Did Tiger Take the Rain?

In a Tharu village in the Nepal terai, it has been uncommonly hot and dry. One day, a tiger comes. People run away in fear. The villagers think it is a bad omen and that the tiger has taken the rain.

Best friends Usha and Anjali decide to ask Tiger herself why she has taken the rain. They set out for the jungle. Entering the forest, they meet Jackal who wants to know why they are there. They tell Jackal that they have come to ask Tiger why she took the rain. Jackal asks them to follow him and he will help them find out where the rain went.

Thus they start on an adventure from Jackals story to being swept away into the tree tops by monkeys who tell their own side of the story. Tiger did not take the rain. Forest help make clouds. Rain comes from clouds and when the forests disappear, so will the rain. What happened to the forest and how can we bring it back?

Monkey gives them the seeds they need to replenish the forest. The girls return to the village, plant seedlings and watch a new forest take shape. The rain returns. Jackal, Tiger and Monkey return deeper into the forest. In the end, Anjali realizes that when the sun shines, it shines down on humans and tigers together. When it rains, we share the same rain.

Charles Norris-Brown

Dish washer, bus driver, teacher, theoretician, and artist, Charles Norris-Brown was born in the small northern Pennsylvania town of Warren. He completed a PhD degree in Social Anthropology and Sociology at Lund University, Sweden, in 1984, based on fieldwork in the inner hills of Uttarakhand, India. By 1990, Charles had re-focused his work to look at small communities living in and dependent on forests. This took him from the rainforest of Borneo to poor communities in eastern Canada and the Appalachian region of the USA. Part of this new focus included the terai region of India. While visiting the Corbett National Park in India as part of a planned applied research project, and on the recommendation of some villagers there, he decided to combine his art, anthropology, and concern for the environment and to focus on writing and illustrating children’s books. He began by completing an on-line course with the Institute of Children’s Literature in 2005. In time, he would raise the funds to allow his return to the terai, this time to Nepal, and from visits to the western terai region of Nepal in 2011 and 2012, he developed what would become his first children’s book: Did Tiger Take the Rain?