by Katy Yocom
That night, the elbows-and-knees man visited her in a dream. He said nothing, merely flailed across the floor in front of her, thick calluses darkening his elbows. She woke up disturbed. She hadn’t conjured him that way since she’d been a teenager. Now she found herself dreaming about him several nights a week. She couldn’t ignore him, couldn’t make him go away. Somehow, his visits meant something about her marriage.
.
At sixteen, she had gone into treatment for an eating disorder. In the hospital, the counselors had told her over and over, till she believed it, that in order to get well, she must find ways to express her feelings: not suppress them, not use starving herself as a way to deal with the pain. Art therapy taught her how to paint her feelings, which brought them down to human scale.
The day she left treatment, on the drive home, she and her mother stopped for a meal at a carefully chosen restaurant. Quinn allowed Mother to order her a baked potato, plain, and ate half of it in silence, watching the twins slip out of the house like fishes. She set down her fork and said, “I have to tell you what happened to Marcus.”
Sometime after the family moved to Louisville, they had stopped talking about Marcus, stopped saying his name.
“Eat your potato.”
“I could have stopped it.”
“You couldn’t have stopped it, Quinn.”
Like fishes from the steamy kitchen. The door never opened more than a crack. “I saw them sneak out of the house. I let them go.”
They stared at each other. Her mother’s eyes darted between the potato and Quinn’s mouth. Quinn took a bite and chewed, making horrible faces. “You like watching me eat, Helen? Does it make you happy?”
Mother leaned forward. “Believe it or not, young lady, you are not the center of the universe. What happened to the twins had nothing to do with you.” They stared at each other till Mother’s face flushed. “I have spent a fortune getting you healthy. You ought to be grateful. Now eat that potato, and I don’t want to hear another word about any of this.”
The scenario had never unfolded this way when they role-played it in counseling sessions. Quinn dug a tattered notebook out of her purse and started ferociously doodling with a ballpoint pen. Apparently the feeling of being silenced expressed itself as interlocking circles and triangles, heavily inked.
“Quinn, that’s rude. Put it away.”
She looked up. “Seriously? Did you even talk to my therapists?” Mother glared at her. Quinn shoved the notebook into her purse.
They drove home in silence. On the way, Quinn lit a cigarette, a habit she’d picked up in treatment. “Roll down your window,” was all Mother said, and Quinn knew she had won something. The buzz of the cigarette reminded her of sex, the way it felt when you held your breath when you were trying to come. Waiting for release.
That night she sneaked out of the house and met up with some girls who had a liter jug of vodka. She came home after two in the morning to find Mother waiting up. She led Quinn to the bathroom and held her head over the toilet while she threw up. She brushed Quinn’s teeth and tucked her into bed, kissing her forehead.
“Ugh,” Quinn groaned. “Get off me.”
In the morning, Mother told Quinn and Sarah that Daddy was dead.
There was going to be a memorial. Quinn assumed she and Sarah would at least get to see their father’s face, but it turned out his body had been cremated. The boy Quinn was sleeping with came to her house the night before the service and gave her a joint to take the edge off. She asked him to come to the funeral place with her (she wouldn’t call it a funeral home; nobody lived there), and he said he would, but he didn’t answer her calls after that. She stood in her room in a pair of baggy pantyhose and a too-big dress and tucked the joint inside her bra. Outside the funeral place, she ditched Mother and Sarah, stepped around the corner, and lit up. The joint burned her lips and tongue the way it always did. She didn’t mind that. First the pain, then the buzz. It helped.
.
Mother began calling more often after Sarah’s tiger rescue. A “rescue” was how Quinn thought of it. Mother called it a “tiger accident.”
“It wasn’t a tiger accident, Mother,” Quinn said on one of those calls. “She wasn’t attacked.”
“Call it what you want. It was an accident involving a tiger.”
Quinn laughed.
As the call wound down, Mother asked, “How’s Marcus doing with his asthma?”
Quinn’s stomach did a nasty flip. “You mean Nick,” she said.
It was as if India were sucking them all back in.
Sarah
Sanjay offered only a short greeting when he picked her up. He’d been brusque with her since the incident in the park. Sarah threw a leg over his motorbike and rode behind him, gingerly holding his waist. Probably she should have tried sitting sidesaddle like an Indian woman. Sanjay likely found something distasteful about a woman riding astride, but she hadn’t survived a tiger encounter just to get killed sliding off a motorcycle.
He parked under an awning in case of rain. When she climbed down, her limbs felt rubbery. “Here goes nothing.” She laughed shakily.
“You’re afraid of an injection?” He took the helmet from her and secured it to the motorcycle. “You were brave enough the other day in the park.”
She didn’t respond. He had every right to be angry.
His face softened, but only a fraction, as if it annoyed him to feel sorry for her. “Look, it won’t be so bad. The injections aren’t as painful as they say.”
“Really?”
Sanjay shrugged.
“It’s just that needles aren’t my favorite things.”
“I know. Your favorite things are tiger claws.”
She supposed she deserved that.
They stepped out from under the awning and skirted the side of the low brick building. “I have to do something,” she said. “Make myself indispensable somehow.”
He glanced at her as they walked. “Ranthambore has cast its spell on you, I see.”
She smiled. “Ranthambore and those tiger cubs.”
They entered the hospital through automatic sliding doors, past two thin brown dogs sleeping in the doorway. In the half-filled waiting room, children turned to stare at Sarah, and even the adults gave her a good long look. Sarah wondered if she owed the scrutiny to her whiteness or her sutures. Or maybe they knew what she’d done.
The nurse who had admitted Sarah the day of the accident sat behind the desk. Puja Mahar, her nametag read. She had a friendly face; Sarah guessed her to be about her own age. The nurse looked up from her paperwork and offered a good-humored smile. “So!” she said in Hindi. “Here comes the tiger woman.”
Sarah glanced at Sanjay. The tiger woman. She hoped that didn’t catch on.
.
A week later, he picked her up in the Sumo for her second injection. A paper bag rested on the passenger seat. “They’re for you,” he said. “The grocer gave me extra. No point in letting them go bad.”
She opened the bag and peeked in. Three pretty mangoes. A gift, then. She glanced over at him, but his expression gave nothing away.
“I saw the film footage,” Nurse Puja said when she checked Sarah in. “It’s quite all right, ma’am. Plenty of people are a little mad.” A slight breeze from an open window stirred the nurse’s hair, and she picked up a clipboard to fan herself. “But you, you’re also extremely brave. And it’s obvious the tiger likes you.” She gestured to her cheek, drawing three parallel lines with her fingers. “I’ve heard the village women talking about you,” she added in a gossipy tone. “You know how they are. Superstitious. They think you have strong magic in you. Tiger magic.”
Sarah glanced back at Sanjay, who seemed to be listening with great interest. She would have to ask him what, exactly, tiger magic entailed.
As a token
of her admiration, the nurse gave them private mini-tours of the hospital at the end of their visits, never mind that the injections made Sarah feel dizzy and ill. Puja was proud of the hospital, a well-equipped new facility funded by a local foundation. The first tour had covered the obstetrics-gynecology ward, X-ray lab, and phlebotomy station—all at top speed, since Puja couldn’t leave the front desk for long. The current itinerary ended in a wing where the walls were painted a soothing mint green, but the steamy air thrummed and clattered: the laundry down the hall to the left, the kitchen off to the right.
A girl of fifteen or so stepped from behind an unmarked door into the hallway. Sarah had seen this girl on their previous visit, sitting alone in the courtyard, embroidering. Her chin and neck were badly scarred.
“Nuri, how are you today?” Puja asked. To Sarah and Sanjay, she added, “Nuri is living here since two years. She came in with very-very bad burns on her face and chest.” She lowered her voice. “Her husband’s family. You know. Kerosene. When she came in, her mouth was just a hole. The doctors have done a very good job with her, don’t you think? Six surgeries. And all for free.”
Nuri looked at the space between Sarah and Sanjay and smiled shyly, her eyes huge and round. Sarah brought her hands together. “Namaskar, behenji.”
Nuri murmured a namaskar. She was hardly bigger than a child, but her back curved like an old woman’s, and the hem of her sari puddled on the floor around her bare feet. She seemed as if she wanted to apologize to the world for her scars, or maybe for her existence. Sarah wondered what had made her husband’s family decide she deserved to die. Too small a dowry, probably. Or she hadn’t produced children. How old had she been when she was married off? Thirteen, maybe?
She thought about Drupti, studying for law exams. And about herself: divorced after a brief, ill-considered marriage; childless by choice. The entire world was hers if she wanted it. All she had to do was pick up the phone and call her editor.
She turned to Sanjay. “I don’t know the words. Would you tell her I’m sorry I’ve been staring?”
“Not to worry.” Puja waved a breezy hand. “She’s quite used to it.”
Sarah shot Sanjay an uncomfortable glance. He turned to Nuri and repeated Sarah’s message. Nuri replied in the Vinyal dialect, and Sanjay didn’t translate.
“The doctors did well,” he told her. “They gave you a nice smile.” Nuri dipped her head shyly, seeming pleased.
“What did she say?” Sarah asked as they walked to the parking lot through a steady drizzle.
“She said it’s okay.”
“No, she didn’t.”
He sighed. “She said everyone stares, or they don’t look at her at all. She said before the surgeries, she wished she had died.” He paused. “She says it’s not as bad now.”
Sarah said nothing on the drive back into town. The Sumo’s windshield wipers slapped across the glass. Sanjay glanced at her. “It happens in the villages sometimes. They’re not modern.”
“Modern? It’s barbaric.”
“India is not always kind to women. In a lot of households, it’s the women who run the show, believe me. But with the villagers, it’s another thing entirely.”
“Do not excuse what happened to that girl.”
“I would never excuse it. I’m just telling you how it is. In the villages, sometimes people end up dead. ‘She fell down.’ That’s what the family members tell you when you ask.”
“It’s horrifying,” she said.
After a silence he glanced at her again. “Do you know the story of why Ranthambore became a tiger preserve?”
“I’ve heard it. But let’s hear your version.”
He told her the story. The maharajas of Jaipur had used Ranthambore as their private hunting ground. They and their entourage, riding elephants, would wait at the center of an enormous circle while hundreds of servants beat the bushes and trees at the perimeter. The animals had no choice but to flee, not knowing the beaters were driving them to slaughter. Tiger, sloth bear, python, blackbuck, jungle cat, leopard, jackal—all fell in the barrage of arrows and spears until every living being that could not fly out of range had been annihilated. The ground ran red with blood.
But the maharajas’ thirst for butchery was precisely what saved Ranthambore’s tigers. In order for the hunt to go well, the territory needed thriving populations of wild creatures. Hunting happened only six weeks a year, a privilege reserved for the court. The tiger population received royal protection the other forty-six weeks. A poacher discovered on the maharaja’s private grounds suffered a quick and summary death.
“So what are you saying?” Sarah asked. “That somehow the attack on Nuri was actually a way of protecting her?”
“Not in the slightest. I’m saying India can be a violent place. That often the weak suffer at the hands of those who are slightly less weak.”
The rain strengthened into a downpour. The air hung gray with the weight of water, though the western sky was clear. Sarah had heard the stories. The maharajas had boasted of their kills as if they’d been sexual conquests. This one had killed 112 tigers, that one, 300. What greater measure of manhood could there be than a dead tiger? They even counted the fetuses that lay curled in the womb.
“Don’t hold me responsible for the history of this place,” Sanjay said. “Or for what goes on in the villages. I’m only telling you. I’m not defending it.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just upsetting.”
“You know, your anger is one of my favorite things about you,” he said. “It’s very righteous. There’s no bitterness in you.”
She gave a short laugh. “Lot of good it does. All the righteous anger in the world won’t keep people like Nuri from getting set on fire because her in-laws find her inconvenient. It’s not going to keep poachers from killing tigers, either.”
“Then why are you here? Tell me that. You came halfway round the world to make things better for the people and animals here. Don’t tell me you think it’s impossible.”
The late-afternoon sun sank into a ribbon of clear sky between clouds and horizon, illuminating the window and casting a shadow of streaming drops onto Sarah’s forearm. The effect was like film melting in a projector. Like skin in a fire. She moved her arm out of the sunlight. “Actually, I don’t ask myself whether it’s possible to make things right. I just tell the story so people can’t pretend they don’t know what’s going on.”
“But you’re not a journalist anymore. You’re here to save the tiger.” He gestured to the sutures on her cheek. “A task you’ve taken to heart, I must say.”
She sighed. “I keep fighting with myself. What should I have done? Let the cub drown like I’d been told? Or save it regardless of the consequences?”
“People do what it is their duty to do. Whether it has the outcome they want is another question.” They passed a cart drawn by a camel, its head lowered against the rain. “Saving that cub was your duty, or you wouldn’t have done it.”
She laughed without humor. “I did it, all right.”
“And you did it in front of a camera. You’re going to be a tiger-rescuing celebrity.”
She looked at him sidelong. “Haven’t you heard? I already am.”
He surprised her with a smile.
Back in Sawai, the streets had turned into rivers. Shopkeepers stood in their doorways, watching the pouring rain. Sanjay steered carefully through the flood. “You said the other day you needed a way to convince Geeta Ma’am to keep you on. She’s been wanting to start a new project. Something to help the village women generate new sources of income so they can do things like buy electric cookstoves instead of burning wood they’ve foraged from the park. Until you joined us, we hadn’t the staff to take it on.”
She sat up, suddenly intent. “Does she have a particular project in mind?”
“I don’t know.�
��
“Is there money in the budget to get something started?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated lightly. “You’d have to ask our boss.”
They stopped at Sarah’s building. She stepped out of the car and turned to him. “I might have an idea.”
“Don’t forget your mangoes,” he said.
.
Sewing would be the way to do it. The women dressed in rainbows here. Every fabric featured a block print or a gilt edge or tiny mirrors—sometimes all three. The village women knew how to sew—and embroider, too. They did it for their families. The trick would be figuring out how to scale it up into a business.
They would have to spend some money up front buying fabrics and sewing supplies. They could work out a microcredit plan, lending the women $50 or $100 each so they could buy materials, to be paid back as the goods sold.
She did her best thinking when she wasn’t trying to think. In the evenings, after work, she rearranged her bookshelf, looked through her photos, ate dripping mangoes at the kitchen sink. One afternoon she decided to catch a movie at the local cinema. On the walk there, she passed a spice vendor and an electronics store, a small boy driving a wooden cart pulled by a water buffalo, a long-distance phone call store, a pig rooting in the middle of the street. A shopkeeper called out, wanting to sell her skin-care products for pretty ladies. She wondered if he was mocking her for her sutures.
She glanced up at the cinema’s pink-and-white-striped façade and joined the crowd of people streaming through the doors, past the whiff of an open drain. Inside, the lobby smelled faintly of mold. Whenever she returned to Louisville, it always hit Sarah how odorless the neighborhoods were. Springtime smelled like magnolias and tree pollen, summers were cut grass and hot asphalt, but by and large, Louisville smelled like nothing, even on garbage pickup days.