Tigers of Taboo Valley Read online

  Ranjit Lal has written books for both adults and children. Some of his books include The Crow Chronicles , The Life and Times of Altu-Faltu , Bossman and the Kala Shaitan , Birds from My Window . He has been a winner of the Crossword Best Children’s Book Award for Faces in the Water .

  Published in Red Turtle by

  Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2014

  7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj

  New Delhi 110002

  Sales centres:

  Allahabad Bengaluru Chennai

  Hyderabad Jaipur Kathmandu

  Kolkata Mumbai

  Copyright © Ranjit Lal 2014

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN: 9788129132499

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

  For Juhi—this was long overdue

  R ana Shaan-Bahadur, the most macho and royal of the Royal Bengal tigers of Sher-kila National Park, yawned and stretched as the first golden rays of the sun set his coat afire. His Personal Assistant and Press Secretary, Naradmunni the jackal, swept up dust with his tail and smiled ingratiatingly as he crawled towards him, head between paws.

  ‘Huzoor, I bring glad tidings on this golden morn! The world-famous photographer from the National Geographic , the beautiful raven-haired Ayesha, has arrived at the Rest House. And even as we speak, she could be setting forth into the park to take pictures in the gilded light of this new dawn…’

  Shaan-Bahadur’s green eyes glittered. ‘Eh? What the hell are you talking about?’ Then understanding glimmered. ‘Is that so? I’d better go down to the waterhole and make sure I’m looking good…’ Actually, it was the first thing Shaan-Bahadur did every morning—look at his re flection and make sure that every whisker was perfectly groomed and positioned, and his coat glowed like the interior of Popacatapetl volcano.

  ‘Huzoor, do forgive me, but you always look so noble. You are the most handsome tiger in the country, even in the morning when you awake, with bits of grass sticking out from your head and ears and your dragon’s breath that can render a rhinoceros unconscious at twenty feet!’ Naradmunni rolled his eyes and reeled as if he were about to faint.

  ‘You talk too much!’ Shaan-Bahadur growled and made his way down the rocky path. The waterhole was some distance away, surrounded by high elephant grass with only one winding path leading to and from it. Shaan-Bahadur had often crouched behind the grass, at a bend, waiting for prey and had scored many kills here. In the summer, when most of the other waterholes dried up, many animals had no choice but to come here to drink.

  This morning however, well before sunrise, there had been visitors of a different, sinister kind. Two men in khaki shorts and shirts, carrying something which had terrible steel jaws. They had stopped on the path near one of the spots from where Shaan-Bahadur had launched many an ambush and then nodded to each other, keeping their torches well hooded. They were armed, and while one looked around nervously, the other began his work. It took him longer than he thought it would because the soil was rock hard and by the time he finished, the sun had turned the waters to gold.

  Unknown to them, Ayesha the beautiful raven-haired photographer from the National Geographic , had also risen very early, coiled her tresses into a neat bun at the nape of her neck and had set out in a Gypsy towards the waterhole in the hope of photographing the animals and birds that came there to drink and bathe. Normally, of course, visitors were not allowed unescorted into the park, but Ayesha, a prize-winning photographer and wildlife film-maker, was from the National Geographic after all. She had beautiful silky hair and the most wonderful curling eyelashes (framing big black eyes) that anyone (and certainly the Field Director) had ever seen…

  ‘Jaldi karo!’ the second man now said. ‘The sun’s risen!’

  ‘You just stand around farting, don’t tell me to hurry up!’ the first man snapped irritably. ‘Come on now, it’s done! Let’s go! We’ll check again at dusk.’

  They packed up their digging equipment and started to walk back around the bend…

  …And came face to face with Shaan-Bahadur!

  ‘Yaaaa, mummy bachao!’ they shouted and backed away, white in the face, too petrified to raise their guns.

  ‘Grrrrrowwwrrr!’ Shaan-Bahadur roared, equally startled. He roared again and then turned and fled, leaping through the grass as though the devil was behind him.

  Phattack! went the trap as one of the men tripped backwards on top of it, its jaws snapping shut on his bottom.

  ‘Owww! Pakad liya!’ he howled, clutching his bum and trying to free it of those merciless jaws. The other man panicked and dived into the waterhole forgetting that tigers were good swimmers… and anyway now Magar and Machch, the crocodiles who owned it, were languidly swimming towards him.

  ‘Breakfast is served, darling,’ Magar murmured, grinning.

  ‘You are too kind, my sweet!’ Machch said, flipping his tail.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Ayesha, breathed as she squinted through her viewfinder, her finger firmly pressed on the camera’s shutter button. She had parked her Gypsy at a vantage point and had seen (and photographed) everything. Well, almost everything: she’d got the face-to-face meeting between the men and the tiger and the poachers falling back, but (happily) not any shots of Shaan-Bahadur fleeing through the grass.

  Within hours the photographs were everywhere, on the Internet, on YouTube, on Facebook, on every TV news channel. To say they had gone viral would be completely inadequate.

  Before seven o’clock that morning, Rana Shaan- Bahadur had become the world’s most famous tiger—the only tiger to have caught poachers in their own trap. He was an international celebrity!

  ‘Holy chital,’ muttered Ugly Thug, the park’s Beta-male (no prizes for guessing who the alpha male was), ‘now his head is going to swell like a watermelon!’ He shook his own massive head. His chances of becoming boss tiger had diminished considerably. As it is all the tigresses in the park, Raat-ki-Raani, Resham, Razia and Lolita, went weak at the knees and behaved in a disgracefully coy manner when Shaan-Bahadur walked past them.

  Naradmunni, of course, was ecstatic. ‘National Geographic , BBC, CNN, NDTV, ABC, DEF, GHI…! Boss, you name the channel and you’re on it!’

  Shaan-Bahadur made the most of his celebrity status. He changed his Facebook profile photo every half hour. He posed statuesquely at sunrise and sunset when photographers get the best light, on the ramparts of the Sher-kila. He roared and snarled ferociously, he conducted mock charges, he tried very hard to be photographed while actually hunting, but the stupid chital didn’t cooperate and ran away behind some high grass… He was magnificent.

  Tigresses as a rule are not in the habit of gossiping (or kitty partying), but after Shaan-Bahadur’s rise to stardom, they couldn’t help messaging each other frantically by squirting on their ‘walls’ (tree trunks) and calling .

  ‘I’m going to have his cubs,’ Raat-ki-Rani announced proudly as the others growled jealously. It was true… Three or four months ago Naradmunni had smugly informed the others that Shaan-B
ahadur and Raat-ki-Rani were an ‘item’.

  Well, their turn would come. Shaan-Bahadur was notoriously fickle and changed his mates frequently. Also, he wanted to father every single cub in the park. In the meanwhile, the other tigresses had to accept types like Thug and Taimur and Caligua.

  ‘Sure, but last time he walked past me, he gave me that look !’ Razia now messaged with a delicious shudder. ‘You know what that means? Turned my knees to water, I can tell you.’

  ‘And he pretended to drive me away from a kill I had made,’ Lolita replied. ‘I know the silly fellow was only flirting!’

  ‘Did you run away?’ Resham questioned bitingly.

  ‘I was honoured that he ate at my table,’ Lolita replied with great dignity. ‘And he ate everything!’

  ‘Sure, sure!’ the others chorused, ‘Of course he would!’

  ‘I’m the one he’s really after,’ Razia squirted smugly. ‘He ignores me, and that’s the first sign that he’s interested. One day he’ll…’

  ‘Keep on dreaming, darling.’

  Soon, though, the outside world, in its usual fickle way, lost interest and drifted away. Not that it made any difference to Shaan-Bahadur; his head remained swollen as a pumpkin. He made sure that no tiger in the park ever forgot his deed. If any tiger or tigress did not show him the respect and deference he thought they should, they received a swift swipe to the head and a jet of urine up their noses, accompanied by a roar: ‘Do you know who I am, you hyena-striped scumbag? Now grovel!’

  There was however, one person who was still interested in him: Ayesha, the beautiful raven-haired photographer. She had often wondered what had happened to him that morning; she had been so busy photographing the poachers falling into their trap and jumping into the waterhole that she had not seen what had become of him. Had he, in the manner of the best heroes, done his brave deed and vanished like a phantom super tiger? Of course, very soon afterwards, he had been photographed scores of times, posing statuesquely on the fort, but was that because he was clever? By letting the paparazzi and visitors photograph him was he ensuring that they wouldn’t bother him at other times, when he wanted his privacy?

  She was determined to find out what he did in his ‘private’ time and photograph his private life.

  R aat-ki-Rani leapt fluidly up the flat step-like rocks until she was nearly at the top of the rock-face. From here she got a panoramic view of Sher-kila National Park. Surrounded by rocky escarpments that tumbled into deep ravines, it had large patches of dense teak and sal forest that encircled grassy meadows where the chital and sambar grazed and wild boar piglets chased each other. She could see Magar and Machch’s waterhole too, surrounded as it was by its elephant grass. It was a good place for a tiger; the dense forests were perfect for hiding in, from where you could watch the deer in the meadows. Invariably, they would drift closer to the forest’s edge, and if you had anticipated where the herd would reach, and wriggled near that spot, you could launch your attack with a very good chance of making a kill. Then all you had to do was haul it into the shade of the trees away from prying eyes. There were streams and pools in the ravines, ideal for cooling off on a hot summer’s day after you had eaten your fill and hidden your kill.

  Of course, that selfish (if extremely handsome) lout, Shaan-Bahadur had claimed a huge area around the waterhole for himself, but the park was extensive and so far at least, there had been enough space for all the tigers inhabiting it. He did tolerate the occasional visit from pretty tigresses into his area.

  She stared at the almost sheer rock-face looming up far behind her into the sky like a high prison wall: behind it she knew lay Taboo Valley, the forbidden forest; lush and lovely but now so accursed that no predator—not even Shaan-Bahadur dared venture there.

  Raat-ki-Rani looked at the park spread below her, green and gold, thickly forested, studded with sapphire blue waterholes and small lakes. A white-backed vulture everyone called Diclo glided swiftly past her, glancing at her, the wind hissing through his pinions. He was followed by his wife Fenac, and instinctively the tigress growled. They were nothing but thieves, even if they did occasionally help indicate a kill, which you could then steal for yourself… She turned around and slipped into a crack in the rock-face. It opened into a snug, cozy cave, the perfect place for a nursery. Being a sensible and experienced tigress, she had earmarked three other locations in the park where she could take her cubs if their security here was compromised. But now it was time, and she settled down to await the arrival of her family .

  Raat-ki-Rani gave birth to four lovely cubs in that cave: the eldest, a boy, who she called Zafraan because of his fiery orange coat, and three girls—Hasti, Masti and Phasti.

  Hasti was a fat rollicking little thing, tumbling about happily and seemingly only interested in her mother’s milk bar, Masti had the gleam of mischief in her frosty blue eyes from the moment she opened them. Poor Phasti, the littlest of the litter, had actually got stuck inside her Mamma before she popped out, and now stumbled and tripped about in the cave, getting herself stuck between rocks and entangling her tail in tree roots; she seemed to have a co-ordination problem. She had gorgeous jade green eyes, the colour of a mountain stream. Masti had a huge amount of fun at her expense.

  For the first few weeks their mother rarely ventured out, only setting forth to hunt when she was ravenous. The cubs were happy guzzling her milk and matters at the milk bar often degenerated into quarrels and quibbling.

  ‘Oof fatso, move over!’ Masti nudged Hasti, who giggled and promptly squashed Zafraan as she wriggled aside to make room for her sister.

  ‘Mamma, look at her!’ Zafraan wailed. ‘She’s squashing me and not letting me drink!’

  Little Phasti, at the very end of the queue, just closed her eyes and drank as fast as she could before she got pushed away by the others .

  ‘Okay, that’s enough, all of you,’ Raat-ki-Rani stood up as the cubs fell over protesting. ‘Mamma, we’re still hungry!’

  ‘So am I,’ their mother growled, stretching. Very gently she licked them one by one. ‘Now stay here quietly, till I get back!’

  They were obedient little tiger cubs, at least until they were about four or five weeks old. That’s when Masti got the urge to explore and promptly infected her sisters and brother with the bug. Early one morning they waited for their mother to set forth, very innocently crouching at the back of the cave until she had left.

  ‘Come on, kiddos, let’s go!’ Masti said, her blue eyes sparkling. ‘Mamma’s gone! The coast is clear!’ She led the way to the mouth of the cave and stuck her head out.

  ‘OMG!’ she whispered. ‘You have got to see this!’

  For a while they just sat there side by side at the entrance of the cave, taking in the view of the place which was their home.

  ‘Wow! Just look at that!’ Hasti stared, amazed. ‘Awesome!’

  ‘I think one day I will be boss of all this,’ Zafraan said pompously.

  ‘Oh yeah, sure it will!’ Masti said, pouncing on her brother. ‘Come on Hasti, let’s flatten him!’ Hasti joined in and in a moment the cubs were tumbling about, yarring and yowling as they played. Then poor Phasti got swiped by one of her sisters and tumbled down the first two rock steps and got caught in a cleft at the bottom of the second step.

  ‘Help!’ she wailed, struggling to get out. ‘I’m stuck!’

  ‘Story of her life!’ Masti giggled, looking down at her, as Hasti rolled over laughing.

  ‘You girls!’ Zafraan sneered, lying down and crossing his paws. ‘Such juveniles!’

  Hasti nudged Masti. ‘He’s been reading The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, so thinks he’s very smart. Mamma said that fellow made the tiger, Sher Khan, the villain of his story!’

  ‘What a douche-bag! We’d show him, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘Help!’ yowled Phasti, struggling in vain. ‘Stop yakking and get me out of here!’

  ‘Really,’ Masti said, shaking her head and taking aim at Zafraan’s wiggling
tail. ‘All these humans are the same—they think they are very brave if they shoot us from half a mile away while sitting up on an elephant or from a treetop. Let them come after us on foot, naked and bare-handed!’

  ‘Naked!’ Hasti giggled. ‘We’ll probably run away if we see a naked human. They’re hairless and gross! Ugh!’

  ‘Ouch!’ Zafraan yelped, leaping up as Masti landed on his tail and worried it. ‘Cut that out!’

  A large cross-shaped shadow suddenly passed swiftly over them, accompanied by a whistling sound. Diclo, the critically endangered white-backed vulture whizzed by, his eyes raking the little cubs, followed by his wife, Fenac.

  ‘Run!’ Masti squealed. ‘Get inside!’

  The three cubs dived back into their cave.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Hasti asked weakly.

  ‘A pair of white-rumped or white-backed vultures,’ Zafraan informed them. ‘They’ve nearly been wiped out… Gyps bengalensis !’

  ‘Hey, where’s Phasti?’ Masti looked around.

  ‘Shoot, she’s still stuck!’

  ‘Oh heck, Mamma will kill us if anything happens to her…’

  Cautiously they poked their heads out of the cave and then belly-crawled out. A terrifying sight met their eyes. Two steps down, sitting on either side of a petrified Phasti were the two enormous vultures, their bald heads gleaming. They were regarding poor little Phasti in an interested sort of way.

  ‘We’ll have to kill it, can’t wait till it dies; its mother’ll come back!’ Diclo croaked.

  ‘Yeah, though I prefer them dead for a couple of days. Nice and tender they become then.’

  ‘…and garnished with bluebottles and maggots. Yum!’

  ‘Come on, we peck its eyes first?’

  ‘I guess!’

  Masti didn’t hesitate. With a yowl of rage she leapt at the enormous birds startling them. ‘Get away from her, you ghouls!’ she screamed. Hasti leapt after her and Zafraan, trying to (unsuccessfully) growl deep in his throat, followed in a more dignified manner. They sat around their little sister, growling and swiping their paws at the two huge birds that had skipped away.