Drowsing at the mouth of their cave, Rani opened her beautiful blue-green eyes a trifle as she watched her mate. Ozzy had been moody and difficult to handle all through the rains. The monsoon reminded him of the way summer yielded to better weather in dusty Ranthambore, and he had been pacing the length of the cage since the last full moon, restless, growling at the keepers and gawking visitors. As Mara hovered over the water, Rani sensed happiness ripple through her mate’s mane and was relieved.
“Brat!” Ozzy roared, letting his voice rumble through the air and rattle the branches of the leopards’ cages next door. “What took you so long? Forgot all about your old friends, did you?”
The kitten was so pleased to see Ozzy that she almost cannoned into his stripy muzzle, stopping herself in mid-tumble. She wouldn’t have been hurt, but Mara knew from experience that other animals found it disconcerting to have a kitten, however virtual, shimmer through their bodies.
“I missed you!” said the kitten, surprised to discover how true this was.
Then Ozzy did something very unusual, by his standards. He leaned over, and gently brushed Mara’s virtual whiskers with his muzzle. Mara felt a jolt run through their link, and for a second, the air around her ears bristled as she picked up on the immense, carefully contained power and strength that ran through the great tiger’s frame. Ozzy’s great golden eyes widened, too, and his whiskers trembled; it seemed to him that the Sender’s strength was greater than the kitten knew, and for the first time, the tiger wondered how far Mara’s powers extended.
“Thank you, Ozzy,” she said, still tingling from the exchange. “Hey, Rani, how’ve you been? Where’s Rudra, is he sleeping?”
Ozzy’s whiskers went flat again, and the tiger’s eyes went opaque. His massive head turned away from Mara, and he growled deep in his throat.
The white tigress kept her voice impassive, but Mara could hear the sadness in the low tones. “Rudra and Tawny have been shifted into another cage, on the other side of the zoo,” she said. “They’re old enough to breed. It’s not that bad; we link and chat every day, and Rudra’s a big boy now.”
The growl from Ozzy was so menacing that it made the ground shake, and the few visitors who had been lounging against the bars of the enclosure, on the other side of the moat, were so startled that they leapt back.
His golden eyes were furious as he spoke to Rani and Mara. “They took our cub away, Rani! Our cub! Without asking me or you, or him!”
“Ozzy,” said Rani patiently. “At least he’s still here; he’s in the zoo and you and I know he’s safe. They could have sent him to another zoo, the way they did with the baby leopards—at least he’s not halfway across the world.”
“They had no right!” roared Ozzy. His roars were making Mara shiver, but though the kitten flattened her ears and dropped to the ground, she didn’t leave either the zoo or the link. “If we’d been in Ranthambore, he would have left to start his family, but do you think we wouldn’t have met? We would have explored the dark, cool dens together, Rani! You would have taught his cubs how to hunt and how to study the ravines and the plateaus, what prey to chase through the gorges, what prey to leave to the sand and the sun. They took my boy away without asking me!”
“Ozzy,” said Rani quietly.
“How could they?” roared the tiger. “He’s MY boy! I should have killed them all! I should have torn them limb from limb.”
“He couldn’t do that,” Rani said in an aside to Mara, “because they tranquilized him. It’s been eating him up for days.”
The great tiger was pacing up and down, and his roars were echoing across the length and breadth of the zoo now. The hyenas woke up and added their insane, laughing barks to the sound; the monkeys gibbered and far away, the elephants began trumpeting.
“We have to stop him,” said Rani, getting to her feet. “Or the Bigfeet will come in and give him the sleeping medicine again. He hates that.”
“Ozzy?” said Mara, timidly following the great cat as he marched up and down, his orange and black flanks rippling.
“THEY TOOK MY SON AWAY FROM ME!” the tiger roared. “Yes, and that can’t feel good at all,” agreed the kitten. “VENGEANCE! BLOOD! DEATH TO THE CUB-STEALERS!” Mara’s ears flickered; she saw the keepers standing outside the cage, in urgent Bigfeet discussion. There were four of them, and two more joined the group as she watched. Ozzy would have to stop roaring, or else it would go badly for him.
“I’m so sorry, Ozzy,” she said. “It must be terrible not to have Rudra right here. But are you sure he’s feeling as bad? I mean, he must miss the two of you, but he was born in the zoo, wasn’t he? And he’s seen other cubs being shifted away from their parents, so perhaps it isn’t as hard for him as for you.”
“RIP THEIR INTESTINES INTO TINY … what?” Ozzy said, his last roar tailing off.
The kitten was looking at him, her head to one side, and as he paced up and down, Ozzy found his anger disappearing when he considered Mara’s question.
“BLOOD! REVENGE!” he said stubbornly, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“You must miss him a lot,” said Mara. “Your fur has the scent of sadness. But you know he’s safe and happy, so isn’t it really the jungle that you’re missing?”
Ozzy opened his red-tongued mouth to roar, but what came out was a confused, “Grrmmmmphhh.”
The keepers were watching him closely, one leaning on the bars.
“My head hurts with all this thinking, Rani,” the tiger said crossly. He glared at Mara. “I was doing fine until you came along and confused me, you—you—miniature furbag!”
Rani eyed her mate, and Mara could see the beginnings of a smile on the white tigress’s face as her whiskers twitched upwards.
“Go for a swim, Ozzy,” she said, her low growl so soothing that Mara felt her own fur settle back into calmness.
The Bigfeet keepers relaxed as the tiger plunged into his pool. “Aaroo!” he said happily, splashing around. Swimming always made his head feel cooler. Ozzy did a grand rolling dive and splashed and splashed until he felt much better. Reassured by his action, the Bigfeet keepers dispersed.
Later, as he lay on the rocks, letting his skin and fur dry in the afternoon sun, Ozzy eyed the kitten’s curled-up shape with grudging respect.
“In the jungles,” he said presently, “there are no bars and no boundaries.”
“That seems scary to me,” said Mara. “I don’t like the outside at all.”
“Why not?” said Ozzy.
Neither Beraal nor Southpaw had asked her this question, and Mara washed her paws slowly, first the left, then the right, trying to explain why being outside in person, without the safety of the link, felt so terrifying.
“It’s because there’s so much of it,” she said at last, “and it confuses my whiskers—there are too many scents to follow, too many cats and other animals thinking at the same time, and it all seems so difficult! You have no shelter when it rains, and the food isn’t already dead—you have to kill it, and it talks to you …” The kitten bent her head and washed her back paws with fierce concentration.
Ozzy didn’t contradict her. Instead, he let his whiskers stretch out in Mara’s direction, questioning, open, friendly.
“So you’ve killed, little one?” he asked gently. She had grown up since that first surprising sending, he thought. A season and more had gone by since the kitten had tumbled into their lives; she would soon be a full-grown cat.
Mara meeped, very softly.
Ozzy raised his immense white whiskers, each one of which could have circled the kitten twice over, and his eyes met Mara’s. The two looked unblinking at each other, tiger and cat. It was Ozzy who blinked and looked away, after a few moments.
In the distance, a baby elephant trumpeted, the shrill call followed by the rough bark of a cheetah. The cats, the big one and the small one, ignored the sounds from the zoo, and the attempts of the Bigfeet visitors to get them to come closer to the bars. Some of the Bigfeet were th
rowing plastic packets into the enclosure. Usually Ozzy would have warned them off with a growl, but he ignored them this time round.
“Thank you for letting me share your memories, little one,” said the tiger. His flaming flanks rippled as he shifted, and once again, Mara was reminded of how much power lay dormant in his massive body. The kitten was curled up in a small heap near Ozzy; Rani had padded back to the cave, knowing that it was best to leave the two alone.
Ozzy let the silence grow and deepen, allowing Mara to consider the endearment he had used: from the time he and the orange kitten had met, the bond between them had grown, in a way that the tiger could not explain. She reminded him of his first child, the feisty tiger cub he had lost so many years ago—the two had shared the same spirit, even though they came from different species.
“I was just a young cub when my mother came back to our den one day, her jaws bloody, an ugly wound raking her hind leg, and told us that my father was dead,” said Ozzy. His voice was low as he roamed the forests again in his mind. “There had been a fight with a pair of wild boars; my mother won her battle, my father lost his. My sisters left soon, to make their claims to their territory; I was too young to leave my mother, but I was old enough to learn how to hunt.”
The artificial river, the dusty grass, the bars of the cage: all of these seemed to disappear as Ozzy shared his life in the ravines and the forests, the territory that he and his mother would roam for nights in a row without scenting another tiger’s scat or seeing unfamiliar pugmarks.
“The first deer I hunted spoke to me,” he said. Mara sat up, her tail flicking back and forth in interest. From what Southpaw and Beraal had said, she had gathered that most cats didn’t hear their prey, or didn’t listen to the voice of the kill.
“What did it say?” she said, her ears upright and alert.
“It caught my scent first, and it begged silently for its life,” said Ozzy. “As I drew closer and it sensed how eager I was for the kill, as I lay crouched in readiness, it shared with me the joy it felt when it drank water from a stream that had not dried in summer, when it raced its friends and mates to see who was the fastest; it spoke of the babies it hoped to have, the mate with whom it hoped to raise a family in the shelter of Ranthambore’s jungles.”
“And so you spared it,” said Mara, thinking of the moth, wishing she had been less impulsive.
“I broke its neck in two with my first bite,” said Ozzy, “and when the hot blood ran out, I was sorry only for a moment before I began to feed.”
The tiger shifted and let his giant paw shoot out, resting on the ground right near Mara. The claws extended, and the kitten could see how wickedly sharp and curved they were; massive, deadly versions of her own.
“Killing is in my bones and blood, Mara,” the tiger said, “as it is in yours. I felt sorry for the deer, but I showed it mercy.”
“You killed it,” said Mara. “How was that any kind of mercy?”
Ozzy yawned, and she saw his long, curved teeth exposed, the fangs larger than her furry head.
“I killed it fast,” he said. “That is no small mercy, Mara. You’re running away from being a Sender, because it sets you apart from the other cats; but you can’t run away from being a cat. When your prey speaks next, listen to it for as long as you choose, and then kill it as swiftly as you can. That is the only mercy, little one.”
Mara blinked, and then she gazed again into his golden eyes, and saw that what he was saying was true. She set it aside neatly in a corner of her mind to think about later, but the way in which the tiger had said it made the kitten feel better. Ozzy understood. And if a cat as large and powerful as him could listen to prey, perhaps she wasn’t as much of a freak, after all.
“Tell me about the jungles and the ravines,” she said. “Why did you love them so much?”
“Where shall I start?” said Ozzy, his eyes flashing into life.
When Rani came to the mouth of the cave a while later, what she saw made her growl softly in relief. Her mate was resting on the rocks, his whiskers and ears radiating enthusiasm, and he seemed to be telling Mara one story after another. Rani’s beautiful eyes softened as she watched the kitten, but the white tigress’s tail stayed low to the ground. She sorely missed the play and chatter of her cub, and the kitten’s tiny presence made her ache with sadness. It was not the right age for Rudra to have left her side; another turn of the earth, another season, a few more moons, and the white tigress would have pushed him away herself. He had left so bravely, walking with a cub’s swagger into the cages the Bigfeet keepers brought. His courage made Rani see again how very small he was to face a separation.
It could have been worse, she told Ozzy often. If they had been in the jungles, Rudra would have faced poachers, and predators; the fires from the nearby villages often took the lives of cubs, who couldn’t breathe in the thick smoke, and Rani remembered the hyaenas who had wounded her first cub so grievously.
But their enclosure had seemed lonely and empty after Rudra left, and the white tigress felt his absence more grievously than she would ever let her mate know. As she watched Ozzy and Mara, her belly warmed at the pleasure her mate was taking in the conversation, and Rani felt some of the emptiness in her heart ease.
Mara spent much of the day with the tigers. She wondered whether she should go and visit Rudra, but when she noticed the sad downwards curve of Rani’s whiskers, she decided to see her friend on another day, rather than risk making the two adults sad at the thought that they couldn’t go with her to see their cub. Instead, she drew Ozzy out, letting him share all of his memories, and for a pleasurable afternoon the jungle invaded the cage, and the bars and the zoo faded from the tiger’s mind.
“Perhaps you should come for a walk with me one of these days,” the kitten said to Ozzy in jest when she left, as the rain started to pour down again.
The tiger rose to his great height, the orange-and-black stripes rippling, his bulk silhouetted majestically against the sunset.
“If I did, what do you think the Bigfeet would say?” he asked.
Mara imagined a tiger strolling through Nizamuddin, scattering the babblers and the mynah birds left and right. Then she tried to imagine Ozzy pacing menacingly through her house.
“Ozzy,” she said seriously, “I don’t think you’d fit in their kitchen.”
Ozzy thought that was very funny. The tiger’s enormous chuffs filled the air, a happy, explosive sound that the animals in the zoo heard with relief. It had been a long time since Ozzy had done anything except sulk or roar.
Katar felt the first questioning touch of rain on his fur and lingered, liking the way the drops felt as they soaked through to his skin. He was unusual among the Nizamuddin cats in his love for the rain; while the rest of them shivered and sought shelter, the tom would stay out in anything short of a heavy downpour, spreading his paw pads in pleasure as the rain washed his whiskers and fur clean.
Beraal had once watched from the shelter of a park bench, astonished, as he chased water insects through puddles. She agreed with Miao, who had narrowed her eyes one monsoon and pronounced that Katar must have been descended from the river cats of the North, or perhaps from even further away in Bengal, that was famous for its swimming cats of the Sunderbans forest.
It was only when the sound of the rain deepened, from a light percussive rumble to a heavy, steady drumming and his fur stood in danger of waterlogging that Katar reluctantly leapt down from the roof, taking the road to the Bigfoot fakir’s shelter through the inner lanes. The tom took one look at Nizamuddin before he left: the maze of rooftops that announced the dargah to one side, the dark sprawl of the Shuttered House like a sullen blot near the part where Nizamuddin proper began in serried rows of neat, often green rooftops. To his left ran the great, muddy sludge-filled waters of the canal, which the rains had transformed into a fat, silver snake.
Miao and Beraal were crouched under the spreading branches of a ficus, lapping at bowls of warm milk that the faki
r had thoughtfully placed outside for them. Katar bounded in, stopping to shake the water off his fur. He lapped greedily at the milk, looking up once to see Qawwali slumbering inside the shrine, drowsing by the fakir’s side as the evening prayers started.
The three cats lay curled up afterwards, letting their combined warmth combat the sudden chill and damp of the rains. Katar stretched out luxuriously, burying his paws under Beraal’s belly to keep them warm. He barely flinched when a few Bigfeet hurried by. “You’re getting more comfortable around the Bigfeet these days,” said Miao.
“Only when the fakir’s here,” said Katar sleepily. “He understands us. Perhaps it’s his whiskers.” The fakir had a fine beard and moustache, and it was Katar’s private belief that if the Bigfoot tried hard enough, he might be able to communicate like cats some day, but this had never been tested. “But other Bigfeet are treacherous. All Two-Feet are dangerous.”
There was an edge to his mew. Katar’s father had gone hunting in a Bigfeet home and never come back again; his mother had met her end on the roads. The tomcat had little love of the Bigfeet, staying away from their houses even if he loved exploring the rooftops.
Beraal watched as visitors to the shrine petted Qawwali. “But not all Bigfeet are bad, are they?” she asked. “Mara seems to love her own Bigfeet—she treats them as though they were fellow cats.” She thought of the way the Bigfeet carried the kitten around in their arms, the bowls of food that were so carefully replenished, their patience with her pounces and leaps.
Katar whiffled contemptuously. “Your Mara is hardly a cat, is she? We’ve seen her sendings, but she hasn’t stepped out of her Bigfeet cave. Except for Southpaw and you, we don’t know the scent of her fur, and our whiskers haven’t touched, for all that she’s our Sender,” he said.
“Perhaps it’s a Sender thing,” said Beraal, her nose questing as she turned to Miao.
The Siamese lay on her side, half-asleep. Her blue eyes opened at Beraal’s question. “Tigris was born in the hedge behind the Shuttered House and grew up playing on the canal road,” she said. “She was an outside kitten through-and-through, part of a large litter.”
The Wildings Page 16