Skip to main content

Cat Lover

Antony and Cleopatra (Dec 2020)

 

I was never fond of animals except as objects of spectacle in a zoo. I would prefer a considerable distance between animals and me. I didn't even want pets as they would mess up the place and I admired orderliness. My obsession with orderliness and cleanliness went to such extremes that my wife was convinced that I suffered from OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder].

Three little kittens run around in my house now as if the house belongs to them. Do I love them? How did this happen?

Cats entered my life accidentally. My house is on the roadside in a village. People who find it hard to look after new litters abandon them on roadsides. (Cats seem to have been blessed particularly with a fecundity to multiply like the stars in the sky or the sand on the seashore.) These abandoned little creatures cry for a while helplessly, then look around, and finally walk into the nearest house and inherit it. Cleopatra was the latest inheritor of our house.

Cleopatra was a tiny creature that looked more like a famished rat than a kitten when she came. Unlike other kittens, she didn't come to us. We went to her. Her mournful cries rose from the roadside for a whole night and day. The intermittent rains kept me home. Moreover, I wasn't sure where the cry was coming from. Finally my wife pushed me out of home asking how I could be so heartless.

Following the cry that was becoming feeble, I traced the tiny kitten under a discarded piece of tarpaulin on the roadside. There were two of them huddled together shivering and looking hideously frightened. I realised that I wasn't heartless because something melted instantly within me and the tiny skeletal creatures became our guests and in a couple of weeks they metamorphosed into our beloved Antony and Cleopatra.

That was in August last. Antony is no more now. He died fighting a poisonous snake. They killed each other in a dark night two months back under a tamarind tree on my brother's farm. The snake lay dead in the morning and Antony had a slow and painful death in the day which rattled me. I wished nature was less malign. I wished there really was a God in Heaven so that all was right with the world.

Cleopatra littered three cute kittens last month. "Do you want to adopt one?" I asked a female colleague who enquired after them having seen a post in my Facebook timeline. "You want to add the burden of a kitten to all those I already have?" She whined. "It's okay," I said placating her, "I offered you a part of my heart and if you don't want it's fine," I said. She laughed.

But I was pretty serious. I mean the kittens were becoming a part of my heart.

Cats tame you, you don't tame them. It was none less than Mark Twain who said, "Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat." In Kerala where I live there's a saying that the cat will sit on the throne if it is in a palace. Cats have a greater sense of entitlement than our most narcissistic politicians. Look after a dog and the dog will think you are a god, as Christopher Hitchens said. Look after a cat and the cat will think it is the god.

I learnt all these and a lot more about cats after they became the gods in my home. I read about cats, their food habits, likes and dislikes, prejudices and phobias, illusions and delusions, menstruation and mating, littering and kid-rearing. I learnt to administer Bendex and Carmicide. Most of all, I learnt patience and humility. Dogs look up on you and cats look down on you, said Winston Churchill who added that he loved pigs because pigs treat us as equals. I prefer being looked down on by Amar, Akbar and Antony. Oh, those are the names of Cleopatra's kittens until I learn to identify their genders.

Neil Gaiman will scold me now. He will tell me that we people need names because we don't know who we are. Cats know who they are and so they don't need names. That's one thing about cats you shouldn't forget: they know everything. And they are smug about it. They are connoisseurs of self-knowledge and philosophy. If you don't believe me, adopt a kitten and see. I can give you one or even two if you want.

Comments

  1. "Cats tame you, you don't tame them."- So true!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I have two of them. I have mentioned about them in the post "Pet" during the blogchatter challenge.

      Delete
    2. Had missed it. Visited just now.

      Delete
  2. Hahahaha good one...they are snooty and how! A stray cat adopted us and would saunter in and out of our home whenever she pleased. We started calling her chotu ...and then we moved house. But every time we went to our old house we only had to shout chotu and she would magically appear in the courtyard. Then one day she didn`t come and never after that..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's it. They live life oon their own terms but love you at the same time. A superior kind of love! They might even disappear one day, especially the males.

      Delete
  3. For those who adore cats, PetCareRx compiles interesting and entertaining material. A resource for actual cat owners who vehemently debate the virtues of catnip over dinner, have strong ideas about vet bills, and are prepared to invest their time and money to appease the animals that actually rule their homes. For details on cat food, check out this blog.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I am so happy to visit this blog and I love to read. Please stay upto date with your blogs, we will visit again to check our your new post.Buy Persian Cat in Bangalore

    ReplyDelete
  5. What a serendipitous twist of fate! The post begins with a captivating statement, drawing readers into a narrative about unexpected feline companionship. A poetic and humorous observation on the prolific nature of cat, adding a lighthearted tone to the narrative. Naming the latest feline addition adds a personal touch, and the reference to Cleopatra adds a touch of regal elegance, perhaps hinting at the cat's personality.

    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

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...

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 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...

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...