The Hundred Names of Darkness

by Nilanjana Roy

  “Wouldn’t he have moved into his own range if you’d been in the jungle?” said Mara. “He and Tawny would have wanted their own part of the forests, wouldn’t they? It must be nice for you to have cubs around again, even if they are lions.”

  “NICE?” roared Ozzy. “NICE? Those worm-ridden, undergrown, hairless creatures?”

  Mara glanced at the cubs, who were ignoring Ozzy’s roars and playing a wonderfully absorbing game of pounce-at-a-Pepsi-can, growling at it as they took turns to shake the hapless can by the scruff of its tin neck.

  “You never watch them at play?” she said.

  “Of course not!” growled Ozzy.

  “All the time,” said Rani wearily. “He grumbles about them endlessly, but he spends most of his time on this side of the bars these days.”

  “I’m only watching them the way you watch prey!” roared Ozzy, infuriated.

  “So you’re missing out on the fun of having cubs right next door to you, instead of—I don’t know—giant sloths who’d sleep all the time, or odoriferous skunks, or an enclosure filled with monitor lizards?” asked Mara.

  Ozzy roared, but his heart wasn’t in it, and even Eddie, several cages away, didn’t bother to whoop in response. The tiger turned away from Mara, stalking over to a fallen tree trunk and scratching his sides against the rough bark morosely.

  The Sender wisely stayed silent, letting him work his feelings off, which Ozzy did by knocking over a termite heap with his tail.

  “I hate it when you make sense, Mara,” said Ozzy, padding back towards the Sender, and flopping his great bulk down on the cold ground. “It ties my fur into knots.”

  “I’d say your fur’s got enough knots of its own without any help from me,” said Mara, who was a believer in the benefits of regular grooming. “What’s really gnawing at you, Ozzy? It isn’t just Rudra or the cubs, or even the smaller cage, is it? You must have known that the Bigfeet would take away some of your space, after Rudra and Tawny left.”

  Ozzy began, sulkily, to lick his whiskers straight. For a while, he said nothing, washing his paws, the look in his eyes far away, their colour on this winter day a dull, tarnished gold.

  “How do you cope, Mara?” he said abruptly. “Living in the Bigfeet house, the doors shut, the windows shut, doesn’t it drive you mad? If you couldn’t send, if you couldn’t travel on your whiskers, would you be able to live that way?”

  Mara hesitated, her fur shimmering in confusion.

  “I cannot imagine a life without sending,” she said, “any more than you might imagine a life without smell or sight.”

  Ozzy grunted, a forlorn sound, and started work on his dusty chin.

  Mara tried to think of what life would be like if she had only the Bigfeet’s house. Gradually, it started to steal over her. The web of scents and smells that set her nose twitching from the window, and that she could follow all across Nizamuddin, and indeed, all of Delhi if she chose, that told her how many squadrons of cheels had taken to the air, revealed the existence of cats as far away as Karol Bagh or Mehrauli—that would be gone. She would have to live forever under the roof of the Bigfeet’s home, climbing the cupboards and bookcases for entertainment, instead of closing her eyes and following her whiskers wherever they might lead her. She remembered crouching in a drainpipe under the canal as a kitten, hiding from predators; it would be a little like that, the Sender thought, living in a smaller, darker, closed world without much air or light. It made her mew and shift uneasily.

  “So you can guess, little one,” said Ozzy, softly.

  “Only some,” said Mara, “but enough, perhaps. Is that how you feel?”

  “My fur misses the jungle, more and more,” said Ozzy. “It is different for Rani; as the years have gone by, as the seasons chase their tails around the sun, she lets go of her memories of the mangrove forests and the estuaries where she roamed, queen of all she surveyed. She tells me often that we have the open sky above us; we are fed; the Bigfeet do not poke us with sharp sticks or try to kill us with guns. But me, I remember the gorges and the ravines more and more. This dry earth the Bigfeet have given us; how can it compare with the waving grasses, the rivers, the cool black earth under my paws? If I could go home just once, Mara, if someone could bring my home to me only for a day, it would be enough, to let my roar echo through the trees, through the scrub, with no Bigfeet to hear it. Instead, there are the bars, and this stony ground and the Bigfeet gawking at us.”

  Mara let out a soft mew, watching the way Ozzy’s whiskers tautened and quivered at the very mention of the jungles.

  “I understand,” she said. “This is Rani’s home, and perhaps Rudra’s and Tantara’s, but it is not yours.”

  The tiger said nothing, but his breathing was calmer as he listened, and the pain of memory was receding from his striped face.

  “But is it so bad if you never go back to the jungle?” asked the Sender. “You are not alone in your cage, like the leopard over at the back who moans with such sadness every night; you have Rani. And the cubs could be friends, if you let them be. Will grief hold on to your fur for the rest of your days if you never see the jungle again?”

  Ozzy was silent, only the stripes on his flanks rippling as he listened.

  “The Bigfeet cannot take the jungle from you, Ozzy,” said Mara. “It’s between your ears, cradled and precious, every memory of your life in the forests. They can put you behind bars, but if you wanted, you could be free in your head.”

  The tiger rose, letting his great bulk fill this part of the cage. “The Bigfeet cannot take my jungle away,” he repeated, in some wonder. “And until I see it again…you know what, Mara? Those cubs need some training. They’re spraying all over the place, not getting the hang of marking their territory the way they should, neatly, at distinct intervals. If their mother doesn’t mind, I might give them a few lessons, teach them how to behave like tigers, even if they can’t be us, poor beasts.”

  He stretched, his fur looking much brighter, his whiskers back at a jaunty angle. “You!” he roared at the cubs, but it was a happy roar, not an aggressive call. “You over there! Come over and introduce yourselves properly. Come on, come on, line up by size—or weight, one or the other—by the bars, that’s right.” Ozzy chuffed at the solemn line of lions happily.

  Before he strolled over to them, he thanked the Sender. “While we’re talking about cages, little one,” he said, “time you broke the bars of your own, yes? Sending is all very well. Going for a walk with your whiskers is all very well. Time you went out into the world, Mara, it isn’t good for any of us to be locked up.”

  Mara fluffed out her fur, not wanting to explain to Ozzy all over again how much the outside frightened her.

  The tiger bounded off—but then he swung around and padded back to her. “Mara?” he said, and his growl was low, so that only he and the Sender could hear what he had to say. “I can’t break the bars of my cage. But you have no bars to break. It makes me angry to see you caught in a cage that you have built around yourself, little one, when you could have what we can’t.”

  “The outside?” said Mara, preparing to go back to her Bigfeet.

  “Freedom,” said Ozzy, and then he was off, his magnificent and freshly cleaned stripes lighting up the gloom and fog of the day.

  —

  MARA SLEPT POORLY WHEN she got back from her sending, and her dreams were filled with tigers and their ominous roars. When she finally slept deeply, she dreamed that the hyaenas were cackling as they circled her, their slavering jaws ready to bite. She woke up; there were no hyaenas, there was only the peace of her basket, the safety of the closed windows, and the chatter of her Bigfeet. The cat stretched, letting the aches in her spine ease, and slept again.

  The sky was falling on her head. It had been a dull afternoon sky, touched with pale-green clouds, and as she bounded around the house in the dream, a rending sound had made her look up. When she did, the sky was pouring into the house through a hole in the roof. Grey
clouds roared towards her with a clatter and a clang, and then, just as the sky descended on her, the clouds blanketing her terrified face, smothering her whiskers, forcing their clammy tendrils into her pink throat, Mara woke up.

  There were no clouds in the room, only the suffocating folds of the blanket. She had slipped beneath it in her sleep, and she relaxed, stretching her back, yawning pinkly. Then she opened her eyes very wide—the winter sun, weak as it was, had risen high into the sky. She had slept the morning through; her Bigfeet must have left the house while she was still deep in slumber.

  She had just started to wash her paws when she heard it—a roaring sound, a crash, a clang, a clatter! For a moment, it seemed to Mara that her dream had followed her right into the house, and that the skies and the clouds were raging in the drawing room.

  The clangour trebled, and Mara’s fur fluffed as something crashed to the ground. “Help!” she mewed, but no one heard her over the racket from the other room. Then she heard the scolding voice of the Chief Bigfoot. Mara abandoned her morning ablutions—given that her fur was standing up from fright, they wouldn’t have done much good anyway—and raced into the drawing room, glad to hear anything that sounded familiar through the crashes, bangs and thuds.

  The Chief Bigfoot was standing in the room between two swaying stacks of newspapers. “There you are!” cried Mara gladly, and she put her tail down in relief, heading towards her friend.

  She was halfway across the carpet when she heard him. The fur on the back of her neck prickled, and the long white whiskers above her eyes stood up. He was a large Bigfoot, and when he saw her, he dropped the load of old magazines and cardboard boxes he was carrying, astonished.

  “Who’s he?” said Mara to the Chief Bigfoot, just as the magazines and boxes hit the ground with horrendous thuds and thumps.

  The sounds, so close, made her head spin, and she scrabbled to get away from the Bigfoot. She ignored the Chief Bigfoot’s yelled explanations—“Calm down, relax, don’t be so scared, it’s only the kabadi wallah, he’s here to pick up the old papers and pots and pans”—as she streaked up the bookcases, shot across their length and surfed the room’s pelmets, going flat out as she went round and round the room.

  “Come down!” called the Chief Bigfoot.

  “Stay up there!” called the kabadi wallah, who held strong opinions on cats, especially ones that streaked like greased lightning through the room.

  Mara had no intention of coming down ever, but as she took off from the edge of a pelmet, aiming to land on the top of the door, the kabadi wallah backed into a pile of dishes. CRASHBOOMBANG!

  The orange cat twisted in mid-air and landed on the sofa, bouncing hard, just as the kabadi wallah pushed a stack of magazines onto the floor near her. She sprang off the sofa, terrified that he would come for her with his sack.

  “Mara!” called the Chief Bigfoot, trying to reassure the frantic little cat.

  “Marrrr​rrrrrrr​rrowwww​rrrrrr!” yelped Mara, running full tilt into a tower of old buckets and plastic mugs. They crashed all around her.

  “This way!” yelled the Chief Bigfoot in Hindi.

  “That way!” shouted the kabadi wallah in Punjabi.

  “Yowwwo​wwwowww​wowww!” yowled Mara as she headed for the front door like an orange rocket.

  “Oh no!” said the Chief Bigfoot in alarm, but it was too late. The door had been left open to allow the kabadi wallah to bring in his weighing scales. A vivid orange streak shot out, down the stairs, at full tilt, and the last the Chief Bigfoot heard of Mara was a faint echo in the stairwell.

  Mara shot out and down the stairs, into a waking nightmare. The world, held at bay when she watched it through the window or from the stairs, was inescapable; it rumbled at her, sending scent trails blasting in her direction. The Sender felt sick as the sounds and the smells jumbled together: the deep blare of bus horns, the vegetable seller’s rising chants, the clanging bells from the nearby temple, the menacing black ropes of dog scent that told her of the movements of the neighbourhood pack, the sharp feathery grey scents of hornbills, bulbuls and cheels, the warm tar stink of the tarmac.

  The road was at its busiest, and the roar of the traffic made her head throb. Her paws skidded as she narrowly missed a cycle rickshaw and dodged just in time to avoid a rogue auto driver. She pelted down the road, keeping to the verge, her paws sweating with exertion and fear. The cars seemed to scream at her; the scents jumbled into one another, sending her head swirling. She would have kept running, just to get away from the horror and chaos of the noise around her, the relentless tide of images that assailed her mind. But then, she smelled it—a clean, fresh scent, so different from the coal and burning stench of the outdoors. There it was, rising across the wide frightening expanse of road—the cool, green, beckoning whisper that spoke of grass and earth.

  Mara made herself stop, even though her paws had mixed feelings about coming to a halt. The Sender backed behind the wheel of a car. Her flanks were heaving, and her pink tongue hung out in terror, but she tried to follow the scent trails through. The stench of dog was thick where she had stopped, so heavy that it made her fur prickle in unease. In front of her, the traffic roared and belched fumes of smoke so disgusting that the smell—and feel—of it made her feel both deafened and dirtied. The road ran on in both directions, as straight and long as the paths she took in the sky when she was sending. She could not see an end to it.

  A small part of her mind whispered that she didn’t know how to get home, but she shut it down. That thought was too large and too scary to be allowed space. For now, she wanted to get away from the road, from—she ducked behind the car tire—these massive, rumbling vehicles that wanted to kill her. The Sender stared at the road, and a memory stirred, of rushing water under the canal, of a day when she had opened her eyes and stared at the black shining waters under the bridge. To the eyes of a tiny kitten, the canal had seemed vast, and the suck and ebb of its black waves had been the steady purr that had rocked her to sleep at night. The road seemed as vast to her as any canal, as turbulent as any river.

  The heavy stink of dog filled Mara’s twitching nostrils. She stood stiff-legged and wary, shrinking so that only her whiskers and her green eyes showed from behind the car’s reassuring tire.

  If the reek of the traffic had started to make the Sender feel nauseous—it was an overwhelming onslaught, tangling her whiskers up in so many sounds and smells that her stomach had begun to do ominous somersaults—the dog’s scent throbbed like a dull warning light in her head.

  She remembered backing into the damp earth under the canal bridge. She remembered the sound of barking dogs, so close that she hadn’t been able to stop shivering. She remembered the heat coming off a muzzle that had been thrust into their home, the cold, ferocious eyes, the hoarse barks, the sight of long, sharp, yellow teeth. She remembered calling out to her mother as the dogs snapped and snarled at them, and then she remembered being lifted up by the Bigfeet, struggling in their gentle hands, crying out again and again to a mother who had said nothing at all, who had stopped responding. She had felt so small, so helpless, so alone.

  The dog, who looked like an Alsatian from the front and like a lot of things from behind, was further up the road from her. It raised its toffee-brown head and their eyes met, his startled brown ones, her terrified green ones. “No,” she said, to herself as much as to him, “please don’t cross the road. Please, stay away from me.”

  The dog cocked his head. Then he narrowed his eyes, and scanned the flow of bicycles, three-wheeled rickshaws and assorted flotsam coming from one side, the few buses trundling down the road in the other direction. He waited, assessing the traffic, and when a bicycle ran into the seller of roasted corn, scattering golden cobs everywhere, he padded confidently onto the broad black tarmac.

  “Perhaps he hasn’t seen me,” Mara thought. “Perhaps if I close my eyes very tightly and make myself very small behind this wheel he won’t see me. Perhaps he’ll be run over b
y a bus.”

  The dog had reached her side of the road. She felt her heart stop beating as he glanced in her direction, and then he turned casually away, and bounded towards a tree, scattering a family of squirrels in all directions. They chittered crossly at him as they darted up the branches, two taking to the safety of the bougainvillea bushes.

  “Oho,” said one of the squirrels. “No need for speed, Jao, it’s only Doginder Singh.”

  Jao popped her head out, and gave Doginder Singh an indignant glare. “Some dogs, Ao,” she said with immense significance, “might look all grown up-shown up, but they’re basically just puppies.”

  “Watch it,” muttered Doginder Singh, “who’re you calling a puppy then? I didn’t mean any harm, it was just a Bounding Alertness Check. You could have been in a lot of trouble if it had been a real…I mean, a nasty strange ferocious dog, yeah, then you’d have thanked me for keeping you on your toes…paws. Whatever.”

  “Bounding Alertness Check,” said Ao, his grey-striped head radiating the dignity due to an elderly squirrel who was pretending he hadn’t just been chased up a bougainvillea bush. “Like the Car Alarm Check you and your friends carried out the other night, which had all the Bigfeet up and tramping through our homes just before dawn?”

  Doginder’s jaunty tail lost a little of its bounce. It had been enormous fun, cannoning off the hoods of the Bigfeet’s cars, when he had discovered that you could set off their car alarms in a pleasingly musical pattern. But it was no use explaining this to an unmusical neighbourhood; the Bigfeet had been very unappreciative, and the entire babbler clan had been markedly cold to him, cursing him and all of his tribe in rhyming couplets.

  Doginder folded his ears back. “I can see that my attempts to improve the neighbourhood are wasted,” he said coldly. “Never mind, I’ll go where my talents are appreciated. I hear they can do with a good guard dog, a Ferocious Attack Dog, over in Jangpura.”

  The squirrels watched him march off, his paws clicking smartly in indignation. They let him get some distance before Ao called out: “Oh, Mr. Ferocious Attack Dog? You might want to brush the bougainvilleas off your backside.”