My Home My Kingdom

Bobby, one of my 3 cats, while I was writing this post.
For some time he was on my lap and then found a better place on my printer.

The white paint on the walls just below the windowsills are stained with the pawprints of my cats. When someone asked me why I let my cats stain my otherwise clean white walls, my answer was simple: “It’s my house, they’re my cats.” My cats have the freedom to enter through any open window of my house. I clean the stains left by them once a week or so which means the stains remain there most of the days. The last time I got my house painted I asked the painter to help me with this problem. “Why not apply a washable paint just below the windows?” I asked. “That won’t look good,” he said. “We’ll use a wall paint which can be cleaned with a wet piece of cloth,” he continued when I looked unhappy with what he said. The wet cloth doesn’t really remove all the pawmarks . It doesn’t matter. Because my cats are more important to me than the chastity of the whiteness of the walls of my house.

I live in a state whose people build ostentatious houses by spending almost all their savings and also huge loans taken from banks. When I came to Kerala from Delhi seven years ago, I went around looking for a house to buy. My agent showed me quite many houses all of which were beyond my budget. I learnt that they were all built by people who wanted to show off more than they could afford to. I didn’t want to show off anything. Finally I constructed a house of my own. No ostentation at all. A simple house. Good enough for two of us and the cats that joined us eventually from nowhere.

There’s space for some guests too though I hardly have them. I was supposed to be an antisocial creature in the folklores of my Shillong years (my youth). Then I became asocial in my Delhi years (middle age). Now I have withdrawn myself from the society so much that I don’t know what they think of me and it doesn’t bother me at all. My cats are better company and the stains they leave on my walls aren’t as bad as the blood stains carried by news reports day after day.