by Katy Yocom
Sarah glanced at her curiously. “Which thing?”
“About you thinking my life is small.”
“I don’t think it is small,” Sarah said. “It fits you perfectly.”
Quinn squeezed her gritty eyes shut. “God! Can you hear yourself?”
“Aw, Quinnie.” Sarah set her mug on the counter and cuffed Quinn lightly on the shoulder. “We’re different people. So what? I got a job I’m excited about. Can’t you be happy for me? Just a teeny bit?” She held up her palms and peeked between them. “Pretty please? Just that much?”
Quinn laughed in spite of herself. It irked her. Sarah would do exactly as she pleased, so why did she want Quinn’s blessing? It seemed greedy. Yet some tender spot inside her was grateful for the request. Sarah was not one to ask for things.
She considered her sister’s laughing, hopeful expression. Sarah was so elusive to her, always had been: first because she was a twin, then because she was grieving, then because she was gone. “All right, you,” she said, because what else could she say? “Do what you want. Go save those tigers.”
Sarah grinned. “You’re the best.” She picked up her mug for a last gulp of coffee and set it in the sink. Then she gave Quinn a surprising kiss on the cheek, and she was gone.
Sarah
The water bearer was staring at her breasts.
For the five-hour train ride from Delhi on the Golden Temple Mail, Sarah had dressed modestly, as she always did when in transit: a purple-and-gold gypsy skirt, sturdy ankle boots, a short brown jacket over a white T-shirt woven thick enough to conceal any trace of her bra. Eleven years as an itinerant journalist had taught her never to overlook that last part. She was a traveler, not a tourist. But she was traveling alone, and wherever she went in the world—including this small, dusty platform at the railway station in Sawai Madhopur—certain men saw that fact as an opening.
“Bhaiya,” she began, addressing the teenaged water bearer politely, “do you have a sister?” He pushed an overhang of hair off his pimply forehead and said he did. She asked in Hindi, “Do you like it when men stare at her breasts?” then collected her bags and walked away. She knew how to tell men off in twelve languages. In Hindi, the most direct way to say it was Jao, which meant simply, Go away.Her favorite was Italian: Lasciami in pace, maiale. It sounded beautiful rolling off the tongue. It meant: Leave me alone, pig.
She also knew how to say, “Wait—I have a condom.” It had come in handy from time to time.
Sawai Madhopur. She’d been here when she was seven, with Marcus and Quinn and Mother and Daddy, visiting the Ranthambore tiger reserve. They’d made their way together down this very platform as a family, intact and squabbling amiably. Three months later, Marcus was dead.
And now here she was, a week into the futuristic-sounding year 2000, starting her life over in the land of her birth. So much had changed since she’d been here, and so little. India was as thoroughly, soaked-to-the-roots India as she remembered it, only with the addition, in certain quarters, of cell phones and the internet.
Quinn had surprised Sarah by giving her blessing, however reluctantly, for Sarah to come back here. Mother had tried to talk her out of it, relying on her usual bag of tricks: guilt, hurt feelings, icy withdrawal. Somehow, in Mother’s twenty years as executive assistant to the head of a law firm, she had failed to acquire effective arguing skills. But Sarah had been traveling since she was twenty-two, and there was nothing to keep her in the States. She had business to attend to here, a new mission to replace her old career, even if it was only half-formed in her mind. Things would become clearer, she was sure, as she settled in and committed herself to one purpose, one dot on the global atlas.
Her suitcase wheel began to stutter. Glancing down at it, she nearly crashed into a man. She smiled a brief apology without making eye contact, but he said her name, a question, and she looked up into his face: a white man, older, so worn and grizzled that it took her a second to recognize him. “William Amesbury.” She extended her hand and shook his warmly. She’d expected someone much younger, but of course she was picturing him as he’d been in his nature documentary days. “I’m a huge fan. I grew up on your films.”
He said a few words of welcome and smiled briefly with half his mouth. Maybe he thought she’d just called him old. Or maybe something had happened to him, a stroke, an illness. It might explain why he hadn’t made any new documentaries in the past half-dozen years, why he was now working in obscurity for a conservation NGO. The journalist in her wanted to ask. She filed away the questions: things to find out later.
From the railway station, William steered the silver Tata Sumo SUV over the viaduct, past low buildings and billboards, to a neighborhood of two- and three-story apartment complexes intermixed with small houses. He pulled up to a gate and parked. She would be living just above him in the block of flats. Her younger self couldn’t have imagined she’d end up as William Amesbury’s upstairs neighbor.
“Let’s get you settled in,” he said. “You must be ready to drop.” But then the gate swung open, and a lanky woman in an elegant beige salwar kameez galloped to his door. Geeta Banerjee, the head of Tiger Survival: Sarah recognized her from the magazine articles she’d read while researching her new employer.
“Quickly. We must hurry.” Geeta scrambled into the back seat. “There’s been a tiger accident. A man dead.”
A tiger accident. In the Indian vernacular, it meant a tiger had attacked a human.
“You’re joking.” William reversed onto the road. “Which village?”
“Vinyal.”
“Sod’s law.” William navigated through an intersection, adding for Sarah’s benefit, “It’s one of the less welcoming, shall we say, of the district’s villages.”
“Do you mean violence?” she asked. “Or just the cold shoulder?”
Geeta glanced at Sarah. “Hard to say, given that we represent the interests of the killer.” She didn’t introduce herself.
The drive took them far out into the countryside, to a village of low whitewashed buildings scattered over a nearly treeless plain. A crowd had gathered in front of a mud-and-thatch house. Some of the villagers stared openly at Sarah as she approached, presumably because she was white, and a stranger. But for Geeta they stepped back.
So no violence, at least for the moment.
In front of the house, a woman knelt, keening, over the body of a thin man. A rag covered his face and a blanket draped his body, leaving visible his dust-cloaked bare feet. Three small children clung to the woman, crying, and a teenaged boy sat on the ground, staring at nothing, his oversized hands dangling between his knees. The tiger had eaten the man’s buttock and thigh, judging from the bloodstained blanket. Sarah caught a glimpse of the man’s throat: purpled but intact. The tiger had crushed his windpipe without breaking the skin.
A tall man in Western clothing approached. Sarah recognized him as Sanjay Prakash, the third Tiger Survival staffer. “I spoke with some of the men,” he reported in a low voice. He glanced at Sarah, but again they didn’t bother with introductions. “It’s Sunil. The one we caught poisoning the water holes last dry season. He slept in his field last night as usual, to protect his crop from antelope and boar. When the other men woke to start a fire and boil water for tea, he didn’t join them. His son found his body, dragged a little way from where he’d been sleeping.”
Sarah glanced at the boy with the dangling hands and vacant stare.
“He was wearing a white dhoti kurta, sleeping on a white blanket,” Sanjay said. “The tiger probably mistook him for a bullock. Ninety percent chance the tiger hadn’t eaten in days. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been out here in the first place.”
So the attack hadn’t been the action of a surprised or threatened tiger, as Sarah had imagined, but of one who’d made a fundamental error in its choice of prey. Geeta and William exchanged a look. “One of the su
badults from the Semli Valley,” William ventured. “They’re twenty months. Just the age when they start to disperse. They’ve no experience. No territory.”
Except that now this tiger had discovered that humans made easy prey.
A murmur ran through the crowd as the widow began to speak. “She says the tiger who did this should be killed,” Sanjay said. “Everyone comes to save the tiger, but who was there to save her husband? She says she and her children are as good as dead now, but no one cares.”
How many times had Sarah documented some variation on this scene? Natural disaster, war—the cause didn’t matter; the outcome was the same. It bothered her not to be scribbling down notes, shooting pictures. She didn’t know what her role was in this situation, and she felt like a voyeur. She approached the smallest child, a girl of four or five, and crouched before her. “Aap ke naam kya hai?” Sarah asked gently. What’s your name?
The girl snuffled. “Piya.”
“Piya,” Sarah murmured. “Good girl, Piya.” The girl thrust both hands into Sarah’s blond curls and stared, openmouthed, till her mother stepped forward to take her. Piya gazed back at Sarah over her mother’s shoulder as they walked away.
“I’ll talk to the sarpanch,” Sanjay said.
“Tell him we’ll do what we can to help,” Geeta said. She nodded to William and Sarah. “Come on. We’re going. I’ll drive.”
They rode in silence down the dirt track heading out of the village. Fields of yellow-flowering mustard stretched away on either side. Who knew what animals were sheltering in that chest-high crop. Ground squirrels, spotted owlets, herds of blackbuck antelope. A lone tiger, invisible.
“Poisoned the water holes. Bah,” Geeta said. She glanced at Sarah in the rearview mirror. “The forest guards had to fill them in with a backhoe. God knows how many animals died of thirst.” She grimaced. “So the man who tried to bag a tiger got bagged instead. I guess you could call that justice.”
William shot her a look, and she raised her chin. “I’m sorry for his family,” she said. “Truly, I am. Padma, his wife—obviously, she’s distraught. She’s in a terrible position. In theory, the government will compensate her for her loss, but it won’t be much, if it comes through at all.” She shook her head. “I promised her we’d do what we could. But I cannot feel sorry there’s one less poacher in the world.”
“Geeta,” William said reprovingly. It surprised Sarah to hear him use her name like that, no honorific, despite the fact that she was his boss. Maybe it was because he was British. An Indian would have called her “Geeta Ma’am,” and Sarah, as her employee, intended to follow suit.
Geeta growled. “You’re right. If anyone needs to be eaten, it’s the bloody dealers, not the poor sods like Sunil who do the dirty work for the price of a secondhand motorbike. You think I’m joking about the dealers,” she added for Sarah’s benefit. “Do this work for a few years and see if you don’t feel the same.”
Sarah leaned forward between the seats. “What will happen to the tiger?”
“Officially, nothing, unless there’s another attack on a human. It’s called a ‘tiger accident’ for good cause. There’s no reason to assume it will happen again.” Geeta steered around a swaying camel cart piled high with firewood. “But the widow wants revenge. And God knows how many men in that village are listening to her say the tiger should die. And thinking how it could have been them instead of our friend Sunil.”
She flicked the wipers to knock dust off the windshield. “Well. This was not quite the introductory meeting I’d planned.” She sketched out Tiger Survival’s mission. Protecting tigers mostly involved getting humans to leave them and their habitat alone. For the villagers, that meant reducing their dependence on the park’s resources. William headed up lake-building efforts. Sanjay served as resident naturalist, educator, and jack-of-all-trades. He hailed from Sawai, so he had community connections and the trust of the villagers. He also served as translator; the dialects changed from village to village. “I’m afraid my role has become mainly administrative,” Geeta said. “My most important task is to consult with Project Tiger officials in Delhi on matters of policy and with the police on anti-poaching efforts.”
She didn’t mention what Sarah had read about her in a conservation magazine: that she’d been more or less born to the work. She came from a prominent Calcutta family, her father a well-known naturalist who’d spent his life advocating for tigers long before most people recognized their endangerment. After completing her education at Cambridge, Geeta had followed the same path. She was famously relentless in her work. She’d been called authoritarian, the interviewer noted. Authoritative, she’d countered. That exchange had made Sarah like her.
Now Geeta glanced over her shoulder. “Rules and regulations. We do not interfere with anything inside the park. If we stumble across a poacher setting a trap, we radio the forest guards. If we find a tiger in a trap, we radio the forest guards. If we see an animal in trouble in any manner that is not human inflicted, we leave it strictly alone. Nature is the boss inside the park, and what nature doesn’t manage, the park director does. We have excellent relations with him, and this is how we keep those relations good. We respect his territory. We do not interfere. Understood?”
“Understood,” Sarah said.
The road curved as it entered Sawai Madhopur, with its collection of low brick buildings and billboards. Geeta waved a hand. “You see the problem, of course.”
“Population,” William said. “And proximity to the park.”
Sarah nodded. She’d read about the hordes of school groups and weekend sightseers, the tourist hotels, the villages drawing on the park for water and firewood and fodder grass. It added up to a ready-made disaster, and the park directors, along with nongovernmental agencies like their own, could hold it off for only so long. “It’s the reality of our work, unfortunately,” William said. “We all cope in our own ways.”
“Stubbornness is a useful tool,” Geeta said.
“As are a few sharp edges,” William added. “And a touch of denial.”
Geeta stopped in front of their building and killed the engine. “Well, Sarah. What else is there to say.” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, frowning. “Ah, yes. Welcome to Sawai Madhopur.”
.
Thirty hours of travel and then the tiger accident. Sarah lay in bed but couldn’t sleep. A day like that deserved a wake of its own—drinks with friends and a chance to say, or not say, the obvious things: that being a poor man in rural India was a life-threatening occupation. That being a tiger trying to make a living in this decimated world was at least equally dangerous.
She fidgeted beneath the sheets, her arms on top of the covers. It was a habit she’d developed in her traveling years. No one had ever actually invaded her room at night, but you never knew, and if your arms were tucked in, you had no way to fight them off. She wondered if Geeta slept with her arms out. It seemed a pretty good bet that once or twice in her decades of conservation work, Geeta had found it necessary to run off some drunken bureaucrat who’d decided to pay her a visit in the middle of the night. Or maybe her upper-class status insulated her from behavior like that. Still, Sarah could picture storklike Geeta sticking her long neck out the door, peering down over her beaky nose at some weaving, hopeful suitor and flapping her bony arm to shoo him away so she could settle herself, with much folding of legs and rustling of nightgown, back into bed.
She got up and made a cup of tea. Sanjay had arrived at their building around dark to visit William. Sarah could hear their voices murmuring downstairs now. She wished William had invited her down, but maybe it wasn’t going to be like that. Or maybe it would eventually, but not yet. These things were delicate. She couldn’t just assume she’d be welcome in any conversation. In her reporter/photographer days, she’d never had to stare down an empty evening. They’d all gathered in the hotel bar at the end of th
e day and swapped stories over beer.
The temperature had dropped sharply since the sun went down. She dressed in jeans and a sweater, stepped outside, trod lightly on the wooden steps down to ground level, and looked around the courtyard for a place to sit. A bench stood empty on the front porch, between William’s flat and the landlord’s, but she didn’t want to claim that spot till she got the lay of the land. Someone had left a low stack of bricks next to the courtyard wall: That would do. She sat, the cold instantly seeping through the denim of her jeans. Ivory light spilled from William’s front window, and she could see the two of them in there, saying their goodbyes.
William’s door creaked open, and Sanjay stepped through, laughing at some parting exchange, but the night air took his breath in a wordless exclamation as he closed the door. He hunched his shoulders and crossed the graveled courtyard toward her.
She said hello, and he jumped, not seeing her. She stood, apologizing, and he namaskared and introduced himself.
“I know who you are,” she said, and she saw that her words startled him, as if she’d just announced she could read his thoughts. “I recognize you,” she clarified. “From the village.”
“So. Sarah DeVaughan.” He recovered himself with a smile. His black hair shone in the buzzing streetlight. “What on earth makes you want to sit outside on such a cold night?”
She had embarrassed him just now. She thought she owed him an honest answer. “I’m seeking clarity.”
“On a stack of bricks? I’ve never found it there, myself. Rats and snakes—now, that’s a different story.”
She took a hop-step away from the pile. “I’ve been wondering when it’s going to hit, that’s all. The fact that I’m here for the long haul.”
“Achchha,” he said, a multipurpose word that meant okay or I understand. “You were a journalist. Always on the go.” His breath clouded white.