Free The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy

bother you like this, I was doing a sending … uh, a range exercise. I never meant to disturb you, Ozymandias … uh, Ozzy Sir … I don’t know what to call you …”
    This was a bit much for Ozymandias to take. “
Call me? Call me nothing! Tigers do not talk to kittens
,” he snorted, turning his back on Mara and stalking to the other side of the cage.
    “Pay no attention to him,” said the small tiger cub. “He’s always like this in the evenings, especially if his nap hasn’t gone off that well.” Rani licked the cub affectionately and peered at Mara again. “I suppose you two had better introduce yourselves,” she said.
    The bars rattled. Ozymandias growled and stalked back.
“No cub of mine is going to consort with a mere cat, Rani, and that’s fine … ouch! Aargh! Let go!”
What Rani said to him next wasslightly muffled, because she had his tail in her mouth, but the gist of it was that the small tiger cub had had no one to talk to in months from his own species. Ever since the leopards had been shifted to another set of cages, their cub’s only company had been a bunch of monkeys. And while she was glad he and the silver-furred langur monkey Tantara got on so well, she didn’t know why Ozzy was being such a stick-in-the-mud about cats, considering that he was one himself, if of a superior species. Besides, this young kitten appeared to have far better manners than the leopard cubs who were so terribly undisciplined, if Ozzy only cared to remember. It seemed odd to Rani that the kitten appeared to be levitating in mid-air, but she was sure an explanation would be offered in the fullness of time.
    While the big cats bickered, the small tiger cub and Mara eyed each other—one from behind the bars of his cage, the other from her insubstantial post in thin air. “He’s called Ozzy because it’s short for Ozeem, which is short for Ozymandias,” said the tiger cub. “It’s a nice … it’s an impressive name,” said Mara. “And what’s your name?”
    The tiger cub looked important; his whiskers sprang to attention. “I am—” he took a deep breath, “Rudra TheGreatAndPowerful, SonOfOzymandias TheKingOfKings, LookOnOur TeethYeMightyAndDespair … but you can call me Rudra for short.”
    “I’d like that,” said Mara, and she whiffled happily at him. Outside Rudra’s cage, cameras whirred as Bigfeet took pictures of the cub standing so close to the bars, and in the kitchen back in Nizamuddin, the Bigfeet looked down at Mara, and smiled to see her twitching and cycling her paws in her sleep.

F rom the point of view of the cheels who sailed the skies above Nizamuddin, the neat residential colonies offered slender pickings. The tidy borders of the handkerchief-sized lawns, the carefully trimmed stubble of foliage and the rows of cars offered little in the way of hiding space for the small animals the birds preyed upon. Of far more interest was the last stretch of road that connected the canal and the dargah, where the houses sat in straggling lines, some almost as broken down as the ruins of the nearby baoli. Here, and on the garbage-strewn banks of the canal, good hunting was to be found, especially for those with sharp eyes, patience and strong talons.
    Tooth unfurled his wings like feathery sails and hitchhiked a passing current, circling his territory like a spy satellite, taking mental snapshots of all the changes that had happened groundside since he last patrolled. The ditch contained a new traffic victim—the second mongoose to run afoul of the road inrecent days, its body too decomposed to be of interest, even to him. His predator’s brain registered a rat skittering into a drain, and dismissed it almost immediately. Tooth’s stomach was full of pigeon, and pigeon eggs—rat wasn’t a tempting enough second course to warrant the effort that a SD&K—stoop, dive and kill—would take. He noticed that the sparrows who had nested in a rusting automobile had been