My friends say I can be stubborn at times. They should have known me as a child. I was more than stubborn, I was willful and, being immature, often unreasonable. Headstrong, Mother said. I doubt you’ve heard of another sixteen-year-old English girl who hunted tigers in Bengal.

Had Mother been in India at the time, she would not have allowed me to accompany my brother when, in September 1943, he took it into his head to shoot a tiger which was terrorising the villages around Khulna. She had stood her ground four years earlier and refused to take me with her to England when she’d sailed “home” to care for Granny Hester, who was ailing. I begged her to let me go. I was born in India, and at twelve I wanted more than anything to visit the homeland I had never seen. (Meeting Granny Hester interested me much less.) With Mother stuck in London for the duration of the war, I was able to browbeat Braxton into taking me along on his tiger hunt. She would have opposed my going because she did not consider tiger hunting a suitable pastime for young ladies. Daddy objected because of the danger, but he was an easy-going man, and after Mother left I quickly learned to have my way. So I was in Calcutta that August to gather the ammunition I needed to go on a tiger hunt a month later.

My family had come to India shortly after Braxton turned four. Daddy had been offered an administrative position in the Imperial Government and been assigned to Rampur, where my brother and I grew up under Mother’s thumb. Then Granny Hester fell ill, and we discovered our freedom. As his first act of rebellion, Braxton left school at seventeen to join the army. Knowing she would not have approved, Daddy kept it a secret from Mother, even when Braxton received his first commission. Then Rangoon fell to the Japanese, and his regiment was ordered to Burma, so Daddy had to tell her. He ought to have let her know sooner and prepared her for the news, since throughout the Burma campaign we suffered setback after setback, and British casualties were extremely heavy.

Daddy was transferred to Calcutta at about the same time. We took with us all our servants who were willing to go, most importantly Nirdosh, our Punjabi cook, for Daddy loathed Bengali food. I was rather partial to its tart, spicy sweetness, but thought they used too much mustard. We had a house on the outskirts of the city, with a large garden surrounded by a high wall, and the kitchen and servants’ quarters in another building. Although Daddy disliked Cal intensely because of the dirt, he took some comfort in the move, for we now lived closer to where his son was fighting. But for a long time we had no word from Braxton, and feared he had been killed or taken prisoner.

At first I found Cal exciting, unlike Daddy, until the summer monsoon came and with it the annual cholera epidemic. The disease broke out a week or so before the end of the school year, and I found myself confined to our compound once classes were over. (As if one caught cholera by breathing the foul-smelling air or I would be foolish enough to eat food I bought in the bazaar!) Daddy ordered the servants not to let me leave, knowing that I wouldn’t listen and he could trust them to obey him.

I was frightfully bored alone at home all day. My school friends had all left with their families to spend the summer in the northern highlands. I did manage one day to elude the servants’ watchful eyes and defy Daddy. Luckily, I didn’t get far. I walked for half a mile and turned back, because to my surprise I could not find a single rickshaw-wallah. If I had gone as far as the city centre, I should have seen what I saw the following year – and I was not yet fifteen!

Remaining cooped up from June to September would have killed me off as surely as the cholera. I survived because Daddy had ten days’ holiday toward the end of July, and we went with two of our servants to stay in a rented houseboat on Lake Wular near Srinagar. On our second day there I told him flatly that under no circumstances would I go back to Cal before school began.

“Nonsense, Maisie. Do you expect me to leave you here alone?”

“Rahul and Nivritti can stay here with me.”

“It’s out of the question.”

“Then send me to London.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

If I had thought for a second he could, I should never have suggested it. Mother would restrict my movements no less than the compound walls. “Then you shall have to tie me up and carry me to Cal,” I said. “Unless I run away first.”

“I’ll tell you what. If you’re that set against spending the rest of the summer in Cal, I’ll see if I can’t arrange something.”

I took that as tantamount to promising I could remain in Kashmir. Instead, he sent me to Rampur to stay with a friend of Mother’s, the insufferably tedious Lady Momser. I resolved to make my own arrangements next summer.

Helena Momser had an opinion on everything, no matter how trivial, and was convinced that if she had an opinion, it was important and worthy of expression. She said she was glad to have me, for she had not had a willing ear since her dear Neville had “passed on” some fifteen years ago. I concluded that “dear” Sir Neville either had the patience of a saint or was as deaf as a post, because she constantly bombarded one with what sounded like the same things but weren’t, inasmuch as she often contradicted herself, and she kept at it from the time she rose in the morning until she retired at eight in the evening, her mouth having exhausted itself at the dinner table from doing double duty talking and chewing.

I escaped from her whenever I could to keep company with an ancient house servant, Satyavati. Lady Momser disapproved. “I can’t imagine what it is you see in that silly, superstitious old woman,” she complained.

“I enjoy listening to her. She amuses me.”

“If you ask me, she’s much too fond of the sound of her own voice.”

This was true. Talking with Satyavati was ninety-five percent listening and five percent asking questions, and what she said was of little consequence, but it was as fascinating and varied as Lady Momser’s conversation was repetitive and dull. Like Scheherazade, Satyavati had an inexhaustible repertory of the most wonderful stories, about gods and princes and warriors and demons, and at night she told ghost stories. Those I particularly liked I wrote in my diary before I went to bed, my first attempts at authorship. They never turned out well. Without Satyavati’s raspy sing-song and the excitement that shone in her eyes, on paper they seemed a colorless compilation of sterile words.

She knew many animal stories, too. It was she who told me about the ghost tiger. It was not one of my favourites. I didn’t consider it a proper story because it had no ending. The subjects of a powerful shah petition him to rid them of a fearsome tiger who has been prowling the countryside and every night comes into a village and carries off another victim. No one is safe from the beast; it chooses men and women, young and old, the strong and the weak, as its prey. To lure the tiger to the palace where his hunters can shoot it, the shah has them tie a hind to a tree in the centre of his garden, but instead of devouring the hind, the tiger enters the palace, seizes the rani in its powerful jaws, and disappears into the forest. The hunters hear her screams and rush off in pursuit, following its tracks, paw prints as large as thalis that sink deep into the earth, wet from the monsoon rains. All night they walk. Finally, at sunrise they come to a clearing, and in the middle of the clearing the tracks come to an end. They simply vanish, though the ground is wet in all directions. And where the tracks end they find the rani’s slipper, stitched with silver thread.

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“There is no more, Miss Maisie. Didn’t you understand?”

“Did it come back and kill more people? And how could they be sure it was a tiger if nobody ever saw it? What did the shah say when the hunters brought him the rani’s slipper? And why was she wearing slippers? I thought she had gone to bed.”

In answer to my questions, Satyavati only smiled and said she hoped she hadn’t frightened me.

I didn’t feel frightened; I felt let down. It had completely slipped my mind by the time my brother heard about the man-eater, so it was not her story that determined me to go with Braxton to Khulna, nor did I remember it until I saw the slippers. My reason for wanting to go on the hunt will soon become apparent, though I am not proud of it. I want to be honest, and to be honest I must not portray myself as a well brought up, respectable young lady. I was still very much a child, and would not become a young lady for another two years. I have grown up since then, and except for the stubbornness my friends laugh at, I have nothing in common with the spoiled, petulant adolescent I was then. I do not approve of her behaviour, but neither am I ashamed of it. You know how adolescents are, and I don’t imagine anyone will think ill of me for having been one. I do not wish to minimise my shortcomings. But I may have given the impression I was rude to people. I was not. I talked back only to Daddy, and I did not make a habit of it. My criticism of Lady Momser is the acid words of an older woman trying to bring across the feelings of a disgruntled teenager. I had many good points, and was by no means an unpleasant person.

I find only one inaccuracy in what I have written so far. I did not browbeat Braxton into letting me hunt tigers. I browbeat Daddy. My brother I blackmailed.

A week before school started, Daddy sent Rahul to Rampur to escort me back to Calcutta. When Daddy asked how I had liked living with Lady Momser, I replied tartly, “Perhaps we won’t have a cholera epidemic next year. How’s Brack? Have you heard from him?”

Daddy’s face became grave. “Not since we left for Kashmir. I’ve been making inquiries. His name isn’t on the list of those killed, wounded or missing.”

“Then we’ll have news of him soon. He couldn’t have simply vanished into thin air like the rani carried off by a tiger.”

“What on earth are you talking about, Maisie?”

In mid-October we learned that Braxton’s unit had become separated from his regiment and got lost in the Burmese jungle. Daddy gave up all hope and said that even if he’d been taken prisoner he was as good as dead, but I knew in my heart that my brother was still alive.

As the end of the school year approached, it became evident that the cholera epidemic of 1943 would be the deadliest in nearly a century because of the terrible famine in Bengal. Those who didn’t die of starvation would have no resistance to disease and, unable to withstand the ravages of dehydration, they would drop like flies. My chum Isabella Chidwith came from Varanasi (the city we used to call Benares) and was a boarder at our school. I talked her into getting her parents to invite me to spend the summer holiday with them.

I brought Isabella home to meet Daddy. He did not particularly take to the idea. “Why not?” I asked.

“For one, we don’t know the Chidwiths. And conditions in Benares are not much more salubrious than here.”

“There’s no place on earth as filthy as Cal, Daddy.”

“The cholera will get there all the same. No, Maisie, I think you will be better off in the north.”

“Oh, if it comes to that we shall all move to my uncle’s house in Delhi, as we did last summer,” Isabella said.

“You see? Then that’s settled,” I announced, though Delhi was not in the highlands. And because I had said it was settled, it was.

A few days before the end of term we received a telephone call from the military. Braxton had been found and had been taken to the army hospital in Dacca, fifty pounds lighter but very much alive.

“Then he’s coming home!”

“They said nothing about his coming home.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“Because he’s in hospital. Think of it, Maisie – fifty pounds! – and his innards must be crawling with parasites.”

“I shan’t leave Cal till he gets here. He’ll need someone to take care of him.”

“I told you, Maisie, he’s not coming home that soon. They won’t let him go until he can take care of himself. You’ll spend the whole summer in the compound waiting for him.”

Daddy was wrong about Braxton but right about the cholera. It broke out in Benares a few days after the first heavy rain, and within three weeks nearly a thousand people had come down with it. The Chidwiths decided it was time to pack up and move to Delhi.

Daddy telephoned the afternoon before we were to leave. He’d received a letter from Braxton. He would have to stay another week or so in hospital, but after that he would come to Calcutta and probably stay until after Christmas.

“Good news, dear, I hope,” Mrs. Chidwith asked when I hung up.

Couldn’t she tell? I was radiant.

“The best,” I answered truthfully, and immediately started twisting that truth. “My brother’s come to Cal, but he’s very weak and needs someone to look after him. Daddy wants me home.”

“But we’re leaving for Delhi in the morning!” Mrs. Chidwith exclaimed. “Who’s to go with you? A girl your age can’t make so long a journey by train unaccompanied!”

“It’s not a very long trip. I’ll take a big tiffin tin of food and lock my compartment door, so I’ll be perfectly safe. You’ll be there to help me settle into it, and Daddy will meet me at the station. I’ll send him a telegram before I board.”

Of course I had no intention of sending a telegram and nobody met my train. I’d said it so they wouldn’t send one. If he knew I was coming, Daddy would ring up the Chidwiths and tell them to keep me with them.

I did not doubt I could easily manage by myself when I got to Cal. Europeans were invariably besieged by a swarm of boys the moment they stepped off the train, all vying to carry their bags and offering transportation. And so it was. I entrusted my suitcases to a boy – he couldn’t have been much over ten – and told him to find me a taxi. I knew some Hindi but had not learned a word of Bengali, and he didn’t speak much English. I followed him as far as the station entrance as he elbowed us a path through the crowd. Though I was more than a head taller than him, I could not have forced my way through on my own.

There were twice as many beggars in front of the station as I had ever seen there, and on the whole they were poorer, hungrier and more desperate, though some appeared to have given up hope and just sat with an outstretched hand, mouth hanging open, and looked up at you unseeing, their faces blank. The boy said, “Memsahib wait here. I get taxi-wallah.” Then he stepped over a man stretched out near us on the pavement and disappeared into the crowd.

The boy with my luggage stepped over him; everyone else walked around him, giving him a wide berth. Then two men in face masks arrived, lifted him onto a stretcher, and carried him away, and I realised he was dead.

At last the boy returned, without my luggage, and said, “Find taxi. Memsahib come.” I assumed he meant he had found one.

To my dismay, I saw my suitcases piled into the back of an open bicycle rickshaw. We lived a good fifteen miles from the station; I had carefully explained to the boy – or tried to – that I needed a motor car. The driver did not seem at all happy when I gave him the address, but as he had already loaded my bags, he told me to get in. At least it was not raining.

It took over two hours to get home with the poor driver having to pedal his full-up rickshaw all the way, and what I saw was appalling. Cal was in the grip of famine and epidemic. It had become a morgue. In the centre of the city we passed other corpses lying on the pavement like the one in front of the station, and when we got beyond the press of cars, cows and pedestrians, the dead and dying lay strewn everywhere by the roadside, some bodies floating in the open sewers. The stench was overwhelming. I would have been less frightened in a closed vehicle; in the rickshaw I felt exposed and vulnerable, and we moved very slowly. Disease and decay, death and despair, surrounded us until we reached a part of the city where only Europeans lived, two miles from my house.

The servants were surprised to see me. “Is Brack here yet?” I asked cheerfully, though I was still shaken by what I had seen on my ride from the station.

Daddy was quite angry with me. “Why did you come?” he said. “I told you your brother will be here until Christmas.”

“And I told you I wanted to be here to greet him. I’m quite content to remain in the compound. I shan’t be bored with Brack to keep me company.”

Braxton arrived a week and a half later, and with him an Indian friend whom he introduced as Acintya, a sepoy assigned to him as some sort of aide when he received his commission. I never understood exactly what his duties were supposed to be.

Acintya caught Daddy off guard. He was surprised to have an Indian guest who was not some high official, and even more surprised that his son had befriended one, which was, to say the least, unconventional. He wasn’t put out, just surprised. Braxton explained that Acintya had saved his life. He could not have survived eight months in the jungle without him.

“Of course your friend is welcome,” Daddy said. “How long will he be staying?”

“Until I leave.”

“So long? I meant, what about his family?”

“They’re all Congress Party, and will have nothing to do with him because he’s fighting for us British.”

“Well, I shall give him the room next to yours.”

I thought it wonderful that Braxton had an Indian friend whom he treated as an equal. I was proud my brother had the courage of his convictions and did not share the narrow-minded colour prejudice of the English in India, which had so grated on me when I lived with Lady Momser. I liked Acintya very much. He treated me like a grownup, which my brother never had, but now Brack followed his example. Acintya was jolly and remarkably intelligent, though he had not had much by way of education. He spoke excellent English, yet his accent and manner were typically Indian. He seemed quite comfortable in our English household, which for him must have been an unfamiliar situation. Most Indians of his station would have felt awkward. In time I came to see that it was because he felt at home with Braxton.

On top of that, Acintya was handsome, with medium-dark skin and very straight, black hair. He had regular features, large, brown eyes, and gleaming white teeth – a full set, unusual in an Indian. I liked his mustache, not cut handlebar style like a Sikh’s, but thin, like an Englishman of my brother’s generation, which gave him a distinguished look. He was tall and quite thin, like Braxton, who we’d been told had lost over fifty pounds, though he had regained some of it and appeared to be in good health. Both had the excellent posture of soldiers, and I thought them very masculine.

Here I am going on and on about Acintya, and barely a word about my brother! One would think I had a crush on him, and maybe I did. But it isn’t easy for me to describe my brother at twenty, because when I try to visualise him, I see him as he is now, paunchy and balding. He has made his home in India, and visits England once in five years at most. The autumn of 1943, besides being terribly thin (emaciated, Daddy said), Braxton had the same light brown hair I had, but cut so short one couldn’t see it curled. He had hazel eyes, small ears, a rather long nose, an infectious smile, a square chin, broad shoulders, and large, strong-looking hands. In short, good looking but ordinary, except that he went around with a black man (as we called them then) and they seemed quite chummy together, a thing which simply wasn’t done in pre-Independence India. Nowadays no one would raise an eyebrow.

As you can tell from my descriptions, I am an observant person. It did not take me long to discover that Acintya went to Braxton’s room every night after the others had gone to bed, and they stayed up till all hours chatting. That’s how close they were. One night I woke up very late. (Early, rather – it was close to five in the morning.) I felt hungry, and thought I would go to the dining room and take a piece of fruit from the bowl on the table. As I was opening my bedroom door, I saw Braxton’s swing open across from mine. I quickly shut my door all but a crack and put my eye to it.

The men came out of the room and stood in the doorway. The lamp was on in his bedroom, so I saw them clearly, though the corridor was dark as pitch. Acintya was wearing the clothes he’d worn at dinner, Braxton just his pyjama bottoms. Were they just going to bed now? At five in the morning?

“Goodnight, Tiger,” Braxton said, and they kissed, my brother rubbing up against his friend’s groin while Acintya slipped his hands down the back of Braxton’s pyjama and squeezed his buttocks. Then Braxton closed the door, and I heard Acintya tiptoe next door into his own room.

Curiously, I was not shocked; but I was definitely intrigued, if not thrilled to discover my brother was homosexual. And with an Indian lover, no less – how thoroughly unconventional! Of course I would not tell a soul, but I couldn’t help but drop a hint to Braxton that I had seen them. It was a subtle hint, too subtle for him to pick up. When I found myself alone with him for a moment the next day, I asked him what he called Acintya.

He looked at me, puzzled. “Why, Acintya, of course. What else would I call him?”

“I mean a pet name, like Sinti. Something like that.”

Braxton stared at me in disbelief and asked, “Are you daft?”

“Why wouldn’t you have a pet name for him? He’s your best friend, isn’t he? I’ve heard him call you Brack.”

“Brack isn’t a pet name. It’s my real name, clipped. Lots of people call me that.”

“What’s wrong with pet names anyway? Maisie is a pet name for Margaret.”

“You aren’t a Margaret. You were baptised Maisie. And there’s nothing wrong with pet names. Men just don’t use them with each other. I suppose I could call him Sinti, but I don’t, and if I did, it would be a nickname, not a pet name.”

Just then Acintya came into the room. “Would you believe?” Braxton said. “Maisie just asked if I called you Sinti.”

Acintya laughed. “Did she? Well, she can call me Sinti if she likes. I don’t mind.”

I must insist that my fascination with my brother’s sexuality was neither unhealthy nor prurient. I wasn’t curious to know what they did; it was merely a novelty. A romantic novelty, to be sure, but romantic like in the cinema, which was not as overtly sexual as today. Sex didn’t enter into it. I harboured no incestuous desires for Braxton, neither did I feel jealous of Sinti, as I called him from then on. Yes, I did feel a bit naughty, but in the sense that I felt I had been let in on an exciting secret, and become a kind of conspirator.

I might have reacted differently if I had been a boy or if I idolised Braxton, but I didn’t idolise him. He was my brother and we were very close – I believe he was my favourite person in the whole world – but idolise him? No. I knew him too well for that. As for Sinti, I thought him charming and extremely beautiful. If my brother was the kind of man who took a male lover, he could not have chosen a better. I was happy for them both.

Toward the middle of August Braxton came across a short article in the paper about a marauding tiger in the vicinity of Khulna. Some half-dozen times it had found its way into a house in one of the native villages, killed someone – not just young children and the old and feeble, either, but grown men and women in their prime – and dragged him or her into the forest. The villagers would go in search of the victim and find the half-eaten body less than a mile from where they lived. They speculated that it had acquired a taste for human flesh by feeding on the corpses of those who had died of cholera or famine. The Lieutenant-Governor had set an unusually high bounty on the animal: twenty-five hundred rupees to the man who killed it.

“I’d like to shoot that tiger,” Braxton said. “It would be my first.”

“Why not,” Sinti agreed, “if someone else doesn’t get to it first? But someone probably will.”

“If nobody’s killed it by the end of the monsoon, we’ll go.”

I asked where Khulna was. I had never heard of it.

“In East Bengal, not all that far from here, on the mouths of the Ganges,” Braxton said. “But it isn’t easy to get to.”

My sixteenth birthday wasn’t far off, and a day or two later Braxton asked me what I wanted for a gift. Without thinking, I answered, “To come with you when you go to shoot that tiger.” The idea simply popped into my head out of nowhere. I surprised even myself.

“You must be joking. You’d only get in the way.”

“How would I get in the way? You could use me as bait.”

“Now I know you’re joking.”

That night at the dinner table Braxton announced, “You’ll never guess what Maisie wants for her birthday. She wants to go tiger hunting.”

“With you?” Daddy asked. “In Khulna? Are you serious?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked.

“For one, hunting tigers is about the most dangerous activity there is, and you don’t know how to use a gun.”

“I could learn.”

“What about school?”

“I’m at the top of my form, and can afford to take a week off. Many girls do when their mothers have to go somewhere, now that their fathers are off fighting in the army. You could write a letter explaining I’ve gone on a tiger hunt.”

“Miss Jensen would never believe it. She’d think you forged it as a joke. Besides, Khulna is close to the Burmese border. What would happen if the Japanese launched an invasion?”

“That isn’t going to happen,” Braxton said, “and it isn’t all that close to the border. It couldn’t be more than a hundred miles from Cal.”

“As the crow flies.”

“And Mandalay is more than five times as far, as the crow flies, with jungles and mountains in between. They’re not going to surprise us in Khulna.”

“I still won’t let her.”

Braxton shrugged. “I told her it was impossible.”

If everyone had not opposed the idea, I would probably have changed my mind. I could think of any number of lovely gifts that would have given more pleasure. But, like all stubborn people, I do not like to be thwarted. I cornered Braxton after dinner and said, “If you don’t take me on that hunt, I'll tell Daddy you’re sleeping with Sinti.”

“You’ll what?” Braxton exclaimed at the top of his voice. Then, lowering it to a whisper, he said, “You know?”

“You see I do. I don’t mind. In fact, I think it’s smashing. You make a lovely couple. Daddy, however, would not see it that way.”

“You wouldn’t really tell him, would you?” he asked in a broken voice.

“I don’t know. I might.”

“Well, it’s far from certain we will go, and it wouldn’t be until after your birthday. Can you think of anything else you want?”

“Surprise me,” I said.

The next day Sinti said to me, “You know, Maisie, you’re a very unusual girl.”

“Unusual enough to go tiger hunting?”

He laughed. “Well, maybe not that unusual. You know what I mean.” And he gave me a kiss. On the cheek – not the way he’d kissed Braxton.

The moon would give its most light the third week in September, though there was a good chance of its being obscured by clouds. On the seventh, a Tuesday, Braxton, Sinti and I set out for Khulna. Knowing they would not let me go with them into the jungle, I took enough books to occupy me for two weeks. I could see from the train that famine and disease, infinitely more deadly than tigers, had taken their toll in the countryside as they had in Calcutta.

The tiger was still on the loose, and by now was responsible for the deaths of at least ten people. It was not actually in Khulna, but east of it. It had made its last kill at a village about ten miles away. A few miles from there in a forest clearing was a small hunting lodge. Braxton obtained the key, and we made it our base camp, just the three of us.

The ground floor of the lodge was composed of a common room, simply furnished, and small attached kitchen, and on the floor above, of two bedrooms, both with shuttered doors about ten feet wide giving onto the same narrow balcony with a plaster balustrade. A thick, bushy shrub like a small tree had been placed in a heavy brass flower pot on either side of both doors for decoration. Each bedroom contained two beds hung with mosquito netting, two chairs, a table, and an oil lamp. There was no indoor toilet.

The men would spend the day in the forest searching for the tiger, while my job was to stay in the lodge and cook their meals, and, as in Cal for the last two summers, I was forbidden to set foot outside except to use the latrine. Not exactly my idea of a birthday present!

I told them I thought one hunted for tigers at night. Hadn’t we chosen when to come by the phases of the moon?

But Sinti said that a nighttime hunt would be too dangerous; they had no experience with tigers – his excuse for spending their nights more enjoyably.

“We’ll tie a goat to that tree and hope it comes to us,” Braxton said. “I won’t leave you alone here at night.”

That tree was about twenty yards from the balcony, and the goat bleated half the night. It did not keep me from falling asleep, however. Braxton and Sinti did. The wall between our bedrooms was very thin.

In the middle of the night after we’d been there a few days, the goat, which had stopped bleating a couple of hours earlier, started again, more insistently than before. I took one of my books, the one that had bored me the most, with the idea of flinging it at the goat to make it shut up, and stepped onto the balcony, for some reason closing the shutters behind me.

The moon, approaching the full, bathed the clearing in front of our balcony in soft silver light. The goat was clearly visible. I took aim and threw my book at it, hitting it squarely on the head, and it shut up. At that moment, an enormous tiger emerged from the shadow of the trees. It paid no attention to the mute, terrified goat, but came to stand under the balcony, its hungry, yellow eyes staring up at me. Then it began pacing back and forth beneath me, like a caged animal, a rumbling deep in its throat like a cat’s purring, only louder and lower in pitch, like the bottom string of a contrabass. It looked powerful enough to leap onto the balcony in a single bound.

Terrified, I turned to hurry back into my room and bolt the shutters behind me, but I couldn’t open them, my hands were trembling so. Then the tiger let out a deafening roar, like the lion at the opening of an MGM film, and I foolishly and futilely took refuge behind one of the potted trees.

The shutters of the men’s room flew open. Braxton rushed out onto the balcony, stark naked and barefoot, and Sinti followed a few seconds later, equally naked but wearing black velveteen slippers with silver stitching and tiny white beads arranged in a spiral pattern. They stood at the balustrade, their backs turned toward me, looking out into the clearing. Side by side, their bums glowed in the soft light like twin moons, a shadowy line running down the middle of each, one pale white like at the full, the other a burnished rust as in a lunar eclipse.

Braxton said in a loud half-whisper, “Was it the tiger? Did you see it?”

“No, you got here before I did. But it sounded like a tiger, and very close, too.”

“Why didn’t it eat the goat?”

“Maybe we scared it off. Do you think Maisie heard it?”

“No, she’d be out here if she had.”

“Good gracious! And see us like this?”

“Don’t worry,” Braxton said, “she sleeps like a log.” Then, lowering his voice, he added, “But she might wake up if we go on talking like this.”

Sinti sighed. “I could use a cigarette.”

“I’ll get the pack.”

Braxton went into the room and returned with cigarettes and a box of matches. They lit up and leant with their backs against the balustrade in full view of me. I was no longer frightened; the tiger was gone. However, I could not leave my hiding place without embarrassing them. I kept still as a mouse, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. I felt I ought to shut my eyes, but I didn’t. They were absolutely beautiful. It now made perfect sense to me why they loved sleeping together. I wondered why any man would prefer a woman. Perhaps men didn’t, and their hatred of homosexuals was their unconscious way of not acknowledging what they really wanted.

I know now that’s nonsense. Since then I have seen a good number of naked men nobody would want to sleep with. But this was the first view I’d had of grown men naked. Until then I had only seen little boys. Of course I had seen statues, but statues don’t count. The penis on a statue – Greek and Renaissance statues – is smaller than in real life. It doesn’t move with the rest of the body, either. It looks like a dead thing, while a living man’s penis seems even more alive and independent than the other parts of his body, except perhaps his hands. When he walks it swings between his legs in rhythm with his stride.

They finished their cigarettes. Braxton said, “Shall we put on pyjamas, get the torch, and go see if it left any tracks?”

It was about time; my legs had started to cramp. I waited a moment before taking a last look into the clearing. Now that the danger had passed, the goat stood contentedly munching the book I had flung at it. Would they notice and figure out I had seen them? I heard them open the door under the balcony and step out of the lodge. I was afraid they would hear me if I tried pulling open my shutters, so I went through their room to get to mine.

One bed, where they obviously slept (close to each other – it was fairly narrow) had two pillows on it. The other, reserved for another purpose, was a tangle of crumpled sheets. I went and stood next to it. It smelled of male sweat and another, unfamiliar odour I supposed must be semen. I put my hand on the sheets. They were cold. The men had been sleeping in the other bed when the tiger roared. Brushing the sheets with my hand, my fingers landed in a sticky puddle. I quickly wiped them dry on my nightgown, tiptoed from their room, opened the door to mine, and went downstairs to join the others.

“What’s going on?” I said. “What are you doing out here in your pyjamas?”

“And why are you out here in your nightgown?” Braxton replied.

“The tiger was here,” Sinti said, shining his torch over the ground, “and it stayed a long time. See, it left tracks everywhere.”

“Then why didn’t it eat the goat?” Braxton asked. “It had plenty of time before it heard us.”

Sinti answered, “No doubt it picked up our scent and was wary.”

“Or it’s lost interest in goats now that it’s tasted human flesh,” I said.

I don’t think Braxton heard us. He was distracted, puzzling over the goat. “What’s that stupid beast eating?” he asked, and continued to watch the goat.

“Oh, no!” I gasped. “It looks like one of my books! How ever did it get hold of it? I hope it isn’t one I like.”

“You’ll have to look through the others to find out,” Sinti laughed. “There go the last pages.”

“The tiger – do you think it will come back?”

“Not tonight, not even if goat is its favourite meal. Let’s go inside and get back to bed. We have a big day ahead of us.”

“A big day? How so?” Braxton asked, finally turning his attention from the goat.

“We’re going to follow the tracks and see if they lead us to the tiger. We’ll need to get an early start.”

“And leave me alone with a man-eater lurking close by? Not until you teach me to use a gun!”

“A tiger rifle would knock you backward twenty yards, and you’d probably miss by just as far,” Braxton sneered.

“But I’d frighten it off, wouldn’t I? It ran away, and all you did was come out onto the balcony.” For a moment I feared I had given myself away. How would I have known they’d been on the balcony? But they didn’t notice.

“I’ll teach you in the morning,” Sinti promised. “It won’t take but a few minutes. Hitting your target is another matter.”

No doubt some readers will call me a precocious, lascivious, filthy-minded, shameless girl. Let them look to themselves. Have they stopped reading? What did I have to be ashamed of? I didn’t ask to see them naked. They caught me by surprise. What should I have done? Faint? A euphuistic fiction, the stuff of moralising, puritanical novels. Avert my eyes? What normal adolescent girl would pass up a chance to gaze at a naked man undetected and in safety? Sixteen-year-old Maisie did not compose that miniature ode to a man’s penis, I did; and if I find them attractive, well, I’m old enough to know what I like, and if I want to see one I don’t have to snoop around the neighbourhood or go peering through people’s windows with binoculars. I’m not a voyeur.

Had it been only my brother, I would have turned my face away and told him to cover up. But Sinti was there, too, and you can’t imagine what a gorgeous man he was. And there were two of them, and they were lovers! A man’s body had begun to lose its mystery (but not its glamour) and I was curious to learn more. No wonder I wanted to drink in every detail!

But perhaps there was more to it than that. I knew my behaviour was more than wrong; it was scandalous. Could it be I was starved for attention, and had been ever since Daddy had made me stay at home my first summer in Cal? Maybe I missed Mother’s discipline. Maybe I didn’t trust my ability to control myself, and was crying out for someone to take me in hand and force me to shape up, which is another way of saying I craved attention. If Daddy wasn’t up to the task, then perhaps my brother was.

The men came to wake me at dawn. Sinti taught me to shoot, standing behind me so the recoil wouldn’t knock me down. With his hands on my upper arms and my back pressed against his body, feeling his warmth and firm muscles, I found it hard to concentrate on his instruction, instead remembering him naked in the moonlight, leaning back on the balustrade and smoking.

They followed the tracks into the forest, and didn’t return until the sun had begun to set. All day I was nervous, expecting the tiger to come back for me. It had ignored the goat completely and fixed its eyes on me.

I had worked myself into such a state that I told the men I was afraid to sleep alone. I wanted Braxton in my room, or, better yet, both of them.

“You’re perfectly safe indoors,” Braxton reassured me.

“But the tiger got into people’s houses. That’s where he killed them.”

Sinti was more to the point. “You know we don’t just sleep in our bedroom,” he said.

Braxton was shocked. “Acintya! That girl is my sister. She knows we’re lovers, but it sounds as though you were inviting her to imagine what we do in bed. I don’t like it. It’s obscene.”

“I’m sure it isn’t obscene,” I protested. “What I imagine you do is very tender, very —”

“What we do isn’t obscene. Imagining it is,” he snapped.

They agreed to move one of the beds into my room so there would be three. “The one for sleeping,” I thought. Surely they intended to put the other to use after I had fallen asleep.

The men went into their room to change into pyjamas while I got into my nightgown. To see if I was right, I pretended to fall asleep almost immediately and slowed my breathing, counting to keep it regular.

They waited a few minutes; then Braxton whispered, “Maisie?”

He repeated his question in a louder whisper. “Don’t wake her,” Sinti said.

I heard them get quietly out of bed, and watched them tiptoe from the room through half-closed lids. They were both barefoot, but Sinti carried his slippers. I wondered if the rani’s slipper in Satyavati’s story had some sexual connotation I didn’t understand and which in her eyes made the story complete. (To this day I don’t know the answer to that, but Sinti had his slippers on when they returned over an hour later. On the other hand, they’d been asleep, not making love, when the tiger roared.)

The sounds of their lovemaking started as soon as they got to their room. Because I strained my ears, I could even hear them kiss. For a long time all I heard was the smacking of lips, gurgles, and whispers. I couldn’t make out the words. Then a low, drawn-out moan came through the wall. It sounded like Braxton stretching a crick out of his back. I tried to figure out exactly what they were doing. The twisted sheets I had seen on their bed of passion made me imagine something akin to wrestling. Their loud grunts and the rhythmic creaking of the bedsprings confirmed my impression. I had no difficulty visualising them doing it naked.

The creaking suddenly ended in a deep sigh. A couple of minutes later I heard them open the door to the balcony. I got out of bed to see if they’d gone for another naked smoke. They were smoking, but in pyjama bottoms. Sinti had his slippers on.

It did not disappoint me not to see them again with nothing on. I loved watching their intimacy, seeing them affectionate together, leaning into each other and caressing one another above the waist; and for that half-clothed was as good as naked. I am not exaggerating when I use the word ‘love’. It melted my heart.

I continued to look at them while they finished their cigarettes. Braxton said, “It’s a pity we can’t sleep together.”

“Why shouldn’t we?” Sinti asked. “Do you think she’d mind?”

“No, but it would be embarrassing to ask.”

“Then we won’t ask. We’ll get into bed, and in the morning she’ll find us sleeping together, and that will be that.”

“You have an answer to everything, Tiger.”

They kissed, as I’d seen them do in the dark corridor at home, only they held on to it longer. Sinti slowly sank to his knees, kissing a path down Braxton’s chest as he did, and pulling his pyjama bottoms to his knees. Braxton was leaning against the balustrade and Sinti’s head blocked my view, but I could see that he was lifting Braxton’s penis to his mouth. I felt like an intruder, and turned to go back to bed, but the lip-smacking and gurgles had cleared up an earlier mystery.

I woke briefly when they came back to my room. I mumbled something about a tiger. “No tiger, Maisie,” Braxton said as I drifted back into sleep.

In the morning I found them asleep in each other’s arms, Sinti’s slippers arranged neatly by the side of their bed. These slippers, which I imagined identical to those the rani had worn, had begun to interest me almost as much as his anatomy. I gave no thought to Braxton’s. It seemed to me that, having seen him once in the altogether, if I ran into him nude I would have taken it in stride, as though a brother and sister had nothing to hide from one another. I was deceiving myself. Had he seen me with nothing on, I would have died of shame.

I took my clothes and went to change in their room, and then downstairs to wash and fix breakfast.

That night set the pattern for the next two, except that they got into one bed after they’d put on their pyjamas and only wore the bottoms. They went outside for a smoke again the next night, but came in right after their goodnight kiss. I almost think I might have watched if they’d done more this time. They didn’t make it as far as the balcony the night after – not for a smoke.

The men stayed at the lodge with me during the day, because, they said, I was afraid to be left alone, but I had the impression they had given up on the tiger. I couldn’t think why they didn’t say we should pack up and go home. It occurred to me the possibility that I was listening to them making love in the next room excited them. What other explanation could there be? Clearly they made no attempt to stifle their noises, and every night it went on longer.

On the third night after I’d seen the tiger, we stayed up in bed talking quietly together. Sinti told us about his family, whom he had not seen since the beginning of the war. He said that he, too, looked forward to India’s independence, but his countrymen were in error not to distinguish between their friends and their enemies, even if they didn’t like everything their friends did, and that as a soldier he had a duty to the army. He had a deep-seated conviction that independence would come after the war, and he would be reconciled with his family when it did.

Braxton said he thought India had more than earned her independence, but he would be sorry to see it happen. Sinti asked why, and Braxton replied that for him independence would mean leaving India, and therefore leaving him.

“You really do love each other very much, don’t you,” I said.

“Yes,” Sinti answered, “and I think you’re a remarkable girl to understand. You can’t imagine how good it feels not having to dissemble.”

“I saw you kiss once,” I lied. “Since there’s no one here but us, there’s no reason for you to wait until you’re alone to kiss... or hold hands, or touch each other... things like that. Why shouldn’t two men be able to do those things if boys and girls in love with each other do?”

“Not in India they don’t,” Sinti said.

“Nor in England,” Braxton observed. “She gets it from the pictures. When have you ever seen a couple being affectionate in public, Maisie? Of course we’d like to, but old habits die hard.”

“It’s a stupid rule. I see you two sleeping in each other’s arms when I wake up in the morning, and it makes me feel warm inside.”

“Then starting tomorrow we shall kiss and hold hands while we’re here,” Braxton said. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Tiger?”

Sinti gave a little laugh. “I hope we can control ourselves!”

Braxton had called him Tiger. Had he done it without thinking or to show he would be more open in expressing his love, both in words and gestures? Did they know I had been watching them through the shutters? And Sinti’s little jest about controlling themselves – was it a subtle invitation to me to see more?

I dozed off while we were chatting. When I awoke they were gone, and the slippers were not by their bedside. By then I was sure I knew what they did, but I had no idea what role the slippers played in their lovemaking. Curiosity, they say, killed the cat. That night my curiosity was just as lethal, but in another way.

I listened to them making love, and could tell by the sounds they would be at it a good deal longer. I got out of bed and opened the shutters onto the balcony, carefully, so as to make less noise than they. It would be dark in their room, but the moon was bright enough to cast lines of light onto their bed so I might see something if I peered through the slats.

The tiger stood in the centre of the clearing, its gaze fixed on the balcony. The goat ignored it. It must have figured out the tiger had come back for me. Silently, I went back into my room and then downstairs to the common room, where we kept the rifles. I loaded one, and started up to the balcony. Wouldn’t it be a laugh if I killed the tiger?

I stopped halfway up the stairs. What if the tiger had leapt into my room and was waiting in ambush for me? Or perhaps it was loose in some other part of the lodge.

I proceeded cautiously, holding my breath. The tiger had not moved from its spot. I took aim and fired. The recoil threw me back against the wall, but even as I fell I kept my eye on my target. The tiger ran off into the jungle. I had missed and shot the goat.

Braxton and Sinti came running out onto the balcony, naked. Their penises did not swing freely between their legs, but stuck straight out and waggled as they ran.

They saw me standing there with the rifle in my hand. I felt I had to say something about their state of undress. “Your pyjamas!” I exclaimed, trying to sound surprised.

“I don’t think about modesty when you might be in danger,” Braxton said without a trace of embarrassment. “Are you all right?”

It didn’t seem to bother him a bit that I was seeing him naked, but Sinti clasped his hands over his groin. He would have covered up more effectively by taking off a slipper to hang on his protruding member!

“Don’t be such a prude, Tiger,” Braxton told him. “She’s seen what she’s seen, and Maisie’s a big girl.”

Sinti removed his hands, but I could see he felt self-conscious.

“It was the tiger, wasn’t it?” Braxton went on. “Did you kill it?”

“No,” I giggled. “I shot the goat.”

Sinti burst out laughing and continued to laugh until he nearly choked and the tears were rolling down his cheeks.

“Let’s go down and have a look,” Braxton said.

We went downstairs and out of the lodge, me in my nightgown and the men in nothing, Sinti trying only half successfully to hold back his laughter.

We stood in a semicircle looking down at the goat. I had hit it right between the eyes.

“Good shot, Maisie,” Braxton said. “At least one of us has bagged something on this hunt.”

Sinti started laughing again. We were all laughing. He forgot about being self-conscious.

“I can’t wait to tell Dad about this,” Braxton teased.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off Sinti. So he wouldn’t think I was staring at him (though I was), I shifted my gaze back and forth between him and Braxton, but it was Sinti I was looking at. My brother didn’t seem to mind much, but I was afraid Sinti would. I didn’t want him going inside to cover up, so I said, as if I’d been looking at something else, “Sinti, your slippers are lovely. May I see them?”

“They’re nothing special, just ordinary Indian slippers.” But he took them off and gave them to me.

“It’s a beautiful pattern,” I told him. “Is there some special significance to it?”

“None that I know of,” he said, taking back the slippers. Then he went on, “I’ll butcher the goat in the morning before we go after the cat. You won’t have to cook for us tomorrow, Maisie. We’ll come back early and I’ll make us an Indian barbecue. Whole goat roasted on a spit.”

“We’d better get it inside then,” Braxton said, “and not leave it for the tiger.”

The men lifted the goat, each holding two legs in one hand, and brought it into the kitchen. Sinti used his free hand to carry his slippers. As we passed the table, he dropped them onto it.

We locked up and went up to the bedroom. Braxton reached for his pyjama bottom, but I said, “You needn’t sleep in them, you realise. I’ve seen all there is to see, and I know you’d prefer to lie in bed together naked.”

He tossed the pyjama aside, and, to my surprise, they kissed before getting into bed.

I awoke early. Sinti was lying on his stomach, his arm across Braxton’s chest. I could see by the lump under the sheet that Braxton had an erection. I quietly went into their room to get into my clothes. Then I came back and sat on my bed with a book, wondering what would transpire when they woke.

Sinti woke up first. He started to get out of bed; then, seeing he was naked, he got back in and covered his lap with the sheet. He looked sheepishly at me. I smiled. Then he remembered, got out of the bed, and strolled across the room to dress next door, doing his best to appear unconcerned. Braxton, who had woken up in the meantime, followed.

Sinti was very efficient at butchering, and made a quick job of it. They were ready to go tracking by nine o’clock. I went upstairs to read, leaving the front door open.

Towards midday I had the idea of making some Indian bread to go with the roast goat. I went to the kitchen, got flour, salt and oil, and brought them to the table in the common room. I needed water from the outside pump. I looked up and saw the tiger standing in the doorway.

We had three rifles. The men had taken two of them. Not daring to move, I cast my eyes about the room, looking for the other. Then I remembered. I had left it on the balcony.

The tiger had not moved. I seized the first thing that came to hand – one of Sinti’s slippers – and flung it at the tiger, hitting it in the face. I screamed, certain it would attack. Instead, it picked up the slipper in its mouth and went back into the forest. I stood in place a moment or two, felt my knees give way, grabbed at the table for support, and fainted.

I expect no one will believe I chased away a tiger with a slipper, or that it passed up a meal of English girl for Indian footwear. I am no less certain that my readers will have concluded my brother was an exhibitionist or at best a repressed nudist, and that it’s no surprise his sister was a brazen hussy with a dirty mind, and that my cock-and-bull story about a tiger is little more than an excuse for writing about naked men parading their wares in front of little girls harbouring incestuous desires. Let them think what they wish. It all happened exactly as I said, and I think it makes a lovely story.

When I came to, I made my breads and put them aside to rise. The men were back at the lodge by mid-afternoon. I did not tell them I had seen the tiger. In fact, it hit me that I was the only one who had seen it, and that I’d seen it three times. I knew it wouldn’t come back. Not because it was content to have a slipper as a souvenir – because three is a magic number.

Braxton went outside to prepare the fire pit while Sinti nosed about the kitchen to see what spices were available for seasoning the goat. They stocked the usual: pepper, cumin, coriander, chilies, garlic, and so forth. He saw one slipper lying on the table, and said, “I must have forgotten them here last night. What happened to the other?”

I assured him it had to be somewhere.

After the goat roasted slowly over the coals for five hours, we feasted. We left the cleaning-up for the next morning. Sinti brought the remaining slipper with him up to our bedroom.

I thought we would stay up talking again. I had planned on asking them how they fell in love, but they simply undressed and walked hand in hand to the other bedroom, Sinti carrying the one slipper. They stayed there all night.

We stayed on three more days and two nights to wait for the tiger that I knew would not come before returning to Khulna. They were disappointed we had not shot the tiger, but said it had made no kills while we were at the lodge. While waiting for our train, I bought Sinti a replacement pair of slippers from a vendor on the platform, much like the others, but in a rich reddish burgundy with gold filament.

We had spent our last days at the lodge chatting, telling stories and playing games. The weather turned very hot and the men no longer bothered to dress. They washed naked at the outdoor pump, laughing and splashing one another, but I don’t think my brother was showing off. He liked being naked with Sinti, and since I didn’t mind, he seized the opportunity. In his eyes, I was still a child. Sinti, on the other hand, must have seen me as a woman, but he felt obliged to follow his lover’s example.

They always went discreetly into the lodge when it was my turn to bathe, and at bedtime they would bid me goodnight and go to their love room with Sinti’s slipper. They only stayed there all night once. The other mornings I woke to find them sleeping peacefully side by side in my room without a sheet to cover them. Even the nights were hot.

It was so hot that we could only have goat sandwiches for lunch the day after our barbecue. By nightfall the meat had gone bad. We tossed the carcass into the fire pit and filled it up with dirt.

Our last morning I brought down the bedding to leave by the door as we had been instructed. For the first time the men were embarrassed when they saw me carrying the stained sheets of their passion. Perhaps I was not quite successful at hiding my distaste.

I had become so used to seeing naked men (that is, those men naked) that after we got back to Cal I often came to Braxton’s room in my nightgown, and we’d sit together on the bed and laugh and tell jokes. I didn’t have to knock. I would put my ear to the door first to hear whether they were doing something a girl my age ought not to see. I did once catch them fondling one another, but that’s not too serious.

What would Daddy have said if he knew! (If Mother had been there we should all have kept to our own rooms.) On the other hand, he did have a lot to say about how I shot the goat. It became his favorite story. He couldn’t hear it often enough, and loved telling it to friends. He wrote Mother a long letter about it. She wrote him a longer reply, scolding him for having allowed me to hunt a tiger. Of course my classmates and teachers wanted to know all about the hunt. I wrote a paper about it, leaving out everything that had to do with naked men. They all loved it, and it was printed in the school literary review, my first published work.

After Christmas, Braxton and Sinti went back to their unit. They fought in the invasion of Burma and survived. Sinti went on living with us. Daddy said he had become one of the family. He called him Sinti, like me. Braxton called him Tiger. As a joke, Daddy started calling me Goat. The name stuck until we got back to England and Mother forbade him to use it.

We left a few weeks before India officially became independent. I have never returned. Braxton went back fifteen years later, after Daddy died, and, as you know, he still lives there. He is not with Sinti; they haven’t been a couple since we left India. Braxton has another Indian lover now, a man I met once and did not care for. He had that condescending attitude toward women so many Indian men have.

Sinti married a bride his family chose for him, and fathered seven children. I wish they were mine, but my brother would never have forgiven me if I had stolen Sinti from him. Braxton visited him once, and met his family. Together he and Braxton told the story of how I shot the goat. The children thought it very funny. Their mother shook her head and said I must be a very brave woman.

Several years later Sinti’s wife wrote my brother to tell him her husband had been killed by a tiger while on an administrative tour of Bengal. He spent the night at a village rest house, and the tiger pushed open the door and attacked him.

Do you think it was after his slippers?

THE END

---