The Time Traveller and the Tiger Read online

  And a string of pearls, given to him half a lifetime ago.

  Mandeep could remember every detail of that afternoon. It was the day before the Lassiters were due to leave India, and Mrs Lassiter’s room was still strewn with clothing and partly packed trunks.

  ‘Come,’ she had said, as Mandeep stood awkwardly in the doorway. ‘I have something for you.’

  And before he could protest, she had unhooked the string of pearls from around her neck and was pressing it into his unwilling hands.

  He shook his head, surprised and embarrassed. ‘I can’t, it’s not—’

  ‘I want you to have it. You pulled John from the river. You saved his life, Mandeep.’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘Please,’ Mrs Lassiter said in a voice he had never heard before.

  He looked up. There were tears in her eyes.

  ‘I couldn’t have lost another child,’ she said. ‘I think it would have… killed me.’

  She paused, trying to smile, then took Mandeep’s hand and curled it tight around the string of pearls.

  ‘One day, when you have children of your own, you’ll understand.’

  The pearls were fastened with a diamond clasp and extremely valuable. After they had been sold, there was enough money for a train ticket to the city and for Mandeep to enrol in a good school, although he had to work two jobs to stay there, waiting on tables and hauling boxes of groceries before returning home to study until late into the night.

  The speaker was finally winding to a close. Mandeep heard the sound of his name and the thunder of applause. He stood up, his mind still far away.

  The string of pearls had helped to set him on his path, but something else had been even more important. A scrap of paper he had found near the ashes of a long-ago campfire.

  Kelsie had left it there. The girl with all the peculiar questions. She had stared down the biggest tiger in the world with nothing more than a song, and then simply vanished. They had looked for days without finding her. She must have run away from home, John said, although nobody knew where that home might be, or how she could possibly survive alone in the forest.

  Mandeep had never forgotten that girl, nor the words written on her scrap of paper.

  What is an ecosystem? ran the typewritten question.

  And beneath, in scrawling pencil, the misspelled answer.

  An ecosystem is a commewnity of living organisms that interakt together because they are all linked in a kind of cercle circle of life and everything needs everything else or else it will all just eventchually die.

  Mandeep still had that piece of paper, tucked away in a drawer in his office. He’d heard the term ‘ecosystem’, of course, though not until decades later, and he would never understand how Kelsie had known about it all those years before. But her words had seemed like a message.

  The applause was dying away. Mandeep cleared his throat.

  ‘As you know,’ he began, ‘the government has recently announced the designation of another area of national parkland.’

  A picture flashed up on the huge screen behind Mandeep’s back. A winding track through groves of sal trees, the sun pouring in great columns of light between the ancient branches.

  His forest.

  ‘It is my pleasure,’ Mandeep said, and for all his practice at public speaking, his voice caught for a second. ‘My great pleasure, to present to you India’s newest tiger reserve.’

  The area was small, not nearly large enough. But it would be added to, it would grow. Others would take up the fight. Mandeep closed his eyes for an instant. There would be many in the years to come, he was sure of it. People who believed as he did, who shared the same dream. The dream he had held in his heart for as long as he could remember.

  Of the forest as a garden, with a place for everything, and where every living thing was safe.

  1989. ENGLAND.

  The train driver opened the door of his compartment and settled into his seat with a slight creak of his back. The seat was old, its leather worn from decades of use, so moulded to the shape of the driver’s backside that it felt like a part of his body itself.

  Which in a sense it was. He had sat in that seat almost every day for the last thirty-nine years, barring holidays and sick leave.

  Yet not for much longer. As the driver started up the engine and the train pulled out of the station, he was pleased that his last day on the job had turned out to be a sunny one. It gave everything he saw a bright clarity, every sleeper in the tracks stood out, every passing cottage, every tree. But perhaps it only looked that way precisely because it was his last day.

  Days were like pennies, the driver thought sadly. They only rattled when there were hardly any left at the bottom of the jar.

  Thirty-nine years. He knew every bolt in the tracks, every curve, every copse of trees. They were flying by him, vanishing, already gone…

  He was coming to the long bend, with the village below him on the right and the hill rising steeply to trees on his left. For thirty-nine years he had driven his train along this precise stretch of track, and for almost all of them, the same memory had flashed without fail through his mind.

  How could it not? It was stamped there, as firmly as the shape of his backside in his seat.

  July, 1956.

  He’d seen a splash of colour on the tracks ahead. A toddler, his face upturned, as if pinned in place by the sight of the train hurtling towards him. The driver had been dimly aware of shouting from the carriage behind him, the sound of fists beating against a window. His hand shot to the brake, then froze.

  He couldn’t apply the brake, not at the speed he was going, not on this bend. The train might run clear off the tracks if he did. And even if he were to risk it, there was no chance he could stop in time. The child was so close, the driver could already see the stripes on his tiny jacket, his curly hair lifting in the breeze…

  A movement caught the corner of the driver’s eye. He glanced swiftly to his left and his mouth fell open.

  A man was running down the slope to the track in a long diagonal. He was moving fast, faster than seemed possible, fast enough to keep pace with the train, fast enough to actually overtake it.

  For a second, the driver’s brain was unable to take in what he was seeing. Then he felt a surge of terrified disbelief. The sound of beating fists in the carriage behind grew suddenly louder.

  He can’t do it! The words were a shout in the driver’s head.

  The fool! The brave, crazy fool!

  In the hours and days and years to come, the driver would be asked over and over again to describe what happened next, although he could never give a satisfactory answer. At the very last instant, when impact seemed inevitable, he had tightened his eyes in horror. He had not seen the speeding figure cross the tracks with barely seconds to spare, scoop up the child, and tumble to safety on the other side. But the driver had imagined it many times, and each time he did, he thought the same thing.

  If that man hadn’t been there, in just the right time and place, the child would have been killed. And the driver would have blamed himself for it for the rest of his life.

  He shook his head. The child had been saved, no harm done.

  He rounded the bend and the village and hill disappeared behind him. How fast that man had been, the driver marvelled for the ten thousandth time. How he had run!

  As if running was what he was meant for.

  THE PRESENT. ENGLAND.

  Everything was the same, except there was less of it.

  Elsie was too dazed to move for a second or two. Then she slowly lifted her head. The green house door was still ajar.

  Uncle John was standing on the threshold, looking at her.

  ‘There you are, Kelsie,’ he said.

  ‘I sneezed,’ Elsie said numbly.

  How old he looked, and yet not old at all. She could see the boy in him quite clearly, still twelve years old, despite the wrinkles. Time had changed him, and time had left him ju
st the same.

  ‘I told you my nose was itchy,’ Elsie said. ‘You said I was picking it!’

  Uncle John laughed. ‘Did I?’

  He doesn’t remember, Elsie thought. It was seventy-four years ago, after all.

  ‘I think there must have been a bit of pollen in there,’ Elsie said. ‘And it came out when I sneezed.’

  Uncle John walked up to her, moving steadily without a trace of a limp. They stood for a moment, looking down at the flower that catches time. Its leaves had turned brown and its curling petal had withered to the colour of a cobweb.

  ‘You’re right, Kelsie,’ Uncle John said at last. ‘It must have been the pollen.’

  ‘You don’t have to keep calling me that,’ she said. ‘I made it up, you know.’

  ‘But it’s your name. I gave it to you myself.’

  Elsie stared at him, bewildered.

  ‘When you were born,’ Uncle John explained. ‘I was going to name you Elsie, after my mother, but then I looked into your eyes and I thought, it’s her! So, I added a K.’

  ‘I was going to suggest “Corvette” as a middle name,’ he continued, ‘only I didn’t think your mother would go for it.’

  ‘You recognised me?’

  Uncle John nodded. ‘I’d been wondering for some time when you’d show up.’

  ‘But you didn’t believe me when I told you I came from the future!’

  ‘I know,’ Uncle John said. ‘And I went on not believing it. Then it occurred to me that if someone your age really had come from the future, they’d probably have just as much difficulty explaining things as you did. Then the moon landing happened.’

  Uncle John smiled. ‘And the first female prime minister, and the explosion of plastic… by the time the internet made its appearance, I was thoroughly convinced.’

  Elsie couldn’t speak. Her brain was too busy trying – and failing – to work the whole thing out.

  Uncle John put his hand on her shoulder. ‘We can talk about it later, when you’ve rested,’ he said. ‘Colleen has made pancakes for breakfast!’

  ‘Colleen?’ The girl in the photograph, Elsie thought. The one Uncle John had been in love with.

  ‘But I thought you never saw her again.’

  ‘I never saw her again?’ Uncle John repeated. ‘You mean to say—’

  He broke off, shaking his head. ‘I told myself I wouldn’t ask questions. To know what would have happened in your life if things had turned out differently, might be rather… terrible, don’t you think?’

  Elsie nodded.

  ‘So, you married her after all,’ she said. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘I’ll admit, to begin with I didn’t have much of a chance. There were a lot of other people in love with Colleen, you know. But then there was that incident with her nephew.’

  ‘What incident?’

  Uncle John made a face, scratching the back of his head. ‘I managed to save the little chap from an oncoming train. Sheer luck, but it seemed to change Colleen’s whole outlook. Thought I was some sort of hero. Lot of nonsense, of course.’

  ‘So, you did it,’ Elsie said wonderingly.

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Your one amazing thing.’

  ‘Lot of nonsense,’ Uncle John repeated, although she could tell he was pleased by the way he rushed to change the subject.

  ‘You didn’t do so badly yourself,’ he said. ‘With that tiger, I mean. I thought you were a goner for sure.’

  They left the greenhouse and walked down the path by the side of the house and through the back door into the kitchen. Colleen was at the stove, twice as wide as the girl in the photograph, but just as merry of face.

  ‘Mandeep!’ Elsie cried. There was a picture of him on the wall where the ceremonial Gurkha swords had been. He was dressed in a suit, shaking hands with a group of important-looking people.

  ‘We’ve kept in touch over the years,’ Uncle John told her. ‘Colleen and I went to visit him in India not that long ago. He’s a grandfather now.’

  He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table, and Elsie sat down with a grateful thud. Until that moment, she’d not been aware of how terribly tired she was, nor how terribly hungry.

  She was Elsie with a K, who had faced down an elephant and sung to a tiger and avoided at least ten giant spiders and seen the statue of a god in a silent glade. And she still didn’t know how any of it had happened.

  After breakfast and a good, long rest, she would have to find a fresh notebook and write the whole thing down. The Incredible (True) Adventures of Kelsie Corvette. She already knew how it would start.

  Chapter One

  Most people would have screamed to find a tiger in Uncle John’s spare room but Kelsie meerly raised an eyebrow. How very peckuliar, she thought to herself…

  Colleen placed a plate in front of her. It was piled so high she could barely see over the top.

  ‘There’s plenty more if you want seconds,’ Colleen said.

  Uncle John gazed thoughtfully at the stack.

  ‘You can’t go wrong with pancakes,’ he said.

  THE PRESENT. CENTRAL INDIA.

  The cub was less than a year old, yet he was nearly the size of an adult, the sole survivor of a litter born in the root pit of a fallen tree. One sibling had died soon after birth, another had been taken by wild dogs six months later. Only the cub was left to follow his mother, looking where she looked, stopping when she stopped, each step a silent echo of her heavy, velvet footfall.

  He might have been her shadow, but for the unusual markings on his head, stripes so broad and black they made his face look scorched.

  They had fed the previous night. A full-grown boar. His mother had held it down for her cub to make the kill, his grasp clumsy, his teeth grappling against the boar’s bristly neck in an ecstasy of eagerness. Hours later, the memory was still fresh in his mind as he moved through the grass, the morning sun on his shoulders, keeping his gaze on the two white patches behind his mother’s ears as she walked ahead.

  He felt a vibration in the ground, a distant, rumbling growl, becoming louder by the second. His mother paused and raised her head. But it was neither threat nor prey, and certainly no reason to alter course.

  The cub had heard the sound many times in this part of the forest. It came from humans in vehicles, moving back and forth along wide trails that skirted the meadows and the densest trees. They appeared singly, or in groups, either inching along or else travelling so swiftly that the dust spat and turned to cloud. Yet fast or slow, alone or together, they always did the same thing when the cub and his mother happened upon them.

  They stopped. They fell quiet.

  It was no different that morning. Two vehicles, motionless on the trail, as the cub’s mother emerged from between the trees. She crossed in front of them without sparing a glance, the cub at her heels.

  The vehicles were no more than a leap away. The cub caught the bitter scent of humans, heard the sound of their breathing, full of strange gasps and mutterings. His mother had already disappeared into the thicket, but the cub was young and easily distracted. He had never come this close to humans before. He halted mid-stride to look at them.

  Instantly, all movement in the vehicles ceased, all breath. As if the turning of his head had stopped the world itself.

  For as far back as anyone in the area could remember, there had been a tiger that looked like this cub, one in every generation. A male, massive in size, with the same burned-black striping on his face, the same air of command. So identical were these animals that even the wardens of the park, who monitored each birth and death, half-joked that they must be a single individual. And that was perhaps why, unlike all the other tigers in the park, the wardens never gave this one a name.

  He was simply the tiger. Part-real, part-legend, born over and over with the rising of the sun. A tiger that would live for ever, as long as there was prey to stalk and forest deep enough to hold him.

  And people who would fight to
keep his world from vanishing.

  The cub stared at the humans in a silence so profound that he could hear the sigh of the dust settling on the trail. Then he glanced aside and continued on his way, walking the tiger’s solitary path. No wider than the length of his whiskers, no louder than the snapping of a twig. Where his feet fell the softest, and the cover was greatest, and the light tricked every eye but his.

  As always, special thanks to my agent Rebecca Carter whose steadfast support makes all things possible, and to Fiona Kennedy, eagle-eyed Jenny Glencross, and the whole team at Zephyr.

  Huge thanks also to my sister Thomasina Unsworth for her endless love and encouragement, and for being the funniest, most enthusiastic and long-suffering partner in adventure that anyone might hope for.

  I could not have had two better guides to the Indian forest than naturalists Karan Singh Kotla and Sanjay Mohan, both of Pugdundee Safaris. Their passion, depth of knowledge and unfailing good humour will never be forgotten.

  Last but not least, in gratitude to all the dedicated men and women who work – often at great personal risk – to protect wild tigers and ensure their future.

  Tania Unsworth,

  Boston,

  March 2020.

  ‘Wild cats, their prey, and the natural habitats on which they depend are in peril and we need your help. If you think you are too young to be heard and make a difference, remember that some of today’s most prominent and impactful conservationists, like Greta Thunberg and Mya-Rose Craig, are but teenagers.’

  John Goodrich, Chief Scientist and Tiger Programme Director, Panthera

  *

  Of all the big cats, the tiger is the closest to extinction. Worldwide, less than 4,000 remain in the wild, and their survival is precarious. Hunted for their body parts, facing loss of habitat and dwindling supplies of prey, tigers need protection more than ever.

  You can be part of the fight to save them.

  Learn more by visiting the websites listed below. Follow and share. Raise money – either by yourself or as part of a team – and make a donation to your favourite tiger conservation group. Tell everyone why tigers matter.