Edited by Alloe Mak

My grandmother was born in the late 1800s, in a village where mangroves knotted thick as hair and the air hung heavy with salt and smoke from clay stoves. Even when I was small, I knew the jungle was listening. It creaked and hissed like something breathing, like something waiting. 

“Don’t go near the trees at night,” my grandmother told me and my twin. “The tiger goddess takes bad children.” 

She said while stirring daal in a blackened pot, or while laying out wet saris on the line. 

She said it like a prayer, like a warning, like a truth that already had its claws in us. My mother would roll her eyes. Superstition, she called it, just a tale to keep children close to the yard. But she never explained why the warning was directed at the children, when it was not they who were going missing.

It was the men.

The men with fists and mouths sour from the liquor, with tempers that struck quicker than the Azaan at dusk. My grandfather was one of them. My mother said he could charm a crowd at the chai stall, all smiles and stories, then come home and slap the smile off her mother’s face. 

She told us about one night when she was 13. The rice burned—only a thin layer was blackened at the bottom, but it was enough. His glare slid from my grandmother to my mother, and his hand followed. The blow sent her against the wall, her cheek swelling like bread left too long to rise. My grandmother did not move, did not speak. 

That was the night he vanished. 

He stormed out, cursing, an oil lamp swinging in his hand. He never came back. At dawn, they found scraps of his shirt snagged on reeds by the riverbank. The mud bore two sets of tracks: bare human feet and massive paw prints, side by side, deep enough to drink rain out of. The village muttered of tigers, of chance and bad luck—but even I knew tigers did not walk like companions. 

The jungle knew. The mangroves breathed with it. When the wind moved through their roots, it was not just rustling; it was whispering. My grandmother said it was the jinns, restless and sly, slipping between branches, laughing in the voices that sounded like women left behind. Some nights, I thought I heard my own name carried in that laughter. Some Aunties told us that trees have eyes. That the jungle was a ledger keeper tallying sins in mud and paw prints. The children were warned away, yes, but the older girls whispered that the jungle was patient with children; it was the men who needed to be afraid.

When they gave my grandmother the cloth for my grandfather’s body, she pressed it to her face—not to weep, but to inhale. Then she laid it down carefully, almost tenderly, as though it were an offering. That night I woke to the sound of laughter, low and rough, more animal than human. It slithered into my bones and stayed there. 

Years later, when I was old enough to snoop, I found the mask. Tucked under her bedding, wrapped in an old dupatta, waiting. A tiger’s face carved in wood, its teeth painted bone-white, its eyes ringed in gold. It was heavy in my hands, heavier than wood should be. When I pressed it to my face, the world sharpened. I smelled blood, raw meat, wet leaves, and I felt something changing inside me. My grandmother caught me, ripped it away, and her nails scored my wrist.

“Some faces,”  she said, “are not for children.”

When she died, the whole village came to see her laid out. Her body was thin, folded in white cloth, her mouth curled into a half smile that made the aunties whisper. My twin and I were told to stay home, but curiosity is a fever. We slipped into the courtyard after dark, bare feet silent on packed earth. The lantern flickered. The air was too still. The jungle seemed to press closer, its branches clawing at the night sky. And then we heard a low growl, like the Earth itself had a throat. The shroud shifted. The mat beneath her trembled as if something huge was pressing against it from below. My brother’s nails dug into my palm. I swore I saw her chest rise, her fingers twitch beneath the cloth. 

Then the lantern blew out.

We stumbled back, choking on fear. The darkness was thick with whispers—hundreds of voices weaving together: women singing, children giggling, jinns calling from the mangroves. When the flame sparked alive again, the body was gone. The shroud lay torn and bloody, the mat stained dark. Across the floor stretched paw prints, slick and glistening, leading out the doorway and into the jungle. 

No one believed us when we told them. They said children imagine things, that death plays tricks on young minds. But sometimes, even now, I hear the sound of claws dragging across the wood, to laughter that does not belong to the living. 

The story remains the same in my village: the tiger goddess takes bad children. But I know better. It was never the children who had to fear her. 

It was the men.