Once, a tigress, Baghini, on her deathbed told her husband, the tiger Bagh, “I am leaving behind two small cubs. Look after them well.”
After Baghini passed away, Bagh thought, “How will I do it all? Manage the household and also look after the two cubs?”
His friends were quick to advise, “Remarry. Everything will fall into place.”
Bagh thought it was a good idea too, “I will not marry a Baghini this time. I will get a human girl for myself. I have heard that they are good cooks.”
So Bagh set off for the village to find a suitable bride for himself. There, in one household, lived a young girl and her brother with their parents. Bagh abducted the girl, brought her home, showed her to his two cubs, and said, “See now, this is your mother.”
Both immediately retorted, “No tail, no sharp teeth, no stripes, no fur – how can she be our mother? It will be better if we can kill her and then feast upon her.”
“I warn you,” Bagh growled at his cubs, “if you talk like that, I will tear you two into tiny pieces.”
Their father’s anger forced the cubs to quieten, but in reality, they could never tolerate the girl and would often threaten her, “Let us grow up a little. We will be stronger, and then we will feast upon you.”
The poor girl. How do I even express her plight? She would howl and cry whenever she was alone at home, remembering her parents and brother at her home in her village. But the moment Bagh entered the house, she would fall silent. She became Bagh’s radhuni, a cook.
Time passed.
In the meantime, the girl’s parents had been crying foul all the while. Her young brother cried with them too. Finally, he said, “It is useless to sit and weep at home like this. I am off to search for my sister. Let me try to find her.”
So the boy left his home and began his search through all the jungles. Soon he located Bagh’s house amidst the forest. He saw his sister sitting inside. Petrified upon seeing her brother, the girl cried out, “Oh Brother, why did you come? Bagh will eat you up.”
“We will see about that later. I have come to fetch you and will not leave without you. Now hide me somewhere inside your house.” The siblings dug a large pit inside the kitchen floor. The boy crept into this pit and his sister put a massive sheel, a grinding stone, to cover the mouth of the pit. Soon, Bagh returned and sat down to have his lunch with his two cubs, who refused to eat. They kept mumbling:
“Father O Father!
Is he our uncle?
Is he your brother-in-law?
Is he our mother’s brother?
Hear him from under the sheel,
Drag him out and we’ll feast well.”
Bagh, who was already in a sour mood because of a tiff he had earlier that day, paid no heed to his cubs. Already fuming with anger, he gave them each a hard slap, finished his meal, and left the house. But before stepping out, he told the girl, “Make some sweet pithey today. I will have them in the evening when I return. Make sure you prepare them well.”
After Bagh was gone, the girl helped her brother out of the pit and served him lunch. Then they put in a large cauldron of oil on top of the clay oven. After that, they killed both the cubs, cut them into small pieces, hung those over the cauldron, and fled from Bagh’s house. Blood dripped from the flesh and into the hot oil below. The sound could be heard from a distance.
Towards the evening, as Bagh walked towards his home, he heard the dripping of the blood and thought, “Lovely, I think that is the sound of the pithey in oil. If she prepares them well, good enough. And if they are not to my liking, I will tear this radhuni into pieces and all three of us will feast upon her.” Finally, when Bagh entered the house, he was shaken to see the kind of “pithey” that was being prepared. He roared and stormed all over but to no avail. The girl had already run away, and by then, she and her brother had reached the safety of their home, back to their parents.
The villagers rushed to greet and welcome the siblings and celebrated their return most grandly.
Excerpted with permission from “The Tiger’s Cook” in The Collected Stories of Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, translated from the Bengali by Lopamudra Maitra, Aleph Book Company.
