Panther Medicine
Panther Medicine
My best friend’s cousin, M, kept a pet panther in her penthouse apartment in South Bombay’s ritzy Marine Lines neighbourhood. The panther was a baby when M’s brother brought him to Bombay — an orphan he’d found shivering in the bushes near a tea plantation in Assam, where he worked.
M kept the baby panther in an upturned child’s crib in her otherwise immaculate living room; when I first saw him, he looked like a largish, feral cat, a mottled ball of fur with massive paws ridiculously out of proportion to his scrawny body.
A few months later, when my friend and I dropped by M’s place for an after-school visit, her living room was utterly transformed. The first thing that assaulted us was the stench, an animal fug and ammoniac stink of piss and shit that nothing could disguise, not the sandalwood M had burning in a silver brazier, not her Joy perfume.
My eyes adjusted slowly to the dim light. M’s living-room curtains were drawn, their pale-yellow silk hanging in tatters off their muslin lining. All the furniture M had so painstakingly designed and had custom made for this room had been banished. So had the silk rugs, the M. F. Hussain paintings, the throws and cushions and carefully curated pieces of ceramic and sculpture.
The room was bare. Bare marble floors, muddy, a maze of claw marks in the soft stone. Bare walls, gouged with more claw marks.
M’s spacious living room was dominated by a large, rickety steel cage. Her husband’s steel weight-plates held the top and bottom of the cage in place; a cage that didn’t look sturdy enough to confine the glowing, golden-eyed adolescent panther lying on his side, his nose pressed against one end of the cage, his tail jammed against the other. Curious, I sat down cross-legged on the muddy marble floor a few feet away. He stared at me -- a calm, considered gaze.
Looking into his honey-gold eyes was like looking through a telescope, seeing a world more complex, more beautiful, than I’d ever imagined I would see. In his wildness, in the controlled power rippling under his skin, when a single swipe of his massive paw could have set him free, I discovered a kindred spirit.
Curiosity, and something else, kept that big cat in his utterly inadequate cage. For now.
Curiosity, and something I couldn’t yet name, kept me in my pretence of a child’s life. For now.
Neither of us had much of a choice about the circumstances in which we found ourselves. For now.
Solidarity. That’s part of what I felt, in the presence of this beautiful beast. That, and a kind of bubbling curiosity about who he was, what his world was like. How did he feel about living in a cage with an upper-middle-class human couple in South Bombay, instead of roaming the mountains and jungles of Assam that were his home?
I’d known M for a few years, but we weren’t friends — the age gap between us was too great. She was probably in her thirties, then, married and living the life of a Bombay socialite. I was a pre-adolescent schoolgirl, shy, nerdy, far more interested in her panther and her surprisingly extensive library, than in her gossip about who was sleeping with whom among her vast circle of friends and acquaintances.
M abandoned her living room to the panther. She never gave him a name, even after they’d discovered that he was a he. She would not allow anyone else to name him, either. She called him That Thing, with a through-the-teeth fury barely covered by her bright Binaca smile.
instead of the sleek exotic pet she had dreamed of, the one she’d dress up in a diamond collar and take to all the It parties, the cute little ball of fur foisted on her by her brother had morphed into this repulsive beast who stank up her living room, who was ruining her marriage, who had already ruined her social life because he could not be left alone or he would tear her place apart.
M complained that all her servants were afraid of the panther and could not be persuaded by bribes or threats to be alone with him, or to take care of him in any way. It was all up to her. She felt like she’d been saddled with a giant, ferociously snarly baby whom she couldn’t take anywhere. Nor could she invite anyone into her own home. She hadn’t left her apartment by the light of day in months.
Instead, she stayed up past midnight every single night, to take That Thing for a walk along Marine Drive, when the seawall was mostly deserted. She walked him on a heavy chain clipped to a thick leather collar around his neck, returning home through lamplit streets with her shoulder and arm sore from holding him in check.
It was a chain he’d long had the power to snap, though he never did. He could have snapped her in two just as easily, but he never did.
I’ve thought of him often, over the years. When I settled halfway around the world to make my home and life in Canada, his presence would arise when I most needed a friend. I never saw him again in person, once I left Bombay, but he remained my heart’s companion through marriage and divorce, through the sometimes-trackless jungle of motherhood, through the gifts and travails of a long, deeply loved life.
His spirit has accompanied me, not as a story or metaphor, but as the reminder of a truth that also lives in me. A reminder of a fearless, fierce, powerful and disciplined spirit, walking his own destiny.
When I met M’s panther, he was living a half-life that was never meant for him. I heard later that he was rescued by the same brother who’d brought him to M in the first place, who flew him back to be released in the jungles of Assam.
I wondered how he’d fared, this panther who had never learned how to hunt for food. Or how to shelter from monsoon storms, protect himself from poisonous snakes and human predators.
How would he survive in a wilderness that was no longer his natural habitat?
When you find yourself in an unknown environment, he growls — look to the instincts you were born with, to guide you. Look to the spirits of the place, for friendship and protection. Look to your own heart, for strength, courage, and connection.
You’re here, he says, with a twitch of his tail — make the most of it.
