I made this site,

It's somewhere between a journal, a portfolio and a shop.
I write stories - imaginative thrillers, shorts - and I make illustrations.
Keep scrolling to the right for more stuff. Sometimes it refuses to budge and you have to reload.

Send me an email, or choose one of the other options using these buttons:

Yours figuratively,

Omprakash Kaga David

david@okdavid.com
@mylast15letters

From time to time I send out a newsletter.
It is comprised of a piece of my writing and a picture.

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Here's a number of illustrations I made for Liberty.
They'll be printed onto fabric as a pattern called Queue for the Zoo, available in Spring '14.
There are twenty three of them in total, but only six or so were chosen for the print design.•

Above: Look - here it is as a shirt.

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I designed the album art for the new EP by Me for Queen.
The band liked the idea of a haughty cat.
Check out their website.•

Here is the EP cover, the back of the case, and the design to be printed onto the CD:

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What’s the mind of an urban fox like?
The life of any non-human mammal in a city must be strange.
I get the feeling rats own cities at least as much as we do.
But foxes are scavengers, refugees, banditos. An unnatural habitat has become their norm. •

The fox I saw in the street tonight

This December evening I saw a mange-ridden fox with lumps in the full glare of a bulb in the street. Conspicuous from most angles, in the lemon streetlight, then from specific others so shadowy.

A glance told me it was not as street-smart as those particular urban foxes because it showed zero guile: a-prowl at 90' to those railings that skirt the pavement, looking long-nosed and furtive but highly conspicuous to me, walking along the pavement looking down the length of the street, and the railings were low enough look over and down. The fox looked stupid and vulnerable.

But when this blundering animal clocked me staring at it and our eyes found the others' eyes, its' gleamed sinisterly like milk and who knows how it'd have described mine, for that instant I hopped bodies and imagined myself the fox, David the Fox, or Coughs the Fox, and felt out how it maybe feels to be a thing so completely clandestine as an urban beast, born into the heart of a Man-made place, London. But equally any city.

A network of corridors and doors that Man holds the keys to, and Man strutting upright and often with rigid insectoid habits: in columns at significant times of day. Some travel within devilishly fast metal pods that cruise in channels. They stream by like glimmering fish, and transfix me with long glares from brilliant eyes. Cruising without stopping for me, so I stay away from them. I have had friends who limped leaking with dark fur shuddering to pass away beneath an object, unseen until daybreak. Mortally wounded.

My whole life I creep feeling hunted, hiding briefly in the city's shady groins until the coast is clear and I can dart out to the next hiding spot. Flatten my body and slink, do not be seen. I tug at binbags with my mouth, desperate for food.

A concrete warren that goes on and on on all sides. I know its alleys well yet it will always be completely alien to me. As I slink between dazzling signs in the belly of the beast. The smells are completely bewildering too, complex with factors: everything is artificial, addictive sugars drive me wild.

And what happened to architecture you could understand? A garden, a park, a simple wall: these offer a bit of calm, but people always come and I flee. 'Look!'. They always react, as if I am unnatural. In their park. And yet incomprehensibly in this foxy dreamscape I see dogs: dogs who the Men think are also Men like them, who live in their homes and stroll together down the streets. They shit like dogs, but then afterwards do this brisk shake, like Men.

We smell each other – them us from the pavements and us them from the grottos. Perfumed. They even ride the metal fishes, and pull faces out the sides, and look more like Men than ever when they do that.

Just seeing it meant that it had been foiled. Loping back towards the estate, totally wretched and scummy as hell, and as I watched the fox go wherever it was going my human brain returned and I realised I'd like to have beetroot for dinner. And then I thought about how beetroot turns your pee pink, and I can't remember what else.

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Written as a present for a man in Glasgow who lives on Otago street in a white house with a wonderful garden.
His mother had just passed away. She had been a loving gardener and he missed her. The good news: he was about to get married and invited me to the wedding.
Just a week before an old lady had come to his door telling him that one hot summer when she was a little girl, there had been a tiger in his garden and the neighbour kids had played with it every day.
So I wrote him this story, went to his house one night, and buried it in his garden.
This is a true story.•

The fool in the tiger house

Yes Doctor, let me explain. I know you have questions...

Hello nurse.

The house I live in now? It’s the house I have always lived in. Even back in those days when most young men traveled, I always remained.

Ouch - that stings.

The house sits, upright of course, but from the sunken garden that flourishes behind a brick wall of eyebrow height, an observant person notices there are subterranean levels, and to their imagination the house takes on the form of an enormous white rhizome.
I live here alone and read books at the window or in the garden. Over pages I can observe the nearby bridge of iron fossil that supports a busy road, unseen unless from the house's lofty top storey. Shoals of traffic swim across the top and beneath it a cola-coloured river giddily swirls.
Imagine me, seated at the window.

Eesh! Mama.

The winter still hasn’t left Glasgow but never mind; my garden is beautiful all year round, even with the plants holding their delicate colours back as they are doing now. My mother could have made even a stone sprout and bloom flowers. Really my garden is her legacy and tends to me rather than I to it or, I should say, to her.
Mum raised me herself and once in a while would tell her sad joke: that Dad died in childbirth. He suffered a climactic heart-attack during my conception. It's not much of a punch-line! I was a bad idea, and I was born sorry.

Mum’s father kept something back from the military. He had a poet's subtle secrecy. Grandpa was a gentle man. I don’t understand how he came to enlist, but I am grateful that he did, for it was in India that he met Hoshi, and Hoshi was my mortal father's name. Short for Hoshimento.
Hoshi couldn’t swim, and was employed as a swimming pool cleaner, a Wattawashawallah, by those of the British officers who floated. Grandpa rescued him one day, when he overextended and fell in the pool. He had been trying to fish leaves out of the water with a net; he was a hard worker you see, as well as a lousy fisherman.

Ouchy! Careful with that sponge Doctor, please.

He was the nicest man and the most conscientious worker in Manoribel, his village. It was a troubled place. His community were frequently visited during the night by creatures of all sorts, including the striped types with the silent crushing paws of moon-landers and tails that concussed the air as they swished. Irresistibly fantastic creatures from storybooks, but with the paragraphs left in about taut ligaments tightening under bristling fur and snarls gargling from a throat bloodied in entrails.

To repay Grandfather for saving his life, my dear unknown father - grateful quiet Hoshi - presented him with two tiger-cubs just as he was about to sail home to Glasgow. One tiger, one tigress. As it transpired, and I still wonder at this part of the history, Hoshi ended up leaving his village and accompanying Grandfather and the cubs on the long boat-ride back to Scotland. They grew close during a whiskey time farewell, Mum said.
Hoshi eyed the waves the boat was riding with nervous excitement; they billowed as if the folds of a vast curtain. He turned from the horizon and looked back. He could taste the memory of his breakfast puri, prepared in his village. India’s disappearing coastline meditated upon detachment, eyebrowed by deep lakes of monsoon-soaked sacks low in the sky. As Grandpa and Hoshi sailed, the sacks broke, and their rains applauded the friendship with a thousand million wet handclaps.

The voyage lasted two weeks and they arrived home on Mum’s fifteenth birthday, July 16th. The tiger cubs, and their timid, earnest handler, were special and exciting. Mum told me that Dad was gifted with an unfathomably deep imagination, a honeycombed library of stories whose avenues were populated with all kinds of spirited characters, who lived outrageously, in improbable places. Listening to Hoshi’s stories was like peering amongst coral at those life-forms too unusual for the shallows.
When Hoshi recounted to my mother the purring and prowling of sunbeams among palm-leaves, or the vats of thick crystal feni fermenting beneath the cashew trees, her whole body listened and its innermost roots distended to an imaginary realm to drink deeply. Mum used to paint, and I can show you her pictures of Dad telling his stories. It seems impossible, but I can almost remember what they were like.

No – don’t show me that… I can’t stand the sight of my own blood.

Grandfather understood what was happening and approved. He reflected that he had rescued me that day, poolside. He was an industrious man, never one for lounging around in the sun. If only I had inherited some of his busy-ness.

All summer long, Mum said she played behind the garden walls with Hoshi, and with the two cubs, and told one another their secrets. Between them, no mystery remained unmythologised. Did you know, every person is an unrepeatable magic spell, cast among the stars and the molecules? The time passed quickly, with a momentum that made it last forever. Their love goes on. There is a wonderful science to love.
Unfortunately even the unusual sunshine of that summer was insufficient to nurture the targola and mango and papaya trees, or in fact any of the spice plants that Grandfather had brought home in his suitcases bursting with seed pods. Such plants need humidity. Sadder still, autumn's golden sunsets began to breeze, and the tiger cubs would shiver at the sight of cloud. They were growing bigger too, bigger now than dogs. Mum was told that the tigers would either have to go to the zoo to live in pens, or be sailed back home to India, to a real jungle.
A decision had to be made. Hoshi, a young man of ideas, took Grandfather aside and whispered conspiratorially in his ear. Picture my mother, crouching between her tigers in the garden of the white rhizome, wondering what they were scheming about.

Grandfather returned to India with the cubs. If Hoshi had left too, my mother told me she would have found the winter unbearably cold, tasteless, walled up behind an unbreakable sadness.
As it happened, that winter was when Mum and Dad fell truly and achingly in love. They were married in the garden on January 17th, and ten months later the world swapped Hoshi for Hopi, which is my name. It’s not short for anything. There is an awful symmetry to death.

My ribs! Please be careful..!

Grandfather stayed in India. He left the military and studied philosophy and medicine under Sri Alphango in a spice plantation in the South. But he visited once in a while. I looked forward to his visits so much. Often he appeared unannounced and magically, sometimes stepping out of a doorway as if he'd been there all along. Mum was happiest during his visits. His skin carried the scent of spices and his fingers were often coloured with powdered turmeric or saffron: we all viewed life through our third eye when Grandfather was around. Cardamom pods would spill from the pockets of his white kurtha. I can picture him vividly, leaning on his stick, which he’d had made by a carpenter in the holy city. I can hear his Scottish purr with an adopted Hindi lilt, saying, “This is for you, Tigercub,” as he handed me a gift, wrapped in Indian newspaper.
I would discard the paper news from elsewhere. Beneath I found oceanic purple robes, or a peacock-feather quill that wrote with purple ink. The tales I wrote with my quill were nothing but the naive conjurations of an untravelled boy, imagining jungle-islands, and sorcerors who lived in pyramids among the treetops. Mum read my stories and painted me pictures of her favourite scenes. It thrilled me to see them brought to life.

There were times among my bedroom-clutter when I would detect that distinct whiff and chase it down all the stairs to be disappointed by a room without Grandpa. I’d be certain he’d be there, filling the room. But there would be just Mum, stirring a pot of soup or reading with her moon-lensed glasses on by herself with a radio murmuring. I never suspected she had any secrets. She was just Mum, good at gardening.
We were friends but she missed the companion who had brought her tigers. When the missing grew painful she would retreat to a private realm of continual Summer. I wouldn’t see her for days.

How many stitches?

I made the discovery a few years ago, when a rare moment of winter sun blinked through the kitchen window, and dipped a gleaming toe into the metal frame of the spice rack. Grandfather's stick is kept hung on a nail above the spice rack by the way. For the first time I noticed a star engraved in the frame. It was barely visible, but glittered now in that rogue beam of light. I remember thinking to myself, 'Today is an auspicious day'.
The star was familiar. It belonged not in the sky but somewhere else, another down-to-earth place. It resembled the cross-section of an apple core, but I had seen it elsewhere, outside apple cores.
The mystery squeezed my brain until early in the afternoon of the next day. I was busy, inspecting the star with a magnifying glass, when a comet blazed across my memory with a swishing, fiery tail. I felt the sudden, awkward shame of having forgotten something about my heroic Grandfather. Remembering was like being reunited with the friendly tick of your wrist-watch, there all along.
I lifted the stick from its hook and examined its foot, a carved paw. Upon the paw-pad was a star cast in brass, just as I had temporarily forgotten but always remembered: Grandfather used to dip his paw into puddles and conjure constellations onto two dimensional surfaces. The walls and pavements and tabletops and ceiling would twinkle until dry, and briefly seem the glistening skin of an outer space that pretends its flatness to the night-watcher lying on his back in the long grass, all the while holding back its real depth for itself.

Is there any brandy in that medicine chest over there?

I hadn’t felt so excited for years! Grandfather's cane weighed very little so I practised flourishing it the way he used to. “Hopi, watch out for the pans please,” Mum would have said, peering at me through her moonish glasses. She would fill in crosswords with little pictures sometimes, so that they resembled buildings with irregularly spaced windows. Imagine all the secret rooms in a building like that.
Did you know that there is such a thing as a binary star, meaning two stars that orbit some common interest? The brighter star is called the primary, and the other is its companion star. Science can make you feel lonely sometimes.
I tried pressing the star on the cane against the star on the frame, smiling to myself, pretending I wasn’t foolish enough to expect something more to come of it.
But something did come of it. There is a reason for me telling you this convoluted story, after all. Your patience hasn’t been in vain Doctor! And kind, gentle Nurse. The stars of the cane and the star of the frame knocked against one another, and smoothly something was unlocked. The stars discussed their common interest with a single metallic whisper. A mechanism as fine as any watch.

Don’t you have any smaller needle than that Doctor?
It looks like a sword to me.

The spice-rack didn’t swing dramatically inwards or outwards but something had definitely been unlocked. I was perspiring all the signs of the Zodiac. I ignored the postman's delivery upstairs. Nobody writes to me anyway, I only receive other peoples’ letters, by accident. I read them sometimes.
The spice-rack swung neither to one side nor to the other. Foolishly I tried another way: bending my knees, I attempted to slide the rack upwards, as if it were the shutter of a shopfront.
With the slight squeak of a mouse, upwards went the entire library of spices, rising like a theatre backdrop! Behind the scenes was an ordinary looking staircase, as if to a cellar. But Mum had told me we didn’t have a cellar! My family of secrets! And now, a fluttering of wings within my chest: my butterflies muttering a chorus of prompts, “Descend, Hopi!” I put a torch in my pocket and stepped into the beyond. And let the spices close behind me with a sigh of jeera.

Nurse, please hold my hand.

Using the cane as a prop, I descended the stairs. After each step I practised flourishing. Conveniently, stripes of light came through the floorboards above my head. There were eighteen and a half steps. By the final half-step I could flourish with aplomb, and I completed my descent with a skip.
There was no dust, no dead air down here. I could even detect an imaginary breeze, and oxygen, as if from a jungle of imaginary plants. Despite the ribs of illumination gleaming upon the stairs I couldn’t see very much now I was at the bottom. I tried the torch and it gasped the sort of light a dying ghost might briefly manage. I turned a corner and found a door. The door was thumb-shaped and its grain made me think of Grandpa's thumbprint. This mystery had him all over it! What had the old magician stored down here? For the first time I imagined the wealth of papers, journals and family records that would be boxed in the cellar space on the other side of the door. There would be a heap of reading to do, but it’d be worth it if it meant finding out more about where I came from. That troubled little village.

I opened the door. Before me was nothing but an abrupt hole, down into which led two long ropes. Into the deep darkness. Would twin fakirs climb up the rope to meet me? No, foolish Hopi: this was a pulley system. I peered down the throat. Aah! An empty and inexplicable well. It was too deep for my myopic torch, but using the pulleys, an object was revealed. I pulled this object up, up, skwup! skwup! and recognised it as Grandpa’s old rocking chair.
I took a seat, and tugged the pulley ropes to descend. My unpractised single-handed technique lowered me in gulps, an egg and a python. The cane shifted in my lap as I tugged but never fell into the mysterious hole. The walls around me were stone, and there isn’t much to say about them until the final twenty feet of the descent, when my faltering torchlight waxed upon an off-white sheet that reminded me of dust-cloths in ancient ancestral homes you see in films. The torch expired, and its glowing filament cooled to stone. The skwup!'s seemed blind in the dark.

Can you imagine how I felt doing this alone, Nurse? I said, hold my hand.

The chair alighted softly, as gently as a feather on a petal. When I stood up and took a few steps, I was certain there was moss underfoot. I reached my arms out blindly. Finding a beaded string, I pulled gently, which caused a glassy chime and a bulb to light the room from within its paper cave. I found carpet where before there had been moss, and was grateful that it was so clean.
Once my slow eyes had adjusted enough to take in its nature the carpet enthralled me. The most wonderful embroidery, of a tigress reclining high upon a riverbank amidst thick foliage, as lifelike as if I was seeing it through a window in the floor. Her shoulder blades were insurmountable bone peaks, the colour of forest fire. Her eyes glared at me.
Elsewhere in the carpet at that moment, two young people, boy and girl, were splashing unafraid in a river, while an iridescent blue butterfly fluttered sideways, just a cosmic blue blink among the leaves behind them.

Now everyone must have their secrets, but why was this carpeted room kept a secret from me? Did Mum think I couldn’t keep my mouth shut?

Have I lost much blood? How much do I have left?

My empty stomach growled and I shuddered suddenly with hunger. I don’t eat much, anymore. The walls swayed as if water. At my desk my wine conducts my patterned wallpaper to dance mystically for me until bedtime. I stood still and watched, like a fool, expecting the drowsy motion to become calm again.
But the walls continued to wax and wane then swell and shrink, a tide liquidly tethered to stone walls. I approached and, noticing the blankets faint floral print for the first time, I reached out to the fluttering wall, in the milk of the lamplight, and lifted the curtain as if a parent discovering their child's fortress beneath the tablecloth.

Bending my knees for better peering, I saw no stone wall behind the curtain. Instead, from beyond, a tongue of foreign humidity licked my forearm with a slap! I peered beneath: my eyes widened to take in the astonishing secret beneath my house.
The ceiling was at least as high as the tunnel I had recently spelunked in Grandpa’s rocking-chair, and along it ran a network of pipes, some the size of trucks, that I figured must be part of Glasgow's hot water system. There is a curious biology at work in cities. Steam fizzed and clung as teardrops to fully grown trees, tropical flora rising together everywhere around me in vegetable conversation, bearing ripening fruit I was able to recognise from the picture books Grandfather used to bring me. The quickest way to spot the difference between a mango tree and a papaya tree is by noting the shape of the leaves.
I couldn’t see the end of the room in any direction, for the jungle was thick with giant ferns and lichenous mounds. I once read a book called ‘The Boreal Subkingdom’.

Is that my own rib I see underneath all the red?

Beneath my slippers was moist soil. I noticed a dragon fly slide between the necks of long red-headed flowers from a faraway country and held my breath in surprise, following it with my eyes as it threaded a hesitant path between leaves and around vines and past custard apples. A peacock strutted into view and I had to shut my eyes to steady my nerves. In the darkness of closed eyes, I inhaled through trembling nostrils and told myself that this place was as real as I was.
The unmistakable fragrance of vanilla gave me its pungent sweetness. Next was the reassuring smell of cinnamon. ‘Yes, I feel safe here.’ Opening my eyes the peacock's tail feathers waved as it pecked around the base of a betel nut palm.
I walked past the bird as if in sleep, its many eyes watching through filigree lashes. My vest was soaked through with perspiration from the piping overhead and hot drops spilling from banana leaves. Hyper-fertile nature flourished here unlike anywhere else I’ve ever seen, here in the most unexpected place, a cavern beneath my wonky white house. A freckle hummed past on wings smudged with motion. An elegant heron, the size of a man, walked out to preen itself at the summit of a Broccolic, Asiatic Giant. The comma is included in its name. I read it last Spring, from Mum’s library.

Mine were the first human footprints to walk to a certain lakeside for the first time in many years. It must be generations in terms of certain strata. If you want, I’ll lend you some of Mum’s old books. Then you’ll know what I mean.

Of all her paintings, this was my mother's best portrait of a person’s soul. Mum never bought tinned anything in her life and now I knew why. Down here she had her own jungle of fruit and spices.
Steam rose from the water's surface, and lilies floated towards the far side. Of course I took a swim. Have you ever felt your blood dance? I put down Grandfather’s cane and stripped to my skin. Fish drank from the bubbles between the hairs on my shins. Floating upside down, I could see the ceiling was a road map of pipes. Down here, looking up, I was an eagle soaring above the city, above clouds of steam and treetops. Is that a lemur? Just relax, Hopi, stop quivering..
My tummy was a growling island. A blue butterfly came to drink from my belly-button, and floating with it upon me gave me an impression of absolute serenity. And buoyancy.

Please stitch me up neatly.

I floated ashore. There seemed no reason to wear anything in this place. Nature was a loving mother and would protect her naked baby. A cashew tree by the lakeside provided sustenance - see? A mango tree's fruit spilled its juice down baby's chin. The jungle had tidy avenues. Any fool could see that it was a completely tame environment.
Succulent grapes were lowered for my consideration by the fortunate pressure of monkeys or macaws or some other charming wildlife nestling amongst the vines, and a flying dart of paint with a slender beak disappeared into the tresses of a pepper plant. What unusual flower-buds! I saw an adorable lizard.

Yow-ee! Be careful with that blade!

In such a mystical place the eddies of airborne pollen could have been star-dust. Did you know that all life grew from spores that fell from space? You should read more, you know that? It’s true: we are the micro that comes from the macro.

No I don’t take any prescription drugs Doctor, why?

Every precious leaf reassured me of something I’ve thought for a long time. Together, we who are truly Of Nature, are sensitive to the mythologies of life and the imagination. We feel it. Around me, tendrils of young shoots were unfolding from the soil at the speed of time. I spied a trail of colourful, photographic film that had been left behind by a snail. I watch it sliding along a crest of slimy bubbles. On the tip of my tongue there also sat a bubble. The undressed, earthen-toed son of the land understands his mother's subtleties. Oh, yes!

Rounding an obese bunyan tree, a metallic gleam could be seen between the puzzle of its wooden limbs, leafy gestures and pouting flowers. A refreshing breeze tickled my nakedness.
The gleaming I could see up ahead was not part of the piping system. In a slight, respectful clearing was a bronze statue of a crouching Indian boy, collecting two tigercubs in his arms. An actual ladybird was crawling across his forehead and mounted the prominent bindi engraved there. Nearby on the floor was a bronze fishing net holding bronze leaves. How the naked son cries in delight upon meeting his prodigal father for the first time! I crouched opposite Dad and looked through salty, monsooned eyes at every detail of the face of my father’s likeness. There he was. Slimmer than me. Younger than me.
My tears quickly joined the humidity of the air. Hoshi's face was compassionate but elfishly mischievous, his smooth cheeks and round eyes looked at the tiger cubs rather than at me, his own cub, but I took no offence. His hair had been sculpted as if sopping wet, freshly fished from a swimming pool. His linen trousers clung to his legs and beneath the condensation of the air bronze droplets sat upon his skin.
High above my father and me, whizzing swifts made the most of the break in the jungle canopy and zipped after insects. Apus! Apus! The swishing of branches, the hissing of steam, the fluttering of wings, and the heavy padded footfalls; a huge tigress had entered the clearing behind me and was cautiously approaching.

No, Nurse don’t put that oxygen mask on my face,
I won’t be able to tell you the story!

A lithe, elongated body with a tail shaped like a walking stick. Er. Where did I put Grandfather’s cane? Her shoulder blades rose and fell with the silky violence of tectonic plates. And then, our eyes met. There was instant recognition. I crouched with my arms held out to greet her, in living shadow of my father’s statue.
As she approached she loomed across the sky like a tanker next to a humble canoe. My new pet’s paws flattened with every step she took. Soon we were nose to nose. Her breath smelled of nutmeg. From her throat a spiced and scented purr bubbled, volcanically, gently. She watched me from two welcoming yellow doors and smiled with great kindness. Her tail licked in a gesture I understood immediately: she wanted me to ride upon her back, to enthrone me between her shoulder blades.

The musculature of an obligate carnivore is thrilling to touch. Sculptural oblique’s, intercostals, iliopsoas and then latissimis; names I’ve read in anatomical books. Life of an unfathomable voracity heaved beneath ligament and tissue and thick coarse fur. The tigress could see me in the corner of her eye and taste my breath with her whiskers.

Is there any incense we could burn?

Her shoulder-blades stood higher than my chest, so to climb aboard I had to take a run up and then leap off a rock, which only added to the invigorating sense of being amongst nature. The landing was awkward. Leaping onto tigers is especially difficult with no clothes on, Doctor. It wasn’t difficult for her to carry the weight of a skinny man like me upon her back, I was clumsy and troublesome, perhaps even a bit irksome. I remember wondering whether there was something about our arrangement that she didn’t like. When I held onto her ears and tried to steer her with tugs towards a banana tree this thought came back to me in a hurry.

No! She said, all of a sudden. That crazy cat shook her head, angrily hissing and spitting foam, overtaken by fury for some reason. With a yelp of terror I slipped from her neck, my throne.
And the situation got worse, Doctor. Sympathy please. Please remember that I am naked in the mud at this stage. Unsettlingly long sharp-looking claws now appeared, first in her wonderfully soft paws and an instant later in my flesh. Each strike hit with a haughtiness that was cruel and a strength that turned my body to jelly. She bit me too; her teeth ploughed into my buttocks, just once thank God. Through the trees she went! The attack had lasted about three or four seconds. The snarls of the tigress and my own breathless shivers had been musical partners only very briefly. But beautifully, perhaps.

Thank you for patching me up...

I crawled back through the jungle with the squirming method of a snake. Passing the peacock was very embarrassing for some reason. Remember he had seen me pass by just ten minutes previously, in a much finer state. Skwup! Skwup! Skwup! And I called for an ambulance from the kitchen, and sat waiting with a glass of feni.

Will I be scarred for life?