All the Way to the Tigers

by Mary Morris

  54

  India, 2011

  THAT AFTERNOON there’s no tiger safari planned. I am offered a ride in a bullock cart instead, but I opt out of that. I want to visit some of the nearby villages. I’m happy to do it on foot, but Sudhir has offered to take me. It only occurs to me in hindsight that walking around isn’t encouraged when you’re only miles from a tiger reserve with no buffer zone. I’m assuming we’ll tool around a little and stop off along the way.

  But this is not what the hotel or Sudhir thinks is proper for a person of my stature, not to mention for their only guest—and one they’d prefer to see go home alive. I arrive at the edge of the property at about four and see that Sudhir has the jeep, stocked with water and hats, and there are servants waiting to help me on board. Not what I had in mind, but I don’t have the heart to disappoint or embarrass him after he’d been so nice, showing me his python.

  In the jeep are a few other people, all local. Perhaps we are taking them to their villages. A young girl sits beside me. As we go along the dusty, potholed road, she keeps smiling at me but is silent. I’m assuming she’s from a village and we’ll drop her off along the way. We drive through one village, then another, but we don’t seem to be stopping. We pass another village with houses with thatched roofs, and I want to stop, but Sudhir tells me that we will later. It seems there is an itinerary. This is a guided tour. Definitely not what I’d had in mind.

  We pass through towns where men and women, stooped in the fields, are doing backbreaking work. In the rice paddies children plow with their bullocks. In the dusty streets of a town they play a game with a battered plastic water bottle and a stick. Nothing is paved. There is dust everywhere. In a patch of shade, a woman with long nails and hennaed hands works at separating the rice from the chaff. A bullock walks in circles, turning a grinding stone. The woman wraps her yellow sari around her face. I put my hands together in greeting and she bows her head.

  In the past week I’ve been in planes, cars, jeeps for days, and what I really want is to walk around. To see how people live in the villages, but Sudhir is hesitant to stop. In the jeep the girl is more or less silent the whole ride. Finally, I put my foot down. “I need to walk,” I tell him. He seems miffed, not really understanding. For Sudhir, I know, this is a big honor, driving me through the towns. But I’d prefer less of an honor. “Please,” I ask him, “can’t we just walk around?”

  “But there are more interesting villages a few miles ahead.” I actually don’t care about the more interesting villages. I am happy to visit one of these. I was hoping to leave my hotel and wander around, but apparently that’s not possible. We push on farther along the rutted road until I don’t think I can take being bounced and jostled any longer. I point to a village on a hill. “Why don’t we just stop there?”

  Sudhir points. “You want to stop there?”

  “Why not?”

  I can tell he’s disappointed. There must be a village some distance from here that he wants to show me, but between my throat and coughing and the dust and the bumpy road I don’t think I can go on. We stop at a dry riverbed and park the jeep. When I get out, I’m wobbly, as if I’ve been on a horse all day. I don’t think I’ve stretched my legs since I arrived in India. And the truth is, even hardly walking, my ankle feels sore. I’m longing to test it. There is only one road going through the village and I follow it. And in a matter of moments the word is out that there is a visitor.

  Children pop out of doorways. Women, saris pulled over their heads, greet me as I pass, hands pressed together in the usual “Namaste” greeting. At first, I try just smiling, but they look away so I repeat the “Namaste” greeting. Sudhir walks beside me and shares with me some of his own story. He has a wife and child who live back in Nagpur, which is about six hours away. He goes home a couple of times a year or they come to visit him here. “I want my wife to move down here, but she doesn’t want to leave her family,” he says. “We argue about that.”

  “My husband moved to America from Canada.”

  “We have to make sacrifices. Anyway, my work is here.”

  We walk on in silence for a while as village children peer out from houses made of straw and wooden slats with dirt floors. In front, women sweep with short brooms, but it all seems a fairly useless endeavor to keep the dust out of the dirt. Young girls walk with plastic jugs on their heads to and from the well. There seems to be no running water or electricity, but then suddenly in the middle of the village, in front of a house, a sewing machine appears. It looks brand-new and sitting at it is a woman in a pale blue sari, its gossamer fabric blowing in the dust and the wind, as she hems a cuff on a pair of pants with her foot working the pedal.

  Seeing her there, so incongruous, head bowed, working away, is striking. Later in New York, when I go to my local appliance store, I will learn about the sewing-machine project. My neighborhood store contributes dozens of sewing machines a year to villages in India to provide women with a means of employment. This woman has stacks of trousers and saris in a basket at her feet, waiting for her to mend them. We walk on to the edge of the town, where I gaze across the rice paddies and wheat fields. Women in green and crimson and blue saris work in the fields. “All right,” I tell Sudhir, “let’s head back.”

  We get in the jeep and start the ride back. The girl is still with us. I’d assumed that Sudhir is taking her to her village, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. On the way back she and I start talking with Sudhir translating, as the girl has only a few words of English. He explains that she is just along for the ride. “No clients at hotel. Just sightseeing,” he tells me, and the girl smiles at me, her head bobbing.

  She is the hotel masseuse. She laughs at the thought that she is from a village nearby. Her name is Asha and she comes from the south, from Kerala. She has taken a three-month massage training course. She holds up three fingers. Three months doesn’t seem like a lot of training, but perhaps that’s customary here. “Have massage?”

  Anyway, I think, “Why not?” The girl can probably use the business. At the worst it will be another cultural experience. And the cost is negligible. Three hundred rupees, she assures me. Only about four dollars. I ask three times and she assures me. Three hundred rupees. I agree to meet her at the massage house at eight o’clock.

  55

  SARAH BERNHARDT traveled with a tiger on a leash. It was rumored that her tiger once devoured two waiters in an American restaurant. She went to Paris with her tiger, passing it off as “a spotted African cat” because the manager of the Paris hotel had heard about the incident in America. Apparently Bernhardt kept her exotic pet in order to distract people from the fact that she was Jewish. She wanted people to think of her as just being crazy and wild. The solitude and wildness of the tiger reaches into our most primitive selves. Perhaps they are a reminder of another time when we too roamed free. Instead of tied down as we are by time and space, by mortgages and jobs and family obligations. A friend’s child recently asked his father, “Why do humans live in captivity?” My friend was at a loss for words.

  56

  I’M AT A LECTURE in Mumbai about tiger conservation, and a woman asks the naturalist if keeping a tiger as a pet would help in their preservation. And the naturalist, who can barely hide his disdain, replies, “No, madam, it would not help. And tigers do not make good pets.”

  57

  Brooklyn, 2008

  MY VISITING NURSE—a dour man—shows up unannounced about a week after I get home. I’m surprised when he rings the bell and have no idea who he is. “I’ve been assigned to your case,” he tells me as I open the door. This troubles me since I didn’t know I am or have a case. Still I let him in, and he puts me through the motions like a trained seal. He has me hop on my good leg, propelling myself with a walker across my carpeted office floor. He scribbles notes on a pad, says very little, except to tell me that he’s requisitioning a wheelchair, which arrives a
few days later. To Larry’s relief it comes fully assembled. He just has to sign for it.

  From the start I have a bad relationship with the wheelchair. It is heavy and cumbersome. It’s a struggle to get the footrests in place. I hate the way it bounces over the bumpy sidewalk, the curbs. Tree roots are enemies. I don’t like being three feet off the ground, eye level with babies in strollers. And though this, of course, is ridiculous in retrospect, it seems as if this chair has a personality of its own—somewhat contemptuous, disapproving. An “I told you so” look to its stolid, stubborn frame. And it terrifies me. I feel as if I have no control over what is happening. I’m not unlike a baby in this regard. Babies are born with only one natural fear. That is the fear of falling. If you put a baby on a glass table, it will start scrambling and shrieking. It doesn’t know that a layer of glass stands between it and the abyss.

  As Larry pushes me along the street in my wheelchair, I try to explain this to him. I tell him that from my vantage point it looks as if the FreshDirect truck is going to run me over. No matter how much he reassures me, I can’t quite believe that a van hurtling along the avenue is going to see me, so low to the ground, in time to stop.

  And it makes me feel old. Is this what it’s going to be like? I ask myself. In twenty, thirty years? Being in it reminds me of my parents, late in their lives. My father particularly. How he despised the indignity of being carted around. The last time I saw my father, he was gripping his walker, banging it through the apartment. He was determined to beat death. He’d do it with these steps. My father, an avid walker, tried walking until the bitter end.

  A few days after the wheelchair arrives, my ever-patient husband is wheeling me to a store when a neighborhood Muslim boy who lives above the dry cleaner stops to speak to me. “What happened to you?” he asks. This boy is paralyzed, his body twisted in an odd way, and I’ve watched him grow up in a wheelchair since he was very young. Yet this is the first time he’s ever said a word to me. For once we are eye-to-eye. And I tell him that I’ve had a bad fall.

  “So you’ll get better, right?” he asks, somewhat disappointed, I think.

  “I hope so,” I reply.

  He nods, dropping his head. “I hope so too. My name is Ibrahim. I was born this way. But I’m only paralyzed from the waist down. My arms are strong.” He flexes a muscle to show me. Then he spins with his front wheels off the ground and bounces up a tall curb. Larry gives him a thumbs-up and I try to smile, wondering if I’ll be popping wheelies soon as well.

  Six months later, when I’m walking, I’ll see Ibrahim again at a block party. I’ll hobble up to him on my cane and say, “Hello, Ibrahim.”

  He’ll look up at me oddly. “How do you know my name?”

  58

  India, 2011

  THAT EVENING after dinner I make my way through the woods. Perhaps a good massage will get my energy flowing again. Besides, I feel sorry for the girl. There was something sad and shy about her. I trip over something on the path. A root perhaps. I can’t really tell. Jungle sounds pierce the darkness. Birds or monkeys. Nothing threatening. Certainly not tigers. No predators roam this far from the reserve—though there are packs of feral dogs.

  I follow the path though it’s difficult to tell in the dark just which direction the massage house is. I hope I’m not lost. In the daylight it had made more sense, but now I’m not sure. It should be right beside the pool, but the path isn’t lit. I stumble on a large rock, then walk right into a cable that secures a tent. Ahead, the blue lights of the pool shine. And past the pool is a stone cottage. Up several steps a silhouette is framed in a doorway.

  At the entrance the girl is waiting for me, and right away I can tell that she’s trembling, rubbing her arms and trying to get warm. She’s wearing only the same thin cotton dress she had on during the day, but now the sun is gone. The massage building itself is just bare cinder block, no curtains or rugs. I am sure that there must be some kind of space heater or secluded massage room inside.

  But there isn’t. It’s just as cold inside as it is outside, and I wince under the bright fluorescent light. Asha has put clean towels down on the massage table and plucked petals from the bougainvillea vine that grows on the wall outside. She’s arranged them in a special pattern she learned in school. But I can see my breath. Since the sun went down, it’s as if a blanket of ice has been laid across the forest. I’m thinking about walking back to my cottage. This is more like a place for interrogation than the spa I’d been hoping for. There’s no scent of candles, no soft music. In fact, there is nothing here that feels even remotely relaxing. Surely there’s some other room, some secret place where the girl will guide me and a heater will be on. They can’t do a massage here. As she touches me, I’m stunned. Her hands are freezing; it’s as if death is touching me.

  I am wondering if I can get out of this massage gracefully when a man arrives. He’s dressed in a camouflage jacket and a woolen cap. But as he rubs his mittened hands together, I know I’ve seen him around the hotel. The other day he approached me after my morning safari. I thought he was being friendly, but he was just trying to drum up business. Then he was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans because in the light of day it is warm in this valley of hibiscus and lemons. I’d taken a dislike to him and I’m not pleased to see him now.

  He thrusts a piece of paper in a plastic binder into my face. I don’t know what it is, then I look again, and I’m stunned. It is the list of services and prices. The massage is ten times what Asha told me in the jeep. Pointing, I shake my head. A full massage is three thousand rupees. Not the three hundred the girl repeated at least twice in the jeep. “No,” I say, “no, no, no. Too expensive.” I look at Asha. “This is not what you said.”

  The girl laughs a nervous laugh. She needs this massage. There is no one else at the hotel and she probably hasn’t worked in days. While I realize that working here is a pretty good job for her, she probably has to pay for her room and board. And the behavior of this man seems to indicate as much. Still it is ten times more than she said it would be. I’m scanning the price list. “Shoulder massage, full-body massage, pressure massage…”

  The girl seems desperate. Anyone can see that. The beggars banging tin pots or pointing to their hungry children, those dark pleading eyes, the old ladies selling marigold garlands, it seems as if everyone is hustling just to get to their next meal. Even the animals. Those skinny sacred cows who wander through the cities (and with all these people starving). And the mangy dogs. Yesterday at the hotel I tossed a bone toward a dog crouched in the bushes, and in seconds a pack of dogs were going at one another’s throats. So the girl needs the money, and what is it really to me? Forty dollars instead of four. I’d pay twice that for dinner in Manhattan.

  Finally, I agree. Just head and shoulders, forty minutes, 1,200 rupees. “Good deal,” Asha says. She takes me by a trembling hand. “You come with me. Massage.” The girl leads me behind a screen where the light is just as harsh and the room just as cold. “Perhaps if we shut the front door,” I say, but again the girl shakes her head. I stare at the wooden massage table, a single green towel strewn with pink petals. “Come.” The girl points to my chest. “Take off clothes.”

  On the other side of the screen the man is pacing. I’d expected some privacy. A fluffy towel to cover myself. But none is offered. Asha wants me to get undressed. Just take off my clothes in front of her, with a strange man pacing on the other side. I refuse. I can’t.

  The girl tugs at my shirt and jacket. “Take off.”

  I want to leave. I want to run out of here. “No,” I say, hands folded across my chest like a petulant child.

  Asha looks at me oddly. At last with a sigh I take off my jacket and sweatshirt. I leave on my shirt, my loose-fitting pants. But at least I’m taking off something. I lie on the cold metal table as if I’m waiting for my own autopsy. I rub myself with my hands. In the corner Asha is trying to
warm the oil with a candle. I realize that while she has sprinkled bougainvillea petals on the table and the floor, she forgot to heat up the oil. She comes over and begins to pour it on my head.

  The oil is cold and I’m still not sure if I have hot water in my cottage. I haven’t had a hot shower since I arrived at this jungle camp, and I have no idea how I’ll be able to wash the oil out. But what can I do? The girl is already rubbing in the oil, more the way a mother puts baby lotion on a child’s bottom than an actual massage. “You good? Everything all right?” Asha asks. She keeps running her fingers through my hair. I’m waiting for the massage to begin.

  “Yes,” I reply. “Everything is all right.”

  As the girl runs her fingers through the oil, then adds more, I realize that this is my massage. It has begun. I suppose I could get up and go, but I won’t. I’m already in, so I may as well grit my teeth and be nice about it. I gesture to the girl to wait a moment as I unbutton my blouse. No point getting oil all over everything. And, since there is nothing to be done, and since I don’t want the girl to have trouble with her boss, I try and make conversation if only to pass the time. “How long have you been here?”

  “I here four months. Very cold.”

  “Yes,” I say, “very cold.” The girl is scratching my scalp. “You can go deeper,” I say. “You won’t hurt me.” But she shrugs, laughs, and keeps on scratching. “So why did you come here?” I ask. Of course, I know the answer. Because work is here. But I don’t want to just say it. And perhaps a conversation would do us both good.

  “Mother, brother. Need money.”