On 24 April 2011, evidence was presented that the only thing big about an adolescent male tiger is his body. Deep inside, he’s still a toddler, really.

A little after half past five, M2, another handsome product of the Mirchahni School of Superstardom, crossed over to the grassland from the woods of Andhiyari. We thought he was merely trying to make a dent in his sister’s viewership, who had commenced her show a few minutes before.

But, as he walked right past her, he kept swiping his tail in the air and looking back at his flanks, and we realised that the cause of the emergence was no sibling-revelry but an irksome pestilence.

The big boy with a cherubic heart had managed to contract a fly on his person, courtesy of his physical association with a deer cadaver awhile before, and perhaps having read somewhere the grandma remedy of putting things in the open to purge parasites, he thought of hanging himself out as an effective type of pest control.

Sadly for him, the fly was a tenacious pest. It followed him everywhere, and promptly carried its depredations into the clump of grass where M2 decided to settle. In a desperate attempt to shrug the insect off, he shook his head with much vigour, but when it failed to fruit into nothing but a fiasco, his eyes shrank, the mouth wrinkled by itself into a frown and he looked all set to bawl out loud to his mother to rescue him from the incessant botheration.

A fly had made a tiger cry.