Tiger Heart: Chapter 3 - Misbehaving

The sun is pouring down on me, and I am running—running towards home, running towards the river. I’m about to dive in and cross. Vick’s voice: “Aradhia!”

Thumpinghard headhitswood—yeowch! But—oh! OOoooh! There’s VICK! I see him! Jean legs standing there through this dang hard-leg-table thing. Bleh, dropping potholder, boring old thing. Pewhy. See what you’ve reduced me to? Without you this is all I have to do? Scamperscrambleflipflop, POUNCE.

Yeessss! AAAGH! There! I got you! I got you! Oh, wait. I don’t got you. Darn it. There now! See! Got you again! DESTINY! DESTINY! Got your leg! Nyaah…Aw, Come on—play with me—PLAY—bleh your jeans don’t taste good—please come down here and PLAY with me. Please!

What? You’re NOT—not going to? You’re BUSY?

Bah you’re no fun at all. I’ll leave you alone. I’m done with you. Back to potholder. Ugh.

Oh. Wait. Cupboard squeaking, box opening noises. Ears perkturning—you’re going to FEED me? Feed me! FEED me! And you ARE feeding me!!! Oh thanks. That’s good. But I want you to PLAY. I want you to—oh well, this is good. I’ll just munch this for a while.

Soon, though. We will play. MMmm this is good. We will play. And it will be rough. Mmm, this a new brand or something? Tongue-smack. Yum.

Oh. Hi there, you.

Yeah. YOU.

You, watching me.

You out there. Yeah.

Don’t bother hiding. I know you’re there.

I can hear your heart beat.

And I know what you’re thinking. And the answer is no. You’re NOT getting ANY of my meat here. Nope. Sorry. This is MY food dish, and this is MY meat, Vick gave this to me, and it’s the best meal I’ve ever tasted and YOU’re not getting ANY of it. So don’t even THINK about it, OK?

Aww, gee.

See, you look friendly, so maybe normally I’d share. But look, see I don’t get much meat stuffs. I’m only just cutting my big chompers so I only get meat once a day. I get milk six times a day. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like milk. Milk is comfortwarm, and it makes me want to be cuddled, and puts me in a mood where sure, I’d love to share. Just scratch my chin, huh?

But meat is new, and different, and exciting. And it’s making me crave MORE of...of...something. I’m just not sure what. It makes me want to go crawling on my tummy and hunting for it...whatever that is. Like...crickets. Or giant, ten foot tall potholders! Or...something.

So lately I’ve been going outside more and hunting for it. That missing something that I must catch. The other day I was trying to find it, out under the back deck. Dude, you never know what you’re gonna find down there!!! Like that black lil beady-eyed slimesquirmy froglizard dude I saw yesterday hanging off the woodboards and I knocked him off but then he disappeared into the leaves and I dug and dug but I couldn’t find him again. I did dig out a beetle though, but the way it was jitterbugging along freaked me out and I ran out of there and pounced on that Radsy Red-Hair Chick instead.

Which was a lot better. ‘Cause she had a POP CAN. So I attacked that and it BURST open and I lapped up the stuff and it was bright and fizzy and guess what I LIKED it. And it made the BESTEST sounds ever.

No wait. Those aren’t the bestest sounds ever.

You know that hard-leg-table thing they put stuff on that was in the way of Mr. McArthur this morning I keep bumping into? It’s REALLY SUPER HARD to knock over. But the other day, I DID it. And there was this HUUUGE heavy yellow contraption, a water holder gizmo, and that skinny little snot of a cat-thing Sangita likes (she thinks she’s SUCH HOT STUFF) all on top. So anyways I come at at it at just the right angle and I flip the whole shebang over and water goes everywhere and bitchcat hisses and shrieks and the big heavy yellow thing makes this TERRIFIC noise like an EXPLOSION of metal wielding bell monsters destroying the whole research center! And yeah, THAT’s the best noise ever, and it’s totally my most glorious achievement ever. I gotta do it again pretty quick to keep up my reputation. They put that big box thing up on top so it’s gonna be just a LITTLE bit harder to do. And that means next time I do it the explosion will be even better. I swear.

“Hey, Mona!”

OH. But that’s not the best sound either. THAT’s the best sound. That, right there.

The best sound ever is when people call my name.

Mona is my word. My name. MY sound. The sound they all call me. It’s what my pal named me. My pal, Vick McArthur. Where it came from I have no idea. There’s some sort of sound energy down inside me, waiting to burble over and splash at everyone, but it’s more like the monsoon thundering in or the clashing clamoring crash of the table knocking down than whatever MOH-NUH is s’posed to express.

But it works. When people say “Mona”, I know they mean me, even though there’s a lot more to me than that.

“Tell you Mona what I wanna do,” Vick sings to me, each night. “I’ll build a house next door to you…Yeah, come on, come out on the front. Listen to my heart go bumpety bump…”

I snuggle on his chest and rumpleclaw his shirts and listen. His heart does go bumpety bump. I like the sound of his heart. You can hear anyone’s heart if you get close enough to them. Some people’s hearts are stable and plodding, like Chaturwedi’s, and some are quick and trolloppy and skip beats now and then, like Dwight’s. Some are all over the place, like Aradhia’s (dude, her rhythm’s loaded—it must be hard work being her). But Vick McArthur’s is steady, like something you can count on, and I’ve noticed when he comes into a room other hearts in the room tend to sync around his.

Sounds are all over, too. Not just the hearts and the stuff I knock over—doors, boxes, radios, voices. I like sounds. Sounds means things are happening, folks are talking, to each other, to me, and that the world’s going around.

But most of the time, lately, it seems to be going around IN SPITE of me. Now don’t get me wrong. See, Vick is my pal, my best friend, my confidante, my playmate. But he’s been so BUSY lately, and so hung up on this thesis thing, and the audio tapes, and those net chats with that frumplefat advisor lady who lives in his computer (she has eyewindows like Ajay), and in that scampertwirly RadsyRedHeadChick, so sometimes when he says Mona, it sounds less like MONA and more like moan-ugghhhhh.

So. Yeah. I’m sure things aren’t always gonna be like that, though. Things will be back how they’re supposed to be again real soon. Like it was when I first got here.

“Now, playtime,” says Mr. McArthur.

SEE! I TOLD YA SO!

YAY! Vick is running with me! We are running outside, running down the stairs of the porch. We’re running together, around out back behind the porch, through the trees, around, around, in full circles—one time, two times, three times—I’m gaining, I’m gaining—oh, I got him! I got him again! And he’s stopping, and I’m leaping at him, my paws on his chest, and he’s petting my ears and chuffing at me and I’m chuffing back, and I leap up again, and now I hear a click—

OH NO! You WOULDN’T!

He takes off. “Sorry Mona, company coming. You’ve got to be on the leash.”

He runs off back up the stairs. ABANDONMENT!

Got to break—off of this thing. Erghghghghhh. How can you DO this to me??? You’re my FRIEND.

He shuts the door. BETRAYAL!

I loop around the tree and take a run and leap. I know sometime it’s gonna break if I continue this.

It’s not like I’m STUPID, MISTER McARTHUR. I’m gonna get off this thing, and then I’m gonna run off. Run away! Maybe I’ll never come back!

I’M gonna start getting all DISTANT now. You LIKE THAT? Do ya?

9:01 AM, October 15

Bhairavi Research Center Dormhouse - Aradhia’s room

The sun is pouring down on me, and I am running—running towards home, running towards the river. I’m about to dive in and cross.

Vick’s voice: “Aradhia!”

Oh no...

“Aradhia!”

I’m opening my eyes, blinking. Light is searing, tearing.

—Stop it, light. Stop it. I don’t want to wake up.

“Aradhia!” It’s Sangita, not Vick, knocking on my door, yelling for me, telling me to get up, wake up. It’s time to get dressed. “Dr. Hiranya is going to be here any minute.”

Dr. Hiranya.

Now I’m gonna want to get up?

But for some reason, somehow, I am getting up.

And I’m rubbing my eyes, and grabbing the shirt Sangita tosses my way through the door. And she’s telling me to hurry, so I’m putting it on and pulling my jeans on, and now I’m rushing to the kitchen, and Ajay’s slopping breakfast on my plate (“it’s called break fast coz you break your fast,” Sangita is explaining, and I guess it breaks the speed of the start of the day by interrupting everything) and I’m chugging juice and gulping eggs and chickpeas and sweet rice (“kheer”), and Mona’s on the floor attacking an old raggedy thing Sangita tossed her, and she’s about to knock over the table again.

Mr. McArthur comes running in in zebra shorts, pulling on his jeans as he runs and he’s gulping the last swig of coffee straight from the pot (Sangita shrieks at him) and he lets Mona outside on her horse leash since we have stuff to do. But then (of course) she gets away, she’s loose, and now she’s wading out in the little creek-riverlet out back.

Mr. McArthur looks at me. “Hey Tiger, you go drag her in.”

Me: “She’s YOUR tiger—”

Mr. McArthur: “Yours now. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

He is simultaneously shaving and brushing his teeth in the kitchen sink. And now of course he’s cut himself and Sangita is yelling at him and he’s bleeding all over his shirt and they’re looking for a bandaid and Sangita is tut tutting at him. So. I go outside and march down the stairs and wade out there into the creek and grab hold of Mona by her collar, and—yeowch!—I’ve stepped on some kind of rocksharpy thing, and now I’m limping back up the steps dragging Mona by her collar, and Mr. McArthur is popping his head out there, cheek bloody, and now he’s yelling at me (“HOW did you get so MUDDY?”) and I yell at him (“DOING WHAT YOU TOLD ME TO! How did you get so BLOODY?”) and he yells back (”For God’s sake find something else to put on!”).

So I run back in tracking mud everywhere. And of course there isn’t anything else to put on—there’s nothing in my room, these are my same jeans from yesterday, and the laundry is all hanging outside and isn’t dry yet. And then I remember one place at the research center where there are always loose clothes all over the place so I run back into the dorms and trip over Vick’s notebook and hurt my foot again, and I grab some jeans off the floor, and I’m pulling them on and of course they’re too long for me, and I’m coming back out, and Sangita sees me in the hallway (“Arre wah—What are you wearing?!”) and tries to find me something else, but it’s too late, Dr. Hiranya is in the drive, and then Sangita’s muttering and looking up at the sky, and I’m trying to put on a belt she gave me to hold them up. And we go outside on the porch.

Mr. McArthur is already out there. He sees us and his eyebrows shoot straight up.

Sangita gets out a scissors and starts cutting off the cuffs of my jeans. Mr. McArthur opens his mouth to protest (“Hey, those are m—”) but then he just puts his hand over his eyes and shakes his head, and his hand drops and he gives a sickly looking thumbs up and then he turns and starts walking down the stairs out towards the jeep, towards the woman getting out of the jeep who is Dr. Hiranya.

“Namaskar.”

Dr. Hiranya is not wearing white. A tiger’s pounce away from me, in the middle of the jungle, she looks strangely small.

I can’t see her eyes—they are covered with dark-shined mirrorshades the color of a bluebottle fly—but her face is not so tight as I remember. Her hair is grown out just a couple fingertips past her jawline and dirt brass earrings are falling out from the back of it. Her coat is the color of dying grass. A bag is slung over her shoulder. Her arms are folded, and she nearly trips as she stumbles up along our mud road.

There is someone walking along with her. A man with a flash thing—a camera. He takes a picture of us all together on the stairs of the porch. The flash dizzies me.

“Family portrait,” Sangita says, grabbing me around the shoulders and chucking Mr. McArthur in the elbow. Sangita always poses for cameras.

The man does not take a second picture.

The camera flash is still pulsing in my eyes, and suddenly I’m nauseous. I look back up towards the door.

I feel a nudge—turn. It’s Mr. McArthur.

“No worries, mate,” he says to me.

“Namaskar, Aradhia,” says Dr. Hiranya.

“Namaste,” I say. Major emphasis on ste. (I am not going to repeat what she says. I’ve already done enough of that.)

Sangita gives me a little shove and I trip down the last couple stairs to meet her. I stop on the last stair.

Dr. Hiranya takes off her shades. Our eyes meet, and I wince. Her eyes are how I remember—the pupils huge, starving for light. She bites her lower lip. And for just a bite of a second I am sorry—so very sorry—and I don’t even know what for. But then her tongue flicks and slowly slides—counting each tooth—across her mouth.

“All right, let’s get started.”

We pile into the kitchen. The man with the camera takes a snapshot of our kitchen, but he doesn’t say very much.

“It looks like you are all…busy, in here,” Dr. Hiranya says, looking around.

Ajay is washing up the dishes from breakfast. He looks up. “Oh, Dr. Hiranya, please sit down.” He runs to the table and grabs our big box of school stuff off of a chair and waves for her to sit down, but before she does there’s a shout from the store room.

“This stool sample is AMAZING!”

Ginnis Davidson comes running into the room wearing goggles and yellow gloves. He almost collides with Dr. Hiranya. “Oh. Hey. What’s up, Doc?” he says. Dr. Hiranya drops to her seat. Ginnis looks at Vick. “The midget skinks have been eating bullfrogs, Vijay! BULLFROGS!” He goes rummaging through the kitchen drawers.

Sangita shrieks. “GINNIS! Take those off before…”

“Aha!” says Ginnis, shoving aside forks and spoons and holding up a pellet filled tube, and then he goes running back out, leaving the door open to the storeroom.

Now Mona comes bounding in, still all muddy from the creek, pawprinting all over everything and running over Dr. Hiranya’s feet. She shrieks, pulls her feet up into the chair under her legs.

“Ewww.” Her shoes are caked in mud, and now the mud is all over her pants.

“Do you want some water, Dr. Hiranya?” Sangita asks. “And…you?” she says to the camera man, who is standing silently by the sink and photographing random corners of the room. “Pop? Tea? Something to eat?”

“No, no,” Dr. Hiranya says. “No.” She digs in her bag and pulls out a giant notebook bursting with yellow tabs. She sets the notebook down on the table and spreads out a set of word picture cards and a timer. She opens it up to one of the labels. “Please. Let’s just get started.”

When Dr. Hiranya tests me, everyone else around me gets very nervous. Ajay goes into a corner and starts humming to himself and finding strange things to do with spice bottles. Sangita sits down and looks VERY encouraging. Mr. McArthur bites a nail and looks like he’s the one about to take a test. I wonder how he is going to restrain himself from doing the problems for me.

(But me? I’m not nervous. No.

Nervous is not the word.

Right now—?

Oh—I’m really just not sure I’m here.)

“You all can go away,” Dr. Hiranya says, looking around at the rest of them.

Ajay looks hurt. Sangita and Vick start to get up.

“Except you,” she says to Vick.

And suddenly I realize he’s the only one of them who’s really annoying me. But I’m not gonna tell her that.

And now Dr. Hiranya clicks the timer.

So. These are the things that I have to do when Dr. Hiranya tests me.

Yeah. I bet you can guess just how great I am at that. [11]

She gives me this problem and I take out the cereal, because chicken and peacocks are both birds, and there is nothing about a bird in the middle picture. (Mr. McArthur growls at me when I do this. I growl back. Dr. Hiranya roars at both of us and then tells us to stop.)

I think the problem for me with this shape stuff is I really just don’t understand the point of it. The shapes do not mean anything. (”They are patterns,” Mr. McArthur is always explaining. “Patterns are important.”) And yeah. I get that. But patterns are only important when they are made from—or when they point to—something else, something purposeful, something alive. Something with meaning. (”The meaning here,” Sangita said to me once when we were practicing, “is that you can work with patterns and prove to Dr. Hiranya that you are not stupid.”) But these patterns are stupid. They are patterns of nothing. They don’t point to meanings. They are not alive.

So I really don’t care. They just make me mad. They remind me of rooms I don’t want to be in, and I can’t focus.

The timer clicks. “Next page,” Dr. Hiranya says.

I haven’t finished the first page yet.

“Let’s skip the next progression of Raven’s Matrices.” It’s Mr. McArthur. I look up, and he’s looking at Dr. Hiranya. “Aradhia can show you a project she’s been working on.

“A project?” Dr. Hiranya is biting her lower lip. Maybe she’s bored. She marks down 2/20 on the scoresheet for Raven’s Matrices. “Go ahead.”

Mr. McArthur shouts for Sangita. Sangita comes in and digs in the school box for our notebook of haiku.

“Tell her about haiku, Aradhia,” Mr. McArthur says.

“Haiku,” I explain, “work like my brain. Pictures make meanings. But these are words that make pictures that make meanings.”

I open up the little notebook that Sangita and I have been working on. This is a notebook of our favorite haiku. We draw a pictures on one page, and the poem on the other page. Sometimes I do the picture and she writes the poem. Sometimes we reverse.

Now, all haiku poems are simple, and some of them are very simple. Like this one on our first page:

“So,” Dr. Hiranya says. “How is this haiku going to help you with your learning, Aradhia? Can you say a few words about it?” She’s jotting in her notebook.

“Haiku is not learning,” I say. “Haiku is remembering. First, in the poem, something hides behind the green. Two parts stick out. You think these parts are different, distant, des—des—it’s like instinct,” I say, to Sangita.

“Distinct?” Mr. McArthur suggests.

“De-stinked. Because the essence is gone—the smell is taken away.” (Sangita is laughing. Mr. McArthur is biting his nail again.) “Anyway. At the end, haiku pulls up on the blankets, and you can see the two parts made together in a wild way. You re-member the pieces. It brings them back together, and the pieces are different together. It’s big magic with little words.”

“Magic,” Dr. Hiranya smirks. “That word again.” She flips through our book. She looks at her book. She writes.

I can see what she is writing, what she has written:

“Magical thinking being encouraged—symptoms of Gerstmann’s/Geschwind’s displayed.” (Seventeen syllables. Like a strict haiku. I counted.)

I ask Dr. Hiranya if she is writing a haiku.

She says she isn’t.

I ask her if she wants me to help her write a haiku.

She says she doesn’t.

Now Dr. Hiranya says she has to ask me some questions.

She asks me if I am happy.

“Not big as happy, like with tigers,” I say.

“Do you want to be around more children your own age?”

I stare at her confusedly.

Sangita cuts in. “We’re going to go to Jabalpur soon to see my brother and his family.”

“You’re going to have to file a special permissions request on that,” Dr. Hiranya says. “There’s a fax at my hotel, so I can get it and bring it in for you to fill out tomorrow before I catch my plane.” She gets up, shoves her chair back under the table.

She talks more with Ajay and Sangita, and now more with Mr. McArthur.

And now they’re walking outside together, onto the back porch, and they are still talking. I move to the door and watch.

Dr. Hiranya is leaning close to Mr. McArthur—she touches his shoulder and laughs. He shrugs.

And she’s just like this sometimes—giggle-nerved under skin and shoulders tense—but it doesn’t seem to belong today. She’s more giggles, less nerve. There is something off. And I’m watching for it.

But she’s going now—she’s heading down the stairs. And I’m thinking, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s nothing.

But now she spins around.

“Oh, one more thing,” she says, and she’s smiling in the corner of her mouth. Her smile kisses herself. “I almost forgot to mention—Aradhia has to come to Kolkata in a few weeks for an interview with a funding organization.”

( What?! )

“WHAT?!” Mr. McArthur says.

“She has to come to Kol-ka-ta, for an inter-view, with a fund-ing, or-gan-i-za-tion,” Dr. Hiranya says, spitting out each piece of word gently, half smiling at him.

“But—why!?” Mr. McArthur looks confused.

Dr. Hiranya puts her hand on her hip. Patiently, “We’ve been forwarding your cassette tapes to the Language Acquisition Studies Association of America. They are interested in what we are doing. Professor Feldspar’s team out of Berkley is scheduled for a visit in two weeks. We can’t have them trekking out here to get stuck in the mud.”

“But we’re doing just fine with our money here,” Mr. McArthur says.

“Oh, really.” Dr. Hiranya points at my legs, cocks an eyebrow. “Whose jeans are those, McArthur? Yours?”

“Er….” Mr. McArthur tries to crack a smile. His smile could crack a nut.

“Those clothes are just temporary. We have some better clothes on…mail order.”

Dr. Hiranya nods. “Well, that’s good to know you’re so concerned. However, I must ask you to reconsider.”

“The mail order?”
“No.” Dr. Hiranya’s smile is fading. “The trip to Kolkata.” She’s walking towards her car again.

Mr. McArthur is standing blankly. Now he’s running after her.

“How can I re-consider? I haven’t had time yet to consider! Who’s this guy again? Has he been to India before? We could meet him in Jabalpur—or Khajuraho! Everyone loves Khajuraho! Tantric temples, sexy statues…” He’s waving his hands like a tour guide.

Dr. Hiranya snorts. “She. And she is elderly, so this would not be suitable. And to be frank, she needs to see our institute as we are being considered for a major grant.” She turns towards him. “Believe me, I understand the toll this would take on your schedule—coming out this far was murder on mine, and I’m not in the middle of a PhD. But you must understand the grand opportunity this is for Dr. Feldspar—we have to make this trip run as smoothly as possible for her. But, things can certainly be rearranged without your collaboration if you have exhausted your support. How’s the PhD doing, anyway?”

“Practically writing itself.” Mr. McArthur is lying. “How’s Abi Wali? Dr. Dhamya? The ferret?”

And now they are talking about other things, but this is not what they are really talking about.

They aren’t talking about.

They are talking around.

But I know what they are talking around.

She almost said it when she mentioned Kolkata.

She almost said it when she mentioned funding.

And I don’t like the tightening of Mr. McArthur’s voice, or the loosening of Dr. Hiranya’s. I don’t like how she is touching his arm and asking about the dark rings under his eyes. I don’t like how her hair is blowing in the wind, how her finger curls as she smoothes it back behind her ear, or how she kicks her foot in the leaves as she pats his shoulder (again? really?) and goes walking back to her car.

I came here because the institute lost funding.

Now she wants me to go back so they can get more?

I don’t like how any of this is sounding.

I don’t like how any of this is sounding, at all.

Now she’s gone. I run outside across the deck towards the stairs.

“You said I would never go back!”

Mr. McArthur stops on the stairs. “Back where?”

“The Institute.” My voice is shaking. “You promised.”

“You’re not going back,” he says. He hesitates, looking at me. He reaches for a railing that isn’t there. Almost trips and falls. Steadies himself. Starts to say something else. Doesn’t.

He starts back up the stairs. “Sangita, do you have a brother in Jabalpur?”

Sangita: “Do you have clothes on mail order?”

But now I’m taking after him, following him across the deck into the center.

“She said things could be re-arranged. Which things? Am I a thing?”

We’re heading through the store room, and he’s tripping over the tripod. “This stupid—” He looks back at me. “No, Aradhia, you are not a thing.”

“Am I a thing to her? Am I a thing to you?”

He’s in the main lobby office now, picking up the telephone and dialing. “Namaste. May I speak with Dr. Dhamya, please? Maim mai Dr. Dhamya ke satha bolate?” Under his breath: “Damn.” Then: “Oh. Yes, Dhamya. Dr. Dhamya. Yes, it’s important. May I have his voice mail, then? Dhanyavaad. Hello, Dr. Dhamya, this is Victor McArthur. It’s the morning of the fifteenth and Dr. Hiranya just left. I need to discuss certain matters with you as soon as—”

“Mr. McArthur, what was she saying?”

“—possible. Thanks.” He hangs up the phone. “They gave me a damned answering machine…”

“Answering machine?”

He stares into space for a moment. Automatically, “It’s like an audio recorder. You leave your voice on it.” He looks pained.

“Mr. McArthur, what’s wrong? What was she saying?” I ask.

He falls back on the couch. “She was saying you need more clothes, she needs more money, and I need more sleep,” he says, and smirks. He rubs the side of his forehead. “She’s prob’ly right on all three.”
“But McArthurs never sleep,” I say, pathetically. I flop down beside him. Blow hair out of my face.

He just nods, sighs. “I know, Aradhia,” he says, softly. “I know.”

I pause, waiting for him to say more. He doesn’t. “What about Kolkata?” I ask.

His eyes widen a little. He takes a deep breath. “I think she’s hoping we’ll come visit,” he says, slowly, exhaling. He looks across at me but doesn’t meet my eyes.

“Visit,” I repeat. I’m staring at him, but his eyes aren’t meeting mine. “You’re going to make me go back there,” I say, slowly. “To visit.”

“Only if we’ve gotta do that to keep you here,” he says.

My eyes meet his.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

He frowns. “Neither do I,” he says, honestly. He grabs a half empty coffee mug off the table, and sips it, absently. Sets it back on the table. I stare for a few seconds at the mug.

“Why does she want us to visit?”

“She thinks if you visit it will help her get money,” he says.

“Why does she want money?”

“She wants money so she can get things,” he says, patiently.

“Things like me,” I say.

“No,” he says. “Not like you.”

And now the phone rings and he knocks cushions off the couch jumping for it. “Hello, Dr. Dhamya?” he says. “Oh.” His shoulders fall. He smiles, weakly.

“Hi, Natalie. I was just expecting a call. No, it’s fine. Um—no. I have no idea where he is. I’ve been in meetings all morning. What? No, no, I’m fine. Just sort of zonked. Did she what?”

He looks bewildered. “Leave me for a tiger? Aradhia? Oh. Mona. No, Mona’s fine—she’s right—here…“ He looks around the room. Perplexedly, “At least, she … was…Oh yeah, I’ll tell ‘em you’re coming over. No, it’s fine. Sure, Natalie.” He hangs up the phone.

He looks at me. “Do you have any idea where Mona is?”

On the other side of dark, there is another dark.

The dark inside the shutting of your eyes.

I open my eyes.

It’s dark down here, under the deck. The foliage is wet, and there’s a funky little black skink clinging to one of the boards, above my head. Mona is beside me, chomping on a rawhide bone. Mr. McArthur and I just got done raiding the center looking for her, and then Sangita and I came out here, and I found her, but instead of bringing her back into the house I went and got my audio diary and crawled underneath here with her.

So I’ve been recording the sounds of her chomping, and the sounds of people walking on the deck, and then playing the sounds back and comparing what is happening for real with the recordings. The recording is never exactly like the reality, and this is bugging me.

But it’s not what is most bothering me.

I don’t know how to express what is most bothering me. There aren’t any pictures in my head to hold onto. There are words floating around in my head, but they’re droning in the background and I only catch snippets of them. I record them onto the tape, trying to get rid of them, make them less real. Like the other sounds became less real.

Funding. Kolkata. Money. Dr. Hiranya.

I play the words back.

It’s weird. But words don’t sound less real when played back. They just sound like themselves.

I don’t want the words. I want the pictures to come back. I thought maybe down here in the dark they would come and find me.

I shut my eyes again. Squeeze them tight.

Nothing happens. I squeeze harder.

This is how to make the star clouds burst in.

Maybe I ought to explain a little about this.

OK. So have you ever closed your eyes right after you’ve been under a bright light, and seen floatcloudy colors? These are a lot like the colors you see then, except these are much brighter, and I have not been looking at the sun. I call them starclouds. I see them a lot—and sometimes I don’t even have to shut my eyes. They pulse with my heartbeat, and quivershift like the globules in Dr. Dhamya’s lava lamp, and sometimes they sparkle-scatter, especially when they’re first mist-smogging in.

I never knew other people saw the starclouds too until I found them in one of Mr. McArthur’s magazines. Nebulae, they’re called. Places where stars are born, and where they die. The stars are born from cloudy gas, and when the stars die, they make more of the clouds, and then new stars are born from those clouds. It just keeps going like that—life, death, life, death, life, like breathing in and out.

I told Mr. McArthur about the clouds. But he says the clouds I see aren’t the same as the clouds in the magazine. He says the colors in my eyes are called phosphenes and are caused by neurons, these little branch connectors that carry messages with sparks of spiderlightning through your body and brain. The doctor who said I have cataplexy put some scanner things called electrodes on my head, and he said that my neurons fire more often on average than most people’s. Mr. McArthur explained that neurons sometimes get bored when they don’t have messages to carry, so they put on fireworks shows for your eyes. Sort of like the flashing screensavers on Ginnis’s computer. And Mr. McArthur says that’s where the color clouds really come from.

But now, today, I’m thinking that the universe is a big brain full of neurons, and that’s where the star clouds are coming from, in space up in skyland out there too.

Because the clouds I see are not just in my mind.

I know this because if I look hard enough I can see past them. And then the part of me that thinks and feels and hears and tastes and smells and sees goes somewhere else.

Mr. McArthur does not know about this.

Tara knows. I learned it from Tara.

Tara would take us outside to stretch and jaunt around before she would go hunting. And then after stretching she would relax and stare off, ears round curving, sometimes flicking, wait listening. And she would relax, soft quieter slowly—her eyes would blink once—twice, and again, and then close, in the sunlight, tightshut. But not for sleep. Just in pausing. Head held up. I would do the same thing. And this is when the starclouds would come. And the other things. But I haven’t gotten to that yet.

So. Tara knows. And I think Mona knows, too, because I’ve seen Mona do that. And there are other animals who know. Not just tigers. Sangita’s cat Teflon knows, and the lizard in Dr. Dhamya’s office at the institute knows (the one who likes to look at the lava lamp). You know when a cat just stares off sometimes? That’s what they’re up to then.

And yeah. I said there was more, and there is. But in words, it sounds weird. So let me think about it.

So. Have you ever felt—more here? Like—more here than you already are?

Or more alive?

You know. Like the world takes on a sharptoned, intent-intensed, color drenched alertness, and all your senses are tingled up more here now than now?

It’s sort of like that. And so. Say this happens, and your eyes are shut, and the starclouds are starting to pour in, but you blink them back, and just think about the realness of it—the room and chair or sky and trees—and when you really feel it, you can hold onto it—grasp it, intense it, magnify it, saturate it—until you are so very here—that if you think of someplace else, anyplace else, you’re there.

And now the starcloud colors are breaking up, and you can pierce through to see what it is you were thinking to see.

So say you are going hunting and you want to find jungle fowl. You think to yourself: jungle fowl. And as the starclouds part, there’s the jungle fowl’s nest, out by the river glen. And there’s the hen herself, pecking and warbling.

But I didn’t mean to think “jungle fowl.” I’m not hungry and jungle fowl are loud and annoying.

So I think of Tara. And I can feel, see, watch her up at the marshy river bend stretch—and she’s whiskering for frogs in a whir of tadpole moggywetness. And oh! Warli’s nearby. He’s clowning around with Akbar by a fallen log. (And wow are they big. They’re getting almost as big as Tara. But they still are clumsy and their heads and paws are oversized and babyish.) Hmmm—but where is Namagiri? And I’m straining, searching around. But I don’t see her. And I’m thinking of her, but I’m not going to her—I’m not seeing. And this is frustrating.

This is frustrating, but it’s not like I’m not used to it.

This actually happens a lot. When I strain too far—and sometimes too far is literally far, and sometimes too far is very close (like say, if I was wanting to see what Mr. McArthur is up to back in the center inside)—I eventually hit this wall.

It’s not like a wall you can see.

It’s…it’s like the skin of the universe, or something, is just there—and you just know it. You can feel it, lean up against it. Like a cell membrane. And you cannot see beyond it. But when you lean up close to it, you feel this energy wigglethrumming over, from the other side. It’s got this uncertain wildness. Like a cup of juice, that’s about to be splashle poured, and could go anywhere, everywhere in chaos—but instead is just hovering there, indeterminate, on the brim.

So I don’t know what is on the other side.

But I have this feeling, that if I ever got past this wall, wherever it Shows Up—I’ll find something Different. Something New. Something exciting—something More than even whatever it was I was trying to see.

But I can’t burst it.

And the worst part of it is, I don’t think Tara knows about the wall. I think when Tara closes her eyes, she goes beyond the boundary and is on the other side, just snap like that. I am pretty sure of this because sometimes, when Tara and I are together, when Tara is pause-watching with eyes tight shut, and I close my eyes, when I think of Tara, I cannot see her. She’s right there beside me, physically, but in the dark behind the dark in the starclouds, I think of her but this Boundary is all I can perceive.

And I’m mad about this. I want to cross.

‘

It’s not as if Tara could show me how to cross. I’ve wondered about this, but I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know. I think for her it’s just like how when you open your eyes you just see. You can do it. But you don’t know how or why, and you couldn’t explain it to a blind person if they asked you how it’s done.

So, if you want to know what’s on the other side of the boundary, I can’t tell you. But I have feelings. And the feelings leave me guesses.

I think there are more colors on the other side of the wall, more than are in our rainbow right now. And more ways of touching and experiencing than we can usually use. And I think—somehow—if I could just burst through—I could heartspeak with my tigers right now. I think I could always talk with them, no matter how far they are away.

I’d know for sure where Namagiri and Rajani are, and if the smaller cubs are all okay.

I could let Tara know that I’m okay. That I miss her.

And I think maybe, just maybe, I could heartspeak with anybody. Even people who don’t know about heartspeaking, like Mr. McArthur.

But I don’t really know any of that, not for sure.

All I can do is know it’s there. This boundary. That I can’t go through, that I’m pressing myself up against. And I hear a low hum, a sound like blood rushing in my ears. And time sloooows dooown. And I want to sing or shout, or something—anything, because it’s just soo good.

But that’s it. I can’t get past it. It might be a sort of Rule.

And this is the weird thing. I think the Boundary being there might have something to do with me being human. But the humans I know, the ones I have asked about it—they don’t know anything about it.

“If you shut your eyes, do you see colored light nebulae and if you stare hard enough get up against a wall?” I asked one day in the kitchen. Ajay said he saw stars once when he hit a wall. Sangita said she sometimes sees lights when she rubs her eyes. Mr. McArthur told me about phosphenes (“like a screensaver your nerves put on to keep your mind from going blank”), and Ginnis told us we should all lay off the spotty red mushrooms and this isn’t a college campus.

I would love to talk to somebody about it. To figure it out, with someone. I think if someone else just knew about the Boundary, I think we’d be able to talk, to really share. Like tiger cubs in a pile share, but deeper more, like sharing the starclouds behind your eyes.

But now the Boundary is pulling away, reticence-ing, and I turn around, and clouds are parting, and something else, something new appears, hardshining, sharpglimmering. Something lodged in grass, hard twisted. At first I think it is a snake, but it is so very shiny, so very lifelessly patient. And something else is coming in the distance, just outside my eyereach.

And now I see.

It’s Namagiri.

And I am mad at Namagiri. Because Namagiri has left the Bodhi Tree Den. Namagiri is misbehaving. Namagiri has snuck away. She is trying to hunt on her own. And I’m full of angerworry because she is not old enough to be doing this. And I’m worried about her alone when Durjaya, the limping transient tiger, is pushing up against the bounds of Rajani’s territory, edging in.

But Namagiri is not worried, Namagiri is on the prowl. And now she’s crouching, whisker twitching, tail swishing—about to be pouncing—she’s prepping for the big dash. And now she’s running, springing, blur flashing into the undergrowth, and heading for the shine catcher twisted in the grass.

Namagiri stops running.

And something slams into me and I open my eyes and it’s Mona on me, and her paw is on my face, and I roll over and watch her chase something off into the leaves.

I guess she’s after the skink again.

When I come out from under the deck, dragging Mona by her collar, I almost bang into Sangita. She’s at the foot of the porch stairs, doing a handstand, with one leg bent so that her foot is touching her knee in a shape like a “V”. Her eyes are closed, but her eyebrows are scrunched as if she’s not as relaxed as she’s trying to be. I don’t know whether to say hello. I’m not sure how long she can stay that way.

I hear a squeak and look up and it’s Mr. McArthur coming outside, mug of coffee in one hand, sheet of paper in the other. “Ajay’s in the lab developing yesterday’s photos,” he says, coming down the steps. “We got a shot of a cat after all and I think it might be—whoa.” He stops just short of bumping into Sangita and stares silently. Takes a sip of coffee. Stares more. “How long can you stay like that?”

Sangita opens her eyes and laughs. “Twenty minutes. I’ve done it longer, for over an hour, but I find that kind of defeats the point.” She winces, straightening her legs. “Ouch. But in short periods it relieves tension and allows for better oxygen flow throughout the body.”

Vick and I exchange glances. —Yeah, right.

Sangita says, “You ought to try yoga out, Vijay. With your whole manic depressive thing going on it’d be good for you.” She flops down ungracefully, sits up, and shakes the leaves out of her hair.

Vick looks annoyed. “My what thing?”

Sangita groans at him. “It’s kind of obvious.”

“What’s manic depressive?” I ask.

“It’s why Vick chugs Red Bull, goes without sleep for months and then won’t come out of his room for 48 hours,” Sangita says, shrugging.

“Oh,” I say. That is just sort of how he rolls with things.

“That’s just sort of how I roll with things,” Vick says.

Sangita looks at what he’s holding. “Is that coffee for me you got there?”

“Well, it’s coffee,” Vick starts.

Sangita grabs it from him and chugs it. “Thanks!” she says. “Did I hear you say you have a shot of something?”

“Well, just the tail, and it’s black—”

“BLACK!?” Her eyes light up and she starts bouncing. “Oh, gimmee, gimmee!”

Vick hands her the photo. I lean forward. There’s a black blur almost resembling a rear and tail in the righthand corner of a green blurry shot. “I think the lens was wet,” Vick says.

“He probably sprayed it,” Sangita says, and pouts. “And when I checked our cam this afternoon all I got was a jungle cat. With a fish in its mouth,” she added, thoughtfully.

“Hey, that oughtta sell,” Vick says.

Sangita shrugs. “Won’t make the cover of National Geographic, but it’s something…maybe NGS Kids’ll use it. Either that or Corel’ll probably buy it for about fifty cents.” She shakes her head and laughs. “A cover shot is what we need to break the wildlife market. Celeb shots pay better—but oh, well.”

“Well, maybe I’ll have your cover shot,” Vick said. “Ajay’s checking the autocam again this morning. Heck,” he adds, waving his blurry snapshot. “This one here might make Weekly World News!”

Sangita waves her hand, laughs. “I don’t take charity.”

I look at Mr. McArthur. He exhibits the photo. “Is it Rajani, Rads?” he asks me.

“It’s a langur monkey’s ass,” I say, dragging Mona inside.

Sangita shouts at me, “Who taught you to say ass?”

“Ajay and Vick,” I shout back, and slam the door.

I let go of Mona and she runs off towards the dorm rooms. I’m going to go to my room, but there’s shouting from the store room. I poke my head in to see what is going on. Ajay and Ginnis are talking. Or rather, Ginnis is talking. Ajay is holding up his hands and making reassuring noises.

Ginnis yells, “Dr. Shrinkhead this morning, I-COPE and Evil Jack Hanna tomorrow, Chaturwedi’s back, and now NATALIE is coming? This is too damned much!”

Natalie is Dwight McArthur’s stepdaughter. She is tall like Dwight is. She has come through here before. And now she’s standing in the doorway. Ajay and I both see her. Ginnis does not. Ajay and I exchange wild glances and Natalie grins at us and puts a finger to her lips in the “shhhh” sign.

Ginnis continues. “There are REASONS I came to India. Helping Vicky boy avoid a nervous breakdown with the programming was only one of several. Others include taking a break from human relationships and my Ph.D.—”

“Don’t you mean V.D.?” Natalie asks, laughing.

Ajay starts laughing.

Ginnis turns. “It’s called a D.V.M. and I’m already done with THAT. And how did you get in here without me even—”

“Sounds like you’re really happy to see me,” Natalie says, brightly.

“Well, yes,” says Ginnis. “I mean, no. I mean, NO—not no!” Ginnis is turning red. “It’s just—this is the store room. But it’s also my sanctuary. Where I—like—store things. And work. Program. Meditate. Breathe. You could call it my ‘Happy Place’. And now, you’re standing in it. And they tell me you’re going to be sleeping in it. And…what have you done to your hair?”

Her hair is fierce orange. “Henna,” she says. “From the Adivasi.” She holds out her arms and they are covered in complicated red designs. She lets me touch them. They don’t smudge.

“You look like an Easter egg,” Ginnis says. “Who are you marrying?”

“Nobody. Tatooing is an exclusive women’s ritual of the Bhairavi Adivasi. The mehndi means they have temporarily accepted me.”

“Congratulations,” Ginnis says. He turns back towards Ajay. “Anyway Ajay, as I was saying, we’re dead. I-COPE’s gonna kill us. We still don’t have the Baiga, Gond and Saharia people out of the park, Dwight’s own daughter is picketing for them to stay—“ (Natalie grins at me and makes horn signs with her fingers) —“There’s a poaching rumor up in Katni, and Ajay’s wondercams haven’t captured a tiger since May. The park’s falling apart, we haven’t just lost national park status, we’re about to be downgraded from sanctuary to a reserve. Thornback is gonna fire us all and bring in new people.”

Now Meera steps into the room, munching a banana from the kitchen. “Ginnis, you are a cynical Nazi,” she says.

Ginnis throws up his hands. “I see Natalie has influenced you already.”

Natalie bursts out laughing.

“If Thornback fires us all do I still have to go to Kolkata?” I ask. Ajay looks at me bewilderedly. I realize he has no idea what I am talking about.

“Yesterday everyone was complaining I am too American and now I’m a ‘nazi’!” says Ginnis.

“Same difference,” says Natalie.

Ginnis folds his arms.

“Ask Vick,” I say to Ajay.

“Now that,” Ajay says, “is truly unfair.” But he’s talking about calling Americans nazis.

“I agree,” I say. I’m talking about the trip to Kolkata.

“It’s really not,” says Natalie. “Think about the Ottawa Indians we gave smallpox laden blankets!”

“That was the British!” says Ginnis.

Natalie blows a strand of orange hair out of her face. “Same diff.”

I realize I’ve been forgotten.

Ginnis turns to Meera, Ajay and me. “Natalie must be forgiven,” he says. “She is a sociopath.”

“Eco-terrorist,” Natalie corrects him.

“Point confirmed. She was arrested at fifteen for throwing paint on the head of Excon Oil and the Environmental Activities Council representative because he’d just certified some brand of primary forest logging as eco-friendly. She was supposed to be shaking their hands on nationwide TV and receiving an award for cleaning up more puffins singlehandedly than any other volunteer during the oil spill. She made an international scandal.”

“OH!” gasps Meera. She points at Natalie. “You had green hair!”

“This is true,” Natalie says cheerfully.

“Six months of juvenile detention,” Ginnis says. “Out in two for good behavior. And what good did it do you?”

“One newscaster explained why I had done it. One.” Natalie looks miserable. “I shouted, ‘For Abdugua!’ How much more clear could I have made it?”

“Clear as mud,” says Ginnis.

Clear as mud.

Funny how he just summed up exactly how I feel.

Vick yells at me from the kitchen. “Aradhia! Did you drink my Red Bull? I need that to survive this madhouse.”

For the rest of the day, I’m still feeling clear as mud. I want to talk to Vick and tell him I don’t care what Dr. Hiranya says about the Kolkata thing—that I’m not going. Period. He can go without me. Or I’d meet her anywhere but there.

But after the argument about the Red Bull (Me: “I didn’t drink it, it sprayed everywhere!” Him: “It’s dripping all over, I can smell the Taurine on your shirt!” Me: “Drink your shirt then there’s Taurine in your sweat!” [12]) I can’t find him and I think he’s doing the hide-out-in-his- room-for-48-hours-with-headphones-on-thing.

Dr. Chaturwedi is back from the climate conference. He armwrestles Dwight, Ginnis, and Chanti and he beats all of them. Then he armwrestles me and he lets me win (again) and he gives me a bag of medjool dates all for myself. Then Natalie tries to be friends with me so I’ll give her a date, so I give her a date, but I really don’t feel like being friendly. I overhear Sangita and Ajay talking. (Sangita: “Maybe we can take her there and just try really hard not to get funding—“) but they shut up about it as soon as I come by. Ajay asks me if he can have a date.

I hand Ajay the whole bag. I don’t feel like eating.

I’m mad at Mr. McArthur.

I go down the hall to the dorm house and stop at the door Mona is sleeping in front of. I knock on his door. Mona starts pawing at it. He doesn’t answer. I start to walk back to my room then I sigh and walk back and I put my foot under the door to push it up and jostle the lock until it pops and I open the door up anyway and Mona runs in ahead of me.

His room is a mess.

Well, at least that’s what Sangita calls it. And it does sort of look like a monsoon washed in. There are red socks and blue socks and striped shorts and khaki shirts, a small stuffed tiger, a floppy stuffed zebra, and books of all colors all over the place, everywhere. But you know, I like the mess. The mess is colorful and comfortable has its own sort of nature to it and a sort of completeness, like a jungle made of paper and cloth. Now Mona is chewing the Zebra.

I like reading the titles of the books. Becoming Animal. The Spell of the Sensuous. (Sense-syu-ous. I like how the sound rolls.) Peace is Every Step. An Unquiet Mind. A Sideways Look at Time. Siddhartha. Tales of Brer Rabbit. In the Shadow of Man. Q is for Quantum. Order Out of Chaos. Mountain Lion Bride. Bioelectromagnetic Medicine. Bearded Dragons and Lesser Known Desert Deities. [13]

The other day, before Tara came, I noticed a picture book on the floor in Vick’s room I hadn’t seen before. The cover was torn and bent, and the book had been taped together many times. The Clown of God by Tomie de Paola. I opened the book and a page which had been taped into it slipped out. Mr. McArthur picked it up.

We both looked at the picture. The picture was of a man in peacock colored clothing throwing balls of colors into the air. This is just like the picture on the cover. So this peacock dressed man is the clown.

“What’s a clown?” I asked. [14]

“A clown is someone who makes people laugh,” Mr. McArthur said.

“But he looks sad, “ I said. His smile was sad.

“Maybe that’s why he wants to make people happy,” Mr. McArthur said. He took the book from me, and was about to put the picture back in the book, but then he stopped and did something else. He took the picture and hung it up on his wall with a piece of tape.

It’s still hanging there now, crookedly, by the sliver of tape, above his bed.

(A sliver of tape.)

“Did you play my tape?” I ask Mr. McArthur.

He doesn’t seem to hear me, or even realize I’m in here. He’s sitting up in bed, wearing earphones, sorting through several stacks of papers. I can tell he is listening to music or tiger sounds because he has a look of pure experience on his face he only gets when he is listening to music or tiger sounds.

I walk over to the side of his book and take a look at everything. There are three piles of notes: “THESIS,” “TARAKESHWARI-HART,” and “STUFF.”
Mona jumps up and he sets down his book and pets her. She purrs. [15] Mr. McArthur makes purr-purr noises back at her by breathing and rolling air over his tongue. He sounds like a tiger. One of the best things about Mr. McArthur is that he can sound like a tiger when he wants to.

But now he looks up at me.

“Oh, hey Rads.” He’s shouting over his earphones. He grabs up a piece of paper from the pile marked STUFF. “I was going to read this to you. It’s from a book called Bioelectromagnetic Medicine. It sounds like just your sort of thing.”

I’m skeptical.

He reads, “ ‘The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body.’ That’s like a field of energy like gentle attractive lightning,” he says. “The heart’s magnetic field is around 5,000 times stronger than the field produced by the brain, and can be measured from several feet away using—“ he hesitates, reads rather confusedly, “SQUIDs.”

“You mean squids like in National Geographic?” I say. “They can heartspeak, too?”

“Er…maybe, but I think this a machine,” Vick says. “It’s some sort of quantum field reader.”.

“Well, hearts do the same thing,” I say. “But they can do it from more than a little ways away.”
“How many feet do you think?”
I put one foot in front of another and imagine the distance to Tiger Zone. “Any,” I say.

“Hmm…but that would mean nonlocality,” he says.

“What is nonlocality?”

“Nonlocality is....” He takes off his earphones. Makes a scrunched face. He grabs Q is for Quantum from a stack by his bed and flips through it. Starts to read from it, and stops. He shuts the book. “Well, it appears to be the ability to be everywhere and nowhere in the universe at the same time.”

My ears perk. “No shit,” I say.

“No shit,” he repeats, and grins. “But don’t let Sangita catch you saying that.”

I smirk and sit down on the floor in front of his bed. “She’s happy when I learn new words.”

“Not those words.”

I grin. “Sure? She’s the one I heard say it.”

Mr. McArthur raises an eyebrow. “No shit! The grad students must be getting to her…”

Mona jumps down and rubs up against me. I scratch her ears. “Talk about nonlocality.”

Mr. McArthur holds out two fists, one fist up, one fist down. “Okay, so all the little electrons—little bits of matter, the smallest bits we know about—are either spin up or spin down. And every time we tap an electron to check whether an electron is spin up or spin down, it changes. Tap my fist.”

“Okay.”

His left fist flips up when I tap it. But his other fist flips down at the same time.

“Hey, I not touch that one.”

“We’re getting there. Now say two electrons are closely interacting—say they are dancing together. Like so.” He waves his hands around and hums this bizarre tune from a water level in the game about the little red guy Ginnis plays on his laptop. Now he makes swimming motions.

“Ummm...Okay...” I say.

“Once they are dancing together, once they are family—once they are entangled—every time you touch this electron over here—” he indicates his “up” fist, and I tap it so it flips down— “Any time you touch this guy, this other one—” He indicates the down fist and flips it up— “immediately feels it and changes too.” Both hands flip directions at the same time, each time I tap one of them. “If this one is spin up, this guy will be spin down. And if this guy is spin down, this guy will be spin up. Every time you tap one of them to check, the other one will feel and respond.” He holds his hands far apart from one another. “Even if you’re checking this electron here on Earth and that electron is on the other side of the universe, once they are family like that, they both feel the interaction at the very same time, because they are connected. We have no idea how. It just happens.”

“Like the ideas in a haiku!” I say.

He looks at me. “Yes,” he says. “Quite a bit like that.”

I think about this a minute. “That’s how heart speak works,” I say. “It’s like nonlocality.”

Mr. McArthur’s brow knots. More to himself than to me, he mutters: “But they say due to the randomness of the spin, nonlocal entangled set-ups can’t be used to send lingually coherent encoded messages...”

“Encoded?”

“Like —when you think of something and you say it, you put a word to it. The word is a code. So the idea is encoded. And you can send it in a message.”

“Heartspeak is….not a message,” I say, slowly. “Not sent. Or the—the—” I link the index and pointer fingers of both hands together.

“The link?” He offers. “The connection?”

“Yeah. The connection…The connection IS the message. You don’t decide what to say and come up with a word for it. You just say what you are. And the connection is what you are. It’s the — the essence. Not code. Not the box. The thing inside. Shared.”

“You’re saying it’s the raw state itself which is conveyed,” Mr. McArthur says slowly. “Hmmmmm.” He cocks his head to one side, looks down at Mona. Smirks. “And the raw state is not predictable because it is free.” I don’t really understand what he is saying. He looks at the wall. “But tigers do send messages with sound and infrasound…”

“Heart speak is more important than that stuff,” I say.

“So you tell me I’m wasti NOOOO ng my time trying to figure the infrasound out?”

“Not totally,” I say.

Mr. McArthur laughs. But now he looks sad. Quietly, he says, “I don’t have a heart speak detector.”

“Yeah you do,” I say, sitting up on my knees. He raises an eyebrow.

I lean over and put my palm against his chest.

There’s this sort of jolt, and I’m not sure if it’s him or me, but it’s him, because I can tell, once he relaxes, exhales. And my hand’s just there a second, but I can feel his heart beat. Once. Twice.

And now Mona jumps up and shoves my arm away. She flips around on his lap and Mr. McArthur’s earphones come out of his laptop. The laptop blares, “This Man is Mine” by Heart. I look at Mona and laugh.

“Mona and the radio are entangled,” Mr. McArthur says, helping her get untangled from the earphones.

And now he’s putting his earphones back on and he’s shoving Mona off the bed, and she jumps back up anyway. He grabs up loose papers and starts sorting them again, into separate folders.

“I can’t forget Tara, Vick,” I say. “It’s like with the electrons.”
“I know,” he says. I don’t think he’s paying much attention.

“Am I going to get to see her again?” I ask.

He looks up. “I don’t know. I’m not in charge of that.” He picks up a photocopy of a photograph of a tiger and puts it into the folder marked THESIS.

“Aren’t we going to look for her?” I ask. “You need to know where she is for your thesis, right? And you want to find the black tiger…”

He looks up at me. “Well—” Hesitates.

“I think I can find them,” I say. “I think I can know where they are.”

“How?” he asks.

“Did you play my tape?”

“What tape?”

I groan. “The tape from my hands this morning. The tape about heartspeak.”

He smirks. “Oh—that. No. I haven’t gotten to it.” He picks up another sheet of paper. There’s a pause. “When did you give it to me?”

I shut my eyes and ram my head into the side of his bed. “Why do I talk? Nobody LISTENS to me.” I hear the paper fall to the floor.

He looks at me. “Come ahhhn...I spend half my life listening.”

“Not now we’re here.” My voice is muffled into his bed.

He’s leaning down, I thought for the paper, but now he’s got me by my shoulder. I look at him.

“Would you rather I’d left you there?”

“No!” I say.

“Well, then—”

But now there’s a ringing sound from the lobby room. And it’s the phone that’s ringing. And Sangita is shouting, “VICK! It’s for you!” And Vick crashes out of bed and papers go everywhere and he goes running for the lobby.

I chase after him out there, but now he’s already running back with the radio phone, “Dr. Dhamya, I’m so glad it’s you—“ and now he shuts his door and when I try to turn the knob I can’t get in, but I press my ear to the wood and listen.

This is what I hear:

“Oh. I see. Well maybe we could—Oh. Yes. I see.” And a lot of muffled garbledegook, involving funding and travel methods. And more “Oh’s” and “I sees.” Then there are some “But what if’s—“ And then there is more muffled flustered rambling. I hear my name. Something about trauma. “She’s still having nightmares…How am I supposed to explain?”

Sangita comes and stands by the door with me for a minute—she’s listening, and looking at me. And now she asks me if I want to read something.

I sink down to the floor of the hall. Shake my head.

I don’t hear Dr. Dhamya, but I don’t like the spaces between Mr. McArthur’s words.

Sangita sits down on the floor beside me. She doesn’t talk to me. She just sits.

Mr. McArthur comes out from his room. He looks at Sangita and he looks at me.

“One hour in their lobby,” Mr. McArthur says. “That’s the deal.”
I shut my eyes.

I hide my head behind my knees.

“It’s just one day. One hour of one day.” I feel a hand on my shoulder. His voice gets lower. “They’re not going to take you back.”

I hear him getting down on the floor beside me. “We’re in this together, Rads. We are.”

I open my eyes. “You said I’d go home,” I say.

He glances at Sangita and then back at me. “You are home,” Mr. McArthur says.

Welcome home, says Dr. Hiranya.

I shut my eyes again and lock my head to my knees.

I don’t say anything else.

That night, we have chickpea korma in the living room and Ajay plays a raga on his ukulele on the barstool. Sangita claps her hands, dances in her seat, and covers her ears when he hits the wrong note. Ginnis and Dwight keep arguing about silverware. Natalie is sitting on Ginnis’s lap on the stick-woven rocker, and this is making everything awkward, especially Vick who keeps looking at them like he’s going to say something, but nobody says anything. Vick and I are on the couch by Sangita. Vick keeps trying to make me laugh. He is “riffing” on variations of the same “dad joke” until I’m plugging my ears.

“Why don’t scientists trust atoms, Rads?” He folds his arms, looking very serious. I shrug.

“Because they make up everything.” We’ve been learning chemistry and I guess that’s his theme now. I roll my eyes and reach for a papadam cracker. “

He tilts his head. “Why don’t atoms trust scientists?” I glare at him over my plate. His eyes are almost desperate. “They say we make everything up.” Sangita laughs. I snarf more korma.

“Why don’t protons get depressed?” He leans in closer. I start to chuckle. He goes on, “Because they’re always positive!” I know he wants me to laugh. I want to hit him.

Why did the ice cube break up with the polar bear?”

I think I know. Polar doesn’t get along with water. But I don’t know how to say it. I don’t want to get it wrong.

He leans back. “They couldn’t bond because they didn’t have chemistry.”

He scoots over to me. Brushes my hair away from my ear. Whispers: “Why did the anion go to therapy, Rads?”

I drop my spoon. “No idea.”

“Because it was —?” he holds out his hand.

“Negative?”

He looks smug, leans in, warm breath in my ear: “It needed a bond because it was carrying too much charge.”

Ajay’s ukulele twangs. A string breaks. Sangita throws her napkin at him, and I can’t help laughing. Vick chuckles and looks stupidly pleased with himself, like he just saved the universe, or himself maybe, with a series of bad jokes. I punch him in the arm and he yanks the pillow out from under me, which shoves me clean off of the couch.

That night I toss and turn on my cot in my dorm room. I can’t sleep. I lay on my back, I toss onto my side, then my stomach, then back again, twisting the quilt around my legs until I’m trapped in a knot. The fan ticks. The night presses heavy and loud with crickets and cicadas.

And then I hear it, close.

Aaaawooom. Aaawooom.

I sit up.

Aaawoooom. Aaaaawaooom.

It’s a tiger’s cry. And not just any tiger’s cry.

Maybe forty or fifty feet off.

Tara.

I know the specific tremor, the specific pause and enunciation.

I throw the quilt off and stumble to the window, pressing my hands to the glass, hoping I can see her through the dark. The window is too small to crawl through. My throat feels dry and tight. “Tara?”

I grab the flashlight on the nightstand, freezing with my hand on the switch. I pull a pair of cutoff blue jeans up over my night shorts and slip into sandals. Sangita had hung a bell on on my outside door knob so they’d know if I left, but I open it so softly, holding my breath, every muscle trembling. Once the door is open I reach for the bell. It jingles once, faint-tinkly, the tiniest sound but my heart almost stops.

Then silence, bell cupped in my hand.

No footsteps. Nobody is coming.

I shut the door softly holding the bell so it doesn’t ring more, then I pad down the hall, through the store room and kitchen, and open the back screen door and let it shut, softly, behind me.

And I’m outside.

Wow. I’m really outside.

It’s shiverycool and dark. I flip on the torch. (Sangita calls it a torch. Vick calls it a flashlight.) I wander out behind the porch. I pass the jeep and pad down the packed red dirt road to the deepwoods.

“Tara?” I call, softly. “Tara? Tara mum. Come here. It’s me.” I hear a snap-crack rustle, but it’s just a lone porcupine at the side of the dirt road, padding off into the night. I keep walking.
“It’s Aradhia. It’s all right.” My throat hurts a little as I imitate the tiger moan, once, twice. “It’s all right.” My heart’s beating faster and faster as the trees close in and tower around me. Every footstep takes me deeper into the woods.

There’s another rustling in the trees above. I look up, fearing leopard, but it’s just the spotted owl, chuckling now. Chirruk. Chirruk. I feel called out.

I stop, shivering.

My mind flashes to Vick. I’m sure he’s reading in his room, I know it. He’s awake. What if he stumbles by my room, what if he knocks to ask me something? He came in at 1 AM once to ask me if I wanted pancakes. What if he sees I’m gone? If he finds out, he’ll put a lock on my door and I’ll be shut inside forever.

But if I turn back now, Tara might be gone. My once and only chance.

It’s shiverycool and dark. I flip on the torch. (Sangita calls it a torch. Vick calls it a flashlight.) I wander out behind the porch. I pass the jeep and pad down the packed red dirt road to the deepwoods.

“Tara?” I call, softly. “Tara? Tara mum. Come here. It’s me.” I hear a snap-crack rustle, but it’s just a lone porcupine at the side of the dirt road, padding off into the night. I keep walking.
“It’s Aradhia. It’s all right.” My throat hurts a little as I imitate the tiger moan, once, twice. “It’s all right.” My heart’s beating faster and faster as the trees close in and tower around me. Every footstep takes me deeper into the woods.

There’s another rustling in the trees above. I look up, fearing leopard, but it’s just the spotted owl, chuckling now. Chirruk. Chirruk. I feel called out.

I stop, shivering.

My mind flashes to Vick. I’m sure he’s reading in his room, I know it. He’s awake. What if he stumbles by my room, what if he knocks to ask me something. He came in at 1 AM once to ask me if I wanted pancakes. What if he sees I’m gone? If he finds out, he’ll put a lock on my door and I’ll be shut inside forever.

But if I turn back now, Tara might be gone. My once and only chance.

I keep walking. I trip in rocky tire tracks. I keep scuffing along.

And then a cry. Mraaet. Araaaeet.

“Tara? Tara?”

I look around, in the dark. I spin. I call.

“Tara! Tara!”

I hear a rustle. But see nothing.

“Tara I love you! Where are you?”

And then I hear the sound—I don’t hear it, but I feel it.

The air pulsates, thickens, and then— not just a sound, but a tremor. vibrating through my chest. A tiger’s call, inside my ribs.

And the thump. Thump. Thump. I feel the glimmering electromagnetic field pulsing. I look into the woods, chirping.

Amber eyes, glimmering in the darkness. Chuff. Chuff.

“Tara!” My leg muscles go to jello and I collapse on my knees to the ground. “Tara, Taara, it’s you.” I huff through my nose, making the raspberry blowing sound, a prusten. One, two, three chuffs back. Tara steps closer, chirping for her cub. I chirp back and she shoves her face into my shoulder. Home.

“Tara, Tara, Tara. I love you I love you I love you.”

She sniffs my face, my hair. She chirps. Araeet.

“Yeah I’m okay, Tara. I’m all right. Remember the watchers, Tara? The ones from the center? They’re not so bad, they’ve been nice to me. I have a watcher friend now. He got me out of the other place.” I rest my forehead in the scruff of her neck, breathing in her musky sweet ghee smell. “It was really bad there Tara, without you and Raji, but I’m OK now.”

She chuffs on me and I pull away, looking at her, and she tugs on my shirt with her teeth. <<Come.>>

“I can’t come back all at once, Tara,” I say. “Mr. McArthur would have a heart attack. I don’t want him to freak out or–” I sigh. “Or get hurt. It’s gonna take some time.” She licks my face, licks the tears in the corner of my eyes.

“Try to understand for me Tara, please.” Tara pooks at me, plaintively, and bolts into the underbrush. She chirps, expectantly. I look back towards the center. The light is on in the kitchen. Now it’s off. I hear Tara moving on and chirping, chirping. And now I’m following her, a sense of unreality surging through me.

I’m in the woods. It’s dark. I’m running after Tara. I’m in the woods, nobody watching me, and I’m running after Tara. And I’m not dreaming. I haven’t been alone in the wilderness for aeons. This is too sudden, too easy. Impossible.

And now the living green world of sight and sound and awareness is washing over me. The grasses are giving way to broadleaf plants. THe ground is moist and mucky under my sandals. The distance between trees is narrowing and the drone of insects is intensifying. The soppy earth is making my sandals more cumbersome. I kick them off and take off with renewed vigor.

Tara takes a turn. The plants and trees part into a deer path. I can hear the river in the distance. The air is heavy with moisture and the unmistakable ambience of a familiar way.

“Hey,” Aradhia says. “This is the old den road!”

Tara stops short, yowls, once, twice. <<Hurry.>>

I dart to Tara’s side, my eyes barely discerning a third figure, crouched in tangled undergrowth. “Namagiri!”

The little tiger in the scrub perks her ears and sits up. Deep in the forest, without the clutter of human thinking, the tiger speak comes through clearly, like the volume on the tiger thought dial is turned way up. <<It’s you! It’s you! I thought you’d never come.>> Tara licks Namagiri’s ear.

“Giri, what’s happened?”

<<Paw. Prickly. Porcupine patch. Can’t move.>>

Oh, the porcupine, of course. I examine her paw. But quills aren’t the problem. There’s a shiny coil wrapped around her paw, a snare. I try to find a way to open it, but there’s nothing. “I’ll never get this open. I’ll have to get help. I’ll get one of the watchers.”

Namagiri yowls.

“I’m getting help,” I say, and turn on my heel back up the old den path back to the center as fast as my legs will carry me.

I’m thinking about going to Sangita. She might smack me in the rear with the back of a newspaper, but she’s never really angry very long. But Sangita doesn’t work with tigers up close, and I don’t think she’ll know how to open the snare. I yank open the kitchen screen door and pad through the kitchen, looking for something that would cut wire. Nothing.

I stumble through the store room, searching, but then I hear something and I freeze. A funny squeaking sound, like a mattress coil breaking.

A woman’s voice in a whisper. “Stop that, I don’t like that.”

Then a man’s voice: “Try this.”

It’s Ginnis and Natalie. They are on the couch.

I freeze, watching them.

They are doing….something odd. Something I hadn’t thought about too much before.

But if animals do it I guess it makes sense people do it, although I was kind of wondering how, because people never seem to get close enough to each other for it to really happen.

“Relax Nata-Lee,” Ginnis says, from under her. “It’s supposed to be natural.”

“Natural?” Natalie giggles, shoving him in the chest. “Ginnis, I’m GAY.”

“Sure sure,” Ginnis says. “Ambassador to the hetero world. Diplomatic relations. I’ll sign the treaty.”

They bounce around, Natalie’s face scrunches. I feel sorry for her. She doesn’t look happy.

“Oh, God!” she says.

Ginnis says a four letter word that doesn’t mean love.

They seem busy and haven’t noticed me, so I trip away. I don’t think Ginnis would hurt Natalie, not on purpose. I like Ginnis. I just think humans must be bad at that stuff. But I’m wondering if the twisted look on Natalie’s face wasn’t pain and maybe it was something else. And if it was something else, I’m wondering if I’ll ever feel that.

I trip away. People are weird, but I need help. I open the door off the store room/kitchen to the dorm house. I trip past the Payals’ dorm, past mine, past Meera’s. The last dorm is Vick’s.

I pound on his door. “Mr. McArthur! Open up, it’s me.”

He doesn’t open up. I knock harder. Nothing.

I jostle the door, knowing I can get the lock open if I jostle it just right. I pry it up with the arch of my foot. It hurts, but it pops open.

“Vick.” I trip in on my aching foot. “Vick, wake up.”

He’s lying on his back in bed with Mona, the tiger cub. Her head and upper body are sprawled over his bare chest. At four and half months, she’s half as big as he is. It’s ridiculous. I shoo her away, and shake his shoulder. “Mr. McArthur, come on. Vick, wake up.”

He mutters. “No exams on a Sunday, Maddy.”

I try to make my voice low like Dwight’s. “Victor Jay McArthur Jr! Your thesis chapter is due. Your thesis is due!” I sigh, jostling him. “Vick you’ll miss your Skype.”

He groans. “Aw’right, already.” He sits up, swats his forehead, opens his eyes. “Aradhia! What are you doing here?” He glances at his alarm clock, gasps at the time, reaches for his shirt on the night stand. He pulls it over himself. “In God’s name, Rads, what the hell are you doing in my room at 3:00 in the morning!?”

“It’s an emergency. One of my tigers is caught in a trap.”

“Tiger…trap,” he repeats, blankly, staring into space for several moments. His eyes begin to focus, to sharpen. He looks at me squarely. “How do you know?!”

“We need to help her,” I say.

He tosses his blanket aside. “You went to Tiger Zone alone.” He grabs his jeans off of the folding chair, trips, and pulls them on over his boxer shorts. He grabs his Doc Marten boots and shoves them over his feet, starts tying them. “Answer me. Don’t lie. You did.”

I don’t answer. He grabs me around my shoulders. His stormy eyes burn through mine. “Answer me!”

“I had to, Vick. Tara was crying for me to come. I couldn’t help it.”

“You’re a liar, Aradhia,” he sighs, letting me go with a shove, buttoning his khaki shirt. “You told me you’d never go back on your own.” He grabs his hat, puts it on, straightens it.

“She’s my tiger. I know you don’t get it but try.”

He glares at me. “I understand completely.” He grabs a flashlight, opens the door, takes my hand by the wrist and we trudge out, shutting the door quickly behind us so Mona can’t follow us. We pass through the store room (Ginnis and Natalie have vanished), through the kitchen out to the back door.

“Rag—” he starts. “Rads. Which tiger is it, and where the hell is she?”

“It’s Namagiri. One of the older cubs I know. She’s on the edge of Tiger Zone. Her ankle is tied up.”

“Is she injured?”

“I don’t think so.”

We pile into the jeep at the other end of the dorm house.

“Why the jeep?”

“Maybe you don’t mind,” Vick says, getting in. “But personally, I don’t like wandering around cobra infested field grass in the middle of the night. We can get to the edge of the woods in this thing, just show me where to go.” I hop up over the side and jump in beside him. He starts the motor. “How did you find her again?”

“Tara took me.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am serious, Vick. I lived with Tara for years.”

“I can’t believe you,” he says. “I really can’t believe you.”

“What can’t you believe?”

“That you’d go back on your word, when I warned you not to go in the forest at night. Not to go to Tiger Zone alone. And NOT, capital N-O-T, NOT to interact with wild tigers. Do you realize I was breaking the institute’s requirements when I had your door unlocked? Because I trusted you? Because I somehow duped myself into believing you had some sort of–of understanding–some kind—some kind of bond with me?” His voice is shaking.

“I’m alive, Vick. I’m OK, I’m fine.”

“That’s not the point.” We’re driving now. “Going near a mother tiger with cubs…Which way from here?”

I point, and he heads that way.

“She was crying for me to come. She was calling for me. So I went out and I followed her. She nuzzled me, she’d never hurt me, she loves me.”

He grimaces, turns the direction I’m gesturing. Glares at the road. “She loves you. And I’m just the bloody chauffeur. Like I’m not about to physically combust over here.” His voice cracks and he sighs, gusty. “You broke your promise.”

“Think if tigers stole you away from your mom and dad. Wouldn’t you want to be with them?”

“My parents are dead,” he starts. Then, softly, “Rads, that line of reasoning only makes sense if you’re a tiger. You’re a human.”

“Tara is my tiger.”

Sharply, “And I’m not important? It doesn’t matter what I think?”

I don’t answer.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you.”

When we get to the forest’s edge, we stop. We hop out of the jeep, and he’s suddenly all brisk and business-like. I show him where to cut through to the old den road. I don’t walk too far ahead so he doesn’t think I’ll make a break for it. When we come to Namagiri, Tara is nowhere to be seen, but she’s crouched as she was before, crying with her ears turned back. When Vick approaches, she growls and snarls.

“Uh oh,” he says. “She’s angry.

I take a step forward and he grabs me by the wrist and yanks me back.

I kneel down. “It’s okay, Giri,” I say, staring into her eyes. “It’s all right. This is the watcher I brought. We’ll get you out of here.”

Vick bends over her as she hisses and spits, shining his flashlight on her snared paw. “She’s caught pretty good, all right,” he says. “It’s weird. That’s an Aldritch foot snare, designed not to hurt the tiger. But we haven’t used those around here in forever.” He sighs. “We’ll have to tranquilize her before we can even try getting her out of there. It’s not like the ones we used in Siberia and I don’t know how it unlocks. We’re gonna have to wake up Dwight. Come on, Red.” He takes my hand.

Namagiri cries, looking at me like, <<All this time and you bring a moron who can’t fix me? What the??>>

“We’ll be back, Giri,” I say. “Don’t worry we’ll be back.”

Dwight is not happy about being woken up at 3:40 AM. He’s getting older and appreciates his sleep. After hearing Vick’s story about a tigress in distress, he reluctantly drags himself out of bed, fills a dart with a sufficient dose of tranquilizer, and hops into the jeep with us.

“Why are we bringing the kid, again?” He asks when we pile into the jeep. “Is this family safari night? Do we all get a T-shirt? Custom field guides? Perhaps a bloody campfire anthem to sing on the way?”

“I woke her up bumbling around.” Vick winks at me, adjusting his hat so Dwight doesn’t see. “May as well let her have some fun, right?”

“I should never have left Australia,” Dwight says.

Vick drives. Dwight grumbles the entire time about how his nephew doesn’t know how to use a tranquilizer gun or unlock an Aldritch (“What do they teach the children at these colleges, anyway?!”) I keep quiet in the backseat.

…Namagiri…

When we get out and find Namagiri, Dwight darts her. Vick reassures me she’s okay several times, but she lays her head on the ground, still.

Dwight kneels down at her side. “Yup, it’s an Aldritch. Brand new, too—No rust–twarn’t set up over a week ago. Weird.” He smirks, manipulates the snare. “Can’t believe any poacher would have the nerve to come all the way up into the park like this.” He fiddles on the ground around her paw. “They unsnap like this. There we go.” The snare unsnaps. Dwight smiles, scruffs Namagir’s furry head softly. “She’ll come to, in twenty minutes or so, free as a bird. Won’t know what hit her or what saved her.”

We wait around until she starts to stir. (“Zoologist’s etiquette,” Dwight grumbles. “Completely unnecessary.”) We stumble back towards the jeep. I peer into the undergrowth, and my eyes catch a glimmer of amber. “We did it, Tara,” I whisper.

“Aren’t you coming, Rads?” Vick yanks my hand, watching me, but he’s not angry.

“Yeah,” I say, tugging my hand back.

He grips my hand tight, but we’re quiet for the drive home. When we pull in the drive, it’s almost 5 in the morning.

“G’night,” Vick says as Dwight exits the jeep and marches up the porch stares.

“G’night?” Dwight grunts. “You mean g’morning. But don’t let anyone wake me til nine thirty.” He slams the door, leaving us alone in the open jeep in the cool air outside.

“I’m sorry I was rattled,” Vick says. He brushes his hair out of his eyes. His brow is knotted like he’s coming to terms with something new and different. “Let me get this straight,” He pauses. “So Tara came to you, and she brought you to Namagiri–and then you came back here for me.”

“Yes,” I say.

“And Tara was there watching–when we were all there, wasn’t she? At the end when you turned and looked back–you saw her.” He was narrating, not asking.

“Yes,” I say. My voice is tight.

“And she hovered around, remembered you, and let you go.” There is an odd, blank look in his eyes. He looks away and his voice trailed off. “How did it go, seeing her again?”

“We heart-talked. I put my head on her forehead. She was upset about Namagiri. She led me to her.”

“Like I told you it couldn’t happen,” he said softly.

“Yes,” I say.

“Right,” he says.

He gets out of the jeep, and I slide over the door and land beside him. We walk up the porch steps, into the kitchen.

Ginnis and Natalie are in the kitchen and Natalie screams when we come in and they scatter and dart off. Natalie is wrapped in a towel. Vick watches them, incredulously, raises his eyebrows at me and makes a funny face like, what the hell’s up with them?, like he is going to comment, but he doesn’t.

“I’m going to make coffee,” he says finally. “Want anything?”
“Coffee,” I say.

“I can’t believe Sangita gives you coffee. You’re already a live wire.” He opens the cupboard and grabs the coffee, measures out several spoonfuls with a watermelon scoop. He sighs, dumps water in the back of the machine, flicks it on and it starts to bubble and drip. He stares at it, morose.

Finally he says, “The human world is your world, Aradhia. You were born into it for a reason.” I’m worried there’s a whole speech coming (one of his “Running for Parliament” speeches, Sangita calls them.)

“Yeah,” I say. I’m sitting on the bar stool, kicking my legs. If I don’t argue, maybe he won’t lecture.

But he’s just watching me. “Careful, shorty. Don’t hurt yourself.” He turns back to the coffee, kicks the foot stool out of the way—the one I use to grab things–reaches into the cupboard and produces two mugs. One mug says “Kansas City Chiefs” and the other mug says “Lincoln Park Zoo.”

He says to me, “You’re Lincoln Park Zoo”. He’s not as tall as Ajay or Dwight, but he can reach things. (“5’10” —no 11”,” Sangita had announced last week, playfully measuring him before measuring me. “It’s 6” even,” Vick had protested. Sangita barked, “Take your shoes off.” He acquiesced, stretching tall, and she re-measured. “5’11 and almost half,” came the verdict. Then she measured me. “5’3’!” she pronounced happily. “When you got here, 5’2”. I think you’re still growing!”)

Vick meanders to the refrigerator, removes a pitcher of cream Meera brought from the cow in the village, and fills my mug half-full with it before pouring the coffee. “Can’t have you wasting away,” he says. I chug it. He hesitates then gives himself a little splash of cream.

He sits beside me on the second bar stool. His legs don’t dangle.

He sips his coffee carefully, notices I’m tipping, and steadies the stool with his foot and kicks my ankle. “Don’t tip the stool like that. You’ll break yourself.”

“I’m fine, Vick.”
He takes a deep breath. We look at each other for a minute.

There’s this weird electric charge in the air, like before a storm, but it’s between us. We each want to say something but the words aren’t forming.

“Are you going to put a lock on my door?” I ask finally.

He opens his mouth. Shuts it. Opens it. He reaches over, runs his fingers through my hair. Produces a whole leaf that must have been stuck there like he’s done magic. “Daduh-duh-dahh,” he says, making the Zelda treasurebox opening sound. [16]

I sigh, dramatically.

He swallows hard and sighs. “I’m not going to lock it, no. But you have to tell me before you do anything like that again. All right?”

I gulp the last of my coffee and he chugs his down. Sets his mug on the counter.

“Aw’right?” he repeats.

I sigh. “Okay,” I say, finally.

He stands up, reaches over and tickles me. I punch him and jump down from the bar stool. We walk back through the store room to the dorm house.

“Vick,” I say, when I get to my door.

“Yeah?” He raises an eyebrow.

“Thanks.”

He rolls his eyes and chucks me under my jaw. I open the door and go in.

“G’night,” he says, and shuts it behind me. But then before I can move he opens it fresh.
“What?” I ask him.

He stands there for a moment, hesitating. “Thank you,” he says, finally. “For coming back.”

I toss my arms around him and he embraces me roughly for several seconds, then lets me go with a kind of shove.

“Go to bed,” he says, just as roughly, and shuts the door.

Vick’s alarm rings off at 10 AM but he’s already up. Everyone is scrambling. Sangita tells me to shower so I shower in the bathroom off the store room. When I come out in my day clothes, Ginnis is yelling something indecipherable.

Vick says, “No, I can’t deal with the program demo today. I’ve got to figure out this Kolkata business with Berkley.”

Dwight yells, “Kolkata be damned! I need you out here showing these people the program India’s hard-earned rupees are paying for.”

“But—” Mr. McArthur starts.

Dwight continues, “You knew when you signed on you’d be dealing with I-COPE. We didn’t know he was coming, but you’re our Tiger Man and you’re gonna have to cope with it.”

“Cue the Luke Skywalker,” Ginnis mutters to Natalie and me.

Mr. McArthur’s reply comes like it’s from the bottom of a pit. “If it weren’t for that man, my father would still be alive.”

Dwight’s hand lands heavy on Vick’s shoulder. “Your father was killed by a snake, Vick.”

Outside, a door slams. Sangita yells from the kitchen.

“Well, well, well. So this is Bhairavi 2.”

Jake Thornback is a tall, well built man with iron gray hair and metallic gray eyes that twinkle like rupees in the sun. He has a hawk nose and holds his arms out like wings, as if he is soaring high above the porch, high above all of us, and his smile shines. I think if I grabbed Jake around the arm I would feel nothing but coiled iron.

He wears an Aussie hat just like Mr. McArthur’s, except his hat has six white teeth around the brim and Mr. McArthur’s just has a couple of feathers (“a blue jay from my yard in Kansas,” he said, back at the institute, showing me the smaller iridescent feather, “--And a lil gold eagle feather I found. I’m not supposed to have that, so shhh, but it looks just like a hawk feather, so.”) I remember that Vick does the arms out thing too, but his is more, “Look I’m a plane!” Jake’s is more, “Look I own the sky!” Jake steps onto the porch without waiting for an invitation, eyes sweeping the place like he’s counting what’s his.

I’m watching him through the sliding door on the porch. Dwight and Ginnis are scrambling out to meet him, and I’m trying to decide if I want to get away, or if I want to watch him more. So far I’m just watching.

I hear footsteps in the hall and it’s Mona bounding into the kitchen, and Vick stepping behind. Mona scratches at the screen door, bawling to be let out.

Vick pauses, folds his arms over me. Unfolds his arms. Leans one against the wall. “Sangi says you’re worried.”

I’m not really worried. I’m upset. So much is going on, and all I want is Tara, but I’m distracted by everything else going on around me, and I’m not sure what I’m doing in the middle of it. I’m supposed to be in the forest. I’m thinking of running away. I want to ask Mr. McArthur a question, but all that comes out of my mouth is a single sound. “Mmmm.”

His face cocks at an angle. “Everything’s going to be okay, Red,” he says.

At the institute, he told me that, and I believed him. I don’t believe him anymore.

Someone opens up the porch door—it’s Dwight, from the outside—and Mona scampers out the door.

I turn back to the glass door. I see Jake’s eyes light up. “Hey, kitty girl,” he says.

I hear growls.
“She’s always like this with new people,” Dwight says, in an excuse. (She isn’t.)

“That’s good,” Jake says. “That’s what we want in a rehab.” I don’t know how to describe Jake’s voice. It’s deep and curved, funny, but not like Vick’s. It’s like Sangita’s bitter coffee with maple sugar melted through. It sounds like the records of old singers Sangita sometimes puts on the player in the kitchen, that Vick tries to sing along with. Tony Bennett. Frank Sinatra. The Rat Pack. I can’t see him from the window anymore. The screen door opens, and I see a hand with a brown stone in a gold ring, and Mona comes bounding back inside, fur all standing on end, and then I see Jake, coming through, and standing there. He’s looking at something, and it takes him a while to get done looking at it, and then he starts laughing. I think he’s looking at the sign that I helped Ginnis and Chanti put up.

BHAIRAVI II WILDLIFE RESEARCH CENTER STAFF

-I-COPE Supervisor: Dr. Jake Thornback

- Co-Directors -

Dr. Fateh Chaturwedi - Director of Forestry and Management (Stationed at Ranger Quarters)

Dr. Dwight P. McArthur - Director of Eco-Research (Stationed at Research Center)

- Graduate Students-

Chanti Chatterji - Ungulates / Forestry (MSc Pending, IIFM, Bhopal)

Ginnis Davidson - Veterinary / Programming (DMV, UChicago)

Meera Gurnani - Ornithology / Marsh Ecology (PhD Pending, UDelhi)

Victor Jay McArthur, Jr. - Tiger Communication / Family / Rehab (PhD Pending, UCSC)

Atlas Rawlen (PhD pending, OSU)

- Adjunct Forestry Photography Team -

Ajay Payal - Camera System Developer, Tiger ID, Adjunct Forester

Sangita Payal - Traditional Photography, Tiger ID, Adjunct Forester

- Bhairavi I Outpost Foresters -

Sandip Sakal – Chief Mahout - Area I & III - North side / River

Kusagra Kundra - Area II - Central Forest / South Field

Bhoktr Bharadwaj- Area II - Central Forest / South Field

Nadi Kumar - Area IV - East Cordidor

- Visiting Student / Associate Researcher at Bindusar and Katni-

Natalie Kit McArthur – B.Sc. Sociology, B.Sc. Ecology, B.Sc. Cultural Studies, Pending, UMKC - Honor’s Thesis – “Going Greend: Sustainable Logging, Biodiesel, Village Relocation and The New Politics of Ethno-Suppression of Baiga Wise Women in the Eco-Wars”

- I-COPE / WERC-Core Assistant Supervisor -

Atlas Rawlen

- Honorific-

Mona Tiger – Wildlife Ambassador / Chair of the Board of Tiger-Human Relations / Thesis Slayer in Chief

Aradhia Tarekeshwari-Hart — Co-Chair of the Board of Tiger-Human Relations / Associate Thesis Slayer / Wild Child in Residence

And he sees Mr. McArthur and Mona hides behind Mr. McArthur, and Jake’s mouth hangs open for a second and now breaks into a wide crooked grin.

“Well look what the monsoons brought in! Vicky McArthur, my boy!” He holds out one arm, but Vick just steps towards the door and extends his hand. Jake takes it, shaking firmly, eyes searching Vick’s. “The last time I saw you, you were still in high school.” He clamps his arm around Vick. Vick looks scrunched. Jake’s eyes catch mine. He lets Vick go.

“And this redheaded young starlet must be Ruby…?”

“Yeah, that’s Aradhia,” Vick says. “Ruby was an assigned name for magazine articles.”

“Lohita,” Jack says, his smile too bright. “Fire of my life, sin of my soul.” He winks at me. “Goes well with the hair though. You look like a tiger cub, kid.”

Vick looks horrified. Jake turns to him. “I read that article about you in Animal World a few months back.” He chuckles. “You’re just like your father. Though still tigers instead of crocs. Back in Queensland we’re debating about when you’re gonna take up snake handling.”

Vick’s eyes narrow slightly. Dwight comes in the door.

Jake turns to Dwight. “Well, the place looks fine from the outside, but the dorms are old and so are the dunnies. We can have improvements put in—the place can be renovated. Not like Bhairavi the Game Preserve back in the old days, when I was a boy.” He smiles, and pulls a cigarette from his pocket. “Don’t mind if I smoke with the door open?” he asks.

No one minds.

I watch him light the cigarette, watch the smoke unfurl, curl around him. He inhales. Exhales. Jake says, “As most of you are aware, about two years ago, the late head forester, Dr. Jivana Mukherjee, enrolled Bhairavi in the park revival program of the International Cooperation Organization of Partners for the Environment, that is I-COPE, a collaboration between the World Bank, WERC, GEF, and UNESCO. So how this works is, I-COPE manages struggling parks like Bhairavi for a trial period of three to five years, bringing in scientists and experts from around the world to do the work. That’s you all. At the end of the probationary period, the park is readopted as a national park, granted an extension for another three years, or is considered a failure. And while ICOPE provides the key networking support, and the funding comes from various private and public contributions–mostly from WERC—the work itself and expertise fall on the key men on the ground like all of you. And women,” he adds, regarding Sangita and Meera.

“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here, as president of I-COPE and CEO of WERC, why I would take an interest.”
We all stare at him.
“Actually,” he babbles on, “It’s not just the fact I did my doctorate here and have friends in the area that made me interested in overseeing Bhairavi personally—it’s this particular center. You guys have such a unique thing going on.” He includes everyone in the room, which is suddenly almost everybody. “Resident wildlife photographers—“ he waves his arm at Sangita and Ajay. Ajay shoves his glass back up his nose and smiles a dopey grin. “Veterinarian programmers—“ he indicates Ginnis. “Even an anthropologist—“ (Natalie is standing in the threshold now. Her cheeks are turning red. “I’m still an undergrad,” she says. Jake ignores her.) “Gazelle experts,” he points to Meera. (“I study birds.”) “Feral children,” he points to me. “This is one of our star locations on the I-COPE map, and I’d like to oversee things and find a way that we can apply all that you all have done worldwide. That’s why I’m going to be staying here a few days before I move on up to headquarters with Chaturwedi.”

He steps further into the center and Dwight and Meera and Ajay trail after him.

“He acts like this is his territory,” I mutter.

Chanti shrugs. “He funds it, so it is.”

“He’s our dadses’ half brother,” Natalie explains to me in the hallway. “We’d call him Uncle Jake, but he hates that. He prefers ‘second dad’, ‘backup dad’” She laughs, twirling her finger around her strawberry blonde hair. “Isn’t it weird though? He’s just Vick with extra air miles and a whiskey habit instead of Red Bull.”

“I heard that,” Vick says from the kitchen. “Not happy about it.”

Natalie is beaming.

Around three in the afternoon, Chaturwedi gets back from the Climate Conference. “The gang’s all here!” Natalie shouts. “Time for lunch.”

Chaturwedi, the forest director, is round and jolly and big, and he always brings me something sweet when he comes through. This time it’s wild boar jerky, three lumps of tamarind candy, and five licorice bears — but only after I arm wrestle him. I win. Then Jake and Chaturwedi arm wrestle. Chaturwedi wins. Now I realize Chaturwedi just let me win.

While we’re eating Ajay’s vindaloo, Chaturwedi mentions poachers have infiltrated the far south gate to Bandhavgarh.

Dwight is alarmed. “But they can’t be?! The new security—”

“What are poachers,” I ask.

Sangita and Ajay look at each other. Vick takes my hand under the table and rubs his thumb over the back of my hand but doesn’t answer either.

“Poachers kill animals,” Chaturwedi says. “Especially rhinos, and here, tigers.”

“Tigers. Why?” I ask.

Jake grins extends his hands like a salesman at a bazaar. “Whiskers cure toothaches,” he quips. “Claws make good luck charms. Hearts and liver mixed with blood make tigers out of men! Arthritis in those old rickety knees, Dwight? Try powder of bone! Still battling adolescent acne, Natalie? Try tiger’s eyes. Trouble concentrating, Ajay? Freeze-dried brain will clear your thoughts! And Vijay,” he says, lowering his voice as he turns his wicked glance on Vick McArthur, “You seem Puritan but ol’ Jake sees a playboy under façade. Want a fun night out? For only three hundred dollars try a nice hot bowl of tiger pen–”

“Stop it, Jake, Stop it,” Vick said, mock plugging my ears. “There are children here.”

“-Nis Soup!” Jake finishes, cackling. He claps Vick around the back. “Lighten up, V.J.!”

At lunch on the porch, Jake asks Vick, “So I understand you believe Aradhia has some form of extrasensory perception.” Everyone stares at him. As if nobody will understand what he means, he adds, “ESP.”

Dwight cracks a smile. Ginnis laughs.

Vick smirks. “Well—”

“He thinks she knows everything,” Ginnis says. “Pretty sure he’s gonna start a religion.”

Vick makes a face. “The Chandigarh Times took what I said and ran with it a little bit. I only mentioned—I brought a kitten to the hospital, and one day it got away. Nobody in the whole building knew where it was. Aradhia kept saying ‘dark’ over and over, which didn’t make sense. But the kitten was in the dark—we found her in the bathroom cupboard. And there’ve been other things like that.”

“And you believe she developed that connection with the animals in the forest,” Jake said romantically, “and kept it with the tigers.”

Vick shrugs. “It’s possible. But it’s not something you can easily investigate or verify scientifically, not without disturbing whatever’s there in the first place.”

“The scientist and his subject are a single system,” Jake says, his eyes flitting from me to Vick, “and true objectivity is hardly possible.” Jake hesitates as if weighing his next words. Vick looks flustered, opens his mouth to interject, but Jake steamrolls on, “I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but when the CDPR Institute contacted the park authorities, asking for a tiger expert to inspect the wild kid…” Jake smiled. “I recommended you.”

Vick raises an eyebrow. “Quite the opportunity. Why me?”

“You’re the one most familiar with rehab tigers—that’s rare. And you’ve had the longest-term study on the Bhairavi tigers since Mukherjee passed. Besides—” his grin widens—“old geezers like Dwight and I hardly have the energy to play Annie Sullivan. Isn’t that right, Dwight?”

I really can barely imagine Jake visiting me at the institute at all, but now I really wish I hadn’t thought of it.

I get up and go to get water. Natalie is in the store room. “Hey girlfriend!” she says to me.
Natalie has visited us several times. She has been taking classes at the University of Delhi preparing for fieldwork in Bhairavi and Bandavgarh studying the Adivasi. She spent a week with us in August and two weeks in September, but Ginnis was away in the states for September programming in the states. Now Ginnis is here and Natalie is back until at least November studying the Adivasi. Her laptop is broken, so she is borrowing Ginnis’s laptop. She asks if I want to “watch TV”, by which she means watching recorded shows on the laptop. I nod.

“You doing OK, princess?” she asks me as I settle beside her.

“I guess.”

She looks at me, smirks. “How are things with my brother? Is the pillow fort still standing?”
“You mean the hide?”

“I mean—” she clacks on the keyboard, eyes me over the top of it, studying me. “You two break up yet? Or still going steady?”

I think she’s teasing me, but I can’t tell what about. “Going steady?”

She chuckles. “Oh, never mind.”

“No,” I press. “What do you mean?”

Now she is searching through a clear cloth–plastic? rubber? not sure) case for the CD we left off. “You know what I mean. Your… thing. Your absolutely platonic, nothing-to-see-here, healthy boundaries, family-friendly thing.”

“You mean that we’re friends?”

She rolls her eyes. “As long as he hasn’t bought a ring yet. When he does, say no unless Chaos McCowboy has learned how to do laundry and can find the dish soap by then.” She plucks out a disc. “Aha, here’s Episodes 11-14.”

Natalie has every episode of a low budget medical drama called Phoenix Internal dubbed in Telugu on 12 bootleg CDs obtained by mail order from “Uncle Salim’s” thrift shop in Northeast Mumbai, each in a cracked plastic jewel case, all labeled with black or red sharpie (Phoenix Infernal IV, Best quality, No Ads).

When we first watched the show back in August, Natalie really hyped the show and told me this show is going to repair my hospital trauma and replace it with hospital drama. None of us speak Telugu, but the episodes are subtitled in Spanish which Natalie rapidly translates to English, sometimes using Babelfish, but the words only sometimes match what seems to be happening. It’s a Bollywood show which supposedly takes place in Phoenix, Arizona, in the United States, but all the actors are Indian or Pakistani and every scene is filmed in Jabalpur, Sialkot or Mumbai. Despite the fact it’s nearly always raining, all the characters complain continually about the desert heat (”at least it’s a dry heat”).

I don’t really understand why Natalie finds it so funny while we’re watching, but by now I’ve rewatched it a few times. Maybe I am finally starting to get it. The show follows Phoenix Light, a first year medical intern from Malibu, as she adjusts to life in Phoenix, Arizona and falls in love with the intern supervisor, cardiac surgeon Daryl Harper, who she already kissed in an ill-fated game of “Spin the Bottle” at a drunken “Welcome to Phoenix” party. Each episode features flashbacks to the party—sometimes she kisses Daryl, sometimes she kisses Hannah, sometimes the bottle doesn’t stop spinning at all, sometimes inexplicably the camera cuts to a cow wandering past the main hospital gate.

The Arizona skyline is just Marine Drive Mumbai (“Bombay”) tinted orange. Daryl wears a kurta under his lab coat and occasionally dumps the lab coat altogether for a shimmering white sherwani, and half of the time when he walks in “Addicted to Love” pops on in the background. The Jabalpur hospital has flaked stickers pasted to the front door, “PHEONIX INTERNAL MECIDINE,” but all the other signs are in Hindi or Telugu.

The front desk features a Ganesha statue wearing a stethoscope (he gets new props every episode: sometimes a face mask, once a top hat, different colors of prayer mala beads, sometimes a red or blue blood pressure cuff). Every time the elevator gets stuck, a raga number plays, and two interns fall in love. Every Thursday’s episode features a reading from “the Holy Bible”, but Sangita says the lines are misattributed quotes from the Vedas, the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita (“Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” — Book of Revelation)

The MRI machine is just a giant (“industrial size,” Natalie says) washing machine with a blinking police light set on top, and the defibrillator is a rusty set of jumper cables. While everyone talks about burgers, Snickers bars and coke and the doctors advise patients to eat “whole wheat toast and low fat cottage cheese”, people only snarf samosas and Parle-G biscuits and guzzle lassis, Frooti and Limca soda. In Season 1, the office copy machine randomly spits out reams of English and Devanagari with warnings for the week: “Do not confuse turmeric with morphine”, “Love hides in the supply closet”. In Season 2, a man they call “The Sleeping Oracle” lies in a coma but mysteriously utters words in perfect English (“Tie your shoelaces”, “avoid the kimchi”) that foretell events in the ward; if there is a tough case, Daryl hovers around him hoping for advice and the interns suspect he has lost it completely. Now and then a troop of Hanuman monkeys runs through the hospital and nobody does anything to stop it.

Any time a patient is saved, the entire team breaks out in full Bollywood dance while Daryl strums an electric guitar that sounds suspiciously like the sitar. If a patient dies, the nurses burn incense, cry, read from the Bible some more (“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come” —Gospel of Matthew) and talk about how “the desert heat was too much for them”, even though you can clearly see the monsoon raging in a reflection of the window outside. Every day an old woman patient screams “Help me!” from the hospice wing, but if anyone goes to help her, she screams, “BEAT IT!” (She is still alive well into Season 4.)

When we ran out of episodes of Phoenix Internal in August and Natalie put in another order to Uncle Salim, we watched ER or this new show, Grey’s Anatomy, but Natalie cussed it out as a rip-off of our favorite. (“MCDREAMY IS JUST WHITEWASHED DARYL WITHOUT A KURTA” she screams, and nicknames him “Gentle Low-Heat Cycle” or just “The Fraud”). When she ordered more episodes in August, by September Uncle Salim had accidentally sent a karate movie, a cricket highlights reel, a Bhojpuri musical and a pirated copy of The Matrix, but Natalie insisted these were also part of the canon lore of the show.

Ginnis comes in. He cusses and demands his laptop back. But Natalie is ignoring him. He leaves. When we are almost through Episode 12, he comes back in and demands the laptop again. Natalie says she can see all his notifications and all he has is 3 emails from Walgreens telling him that his photos are available. This works and we have the laptop for the next episode.

After that we debate if we are going to watch a Disney movie. So far, I have seen Sleeping Beauty which is Natalie’s favorite, Lilo and Stitch which is Sangita’s favorite, The Lion King which Vick said I would like and it was OK about a cub, and Beauty and the Beast which is Ajay’s favorite. Vick wants me to see The Little Mermaid, which he says is “about you—not really but kinda”, but we’ve never gotten around to it because Natalie hasn’t pirated it yet. Now Natalie tries to pirate Little Mermaid but then Ginnis’s laptop “blue screens”. She has to reinstall Windows. Just as she has it loaded, Ginnis comes in and takes the laptop. She shoots me this huge grin and makes the rockstar horns with her hands. Then it’s time for dinner.

Jake’s graduate student, Atlas Rawlen, is in from the field and he’s chattering to Meera. Atlas reminds me of that guy in the red shirt in Natalie’s CD, Beauty and the Beast. “And then Jake says to me, back up. I hear this growl coming from in front of me, and I swear to God, it sounded like a frickin’ demon.”
Meera keeps smiling tiredly.

“But I couldn’t show fear, right? Most people would have run, but me—” he thumps his chest— “I just start to back up, real slow, real slow. And there she was – a leopard, five feet away, in the underbrush, eyes like lamps, teeth like swords.” He scratches his beard, “And what do I do? I looked her dead in the eye and I just winked!” He winks at Meera. “And you know what? She backed off.”
At this point, Meera is pulling her chair back, but Atlas doesn’t notice. He barrels on, “Coz tigers can smell you. That’s what Jake always says, right? Confidence and dominance. Animals smell it. Jake’s got it, I got it. Vick—” he gestures at Mr. McArthur. “He don’t got it.”

Vick pretends he didn’t hear it but his face is dark.

Meera dives into her room and comes back with a Furby. She sets it on the table.
Atlas opens his mouth again—Meera shakes the Furby.

“Ah, kah dah boh-bay!” the Furby squeals.

Atlas blinks. Frowns. Clears his throat. “Anyway, like I was saying—”

“Doo-ay! Kah-bah-lah! Weeh Thai GAH!!” the Furby blurts.

Meera shakes it once more for emphasis. Atlas sits back, defeated.

Vick takes a long drink of water. His smirk becomes a smile, and his shoulders ease. I move my seat closer to his and steal one of his samosas. Atlas studies us.

During dinner, Jake is in the kitchen at the foldout tables when I’m in the kitchen. Everyone keeps calling dinner “the veranda party” and Jake is demanding a martini.

“Family, Ohana, Parivar,” Sangita chirrups, fluttering around the table playing waitress.

“Ohana, parivar?” Jake repeats, disbelieving. “Is that your joke then?”

“Joke?” Sangita is cleaning used dishes. “How ever do you mean?”

“Ohana includes everyone,” Jake says. “Nobody left behind. Inclusive. Parivar is blood or friendship like blood. You’re in or you’re out. Exclusive.” He pulls his chair out. Barks, “So which is it?”

Sangita wipes her hands on Ajay’s red checkered faded-to-pink apron she’s wearing. “Both,” she says, wiping her forehead. “It’s both.”

Jake presses, “But parivar means somebody left behind.”

“Only false friends,” Sangita says, fetching me some jello. She looks sharply at him. “Terrorists and liars.”

“Which category do I fall in?” Jake asks, innocent, eyes bright like a cub. He grins at me and at Sangita. Vick and I look at each other helplessly.

Sangita looks at Jake, and looks at Vick. “Parivar, Ohana. Family, duh.” She rolls her eyes, smiles half facetious half fondly. She drops some palak paneer in front of Vick’s plate, wipes his chin like he’s a baby. Looks at Jake. “Why else would we keep you here?”

“Because I have the power,” Jake says. “Duhhhhhh.” He’s mocking her use of ‘duh’ which only Natalie used to say, but now everyone is doing it.

“Power is not enough,” Sangita quips. “Not to make a home as such.”

“Oh, I feel so included, Sangi,” Jake says, sing-song. He looks at me. “I’ll be Uncle Jake then, just to you.”

I don’t like this. “You’re not my uncle,” I say.

Vick splutters.

Jake lights his cigarette indoors. Says, “Oh, how would you know, kid?” He grins, teeth gleaming. “I get around.”

I sip my juice. Sangita called it a virgin daiquiri. “If you were my uncle,” I say to him, “You would’ve eaten me by now.”

Jake laughs. “Tiger dad. Haaa.”

Sangita sets a plate of butter chicken in front of Jake, listening to us sharply.

“You’re not my dad either,” I say. “My dad died in a fire. You’re just loud.”

Sangita gasps.

Jake grins at me. “I like your fire,” he says.

Sangita gasps again.

“You would,”I say.

Sangita sighs, wipes her brow. She seems relieved nobody is crying. She goes to the kitchen and comes back with some jolly kheer with cardamom carrot gajar halwa. She plunks the first helping in front of Jake.

Jake leans back, eyes glinting at her. “You’re sure I’m not a terrorist?” he drawls.

“Only to your own life’s hopes and dreams.” Sangita says, and walks off with a stack of plates. But she comes back with the martini he pestered her for.
“I’ll feed the dog,” she says. “But I’ll still call it mangy. Jesus and the Canaanite, right?” She grins at him—her silly grin, her flirty grin that’s only for Ajay, the one with the kiss behind it. “Your holy book, not mine,” she says.

“You give me butterflies,” Jake says, but he looks grumpy. “Sorry Ajay.”
Ajay shrugs like he isn’t worried. He isn’t. He’s seen it all.

“Pah-ri-vahr,” Jake growls in his grizzled Aussie drawl, like it’s something dangerous he half respects, half wants to punch. “Like a cult name. Next thing you know, you’ll be calling me Baba Jake,” he says to Ajay.

“Only if you grow a beard and give halfbaked homilies,” Sangita says.

“Don’t tempt me,” Jake says.

After I’m finished with my butter chicken, I go out back on the porch with my pudding. But Jake is already out there, sitting on the builtin wood seat, drinking his martini and talking to Chanti, who looks about as interested as Meera did with Atlas Rawlen.

But now, the sliding door opens, and Natalie bursts out. She wasn’t at dinner. But she has a martini in her hand. She seems drunk. She chugs it in one gulp and then she comes at him. She spears an olive from Jake’s martini on the kitchen table, downs it, then points the toothpick at him.

“Your company—” she spits out, poking at him with it, “—is throwing indigenous tribal people out of their HOMES. In ORISSA. Is that what you’re gonna do here, Uncle J? Is it?”

Jake blinks, slow and deliberate. “My company?” His grin returns. “You mean OUR not-for-profit NGO.”

“Whatever you call it. WERC. I-COPE. All those Global Environmental Fund funds.”

“We relocate and offer compensation,” Jake spells out savagely. “It’s humane and legal, and necessary for conservation in some cases. In other cases they can be recruited for part of the cause. Honey, have another martini.”

Natalie slams another martini and sits down beside him, looking at him almost dreamily and cussing him out. Ginnis looks at me like I’m supposed to be doing something about it. Natalie is saying, “Fuck you, Fuck you, FUCK YOU—DAD.” Then puts her head on his shoulder. Jake looks strangely touched.

“Wait, I thought Dwight is her dad,” I say to Ginnis in the hallway.

“No Dwight adopted her when he married her mother,” Ginnis says. “Her mom was Jake’s ex, but nobody really knows who her dad is.” He sighs. “Except Alta. Well, maybe. The McArthur brothers were wild in the seventies. At least Jake and Vic were. But face it—with her personality? Jake Junior, it is.”

“Vick,” Natalie says. “Vicky! He has to listen to AdIvAsi MaGaZine! By Pink War Cry.” She hiccups. “I mean War Helmet. Play it play it play it play it!!!”

Vick stands there, gaping, but he dives into the store room, shuffles through the third drawer, shrieks at the contents, then comes back with a tape and player.

“Vicky and I recorded this in the frickin’ RAINFOREST,” she says. “It’s about the apocalypse. You’ve GOT to listen.”
Jake listens. We all listen. It’s a punk opera. It’s scary. She screams. Vick bangs on drums (well, peanut butter jars) and occasionally yells. (Vick leaves while it’s still playing.)

You get the impression that it’s all over, we’re all dead, and the only people left are the villagers who know the forests. She makes it clear.

“Needs better production,” Jake says when it’s over. “You could go shoe-gaze. More percussion, more cowbell. Slightly slower tempo, there, at the end. Bit Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, but eco-death spiral. Reminds me of this girl I dated in a yurt in Tasmania. Screamed like that. Different context.”

Natalie shrieks and buries her head in Jake’s arm. “You get it you get it you get it—you just DON’T CARE,” she cries.

Jake looks at me hopelessly, like, can you believe this woman? and asks me to bring him a lighter.

When I come back, she’s sobbing into a martini and blowing her nose on Jake’s sleeve, hysterically. “You’re my FATHER,” she shrieks. “I know it I know it I know it. You’re my bio-logical FATHER. And you don’t give a DAMN about me.”

Jake looks over his shoulder at her like he’s peering over a precipice, or like he maybe almost sort of somewhat feels something. He hover-pauses, like he’s calculating risk. “Dwight is your father, honey,” he says, producing a handkerchief, but his voice has that triumphant tone, like he has struck a chord he didn’t expect, but he’s happy about it. “That’s what it says on your birth certificate, right? But I’m here,” he adds like an afterthought, grinning and holding up his hands, like he’s embracing the world. “Right? Bygones be bygones and all that.” He smiles-half-sighs self-importantly, then goes on, mock-profound. “I mean, what IS family, anyway?” He shrugs, guilelessly. “Biology is a start, but then, so is jazz!”

Natalie gestures at me wildly. “DWIGHT IS BASIL FAWLTY IN A SAFARI HAT,” she says, as if I’ll understand what she’s saying. “I don’t look like THAT. I look like HIIIMMM.” She points to Jake. “Oh God, WE look like him. Vickeeeey! Vickeeeeeey.” She screams and buries her head in his sleeve again.

“Vick has my eyes, you’re stuck with my nose, Who knows what it means. But he’s your age, dear, perhaps you’d have an understanding.” He inhales his cigar and blows the smoke at her as if she’d like it, like a peace offering. “Dear, I think it’s probably time you should read the Diaries of Anais Nin,” he reflects, seriously, like she’s just finished Dr. Seuss and is moving up to Nancy Drew and other middle grade chapter series. “Fascinating woman. Brilliant but bizarre. Tragically French. As a warning, mind you, not a template.” He tussles her hair, distantly, but somehow messes it up. He inhales, exhales his cigar, letting the smoke linger and drift lazily between them like unspoken love.

“He gave me a GUITAR,” she sobs at me. “He gave me a JUNGLULL. But not a childhood. And we’re—NOT—FRENNNCH.” She blows her nose loudly, chaotically, partly on his shirt and partly on the hanky. “I don’t wannnna be Frennnch.”

“You’re certainly spirited, dear,” he says, standing up. “Take care of her,” he says to me. And he starts to walk off.

Natalie tumbles down off her chair and—clings to his legs. “Jake. Jake. Jaaaaake.”

He drags her along. He looks more than annoyed now. “This is why I am a nihilist,” he says to no one in particular. “Honey, Nin diaries. Volume II. 1933 or 4. Page 207 or so, I think. It will help. Cathartic, maybe. And then date women! So you don’t have to be so emotionally wrapped up in me.”

Natalie is still sobbing and clinging to him. She blubbers, “I already date women.”

Jake sighs, looks skyward, then kneels down to her level.
“Listen,” he says, hand lightly on her shoulder. “Darling.” His voice is low, half disgusted, half moved. He scratches her hair, awkwardly, and she sniffles, dramatically, and looks up at him. “So,” he says, mostly unphased. “What you need is a vision quest, sweetheart.” He gestures to the jungle outside, like it’s some grand new idea he’s just stumbled upon. “Take some peyote. Or ayahuasca. Whatever the adivasi take. Find a nice rock. Sit on it, a few hours. Eat some mangos. Puke some. Let the trees talk to you” He waves his hand above her head like he’s unlocking the wisdom of the universe with his outstretched fingers. ”The trees know. They do. You know. And get a good, thick, hardcover journal. For your thoughts! Nin was right about that. Hell, I’ll get you one. It’ll clear your head so you don’t get lost in it. Helps with the emotional debris.” He pats her head one more time and stands, shaky, like they just found God. “Go find enlightenment! You’ll thank me later. Or not! That’s the whole beauty of it! And it’s yours! And polish off the night with some Chablis–you’ll knock it off, it’ll put things in perspective.”

Sangita steps outside. “What in the world is going on?! Vick said there was a trouble…?”
“She needs feminine assistance,” Jake says, untangling his leg finally. “Maybe some hygiene even.” She reaches for his foot but he arcs away. “Take care, kids.” And he heads back inside through the sliding glass door.

Sangita says, “I think this is more serious than a period.”

Ginnis comes out. “Natalie, for crying out loud.” He helps her stand up and she clings to him. “Ginnis, I LOVE YOU,” she says maniacally. “That’s why we’ll never work.”

I head inside, avoid the lobby where Jake is collapsing, and wander into the dorm rooms. Sangita and Ajay’s dorm is shut and they aren’t there. Vick’s door is slightly open. I push it open and flop at the foot of his bed.

“When is he going to get out of here?!” I ask.

Vick’s wearing earphones but he pries them off. “God, maybe never,” he says.

“NEVER?!”
“Well, probably in a few days he’ll go back to headquarters and things will calm down a bit.”

“Can I hide in here?”

“Why here?”
“I need something to get the Jake off of me.”

Vick nods gently. “Yeah, I get it.”

I stay in the room with him while he’s working until Mona saunters in.

The next day goes more or less the same way, except things are even busier, and Jake and Natalie are less drunk. Atlas comes in to introduce several new park rangers. I shake hands with two. Their names are Bhoktr and Kusagra. The conference room and kitchen are stuffed all morning. My reading lessons are moved to the back deck, but the deck seems haunted by the conversation the previous evening.

Before Jake heads out with Dwight, he gives Natalie a journal. It looks like a pirate’s logbook. She clutches it. “Remember Nin Volume 2,” he says. “Amazon $0.50 cents.”

“And this is for you, Ruby,” Jake says to me. It’s a thin box with a ribbon. Sangita hovers in curiosity as I open it. Inside is a beautiful book with a bird’s nest on the cover. I sound out the title. “Ill-uuuminated…Rumi.”

“Illuminated Rumi!” Sangita squeals. “How beautiful.”

“For an illuminated Ruby!” he says.

I open it. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there,” I read. Natalie tilts her head. “The world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.” I gasp, turning the pages. “I am dust particles in sunlight. I am the round sun.”

It’s the most beautiful book I have ever seen. This author understands me. But I can’t really believe Jake understands me.

Natalie glares at me. Meera gapes over my shoulder cooing.
“Remember, emotional debris,” Jake says to Natalie. He salutes and takes off out the sliding glass door.

Suddenly there is a loud honking from the front of the building. “What now?” Vick asked. He jumps up and goes running down the stairs, past Jake and then around towards the front and I follow him.

A park ranger driver comes around and opens the door to the jeep and Dr. Hiranya steps out.

“Mister McArthur!” she says, waving a manila envelope. “I’m so glad I caught you when you’re actually here. I have that permission form and when I came in yesterday I forgot to give you this—Dr. Dhamya’s critique of your last set of tapes. I have some of my own notes attached.”

“Oh, I see, that’s fine,” Vick says, taking the envelope. “Thanks. Is there anything else you’d like to do for us? Would you like coffee?”
She shakes her head. “No, I’ll just be on my way. But where is Aradhia?”

“She’s right h–” Vick starts, looking around for me. I’m behind the sal tree.

But suddenly Jake is in the middle of us all, beaming a winning smile and holding out his arms as if he’s going to hug someone.

“Dr. Kalakavi Hiranya!” he exclaims.

“Yes,” Dr. Hiranya answers, crisply. “Kali, please.” (None of us have ever been told, “Kali, please.”) “And you are…?”
“Jake Thornback. I-COPE Interim Director. Biologist. I read all about you in the last issue of the Gazette. I am so pleased to meet such a gifted psychiatrist.”
“Kali” smirks. “The pleasure is mine, Dr. Thornback.” Her obsidian eyes scan him, searchingly. “Have we met…?”

“You were a mite younger,” Jake says, indicating the height of his knee. “I knew your father. We traded oh—information of sorts. Some time ago.”
Hiranya raised an eyebrow and then dipped it. “That’s…very interesting,” she murmurs.

“Small world,” Jake grins. Then, pointedly, “How long are you in this neck of the woods?”

“Unfortunately, with the train situation in Katni, I’m stuck in the Bandhavgarh tourist suite until 4 o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

“Here—” Jake takes a pen and a piece of scratch paper from his pocket and jotted something down. “My cell phone number.”

Hiranya takes the paper slip, unaffectedly.

“Talk about a match struck in hell,” Ginnis says, after Dr. Hiranya has driven off and Jake is off somewhere.

The next day, Vick is mostly camped in his dorm room. He has to type a report for when he meets with his thesis advisor, Delaine Kalding, on video chat.

Natalie is in the store room on the couch or in the nook most of the time. Ginnis seems apoplectic about it. We watch more episodes of Phoenix Internal. Inexplicably, Natalie prefers Greg (the stammering asthmatic South Indian intern in coke bottle glasses and a horizontal striped shirt who frequently makes miraculous life saving errors and uses his inhaler in the supply closet) to Daryl, insisting Phoenix’s choosing Daryl over him “betrayed the xerox prophecy”. “LOVE HIDES IN THE SUPPLY CLOSET, PHOENIX—REMEMBER YOU TWO TIMING BEETCH?! STRIPES EQUALS LOVE!!”)

At the time I didn’t understand much of it, but the episode where half the Hospital blew up and Daryl dragged Phoenix out of the hospital as she screamed for the monkeys (”THE POOR MONKEYS! I HAVE TO SAVE THE MONKEYS!!!” and Daryl passionately kissed her to shut her up before pulling a single baby capuchin from his lab coat pocket was available dubbed in English with Hindi subtitles.

“The Telugu actors had SOUL!” Natalie complained when we ran the English dub. “DECOLONIZE PHOENIX!”

Natalie always makes buttered or caramel popcorn. “MORE GHEE!” she screams to Sangita. Sometimes Sangita watches too. Sangita says it is a great sisterly bonding exercise. In September Ajay watched from the doorway to the store room and smiled broadly (“Greg was based on me!” he said, cracking his tooth on a kernel) Back in August, Vick insisted he would never watch, but by September sometimes he stood around and invented new plotlines from the hallway (“In Season 6 the cow is promoted to Dean of Medicine! Phoenix leaves Daryl for a nurse named Lucille.” “THERE IS NO LUCILLE THERE IS ONLY GREG!” Natalie yelled.)

The actor who plays Daryl Harper is named Vijay Karim. Natalie screams this to Vick excitedly the next time he pops his head in. The actress who plays Phoenix Light is Aradhana Nayak. “That’s basically your name!” she says to me. “We were destined for this, Rads.”

That night I crash in my room. I want to go to Tara but I don’t hear her calling. I don’t want to go to Kolkata. I’m tired of Atlas and Jake. Everything swirls in my mind.

At 2 AM, I wake up and turn on my audio journal.

“Kay so. Dream again. The Institute is exploding, like the hospital scene with Daryl and Phoenix. The ceiling tiles are—like—on fire, dropping, like broken teeth and popcorn. The tigers are running in the hall, claws slipping on tile and sliding, and I was screaming for them, screaming. Then Mr. McArthur is there and he’s yelling too and he grabs me, like half carries me, half drags me out of the building while I’m screaming. And it all blows up and collapses behind us. And then he’s panting and sweaty and he just pulls me to him and kisses me, like really kisses me, crazy hahaha. Three whole minutes this time I counted! He’s super into it. It feels good.
I cry for my tigers and he reaches into his pocket and whips out this stuffed tiger. He says ‘I saved one!’ Like I am supposed to be happy. And I’m not happy. I’m mad. But then I throw my arms around him like I’m so grateful and I kiss him again anyway. And he picks me up and carries me to a hospital bed that didn’t burn and he throws me on it and keeps kissing me.”

I take the cassette tape out and flip it to Side B, the assignments side, but I notice they are mislabeled. I look for the sharpie to fix it, but can’t find it.

I am really embarrassed about this dream. The last time I had the dream there wasn’t so much kissing, just one kiss, and I told Natalie about it, and Natalie was like, “EWWWW. Delete delete. Back up. Don’t ever tell me anything like that again. But seriously, it’s just a dream, dreams are dumb. Dreams are chaos. It’s no biggie.” She pauses. “But seriously princess—if he ever tries something like that in real life? You don’t kiss back, you don’t freeze, you don’t swoon or blush and giggle. You clock him with the binoculars, the frying pan, his notebook, my shoe. Got it?”

I nod solemnly, but I’m not sure she’s serious, and I’m pretty sure he’s not going to kiss me.

“I mean, he won’t,” she says. “But just in case. A girl must always be prepared.” She looks at me more seriously, smirk fading. “You gotta know this—we girls—we’re equally smart and skilled to men–actually smarter honestly, but when it comes to blows, blow for blow, a man can overpower a woman. Vick’s a good guy. He’s my brother. He knows this stuff. But like—in real life, in practice, with most guys?—You never really know.”

I just saw Meera shut up Atlas with a Furby, and Natalie take on Jake with a toothpick. But I think about Vick knocking me down by the river. I guess if she says I should be prepared I’ll be prepared. I don’t tell her this, but I also really don’t mind the idea of him kissing me. But I feel like she knows that.
“Okay,” I say.

She high fives me. “Feminist Soul Sisssterrss forevahhhh!!” she says. “No boys allowed. Let’s watch another episode.”

But I hear a scuffle from the kitchen. “Oh God. Speaking of men,” Natalie says and we go to the door to watch. “My money’s on Ginnis.”

It’s Ginnis, Vick, and Atlas.

“You dirty data stealer!” Ginnis is yelling at Atlas and pushing him.

Atlas makes fists and swings at Ginnis. Vick jumps in between, gets hit in the ribs, and pushes Atlas up against the wall. Ginnis covers him.

“It’s property of the park,” Atlas says.

“You took the film out of our camera traps,” Vick says.

Atlas shrugs. Ginnis decks him. Atlas shoves Vick into Ginnis and socks Ginnis in the jaw.

Now Jake comes in. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he says. He claps his hand and they untangle. “Don’t make me break you up. I’m an expert in Brazilian Amazawa-ryū Jiujitsu. Ginnis, Vicky, what are you worried about? I’ll make sure you get anything we have back. Nobody is stealing anything. We needed all the evidence we could get for the Global Environment Fund. I-COPE must provide. We’re just counting the tigers in the tape. I’ll get it back to you. Cross my heart.” He draws an X over his heart.

“When?” Vick says.
“Now,” Ginnis huffs. “We need it now.”

“By next week,” Jake says. “If you let me get to it, day after tomorrow.” He cuffs Atlas, waves for him to follow him outside. “You’ll see.”

Vick stumbles into the store room, winded.

“Did he hurt you?” I’m hugging him.
Vick puts his arm around me, automatic. “I’m okay. I’m okay.” But he’s wheezing. I reach up to pet his hair and he swats my hand away half-heartedly.

Natalie is watching us making a face. “Ewwww. Mushy stuff. You guys are a train wreck with cooties. Where’s Ginnis?”

“Oh, I’m fine.” Ginnis darts in. He dips into the third drawer, rummaging, and produces a first aid kit. He rubs some neosporin on his cheek. Hands it out to Vick but Vick waves him off.

Natalie has her hands on her hips. “My God, you two. This is a science center not a UFC fight ring.” She folds her arms, shaking her head. “Next time you boys want to throw punches, Rads and I will sell tickets. And fight over something useful—like who’s going to clean the bathroom. I’ll referee.”

Ginnis snarks, “Once you figure out palmolive is for more than oil-slicked puffins we’ll get right on it.”

Natalie kisses him. “Shut up.”

Vick makes fists and looks like he’s ready to fight again. “Are you two dating?”

“Dating?” Ginnis splutters with his arm around Natalie’s waist. “Us?”

Natalie shakes her head violently. “Don’t make me throw up. Also, Vicky, taketh the sticketh outeth thine own eye-eth.”
“Taketh what?”

“Physician, heal thyself,” Natalie quips. But they are already tearing off arm in arm, giggling.

“Ginnis you used to babysit—” Vick yells. He scoffs at me. “I trusted that guy.”

“Maybe they like each other,” I say.

Vick makes a face. “Natalie’s supposed to like girls,” like it’s some law of nature.

“I like girls,” I say.

“But not like that,” Vick says. “At least I don’t think?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” I’m heading for the kitchen and grabbing a mango off the table.

“Exactly,” Vick says.

Vick fries hamburgers for just him and me with some beef he says he got from a Muslim at a farmer’s market in Tala. “Shhh. Don’t tell Ajay.”

Ajay comes in. “Don’t tell me what?” Then he shrieks. “That is not falafel. That is not chicken. That is sacred gau mata!.”

“It’s halal,” Vick says.

Sangita walks in. “Mmm. Smells good.”

“SMELLS GOOD?” Ajay cries. “Is sacrilege! He is cooking Surabhi, the mother of life.”

“Well, she smells delicious,” Vick says.
“You’ve really never had a burger?” Sangita asks Ajay. “I got one by accident thinking it would be falafel at a McDonalds in Bath.”

“Wait–you ate it?” Ajay tears what’s left of his hair. “I return dowry.”

Sangita is laughing. “Better than letting gau mata go to waste? Vick is Aussie, let him have his cattle rancher nostalgia. Durga is devi too. Cows can be sacred in more than one way. Cooking is sacred.”

“It’s not cooking,” Ajay says. “Is MISBEHAVING.”

“You don’t have to eat it, Ajay,” Vick says, slopping my hamburger onto a slice of toast. “No ketchup.” He dashes sambar and rasam on it and slides it over to me.

“But my baachi! My spices! My frying pan! Vijay you reincarnate as snail for this.”

“Yeah yeah,” Vick says, salting his burger. “A little salt and it all comes around full circle.”

“Snails are cute,” I say, kicking my legs. “How their little antenna move when they drink water.”

“Fine. Cute snail,” Ajay blusters. “Next life,” he says to me, “don’t come crying when you are slimy snail wife!” But his eyes are laughing. He turns to Vick. “Snail husband! And slugs for children!”
“Ehh,” Vick says, shaking curry over his own burger. “I’ll slime my way away from the altar, Ajay.”

Sangita is laughing. “You’ve got to understand, Ajay—firengi are hopeless. I saw a cow leather yoga mat in New York, Ajay.”

Ajay blasts, “Would you use that Vijay?”

“No,” Vick says, snarfing, rolling his eyes.
“Some sense,” Ajay says, laughing. “Did you?” he asks Sangita. Sangita shakes her head wildly, and they depart giggling to the living room.

The burgers are delicious, but Vick keeps muttering. “Needs ketchup,” he says.

“Needs KARMA!” Ajay shouts from the other room.

After I eat the burger, I grab a grape soda and my pocket audio recorder. But Vick says it’s time for Mona to go out. So I stuff the audio journal in my sling satchel and I take her out on the horse lead to tie it to the lead outside. But she escapes and gets under the deck in the leaves chasing a skink again. I follow her under and grab her around the collar, but she’s settled, sniffing for the skink.

I play the tape to listen to Vick’s next assignment. “Compare and contrast two people you know. Thanks Rads.” I’ve already compared and contrasted two people I know, so this should be easy. I choose Natalie first.

“Natalie is my friend. Natalie is Mr. McArthur’s sister. Natalie has orange hair. Natalie is taller and prettier than me. Natalie wears earrings. Natalie is—not me—” but I stop. I don’t know who to compare Natalie with, except me, and I don’t feel like talking about me. I have a better idea. I rewind and decide to compare two people who seem connected but couldn’t be more different. I hit record again.

“Mr. McArthur is my tutor. He has a kind smile. But his smile is sometimes sad. His hat falls over his face. He has hair the color of a lion’s mane. He has broad shoulders in a khaki button shirt. His blue jeans are ripped by tigers’ claws. He has Mona over his heart at night. His eyes sparkle. His eyes are always questioning and they are blue like the sky and they glow like sunlight from the inside.”

I press pause and I think a few minutes. Then I hit record and start again. “Jake is the boss guy. His eyes are gray, like steel. They sparkle like Vick’s, but they reflect the light. They don’t shine with their own glow. It’s like he’s wearing sunshades. I can’t see into his heart. That scares me. It makes me wonder if there really is anything in there.”

I hear footsteps on the deck. I look up, and I see four shadowy figures through the gaps in the deck .

“This is lousy,” Jake is saying. “No tigers in two weeks. Two weeks! At this pace we’ll never get Rajani. McArthur’s autocam says he’s here.”

“Don’t worry, boss.” It’s Bhoktr. “We’ll get him alive.

“It’s a good thing we switched to those new cable snares, then,” Jake says. “I don’t want any tigers mauled until we have the prize on our hands. And that’s Rajani. Curse that devil.” He pauses. “Your monthly pay goes down a rupee every day we don’t have him, got it? But once we got him, you’ll have more money than you’ve ever laid eyes on at once.” He turns to the other shadow man. “Do you realize how much money a single black tiger would bring in on the black market? Multiply that a few times, we’ll really be rolling in the bucks.”

Poaching. He’s talking about poaching. The bad cold shivers crawl over me like the cold pricklies in the Warm Fuzzies story.

“If we’re not found out.” It’s Atlas’s nasal whine.

“We won’t be,” Jake says, solemnly. “I know my work. The only guy who’s got anything on me here is McArthur Junior. Smart kid. Chip off the old block, really. Meaning mine. But he’s woke, now, as the kids call it. Bleeding heart. All tied up in that project with that retarded kid girlfriend of his. So he’s useless, but he won’t bother us. I’ll have a talk with him, later, put the arm on him, find him a job. He’ll come around. Meanwhile, Bhairavi is ours for the taking.”

Retarded kid girlfriend. He means me. I don’t know whether to flinch at being called backwards or smile at being called girlfriend.
The fourth figure laughs. Kusagra. “Yeah, if there are any tigers left.”

“There are. They’re all huddled in the Adivasi dense areas. That’s why we’re getting the tribals cleared out. We compensate them for resettlement, hand out reparations, whatever the buzz word is this year. I already have maybe a quarter of em all holed up in a temp facility right now out west—I’m waiting on a check from USAID so I can ship them to Jabalpur and Katni and Kanha. But look, we have three more weeks before the board at GEF needs a report. We have an initial headcount off the autocams and the pugmarks at the river. Dwight and Chaturwedi think conservation, like Mukherjee, but GEF knows it’s inventory. Once we locate the A1 family, we move them south. The corridor to Bandhagarh is mostly unguarded. Then once we have them in one pen, we sacrifice a few cubs, send the DNA in, splice em, clone em. Work that angle. And meanwhile we breed Blackie with his daughters to bring out the melanism.”

“Breeding doesn’t make money,” says Kusagra. “Just bodies.”

Jake scoffs. He shakes ash and it falls through the cracks on my head, burning. I hold my breath and stay quiet. He rambles, “You know Americans will pay fifteen grand for a tiger cub selfie?”

I realize the recording is still going, but I don’t press stop. If I press stop they will hear the click, and besides that I want to play it back for Mr. McArthur. I think he should know about this.
“Fifteen grand?” Kusagra groans. “No one’s gonna pay that.”
“Americans will. They’ll pay anything if you wrap it in fur and love and let them post it to Instapin and their Friendly app thingie, whatever. Besides, how many more visitors will drink tiger piss if you call it a fertility tonic? And that’s sustainable, never mind bone tea and blood. And DNA is forever. Once we get the first batch in the compound, the program runs itself. We’ll have as many bodies as we need. Wanna save the tiger? Easy. Make tiger burgers. Sell ‘em worldwide and they’ll never go extinct. And that’s what I call conservation. Go get em, boys.”

My tape stops on its own and starts making a squealing squeaking noise. I hit eject. The tape inside is spilling out everywhere. I tug it out, stuff it in my jeans pocket.

“What was that?” Atlas asks.

“Probably that Mona cub and one of her chew toys,” Jake says, unaffectedly.

I wait. They talk more, quietly. Bhoktr and Kusagra walk off and leave in a park jeep. Atlas goes inside.

But Jake stays behind, lighting another cigarette.

Blah. Figures.

Mona is tugging on my lead. An Indian palm squirrel is chirruping along just outside the shadow of the deck, chewing on a mahua berry. Mona flattens herself, tail waving, then takes off and the lead slips in my hand. She can’t be loose at night. I have no choice but to take off after her.

I clamber out from under the deck and grab her by the collar, just a yard away from—Oh, no.

Jake is coming down the stairs. He halts there, cigarette ember burning, his shadow looming over me. “What in Shiva’s graveyard are you doing here?”

His voice is harsh, but his eyes are concerned, almost friendly. A breeze picks up, blowing tobacco smoke into my face.

“I’m…er, trying to grab Mona. What does it look like I’m doing?” My heart is beating so fast and hard it’s flutters like a bird in my chest. But I toss my hair out of my eyes and glare at him. “What are you doing out here?”

“None of your business, Red.” Jake smirks at me. He takes a drag on his cigarette. His face softens. “You should be getting your sleep, sweetie.” (Sweetie? Really? Vick doesn’t even call me that.) As if reading my mind, he blunders on, “Don’t let my boy keep you up. Dwight tells me you two have been gallivanting all over the jungle freeing tigers from traps and whatnot. You’d best be careful,” he adds, exhaling. “Tigers aren’t the only ones who get caught in snares out there.”

“I’m heading back. Don’t worry.”

Jake watched as the mud-tan auburn-haired girl darted away, dragging the misbehaving tiger cub along with her. He heard the porch’s screen door slam behind them as they went into the center.

Jake knocked ashes from his cigarette before taking another thoughtful inhale. She was a cute kid, that Radsy girl, he puffed. Not really retarded. He shouldn’t have said that. But snappy, snoopy. She worried him.

A shiny object reflecting moonlight in the dirt caught his attention. Stooping down to pick it up, he saw it was the girl’s pocket tape recorder. The one she worked the stupid lessons on. Examining it and finding it empty, he smirked.

“Little devil,” he muttered. “She’s not as clever as she thinks.” He set the recorder on the porch step, thoughtfully, knowing she would find it there. He started up the stairs and his flip rang. He opened it.

“Hello, Kali! I was expecting a call from you.” He smiled, pensively. “Okay—Dr. Hiranya it is. Too bad—Kali is such a pretty name...Ha. You want to know who I am, eh? Well, Kali, I’ll put it very clearly to you now—I know who you are.” He smiled, genially, as if in a challenge. “Oh, no, Hiranya, I’m quite serious. I know about—how shall we put it? I know about your employment in the family enterprise during your wayward youth.”

He rolled his eyes, and held the phone away from his ear for one moment, before continuing. “No, I’m afraid you do know what I’m talking about, Hironya. Once upon a time--almost a decade or so back, I believe it was—you delivered a certain hefty payment to an associate of mine in exchange for a sample of sorts for your father’s, um, research. That ring a bell with you? Ha ha...yes, I did believe it might.” He grinned again.

“Let me be frank, Kali, I know that there are certain things in your past which, in keeping with your fine reputation, would be best not to put forward for public release. In fact, if you do not want these things exposed, I would strongly recommend you keep in close touch with me. I can help you to keep them in your past.” He waved his cigarette generously. “In exchange, I would like you to help me with something...Yes, it does have to do with your dear father. I would like a full list of his clientele. Can that be arranged, Doc?” He chuckled. “Yes, I thought so.”

---

Chapter Three Songs: