The story of Grandpa’s tigress

Excerpt from Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan

Photo by Kar Ming Moo on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan, translated from the Bahasa Indonesia by Labodalih Sembiring.

More astonishing that the genies was the story of Grandpa’s tigress. According to Ma Muah the village storyteller, many a man in the hamlet had a tigress of his own. Some married one, while others inherited a tigress, passed down through the generations. Grandpa had one from his father, which before had belonged to his father’s father, and so on right on up to their distant ancestors. Nobody remembered who was the first to marry the tiger.

On warm nights, Ma Muah would tell tales on her porch. Children huddled around her legs, and the girls took turns to massage her shoulders. If she was spinning a yarn late in the afternoon, the girls checked her hair for lice. She was always ready with a new story. She didn’t have to make anything up, she would say; they were all true. Like the tigresses many stories were passed between successive storytellers across the generations. But some were about the present and understood only by the chosen ones, and of course Ma Muah was the chosen granny.

As far as Margioi could remember, Ma Muah didn’t have a husband or a child, and had no work to do either, other than endlessly reeling off stories. She could go to anyone’s kitchen and eat there, or someone would come to her shack bringing food. People loved her, especially children. She had a story about a blind woman with snakes and scorpions in her hair instead of lice, and who ate only the tubers of the purple nut sedge. There was the story of genie princesses who abducted handsome young men and brought them to their realms. They were not malevolent so long as no one barged into their dwelling place. Margio had come to know these places, namely springs, river pools, the peaks of hills, large trees, and the minarets of mosques. Still, nothing appealed to Margio’s curiosity more than the protective white tigresses.

According to Ma Muah, the tigresses lived with their owners and guarded them against all dangers. She said that Grandpa was among those who kept a white tiger. But he would never talk to his grandson about the tiger because, he said, Margio was too young and couldn’t possibly tame such a savage animal. It was bigger than a clouded leopard, bigger than the ones people saw at the zoo or circus or in schoolbooks. If a man couldn’t control his beast, it could turn so violent that nothing could restrain it once enraged.

“But I just want to see it,” said Margio.

“Later! Maybe then you will own it.”

He had often heard of his grandfather’s prowess, and that of elders in other hamlets: how they resisted Dutch efforts to abduct the best young men for forced labor in the Land of Deli. Bullets had no effect on them, nor did the samurai swords of the Japanese, who came later, and if they got angry, their white tigresses came out from their bodies to attack. They even expelled the gangs of Darul Islam guerrillas roaming the jungle. Ma Muah said that this was all because of the elders’ elemental friendship with the tigresses who became family through wedlock.

It was never clear to Margio what such marriages meant. He couldn’t imagine a man sitting on a wedding dais beside a tigress wearing tassels on her head, powder on her burned cheeks, and lipstick on her mouth, while the mast of ceremonies prayed that the marriage of Mr. So-and-so to this tigress be blessed by the Almighty. As a teenager, he thought it would be very strange for a man to have sex with his tiger wife, and wondered what kind of children such a union would produce Ma Muah would show off her toothless gums in laughter, chuckling every time he told her about his notion of the marriage between a human and a tiger.

“Only men marry tigers,” Ma Muah said, “but not all the tigers are female.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Man Tiger – Summary

A wry, affecting tale set in a small town on the Indonesian coast, Man Tiger tells the story of two interlinked and tormented families and of Margio, a young man ordinary in all particulars except that he conceals within himself a supernatural female white tiger. The inequities and betrayals of family life coalesce around and torment this magical being. An explosive act of violence follows, and its mysterious cause is unraveled as events progress toward a heartbreaking revelation.

Lyrical and bawdy, experimental and political, this extraordinary novel announces the arrival of a powerful new voice on the global literary stage.

Copyright © 2004 by Eka Kurniawan.

Translated from the Bahasa Indonesia by: Labodalih Sembiring

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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