and a testament to my mother’s artistic nature. She has a degree in fashion from the Art Institute of Chicago, and she’s a gifted seamstress and artist. She used to paint in our basement, and I recall one portrait. A woman who looked much like herself except that half of her face is black. And the other half blue. I have often wondered if this wasn’t her self-portrait. The first time I see it I don’t ask because I’m too young, and when I’m old enough, my mother says she does not remember the painting.

  We can’t see the lake from our house. Not really. If I go to my parents’ bedroom window, I can see a sliver of it. But we live only three doors down from the lake and if you just step outside, you smell the water. And sometimes in the late summer the dead fish. One summer all the alewives die and almost no one goes out, the stench is too great and the flies are too prolific. But I go to the lake every day. Even when I’m very young, my mother isn’t afraid to let me roam. Despite not having much happiness inside its walls, outside of our home I’m a fairly happy child and free-ranging is what I love most. I comb the bluffs and follow the old Indian trails. I search for arrowheads, bear (which are long gone by the time we live there), and various other objects that my imagination finds a place for in suburban Illinois.
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  Mostly I roam to get away from my mother. She and I have a fractious relationship even when I am small. Once when I’m no more than ten, I need new clothes and my mother gives me sixty dollars, which is a lot of money in those days. She tells me to go to Fell Company and buy some new outfits for myself. I remember riding on my bike, dashing into the store, trying on outfit after outfit. All for summer and spring. I buy three or four that I like and pedal home. My mother immediately asks me to try them on, which I do. She doesn’t like any of them and she takes them all back. One I like a lot is a lemon-yellow shirt with matching Bermuda shorts.

  As I stand in front of her, my mother shakes her head. “Yellow is not your color,” she says. To this day I have never worn yellow.

  27

  A HARVARD UNIVERSITY study shows that creative people tend to remember their childhoods as unhappy even if they were not.

  28

  India, 2011

  WE GOT ONE OF THE BEST guides in all of India,” Sudhir tells me, proudly pointing to the silent, bespectacled young man who has plunked himself in our jeep. Sudhir turns to me and beams. Clearly this is an honor to him, and I thought it must also mean a piece of good luck for me. But Ajay hasn’t said a word since he leaped into our jeep. And he looks a little odd with the bright pink woman’s wool scarf wrapped around his head, but Sudhir seems happy to see him. Ajay barely nods at me.

  I am eager, waiting for the lecture that doesn’t come. I’m not sure what I expected, but I assumed Ajay would start to explain something about the tigers or what we were going to see. That is, I thought I would learn something from him, as one does from a guide, but he doesn’t even tell me his name. Sudhir does. In fact, Ajay says nothing to me at all. He sits up front in the passenger seat, staring ahead. It can’t be much above freezing, and we’ve already been sitting here for more than an hour. I’m hugging my hot-water bottle that grows tepid by the minute and sucking on cough drops, trying not to let them know how sick I am.

  Now the sun has risen, and we’re waiting for the tiger reserve to open. Despite the cold and my illness, I am filled with anticipation. A blaze of scarlet cuts across the sky, but everyone is freezing. The morning in Pench has begun. It is almost eight. When I think I can’t sit here any longer, the gates open, and we are motioned to move ahead. We bounce on the furrowed dirt road for about half an hour until we come to what seems to be a small village, and there ahead of us I can see the gate that marks the entrance to Pench.

  The gate to the game reserve is open, and ours is the second of the dozen or so jeeps waiting to go in. As we enter on the dusty road, the jungle is lush, but oddly still. I thought I’d be seeing wild animals swinging on the vines, but the trees and branches are empty. Ajay and Sudhir mutter to each other. It seems that I am not the only one affected by the cold. The animals don’t like it either. They have remained in the warmth of their caves or dens or the groves where they huddle. We drive for more than an hour and hardly see a thing. A few langur monkeys shake the branches of the trees. A baby langur squawks on the ground in distress until its mother scoops it up. Ajay and Sudhir laugh, but Ajay says little.

  He is a bit of a conundrum, really. I am starting to wonder if he isn’t just along for the ride. And I have the impression that he doesn’t speak any English. Not that he must, but it would be easier for me to communicate with him if he did. And again I am confused about his role as my guide. How is he guiding me exactly? For a long time we’re bouncing up and down the potholed roads. They chat between themselves in Hindi. Even if I lean in from the backseat, they make no attempt to talk to me.

  I sit back and decide to wait, when suddenly Ajay raises his hand and Sudhir pulls to a halt. No one says a thing. We sit for ten or fifteen minutes. “Excuse me, but—” I start to ask what we are waiting for, but Ajay shushes me. He cups his ear to indicate that he is listening. I don’t know what he’s listening for because I hear nothing except for the call of some birds, the shriek of a monkey. Still, it is peaceful sitting in the quiet of the jungle. It is a kind of quiet I don’t think I’ve ever heard before (if one can hear quiet, that is). Every rustling of the wind, every flutter of wings, is as clear and clean as pure water.

  Then Ajay points in a direction. Sudhir starts the engine, the quiet is gone, and we go that way for a few moments. We stop again and listen. “We are listening for alarm calls,” Sudhir explains in a hushed tone, and even that seems to annoy Ajay, who flashes a grimace his way. The alarm call is the sound an animal makes when the tiger is near. There is a sound for the mother calling her young; another to bring the herd together. And the animals make a different sound if the tiger is near. That is what Ajay is listening for. I’m trying to listen as well but I hear almost nothing. A high-pitched cry now and then that seems far in the distance.

  I am more perplexed than bored. I am, after all, in a jungle in India and somewhere out there tigers lurk. But Ajay has explained nothing of his method of tiger tracking. He is pointing to the left, hand to his ear, when I catch a flash of emerald green out of the corner of my right eye. “What was that?” I ask, not really expecting an answer. Besides, Ajay is looking in the opposite direction.

  “Green bee-eater,” he replies without turning around. These are his first words to me.

  I’m stunned. The bird was behind him. “How do you know?” I ask. “You didn’t see it.”

  “By the sound of the wings,” he replies.

  And then we fall silent again.

  29

  A STUDY shows that if an American schizophrenic hears voices, they tell him to commit violence. And if a schizophrenic in India hears voices, they tell him to clean the house.

  30

  Brooklyn, 2008

  THERE’S A BLIZZARD THAT DAY. At least that’s what I’m told. And that’s what it looks like as people clomp in and out of the emergency room, covered in snow. But I don’t know what the weather is doing. I don’t even care. I barely understand what is happening. I know I’m going to have what’s called “reduction.” To me a reduction is something you do to a sauce. You boil it down. But an ankle? At last I am put under, during which time my ankle is popped back into place. I assume that that will be that. But hours later I’m still in the emergency room on a morphine drip.

  I remember being cold. Shivering. Doors open and close and frigid breezes filter in. I ask for blankets. It seems as if I keep asking. But the blankets aren’t enough. The chill is in my bones. Larry rubs my hands and my arms, trying to get me warm. He can’t bring himself to look at my foot. I drift in and out of what might pass for sleep, waiting for a doctor to tell me that this is somehow all a big mistake. Just sign here and you can go home. On the wall in front of me is a clock and the hands keep going around the way they do in those old black-and-white films, as if time is flying by.

  Toward evening a doctor appears. He is an anesthesiologist and he informs us that I’ll be operated on that night. Operated? I don’t understand. He tries to explain to me about the bone being in several pieces. How I will need a plate in my leg. “Can I go to Morocco?” I ask. I have plans for my sabbatical, and I think he almost laughs.

  “We’re going to put you in a room for now,” he says, patting my hand. “And you should get some rest.” But more hours go by before they wheel me into a room. In the next bed a comatose woman whimpers as Larry and I wait for a surgeon to show.

  When the floor nurse comes in to check on me, we ask what time the surgeon will come. She looks at me with disdain. “No one is going to operate on you at this hour,” she tells me in a flat voice.

  “But they said in the ER…” I’m holding on to the thin thread of hope that the sooner they operate—even if it is only a matter of hours—the sooner I’ll be on the mend. How long can this take? I’m viewing this as an unfortunate detour, a brief derailment. Like a flat tire or a wrong turn. A month or so max and I’ll be on my feet.

  “I don
’t care what they said, you won’t have a surgery tonight.” I search her face for a touch of compassion, a glimmer of hope, but there is none.

  “Would you just call down to the OR and make sure?” Larry asks, making his voice as respectful as he possibly can. Already we’re becoming versed in the language of hospitals.

  In her cold tone, her face still expressionless, she says she will. “When did you last eat?” the nurse asks me. The idea of food has meant nothing to me, but now suddenly it does. I tell her I haven’t eaten all day. “Well, you should eat something.” She tells me she has no idea when in the morning I’ll have my surgery. If I’m going to eat, it’s now or never, she implies.

  It’s after midnight on a cold, snowy night. The cafeteria is closed, as are most of the restaurants nearby. On the brink of despair I ask Larry to go home and bring some of the pasta we have left in the fridge. A nice spaghetti Bolognese I made the night before. “And smuggle in some red wine,” I beg. It’s true I’m on a morphine drip and I can’t say I am proud of myself or am thinking clearly, but this is what I ask for.

  When he returns with a warm container of spaghetti and a thermos of Bordeaux, I eat and sip some wine. It’s almost a picnic, except for the morphine and the throbs of pain that course through my body. We’re just finishing when the phone in my room rings. It’s odd to get a call at one in the morning in a hospital room, especially if no one knows you are here, but Larry answers and I can tell by the look on his face that something is wrong. He keeps shaking his head. “Oh, no,” he groans, “but she’s just eaten.” He pauses, and I can hear the loud voices on the phone. “The floor nurse told us no one would operate on her at this hour.”