More astonishing than the genies was the story of Grandpa’s tigress. According to Ma Muah, the village storyteller, many a man in the hamlet had a tigress of his own. Some married one, while others inherited a tigress, passed down through the generations. Grandpa had one from his father, which before had belonged to his father’s father, and so on right on up to their distant ancestors. Nobody remembered who was the first to marry the tigress.
On warm nights, Ma Muah would tell tales on her porch. Children huddled around her legs, and the girls took turns to massage her shoulders. If she was spinning a yarn late in the afternoon, the girls checked her hair for lice. She was always ready with a new story. She didn’t have to make anything up, she would say; they were all true. Like the tigresses, many stories were passed between successive storytellers across the generations. But some were about the present and understood only by the chosen ones, and of course Ma Muah was the chosen granny.
As far as Margio could remember, Ma Muah didn’t have a husband or a child, and had no work to do either, other than endlessly reeling off stories. She could go to anyone’s kitchen and eat there, or someone would come to her shack bringing food. People loved her, especially children. She had a story about a blind woman with snakes and scorpions in her hair instead of lice, and who ate only the tubers of the purple nut sedge. There was the story of genie princesses who abducted handsome young men and brought them to their realms. They were not malevolent so long as no one barged into their dwelling place. Margio had come to know these places, namely springs, river pools, the peaks of hills, large trees, and the minarets of mosques. Still, nothing appealed to Margio’s curiosity more than the protective white tigresses.
According to Ma Muah, the tigresses lived with their owners and guarded them against all dangers. She said that Grandpa was among those who kept a white tiger. But he would never talk to his grandson about the tiger because, he said, Margio was too young and couldn’t possibly tame such a savage animal. It was bigger than a clouded leopard, bigger than the ones people saw at the zoo or circus or in school-books. If a man couldn’t control his beast, it could turn so violent that nothing could restrain it once enraged.
“But I just want to see it,” said Margio.
“Later! Maybe then you will own it.”
He had often heard of his grandfather’s prowess, and that of elders in other hamlets: how they resisted Dutch efforts to abduct the best young men for forced labor in the Land of Deli. Bullets had no effect on them, nor did the samurai swords of the Japanese, who came later, and if they got angry, their white tigresses came out from their bodies to attack. They even expelled the gangs of Darul Islam guerrillas roaming the jungle. Ma Muah said that this was all because of the elders’ elemental friendship with the tigresses, who became family through wedlock.
It was never clear to Margio what such marriages meant. He couldn’t imagine a man sitting on a wedding dais beside a tigress wearing tassels on her head, powder on her befurred cheeks, and lipstick on her mouth, while the master of ceremonies prayed that the marriage of Mr. So-and-so to this tigress be blessed by the Almighty. As a teenager, he thought it would be very strange for a man to have sex with his tiger wife, and wondered what kind of children such a union would produce. Ma Muah would show off her toothless gums in laughter, chuckling every time he told her about his notion of the marriage between a human and a tiger.
“Only men marry tigers,” Ma Muah said, “but not all the tigers are female.”
His grandfather of course had a wife, a human woman, and clearly that made the tigress a kind of co-wife. Grandpa never married the tigress, because he inherited her from his father, but still for the family she was another spouse, loved and revered, sometimes more so than the human wife. Grandma was the first to die, succumbing to the pitiless onslaught of tuberculosis. The disease ruined their nights with nonstop coughing and an interminable fever as her body shrank toward the grave. His grandfather never remarried. Maybe the tiger wife was enough, although he didn’t live much longer, too grief-stricken by Grandma’s departure.
One evening, on Margio’s last visit before his grandfather’s death, the old man said firmly: “The tiger is white as a swan.”
He wanted Margio to recognize the tigress if she came to him. Grandpa added that if the beast wished it, she might go to Margio’s father and become his. Margio would then have to wait until his father died to take possession of the tigress. But if she didn’t like his father she would someday come to Margio, and she would be his.
“And if she doesn’t like me?” Margio asked anxiously.
“She will go to your son, or your grandson, or she might never reappear if our family forgets her.”
The tigress had come to him, lying beside him on the surau’s warm rug, while the universe outside froze. As his grandfather had said, the tigress was white as a swan or a cloud or cotton wool. How unbelievably happy he was, for the tigress was more than anything he had ever owned. He thought about how she would hunt with him, helping to corral the wild pigs that ruined the rice fields, and, if he ever got slack when one or two boars charged, she would protect him from the worst. It had never occurred to Margio that the tigress would turn up on such a damn cold morning, surrendering herself to him like a girl. Look how the tigress lay down, still licking the tips of her paws, tongue flickering. For a moment she seemed like a giant domestic cat, grandly aristocratic and huge. Margio looked deep into her face, so lovely to him, and the boy fell profoundly in love.
He wrapped his arm around her neck, embracing her and feeling the warmth of her fur against his body. It was like sharing an embrace with a girl on a cold morning, stark naked in bed, the most tender intimacy after a night of love-making. Margio closed his eyes, ecastatic after his long wait, free from yearning, reassuring himself that the tales he’d heard as a child were all true. But of a sudden he felt an abrupt pang of loss. The beloved had left without a word and warmth vanished with her. Margio opened his eyes, and saw that the animal had gone.
He was more surprised now than when he first saw her. The boy stood up and searched, but the surau was small, and he could soon tell that not a trace of her was left. Not even one scrap of fur. The rain still fell hard enough to make children on their way to school outside complain. In downpours such as this banana leaves would be cut from the trees, becoming disposable umbrellas, but Margio was not thinking about any of that. He thought of nothing other than his tiger. Standing still, he opened his mouth to call but not a sound emerged. He didn’t know what to call the tiger. Grandpa never told him her name; neither did Ma Muah. Maybe he was supposed to name her himself, but there was little point in that when the animal was nowhere to be found.
He might have had his heart broken eleven times over by girls he loved dearly, and still the pain he felt now would surpass all of those rejections rolled into one. He struggled not to weep. No, it wasn’t a dream, he said to himself. She had come to him because she was his. He had felt the softness of her fur, and they had played together. It was too real to be a morning’s silent dream. Having searched and searched, and feeling sure that she had gone, his heartache grew into resentment. He shivered and his fingers clenched. Never had he felt so ruthless and vengeful a rage, and he couldn’t evade it; he had to bear the pain. She had made him fall in love, the climax to years of longing, and he would not be deserted in this way.
He pounded on the door, scratched it, until the dark green paint peeled off its mahogany planks, and out of his mouth came a heavy growl that shattered the air. The deep scratches shocked him. Margio stood still and silent while his anger abated. He stared at the three parallel scratches, blistering wounds had they been on someone’s back, then checked his hands. His fingernails weren’t long. He kept them short so they wouldn’t be a nuisance when he held his spear for pig hunting. His nails couldn’t have etched marks like these into the door. Still, he saw paint and timber flakes under his short fingernails. For some time Margio was frozen in awe and puzzlement, until he understood what must have happened. She hadn’t left him. The tigress was there, a part of him, the two of them inseparable until death. He leaned against the wall, rubbed his navel, below which he sensed the tigress now resided. She wasn’t tame after all.