Book Review: A Tiger in the Lounge by Ruskin Bond

The best thing about Ruskin Bond’s stories is that they aren’t empty, rather they carry beautiful message about humanity, childhood, and nature. Nature is an imminent part of his stories and he always emphasis (directly or subtly) through his stories that nature be preserved, not to be destroyed. Through the short story ‘A Tiger in the lounge’, Ruskin tries to say that the population of tigers has gone down drastically in India.

A carefree boy who lives in the Green Hotel of Dehradun meets retired Colonel Wilkie. They are drinking beer in the Green Hotel. The colonel tells him that this place once had a plenty of tigers ten-fifteen years ago but not now because of hunting and deforestation. Colonel Wilkie says that he had shot a tiger in the same hotel twenty years ago. The boy finds it tough to believe him. As the story goes, one winter morning Colonel Wilkie was relaxing in the verandah of the hotel when he saw a tiger approaching him from the mustard field.

Before entering the hotel like a vagrant customer, he attacked the bullock cart which was full of people going to a wedding. The tiger didn’t kill or took away any person but instead injured them severely. It was strange that a man-eater didn’t make off with its prey. Soon the tiger was inside the hotel in the lounge and from there he grabbed an American travel writer, Frank Busby, and dragged him out through the French window. In the garden, the tiger was playing with him as he was a rag doll. Colonel Wilkie shot at the rump of the tiger and that soon ran away in the dark forest.

The tiger didn’t kill Busby but ripped his one arm apart. He was admitted in the hospital where he caught rabies and after a fortnight he died of the wounds. The tiger injured many people but killed no one. Later it occurred that the tiger was not a man-eater but a rabid tiger. The tiger got rabies from one of the animals it had eaten. Nearby villages around that hotel were in fear until the tiger was killed by the forest department.

The boy didn’t believe his story so he went to the church and found out the burial details of Frank Busby. There was an entry for his name. The reason behind his death was rabies but there was no mention of tiger in it. Clearly, the message in the story is that deforestation is forcing wild animals out of their basic dwelling places like forests.

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