Tigers of Taboo Valley

by Ranjit Lal

  ‘Look at them!’ Diclo said.

  ‘Little wildcats, eh?’ Fenac added. She lunged towards Hasti, who screeched and snarled.

  ‘What a little tempest!’ Diclo grinned. He glanced up. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the squadron’s arrived!’ Four more enormous shadows swept across the rock-face and suddenly the little tiger cubs were confronted by half a dozen (extremely rare, it has to be said) white-rumped and long-billed vultures. It certainly didn’t bode well for them.

  At the base of the rock-face, Raat-ki-Rani looked up at the wheeling birds. They were settling very close to her cave and cubs. She tightened her grip on the delicious wild boar she had killed, and leapt lithely up the rocks towards her cave. A terrible sight met her eyes when she reached the rock where Phasti was stuck. Her three other babies were squatting in a semi-circle in front of the trapped cub, swiping valiantly at six enormous ugly birds, who were openly laughing as they lunged and thrust their hideous faces and beaks towards them, squawking harshly. Raat-ki-Rani dropped the boar and with a low growl leapt like a flame from a flamethrower. As one, the birds jumped off the cliff face, unfurled their enormous wings and wheeled away.

  ‘What did you do that for? We were just having some fun!’ Diclo whined petulantly as he swept around.

  ‘You stay away, you diseased bats from hell!’ the angry tigress snarled. Then she turned to her cubs.

  ‘All of you okay?’ she demanded, gently lifting Phasti out of the cleft.

  ‘Sure Mamma, we’re good,’ Masti said cheekily.

  ‘I told you to stay in the cave! So what were you doing outside?’

  ‘It was her idea,’ Masti pointed to Hasti who pointed to Phasti who pointed to Masti. Zafraan smirked.

  ‘Such juveniles,’ he sneered, ‘really!’

  Their mother looked at them balefully. She knew it would be impossible to keep them confined to the cave much longer—they were growing up so fast! It would be better if she took them around and began teaching them the ways of the jungle and how to live in it.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘lessons will start immediately!’ She retrieved the wild boar and ripped it open. The cubs stared at it, licking their lips.

  ‘Okay, help yourselves. Normally you’ll have to take the hair and skin off, but I’ll do it for you this time. The rear parts are the softer ones and you must always go for the organs first because they’re good for you… Now, mind your manners!’

  Their table manners were, frankly speaking, quite disgraceful as they clambered all over the tough boar, trying to get to grips with it.

  Down in the meadows, the beautiful Ayesha, out on her rounds, had been following the flight of the Diclo-Fenac squadron and photographing them. They were critically endangered birds, after all. She watched as they landed on the cliff face and then her mouth dropped open in astonishment as they teased the cubs.

  ‘Tiger cubs!’ She focused her lens on them, even as Raat-ki-Rani leapt up gracefully and charged at the birds.

  Ayesha shook her jet black tresses as the tiger family disappeared inside the cave. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered incredulously. ‘She has cubs! They’re adorable!’

  Of course, Diclo and Fenac couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Before long, all the hyenas and jackals and tigers in the park knew that Raat-ki-Rani had had a litter of four cubs.

  ‘Huzoor, you are the proud father of four splendid cubs!’ Naradmunni informed Shaan-Bahadur, stretching himself prostrate. The macho tiger eyed him like he was some kind of vermin.

  ‘So what’s so great about that?’ he sneered.

  ‘Three are girl cubs and one a boy cub…’

  ‘Three girls? Pah!’ The magnificent tiger grimaced and spat. ‘I want to have nothing to do with them! ’

  ‘You don’t have to, huzoor. The gorgeous Begum Raat-ki-Rani is bringing them up splendidly. They will be a credit to you!’

  ‘Stop disturbing me now…’ Shaan-Bahadur yawned and stretched out, unsheathing his claws and carefully examining them. ‘I need a manicure!’

  ‘Hah!’ snarled Thug, ‘that stupid Shaan-Bahadur can only have little girlies. What kind of genes does he have? Thinks he’s a stud!’

  ‘And he struts around as if he owns the show!’ Caligua added.

  ‘Three girls? Did you say three girls?’ Razia smirked maliciously. ‘Oh my word, poor Rani!’

  ‘And they say the boy is bit of a…a…well, not boy enough…’ Resham added with great satisfaction. ‘He likes reading…’

  ‘With three sisters, what can you expect?’

  ‘We must extend our good wishes—and sympathies of course—to dear Rani… But three girls…’ The tigresses dissolved into giggles.

  ‘M amma, what’s a poacher?’

  ‘What’s a man-eater?’

  ‘What’s a zoo?’

  ‘Who’s our Papa?’

  ‘Who was Jim Corbett?’

  ‘Hey, I asked first!’

  ‘I did!’

  ‘Did not!’

  ‘Did too!’

  ‘Did not!

  ‘I’ll show you!’

  Within seconds a spirited rough and tumble wrestling bout was going on in the cave as the cubs launched themselves at each other.

  ‘Just look at them, Mamma,’ Zafraan said, settling down under his mother’s chin and watching the scrimmage. ‘Little hooligans!’

  ‘Girls, did you hear that?’ Masti paused and turned, her ice-blue eyes sparkling. ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy called us hooligans!’

  ‘Gettim babes!’

  ‘Mamma, help! You ghouls—stay away! Mamma, tell them!’

  Raat-ki-Rani licked her son and purred affectionately. ‘Okay girls, break it up…’

  ‘So Mamma, what’s a poacher?’

  ‘Now stop climbing all over me and sit down and I’ll tell you.’ With Zafraan still claiming pride of place under his mother’s chin, the other three arranged themselves around her expectantly.

  ‘A poacher is one of those two-legged hairless cowards who will kill you if he can. He might use any revolting method he can think of—poison, traps or guns.’

  ‘But why?’ Masti asked, her eyes wide. ‘What have we done to them?’

  ‘For many reasons, but nowadays because millions of hairless and brainless cowards think that by making “medicines” out of our bones they will become less cowardly and maybe more like us. Also, our skins are in great demand…’ An angry glint entered her eye, ‘and are made into rugs and cloaks. They also hang our heads on the walls of their houses.’

  ‘What’s with them?’ Hasti shook her head, truly horrified. ‘Are they sick?’

  ‘Well dear, in the past the hairless cowards used to think that they were very brave if they hunted us. So they came after us with guns and elephants and beaters. Then the fools realized that there were so few of us left that we might disappear altogether, so they tried to stop the slaughter.’ She snorted. ‘Typical, first they cause a problem then they run around chasing their tailless bottoms trying to set it right when it gets out of control!’

  ‘Sounds like Phasti,’ Masti said and Hasti giggled.

  ‘Actually…’ Zafraan said smirking, ‘those hairless creatures reproduce quicker than rabbits and then they have no place to live so they push and shove and fight each other and enter our territory…’

  ‘God, what a pathetic species!’

  ‘And Mamma, what’s a man-eater?’

  Raat-ki-Rani nodded. ‘It’s a tiger that likes to kill and eat those hairless creatures.’ She grimaced. ‘Either these tigers are cowards because it’s just so easy to kill them, or usually there’s something wrong with them and they can’t hunt properly. Either way they’re trouble… Once they start, they get addicted.’

  ‘Yes,’ Zafraan said, nodding his head sagely. ‘And then the hairless ones set people like Jim Corbett after them and all of us get a bad name. Like that Kipling fool gave us…’

  ‘Who’s Corbett?’ Hasti asked.

  Zafraan shook his
head witheringly. ‘God, don’t you read? You don’t know who Corbett is? He used to hunt man-eaters on foot…killed a huge number of them… Those hairless creatures loved him.’

  Hasti’s eyes gleamed. ‘I’m going to be a man-eater when I grow up,’ she decided. Her mother slapped her gently.

  ‘Baby, you are not!’

  Masti stretched languidly and licked her coat. ‘Actually I think I already am,’ she smirked. Then she frowned. ‘But Mamma, when I looked at myself in the pool this morning I thought I saw zits…’

  ‘Those were bluebottles, sweetie, you didn’t wash up properly after eating!’

  ‘Oh, thank God, I nearly fainted when I saw them!’

  Hasti grinned and nudged Phasti. ‘Masti spends most of her time looking at herself in the pool…’

  ‘Do not!’

  ‘Do too!’

  Hasti winked. ‘Next time we see her doing that, we’ll push her in!’

  ‘Dare you!’ Masti growled. ‘Besides, that one…’ she pointed to poor Phasti, ‘she’ll probably fall in all by herself!’

  ‘So why are you worried then?’

  Another scrimmage broke out. Zafraan looked at his mother.

  ‘Girls!’ he snorted shaking his head. ‘No sense at all!’

  His mother purred. And you, my snooty little beta-jaan, she thought, you are just like your father. A burra sahib from the word go!

  But she had to admit that the cubs’ father Shaan-Bahadur had both style and substance…

  Phasti wriggled free from her sisters’ clutches and jumped on to her mother’s head.

  ‘Mamma, who’s our Papa?’ she asked.

  Raat-ki-Rani sighed. ‘Okay you two, break it up and listen.’

  With Zafraan still under her chin, and Phasti settled comfortably on top of her massive head making faces at her sisters, the tigress took the plunge. It was time the cubs knew about their father.

  ‘Your father is Rana Shaan-Bahadur—the boss tiger of the park!’

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘Not only that, he’s world famous! His pictures have appeared on television and in newspapers and magazines in every country of the world. He’s said to be the only tiger in the world to have caught poachers in their own trap.’

  ‘But Mamma, why hasn’t he come to see us?’ Phasti asked in a small voice. ‘He hasn’t come even once or brought us presents or anything.’

  Raat-ki-Rani swallowed. Good question, sweetheart, she thought. Why hadn’t the fellow even bothered to check on his family even once? Surely he knew about the cubs; word got around here very quickly. What a pompous oaf. Just because he had become a celebrity didn’t mean he could ignore his family. He must be running after some bimbo, that flirty airhead Lolita, for instance. She growled softly deep in her throat.

  ‘Baby, your father is a very busy tiger with a lot of responsibilities. He has to make sure all the other tigers stay in their territories and behave themselves.’

  ‘But we want to meet him.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ their mother said with a sigh. ‘He loves posing for photographers on the ramparts of the Sher-kila at sunrise and sunset, so one morning, if he’s there, I’ll take you along and you can see him.’

  ‘Great!’

  ‘Can I get his autograph?’ Phasti asked, her green eyes shining.

  ‘We’ll see at the time, okay?’ her mother replied, twitching her ears.

  ‘You can have mine!’ Zafraan offered generously. ‘But you’ll have to be nice to me!’

  ‘Mamma, will you listen to him!’ Hasti said.

  ‘Yes,’ Masti grinned, ‘his ego’s as big as you are!’

  ‘Are you calling me fat?’

  ‘You said the F-word babe, not me!’

  ‘There they go again!’ Zafraan remarked.

  ‘Mamma,’ Phasti asked, ‘so what’s a zoo?’

  Her mother’s thick fur on her ruff rose instinctively. ‘Baby, a zoo can be one of the worst places in the world for a tiger or for any animal… ’

  ‘But why?’ the three sisters chorused.

  ‘I can’t believe it! My sisters are such total dodos! They don’t know what a zoo is!’

  ‘It’s a place where those hairless cowards keep us in cages and then make faces at us like some of the monkeys here do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, because they think that not everyone of their kind can actually see us or make faces at us in the jungle… so they trap us and cage us.’

  ‘That’s just so weird!’

  ‘Do they feed the tigers in a zoo?’

  ‘Of course! Zoo tigers don’t have to hunt. Also, some of the cages can be pretty comfortable, or so I’ve heard. In some places they even have something called air-conditioning…’ Raat-ki-Rani shook her head, ‘but it’s still no place for any self-respecting tiger or tigress!’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind having meals served to me, and air-conditioning,’ Hasti mused. ‘And no hunting…wow! A life of leisure.’

  ‘It’ll kill your soul; you’ll go mad and pace up and down your cage a million times a day, not even knowing that you are doing that! Just hope you never know what a cage is.’

  Zafraan shook his head. ‘I heard that in some places they have enclosures for tigers which have glass walls so that if the tigers want to do “it” they have to in front of everyone. How sick is that!’

  ‘Do what?’ Masti asked innocently.

  ‘Tell us, bro!’

  ‘The gory details! We want the gory details, your lordship!’ Hasti giggled.

  ‘You girls are beyond help! Mamma, they’re crazy!’

  ‘Okay, you lot, let’s go for a swim now!’

  ‘Yay, Mamma!’

  With great dignity Raat-ki-Rani led her excited family down the rock-face and headed towards a ravine.

  ‘Mamma, why don’t we swim in that pool?’ Hasti asked, looking towards Magar and Machch’s waterhole.

  ‘Because you’ll end up as the crocs’ dinner, sweetheart! Now follow me.’

  They made their way to a quiet hidden pool deep in the ravines where the cubs played and splashed as Raat-ki-Rani cooled off. She half submerged herself in the cool water and relaxed. The cubs were fooling around as usual, racing up and down the banks and splashing into the water, pouncing and jumping. Suddenly they were quiet, and instinctively Raat-ki-Rani opened one eye to check on them. They had gathered in a semi-circle around a large hole at the base of some rocks, cocking their heads this way and that.

  ‘Can’t you smell it?’ Hasti said, wrinkling up her nose.

  Masti peered into the hole. ‘Can’t see a thing, but it’s there. It’s making a noise and it stinks. I think it farted! ’

  ‘You idiots, get away from there; it may be a snake!’ Zafraan said, backing away.

  ‘It’s not making a snake-like noise! It’s grunting!’

  ‘Wow, might be a wild boar. If we can kill it Mamma will be so proud!’

  ‘Phasti, you’re the littlest. See if you can crawl in and check it out!’

  ‘Sure, sure, and get my eyes scratched out!’

  Hasti jumped up on to the rock above the hole and bounced up and down on it.

  ‘Shoo, scat! Get out of there!’

  ‘Knock, knock, who’s there?’ Masti giggled.

  Zafraan rolled his eyes and glanced towards his mother.

  Just then, there came a terrifying, angry grunting from the hole, followed by a frightening rattling noise!

  ‘Get out of there!’ Raat-ki-Rani shrieked, leaping to her feet. In a flash she was beside them, cuffing them away from the hole. Astonished, they tumbled into the water, just as the most terrifying creature, full of spines, reversed out of the hole at a fearsome speed, grunting and roaring. Raat-ki-Rani jumped away from it, her eyes blazing, a deep growl reverberating, her ears flattened back.

  ‘Wha…?’

  ‘Mamma!’

  ‘Stay in the water!’

  The creature eyed their mother balefully. ‘Madam, you and your filthy pup
s have dishonoured me, leader of the Al-Seekh-Kebab Atankvad Aandolan!’ it hissed. ‘Death to you!’ Then he trundled off, rattling his spikes horrifyingly.

  Raat-ki-Rani watched him go and then joined her cubs in the water.

  ‘Mamma, what was that?’

  ‘It was a concubine!’ Zafraan said smugly. ‘They’re deadly!’

  Raat-ki-Rani nodded. ‘Porcupine, not concubine, beta-jaan, but yes equally deadly! Babies, you flushed out a leading member of the ASKAA, the Al-Seekh-Kebab terrorist movement! We’re going to have to be very careful in future. They’re going to come after us!’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘They’re a bunch of fundamentalist porcupines who have sworn to convert all tigers into man-eaters so that people will shoot them to extinction.’

  ‘But how will they do that?’

  ‘You saw their quills? Well, they attack us charging backwards and embed as many of those terrible spines into us. Tigers can go lame or blind, or even die. At any rate the injured ones soon take to killing humans because that’s so easy. They are then deemed to be man-eaters and shot. So you see how devious they are!’

  ‘But Mamma, why do they want to exterminate us? What have we done to them?’

  ‘Umm, they’re very tasty, so we eat them, sometimes. But only a very experienced tiger or tigress is able to kill them without being injured.’ Her eyes softened. ‘Your father is one of the greatest porcupine hunters of all time. He doesn’t get the slightest prick while killing them. In fact he brought me fresh porcupine many times and taught me how to eat them without stabbing myself with the quills.’ She sighed. ‘Many of them, in fact, were members of ASKAA, and they’ve sworn to kill him too.’

  ‘One day, I shall be the most famous porcupine killer of them all,’ Zafraan averred.

  ‘Sure, sure, Mr. Pincushion,’ Hasti said, rolling over with laughter.

  ‘If I recall Mr Hero, you were furthest away from the mouth of the hole,’ Masti added.

  Raat-ki-Rani regarded her family, immensely relieved. It had been a close call—any one of the cubs could have been horribly impaled by that psycho porcupine.