by Mary Morris
66
IF THEY COMMUNICATE AT ALL, tigers do so through a rare sound called chuffing. It resembles a deep, guttural purr. It is the sound they make when they greet each other in a nonthreatening way. It is also the sound they make when they are in a good mood. In the wild, tigers chuff when they meet on neutral territory. However, in captivity tigers often chuff when they see their keepers. A roar on the other hand means something else. It is a warning to other tigers to stay away. It may be used during mating or after a kill, but never during an attack. During an attack the tiger is silent.
67
India, 2011
IN THE BEIGE FLOWING GRASSES of the savanna it is almost impossible to detect the tiger’s stripes. Still we look. I pan the grasslands with my binoculars. But if she is out there, we don’t see her. For a long time we are silent and the only sounds are birds and the wind. Somewhere in the distance we hear the chatter of monkeys. But that is all. I don’t know how long we are sitting when another jeep comes clattering up behind us. They’ve heard a call. For a few moments the drivers chat. There is the nodding of heads. In the other jeep a family sits, blankets over their heads. The kids have earphones on and look utterly bored. The parents don’t seem very happy either. In fact, none of them smiles or even nods hello to me.
A few minutes later their jeep pushes on. Ajay and Sudhir look at me. “So?” I ask. Sudhir wants to persevere. And so does Ajay. And so do I. As the other jeep leaves us in a trail of dust, we pause, deciding what to do. Ajay and Sudhir talk in Hindi, and then take a road where we haven’t been.
Our jeep bounces up and down the furrowed road as I clasp the frame. After a few hairpin turns we leave the dirt road and drive along a path that has been cut through thick brush. It is clear that no one comes here very often. After a few hundred yards the brush opens, and we enter a sunny meadow. For the first time in days I feel the sun beating down, warming me. The meadow sits on the shores of a wide pale-blue lake, surrounded by savanna and reeds. On the slopes around the lake, herds of spotted deer, sambar deer, antelope, and wild boar graze. Monkeys skitter across the paths and through the trees. Dozens of aquatic birds stand poised in the reeds, searching for fish.
We sit in silence for several minutes. Then Ajay says, “There is no tiger here.” It is rhetorical. Of course, there is no tiger here. No scene would be so peaceful if a tiger were near. It is beginning to occur to me that I might not see a tiger in the wild. No matter how determined my driver and guide are, I think that it won’t happen. Not now. Maybe never.
Still, in that warm circle of sun I find myself growing stronger. For the first time since I arrived, it seems I am not hacking away. It is as if I have suddenly been healed. More than anything I want to get out and walk. Clearly it is safe. Even I know that. I want to stretch my legs and walk around this turquoise-blue lake. I’ve grown stiff after days on airplanes and cars and now in this jeep, but it isn’t just about that. I want to walk. Desperately. Though I have lost track of the days and the dates, I know that it is almost three years since my accident. I recall the truck driver I met at the hospital. Soon I will be beyond the point of improving. This is probably as good as it will get. And now, perhaps for the first time since my accident, I want to get up and walk and walk. Which is exactly what I cannot do. But it is as if I can’t sit still. I can’t contain myself. On the off chance that they will let me, I have to ask.
“Could I…go for a walk?”
They look at each other, then at me, incredulous. Then they laugh. “No,” Ajay says, “you can’t go for a walk.”
“But there’s no tiger here.” They look at me again, and then politely say no. I nod. It is what I expected.
None of us speaks for a little while. Then Sudhir breaks the silence. “Almost nobody comes here,” he says.
This surprises me. It is such a beautiful, tranquil place. “So why did you bring me?”
“Because you want to see.”
I shrug. “Doesn’t everyone?”
Both men shake their heads. “Most people only want to see tigers,” Sudhir explains. “You want to see everything.”
Again we sit in silence for a long moment. None of us wants to move. A flock of cormorants and egrets takes to the air and it fills with the flapping of their wings. “Shall we go?” Sudhir asks.
It is close to time to leave. And it is also time for me to say goodbye to my friends. Our time together is drawing to an end, and, as we all know, I haven’t seen my tiger. “Just five more minutes,” I say—a phrase I’m starting to imagine engraved on my tombstone—and the men agree. I don’t want to leave. And neither do they. Together we sit, listening. But the jungle is surprisingly still. Sudhir is slow to turn on the engine. I am content to be here, but I can tell they are disappointed. The tiger has eluded us. “It takes patience, doesn’t it, to find a tiger?” I ask, and they nod.
“And luck,” Ajay replies.
68
CENTURIES AGO William Blake wrote the lines for which he is renowned. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” It is difficult not to believe in a higher power when you gaze at this creature. Its black stripes appear painted on with the sure strokes of a calligrapher’s pen. Or the work of a steady-handed tattoo artist. If you shave a tiger bald, its stripes will still appear on its skin.
69
IN 1972 I’m a graduate student at Harvard and my life is in shambles. I have no money, my boyfriend moves out when I’m at school, and two days later my bicycle is stolen. I’m struggling through The Divine Comedy in a graduate seminar I’m taking. On a hot July afternoon, I am reading Purgatorio. I already want to be a writer, but I have no idea where to begin or how to go about it. Then I fall asleep and have this dream.
I dream that I’m walking down a street in Paris and pass a café. Inside I see Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald drinking Campari and soda. The café has its name written above the doorway. It is: Lasciate Ogni Speranza, Voi Ch’entrate—Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Café. Strange name, I think, but I know that if I want to be a writer I have to go inside. So I do. I sit at a bistro table and order my own Campari and soda, and as I do my chair falls into a deep, dark hole in the center of the earth. I am inside what was called in medieval times an oubliette. A place where you are forgotten.
The darkness that surrounds me is absolute and as far as I can tell there is no way out. Suddenly six men appear, and they are carrying a coffin. They place it in front of me and leave and I understand that the only way out of this hole rests inside that coffin and it is my task to open it. So I do. And the coffin turns into a rolltop desk and paper for eternity.
A few weeks later I pack up my apartment in Cambridge and move to New York.
70
Brooklyn, 2008
THREE MONTHS into my ordeal Dr. Patel tells me I can walk. He’s staring at my X-ray when he informs me. “The bone has healed.” He looks clearly pleased. “You’re good to go,” he says. “Get some comfortable shoes. You should be fine.” Buoyed, I actually thought I might be walking home from his office that day. I’ve brought some shoes with me. They’re white sneakers that look like nurse’s shoes. (I will subsequently abandon them outside a geriatric residence where they will be scooped up right away.) But they are the most comfortable shoes I have. I put them on, ready to set out.
And I can hardly take a step. The pain is unbearable. I try to hobble down the block toward home, but even with a cane I can’t put any weight on my foot. Every step is excruciating. After half a block I have to stop and call a car service to take me home. Later a friend watches me, shaking her head as I clutch the banister, leaving her house.
I begin spending a lot of time online, studying the anatomy of the ankle. I come to understand why magnificent racehorses, such as Ruffian or Barbaro, are put down with a broken ankle. The
racehorse rests all his weight on three tiny bones—the sesamoids. The human body is more or less the same. The ankle is perhaps the most complex of all the human joints. Shoulder, hip, knee replacements can all be done with fairly consistent results, but there is no successful ankle replacement as yet.
And I can’t make it to the corner store for a quart of milk.
* * *
—
A week later I go to see Dr. Patel again. This time I don’t care how I look. I don’t bother to put on lipstick. I no longer want him to come to dinner or be my friend. My Stockholm syndrome relationship with him has come to an end. I just want to walk. I want him to tell me when I’ll be better. He has betrayed me. Getting good shoes and walking is absurd. I’ve made no progress. My ankle swells hideously when I put any pressure on it at all. He’s spoken to me about the possibility down the road of having the hardware in my ankle removed, but that’s still a year away and I don’t want another surgery.
For the first time I’m truly annoyed with him. Furious, in fact. I thought I’d be cured. It hasn’t really occurred to me, though it will more and more, that some things are forever. And there’s no miracle. I’m not sure why I was so naive, but I still believed that doctors made you well. I assumed that if you got hurt, they’d make you as good as new. I never wanted to think that something permanent can happen. That you can be forever changed.
Of course, I understood that death was real and illnesses could be terminal. I knew there were things that nobody could do anything about. But it hadn’t really sunk in that you might not be the same way you were. You might not be cobbled back together again. Suddenly I grasped that silly childhood rhyme. “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” I always thought it was nonsense about an egg. But it isn’t nonsense; it’s true.
* * *
—
In his office there is the usual two-hour wait, but this time I mind it. This time I’m annoyed. I keep asking the secretary how long it would be. “He had an emergency this morning,” she tells me. Of course, a trauma surgeon has many emergencies. I know there are people much worse off than me. I think about that man I met in occupational therapy who’d had his bones crushed in a trucking accident. What he’d been through was a million times worse than anything that had happened me. I try to feel lucky, but I don’t. I don’t feel lucky at all.
I sit, staring at the TV. A game show is on. A woman is poised to win a car and she’s jumping up and down, terrified that she’ll get the answer wrong. She gets it wrong and loses the car, then breaks down in tears. At last I’m called. Dr. Patel is staring at my X-rays with his back to me. I sit in a straight-back leather chair while he leans back in his chair, his white shirt spotless, ironed. Who irons them? I wonder. “It still hurts,” I tell him, and he nods. “It hurts a lot.”
This is nothing new. He gives me a timeline—one I’ve heard before. In occupational therapy, physical therapy, and from him. In the first year I’ll show the most improvement. In the second a little more, and by the third year…“Well”—he raises his eyes—“that’ll be about the best you can do.”
I wonder how much more progress I can make in this first year. Months into this ordeal and I can barely take a step. He outlines various options. “Now, I doubt that you’ll need this, but you could get an ankle replacement down the road, though they really aren’t very good yet. Hips, knees, those you can replace. But the ankle. You know it’s the most complicated joint in the body. Few people give it much credit. I’d rather break any other bone…” He pauses here, realizing this might not be the best tack to take. “There’s ankle fusion.”
I blink. “What’s that?”
It’s as bad as it sounds. A steel rod is rammed up the heel into the tibia. The foot is secured in place, but you have no dorsal flexion. In other words, a permanent limp on a foot that would have no give. “You could still consider a second surgery to take the hardware out. That might improve your flexion. We could do that maybe next January at the earliest. That might help.”
Another surgery, a rod rammed up my foot, an ankle replacement. None of these options makes me feel any better. “I just want to know…” My throat is catching, but I struggle to go on. “When will I be normal again?” I ask, tears welling.
He seems surprised by my question. As if no one has ever asked him such a thing before. “What do you mean by normal?” He has a perplexed look on his thoughtful face.
“You know…” My skin bristles. I can barely hold back my tears. “When will I be able to do things I used to? Like go to the store, take a walk in the park.”
“I’m not sure you will…” He hesitates. “Quite frankly, I didn’t know if you’d ever walk again.” Never walk again?
“What do you mean?”
Dr. Patel gives me his most professional look, one I have rarely seen. It must be what he uses when he is delivering bad news. “I didn’t know if your bone would heal. It was completely shattered.”
I ask why he is telling me this months after my accident, and he replies quite succinctly that it was better for me not to know until now.
* * *
—
That night I can’t sleep. Even my cocktail of drugs doesn’t work. My doctor’s words reverberate in my brain. “I didn’t know if you’d ever walk again.” How can such a thing be possible? And how would I live if it were so? In some way this is my own doing. Somehow this is my fault. My hubris, my need to prove myself. My accident. Mine alone. Meanwhile Larry sleeps soundly. He’s exhausted. Between his job, his life, and caring for me, he has no time to himself. All he does is run around, then collapse at the end of the day.
I don’t want to disturb him, but I’m up, my mind churning. The truth of this weighs on me like a ton of bricks. No matter what I do, it is possible that a part of me will never be the same. Humpty Dumpty. It’s a lesson we all learn sooner or later. But I had to learn it in one fell swoop.
71
A SINGLE MALE TIGER requires a hundred square kilometers for its own private range. With poachers and population growth, that terrain is shrinking. So while there is no danger of extinction, as thousands exist in captivity, it is conceivable that the tiger will cease to exist in the wild.
The government of India’s Project Tiger began in 1973 in an effort to preserve the Bengal tiger in the wild. It was started after a census showed that India’s tiger population wasn’t more than 1,800 (and it would continue to drop for a few years, due mostly to poaching). Its mandate was to create tiger reserves, and by 2008, there were more than forty Project Tiger reserves in India, covering 37,761 kilometers.
Project Tiger helped increase the tiger population to almost 3,500 in the 1990s. But a census in 2008 revealed that the population had once more dwindled to only 1,411. Since that census the government has pledged an additional $153 million to expand the project, setting up a Tiger Protection Force to combat poachers, and also a fund for the relocation of almost 200,000 villagers. The goal is to create a larger buffer zone so that tigers can move freely and, as you can imagine, minimize tiger/human interaction.
To date forty-eight areas have been declared tiger reserves. Some are relatively small, fewer than fifty square miles, but with large buffer zones that enable the tiger, especially the young males, to travel to other areas where villagers no longer live. Indeed, many villages have been moved away from the reserves. This has often led to conflict between the villagers and the conservationists. But about two decades ago the government came to see the value in preserving tigers.
The official number of tigers in India as of 2014 was about 2,226. The struggle remains to enable two apex predators (tigers and humans) to live in something that resembles harmony. Poachers remain the biggest problem. And the Chinese, who believe there is some secret to potency and longevity in the bo
nes and the blood of the tiger, are the worst perpetrators.
To the Chinese the tiger is king, and they want to consume its marrow. In fact, the Chinese symbol for emperor is identical to the blaze that is found on every tiger’s forehead. A vertical line with two horizontal lines through it. Indeed, it is possible that the Chinese character for king derived from the tiger’s blaze. Though the individual tiger’s stripes are unique, this blaze is always the same.
72
India, 2011
IN THE LATE AFTERNOON back at my bungalow I drag a blanket outside and lie in a circle of sun on the patio. The heat of the day warms me—just as the night chills me. The warmth soothes my head and my chest, and I imagine that I am getting well. Butterflies flit from hibiscus to bougainvillea. I am content in this patch of sun. The jungle is just beyond with its alarm calls, but no tigers. Where are the tigers? What if I don’t see a tiger? After coming this far. How could I possibly not see one? If Ajay is the best guide in India and he can’t find one, then how could I hope to? How disappointed will I be? What if I fail? And in this kind of quest can there be such a thing as failure?
I don’t know. I’m not sure. Still lying there in the warmth, I experienced something that I’ve felt only a few times in my life. Crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, or gazing at the Black Sea. On a train traversing Siberia. In the water with dolphins swimming around me. In a man’s arms. Nursing my daughter at my breast. It is the feeling that I want to stay here forever. I never want to leave. I want to hold on to this moment and never let it go. I want time to stop.