He was outstretched at full length on his back, upon the cracked, decaying plank. He could almost feel the wood slowly disintegrate beneath his weight, half-defeated by the water that seeped into it like an innocuous poison, eating away at it for as long as the floods would last.

Beneath his dark lithe frame, taut as steel wire, the waterlogged wood lathered a dull cold across his back, a sickly semi-iciness that forced his teeth into a rictus. Yet his chest burned, cooked, as the white fiery spears of sunlight pelted him, and for a gruelling few minutes of lying down, he was in limbo between the deserts and the frigid waste. 

Ashwani raised himself, his back dripping wet. Silently, he berated himself for so callously drenching his shorts - he had only one other dry pair left. The water left them translucent, plastered to his rear, and only the double-faced loincloth he donned over them shielded him from further embarrassment. He steadied himself on the wooden plank, his excuse for a porch, as it disappeared into the greenish-brown depths, the waters where his own reflection never showed amidst the distortion of ripples. 

And yet the tourists, the rich folk on their pompous boats that he sometimes saw, sung countless praises about this swamp, these Sundarbans. He’d even waved to one before - the toothy grin of ignorance was a most difficult memory to erase. 

His train of thought derailed as a barrage of bellowing guffaws struck his ears. From deep within the hut, Ashwani’s brother, Malik, clutched at his chest, a writhing heap of limbs as he succumbed to the heartiness of the moment. A dappled tapestry of light patterned his wiry frame, the marriage of sunlit shafts that pierced through the thatched roof and the shadows that spilled throughout the depths of the hut. Panic nicked Ashwani for a moment - he began to fear for the hut’s rickety wooden stilts beneath the brunt of his brother’s frenzy. 

“You’re rebuilding the whole house if it collapses,” Ashwani grunted with a wry curling of his lips.

“Hah, but your soaked pants were just too funny,” Malik called back amidst fizzling chortles, slapping the wooden floor. “Plus, I’ll just get the other people to help. I’ll catch them enough fish to pay them for their time.” 

“Yeah, big fish, but the ones we’ve reeled in within the past week were all small fry,” Ashwani said, sending the water splattering with a kick as he let out a parched sigh. “We can still feed Lakshmi and your kids with what we catch, but not many more.” 

“Sometimes I forget how many people live here.” His brother scratched his head. “What, fifteen, sixteen others?” 

“Damn it, get up,” Ashwani said, sauntering into the mouth of the hut to practically drag Malik out on the half-submerged wooden plank. 

His brother halted him, sifting through a shapeless stack on the ground to produce a pair of rubber face masks, each with the bearded, lilac-browed face of a man. Malik strapped one on behind his head, handing the other one to Ashwani. 

“Don’t forget,” he said.

“The texture of the straps always bothered me,” Ashwani muttered, before shaking his head and regarding Malik in the eye. “Their cunning stretches farther than that of a hundred jackals, you know? One day they’ll see through these guises.” 

“Aye, but they’ve worked so far, no? It’s been moons since we’ve heard of even a scratch on anyone’s hide. If the whole village wears these, we follow.” 

“What about Muthu? Have you forgotten? He was found with his skull split under a tree, stomach torn open, and he wore the mask. They learn fast - we need to learn and keep that one step’s distance ahead of them.” 

Sighing, Malik pushed the mask deeper into his brother’s palms. “No one liked him, anyway. And things happen by chance, by luck. Just wear it.” 

Ashwani fiddled with the rubbery frame of the mask. “Do you feel safe with just these on?” 

“Safe enough to head out.” Malik strode towards the door. Ashwani slipped his mask on as he hauled himself after his brother, onto the plank to gaze upon the sprawling vicinity. 

They were clustered together - boxy, straw-walled huts on stilts buttressed with wooden beams, their thatch roofs almost like mops of yellowed hair if not for the occasional zinc or cardboard sheet that served to patch them when the downpours tore through their fragile frames. Small outposts hobbled together from discarded fabrics and poles were scattered about the huts, as the spindly remains of old fencing and ramps bided their time to crumble and add to the dilapidation. The hull of a shattered wooden boat lay part-buried in the muddy riverbank, and a slew of nondescript scraps of metal, plastic, and rubber drifted along the murky floodwaters. 

Here and there, pockets of unruly vegetation had crushed their way between the huts, the trees and shrubbery ever so eager to exploit. Two hens gingerly pecked at the mud for scraps, before being run off by a scrawny, barking pariah dog. A woman garbed in ethnic robes wrung clothes out by the water’s edge, as bare-chested children chased one another up the wooden ladders up into the huts. 

The woman tilted her head up, her mouth hung ajar as her glassy stare averted from her half-finished laundry. Then she seemed to catch sight of the brothers, suddenly jolting as the dirt-crusted rims of her eyes met theirs from the opposite sandbar. 

She crammed the sari she was washing into a straw basket, before abandoning her laundry entirely to stagger into the rippling murk. Churning against the water as strongly as her thin frame could afford, the woman scrabbled up the riverbank, panting as she fought the hindrance of her now-drenched robes. Her gnarled fingers clasped together as if to beseech, her flat stare now wet with a glistening film. 

“Sons of Chopra, I ask for a share of your catch. My cousin…she’s had another baby. And her oldest just turned seven,” she crackled. “They have not a morsel left in their house to feed their brood.” 

“The village waters now yield little; the fish elude even us,” Ashwani said, with a flipping gesture of his hand. “And your cousin! Six children and yet she brings another to feed?” 

“Not just another, Faria also just gave birth.” The woman pointed to a hut tucked behind a large banana plant. “Her husband can’t haul in enough fish to sate his whole family. I hear some of the other mothers have turned to slaughtering their egg chickens to put food on the table.” 

“So he’s had bad luck with fishing as well?” Malik questioned. 

“Aye, all the men in the village. Those who have a spear and boat to their name, they return with a fifth, sixth of their usual catch. It’s a crisis - just too many hungry mouths coming about,” she said, her arms outstretched like great jaws. “We must either change how or where we fish, or wait for a miracle by Varuna’s hand.” 

Something deep within the woman’s eyes bristled the fine hairs upon Ashwani’s nape. He couldn’t quite describe it on the tip of his tongue, yet he was aware it was the pressing, faintly venomous glint nestled in the black of her iris. It ripped into the fabric of his clothes, pierced his being, with the cutting mockery only the old and bitter could summon. And now that he thought about it, the rasp of her voice seemed to veil a harsh steeliness. 

“Never mind that. The chief will be holding a village gathering tonight to contemplate the matter, in case it hasn’t reached you. Be punctual, boys.” And with that, she skulked back into the water. 

Even then, a stench still persisted, the air rife with a deathly decay that drove bile up the brothers’ throats. The laughter of children, the barking of the village mongrels, they all petered out into silence. 

The slums seemed to have already died. 

~~

What few vestiges of sunlight still seeped from cracks between the burning amber clouds sent cascades of orange spilling upon the floodwaters, as the evening twilight rose to inherit the sky. Yet the slums ceased to slumber, the night silence now alight with the clamours and chatterings of an entire village that had been assembled in the town square - a massive banyan whose branches had held its leaves up for beyond a century. 

There were wives and widows, fishermen and farmers, all vanishing into the crowd of a hundred strong from their flimsy doors. Some of the children tried muscling their way to the front of the gathering, while others clung fiercely to the hems of their parents’ clothes. 

The headman stood upon his podium - a tree stump - to address the sea of staring eyes. A wizened pole of a man, his head was crowned by a scarlet turban, the grizzled beard he donned framing his wrinkled forehead and the dark jewels he had for eyes. Unlike most of the plainclothes-wearing men, he distinguished himself with the traditional patterned cloth he draped over his jutting shoulders. Shorn of the strength of youth, he helmed the village through the cunning of age. When his old tongue spoke, no other lips dared part. 

“The last rainfall has brought our village twelve new children, assuredly each and all gifts from the heavens. But as many of our folk realise, our reliance on fishing has led to dwindling harvests, the fish all the smaller and scarcer.” he began with trembling words. 

As his lament went on, the headman’s skull dipped, lost in solemn thought. “Should we be unable to feed each new mouth that comes, we would fail our children, as we would fail our forerunners, the blood that brought us into this world.”

His outstretched arm then swept over his audience, capturing the attention of the few eyes and ears which had gone astray. “Continuing to fish within these village perimeters would be foolish; we have exhausted every inch of these waters. It is likely we will have to take…bolder steps, if we are to fill our women and children’s stomachs.”

“Like what?” A young girl chimed in, before her mother silently chided her. 

“The menfolk must take their fishing operations beyond the village waters - into the swamps and marshes, where the fish remain fat and tender. I bring them a new cause to sharpen their spears and cast their nets, so that the village can thrive full and warm.” 

Prickling heat stung the tips of Ashwani’s ears. His chest clenched, as if it were in a python’s coils. The swamps? The headman better have been drunk off betel nuts. Or had age clouded his memory, and he had forgotten what lurked in the mangroves? Even the village hedonist never took her drunken forays into the swamplands. And this was the chief! 

A woman jostled her hand above the swarming villagers. “Why the swamps, might I ask? Why fishing? Can we not trade with neighbouring villages, invest more in our livestock to last us? We have safer options.” 

The headman seemed to shake. “Are we not children of the rivers? Are we not fishermen? The rivers, the marshes, they are our lifeblood, as they were for those who came before us. To stray from this would be to insult our forefathers.”

Ashwani looked upon the silenced dread, the pallor that slowly bleached the crowding villagers’ faces. His fellow men whose thoughts were Ashwani’s thoughts. What their chief had spoken, they squirmed with tenfold the words to object with, but the ice in the air remained unbroken. Ashwani’s mind screamed for him to act, his tongue furiously gathering words of protest. 

Then the headman began once more. “It has come to my attention that a shark has been sighted along the outskirts of the nearest mangrove. A brute that claims those waters as its hunting grounds is an unpleasant thing to have roaming…” 

“A shark!” 

“My cousin lost an arm to one!” 

“You trying to feed us to the animals? And you speak for us, still?”

The crowd erupted ablaze, whispered voices drowned in the gunfire of hollers and shouts. There was the shrieking cacophony of women who feared widowhood, accompanied by the men’s agitated barks. They saw only the imagery of limbs ripped from sockets by serrated teeth. Some raised pointed fingers and balled their fists at the headman, sparse obscene gestures visible above the ocean of sable hair and fierce red faces. 

A hard clack of the chief’s old rattan stick against the wooden podium, and the uproar suddenly died down a notch. The headman cleared his throat and spat onto the mud beneath him. 

“The plans are that fishing commences in the marsh by half-light, when the large fish are most active. Thus the shark must be slain before the sun rises above the water, for the welfare of our men who shall reap prosperity unto the village,” he spluttered. “Hence, I ask for a volunteer with the strength and will to destroy the creature by the coming of dawn.” The chief held up a beckoning hand. “Please, come forth.” 

Not a moment passed before the headman saw the dark form of Ashwani crumpling to the ground, a grunt torn from his lips as he slammed into the muddy earth. The shock of it all blinded him. Reeling, he clenched his teeth, growing ever aware of his mud-caked skin. 

Ashwani had only seconds to glance at the hulking farmer who shoved him forth before the man slipped his giant frame back amidst the crowd. Then he turned to the other villagers who encircled him, but the pleas in his eyes were answered with the bovine scrutiny of theirs. 

As if possessed by some sheer, cohesive force, the horde of villagers shrank back from him several paces. 

He whipped around at the crackle of the headman’s voice. “The son of Chopra…the bringer of the biggest fish to grace the village waters.”

“No! I-I never…” Ashwani’s hands swooped up in denial. “Someone pushed me! This was not of my own-”

The village chief eyed him with a stone’s gaze. “You will drag the brute’s carcass to this same earth you now stand upon at dawn. By spear or by blade, destroy the creature and the marsh will be open to us.” 

Seconds later, there came the squelch of running feet in the mud, the grumbles and tutting of villagers as Malik jostled his way to the front of the crowd, sweat-sheened. He glanced at his brother, before his eyes swept towards the headman. 

“If he goes, I go.” His words fell from between ragged gasps. 

“Is that so?” 

“By the coming of half-light upon the water’s surface, so as to honour our mother and father, we will present the beast’s body here, for every soul to see,” Malik rang out. He stood, stark and rigid as he stared down the headman. “This we swear.” 

~~

Ashwani huddled up against the damp wooden frame of the boat, his knees stuffed close to his chest. His arms felt cumbersome with blood pounding through burning veins, the oar he scraped against the grey currents like a twig in his hands.

 Each slap of flat wood against the water echoed a splashing percussion throughout the mangroves, and he felt the river churn beneath the thinly-constructed floor, lapping against the hull. He steadied the twin spears stowed beneath the thwart, which glistened in the amber nimbus of the oil lamp’s glow. 

The hunched figure of Malik grew bronzed in the candlelight, his back heaving, the bones of his spine protruding into and out of sight with every movement. The bearded face of his mask stared back at his brother, like a third, unwelcome guest. Head tilted ever so slightly to the right, Malik eyed the section of water that had stirred a tad too suddenly, with too much strength. Too much life to it. 

There came a splashing, a gunshot of water, and the foamy white of ripples jolted the corner of Ashwani’s eye. He felt his heart spike up his throat, the entire boat seeming to quaver as he did. He dropped the oar, staggering back, breaths shuddering. Clutching the gunwale, he forced himself to peer overboard. 

The water itself was a sable shroud, now beyond the reach of the oil lamp as they rowed. Only a faint trail of red revealed itself to the observant amidst the abyss - seeping from the twin chicken heads tethered to the boat. The scent of blood would not go unanswered, even within the murky depths. 

Just as the bewildering network of the mangroves was. As the oil lamp spat embers, they could scarcely make out the twisting branches, the canopy’s emerald hue lining the blackness, the tangled barricades of tendril roots buried in the clayey soil. The jutting heads of mangrove roots glistened like stars, the mudbanks awash in a celestial lacquer. 

Suffusing through the air was the stench of waterlogged earth mixed in with a hint of driftwood, packaged within the olfactory assault of the things that rotted beneath the dark currents. The thick canopy trapped a sweltering humidity that caused the brothers’ backs to grow slippery with sweat, even with the wisps of the night breeze threading across their bodies. 

Ashwani then felt something pelt against his hair. He jolted, cursing, his free hand flying to his head in a fury; his mind filled with the image of beating wings and hooked claws. Then came a sharp slap from Malik across his thigh, Ashwani jolting as his eyes snapped wide. 

“It was leaves - you were fighting against a leaf,” his brother sighed, mid-yawn. He nodded at the low-hanging branches snaking down from the canopy. 

The water rippled, slurping, white froth bubbling. The grim hooting song of the eagle-owl was suddenly broken by the howl of the golden jackal. Somewhere in the blackness, a twig crunched underfoot. 

“We shouldn’t be here.” Ashwani scrabbled at the gunwale, gasping, shifting in his place like a caged animal. “The swamp doesn’t want us here.” 

“The village does,” Malik said. “Like the headman said, we can’t have men fishing here while a shark of all creatures still swims at large.” 

“Headman, headman, there’s your problem!” Ashwani shoved his oar beneath the thwart. “What he says, everyone follows. He says to fish in the mangroves, has he forgotten what lives in our mangroves? How many more lives will that take? We’re sheep being led towards the butcher’s blade.” 

“What other option do we have? You can’t pretend our village wasn’t built from the blood of the rivers.” 

“We could grow more crops, we have chickens and pigs. Hell, we could trade with other settlements. But no,” Ashwani snarled, “we choose to narrow our horizons, and entrench ourselves in these old fisherman ways. Old ways that kill people. Fish in these swamps, they know nothing!” 

The marshes stirred again. They felt the wind muster its strength, the gusts buffeting the trees and tousling the brothers’ black mops of hair. The canopy swayed, branches arching, leaves trembling, and the shadows within ran riot, flittering about in dappled bursts of black. 

Riled by the wind, the pockets of ferns and reeds burst into a crackling chorus, shimmers of lush green where the moonlight graced them. And where the same moonlight backlit the grim souffle of clouds, the thunder spluttered to deafen the entire swamp. 

“Malik, why did you come here.” Both hands clutching his brother’s shoulders, he shook him. “Why did you throw yourself into this fire? There are worse things than sharks in these waters, things that shaped the masks we strap to the back of our heads!” 

Then, by the glow of the candlelight, he saw the dark sinuous figure materialising from the clouded depths. A formless haze breaching the alien realm of shadows, then disappearing into the blackness once more with a languid swish. The currents frothed, cold slaps of watery sludge hurling themselves at the hull of the boat. 

The black shape lurked. Phantom fingers gripped his heart. He prayed it was another shadowy trick of the oil lamp, but the churning in his gut insisted otherwise. The ripples now came in sharp arrowhead currents. 

“What was the plan again?” Malik croaked. 

A coiled, jittery terror began festering in him, fingers daring not stray near the water’s surface. The canopy hissed in protest of the thunderclaps rolling above, of the billowing winds that tore at the swamps. He clutched the oar in one hand, a fishing spear in the other - he felt as if he were armed with twigs. 

Beneath the deck, there came a splurging of waves, the slight rocking of the little vessel, and Ashwani knew the creature was right beneath them. His fingers scrabbled at the gunwale, toes curling into the soles of his feet. His gaze zeroed in on the thin wooden flooring of the boat, the black waves bleeding onto the deck between the flimsy planks. The thunder exploded. 

Suddenly, he could feel the watery siege on their boat shift towards the rear, where the chicken heads were tied. The ripples changed course, now rushing for the bait in a trail of foam and gurgling bubbles.

 From the shadows, the brothers could now glimpse the long dark shape illuminated in the fire-light. A second, a moment, and it came charging for the surface. 

“On three,” Ashwani whispered. He could discern grey, slicing fins in the candlelight. The chicken heads flapped about in the wrath of the wind. 

“Two.” He could see Malik turn to eye him a final time, his throat rippling. A feeble creak was squeezed from between the floorboards of the rocking boat. 

Then before he could open his mouth, the pointed muzzle of the Ganges shark tore through the surface, a curtain of grey water erupting. A flash of pink rimmed with jagged white, and the jaws had found purchase. The boat bucked, rearing, and Malik shrieked, his spear jabbing aimlessly at the howling winds. Ashwani’s fingers danced on the shaft of his own spear, his blood searing in the midnight cold as he lunged for the great fish’s skull. 

The shark snapped at the mere morsel, thrashing in the murky depths, the rope fraying to a handful of threads. For a moment, he was struck by the eyes - ceaseless black that even the oil lamp couldn’t pierce.  Its tail, fins pointed as blades, churned the currents, the creature’s fury coming in volatile bursts of power.

In a great muscular spasm, Ashwani stabbed the spearhead down just as the shark’s head blitzed upwards. He felt the impact ratchet up the shaft - through coarse skin, dense muscle, thick cartilage. Malik’s spear had buried itself into the creature’s gills, ripping deep. 

The crashing waters died down in moments. Then he felt the end of his spear become laden with a sudden heaviness, blood clouding the water as it spurted from the shark’s pierced brain. 

Mouth still hanging ajar, Malik’s breaths came in laboured bursts, shaking as he slowly shrank back into the boat. He lay down, arms pinned to his sides as his gasps evolved into a terrible splutter. His hands, his mind, they needed time to recover from the white shock of it all. It had all happened too fast - his hands had been numbed to useless hunks of flesh. It felt like minutes since the headman had dispatched them, and here they had the scourge of their swamps at their feet. 

They killed it.  Lives had been spared, the swamps were returned to the fishermen. They would be hailed as heroes. 

“Ey,” Ashwani grunted, “get up, help me drag it into the boat.” 

With gritted teeth, the brothers tugged the full limp weight of the shark over the gunwale, the wood cracking ever so slightly as the carcass bore down upon it. The corpse fell onto the deck with a splattering thump that stirred the entire boat, the brothers collapsing back as they heaved, massaging their arms. Now very much out of the shadowy river, Ashwani could see that the entire creature was more than half the length of their twelve-foot wooden vessel, forcing him to ease the body into the centre, lest the whole boat unbalance on one end and capsize.

“This has got to be our record catch,” Malik remarked. “Even if we did kill one in the past, we’d never have nabbed one that’s grown to this size.” 

“And a big fish bleeds a lot, which attracts even more…unwanted attention.” Ashwani’s finger was tapping away at the gunwale. He kept his eyes trained on the gashes scarring the floorboard of the boat.

In response, Malik reached for the nearest branch, tearing off a fistful of ovaline leaves. Lathering them with his own saliva, he pasted the leaves over the dark gaping wound where Ashwani speared the animal in the skull. 

“Just in case.” He tapped his man-faced disguise strapped to the back of his head. Then he slumped back into the boat and reclined against the bow. 

This earned a glare from his brother. “The hell are you doing? We need to get back now, they gave us until sunrise.” 

“Well, I’m just bathing in our soon-to-be limelight,” Malik chuckled, his body outstretched. He held his spear up like a trophy. “That hag from earlier will know better than to sass us. They’ll all know us as the kings of the rivers, and the whole village will feast in our name, hah!” 

“This isn’t the place to stretch your damn toes,” Ashwani said. “And we don’t need any big celebration. I’m not proud of this, I just wanted to get this hunt over with, and get out. Look, we’ve been testing our luck to the limit here, I don’t want to push it any more. Just -”

“Calm down. Would you just relax? We have the time to catch a break.” Again Malik prodded the mask. “And we have these. They are not difficult to fool. We’re fine.”

Then he saw Ashwani strip the mask off the back of his head, his hands clamping down upon it with an abated anger, such that he thought it might snap in half.  His brother simply sighed. 

“This ugly thing was made from a rubber tree’s sap. You can’t defy nature with the unnatural - you forged that unnaturality from the natural. Only the greatest fools try to use nature’s gifts against itself. The second we left the village, we became prey. To things that see you before you hear them. And you dare to think,” he spat, jabbing at the mask, “that you can outsmart it with this? Oh Malik, why did you come with me?” 

“What kind of wretch do you take me for?” Malik said. “We’re brothers - we’ve endured hell together and we’ll sit through the rest of it together! It doesn’t take having the same mother as you for me to do that. I’ll fear what you fear with you.” 

All of a sudden, a heavy splash resounded from the night, jolting Malik from his words. The brothers hesitated, scanned wherever the ebbing candlelight made visible, before peering over the gunwale. Its rugged texture against that of the water allowed them to discern it: the wooden oar adrift upon the dark lapping waters, guided by the silver ripples of the current as it cruised away from the boat. 

“Damn it!” 

Instantly, Malik plunged headfirst into the marsh, hissing as the watery brunt of the midnight cold enveloped him. He was treading water in feverish strokes, hoping to generate enough heat for his body to regain functionality. 

“Brother, stop splashing!” Ashwani seethed, almost diving for Malik. “The noise is only going to attract them!” 

But Malik had swam several yards too far to bother answering the warnings of his brother. Coursing through the water in sweeping breaststrokes, he pursued the drifting oar as it neared the mud-packed slopes of the riverbank, his stomach braced all the while as the dreadful anticipation of what lay waiting in the black depths for him infiltrated his thoughts. 

His fingers grasping wood, Malik lodged the oar between his left armpit, whipping around to see Ashwani standing up in the boat, gesturing for him to return. In the waning orange glow of the oil lamp, he could see the rivulets of perspiration dribbling down his brother’s gaunt cheeks. Or perhaps it was rainwater? A drizzle had already begun to acknowledge the roar of the thunder, fine droplets scarcely pelting him all over. 

The compromise of the oar between his armpit left his swimming crippled, Malik on the verge of tipping over as he clawed with wild strokes against the marsh. His neck was by now craned to its breaking point, brown turbid water seeping into his gasping mouth. With every splash, Ashwani’s face grew more furrowed, his teeth gritted until they gnashed. 

Come on…just a few metres more, then they would be blazing their way out of here. Ashwani  kept probing the shadows between the matrix of roots, hyper-attuned to every flutter in the canopy, every stir in the mudbank. The breath rasped in his throat as he imagined just what might burst from the treeline. 

There came the jackal’s bark-howling again. Cold air shuddered out from between his lips. He sat down, knees bunched up against his chest, then was forced to relax them as his stomach felt suffocated.  The drizzle became a freezing tickle down his spine. 

He surrendered to the weight in his eyelids, shutting them tight. Silently, he prayed that the daybreak would give them just an hour’s more grace to return to the embrace of their village. 

Just a couple metres more, Malik. 

A fierce splotch of blistering white seemed to shine behind his eyes as he shut them. Suddenly they split into twin spheres - stinging, piercing the back of his skull like daggers of light, even as he clenched his eyes shut. It was as if the flare of two suns were being driven between his eyelids, burning at his corneas. 

Amidst the intensity of it all, Ashwani flung his eyes open. He blinked twice, gathering himself, for a moment removed from reality. The spheres of white remained. 

Then it came, a stabbing epiphany. 

He felt every bone in his being dissolve. 

They were eyes. 

The eyes were ivory opals, smouldering in sockets rimmed with black,  the stark visage framed in nature’s calligraphy - stripes that traced a path to the dark lips, and within those the great fangs, glinting at the tips by the light of the flickering oil lamp. 

The beast had dissociated from the shadowy foliage, weaved its rippling bulk between the roots. Not a snap of a twig, no crunch of loose soil. The forest felt unstirred.

It should have been. It shouldn’t - couldn’t have been right there, shrouded in the dark, all the while. But no earthen law seemed to govern it. 

Malik lifted his drenched head, panting. The water had dampened his senses. “Mind helping me up?” 

The dark lips furled back slightly, exposing an inch more of yellow dagger teeth, the ears twitching as a powerfully-muscled forelimb lifted to part the undergrowth. His mind shrieked, knowing it would pounce; his mouth was agape, a torrent in his throat. 

Yet he couldn’t scream. As if concrete had sealed his throat. 

Muted. 

Malik stared at him. “Brother, what devil has driven you mad? What has possessed you?” 

He couldn’t squeeze a sound from his larynx. His hands flailed about in a wild flurry, teeth clenched,  eyes darting from Malik to the tiger behind him on the mudflat, bellowing for him to get onto the boat. But he couldn’t scream no matter how he strained, no matter how much blood surged to his brain. 

“Ashwani, what’s wrong with you?”

In an instant, instinct overrode everything. Swooping, his arms dived for Malik, clawing to get ahold of his brother’s shoulders. 

And then it leapt. 

First the blur of a sable silhouette. A looming shadow eclipsing the candlelight. 

Then a collision course, the explosion of water, wood and hurtling claws that shook the currents when the animal’s muscular paw swatted, caving in the flank of the fragile little boat. Chunks of wood spattered about, the whole boat bowling over as Ashwani sprung from the gunwale, the freezing marshwater smacking him in the face. Somewhere above, Malik’s screams punched above the frenzy. 

He breached, gasping, his thoughts scattered in the chaos of it all. The rivers crashed, and there came the deafening crackle of thunder and shattering wood combined. 

Now he saw it: the smashed remains of the boat sinking, disappearing beneath the depths. The dead shark soon followed, consumed back into the marsh. Ashwani spluttered, his limbs turgid as they splashed in the marsh, vision blurred by the water seeping into his eyes. Was this how he’d die?

Then he heard a sickening crunch, a rupture, something hard splitting down the middle. A moist squelch that wrung his stomach out. The sound of bones snapping open. 

A slack, unmoving black mass was hauled onto the sloping mudbank in the tigress’s jaws. Her eyes blazed silver against the midnight shroud, ragged snorts wafting from between her prize and the teeth on which it was skewered. The beast lounged over its quarry, half its lithe frame sunken back into shadow as it lay there in its dark resplendence, sparsely obscured by the mangroves.  

The water drained from his eyes, Ashwani blinked, making out a visible torso, the arms and legs dragged along the earth like entrails. His pulse slowed to a terrible crawl. 

The shoulders, sharp and protruding, a neck, just below where the huge fangs clamped down. As the tigress tightened her hold, another wet crunch rippled the waters. 

The head.

And just as Ashwani could finally piece the realisation together, something thumped him on the arm. 

A scarlet rubber mask drifted past, moustached and blank-eyed. A blood-soaked rubber mask. That all-too-carefree face, the black brows and the beard - the mask couldn’t be anyone else’s. 

“Please…no.” 

He was numbed to the core, as if an icicle had speared his heart. The world momentarily lumbered to a deathly stop. Perhaps it would all collapse upon him. Ashwani couldn’t make out even his own thoughts, every second in that crack of frozen time spent convincing himself that this didn’t happen, didn’t happen. Yet the very real tremble in his fingers, throbbing of blood in his head, yanked him from his denial. 

In his hands, the red-soaked mask lay cradled, smiling with its thin lips. The eyes seemed ever more lifeless. 

No. Not like this. 

Twenty years of hell together - they couldn’t go this way. 

Ashwani reached for the broken plank floating beside him, brandishing the wood as he hobbled against the water towards the steep mudflats. Towards the feasting tigress. 

First step. Immediately, his muscles seized up with a cold immobility. Tremors conquered his entire being. He was shackled to the spot. 

His arm kept twitching, trembling, the plank of wood inching out of his grip. As if he had to push an impassable wall away from him the further he advanced. Frail whistles wisped from his cracked lips, his every trembling step energised by nothing but brazen revenge.

Then, as if it had heard his breath upon the breeze, the tigress perked her ears up and hoisted her massive striped head from Malik’s corpse. Between the fangs was a haunch of ragged flesh. 

The eyes, Ashwani swore, could set the marshes afire. 

His hand quaked. The wooden plank splashed back into the water. The thunder rolled. 

Ashwani bolted. 

~~

Beneath the scurry of his rubber soles, the mudflats oozed, ever eager to give way and send him plunging into the black depths. He sprang over the clawing roots, crunching across the mudflats littered with yellow leaves wherever the shadowy canopy overhung. Across sloping peat and collapsed riverbanks, crushing his way through the thick swathes of leaves above. His shorts were heavy with mud, calves burning, wetly gasping between sobs, the drizzling dark leaving him an inch from blindness. 

He ran till he could see the tips of thatched roofs beyond the crest of the sandbars, against the bruise-coloured sky. Ashwani lurched to a halt, eyes glazed and slack-jawed as he overlooked the sleeping huts. The twinkling torches cloaked the village in a faint fiery beacon, faltering in the paltry rain.

“Tiger!” He shambled forth like a madman. “Tiger!” 

Raising his head, he cupped his hands to his mouth. “The heavens have loosened a tiger upon our village!” 

Through the dark entrance of the nearest hut, a thin, furrowed face peered outside. The girl draped her patterned shawl over her head, seeing only the vague, lanky shape of a man stumbling towards her in the drizzle. An oil lamp was pinched between her fingers, and she held it up to see Ashwani’s face sheened by the tiny flame. 

“You…you are Malik’s half-brother, yes?” she asked, climbing down from the stilts. “Weren’t you both sent to kill that rogue shark? What’s this about a tiger?” 

He nodded between panting breaths. “We-we were hunting for it. We killed it. Then it…the brute, it  just…appeared from the trees and I…I-” 

“Then where’s its carcass? Where is Malik?” The girl’s thinned patience from being shouted awake only wore further with his stammering. 

At that, Ashwani’s eyes turned glassy. He stood stiff in the mouth of the hut as he regarded her. 

“...I just was not fast enough for him.” 

“So it…” The girl gawked at him, averting her gaze from his own as she processed his words. 

He remained silent. But his breaths were deep and wet. 

“But you were wearing the masks! It shouldn’t - couldn’t have attacked you, they can’t differentiate between mask and man. It’s worked for generations.”

“And on what grounds do you say this?” Ashwani snapped. “You don’t remember the killings? Muthu, Arav, Pravesh, all wore them, and they all were torn apart.” He suppressed a sniffle as he loomed forth, now filling the doorway. “And my brother? It doesn’t work. So what if it did once upon a time? They adapt, we don’t - we’re resting on wilted laurels. Those men’s deaths could have been prevented if we just did things differently - if we changed. The way we protect ourselves, the way we procure food - fishing has never been the sole option - but no, because you all and the headman wallow in pride and blind tradition. And that’s why people die.” 

As he reeled from his own words, he could hear the booming voices of chanting men climb to a crescendo amidst the patter of the drizzle. Then as he listened closer, there came the splashing thumps of two dozen rubber soles against the waterlogged earth. The thunder unleashed another distant crackle, but the men’s cries fought to drown it out. 

Glancing outside, he estimated there were about twelve to thirteen men in the ambling wall of black, only their faces aglow by the light of the spitting torches they waved against the rain. The drizzle peppered, their fires withered, yet the mob trudged on. Some wielded clubs, sticks, a plethora of makeshift shivs and bludgeons from what they could scavenge, in contrast to their conglomerate bellow rising as one heavy chorus. 

Suddenly, the head of the mob raised a hand to the others, a flaming torch in the other held outstretched. The procession rippled to a standstill. Then the leading man craned his head high, as if to listen. 

“They must’ve heard you crying tiger earlier,” the girl whispered, edging slightly up the ladder that led into her hut.

Still the mob leader held his hand to his allies, and still the bush stayed mute. 

Even then, he probed the thickets with fierce waves of his torch, scattering light to reveal the trace of a tail, listening for the slightest grunt or chuff. Ashwani listened along with them. 

To the east, there descended a jagged bellow from the heavens, erupting between the clouds, as if echoing the unabated rage of a seething deity. From the celestial expanse it swooped, sweeping over the huts, as a vicious fork of lightning split the sky in the thunder’s wake. Then the drizzle became a shower, and instantly thereafter morphing into a cloudburst, slashing down on the village as if an endless siege of arrows, pounding as it poured - gunfire upon the patchwork roofs and flooding down the gutters. 

As if a spell had been cast, the flames fizzled out all at once, the men’s faces cloaked amidst the rain and the blanketing grey fumes that steamed from their dead torches. The chanting died instantly. 

Then came the roar of the tiger, throaty and prolonged. Ashwani shrank deeper into the doorway, praying between stifled weeps. 

“By God, you weren’t mad at all!” She sidled behind the wooden door. 

At this, the runt of the pack, a scrawny fellow with an oddly bulbous head, let his torch clatter to the ground as he broke rank, turning tail back into the village walls. Two more followed, a third retreated, and by the next flash of lightning the whole mob had vanished, the rhythm of their soles splashing as they ran all but lost in the dull thunder. 

The tigress issued her challenge again. 

“Come, inside, quickly,” the girl hissed, grabbing Ashwani by the forearm up the ladder. 

Once masked by the earthy scent of the rain, the mustiness that swamped the hut assailed Ashwani’s nostrils, tickling the bridge of his nose as she hauled him into the pitch-darkness. Indeed the stench was a cocktail borne from varying sources - the wet stink of drying clay alongside that of sweat and bodily oils, the choking fumes of smoke that coiled from the candles by the straw mats. The curled-up figures of two men and a woman resumed their slumber, lightly snoring. 

She bolted the thin wooden door shut, turning around to see Ashwani on the ground, face rammed in his palms, his back rigid against the prickly straw wall. By then, his towering frame had balled up to where it could be mistaken for a drenched, shaking child’s silhouette in the dark of the hut. 

“Oh no…” She scrambled, scanning the room, before returning with a clay bowl brimming with yellow lentils, scooping out a few as her eyes searched for his beneath his unkempt curls. 

Tilting Ashwani’s head up with a finger, she lifted one of the pulses to his lips. “Whenever I would wake up soaked in my own sweat after my chronic nightmares, eating some daal as a midnight snack never failed to soothe me.” Then she chuckled faintly. “My most vivid memory of those was of a tiger raiding our hut and stealing my father away.”

She prompted him again, inching the food closer to him. “Perhaps it’ll help soothe nightmares that have become reality.” 

Ashwani hesitated, before extending a hand to take some of the lentils into his mouth, his jaw trembling as he chewed. For a moment, he met her gaze, the corner of his eyes glistening.

“Thank you. Thank you…er…” 

“Padmi.” She sat down beside him, hands clasped together. Other than the slow, deliberate movements of her jaw crunching the daal, she was unmoving. 

Stuffing his back tighter against the rain-pelted wall, Ashwani could only stare at the door. How he wanted to clench his eyes shut and escape from it all, but he just knew he had to keep looking, keep watching, his eyes transfixed. 

The prickle of the thatched walls on his skin seemed to fade into a dull caress, the odour of fumes and sweat trickling away. But his chills were coming in savage bolts, his throat knotting the more he fixed his eyes on that thin wooden sheet on hinges. 

The thin wooden sheet that would be punted from its hinges with a single swing of the tiger’s paw. Bursting into a thousand splinters. He could imagine it now, he could hear the crash of shattering wood, fresh in his ears. 

Ashwani reeled his head back, breath shuddering. His heart scampered in perfect sync with the hammering rain, a storm on the inside to match the rage of the heavens thundering overhead. 

Padmi raised herself slightly, craning her head up front. “You think they managed to intimidate it into leaving?” 

“No.” Ashwani trailed his finger between the gaps in the wooden flooring. “A tiger never roars back at an enemy it knows it cannot defeat. They pick their battles. Some dub it cowardice, I consider it wise.”

“Isn’t that the same idea behind the masks?” she asked.  “They attack from the rear, calling off the hunt should they be spotted, and…well, we use that fact against them.” 

“And they’ve learned not to fall for our tricks. So why do we refuse to learn to adapt to that?” 

Suddenly, a distant splash interrupted the thrumming monotony of the rain, barely muffled by the straw walls of the hut. A second immediately followed, before a third. Heavy, the splashes rippling.  

Footsteps. 

The both of them eyed one another, then the wooden door, silent curiosity and dread embroiled in a maddening wrestle against one another. Already Ashwani could see the hinges buckling under the windstorm. The splashes grew louder. 

He had made his mind up: he wasn’t laying a finger on that door’s handle.

Then he saw it - to his right, a chink in the armour of the straw walls, where the rain managed to barely seep through. He stood, hesitating, before tiptoeing his way towards the little crack. Armed with a deep breath and a prayer, he pressed an eye through the hole in the wall. 

He saw her.

The tigress bared herself, skulking from the ramshackle form of a fence out into the storm-swept village clearing, the thinnest beams of moonlight dappling her spectral shape. Her head was lowered to the ground, snorting against the flooded earth. Then the lightning fired, and for a split-second Ashwani saw it all: the drenched, rippling fur, the streaking stripes, the eyes. 

They were wide and glowering - and had zeroed in, invaded the little chink in the wall. They froze him. 

And that was when the great ears rotated, turned from the bellow of the downpour to trace the whisper of his breath towards the hut. They turned towards him. 

In an instant, Ashwani staggered from the wall, before tripping, crashing onto his back. His foot flailed, bowling a clay pot over as he felt the impact judder through the stilts beneath. 

“She’s there…she’s there…” 

“Oi!” Padmi’s brother lurched from his sleep, blinking the sleep from his eyes. As he clawed for the oil lamp, their parents were jolted from the bed, scrambling for their bearings in the shadowy hut. 

“You! Who’s this?” their mother barked, a haggard finger pointed at Ashwani.

Then their father took the remaining oil lamp in his fingers and shone it upon the stranger, casting into view the pallor-stricken face and screaming eyes. 

“Chopra’s son - what are you doing here? Were you not-” 

He grunted in shock as Ashwani was suddenly inches from his face, the bloodshot film of his eyes visible in the frail candlelight. A single finger quivered to his chapped lips, a wordless plea, to cram their voices to the very recesses of their lungs. To move not a fibre in their body. 

A heavy splash, that of a great foot. The torrential pounding of the rain buffered the noise, sabotaging his attempts to gauge how close or distant the footsteps were from the hut. He couldn’t pinpoint where the tigress was anymore. 

She could be a mile away, or an inch below them. Had she slunk back into the forest? Yet who but the heavens could be sure she wasn’t beneath the hut, between the stilts, there and then? Perhaps-

A silent thud came from above the thatched roof, as if a great hammer’s impact had been cushioned just overhead. There came the creaking of the wooden framework, a crackling rustle, just as the whole roof quivered with the slightest tremor. Flecks of straw drifted to the ground like fallen feathers, and only then could the moonlight trickle onto the floorboards in tiny, ever-enlarging dots.

Just like how the realisation seeped into the white of his mind. Ashwani felt himself crumpling, his breath a ragged wisp, a black tsunami devouring his sanity. His heart shrivelled to stone and sank to his stomach. The roof rattled once more. 

He rattled once more. 

Behind him, he could barely make out the cowering figures of Padmi’s family in the dark of the hut. At their feet, the oil lamps wavered in their dance, the embers lost to the drops of rain now pattering on to the floorboards. The hybrid stench of perspiration and wet clay faded to give way to a new, rancid pervasion - like putrefying meat had been stashed somewhere in the room. 

Slowly, as if stones encumbered his skull, his eyes tilted ever so slightly upwards. The straw kept falling in flecks, the wood buckling, the spots of moonlight on the floor growing, dull thunder crashing miles beyond the thatch walls. 

“Ashwani…Ashwani…” Padmi’s voice was shallow.

“Shhh!” Her mother cupped a shaking hand over her mouth, murmuring whimpers.

From overhead, the material had thinned enough such that the clawing noise from above could waft into their prison unfettered, raking away at the roof. He whipped around, gaze sweeping, heartbeat hammering to a staccato. The door was right there - just three bounding steps from the shadows, yet he found himself shackled as his eyes darted back to the fraying ceiling. There was nothing he could do now: the hut surrounded him from all angles, all four walls. Caged them all like mice in a shoebox. 

Ashwani collapsed onto his knees, his arms limp, head hanging. The impact shook the stilts beneath. His eyes were still transfixed on the roof, the falling thatch snowing upon his frame - like that of a man shattered - as there came again the scraping of claws on decayed wood. Prolonged, dragged to a gnawing crawl, as if to break the last of what remained in him. 

Peering back at Padmi, at her brother, her parents, he saw them cramming their knuckles into their mouths in the furthest corner they could reach. A family of four, just like his brother’s. In his mind, he could almost superimpose his kids’ toddler faces onto their kids’ own, Lakshmi’s onto the mother, Malik’s face onto Padmi’s father - his vision stung with a moist bleariness. 

The family who Ashwani fed alongside himself, the family whose children would sit at his feet while he indulged them with stories from his teenhood. His family. 

“And I’ll sit through the rest of hell with them.” He clambered to his feet. The stones on his head rolled off one at a time. “And I’ll fear what they fear with them.” 

By then he could see the matted slinking fur interlaced between the hair’s breadth layer of roof that remained, neither stripe nor thatch distinguishable from one another in a phantom crisscross. He could see the very tips of the scraping talons now, digging themselves into the hut, as the ceiling was buffeted with the hot snorting breaths of rot. 

Ashwani sidled backwards, still staring the roof and their invader down, reaching for the long wooden spear propped up against the wall. The weapon trembled in his grip, such that he nearly dropped it. Behind him, he heard Padmi gasp sharply. 

For a final time, he glanced back at her. “I’ll face what you face with you.” 

Turning towards the sole burning oil lamp, he dipped the spearhead into the embers, watching as the tip crackled afire. With firm, planted footsteps he walked, poising the burning spear towards the roof as the scars in the ceiling grew, the claws now fully sunken in. He pressed his forehead against the shaft of the weapon, but his eyes were on the tiger. The trembling in his arms seemed to disappear. 

He would sit through this hell with them all.