of Luca’s, or rape by some unnamed villager, and that the baby had been there before the tiger had come to Galina’ (p. 220). Instead, he longs for his Shere Khan, both real and imagined, and wonders why the villagers cannot understand that the cold, hungry tiger means no harm, that he sees ‘the girl as she had seen him: without judgment, fear, foolishness, and somehow the two of them understood each other without exchanging a single sound’ (p. 220). When the girl doesn’t come, the tiger waits. He agonizes when he has to go ‘a week without the warmth of the village and the smokehouse smell of her hair, though he had found faint traces of her in the air now and then, almost always at night’ (p. 261). When the pain of separation could no longer be borne, ‘Once or twice he had gone to her, had tracked her down in the blackness of the trees, but she had always led him back’ (p. 261). Can this tender story of a woman and a tiger—interspecies love, as it were— have a conventionally happy ending? Of one thing we can be sure: male, but not human, and entirely unschooled in the gendered rituals of ‘civilized’ society, the tiger is able to love, to surrender, and to wait, with the fullness and humanity that perhaps only an animal sometimes can. […]
Debotri Dhar
Dr. Debotri Dhar is an author, editor, essayist, novelist, columnist, educator, and world traveler. Her books, scholarly and fiction, include the essay collection Love is Not a Word: The Culture and Politics of Desire (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2020), edited with introduction; her single-authored Postcards from Oxford: Stories of Women and Travel (London, Kolkata); The Best Asian Short Stories 2018 (Singapore, Kitaab, 2018; judged and edited with introduction); the novel The Courtesans of Karim Street (New Delhi: Niyogi, 2015); Education and Gender (Bloomsbury Academic: New York, London, New Delhi; edited with introduction), among several others. Her stories such as "A Flute Called Radha" (Penguin Random House), "Meeting Sabita" (Every Day Fiction), "Snakes" (Honourable Mention, Glimmer Train) and others have been published in literary magazines and anthologies worldwide. Debotri is the founder of the Hummingbird Global Writers' Circle, a transnational literary traveling initiative to foster a love of books and ideas, cultural exchange, and global understanding through free themed readings with local communities. Dr. Dhar earned a Masters' degree in Women's Studies, with distinction, from Oxford University, a PhD in Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, and currently teaches Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 121
