Inside the Tiger’s Den — Chapter 1

A story about a boy raised in a Bangladeshi shipwrecking town

“There are two tigers that will kill you,” my father told me at least a dozen times over the years. “The Bengal Tiger is a vicious creature that will tear you to shreds, regardless of whether you’re even worth eating. When you see a Bengal, run.” At this point his face would invent a curious smile, complementing the rigid features of his ebony skin, wise wrinkles, and olive eyes. The smile only widened as he reached down into a brown paper bag, wrinkled near the top from carrying it home, his hand reappearing moments later with a glass bottle of beer. “The other tiger will kill you from within, and you’ll enjoy it the whole time.” After this ritual he would pop the cap and raise it to his mouth, gulping as though racing an imaginary drinking partner. “If you chug the first, the others feel better,” he would often mutter in attempt to penetrate the subsequent silence (none of us knew the proper reaction to his whole tiger thing, as we had grown tired of laughing at it). But I get why he liked it. The golden amber bottle of Tiger Beer was revered around Bangladesh, as it was an import from Singapore. Foreign things were, without exception, better. In many cases, the foreign products weren’t even that good — flashlights from China, for instance, had a lifespan of about one hundred uses…