Skip to main content

The Cat



French writer Anatole France was of the opinion that until we have loved an animal a part of our soul remains unawakened. Among the many parts of my soul that remained unawakened was love for animals. I would admire them from a distance and quite a lot of them are far more admirable than many human beings. The ‘fearful symmetry’ of Blake’s Tiger and the ‘shining tail’ of Lewis Carroll’s Crocodile move me to wonder but I wouldn’t get too close to them anyway. Why, for that matter, I wouldn’t get too close to the loyallest of dogs or the cutest of cats just because I couldn’t tolerate some of their habits like the dogs leaving their signature piss all over the place or the cats licking their paws narcissistically.

   A cat walked into my soul a few weeks back, however. Someone was tired of the cat’s intemperate love and hence abandoned it in the farm behind my house. Maybe, he was abandoned on the roadside in the night and he just strolled into my farm. I saw it roaming round in the morning and ignored it. In the evening, back from my regular job, I went to the farm to fill a few grow-bags for the spinach saplings that were getting too big for the seed pot.

   The cat watched me gingerly from a distance before inching closer and closer, encouraged probably by my cool indifference.  He sat down a couple of metres away from where I was digging and continued to watch. When I was about to move with the filled grow-bag, I said to the cat, “Come.” He followed me with an obedience that warmed the cockles of my cold heart.

   Maggie gave him some food which he ate ravenously. He has continued to share our meals ever since and has gone on to become a mild dictator. If he is not given his share before we sit down at the dining table, he will walk in through the window and circle the dining table furiously with loud protests.

   I have a habit of drinking a couple of glasses of plain water as soon as I wake up in the morning. The moment the cat hears the sound in the kitchen he will start meowing relentlessly at the door. I pick up a couple of biscuits, wet them under the tap and place them in his plate. The purring sound that accompanies the process has become my morning bhajan.

   In case I am late one morning he is sure to sneak in through the window and march majestically into my bedroom with a demurring miaow. When I am in the garden in the evening plucking out weeds, he is there watching me jealously before making an occasional leap at my hand that’s plucking the weeds. He is jealous of the weeds that get more attention, I think. When I take my usual walk outside home after dinner, he joins me trying to rub himself against my leg.

  The other day, when I didn’t hear his demand for his morning biscuits, my heart skipped a beat. I opened the door and he was not there. I called him by the name I have given him. No response. I went out and walked to the front of the house. And there he was gleefully catching and eating the hoard of alates that were flying around the bulb outside. He didn’t bother even to look at me. “Have your feast, gentleman,” I said as I walked away to my morning’s chores.

   The cat has indeed awakened a part of my soul, I realised.


  

Comments

  1. indu chhibberMay 26, 2018 at 8:52 PM

    I am glad you left it free to come and go.I dislike chaining pets in home.Dogs,birds,fishes:how we isolate them from their kind.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 26, 2018 at 9:38 PM

      It hardly wants to be free, looks like. It's clinging to me a little too much.

      Delete
  2. Pradeep NairMay 27, 2018 at 8:33 PM

    I could relate to his fully, since I love cats.

    ReplyDelete
  3. zaramozzoeJune 20, 2018 at 1:00 AM

    thankz infonya

    visit jg ya >> dewa Pandai Besi



    sampai jumpa :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
17 comments
Read more

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
5 comments
Read more

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...
8 comments
Read more

A Curious Case of Food

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...
6 comments
Read more