by Mary Morris
“All right,” I reply, “but I don’t want to live together. I’m just not ready. And I have to think of Kate…” I don’t want her to grow attached to a man who isn’t going to stay in her life. Larry asks if I’ll help him find an apartment and I say that I will.
The next day my upstairs neighbor knocks on my door. She’s a professional mime and clown and she has just returned from a tour of Eastern Europe, where she’s done street theater. She’s going on about a Polish boat mechanic she met in Gdańsk and how it was love at first sight except that she doesn’t speak Polish and he doesn’t speak English. It’s a long, rambling monologue but finally she gets to the point. She’s going to move to Poland to learn the language and do I know anyone who might want to sublet her apartment?
And I tell her I do.
91
TIGERS WERE VIRTUALLY UNKNOWN in Europe for centuries. In Aristotle’s History of Animals, he makes no mention of the tiger. The first known tiger to visit Europe came via one of Alexander the Great’s faithful generals, who brought one to Athens in 323 BC and displayed this beast, once believed to be a myth, in front of the Acropolis for all to see. Still the tiger remained an obscure and enigmatic beast. In The Travels of Marco Polo, Marco Polo describes how “the Great Khan has many leopards, which are good for hunting and the taking of beasts…He has several great lions, larger than those of Babylonia. They have very handsome coats, of beautiful color, striped lengthwise with black, red, and white.”
Of course, these red-striped lions weren’t lions at all. They were tigers. But only those who had crossed into Asia had seen them before.
92
“YOU WILL BE a restless wanderer.” This was God’s curse to Cain.
93
Brooklyn, 2009
ON A BLEAK NOVEMBER DAY I wake and look outside. The sky is gray. The oak tree in our yard is shedding the last of its leaves. Squirrels grow fat as they chomp on acorns, preparing for another winter. They scamper along the lines of cable that we refer to as “the squirrel highway.” But on that gray morning, gazing outside, I’m bored. And, though I hate to admit it, in despair. I’ve gone almost nowhere in more than two years. And one year of that I spent laid up, often in bed.
Just the other day a former student wrote from Egypt, where he was traveling for three weeks. He shared with me that he put an Italian passport cover on his American passport in case of a terrorist attack. A clever precaution, I thought. A close friend, heading to India, asked me to come over and help her pack. “You’re such a good packer,” she said. A good packer? This had never been how I defined myself. It was not how I wanted my friends to remember me.
A friend on Facebook shares a picture of a monastery, perched on a pinnacle of a rock, in Bhutan. It’s called the Tiger’s Nest because it looks unattainable. I sit, staring at the picture, longing to go, but I’m sure I can’t hike a mile, let alone up to a place in the heavens. Since my accident I’ve hardly traveled and certainly not solo. For months I’ve been stuck at home as if a locked door stood between me and the world. In a way I suppose it does.
It’s been almost two years since my accident. I had a second surgery to remove the metal plate, but walking remains painful, my balance unsure. I can no longer walk on a beach. Within moments the uneven sand causes my ankle to swell. I can’t hike. I have to be very careful what shoes I wear. It is only recently that I gave up walking with a cane—and that was because I left it in a cab. Something that I took as a good sign at the time but that really just meant I forgot my cane.
Now I’m suffering from travel envy. Some people covet riches or another person’s good looks. I covet journeys. Friends who tell me they are off to Bali, hiking in Machu Picchu, camel trekking along the Nile. But my friend asking me to help her pack is the last straw. I have no plans. No maps or brochures lie scattered around the house as they often do. “Oh,” my mother used to say, “she’s looking at maps.” That was a sure sign I’d soon be on my way. I couldn’t stay in one place for long.
But it has been a while since my dog-eared atlas that still has Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in its pages has left the shelf. The plastic bin where I keep maps is gathering dust. Maps. I collect them. I have for years. I keep them all in this bin. From time to time I like to take them out, retrace the steps I’ve taken through Prague or Kyoto. I’ve spent much of the past thirty years on the road, wandering through Latin America, traversing the Gobi desert. But in the last two years I’ve spent my time wanting to travel and hardly being able to. I’ve spent more time than I’d ever imagined at home. “Stuck” would be the operative word. As another squirrel scurries by, I turn to Larry, who is waking up. “I need to get away.”
He looks at me, nodding. He knows what I’ve been through. What we’ve both been through. This doesn’t surprise him. It is as if he expected it. “Where do you want to go?” he asks, groggy from sleep.
“Everywhere,” I tell him. In truth I don’t care. I want to go everywhere.
94
Brooklyn, 2010
AN INVITATION ARRIVES. It comes in an embossed envelope that contains all of our names. We are invited to attend the Hindu wedding of Kate’s best friend’s cousin. The wedding is to be held in Lucknow, India, on June 13, 2010, which a soothsayer has declared to be a propitious date. When I give Kate the invitation, she says she’s going. As a college graduation present we promised her an airplane ticket. And she wants one to Mumbai. And so do I.
For days I hem and haw. We could go together. I envision us, wrapped in saris, red bindis on our foreheads for the wedding, then pushing on into the hills of Bengal. Finally I gather the strength to ask, though I already sense what the answer will be, but still I hope against hope. At last I come out with it. “The invitation is really for all of us, isn’t it?” I say.
But Kate shakes her head. “I’m doing this on my own,” she replies. I cannot ignore the finality in her tone. A few weeks later as I am about to begin a new round of physical therapy, my suitcase leaves without me. Kate has packed it with lightweight linens, including all of my yoga pants, because the temperature the previous week in Lucknow was 108. On the day her plane lands in Mumbai a rubber slide of the Titanic is being blown up in front of my house. It is our annual block party, and for the rest of the day I watch children sliding from the sinking ship into a wading pool.
Days later I receive an e-mail from Kate in Mumbai. They have picked out the gold-and-emerald sari for the wedding. And she has accompanied the groom’s family to the temple for prayer. She was asked to join them in their holiest of ceremonies and she put her hands with theirs into the flame. This is a great honor. For the wedding she will be swathed in silk. She will have a bindi on her forehead to mark the third eye of wisdom. Then she asks me to tell her what is happening at home. What can I say? We moved two planters into the back of the garden. I have scheduled dental appointments for all. What I can’t tell her is this: I long to put my hands in the fire. I want to burn.
95
BORGES WRITES, “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
96
India, 2011
VIBHAV IS AS CHEERFUL as Ajay was glum. And while Ajay was contemplative, Vibhav is all about chatter. From the moment I get into the jeep until he drops me off back at the hotel he’s just chattering away. He must think it is his job to keep me entertained but it only makes me burrow deeper into myself. I miss Ajay with his quiet manner and Sudhir with his eccentric mustache and weird love of snakes.
We come upon a savanna that is filled with spotted deer. Ears perked, eyes alert, they are ready to run in a heartbeat. Except for a few instances in the ocean and perhaps now, I’ve never had the experience of not being at the top of the food chain. But the deer clearly know that, at any moment, they can be eaten. Their p
erked ears, always moving, their darting eyes, attest to this fact. No one eats the tiger—except the Chinese who believe the blood and bones contain special powers. And a few poachers I’ve read about who say that tiger meat is sweet and juicy like chicken.
The only natural enemy that the tiger has is man. Here in Kahna there are twenty-one thousand spotted deer, and the spotted deer make up 52 percent of the tiger’s diet. No wonder their ears are twitching. We pause at the savanna, then keep driving around. My driver and guide hear the alarm calls of peacocks, monkeys, wild chickens, spotted deer, barking deer, sambar deer (while I, of course, hear nothing at all), but after hours of driving on the rutted roads, still no sign of the tiger.
Then suddenly in the late afternoon we hear something. We all hear it. Even me. It sounds like an engine revving up, but it is in fact a growl. A real tiger’s growl. It starts low, but then it ripples through the jungle until it is a full-fledged roar. All around us we hear the alarm calls of peacocks and deer. Ahead of us the dust of a speeding jeep recedes down the road, and we set out after it. We race around the bends and I’m holding on to the frame of the jeep, scanning the woods for some sign of a six-hundred-pound striped animal. We follow the wake of the other jeep until it leads us to a dry riverbed where drivers and guides are all pointing at the ground.
There on the path, heading toward a pond, I see them. Pugmarks. Fresh pugmarks. I see them in the ground by the banks of the river. A male tiger has walked through here less than an hour ago. Vibhav knows it is a male because of the circular mark. The female’s is oval. No one knows why, but this is so. It is just one more mystery to be solved. The tiger crossed this riverbed just moments ago, but now he’s gone. Our eyes scan the low-lying scrub, the edges of the river, but he could be anywhere.
As we drive back to the hotel, the tiger and its pugmark have morphed into “she.” All tigers you cannot see are she. Ajay’s words echo in my head. That apex predator, fierce and ferocious. Admired for her fearful symmetry. A solitary creature who succeeds in only a third of her kills. Who will mate for a day, then go on her lonely way. But never get between the tigress and her cubs. And give her room to be wild and free. How can I not see the artist in her? How can she not see the tiger in me?
We ride along the bumpy road through the villages, and Vibhav is humming a song. His voice is soft and melodious, and when he stops, I ask him what he was singing. It is a poem of the great Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore that has been set to music. Vibhav translates it for me. “I am in a boat moored to a dock. This is a waste of time. My morning is wasted. Everything is wasted. I am going to cut the tether. I am going to move out. I will not be afraid of the furrowed brow of the storm. I will make it my friend.”
This is a song you sing, Vibhav explains, when you find yourself at a crossroads.
97
YOGI BERRA FAMOUSLY SAID, “When you come to the fork in the road, take it.”
98
THE TALMUD SAYS that when you must choose between two things and you cannot decide, choose the third. Remember that for Yann Martel the tiger was his third choice.
99
IT IS 1974 and I’m living in New York. I’ve begun a graduate program at Columbia in comparative literature because I think, eventually, I can earn a living, but in truth I have no idea what I want. I’ve considered law school, film school. The dream of being a writer eludes me. Yet I’m writing all the time, scribbling poems and stories, notes for a novel. Meanwhile I’m living in a dorm, International House. The woman across the hall from me, named Marcia, plays her music way too loud. One afternoon I knock on her door and ask Marcia to turn her music down, and she screams at me. She calls me names, and I find myself paralyzed before her rage. The next day I move to a “quiet hall.”
A few weeks later a Pakistani poet named Shuja tells me over dinner that he’s organizing a poetry reading and asks me to read. I tell him that I’m not a writer, but he won’t take no for an answer. “You’re studying comparative literature. You must also be writing.”
Of course, I’m writing. Much more than I’m studying, in fact. But I’ve never shared my work with anyone. Once in high school I showed my friend Phyllis a poem and she said it was “nice.” That was the one and only time I’ve shared my work. That is, until Shuja insists that I show him my poems. I have no idea how he talks me into it, but one evening he comes to my room and I literally open the drawer. For the better part of an hour Shuja leafs through the sheaves of papers that I’ve stuffed in there. He shuffles pages, putting them in piles. After a time, he turns to me and says, “You are a very good third-rate poet.”
And I wonder why I opened my drawer for someone to tell me this.
But he goes on: “Shakespeare was a first-rate poet. John Donne was a second-rate poet. Anne Sexton is a third-rate poet.” Well, if Anne Sexton is third-rate, I could live with that. One of the piles Shuja has arranged contains five of my poems. “Here,” he says, “you will read these.” And for some reason I agree.
On the evening of the event I walk into a packed room and there, sitting in the front row, right in front of the podium, is my nemesis, Marcia. I feel as if I could read in front of anyone but her. But it’s too late. The reading proceeds. I’m trembling as I read my poems. In fact I think I will faint. Afterward Marcia comes up to me and says, “If I’d known you were writing those poems, I would have kept my music down.”
Marcia tells me to send my poems to The Columbia Review. And when they accept them, I knock on Marcia’s door with flowers to thank her. Years later when I am a writer and giving readings, I will at times catch a glimpse of Marcia in the audience.
That spring I drop out of graduate school. I have completed five language exams, all of my written and oral exams. All I have to do is write a thesis. When I walk away, my adviser never speaks to me again.
100
A COURTIER falls in love with a princess and her barbaric father makes him submit to a test he has devised for criminals. In an arena there are two doors. Behind one is a tiger that will devour him. Behind the other is a beautiful woman whom he must marry—though it is not the princess he loves. The princess knows which door houses the tiger and which the other woman. She also knows that her beloved will either be devoured by the tiger or be forced to marry another woman.
Just before he must decide, the courtier looks at his beloved and she gives him a nod toward one of the doors. But the story stops here. We never learn the courtier’s fate. The problem is unsolvable, the choice impossible.
101
PICO IYER WRITES: “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes…And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down, get taken in and fall in love once more.” To become young fools, to slow time down. Isn’t that what we are all looking for? To return to beginnings. The first day of kindergarten and my mother has to pry my fingers from her hand. I won’t let go. When she manages to pull away, I sob into the skirts of Miss Malvey. I don’t know how long I cry, but when I stop and look around the first thing I see is a large map of an empty city on the floor and a boy who is putting buildings, houses, trees, and cars into the city. I get on the floor and join him. His name is Paul and he’s happy to share. I begin making a city of my own. I make it over and over again. It is never the same place. I never want it to be.
Soon I am able to walk to and from school every day. I walk home. I forge my way slowly into the world. Into my own city of unknown streets, other people’s houses, all waiting to be explored.
102
“THE STORY OF CATS is a story of meat,” Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes in her amazing book The Tribe of Tiger. Thomas explains how mammals essentially descended from two branches: the Vulpavines, or the Fox Tribe, and the Viverravines, the Mongoose Tribe. During the Oligocene epoch, members of the Fox Tribe began to evolve into bears, raccoons, weasels
, and wolves. Members of the Mongoose Tribe became mongoose, hyenas, and cats.
The cats evolved as full-fledged carnivores. While other mammals diversified their diets, the cats did not. Not only did they not diversify their diets to include plants and fruits, but their diets also don’t include carrion. Cats became what is known as obligate carnivores. That is, they have no choice. Tigers are almost entirely dependent on captured animal protein for their diet and, as Thomas points out, their modus operandi is lurk and leap. Basically, a tiger is either eating or hunting. Most old tigers die of starvation because they can no longer succeed in their kills.
103
India, 2011
I HAVE MORE OR LESS GIVEN UP on seeing a tiger in the wild. The cold is keeping them away. I am ready to admit defeat. “So,” I say to Vibhav as we leave the jungle on the second day, “I guess I’m not going to see a tiger after all.”
“Oh, you can see one. You will. I can guarantee it.” Guarantee it? I have heard this before, of course. “But perhaps you must do elephant walk.”
“Elephant walk? What is that?”
Vibhav explains that in the early morning the mahouts go out into the jungle and find a place where a tiger lies. Somehow, they know where to look. Then they let the guides know where to come. If I’m going to see a tiger in the wild this might be my last chance. I don’t really want to do elephant walk. It is a practice that I’m sure is frowned upon by conservationists. One naturalist will later tell me that it is a “disaster” for tourists to be going into the bush on elephants, looking for tigers.