All the Way to the Tigers

by Mary Morris

  And it isn’t great for the elephants either. Tigers have been known to rip out the eyes of elephants who startle them in the bush or come upon them when they’re with a kill. But tomorrow will be my eighth and final safari. I’ve been with Ajay, one of the best jungle guides in all of India, and now Vibhav, for almost two weeks and no tiger. Short of hanging a lot of bed linen throughout the jungle, I’ve given up on finding a tiger just by driving around and listening for alarm calls.

  We stop at a crossroads and Sonu stands up. He is listening. His eyes dart about. Like Ajay, this young man has grown up in this place and he hears things I cannot imagine. Then he points into the distance. “Sambar deer alarm call,” he says.

  I know now to sit down and hold on as Sonu dashes ahead. He zips around turns, avoids ruts, makes a wide turn, until suddenly we come to a clearing. Here we stop, and again silence. Nothing. I wait, but I don’t see a thing. Suddenly Vibhav grabs my hand. “There,” he whispers, pointing.

  Still I see nothing. In the distance the bushes seem to rustle, but that is all. Vibhav shrugs. Whatever it was—the wind, a lost fawn—the movement stops, and we push on. This is not, after all, an expedition. I’m not searching for the snow leopard in the Himalayas or the elusive, and probably extinct, ivory-billed woodpecker in a bayou outside of Baton Rouge. I am just on the tourist trail, a bumpy and unused trail though it may be. Still, the afternoon ends, once more, without the sighting of a tiger.

  104

  IN Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes: “You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.” As Calvino understands, and I understand now, the thing itself eludes us. Reach for the stars, my father always said, even though you’ll never touch them. The journey is everything.

  105

  India, 2011

  IN THE MORNING an elephant is waiting for me. As it is also waiting for the four other jeep-loads of tourists who are ahead of me in line. Young children, old women, fat men are prodded up a ladder onto the old elephant’s back. They disappear for a few minutes, then return with faint grins on their faces. It appears that they have seen something. At last it is my turn and, I assume because I am solo in my jeep (again), I am solo, except for the mahout, on my elephant as well. Once I am topside it is what I imagine it must be like to ride shotgun in a Sherman tank as you lurch into enemy territory.

  Suddenly the mahout kicks my poor beast and clobbers it on the head with his stick and the elephant lumbers into the dense bush. I ride for about five minutes when the mahout starts kicking the elephant again around the ears with his heels. The elephant backs up, then comes to a halt. With his long stick the mahout pulls back some branches. Then he starts frantically kicking his elephant again, shouting at me—something I can’t quite understand and then I do. “Tiger, tiger.”

  I’m not sure what I was expecting. I was hoping for at least a moment of what Konrad Lorenz, the famed Austrian zoologist, called the heiliger schauer, “the Holy Shiver,” the terror that predators inspire in their prey. And the tiger, after all, is an apex predator. He is at the top of his food chain and here, in his jungle, I am not. So I was hoping at least for a look, a gaze, its green eyes set on me for an instant so I could experience, albeit from an elephant’s back, what it means when a tiger has you in its sights.

  Instead, as the bushes open, there is, taking a snooze, well, a tiger. She is big and she is wild, but she also seems quite content to doze with elephants tramping around her and a bunch of tourists shooting film. It is as if she was sent by central casting (and in a way she was). I so wanted to have a different kind of moment and in truth I wanted to share it with Ajay and Sudhir. I wanted a tiger to walk out of the jungle on its way to devour some poor spotted deer and for an instant lock eyes with me. So I’ve traveled halfway around the world to see a tiger who is, more or less, a tourist attraction, taking a nap.

  A few moments later the elephant turns, and we amble back to the road, my tiger now behind me. Can this be it? Is this all? Have I journeyed so far for so little? Back where the jeep awaits, I climb off the elephant, feeling dismayed. It is that let-down feeling when you finish a book you’ve loved with an unsatisfying ending. There is time left and Vibhav, perhaps sensing my disappointment, suggests we drive around for a bit. “I will tell you a funny story,” he says. It seems that this young tigress whom we’ve just seen likes to do the elephant walk. She’s not very shy and she seems to enjoy the attention. “Her mother,” he tells me, “was the same way. She always came out for elephant walk.” So it’s kind of a family concession, I guess, but still…I wish it were different. This was hardly seeing a tiger in the wild.

  We come off a ridge, driving toward a ravine, and are about to circle back when Vibhav begins to point frantically. He taps Sonu on the shoulder and immediately Sonu brings the jeep to a halt, then begins to back up. “Look.” He’s pointing. Deep in a ravine the bushes are moving, and whatever is making them move is coming closer to me. The tigress is now walking. I catch a glimpse of her. I can make out her stripes.

  And there she is. She is large and sleek and moves like a well-oiled machine. Orange and black. Just as I’d envisioned her. I stand up, gripping the frame of the jeep, when she jumps onto the road, not twenty feet from me. She pauses, as if deciding which way to go, and then yawns. As she looks around, I gaze into her amber eyes. We stare at each other, and there it is. A creature truly wild, truly free. No longer hidden, she stands in the middle of the road, brilliant in all her glory. Then she gives a long feline stretch, crosses the road on her white fluffy paws that could, with a single swat, break a person’s neck. She slips down into the brush on the other side. Behind the ridge she disappears. The bushes rustle as she descends into the forest. I watch her go as I stand, staring until the movement stops and she has moved back into the dense jungle from where she emerged and where she belongs.

  Then it is time to leave. As we approach the gate to Kahna, Vibhav turns to me. For once he is serious. “So you found your tiger, Mary, didn’t you?”

  I nod, smiling. “Yes, I did.”

  We drive out of the park in silence. Just before the main road a family of deer, including a very young fawn, appears. Overhead, monkeys nibble on leaves and suddenly a wild boar leaps out of the bushes and crosses the road. I shake my head. “This is so beautiful,” I say. For the rest of the ride no one says a thing.

  106

  TO SEE A TIGER in your dream represents power and your ability to exert it in various situations. The dream may also indicate that you need to take more of a leadership role. Alternatively, the tiger represents female sexuality, aggression, and seduction.

  To dream that you are attacked by a tiger refers to the emotions that you have repressed because you were afraid of confronting them.

  To see a caged tiger in your dream suggests that your repressed feelings are on the verge of surfacing.

  107

  India, 2011

  AT THE TRAIN STATION in Nagpur a man with his legs twisted in unimaginable ways drags himself along the ground with one hand. He looks as if someone neatly folded him and he spent his life in a drawer. Another man with broken twigs for legs and a bag of rice on his back hobbles by. It is close to ten as Dinesh and I pull into the parking lot of this huge, dark, dusty station that boils with a cauldron of humanity.

  He will leave me here as I push on to Mumbai, which I’ve decided to travel to by train. But I’m having second thoughts. Women wrapped in scarves drag crying children. Old men and women cling to one another’s arms. A girl without hands holds a begging cup in the stumps of her arms. Inside the station the floor is covered in blankets upon which are s
itting or lying down turbaned old men, women in saris, shawls around their arms, half-naked children, snot running down their noses. Two bodies lie in the middle of the floor, wrapped in white sheets. I assume they are dead until I see a large water bottle tucked between their heads. Dead people don’t drink water.

  I feel as if I have fallen into a painting by Bruegel. The one with all the souls, battling in hell. Out on the platform I huddle with a family, wrapped in blankets and scarves. We are all shivering, watching as dreary train after dreary train passes by. Out of nowhere a line of barefoot holy men, dressed only in loincloths of various shades of orange, yellow, and saffron, carrying wooden staffs, marches past in silence, single file. At last a dingy green train with slats for windows pulls into the station. I stand on the platform as the cars roll by, labeled LUGGAGE, DISABLED, SECOND-CLASS SLEEPER #43.

  I check the ticket I purchased back home. It is for the second-class sleeper and the car number is 43. Dinesh looks at my ticket and solemnly nods. I gaze at the dark, soiled windows, the slats for windows, hoping that somehow this isn’t my train, but I cannot wait long because suddenly everyone is piling on—men hoisting their luggage, women with their shopping bags. I fling myself and my luggage up the stairs along with the rest of the shoving throng, with an assist from Dinesh, who waves at me from the platform. “Have a safe journey,” he says as I fight my way into the car.

  Inside, the car is lined in berths with a sackcloth curtain for privacy. Turbaned men, returning from a pilgrimage, lie in most of the beds. A woman is asleep in my berth. I don’t know what to do, but the conductor shakes her. The woman looks up at me, groggily, then points across the aisle to an upper berth that amounts to a narrow, cramped shelf, and asks if I wouldn’t mind sleeping there. It has no window and no light.

  My claustrophobia kicks in. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m not feeling well, and I just can’t sleep up there.” Disgruntled, she gets up, dragging her things with her. She leaves me her used linens to sleep on. As I crawl into bed, a cockroach is climbing the wall.

  It is freezing on the train. I’m not sure when I’ve ever been this cold. Even Delhi and Pench seem warmer than this train—perhaps in part because the doorway between cars is open and my berth is just feet away. My cough has returned with a vengeance (not that it ever really left) and I’m hacking like crazy. At any moment I’m expecting to see blood. I begin to dig out every article of clothing in my wheelie or backpack that provides any warmth. I pull out a long-sleeve tee, a long-sleeve cotton shirt, my sweatshirt, jeans over yoga pants, three pairs of socks.

  Still, I cannot get warm. I put on layer after layer, but I may as well be naked. My hot-water bottle lies in my suitcase as limp and lifeless as roadkill. I am coughing and my head throbs. I still have a few swallows of whiskey from the last bottle Dinesh purchased for me and I drink it until it is done. Somewhere in the compartment men speak in voices so loudly that it makes me think something is wrong. An argument, an accident. I peek out from behind my curtain and see that the conductor and four or five men are having tea in a bunk across from me. They are laughing, swapping stories. The fact that it is the middle of the night means nothing to them. They look at me, wondering what the matter might be. I shake my head and go back to my berth.

  It is perhaps at this moment that I miss Larry the most. But it will be days before I see him again. Before we can really have a talk. For years I traveled through Latin America, from Beijing to Berlin, down the Mississippi, and now to India. I sought out adventures and learned along the way that I could do this on my own. I know that I can. I also know that it is all right to have someone. And it is all right not to want to do this alone anymore. Now in my cold berth I long for warmth as I try to make it through the night.

  Closing my eyes, I see my tigers. The one in my dreams, the ones I have searched for and never found, and the one that sprang out before me in the jungle. As I’m drifting off, I imagine her, moving stealthily in the bush, silent, hunting. Her amber eyes fixed on her prey. In my dreams those eyes turn blue. At last she and I are one and the same.

  I sleep for a while, aware of the jerking of the train, then wake, colder than before.

  Between cars the door is open, sending in a chilling draft, and I get up to close it. We are stopped at a station. It is about four in the morning, and on the platform the hungry and poor huddle, children cry beside their sleeping mothers. A bleating goat mills about. Women tug their shawls tightly around them while men in sandals and thin linen try to sleep, pressed against their bags of clothing and rice. Some stare straight ahead, trembling with the cold. They sit in a soupy fog. For the rest of the night and into the morning, all I see is this fog.

  108

  RECENTLY, while hiking in Nepal, a Dutch tourist and his guide were attacked by a tiger. The guide was slightly injured, fending off the tiger and giving the tourist enough time to climb a tree. The young man climbed six meters off the ground. For two hours he clung to the tree while the tiger paced below it. Tigers, it turns out, aren’t very good at climbing trees. They are built to pounce, and most of their weight is forward. Their big thick front paws are intended to capture prey, not to cling to branches. But the young man did not know this as he waited to be rescued.

  109

  IN Equus, Peter Shaffer’s play about a boy who blinds six horses, the psychiatrist says something that has stayed with me: “I can cure him of his madness, but I will take away his passion.” I saw the play in New York many years ago when I first moved to the city, but it resonates for me to this day. There was a time when, perhaps, I was a bit on the wrong side of that equation, not mad but not entirely sane. I was also passionate about everything I did. Never mind the drugs, the booze, the one-night stands it took me to get there. I struggled to find the balance and now am not sure we ever can. Rilke, considering the prospect of psychoanalysis, said it this way: “If my devils are to leave me, I fear my angels will take flight as well.”

  How do we walk a thin line between sane and savage, between wild and tame? I think of all the jazz musicians, the brilliant poets and painters and actors who died young. Perhaps we cannot have it both ways, or perhaps we need to heed the words of Flaubert, who said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

  Or circling back to Borges, “It is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger.”

  110

  India, 2011

  BY THE TIME we pull into Mumbai I think my ears are going to explode. The pressure is unbearable. Naresh, a former colleague of my husband’s, welcomes me to his house. It is a comfortable apartment with lots of windows. But I am too sick, it seems, to do almost anything. That night we head to a rooftop bar for a drink with his friends, but I bow out early. Naresh hails a rickshaw that runs me home.

  The next day I wake up late, only feeling worse. My ears feel very strange. I can barely hear a thing. And I’m flying home in three days. Naresh has a deadline for a book on jazz in India, but he doesn’t hesitate. “I’m taking you to see my family doctor.” He is a swift walker and I follow him up and down streets until we come to a road of gardens where tomatoes and corn and squash grow. Toward the back of this road is an old house with a wide porch, filled with rocking chairs.

  This is the doctor’s waiting area. We sit on the porch, rocking, until she opens her door. Handing the previous patient a prescription, she greets Naresh with a big hug. She has been his doctor since he was a boy, and once she takes me in, she is very kind. She listens to my chest and checks my ears. “Your eustachian tubes are completely closed and you probably have an infection in your ears. You also have a very bad case of bronchitis. It is dangerous for you to fly, but in two or three days you will be better.”

  She writes me a prescription for drops and more medication, and Naresh, though he has so much work to do, takes me to the pharmacy and waits with me for my medicine. Then he walks me bac
k to his place, where I lay my head over the side of the bed, as the doctor instructed, and put the drops in my nose, which go down my throat and make me gag. I rest and an hour later I am up, though not doing much better. Naresh has told me there’s a bagel shop not far from his place and he suggests that I go there. “You just have to cross the main road, then go down about two streets to the right. You can’t miss it.”

  There is nothing in this that puts me at ease. I am wary of the “you can’t miss it” thing when spoken by a native. I love people who tell me that there’s a mall or a café and if you just go a few miles one way, then make a right (or maybe it’s a left) and keep going through a couple of traffic lights “you can’t miss it.” But you always do.

  I decide to try to find the bagel shop. Walking to the end of Naresh’s street, I pass large apartment buildings with names like Rendez-Vous, Pourquoi Pas, Cher Ami. All in French. I have no idea why. I pass two men sleeping on the sidewalk. Beside them is a cart with a large plastic bag from Bed Bath & Beyond, filled with their only belongings in this world. I walk around them, and then come to the intersection. I wait for the light (which really makes no difference), try to step out, and again I fail.

  Since arriving in India I’ve been trying to cross the street. I can’t say that things have improved. The learning curve appears to be steep. I’ve read somewhat that in India you should cross the road as if you are a sacred cow. That is, just walk into traffic and hope for the best.

  But now, as vehicles careen past me from every which way, I know that I am not a sacred cow—not yet anyway. I pause for so long at the corner that two rickshaws stop to see if I want a ride.