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
37 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
14 comments
Read more

Mango Trees and Cats

Appu and Dessie, two of our cats, love to sleep under the two mango trees in front of our house these days. During the daytime, that is, when the temperature threatens to brush 40 degrees Celsius. The shade beneath the mango trees remains a cool 28 degrees or so. Mango trees have this tremendous cooling effect. When I constructed the house, the area in front had no touch of greenery as you can see in the pic below.  Now the same area, which was totally arid then, looks like what's below:  Appu and Dessie find their bower in that coolness.  I wanted to have a lot of colours around my house. I tried growing all sorts of flower plants and failed rather miserably. The climate changes are beyond the plants’ tolerance levels. Moreover, all sorts of insects and pests come from nowhere and damage the plants. Crotons survive and even thrive. I haven’t given up hope with the others yet. There are a few adeniums, rhoeos, ixoras, zinnias and so on growing in the pots. They are trying their
7 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
13 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more