Excerpt – Tiger in you By Shiraz Mukherjee
Excerpt – Tiger in you By Shiraz Mukherjee
The Brother smiled and helped Imran lie down on the floor that had been covered with a quilted cloth. He packed his cards and lay down beside Imran with his head resting on a pillow and thought about the happenings of the day. He would do this every day. It helped him sleep well. It was his form of meditation.
Suddenly, a gush of the wind upturned one of the lanterns on the balcony wall. It fell on the ground, rolled to the far corner and struck the railing, breaking into small pieces. The rain had started once more. The wind blew in through the railings of the main gate and the balcony making a noise that normally signalled arrival of monsters in B grade Bollywood flicks. The doors started swinging ferociously, banging hard against each other.
Brother Lobo was the first to get up when a deity on the wall, made of wood and shal pata, came crashing to the floor and hit Imran. Within minutes wind speeds rose to alarming levels. Thatched palm roofs from adjoining village houses were uprooted from their bamboo bases, colliding against each other in mid-air and were flung to far distances.
The bamboo door of the chicken shed, wrenched free from its hinges and went and struck the iron main gate, and the hens scattered, some died, instantly. The estate reeled under nature’s wrath, and one shuddered to think of the helplessness of those who dwelled in the huts at the riverbank. The waves of the river were known to rise to great heights and smash into the huts and damage them. The Brother came screaming down the corridor.
“Sushil da, take care of your daughter and the two girls. I shall be with the others.”
He fastened the main door of the room and moved the wooden chest in the middle of the room against it for extra weight.
Sushil da was sitting on his bed holding his daughter tightly to his chest as she was now shivering from fever. Keya and Hazel clutched onto each other and tried to shut their minds off from everything they saw and heard around them. They could hear the sound of wailing children and men scampering around shouting in a language they did not understand. There was a total pandemonium all around with no indication of ending any time soon.
Sushil da heard a frantic banging on the main door of the house, on the ground floor, and Brother Lobo seemed to open the door and move out. He left the relative security of the bed, went to the window and peered down. He saw the Brother talking to a man at the door.
“Lobo bhai, … Lobo bhai, my wife is in labour pain, and she has to be taken to the hospital. What should I do?” The man was screaming at the top of his voice so that he could be heard over the howling winds and the fury of the storm. Sushil da could hear him faintly from the first floor.
The Brother did not wait to hear any more. He bolted the door from outside and slipped out and ran across the garden getting drenched in the rain. The man followed, struggling to keep up with him. With the Brother sprinting across the garden, the wind relented slightly and the rain eased. But it appeared as if strangers had attacked the estate and left with the booty.
Then the proverbial calm before the storm descended.
The tempest must have lasted about twenty minutes. The hangover of the wrath of the calamity still hung in the air, and a pungent salty smell of the wind that came roaring over the oceans, lingered on. It was impossible to imagine that a place could be so ravaged and left squirming and battered, within minutes. Wind speeds of over a hundred kilometres an hour had left the entire village devastated and traumatised. The friends tried forgetting the storm and took succour in sleep, all huddled together with Sushil da and Bhor in the same room.
They woke up to the incessant cackle of the hens in the garden, early next morning. The hens seemed confused, expressing great woe for having lost their shed and also, perhaps, mourning the demise of their companions.
There were also the sweet calls of the Asian koel, a large, long-tailed, cuckoo. The male of the species, glossy and bluish-black, sat on a branch with a pale greenish grey bill and a crimson iris. This was a bird that had a melodious voice, but it did not know how to build a nest. They were known as brood parasites who deposited their eggs into the nests made by crows, and the crows worked as surrogate mothers raising their young. A crow also cried out from another branch in sync with the koel as though it had recognised the trick and would not be fooled again.
Sushil da brought in steaming tea that was served again in the earthen pots. The tea was refreshing, and after everyone had a second helping, Keya noticed that Brother Lobo was missing.
