Skip to main content

Lucky Cat

Image courtesy wonderslist.com


Fiction

Little Raju was sad, very sad. Tiny drops of iridescent tears clung to his plump, little cheeks like pearly dewdrops on a shimmering leaf edge yet to be kissed by the rising sun. His cute little cat, prettier than Teddy Bear and naughtier than Jerry’s Tom was killed by a speeding car. Raju had named him Tom. Raju was Tom’s Jerry. No, Tom was Raju’s Jerry, clever and cunning and always on the run.

Until a speeding car ran over him.

“Tom’s a lucky cat,” grandma said wiping away the pearly drops from Raju’s cheeks.

Grandma always said that. Raju believed her too. Until now. Now that Tom is dead, grandma is wrong. Still she said, “Tom’s a lucky cat.”

“Tom’s a dead cat,” Raju protested.

“He died young,” grandma said, “only lucky cats die young.”

Tom was a little kitten that was roaming outside the gate when Raju returned home from school one afternoon.  Little kitten. Cute little kitten with golden brown patches on his snow white body. With a golden brown tail that stood high like a mast. Raju picked him up and walked home.

“Where did you get that creature?” Mama hollered as soon as she saw the kitten.

“Lucky cat,” grandma said.

Grandma convinced Mama to let Raju keep the pet. “Children grow up like normal people better with animals.”

Papa smiled when he heard that.

Papa and Raju competed with each other to feed Tom milk and fish. “Lucky cat,” grandma said.

“Not every cat gets so much fish and milk,” she said one day when Raju asked her why she always said “Lucky cat”. And so much petting and pampering.

In his previous birth Tom must have been a good person, grandma said one day. Good persons die and go to heaven. They are not reborn. But this Tom of yours must have had a tragic flaw.

“What is tra…, trash…, flow?” Raju asked.

“Like the little worm inside a fruit,” grandma said. Something lying deep within. Not seen from outside. Not part of the fruit, yet corroding the fruit slowly. Something that is not you and yet is inside you inescapably. It makes the mightiest person fall like a weakling. And when a mighty man falls, even if the fall is not much of a fall, the fall becomes the man. That’s the tragedy of great persons. They can’t afford to fall. Even a small fall takes heaven away from them. And so the person has to be reborn, maybe as a cat like Tom, petted and pampered until his real destiny takes away everything, everything including the pampering here and the fall of the previous birth.

Raju peered into grandma’s distant eyes. She was not looking at him now as she spoke all those words. It was as if she was not here with him, she was there somewhere, far away, among the invisible stars beyond the blue sky. It was as if she longed to be there, far away, with the invisible stars beyond the blue sky.   


For copies click here


Comments

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

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...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...