NONFICTION - July 9, 1995

SPELL OF THE TIGER: The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans by Sy Montgomery (Houghton Mifflin: $22.95; 231 pp.) “On a soft May night in West Bengal, when the sweet scent of khalsi flowers clung to the wet, warm darkness . . . and boatmen’s lanterns winked like fireflies up and down the river, death came with an open mouth for Malek Molla.” Death was a tiger unlike any you’ve ever seen or even heard of. Death was a nine-foot cat that paddled noiselessly up and down the stern of Molla’s moored boat, propelled its sleek, sturdy body out of the water like a striped torpedo, seized the sleeping Bengali’s neck with one fatal chomp and headed for the trees, Molla flopping from its jaws like a freshly landed fish. Sy Montgomery puts the fear of God into you with her tales of the great mangrove swamp of Sundarbans, or at least the fear of tiger. To the locals, it’s just about the same--the tiger is one of the principal deities of the region, with tribute paid in an annual ritual. The Sundarbans tiger, the only natural man-eater of the species, takes its own tribute, up to 100 bodies a year, at the same time maintaining the ecological balance of the vast delta rich in rare woods. The area, on the Bay of Bengal between India and Bangladesh, is protected by statute, and we all know how effective that is. In this case, however, the law has teeth. It is a shame that Montgomery, daughter of a peripatetic U.S. general, could not get closer to her subject, spotting only a single tiger and that at some distance. Her gift of description, however--the sun rose “like a vermilion bindi on the clear forehead of morning”--compensates, putting a susceptible reader uneasily “at the mercy of something else.” “Once you leave the wide rivers,” she writes, “if you set foot in the forests, you enter the world where the ground sucks you down whole, where the night swallows the stars, and where you know, for the first time, that your body is made of meat.” Ugh!