Skip to main content

Silly Romantics



When my neighbour complained that my cat, Kittu, steals into their kitchen occasionally, I decided to leave a window of my house open so that Kittu could sleep inside the room even if Maggie and I were not at home. I left some branded cat food too inside the room so that hunger wouldn’t drive Kittu to neighbourhood kitchens. When I returned home from school, however, Kittu was sleeping as usual on one of the chairs outside the house. Ants were feasting on the branded cat food inside. I decided to confront Kittu after dinner as we both sat outside the house with a galaxy of stars winking at us.

“Did you go gallivanting today too?” I asked.

“What else do you expect me to do the whole day?” He asked with unconcealed scorn. “Sleep on your carpet and eat the tasteless stuff you bring from the hypermarket?”

“So you went and stole your favourite sardines from the Mathais today too?”

Stole? What do you mean by that?”

“Taking anything that is not yours is stealing, Kittu,” I said sounding like a moral science teacher.

“What is yours and mine?” Kittu looked genuinely perplexed. I didn’t answer him. After a brief silence, he asked, “Is the river which supplies your garden water yours? Is the air you breathe yours? What about the sky and all those stars there?”

Kittu stood up on his chair, stretched himself showing me his claws, scratched his ear, and then stepped on to my lap where he made himself comfortable within seconds. I patted his head which he always loved.

“Humans, so possessive!” Kittue purred rubbing his cheek against my belly as if he owned me.

“I’m your fan, Kittu,” I said pampering his ego. He always pretends that he doesn’t like my pampering.

“I don’t want you to be my fan,” he protested. “I want you to be mine.”

“What’s yours and mine?” I threw his words back to him mimicking him as well as I could.

“Relationship,” pat came the reply. “Relationship without borders. Without fences and windows.”

“I never knew you were so romantic,” I said with genuine surprise.

“Would I be lying in your lap like this if you were not jejunely romantic?” He chuckled.

The question annoyed me as much as the chuckle. I pinched his ear gently. He loved that. He always loves it when I pinch his ears.

“Why can’t the world be a little more romantic, Kittu?” I asked.

“You’ve stolen all the romance,” said Kittu, “that’s why. You’ve infected me with it too.”


xZx

Comments

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

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...

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

Emergency - then and now

  When Indira Gandhi imposed a draconian Emergency on India 50 years ago on this day (25 June), I had just completed the first train journey of my life and started an entirely different kind of life. I had just joined a seminary as what they call an ‘aspirant’. One of the notice boards of the seminary always displayed the front page of an English newspaper – The Indian Express , if I recall correctly. I was only beginning to read English publications and so the headlines about Emergency didn’t really catch my attention. Since no one discussed politics in the seminary, it took me all of six months to understand the severity of the situation in the country. When I was travelling back home for Christmas vacation, the posters on the roadsides caught my attention. That’s how I began to take note of what was happening in the name of Emergency. A 15-year-old schoolboy doesn’t really understand the demise of democracy. It took me a few years and a lot of hindsight to realise the gravit...

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...