Sita’s family married her to a Bengal tiger. When her parents had arranged the marriage, she was revolted. To marry a tiger! How loathsome, how base. Was she really so ugly and undesirable that the only interested suitor was a beast?
Nonetheless, reluctant and angry and ashamed, she’d followed him to his home at the edge of the village. But to her surprise, Anand was resolutely romantic, so unlike the boys in her engineering college. He recited poetry, and his pursuit of her was focused and thoughtful. He read the books she recommended, even the British murder mystery novels, discussing why the clues didn’t quite add up or marveling at the skillfulness of the author’s plotting. They attended outdoor movies every Saturday night, eating popcorn and drinking Thums Up cola at the intermission and sitting in the back, out of sight of the gossipers.
After the tiger was murdered, newspapers across India branded Sita a killer, and all the charm fell away from her memories of those early courtship days. Everyone claimed they knew what had happened. At parties in the neighboring state, raconteurs and conspiracy theorists drunk on cashew feni would put forth detailed hypotheses on why she’d done it and how, describing all manner of bloody horrors. In the village streets, the wallahs gossiped about the latest clues being considered in the police investigation. Grandmothers spent long languid afternoons sipping tea and munching on vada, and although they started with the best of intentions—talking about their children’s marital problems and shaking their heads with sighs of ayyo—eventually the conversation would turn to what sort of family Sita must have had, to marry her to a tiger, and what sort of family the dead tiger must have had, to marry him off to a Brahmin girl. Environmental group
