THE MEMOIRS OF MUSTAPHA HUSSAIN - Malaysia Today

Tiger Catcher and Crocodile Slayer 15
shoes and set in silver, supposedly to ward off evil, as he was such a
sickly boy.
We often spoke excitedly, commenting on the dead tiger. We speculated
on how much bigger or smaller this rimau (tiger) was from the
previous one and on countless other details. It was perfectly all right to
use the word rimau in the square, but not in the jungle, where we were
supposed to use the more honourable title of Tok Belang (‘The Revered
Striped One’). Otherwise the tiger might just decide to make an
appearance and look for the person who dared to call it rimau.
Being Malayan tigers, they were much smaller than Bengal tigers,
but to our young eyes, all tigers were giants on fours. Although I was
told that a Malayan tiger could grow up to nine feet in length from nose
tip to tail and could weigh more than four hundred pounds, I never saw
one that big, dead or alive.
Pak Manap’s son, who later moved to Penang, was also skilled in
tiger hunting, but it was not to be his livelihood. He only agreed to track
and kill savage ones that had ravaged villages or killed the ‘sons of Adam
and Eve’. Anyway, by the time Pak Manap’s son was an adult, most
villages had developed to the extent that they no longer received surprise
visits from the dreaded, sometimes beautiful, beast.
Until I turned sixteen I had only seen dead tigers. When a Russian
circus came to Matang, the circus tiger was a natural crowd puller. We
kampung boys loved to show off our courage by teasing it until it roared
angrily, again and again. It was a competition to have the tiger roaring
its loudest, and remained an exciting game until one day a non-captive
female tiger from the nearby jungle casually sauntered into the circus
compound looking for the ‘gentleman’ that had been calling for her. This
experience confirmed what my mother had said all along – a tiger roars
loudest when courting his lady.
While the circus was still in Matang, our group debated among ourselves
whether we should continue with our studies, which were becoming
more difficult each day, or “be adventurous and join the circus.” A brighter
kid quipped among us, “What can we do? We can’t even walk straight
on level ground. They may employ us to clean horse shit!” The entire
group kept quiet upon hearing that, and our ambitions were nipped in the
bud. The circus left the next day.
Growing up according to my father’s tight rules, we could not play
very much. So, we gained much knowledge from reading without much
interruption except once, when I fell in love with a Russian circus
performer. I thought about her for months afterwards. My friends teased
me, saying “Don’t be silly. Don’t act like an owl moping for the moon.”