Page 6 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“This is Noor Baba,” he said, adding a blanket over the creature’s back and then ears. “He is a very good elephant.”

“I like your drawing.”

“Thank you.” He raised his head and gave me a much less impish smile. This one was small and quiet, shining in his dark eyes.

I thought perhaps we could be friends.

“Have you heard about the tiger?” Tanveer asked, taking a new sheet of paper.

“Who hasn’t?” It was all the adults spoke of, servants in whispers, parents and visitors in voices that hummed with fear and excitement. “I heard it dragged off a goat yesterday.”

“It stole a girl from a village in the mountains!”

“A girl! How old of a girl?” I thought of the tiger in my imagination, golden eyed, sleek.

“I don’t know. Not very old. Her mother came to see my father, weeping and weeping.”

“Why?”

He looked up. “Why did she weep?”

“No, why did she come to see your father? What could he do once the tiger had taken her?”

“She wanted justice. She wants the tiger dead, the hide given to her as compensation.”

I recoiled. “Dead! But tigers do what tigers do!”

“Yes, but once they get a taste for humans, they won’t stop hunting them.”

Tears sprang to my eyes. “I can’t bear the idea of it being hunted.”

He sobered, his great dark eyes shining. “Nor I, to be honest.” He touched his chest. “I hope he eludes the hunters.”

“Me, too.” I turned to a fresh page. “Let’s draw tigers, shall we?”

So we did. It was more challenging than I expected, and I started over a few times, my mind snagging on the stripes, the orange of the body, the long tail. Tanveer instead drew a face, the ears and whiskers and eyes, staring right out of the page.

“That’s good,” I said. “Show me how!”

“I only drew my cat, and then made it bigger like a tiger.”

“You have a cat? What is its name?”

“He isShera,” Tanveer said with a smile. “That is the Punjabi word fortiger.”

I laughed, delighted. “Is he orange?”

“He is!”

“I would love to have a cat of my own.” On a fresh page, I copied the shape of the tiger Tanveer had drawn, working with the fatter cheeks, the strong nose.

“There are always kittens. I shall bring you one if you like.”

“Oh, yes! I would like that very much.”

“Would you like to see how to writetigerin three ways? I am learning scripts.”

“Yes!”