The Night Tiger(45)

Dr. Rawlings is a family man, which is why he didn’t take over Dr. Merton’s bachelor quarters. Instead, he’d requested a larger bungalow for his wife and children. But they didn’t stay. One year—a year of monsoons and biting heat and scorpions found in shoes—was enough for them and they went back to England. Ah Long said that many of the foreigners here are a bit peculiar. Why else would they live like this in exile, with their families half a world away, he said darkly.

“Even the ladies?” asked Ren.

“Of course!” said Ah Long with a snort. “Like that daughter of the Thomsons. Lydia, they call her. There was a big scandal about her in England.” What it was exactly, Ah Long wouldn’t say. Now, Ren thinks about Miss Lydia helping out at the hospital earlier, and wonders what she’s run away from.



* * *



Ren watches a knot of boys playing SEPAK TAKRAW with a woven rattan ball. The ball flies out, almost striking the car. Ren grabs it in time. The boys come running, glancing guiltily at the gleaming car and Ren’s white houseboy’s uniform.

“Here you go.” He tosses it back. They’re younger than him, about eight or nine, the same age as Yi was when he died. One of them offers him a peppermint, dug from the depths of his pocket. It has bits of fluff on it, but Ren accepts it with grave ceremony.

“Do you work for the gwai lo?” the boy asks in Cantonese.

“My master’s a doctor.” Ren rubs the peppermint surreptitiously on his sleeve before popping it into his mouth. It tastes cold and furry.

“You work at the hospital?” Ren shakes his head, but the boy continues. “Have you seen the ghost there?”

“Lots of people have died in that hospital,” says another boy.

“I’ve never seen a ghost.” Except Yi, thinks Ren, but only in dreams so it doesn’t count.

“Did you hear that a woman was killed by a tiger just last week?”

“But that wasn’t in the hospital,” says the other boy. “That was in a rubber estate.”

“It’s a ghost tiger, a white one you know?”

“No, it’s a weretiger—it turns into an old man.”

Ren’s stomach clenches in alarm; this account of an old man who turns into a tiger is all his fears come true. “Who said it turns into an old man?”

The smallest boy pipes up, “Someone saw an old man walking in the rubber estate in the dark. But when they went to look, there were only tiger prints.”

Ren can’t help asking, “Did he have a missing finger?”

The boys look at each other. Ren can see their minds busily working, no doubt adding that detail to the story.

Unbidden, a memory wells up in Ren. The crooked shadows of a plantation at dusk, the figure of an old man, dressed in white. It’s too far to see his face but he walks with that familiar stiff gait. The gloom deepens, the trees closing in like silent figures, the only light the whiteness of the old man’s clothes. Ren runs after his master, calling Dr. MacFarlane to come back to the house. It’s one of his master’s fits, when he shivers with cold, sweats feverishly, and doesn’t seem right in his mind.

It’s so dark that Ren can barely see his own feet. There’s the familiar suffocating panic, the fear that the old doctor will fall down or get lost or turn to show him a snarling, unrecognizable face, and Ren will be all alone again in the dark.

Now Ren shivers despite the blazing sun. The boys are just repeating a local story, he tells himself. Still, how long has it been since Dr. MacFarlane died? He counts anxiously. There are now only fifteen days left. He must get the finger back this evening. Then he’ll bury it in Dr. MacFarlane’s grave and make things right.

The little boys drift away. After buying the items on Ah Long’s shopping list, Ren and Harun wait in the shade. To pass the time, Ren learns to roll cigarettes, though the thin paper is fiddly and the tobacco falls out. Harun is patient, not complaining when Ren makes ugly, stumpy cigarettes that look like carrots, rolling and rerolling the same piece of paper so as not to waste.

“You mustn’t smoke though,” says Harun, taking it away. “How old are you again?”

Ren swallows. “Thirteen.”

Harun studies him carefully. “I started working when I was twelve years old. There were nine children in our family and I was the oldest. It’s not easy.”

Ren keeps his head down. First he must complete his task. “Do you think the tiger killed the woman in the rubber estate?”

Harun rubs his chin. “No matter what the magistrate says, it’s strange. Tigers become man-eaters when they’re old or sick and can’t hunt, but who ever heard of a tiger that stopped partway and refused to eat its kill? There must have been something wrong with the body.”

“Do you think a man can become a tiger?” It’s the same question that Ren has asked Ah Long and William in turn.

Harun takes a long drag on his cigarette. The end of it glows bright red. “My grandmother told me about a tiger village, near Gunung Ledang in Malacca. The posts of the houses are made of jelatang, the stinging tree nettle, the walls of men’s skin, the rafters of bones, and the roofs are thatched with human hair. That’s where the weretigers live, the harimau jadian who change their shapes. Some people say that they’re beasts possessed by the souls of dead people.”