Successful small-town farmer Zaitun Arshad chomps cigars and drives around in an open four-wheel drive with a young and leggy 'Charlie' beside him.
His companion is 1.5 metres long, one metre high and weighs about 100kg - a fully grown female tiger. The inseparable pair have been a common sight for several months in Bukit Selambau, a small town in Kedah state bordering the Malaysian-Thai border. But they went missing on Monday and a search for them is under way.
Residents were at first pleasantly surprised and amused when the 50-year-old farmer appeared with a young tiger riding in his Jeep.
They played with the tiger, fed it chickens and competed to name it, finally settling on Charlie, as in Charlie's Angels, the popular television series.
But the bigger Charlie grew, the more worried villagers became, especially when their children crowded around. Local officials said villagers were reminded of several highly publicised cases of displaced tigers attacking and killing farmers.
It was inevitable that worried parents would call the police, but instead they first tipped off the New Straits Times, the country's oldest English language daily.
The newspaper was only too happy to run the story on the front page in its Sunday edition, alongside a photo of Charlie sitting behind the farmer's four-wheel drive in the middle of town.