The Night Tiger(9)
* * *
Ren is sweeping the floor with careful flicks when Ah Long comes by to tell him to do the master’s study as well. Pushing the door ajar, Ren stops short. In the dim light of the half-closed shutters, he sees glassy eyes and an open mouth, fixed forever in a snarl. Ren tells himself that it’s only a tiger skin. The sad remnant of some long-forgotten hunt.
“Does the master hunt?”
“Him? He only collects,” Ah Long mutters. “I wouldn’t touch it myself.”
“Why not?” Ren is uneasily fascinated by the tiger skin. Despite the indignity of being draped across the floor, its fur worn away in patches, the glaring glass eyes warn him away. Tiger eyes are prized for the hard parts in the center, set in gold as rings and thought to be precious charms, as are the teeth, whiskers, and claws. A dried and powdered liver is worth twice its weight in gold as medicine. Even the bones are taken to be boiled down into jelly.
“Aiya! This tiger was a man-eater. It killed two men and a woman down in Seremban before it was shot. See the bullet holes in the side?”
“How did he get the skin?”
“He’s keeping it for a friend who told him it was keramat. Cheh! As if a keramat tiger could ever be shot.”
Ren understands only too well the meaning of these words. A keramat animal is a sacred beast, a creature with the ability to come and go like a phantom, trampling sugarcane or raiding livestock with impunity. It’s always distinguished by some peculiarity, such as a missing tusk or a rare albino color. But the most common indicator is a withered or maimed foot.
When Ren was still at the orphanage, he once saw the tracks of the elephant Gajah Keramat. It was a famous beast, a rogue bull that had ranged from Teluk Intan up to the Thai border. Bullets were magically deflected from Gajah Keramat’s mottled hide, and he had the uncanny ability to sense an ambush. That morning, the sun’s burning rays had dyed the dirt road blood red, spotlighting the men huddled over the tracks leading out of a culvert, across the road, and then into secondary jungle. Ren stopped to goggle at the excitement.
“Tentulah, it is Gajah Keramat.” There was a hiss of agreement.
Wriggling his way to the front of the crowd, Ren saw how the elephant’s shrunken left forefoot had pressed a curious mark in the damp red earth.
Later, when Ren entered Dr. MacFarlane’s household, he’d related the incident to the old doctor. Dr. MacFarlane had been fascinated, even writing it down in one of his notebooks, the words inked across the page in his careful copperplate. Ren hadn’t known then just how deep this interest in keramat animals would run.
A shudder travels up his spine now as he regards the tiger skin on the floor. Is this, then, the link between the old doctor and the new one? And is death now coming on soft feet, or has it roamed ahead, like a shadow set free from its owner? He hopes, desperately, that it’s merely a coincidence.
6
Falim
Saturday, June 6th
One of my mother’s conditions of boarding at Mrs. Tham’s dressmaking shop was that I would return home to Falim often. Each time I did, I brought a treat to make up for the fact that I wasn’t homesick at all. Today it was rambutans, the hairy, red-skinned fruit that snapped open to reveal a sweet white interior. They’d been selling them by the bus stop, and I’d bought a bundle wrapped in old newspaper. As I sat on the bus I rather regretted it, as the rambutans were crawling with ants.
Once, Falim had been full of vegetable gardens, but the outskirts of Ipoh were encroaching every year. Already, the tin tycoon Foo Nyit Tse had built a new housing estate as well as a grand mansion on Lahat Road that was the wonder of the neighborhood. My stepfather’s store stood in a row of narrow-fronted shophouses, their upper stories jutting out to form a shady five-foot walkway or kaki lima. Though only eighteen feet wide, it was surprisingly deep. Shin and I had once paced out its length and found it to be almost a hundred feet.
When I arrived, Ah Kum, the new girl that my stepfather had hired to replace me, was penciling notes into the ledger.
“Back today?” Ah Kum was a year older than me, a cheerful gossip with a mole beneath her right eye, like a teardrop. Some people said that such a mark meant she’d never be lucky in marriage, but Ah Kum didn’t seem bothered. In any case, I was very grateful to her. If she hadn’t started working here, I’d never have been able to leave.
“Want some?” I dumped my bundle of rambutans on the counter.
Ah Kum twisted a fruit open. “Your brother’s back.”
That was news to me. Shin was supposed to return next week. “When did he arrive?”
“Yesterday, but he’s out right now. Why didn’t you tell me he was so good-looking?”
I rolled my eyes. Shin and his female admirers. Obviously they weren’t aware of his true personality, as I’d often explained to him. But Ah Kum had only started working here after Shin left for Singapore—how was she to know, poor girl?
“If you think he’s so wonderful, you can have him!” I said, ducking as she swatted me. Our laughter was cut short by a footfall from the second floor. Suddenly sober, we glanced at each other.
“Is he in?” He could only refer to my stepfather.
She shook her head. “That’s your mother.”
I went deeper into the shophouse, inhaling the familiar dark scent of earth and metal from the stockpiled tin ore. Upstairs, shuttered windows opened over the courtyards, bringing light and air to the family quarters. This large upper room was used as a private sitting room, away from the business of the shop below. Sparsely furnished with rattan armchairs, a square card table for mahjong, and a few large sepia photographs of my stepfather’s parents, it had scarcely changed since my mother and I had moved in ten years ago. A long rosewood sideboard was covered with school trophies and ribbons. The earlier ones were equally divided between Shin and myself, but the last few, after my stepfather decided I’d been educated enough, were all Shin’s.