by Katy Yocom
Sarah heard herself pledge that she would try.
On the drive back to Sawai, after they dropped off Nuri, Sanjay relayed more of what the women had said as they sewed, conversations they’d pretended he couldn’t hear and he’d pretended to ignore. They’d compared opinions about Sarah’s body. What do you think? they’d asked one another. Is her stomach growing rounder? her breasts? Not really, they concluded. But why doesn’t she get pregnant? Why wouldn’t she want a child?
Because, Sapna said: She thinks no one knows she has a tiger lover, and she wants no one to find out.
But if she did become pregnant, Rohini wanted to know, would there be just one baby or a litter? Would it be a cub or a human? Orange-and-black, or fair like its mother, or brown like an Indian? And what if she birthed a hybrid: a little orange human with round ears, black stripes, and a tail? Wouldn’t that be a sight to see?
Sarah sat back in her seat. “What do you think of the timing of all this?”
“Coincidence. No one knows.”
“And yet anyone could have seen us going into each other’s flats. You’re known here. You’ve lived here all your life.”
“And you’re known here,” he said. “You’re the Tiger Woman. It’s dangerous what we’re doing.”
“And is that just because you’re married, or is it because you’ve taken a lover who’s white?”
“Fifty percent each.”
She shook her head. “I look at Geeta Ma’am, and there she is, an Indian woman who married a white man, then divorced him, and now works with him. And no one says a word.”
“That’s because she’s Geeta Ma’am. The upper classes can do as they please. An ordinary middle-class man from small-town Rajasthan does not have the same latitude.”
He dropped her off. She had mounted the steps to her flat when the landlord’s door opened. Drupti stepped outside, gave Sarah a meaningful look, and headed toward the gate. Sarah joined her, and Drupti feigned surprise. “I’m glad to see you! Walk with me.”
They chatted a bit as they walked—how Drupti’s summer was going, the status of a luxury hotel going up on Ranthambore Road too close to the park. At the corner, Drupti turned right, then right again. Sarah could see no good reason to walk down this particular residential street. They stopped at a vacant lot bounded by a wall at the back of the property. A cat slunk across the lot and disappeared into overgrown shrubs.
“You recognize those flats?” Drupti asked, pointing beyond the wall.
“That’s our building.”
Drupti nodded. “When I was seventeen, I sneaked out my window one night and climbed over the wall just there. I met a boy. It was all quite scandalous.” She laughed. “He waited for me here on his bicycle. No one saw us. I hopped on his bike and we rode away and had quite a little adventure.”
Sarah gave her an assessing look. “Is that so?”
“My father pays a lot of attention to what goes on at the front of the property, but he forgets about what’s back here. It’s so dark and quiet. No comings and goings aside from birds and cats.”
Sarah considered the wall, seven feet tall and made of brick, solidly built but not overly formidable. No barbed wire or embedded broken bottles along the top. The place Drupti had pointed out lay partly hidden by overhanging branches. “Good escape route,” Sarah said.
“Easy enough to get back in, too. There’s even a place to chain a bike over there.” She nodded in the direction of a neem tree.
“You don’t say,” Sarah said.
Quinn
For years, Quinn had wanted Sarah closer. Had pursued her, really. And now? Here was Sarah, holding out her hand at last. And we’ll talk was the best Quinn could manage. We’ll talk.
For days after that phone conversation, Quinn had tried to picture herself flying to India, stepping back into that world she had been so heartbroken to leave. But each time she imagined going back, her body gave her its answer in the coldest possible terms. Chills across her arms and legs, floods of ice through her lungs.
Now she sat crossed-legged on the couch, laptop balanced on her thighs, staring at an email.
Hey Quinn,
I know you weren’t ready to talk about it earlier, but you’d love it once you got here. You could come at the end of October and catch Diwali. Remember how much fun it was when we were kids? All over India, one big party. Think about it, okay?
Pete walked into the living room, carrying a basket of clean laundry.
“She won’t stop,” she said.
He paused in the doorway. “So go.”
She looked up, confused.
“Go back to India. We’ve got the line of credit. It’s worth a little debt.”
Quinn flushed. Every day she resolved to tell him about the loan, and every day she convinced herself he didn’t need to know. “I don’t know. There’s the kids. And I’ve got some workshops lined up—”
“Oh, is that it?” He set down the laundry basket. “You’re too devoted to your family, you’re too busy with your art? Or is it maybe that there’s a bigger balance on the credit line than there should be?”
She felt herself pale.
“I saw the statement. Anything you want to tell me?”
“I—”
“You loaned it to your mother, didn’t you? I told you specifically I wouldn’t agree to that, and you went behind my back.”
“It was just supposed to be for a few weeks. I thought it wouldn’t matter.”
“It wouldn’t matter that you lied to me?”
“When I try to talk to you about things, you blow up. It’s easier to just not mention them.”
“Like what?”
“Like if I went to India for two or three weeks and you were totally in charge of the kids, would Nick have his inhaler with him at all times? Or would you forget?”
His face darkened. “That happened twice. In a year, I forgot his inhaler two times.”
“But that’s the thing. We have to be a hundred percent.” She could hear the pleading note in her voice. “Remember how fast he went down that time. His life is literally at stake.”
Pete did a half-turn away from her, an aborted pirouette, and clasped his head in his hands. The very picture of a man at the end of his rope. “See, this is what kills me. You treat me like I don’t love our son. How can you think that?” He let his hands fall to his sides and stood facing her. “I love him more than anything. Him and Alaina both. But I look at Nick, and I see how the asthma makes his life smaller. He can’t run on the soccer field with the other kids. He has to sit there on the sidelines. And you make it worse. Every time you look at him, you’re checking his color, or you’re coming after him with the fucking peak flow meter. Every time you do that, you make his life a little less. I can’t stand to watch that.”
Quinn set aside her laptop and stood to face him. “So I’m the bad guy here because I’m looking out for our son? You act like being a good sport is all it takes. Like if we all just put on our game faces, the whole problem just goes away. He almost died. How do you keep forgetting that?”
“No,” he shouted. “We had a scare. We live five minutes from the ER, and we got him there on time.”
It was too much. “You know what? If you think I’m making Nick smaller by worrying about him, you ought to see how small people get when they die. They just vanish, and it’s a sick fucking joke that life goes on and on and on without them. Every second of my life since then has been an insult to him. And you know what? It never goes away. The hole he left is always there. Do you understand that? It is still there. It’s the fucking stencil of my life.”
He stared at her with bleak eyes. “You’re just so goddamned damaged. It’s too much.” He paused. “Go to India, Quinn. I don’t care about the line of credit. You’ve got shit you need to deal with, and God knows you’re not doing it here.”
&nbs
p; The conversation was beginning to scare her. Quietly she asked, “What, are you banishing me?”
His face softened. “Look, I love you. I really do. But you’re so scared all the time. You let your mother walk all over you. You’re convinced our son’s going to die any second. The kids need to see you let go. They need you to do something that takes guts and that’s not all about them.”
“You mean you need that.”
“So what? You need it more than the rest of us put together. I look at you and your sister and your mom and, my God, you’re so walled off from each other. You always have been.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“That is the subject. And don’t think I don’t know how things are between us.”
She sized him up. “You hate me for being afraid.”
“I don’t hate you.” No anger in his voice, just defeat. He wouldn’t look at her again. She left the room and found Alaina and Nick huddled in the hallway, crying quietly.
“Come on.” She put a hand on each of their shoulders and herded them toward the stairs. “Go back to bed.”
“Why are you fighting?” Nick cried.
“Because we’re sad.”
“You shouldn’t fight because you’re sad,” Alaina said.
Not two weeks ago, she and Pete had thrown a party for the twins’ eighth birthday. There’d been invitations, decorations, swag bags, prizes. All that stupid mass-produced stuff, most of it now consigned to the garbage. She peered into her children’s anxious faces, saw how their chins trembled, how fear made them fold their hands over their bellies.
“It’s going to be okay.” She wiped their cheeks and tucked them into bed, whispering, “It’s okay.” Then she stripped off her clothes and showered, scrubbing herself hard and crying, quietly at first, then in ragged sobs that she tried to strangle, because the twins had already heard too much.
.
The next day, Jane phoned to let her know a shipment had arrived from India. Quinn stopped by that afternoon, still wrecked from the argument. Jane stepped out from the back. “I haven’t opened it yet. I thought you might want to do the honors.” She frowned at Quinn. “You okay?”
“Didn’t sleep,” she said dully.
“Insomnia,” Jane said. “I hate that.”
The back room held a scatter of boxes and crates and loose baubles from around the world. In the middle of the floor sat a box sewn up in thin, off-white muslin, the address scrawled in black Sharpie—Sarah’s handwriting. Someone had stapled three official-looking DHL forms to the fabric, filled out in English by another hand, not Sarah’s, in capital letters written in a thin, scratchy ballpoint.
Jane handed her a pair of scissors, and Quinn cut the muslin and opened the box. A single purse rested on top, mint green and robin’s-egg blue. The hope in it made Quinn want to cry. She lifted it out and opened its flap, peered inside, turned the bag over. Sturdy and well-made. Attached to the strap with a loop of twine was a cardboard tag reading, Women’s cooperative, Vinyal village, Rajasthan, India. And a paragraph about the village, the tigers, the hopes for the bags. A second tag hung from the twine, and when she turned it over, she found herself looking at a familiar photo. Anju.
Something in her chest lifted ever so slightly. She looked up at Jane. “Thank you for letting me open it.”
“It’s pretty special, isn’t it? I thought you should feel what it’s like.”
They unpacked the box and spread the purses on the floor. Thirty handbags in six different patterns, all beautifully made. Quinn’s eye went back to the first one she’d unpacked, pastel green and blue. “I’m buying that one.”
“I thought you might. I still have to enter them into inventory and price them, but go ahead and take that one now. I’ll do the paperwork later. And then, in about eight weeks, I’ll cut a check to the collective.” She paused. “You should deliver it, Quinn.”
“What?” she said stupidly.
“Go visit your sister. Meet these seamstresses. See the way they live and what this money’s going to do for them.”
The way they live. Somehow those words made Quinn think of her twins, huddled in the hallway, crying. “I can’t go to India. I’ve got two little kids.”
Jane fixed her with a stare. “And a husband who can take care of them.”
“Still. It feels selfish.”
“Yeah. Selfish you, helping a women’s collective in rural India.”
“You know what I mean.”
Jane gave her a look of pity and exasperation. “Something’s got a hold of you, Quinn Chamberlain. You want to shake it off, you’re going to have to do something big.”
Later, as Quinn was leaving the shop, Jane put a hand on her arm. “The world would be a better place if more women were selfish.” Then she kissed Quinn’s cheek.
Sarah
It seemed, at first, just a break in the weather: a week without rain, not unheard of during the Rajasthani monsoon. But when a second week went by, and then a third, and a fourth, they knew.
They’d gotten eight weeks of rains. A little less than half a normal monsoon. Coupled with the previous year’s poor rains, it made for disastrous news.
William’s lakes were drying up. In his five years in Sawai, he had built reservoirs for twenty of the driest villages, and nearly half of them were in trouble. Sanjay and William traveled the district for three days, visiting the worst-hit lakes to measure their depths and consider the options. Afterward, they met, the four of them, at the Tiger Survival office to talk through the situation and work up a plan.
The meeting didn’t go well. Sanjay and William seemed at odds, short with each other. Sarah studied them both. William met her gaze, unsmiling. Something in his expression unsettled her.
That night, Sanjay crept up the stairs to Sarah’s flat. She opened the door soundlessly.
“I came over the back wall,” he murmured.
“How was it?”
“Terrifying. The whole time I expected your landlord to step out his back door and shoot me for an intruder.”
They were quiet when they made love that night. They were always quiet, but this time he put his hand lightly over her mouth. She pushed it away and gave him an amazed look. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.
He rolled onto his side, keeping his voice to a murmur, no louder than the sweep of the ceiling fan. “It’s William. He knows. And he’s angry. He told me if I really cared for you, I wouldn’t put you in such danger.”
She felt something rising, something ominous she didn’t want to look at head-on. “Who does he think is a threat to us?”
“My wife’s family.” He looked away. “Let me tell you, Sarah. He’s right. I don’t like to think what happens if my brother-in-law finds out.”
“Why? What would he do?”
“Tarun is not exactly a simple restaurant owner. He’s friends with the district commissioner, the chief of police. When Lakshmi and I were together, he used to brag about his competitors’ bad luck. Somehow their contracts were always being ruled invalid, their permits were always falling through. I suppose with me, he would go after my livelihood somehow.” He ran a hand down his face. “I never thought I would be this person. A man lying in bed with a woman and talking about my wife.”
“We both know this is dangerous,” she said. “We’ve been careful.”
“We need to be more careful.”
A sick feeling swept over her. Every time she slid through his door and pulled it closed behind her, she felt safe, as if she’d gotten away with something. But anyone could be watching them, unseen. Likely they wouldn’t know the moment of discovery. It would come not as a confrontation but as an infection, silent and unrecognized at the crucial moment, and they would know it only later, by its consequences. “William’s wrong about one thing,” she said. “It’s not me who’d be in da
nger. It’s you.”
He didn’t contradict her.
They began meeting later, in the deepest part of the night. Two hours, three, together. It was never enough.
.
The lone benefit of the failed monsoon was that the park reopened a week earlier than expected. Sarah, Sanjay, William, and Hari spent mornings there as frequently as possible, wanting to catch a first glimpse of Machli and the cubs, hoping to get a sighting of Akbar.
On an early visit, they happened upon a village man on hands and knees at the edge of a clearing, not far from a magnificent banyan tree. He didn’t seem to hear the sound of their engine as they approached. Something felt off; Sarah wasn’t sure what, but she raised her camera and clicked off shots. At the sound of her shutter, the man spun around and looked directly into her lens, eyes wide with alarm, then bolted into the woods.
Sanjay leapt out of the jeep and crossed to where the man had been, walking gingerly, as if he were trying not to set off a bomb. He stopped, bent over, and came up holding something. “Snare trap,” he said grimly, showing them the loop of wire. He gave it a sharp tug. “Look how sturdy he’s made it. He was going after tiger.”
Sarah couldn’t keep herself from imagining that wire biting into a tiger’s leg, the tiger leaping and screaming and fighting until it gave up and lay down in defeat. And then dying in whatever way a poacher would kill a snared tiger. A spear between the ribs, probably. She felt sick to think of it but elated, too, to know that at least this once, there would be no trap. She thought she might throw up.
They radioed the forest guards and drove back to the ranger station to give a report to the police. Her horror abated slowly. She turned over her photos as evidence. “Nicely done,” Geeta told her at the office that afternoon. It was the first time Geeta had praised her work.
A week later, they got their Akbar sighting. Sarah recorded it in her journal.
September 24, 2000
Akbar crouches over a fresh kill, a chital doe. He is not at his finest: thin, muddy, bedraggled, and spent. He probably hasn’t eaten in days, and the hunt must have taken most of his energy. Vultures and tree pies have begun to gather, and then the intruder appears, young and thin-faced, only a year or two out of the protection of his mother. He halts three trees back in the forest, watching. Akbar, about to tear open the chital’s haunch, lifts his head and snarls. The intruder holds his ground.
