As a lot of us are aware, Magic Realism is a genre where, as Wikipedia defines it, “magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment”. Occasionally seen in films (Pans Labyrinth, The Life of Pi, Midnight in Paris, Alice) it has been more commonly used in the literary field by writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Nikolai Gogol (A Bewitched Place), Gunter Grass (The Tin Drum), Haruki Murakami (1Q84) and Ben Okri (The Famished Road), to list just a few.

Garcia’s stories, apparently, are influenced by the tales he in turn was told as a child by his grandmother who, he says, “treated the extraordinary as something natural,” even as her husband (his grandfather) refuted suggestions that their house was filled with ghosts and strange portents.

In my case, my grandfather was the storyteller. And the Panchatantra and Jataka were sources he frequently dipped into to satisfy my childlike yearning for a tale before bedtime. One of his stories — often told because I suspect it was often requested by me — was of the Brahmin and the Tiger.

The story involved (surprise, surprise) a Brahmin (generally a very wise, learned man, but in this tale caught out in a moment of weakness and indecision) who lets a ferocious tiger out of a cage (because the tiger, a speaking tiger, promises it will not eat him.) Naturally, the tiger’s promises are written in water, for upon stepping out of its cage, the first thing it does is fall upon the Brahmin and attempt to devour him.

“Wait,” says the Brahmin, “don’t be so hasty, let us ask four people for their opinion and if they all agree I should be eaten, then eat me by all means.”

Fancy urging a famished tiger to exercise restraint (‘Don’t be hasty, old chap. We’ve got to get a consensus first before you sample the menu!’). Easy to chuckle over today, but try getting a four-year-old to tear himself away from the riveting suspense. Is the tiger going to get impatient at any moment and fall upon the hapless Brahmin? Or, is the Brahmin going to, magically, find a bow and arrow and shoot the tiger through the heart?

Anyway, the banyan tree (the first asked) tells the tiger: “Eat the man, for he is ungrateful. He shelters under me when he needs shelter then misuses me when he has no further need.” And similarly, an eagle (which I shall come to again presently) and an alligator. They are all angered by man’s lack of feeling towards them.

And then, in wanders the cunning jackal pretending to be a total ignoramus! “Take it very slow,” he tells the Brahmin and the tiger, “for I am dim-witted. Take me right back to the beginning. Show me exactly how everything was and I will give you my judgement.”

I can only imagine that the tiger had by then reached a point where its own brain was addled by hunger which, as we all know, dims the powers of intuition. So the tiger gets led back to its cage and is locked up once again!

The story doesn’t say who was happier — the Brahmin or the jackal, but it does offer a tenuous link between wisdom and cunningness.

And this came to mind recently, in a totally un-magic-realism way, when a local railway station, overcrowded by pigeons — thousand upon thousand of them — decided that what was really needed to sort things out was — and I promised I’d come back to it — a good old wedge-tailed eagle. So one was procured. I can only imagine the terror it struck in a thousand pigeon hearts as it made its first sortie, sampling from on high the smorgasbord of feathered meat awaiting a quick plucking. You’d have to believe in pigeon meetings and pigeon committees, for the birds must have convened somewhere pretty damn quick, had a hurried confab and decided to flee as the best and only option.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.