All the Way to the Tigers

by Mary Morris

  But that’s the thing about travel. The point isn’t to stay in one place. It is to move on. It is about seizing the moment, the hour, the day, with the understanding that it isn’t forever. We have to move on. In the Sicilian language there is no future tense. You don’t say, “I’ll go to the beach tomorrow.” You say, “I go to the beach tomorrow.” The Sicilians understand the importance of staying in the present. It is what the traveler must learn as well.

  All these thoughts jumble in my brain as I lie like a lizard, warming myself. I am in the middle of India in a place that my internist considered with dismay. The heat enters my bones and I believe, incorrectly, that it will heal me just as the fresh air of spring once helped heal my broken ankle. But more than anything it seems as if I have traveled halfway around the world just so I could sit alone in a warm circle of light on a patio in a jungle where wild beasts roam.

  That night a fire burns in the fire pit in the center of the encampment. Two men sit near the fire and I come and sit not far from them. One is a very old man who is scantily clad and keeps a walking stick at his side. He nods at me as he hums softly to himself. The other I recognize as a worker at the hotel. I know we have no common language, yet we sit together, eyes on the flames. My face and hands are hot. My back is cold. Still, the fire feels good and I am happy for the company—even in the silence. I stay for a while, until the flames subside, and then head back to my bungalow.

  Once again I am cold and tired, so I crawl into bed. I’ve left the windows open. There’s no point in closing them. It’s just as cold inside as out. I think I’ll drift off to sleep but instead I lie there. I listen to the jungle sounds. A strange, guttural chatter, the calls of birds, a monkey’s shriek in the night.

  73

  ONE MORNING outside of Atlanta, Georgia, a woman is making coffee. She has just let her dachshund out into the yard. The dog’s name is Journey. The woman is pausing at the sink, thinking about her day. The sun is just rising as she pours her coffee. She’s holding it, steaming in her hands, when a Bengal tiger jumps over her fence and pounces on her dog. The woman goes crazy, screaming. She’s dialing 911 when suddenly two police officers, who had received reports of a tiger prowling in the suburbs of Atlanta, appear. One of the officers perches on top of the fence and shoots the tiger dead.

  The tiger was a six-year-old circus star named Suzy. She belonged to a circus performer, Alexander Lacey, and was being transported along with thirteen other cats from Florida to Tennessee, where they were to live in a sanctuary. Suzy along with all the other cats had been retired from the Barnum & Bailey Circus. The truck had stopped outside of Atlanta for the night. No one knows how Suzy left the convoy nor did they notice her missing until they arrived at their destination and did a head count. They found that they had thirteen cats, not fourteen.

  Journey survived.

  74

  REAL TRAVELERS, like real writers, move through the world like a child. With a child’s sense of wonder and surprise. To move as if you’ve never been somewhere before, even if you’ve been there a thousand times. As if you are experiencing something for the first time. This is what my husband often says about me, and not always in a complimentary way. Every village we travel through, every painting we see, every meal eaten. It is as if I’ve not experienced any of this before.

  Somewhere Proust writes that travel isn’t about seeing new places. It’s about seeing with fresh eyes. That is the thing about travel for me. I walk into a room as if I’ve never walked into one before. I meet a person as if I’m seeing him for the first time. Recently I read the strange case of a man who could not form memories. While I wouldn’t envy this man, I do think it is an intriguing notion to wake up each day afresh.

  It must be this sense of wonder that makes for good writers and good travelers. One summer we were in Basque Country in a little fishing village, and all day long boats floated past our living-room window. Every time a boat went by, I shouted to my husband, “Look, a boat.” It didn’t matter how many times a boat went by; each time I was enthralled.

  75

  LATE AT NIGHT I sneak downstairs. Groggy with sleep, I tiptoe to the landing on the basement stairs so I can watch my mother sewing. I watch her as if I am watching a TV show—never taking my eyes off the screen. She’s hunched over a quilting frame that takes up much of our basement. Under the light of a single bulb she’s making the tiniest of stitches. Almost everything she does is by hand. There will be tens of thousands of stitches before she’s done. She’s making the bedspreads, pillow shams, and curtains for my room.

  From the stairs I can see only the back of her head and the smoke from her cigarette, which rises like a signal to warn the tribe. She never knows I’m there. Never hears me or sees me, and I don’t dare disturb her. If I do, she’ll send me back to bed. She works into the night. My mother began quilting when we moved into the house I grew up in. I was three years old. She’ll finish when I enter middle school. This task will occupy most of my childhood. When I leave for college and my parents move into the city, she throws the quilts away.

  My mother was a gifted seamstress. She had a certificate in fashion from the Art Institute of Chicago. She had dreams of being a designer. For years she made every dress she wore. She married late—in her mid-thirties—when her own mother had given up all hope for her youngest daughter. Once she married my father, she mainly sewed Halloween costumes for her children. In my life I have been a brontosaurus, a swashbuckler, and a money tree. No princess, no fairy queen for me. I didn’t even get to be a witch. She decided what creatures I would be, what clothes I would wear to school.

  The night I was a money tree, boys at a school party ripped off my paper bills. I walked home crying, the wind blowing through my naked branches. One afternoon our puppy teethed on the arm of an expensive chair and my mother sat on the floor, reupholstering it. She finished just as my father walked in the door. He never noticed. My mother wanted to travel. She wanted to see the world. Instead she spent six years quilting my bedspreads.

  I want to distract her. I want her to come upstairs and tell me a story, but she rarely does. She’s too impatient to sit with me for very long. She has patience only for her quilting. “These are for you,” she tells me, even as they occupy all of her time. But they are beautiful. Pink and white with a soft cottony feel, the way I imagine my mother’s skin must be. In the years I sleep in my room, they will smell of smoke and of her perfume, Replique.

  It is my father who tucks me in. He sits at the side of my bed, making up stories about a homesick snowflake that tumbles to earth, about a brook and a nasty bridge. He sings me the Whiffenpoof song about the poor little lambs who’ve gone astray until I drift to sleep. Not my mother. She stands in my doorway, a silhouette against the doorframe, blowing me a kiss. “Did you catch it?” she asks, and I always say I did.

  76

  India, 2011

  IT IS DISHEARTENING, leaving Pench. After all these days of tiger safari, the only pugmarks I’ve managed to see are on the monogrammed towels in my room. And I know how disappointed Ajay and Sudhir are that we didn’t find my tiger. Later on Facebook they will e-mail me pictures of all the tigers they have seen since my departure. “You have to come back, Mary,” Ajay will write. How have they seen all these tigers and I didn’t manage to see one?

  Though we have not communicated in days, Dinesh, my driver, shows up as planned. He looks well and rested, his shirt white and pressed. I have no idea where he has been for the days I’ve been here. I am late getting ready and he is a little anxious. We are leaving Pench later than Dinesh would have liked. It is true; I am a dawdler and he is very punctual. But I don’t want to leave. I wanted to find my tiger with Ajay and Sudhir, but that wasn’t to be.

  As we start off, he sees that I am still coughing. In fact, my cough has returned with a vengeance. “You aren’t any better?” he asks.

  “No,” I tell him. “I think
I am worse.”

  Heading due east, we pass the Tiger Woods Resort and at first I think it’s named after the fallen-from-grace golfer, but instead it means quite literally what it says. These are the woods where tigers technically roam. Though none that have crossed paths with me. Clearly this isn’t the best season for seeing tigers. Still, I am sorry to leave it behind and sad to say goodbye to Ajay and Sudhir.

  I start coughing again. “You need more cough drops and whiskey,” he tells me. It is not a question but a statement, and I agree. Especially about the whiskey. I think I need a doctor as well, one who can prescribe antibiotics, but I have no idea where or when that will happen.

  We pass a pair of bullocks with their horns painted bright blue. An old man totters by on a bicycle with an enormous sack of rice on his head. It is about four in the afternoon on the national highway, and we hit rush hour. The two-lane road is burgeoning not only with cars and trucks but also with oxen. When the oxen’s day’s work is done, the farmers let them loose from the fields. Each ox knows his way home and they just saunter along.

  Dinesh honks his horn endlessly as he weaves his way around every car, motorbike, truck, taxi, child on a bike, and beast of burden. Vehicles rush toward us, head-on, while we careen in and out of whatever traffic is before us. It is like a video game that’s real. Pedestrians amble along as well. Women in saris of saffron, emerald, and salmon walk behind hay trucks, tending the load. Two friends meet on opposite sides of the road and decide to have a chat. So they just step into the middle of the road and stand there, talking. They aren’t fazed by the innumerable vehicles that veer around them, beeping, and shouting drivers, as they catch up on how the family’s doing.

  One of the excellent things about Dinesh—beyond the water bottle and towelettes that he provides—is that he is very knowledgeable about the bathrooms en route. He knows how long it will be between one good bathroom and the next. And he knows which ones are, relatively speaking, clean. With this in mind we make a preemptive pit stop, then push on to Kahna, which is about a four- or five-hour drive. At Seoni we pull over in front of a convenience store amid a deluge of scooters, rickshaws, pickup trucks.

  On the median strip a herd of feral white pigs with piglets grazes. Sacred cows promenade through the middle of the business district. I use the facilities as Dinesh gets me more cough drops and whiskey, of which I take a hearty swig. Back on the highway a snowy egret smashes into our windshield, bounces into the middle of the road, then flies away, apparently unscathed.

  It is dusk when we leave the main road. We are now traveling on the outskirts of the game reserve. In the gullies children are rushing home. Boys play in the middle of the road. We pass huts made of wooden slats that sell soft drinks, milk, aspirin. Basic supplies. We are in the buffer zone. But as I see the children on bikes dashing around, I can’t help but wonder: Aren’t they afraid? Isn’t there some risk, well, of being eaten?

  Dinesh tells me we have perhaps another half hour on this road, which grows bumpier and bumpier by the minute. Trucks barrel toward us. I finally share with him that I’m disappointed that Ajay and Sudhir didn’t find a tiger. “Oh, you will see a tiger,” Dinesh says. “We are coming to a dry riverbed and in the years I’ve been coming here, I’ve seen at least sixteen tigers at this one spot. I know you’ll see a tiger. I’m ninety percent sure that you will.” But as we come to the riverbed there are no tigers to be seen.

  * * *

  —

  It is pitch-black as we drive through a village to Chitvan Jungle Lodge. We pass a kind of pension. I can see open rooms with bunk beds and Dinesh tells me that is where he’ll be staying while I am at the hotel. This hadn’t occurred to me. I hadn’t thought, really, about where Dinesh would stay, and it makes me sad to think of him in his proper white shirt sleeping in a bunk bed.

  At last we pull into the property of the hotel. Just as Pench was lush and rustic, Kahna is open, with large vegetable gardens, a huge expanse of lawn. It is more like where I imagined the British would stay during the Raj, and I’m not far from wrong. As I check in, I explain that I’m not feeling well, and I would love some soup and tea. The clerk nods and leads me through a garden of winding paths, past a large vegetable patch. In the patch the leaves of banana and avocado trees are crumpled and brown. “It has never been this cold,” the clerk tells me.

  As we walk toward my room, I can see my breath. The chill enters my lungs, and I start to cough. “I’m sorry,” I explain. “I’m a little sick.” My room is a large one-bedroom suite and no sooner am I inside than a tray with my dinner arrives. The man who brings it bows, then walks away without showing me his back. On the tray along with chapatis and curry, I find bread and butter and a strange, oily chicken soup. Another small tray with a pot of tea is delivered.

  There are space heaters in the rooms, which almost make me cry, but the rooms are so spacious, they barely make a dent in the cold. Still I turn them all on, then get into bed to read. No one can see me, so I don’t draw the curtains. Outside, a Cheshire Cat smile of a moon grins. The night is filled with jungle sounds, but nowhere, for me at least, does the tiger roar.

  77

  IN ORDER for a tiger to make a kill, she must sneak up on her prey in a crouch. And then she must pounce and chase it down with all her speed. But she’s a sprinter, not a long-distance runner. So she must rely on stealth. Once the tiger has made her kill, she will hold on to it until her heartbeat slows.

  78

  THE TAHITIANS don’t have a word that means “art.” The closest expression in their language translates to something like “I’m doing the best I can.” Ever since I heard this it has become a kind of mantra to me. I try and apply it to my own work, to my students and anyone who shares his or her work with me. If we live with the idea of perfection, we will never do anything. The notion paralyzes us, but doing the best we can, this is possible. I recall a friend many years ago who said he wanted to write like William Faulkner. I told him I just wanted to write a good scene every day or so. My friend ceased writing long ago, but it appears that I am still plodding along.

  I am reminded of that moment in The Fugitive Kind when a woman shows Marlon Brando a bad landscape painting she has done. He looks at it and, in his Marlon Brando way, says nothing. But the woman replies, “I know they aren’t very good, but I feel better when I do them.”

  79

  WHEN I’M A GIRL, my hair is long and lush. Strangers like to touch it when they walk by. Once when I’m standing in line at Leo’s Delicatessen, waiting for a corned beef sandwich, a woman fondles my ponytail as if she plans to steal it. When I turn twelve, my mother tells me I need a trim. “You’re old enough,” she says, “to go on your own.”

  So I do. I make an appointment with the hairdresser and on a Saturday afternoon ride my bike there. The assistant washes and admires my beautiful, silken hair. Then I sit in the chair and the hairdresser asks me what I want. The pixie cut, as it is called, is popular then. Several of my friends have done this with their hair. “I want a pixie,” I tell her.

  She looks at me a little surprised. “Does your mother know?”

  “She told me to get a haircut.” So the woman chops off my long tresses. She gives me bangs, a shaggy top. She goes happily about her job and we both admire it when she’s done.

  I ride home, but my mother isn’t there. There’s a rock on the lawn at the end of our driveway and I’m sitting there like a lizard, warming in the sun, when she pulls in from the store. She rolls down her window. “Oh my god, what have you done?” She shakes her head in fury. “What have you done to your hair?”

  * * *

  —

  My mother is my mirror. She tells me how I look, what to wear. This matters to her more than anything. If I look good, I get a thumbs-up. If I don’t, she asks rhetorically, “Is that what you’re going to wear?” Throughout my teens we fight, and it is mostly over my appeara
nce. Not my grades or my friends and how I behave. How I look always matters much more than how I feel.

  Every season she takes me to the mall. “You need some spring clothes,” she’d say. Then she picks out what she wants me to wear. She rejects everything I seem to like. The blouse I love tugged at my breasts. She yanks on it to show me. The skirts I want are too long or too short. I always seem to need another size, a different cut. Jackets make me look boxy. Sweaters busty. I need clothes that minimize. With each outfit, I step out of the fitting room and wait for her to tell me what is wrong.

  In the 1930s my mother was working at Saks on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, selling ladies underwear. But before she married, she designed and made all her own clothes. Her idol was Coco Chanel. One day an important designer came into Saks to show the saleswomen how to dress the mannequin. As he was trying to explain something that no one seemed able to grasp, my mother held up the sketch she’d just drawn. “Is this what you mean?” He asked her how she learned to do that. My mother shrugged. “I taught myself,” she said.

  The designer helped my mother get a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied fashion until her father refused to give her the carfare she needed to get to school. But fashion was her thing. If she’d been born a little later, she might have had a fashion line of her own. Instead, I become her mannequin. Dressing me becomes her project.

  I must subject myself not only to these shopping expeditions but also to the visits to the tailor. I dread these outings. Everything has to be shortened or lengthened, let in or let out. Shoulders need lifting. Seams have to be opened. As my breasts grow, special snaps are sewn into my blouses to keep them from “opening.” I stand on raised platforms, scowling at myself in the mirror. The seamstress, her mouth full of pins, rotates me so that my mother can approve. But I have beautiful clothes. My closets are full of pleated skirts; cable-stitched sweaters filled my drawers. On the spare bed in my room clothing piles up. I never wear the same thing two days in a row. I never hang anything up. I never put anything away.