Three Ways to Disappear

by Katy Yocom

  “Exactly. And now I’m not.” She liked him, found him familiar somehow. Maybe they had met before. Maybe when she was seven, when her family had visited the park.

  They mounted the front steps to the porch, and though Sanjay left room for her on the wooden bench by the door, she chose instead to stand facing him, hips balanced on the porch railing. The streetlight threw her shadow across him. “What about you? Have you lived in Sawai all your life?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m a mud hut—I’m made of this place; you can’t move me. Actually, I did go to university in Mumbai and stayed on for a few years, working for the Bombay Natural History Society, but I came back first chance I got.”

  “The BNHS,” she said, impressed. “You must have been at the top of your class.”

  He laughed. “Actually, I got my foot in the door there before university. I won an essay contest in senior secondary school. The prize was a spot at a summer conservation institute.”

  “So you’re a writer.”

  “Not like you are. I’m a devotee of this park. That’s why I left Mumbai. I couldn’t stay away. And of course my family were here, but I would have come back regardless.” He paused. “People say it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. We’re taking you there tomorrow. You can tell me if you agree.”

  “I’ve been here before, actually. As a young girl.”

  “Really? Here? So Sawai called you back, too.” He pronounced it Savai.

  “Ranthambore did.” She hesitated. “I have this recurring dream. I’m standing alone in a thick fog, and I don’t know how to get out. That used to be the whole dream—I was just stuck. But a few months ago, a tiger appeared out of the fog.”

  “Very auspicious,” Sanjay said. “Unless it wanted to eat you.”

  “No. It wanted me to follow it.”

  “And where did this tiger lead you?”

  She spread her hands. “Here, I think.”

  He laughed. “Let me tell you. You must be Indian, to make such a big decision based on a dream. We’re famous for that sort of nonsense.”

  “Really? Most of the Indians I know are very practical.”

  “Sixty percent. Maximum seventy. The rest wander about with their heads in the clouds.”

  “Then I guess I can stop seeking clarity,” she said. “Looks like I’ve landed in the right place.”

  “No doubt about it. You’re made for this country.”

  He smiled at her and stood to go. She watched him leave. Had they met before? In 1974, India had only just discovered that the tiger had all but vanished from the subcontinent, had only just begun establishing its network of tiger preserves. Her father had decided the family should go have a look. They’d ridden through the park in an open jeep beneath the forest canopy until they came upon a tigress resting in a grove of kulu trees, washing her face. To Sarah’s eyes, she didn’t look endangered at all. In fact, she seemed to be smiling and enjoying her bath. Her head moved in a graceful ellipse, tongue out to wet her wristbone, tongue in when her paw swept over her cheek and around her ear. Sarah wanted to sink her fingers into that soft, thick fur.

  The tigress stopped her grooming, her paw halted in midair. She looked directly at Sarah and said, “Hello, you.” Or not that, exactly. The message was languageless but definitely an acknowledgment. The tigress saw her, recognized that she existed: not prey, not competitor, just an odd creature passing through her territory—migratory perhaps.

  Maybe there had been another jeep there, one with an Indian family in it, Sanjay a boy of ten or so. Or maybe the two of them had sat at adjacent tables on the hotel verandah, watching each other curiously, as children will do. Or maybe in another life. Who knew?

  Or maybe she was making the whole thing up because he was good-looking and he clearly liked to play. Her favorite kind of man. She rested her chin in her hand and smiled, considering the possibilities.

  The landlord’s door creaked open, and a girl of fourteen or so stepped out. “Hello!” the girl said. “May I join you?”

  “Of course! If you don’t mind the cold.”

  “I’m bundled up.” She nodded to the shawl wrapped around her shoulders. “I’m Drupti. I was hoping I’d have the chance to meet you. It’s very exciting to have a new person in the building. Especially you.”

  “Why especially me?” Sarah asked. Drupti wore her hair in two long braids. Maybe she was sixteen. Hard to tell.

  “Because you’re living alone,” Drupti said. “In India, it’s terribly rare for a woman to be allowed to live alone. It seems quite glamorous.”

  Sarah laughed. “Nice to meet you, Drupti. You’re in … school?” She didn’t want to guess her age wrong.

  “Yes, law school, in Jaipur. I’m home on holiday.” She laughed at Sarah’s reaction. “I’m twenty-one. It’s hard for us to tell Westerners’ ages, too.”

  Sarah smiled. “How old do you think I am?”

  Drupti cocked her head and squinted. “Mmm … twenty-five?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “Close,” Drupti said. “I’m glad you’re here. We’ve been talking about nothing else for days. And tomorrow, William and Sanjay are taking you to the park, I think. Thin walls,” she explained. “It’s going to be terribly cold tomorrow; you’ll have to wear your warmest clothes. And speaking of which, it really is freezing out here, isn’t it? I think I’ll go in, but I’m glad I got to meet you. Knock if you need anything; someone’s always here.” And she disappeared inside.

  .

  Sarah awoke before dawn to a chilly apartment. She dressed in her warmest clothes and carefully made her way down frost-slicked stairs to the courtyard, where Sanjay and William and their driver waited in an open jeep. The night was black, the air cold as iron, but her introduction to Ranthambore would proceed according to plan.

  On the wind-whipped drive to the park, Sanjay pronounced the cold weather highly auspicious. “The animals will teach us something new today,” he shouted to William and Sarah, who sat in the back seat, wrapped tight in buffalo plaid blankets, eyes watering from the assault of frigid air. The driver—a kind-faced, barrel-chested man named Hari—slowed the jeep only when they turned off the macadam of Ranthambore Road onto the dusty track into the park. The jeep shuddered and snorted white exhaust into the freezing predawn blackness. Around them, hills rose blacker than the sky.

  The Aravalli Hills are the oldest in the world. So began a passage in a book Sarah had slipped into her pocket as she left her flat. Now she flipped to a dog-eared page and read as best she could by penlight on the bumpy road. They, along with the Vindhya Mountains, form two spines that define Ranthambore. It is a place of dramatic terrain: cliffs where leopards prowl at dusk, vine-draped ravines where tigers raise their cubs, mirror lakes reflecting summer palaces and temples built a thousand years ago. The ground is dust and stone.

  She glanced up. They had entered thick woods, and on either side of the track, every leaf and twig to a height of three feet glowed ghostly in the headlights, as if the foliage had been doused in bleach. It was dust, she realized, that created the eerie effect: ordinary dust kicked up by every jeep that had passed that way since the last rain.

  On the tawny hillsides, gnarled acacias claw against the landscape, failing to reach the sky. Dhok trees hunker sere and lifeless until the monsoon comes, and then their spindly branches unfurl leaves of transparent green, the first tree in the forest to wither in the heat, the first to revive in the rains. Near the stony nullahs, wild date palms scent the air, and flocks of rose-ringed parakeets pour, crying, across the sky.

  She lowered the book. The wind had died, and the headlights caught a herd of spotted chital deer nibbling sparse grass beneath a fig tree. “My father taught me the concept of camouflage beneath that very tree,” Sanjay said. “The chital were grazing just as they are now. The white spots on their backs looked like sunlight throug
h leaves.” He turned in his seat. “Please remember, Sarah. Even if you don’t see a tiger today, you can be sure the tiger sees you.” Half aphorism, half consolation, his breath puffing out in white clouds, preparing her for disappointment. But everything seemed a wonder to Sarah. The way the world smelled of ice, of living things pulled in tight. The way the forest creatures came awake when the sky began to gray in the east. Animals rustled and hooted and krr-krrrred.

  The jeep rumbled out of the wood and crested a hill. Rajbagh Lake lay spread out below, its shining black surface exhaling streamers of white mist. In the dark, the water gave up nothing but the liquid reflection of headlights, though Sarah remembered it as a gem of a lake, ringed by reeds and ornamented on its far shore with a summer palace built a thousand years ago.

  Crowning it all is the clifftop fortress, its millennial ramparts golden at sunrise and late in the day. In its thousand-year history, its seven gates have withstood innumerable sieges, their strategic placement at switchbacks in the steep path rendering them all but impervious to elephants and battering rams. In 1301, when the fortress was under the control of the Rajput king Hammir Singh, it came under siege by the sultan of Delhi, who managed to turn one of Singh’s generals against him. Enticed by the promise of his own kingdom, the traitorous general accomplished from inside the stronghold what armies and elephants could not manage from below. In secret, he raised the orange flag, which the king had decreed was to be flown only in defeat. Seeing the coded sign that all was lost, the five thousand women and children of Ranthambore flung themselves into fire.

  In the face of this catastrophe, the Rajput king lost all heart and surrendered to the sultan, though not before finding and killing the traitorous general. The execution was utterly insufficient as an act of revenge, but it was the only thing Hammir Singh had left to him.

  Now the fortress belongs to the tiger.

  Sarah closed the book. Sanjay murmured something to Hari, and they drove on, past a uniformed forest guard who sat on a rock near the lakeshore, peeling an apple with a pocketknife. The headlights caught him, and he pressed his palms together in a long-distance namaskar. Nothing about him suggested that he was afraid of being on foot in the tigers’ domain, but even from a distance, Sarah could see that his face bore signs of an old injury: the nose misshapen, the cheekbone caved in.

  “It happened last dry season,” Sanjay said. “Herders. He and his partner caught them grazing their cattle illegally in the park’s core area.” He glanced back at Sarah. “He was the lucky one. His partner died from the beating.”

  Sarah had heard stories like this before. Too many people, too few resources, everything out of balance. The reason NGOs like Tiger Survival existed.

  All around, bird chatter rose up amid the bustle of bodies moving in the trees, the blunt sound of feathers against air. Whoever thought the countryside was quiet had never been around birds in the morning. Sanjay identified their calls: white-bellied drongo, Asian paradise flycatcher, rufous-tailed shrike. Sarah sat back and listened, both to learn a few things and to enjoy the cadences of Sanjay’s voice, the British cast of his vowels, the v’s instead of w’s: jungle varbler. “When I was a small boy,” he said, “I thought the birds sang the stars to sleep. I don’t know where I got that idea. My father, probably. He taught political science, but he was a naturalist at heart. He spoiled me for any other kind of work.”

  A peahen mewed. Night thinned to gray, and Sanjay gestured for Hari to wheel the jeep onto a track leading into the forest. A few dozen yards in, where blackness still held, Sanjay murmured, “Bas,” and Hari stopped in the middle of the road, killing the engine but leaving the headlights on to illuminate the track.

  “Claw marks.” Sanjay pointed to scratches in a tree trunk at the edge of the headlights’ reach. “But he hasn’t been here in three or four days. Maybe today he makes his rounds again.”

  Sarah and William exchanged a hopeful glance. She was curious about him. On film, William had always been the narrator. In person, he seemed contained and respectful of Sanjay’s authority in the park. Humble, really, a trait she found surprising and rather endearing.

  For forty minutes they waited in the biting air. Sanjay and Hari exchanged a few quiet words about Hari’s children, then fell silent so as not to scare off the animals. The engine ticked intermittently as it cooled. Sarah thought the membranes inside her nose might freeze and shatter. For a time, she listened to the pressured pulsing in her ears to take her mind off her fingertips, burning with chill despite her gloves.

  A hoopoe stalked across the road, its headdress of black-tipped feathers swaying. Sanjay handed Sarah his copy of Birds of the Indian Subcontinent. As she read the field guide by the red beam of her penlight, something shifted in the atmosphere to her right.

  Without moving, she slid her eyes in that direction. And there he was: a tiger, standing alongside the jeep. She could have reached out and touched him.

  In the gray half light, his body blended into the forest like a ghost. He turned his head and looked right into her eyes. Then he stepped past her into the headlights, and Sanjay whispered, “Tigertigertiger!” and the four of them rose to their feet. In the light, he was no ghost but a big, glossy male, long and lean, close enough that Sarah could see the individual hairs in his fiery orange coat. His breath turned to smoke as it hit the air. Without taking her eyes off the animal, Sarah raised her camera.

  Something about the angle of the tiger’s shoulder seemed eloquent, as if all his power and grace originated there. The backs of his black ears sported white spots that stared back like eyes, then disappeared as he flicked his ears backward to judge the jeep’s proximity. He had registered their presence, that much was clear, but he had already measured them up and decided they weren’t worth bothering about.

  He sauntered down the middle of the track, unhurried but purposeful, stopping every few feet to spray his scent on a tree or bush. Twenty feet past the jeep, he reared up and placed his forepaws on a tree trunk, stretching easily six feet up. In profile, his eye glowed amber, as if lit from within. His tail swished the dust as he pulled his claws through the bark, which squealed and groaned under his mauling.

  Hari started the engine, and the tiger turned his head, his eyes transforming into an unearthly electric green. He pulled his black lips into a demonic snarl, wrinkling the skin of his nose and cheeks. His long canines gleamed. Then he dropped silently to all fours and disappeared into the trees.

  Sanjay turned to Sarah and grasped her hand in victory. “God is smiling on you,” he said, and, in fact, so was Sanjay himself. “That was Akbar, the resident male. To see him in your first hour in the park—it’s unheard of.”

  Later that morning, back in her apartment, she thought about that moment. God is smiling on you. People didn’t usually talk to her that way, but she liked that Sanjay did. Throughout the morning, he had seen everything and known what it meant. Not only did he spot pugmarks—paw prints—from a moving jeep, he could tell how old they were. If dewdrops had fallen into a pugmark from the trees, the track had been made before dawn. Three times, he heard noises that Sarah didn’t even register. Once it was a tiger’s far-off roar, barely more than a vibration in their chests. Sarah took a photo of him at that moment: one hand in the air for quiet, lips slightly parted, a searching look on his face.

  In the bedroom, she peeled off her clothing, scattering whitish dust onto the tile in an irregular circle, like unbleached flour. It was too cold to shower, so she wiped herself down with a washcloth and dressed as quickly as she could. She figured it was maybe forty-five degrees Fahrenheit in her apartment. The tile floor didn’t help matters. Still, she had a space heater and warm clothes, which put her in the privileged class. On the predawn drive to the park, they had passed a farmer wearing a thin dhoti kurta and a turban. He clutched a shawl around his shoulders, but his legs and feet were bare to the bitter cold. India was a hard place to live, a h
ard place to make anything change. A hard place to get past the tragic and the absurd.

  She picked up her camera and flipped through the morning’s shots. That tiger! She opened up her laptop and wrote up the encounter in an email to Quinn. She wrote one more paragraph, hesitated, deleted it, and pasted it back in:

  What hit me was not so much the majesty of the animal but the practicality of it all. For the first time, I understood the tiger as a creature with a job. His work this morning was to patrol his territory, the way a person might start the workday by catching up on email. For the first time in my adult life, I saw a tiger in the wild, and I found myself shocked to discover that he and I have something in common. That the tiger’s untamed nature does not exempt him from routine and responsibility. That wildness and freedom are not the same thing.

  This was not the way Sarah normally wrote. On assignment, she reported; she didn’t interpret. Her editor, Hal, used to say, in the sardonic way of old-school newsmen, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” What he meant was, take nothing at face value. Verify everything, and find a statistic or an official to quote. Do not compare your life to a tiger’s.

  But this tiger had looked straight into Sarah’s eyes. The way she saw it, that eye contact gave her permission to write it any way she wanted.

  She sent the message and moved to the front room, where she’d placed a few photos in a niche above the low madras plaid couch. A shot of her skydiving. A photo she’d taken of the boy soldiers after their surrender. A faded snapshot of Marcus and her leaping off the back of a sofa, knees bent, feet pedaling the air. They’d linked arms, both of their free arms flinging outward like wings, as if they were one flying creature with two backlit blond heads.

  There must have been a reason she had lived and Marcus had died. They both went into the creek that day; they both came down with cholera. But maybe she was made of more resilient stuff, the same quality that had made her the older twin by ten minutes. Or maybe it was Sarah’s fate to cause her brother’s death. They lived in a houseful of adults plus one older sister, yet in the moment she had lured him outside, they had managed to slip beneath the notice of every single person charged with their care. The sheer unlikelihood of that achievement seemed to argue that its outcome was fated.