A Sozzled Cook and a Guest who came to dinner

 When Sanjiv Handique posted this fetching, beautiful painting of an old little home in Digboi, the town he and I grew up in, my heart skipped a beat and an old story – one I grew up with – returned.  

Mum and dad lived in an identical home a stone’s throw away from this one, just after their wedding in the mid-1950s, when mum was a nervous eighteen and dad at the first rung of his accounting ladder.  A large central room with a fireplace, which was what the Brits gathered around in those chilly winter evenings, a bedroom each on either side and a pantry - dry kitchen of sorts- at the back.  The kitchen was well behind the house – the small building at the back in the painting - and had a paved covered path leading to it (this is crucial for the story that follows, so, as Rajni would say, Mind it).
 
The bungalow was surrounded by evergreen jungle, a rich, wet forest of an explorer’s dreams.  Dark, forbidding, terrifying mass of green, is how mum saw it, so she awaited dad’s return from office every day and wouldn’t walk beyond the garden (gardening, hence, became a lifelong passion).  They had an old loyal cook, Pillai, who, after his day’s cooking was done, would retreat to his quarters and knock off a couple of pegs of his ‘braandy’ before heading back to lay the table for dinner (these were Brit days.  Mind it).
 
One evening, mum was startled to see Pillai’s sozzled face pressed against the closed glass window outside; he had a look of a man who had seen a nasty, unfriendly ghost and he was gesturing wildly, but could not speak.  Should she let him in? When he looked like he was about to faint, she opened the door with trepidation and he rushed in and dropped to the floor in fright, gesturing to the back of the house.
 
When mum hurried to the pantry and looked out of the window, she stood frozen: resting on the paved path to the kitchen was a large tigress with three cubs. Mum stood there, in a daze, staring in fascination as the cubs played around, while the tigress watched on – I am told – in amusement (an amused tiger is something you have not heard of.  It endorses mum’s storytelling capability).  She did not seem to mind being ogled at by a dumbstruck human and was in no hurry to leave.

 
A while later, there was the sound of a Fiat (1100, that quaint old car) driving up the road to the Bungalow – dad was returning home.  The tigress got up and the family – mom and cubs - walked over behind the kitchen.  Mum saw her take a short jump over the little drain and then wait for the cubs to do so.  A moment later, they were gone.
The guest left behind a story that would traverse seven decades, a hundred re-tellings, much embellishment and a deep family nostalgia for a fairytale world that had once been.  

 
And, yes, Pillai turned teetotaller for good.