A Tiger for Malgudi by R.K. Narayan

Feeling tired of reading quite some serious books in the recent past, I wanted to escape into some nice fictitious world without any ground-breaking theories or proofs or even thrilling plots, something that will lighten me up and thus I picked up this book.

Looking at its title "A Tiger for Malgudi", I was expecting a story focussed on the people of Malgudi terrorized by a tiger...But what i got was a pleasant surprise! and here's how I am going to spoil that surprise for you :-) It is an autobiography of a tiger from the mempi hills of Malgudi, talking about its violence-filled youth in the jungle, followed by its capture and then its life in the circus leading to its short stint in a movie and finally, its escape and enlightenment by a sadhu. All along, it is replete with R.K.Narayan's trademark sarcasm about the day to day aspects of the human life... For a more detailed overview of the book, click here.

Whenever I see an alien (in a movie ;-)) that has some kind of a face with some kind of eyes for vision, I realize that our imagination indeed does have some limitations imposed by the real world! And when writing a fiction about a tiger telling its story in first person, there is a great challenge for the author's imagination to really look at all the actions of a tiger from the animal's perspective without falling into the most common pitfall of bestowing human nature to the tiger. And R.K. Narayan avoids such a pitfall very masterfully - like the instance where the tiger loses its wife and children - you should read the book to see how R.K.N deals with such a "tragedy" like a tiger. Another example is when R.K.N deals with animal cruelty in the circus from the tiger's perspective without getting poignant or sentimental and still maintaining the light-heartedness of the book.

And even in the tiger's shoes, he does not stop making fun of some of the aspects of the human world and even the forest... I found it very funny to read the tiger's comments about humans calling Lion the king of the forest -

"Everyone I encountered proved weaker and submissive, but that submissiveness did not count - I delivered a fatal blow in any case when I wished and strode about as the King of the forest. By the way, who crowned the lion King of the forest ? Probably a fable writer, carried away by the pompous mane and beard, I suppose! A more slothful creature was never created. All his energy is conserved for hunting food, and once that is accomplished he lies down for days on end, so reluctant to move a muscle that he could be used by any other jungle creature as a mattress; it would make no difference to him if birds nested in his beard and laid eggs. As for his supreme strength I had a chance to test it in the circus ring once, when we were let out to fight and he fled into a waiting cage thanking the Creator for the damage of only one ear, which came off when I tried to comb his royal mane."

Though I felt that the book was a bit monotonous during the tiger's circus training period, as a whole it was a very relaxing, enjoyable read for the weekend with R.K.N's heart-warming humor sprinkled all along!