The Wildings (8 page)

The squabbling of the sparrows tucked away in a nest high up on the crest of Humayun’s tomb ceased abruptly. The hen and the cock ducked instinctively, positive that they had just seen an orange kitten move swiftly along the dark crumbling roofs of the tombs. But there were no signs of predators, and after a minute or two, they relaxed their vigilance. “Sunte Ho, I told you to build a little bit higher,” said the hen to her mate. Sunte Ho sulked.

“Higher, still higher, what you want, that we should sit out there and tell the cheels to come and get us?” And soon they were bickering amiably again.

STRETCHED OUT NEAR THE KITCHEN STAIRS
, Mara appeared to be half-asleep. She barely noticed the cats who were linking in droves—from the dargah, the market, the rooftops and the alleys of Nizamuddin. The kitten skipped over entire colonies as though they were no more than puddles in her path, and she registered a larger world opening up in sudden sharp glimpses full of glorious, confusing colours, sounds and smells. Her sendings were smoothening out. The greetings to the astonished cats who felt or saw her as she went by were becoming easier, more automatic.

She felt cats receiving her hurried twitch of greeting in Nizamuddin, at Humayun’s Tomb, in Jangpura, in far-flung Delhi colonies whose names she had never heard of.
Calico cats, tortoiseshell cats, pedigreed cats, strays; neighbourhoods where cats roamed on vast manicured lawns; areas where their territory was a twisting mass of bylanes brimming over with filth and abundant life; old scarred fighters’ faces, blinking kitten faces, furry maternal faces; she could hear them all as a distant, humming noise in the background
. Despite the effort, Mara was having fun, on what was the longest and the most fascinating walk of her life this far.

The fur on her flanks stirred, and then Mara felt her whiskers rise, tingling so hard that it was almost unpleasant. There was a crackle in the air. Her paw pads gleamed with sweat, and her claws came out reflexively. The kitten’s pink tongue hung out and she grimaced and shivered all over.

Somewhere out there, a family of cats was responding to her sendings. She felt them tug on the line, insistently, with more strength than seemed possible. The air had thickened with the slow rumble of their linkings, though Mara couldn’t see them
yet. The kitten’s tail switched back and forth, the hairs on its tip fluffing in alarm. It was as though her fur had been brushed hard, and she felt the presence of the strange cats as surely as though they had entered the room.

Something had gone wrong, she thought. The cats were slowly coming into focus, their faces gleamed into sharp-edged clarity, but the images were too large. The air around her felt hot, and the kitten’s whiskers trembled from the sudden strain.

On the other side of the door, Beraal sat up, her tail rising uneasily. “Mara?” she said.

The kitten’s paws curled under her flank. Mara’s tiny nostrils flared at the scent that seemed to fill the air: fire and musk. The scent padded through her head, and her fur stood up as though a predator had walked silently through the kitchen, its hot breath burning her ears and the back of her neck. She heard Beraal mew, but the hunter’s voice seemed very remote.

Mara opened her eyes briefly, but there was nothing in the park outside her home, just the high friendly chirps of the babblers. Her Bigfeet had moved to another room; she heard their voices far away. It seemed as though black and gold flames danced before her eyes and the air in the kitchen was now heavy with the carrion stink of meat and blood, underlaid by a whisper of dust and grass. Mara’s head throbbed; it felt to the kitten that the unseen predator was padding closer and closer.

A low, menacing rumble ripped through the house; Mara felt her stomach turn over in cold fear, her claws shoot out in instinctive terror. The rumble seemed to go on forever, as though the kitten had called the thunder itself down from the skies.

When the kitten opened her eyes again, she was staring at a
great, red, open mouth with pointed yellow fangs, each one the size of her own face, and great white whiskers that sent out rolling waves of anger. Slowly, she looked up into a pair of huge golden eyes, the pupils tiny glowing orbs of black, ringed by fur striped in all the colours of fire. When its whiskers rose, Mara felt her own tiny whiskers tighten and tingle in fear, but she couldn’t stop sending. “Hello,” she whispered. “Who are you?”

There was silence. Mara’s fur began to unruffle itself, and her tail stopped twitching. She felt Beraal outside begin to relax, too.
Just a glitch, Beraal
, she sent,
perhaps we’re seeing a close-up—pulling back now
.

If Beraal had a response, neither cat heard it. Mara yelped and scrabbled with her paws as her whiskers went painfully taut and adrenaline jolted through her body. The great cat was standing up, and Mara watched in shock, her head tilting upwards as the golden and black fur rippled out endlessly, the tiger growing and broadening until it towered monstrously above her, its eyes never leaving her face.

Another furious rumble shook the line. Mara felt the vibrations deep in her flanks and her belly—it felt as though she had been picked up by the scruff of her neck and was being shaken from side to side.

“I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Who in hell’s name are you and what are you doing in my head?”

“I’m just me,” Mara stammered back, “just a Mara.” Instinct overrode the system of greetings Beraal had dinned into her head, and she reverted to the patterns of her earliest sendings.
Sorry, just me, just small orange kitten, don’t mean any harm at all, Mara terrified, Mara shivering! Sorry, big cat
. Waves of disbelief
radiated back along the connection, and Mara heard the deep-throated growl as clearly as though its perpetrator was right in front of her.

“You’re a kitten? Not even a cub, a common KITTEN? And you dare consort with tigers, Justamara? You’re either very brave. Or very foolish. Or … very, very insolent.”

Mara was frozen with fear, too terrified to attempt to break the sending. The enormous red mouth equipped with long, curving, deadly teeth, opened in a deafening roar.
“I want my mommy!”
cried Mara.
“I want Beraal! Don’t like this Ozymandiwhatever … I want to go home.”

If she’d been listening to the Nizamuddin link, Mara would have realized that she was merely echoing popular sentiment. As the tiger shimmered in the air of Nizamuddin, his great form stalking the minds of the cats, the scramble to clear the link was unseemly but swift. Beraal’s nerve broke when she saw that deadly mouth. Flattening her ears, she shot down the stairs into the park. Hulo, who’d linked furtively, unwilling to admit that he was impressed by Mara’s progress, was so taken aback that he almost fell out of his tree. Back in the dargah, Bigfeet watched in surprise as Qawwali and the two other cats who were on the link sat up sharply, yowled and then fled. Southpaw, who’d linked in his sleep, woke from what appeared to be the worst nightmare he’d had in his life.

So there was no one to witness what happened next.

IT HAD BEEN A TRYING TIME
for Ozymandias. The Royal Bengal tiger liked to do his pacing in peace, and ever since the
zoo had acquired another couple of great cats, space had been at a premium. The grass in his enclosure had long since dried out; in summer, the tigers stirred up clouds of dust as they walked, and Ozymandias hated the way it tickled his whiskers.

He disapproved strongly of the new feeding policy, which required all the animals in the zoo to fast once a week. Worst of all, his litterbox had been dragged out into the open, which meant he had to do his business in front of a gaggle of gawking Bigfeet—any self-respecting tiger, he felt, would have objections to this sort of thing.

So when his nap was disturbed by, of all things, an orange kitten that materialized out of thin air, levitating directly in front of his eyes (Mara hadn’t yet quite got the hang of positioning herself while sending), Ozymandias felt justified in snarling at her.

He put out a gigantic pad, unsheathed his claws magisterially and swatted at the kitten.

Mama!
it howled, but infuriatingly, it remained exactly where it was.

Ozymandias furtively checked his claws just to be sure, but they appeared to be in perfect working order. He swatted at the air again.
Go away! You’re mean and evil and I don’t like you one bit!
sniffled the kitten; but it stubbornly refused to dematerialize.

“Ozzy, stop that at once,” commanded a velvety voice firmly. “You’re frightening the poor thing.” Ozymandias mutinously swung at the kitten again, and received a sharp smack on his ear. “Hunh!” he growled in surprise. “You didn’t have to do that, Rani.”

Scared as she was, Mara couldn’t help noticing that the white tiger who’d smacked “Ozzy” into submission was one of the most beautiful creatures she’d ever seen. Then Rani peered closely at her. “You are a common little thing, aren’t you?” she commented, and then rounded on the Royal Bengal again. “It’s just a cat, Ozzy, there’s no reason to throw a fit. I wonder what it’s doing here, though.”

From under Rani’s belly, a small, almost Mara-sized head popped out. “It said it was a Justamara, Ma,” piped a small, almost big cat-sized voice. “Hello, Justamara. What’re you doing in our cage? And why’re you in the air?”

Mara’s ears began to rise ever so slightly. She still wasn’t very sure about Rani and Ozymandias, but this was more in her league. “Hello,” she ventured uncertainly, and then Beraal’s training paid off as she recalled her manners. “I’m so sorry to … to bother you like this, I was doing a sending … uh, a range exercise. I never meant to disturb you, Ozymandias … uh, Ozzy Sir … I don’t know what to call you …”

This was a bit much for Ozymandias to take. “
Call me? Call me nothing! Tigers do not talk to kittens
,” he snorted, turning his back on Mara and stalking to the other side of the cage.

“Pay no attention to him,” said the small tiger cub. “He’s always like this in the evenings, especially if his nap hasn’t gone off that well.” Rani licked the cub affectionately and peered at Mara again. “I suppose you two had better introduce yourselves,” she said.

The bars rattled. Ozymandias growled and stalked back.
“No cub of mine is going to consort with a mere cat, Rani, and that’s fine … ouch! Aargh! Let go!”
What Rani said to him next was
slightly muffled, because she had his tail in her mouth, but the gist of it was that the small tiger cub had had no one to talk to in months from his own species. Ever since the leopards had been shifted to another set of cages, their cub’s only company had been a bunch of monkeys. And while she was glad he and the silver-furred langur monkey Tantara got on so well, she didn’t know why Ozzy was being such a stick-in-the-mud about cats, considering that he was one himself, if of a superior species. Besides, this young kitten appeared to have far better manners than the leopard cubs who were so terribly undisciplined, if Ozzy only cared to remember. It seemed odd to Rani that the kitten appeared to be levitating in mid-air, but she was sure an explanation would be offered in the fullness of time.

While the big cats bickered, the small tiger cub and Mara eyed each other—one from behind the bars of his cage, the other from her insubstantial post in thin air. “He’s called Ozzy because it’s short for Ozeem, which is short for Ozymandias,” said the tiger cub. “It’s a nice … it’s an impressive name,” said Mara. “And what’s your name?”

The tiger cub looked important; his whiskers sprang to attention. “I am—” he took a deep breath, “Rudra TheGreatAndPowerful, SonOfOzymandias TheKingOfKings, LookOnOur TeethYeMightyAndDespair … but you can call me Rudra for short.”

“I’d like that,” said Mara, and she whiffled happily at him. Outside Rudra’s cage, cameras whirred as Bigfeet took pictures of the cub standing so close to the bars, and in the kitchen back in Nizamuddin, the Bigfeet looked down at Mara, and smiled to see her twitching and cycling her paws in her sleep.

F
rom the point of view of the cheels who sailed the skies above Nizamuddin, the neat residential colonies offered slender pickings. The tidy borders of the handkerchief-sized lawns, the carefully trimmed stubble of foliage and the rows of cars offered little in the way of hiding space for the small animals the birds preyed upon. Of far more interest was the last stretch of road that connected the canal and the dargah, where the houses sat in straggling lines, some almost as broken down as the ruins of the nearby baoli. Here, and on the garbage-strewn banks of the canal, good hunting was to be found, especially for those with sharp eyes, patience and strong talons.

Tooth unfurled his wings like feathery sails and hitchhiked a passing current, circling his territory like a spy satellite, taking mental snapshots of all the changes that had happened groundside since he last patrolled. The ditch contained a new traffic victim—the second mongoose to run afoul of the road in
recent days, its body too decomposed to be of interest, even to him. His predator’s brain registered a rat skittering into a drain, and dismissed it almost immediately. Tooth’s stomach was full of pigeon, and pigeon eggs—rat wasn’t a tempting enough second course to warrant the effort that a SD&K—stoop, dive and kill—would take. He noticed that the sparrows who had nested in a rusting automobile had been evicted; a small, feathered corpse lay on the pavement, and he could see the thin yellow splatter patterns that the eggs had made. Tooth dipped his wingtips briefly—he had no objection to eating sparrow, despite the profusion of small bones, but he and the other cheels had conferred on the falling numbers of the birds.