cat man

a dispatch straight from the society where i live

he rings the bell with the crisp ding-dong and waits as i lug myself out of bed, drape a shawl over my body, dawdle on the chilly floor barefoot and then quickly revert my steps back to the edge of the bed to draw the slippers on. quickly i snuggle into the kitchen, gather the trashbag and walk steadily towards the door.

he waits there adjusting the crooked corners of stuffed black polybags in his trash-bin, making space for new bags. as i unlatch the screen-door, he says, come this side, and waves his right hand towards the floor. i perch out, hand my bag to him and look at the cat seated at his feet.

this daily ritual took me some warming up to. my natural scorn towards cats and general manner of trying to brush any stranger aside kept coming in the way.

the man, whose name i still do not know, is a professional, a strict one at that. he dresses up for the job everyday, oils and parts the silken hair on his head. his shirts ironed, half-sweaters neat, and shoes shining—puts me to shame on a lot of days. let's call the man 'cat man'.

cat man must be in his early forties and has a clean apparition, something very unlikely in a city like Delhi where most people just put on whatever is in front of their eyes. his demeanour had earlier put me to a scare, a tiny reclusiveness, so to say. but seeing him interact with the kids of the society and allowing the cat to hang around with him, created a dissipated sense of warmth.

the cat recently birthed a litter—of about five. we saw them in the backyard garden, i even walked with two of them on one sunny Saturday noon.

days after that we would hear the cat wailing, day and night. no one to her rescue. i was worried that she might be cold, but under no circumstances could i give her shelter. the wailing continued. it would get worse during the nights. i worried sick but did the same thing i do with most things i worry about—the good old nothing.

soon my flatmate told me that the cries came from a place of loss. all her kittens had gone missing. someone took them? i guessed. the male cat ate them, came my flatmate's response.

days passed and i saw the cat here and there, crying in one corner or the other, mostly at night. until a couple of days back when the cat accompanied her friend to my doorstep looking visibly loved.

the cat man not only takes care of her, but also makes small talk with her that i can hear before he rings the bell and after ive shut the door behind him. in the staircase he walks sharply, gathering people's trash, making comforting talk with the cat, sometimes telling her to sit, sometimes nudging her to walk, sometimes asking her what she's thinking.

he also does this with a kid who lives in the apartment diagonally opposite to mine. the kid wanders around to the door as soon as he hears the doorbell in the morning, looking with questioning but loving eyes at the cat man. while the man settles his bin, settles ruffled polybags and papers. the kid croons a mellow ae, to which the cat man would respond with an agile go have a shower then i will take you out. the kid again mutters an incomprehensible short two words to which the cat man responds with what did you eat today.

the cat man and his camaraderie with the cats and kids in the society is something that leaves me elated in the mornings. and sometimes i even look forward to that window of less than two minutes where i can peer through the screen door and find myself smiling at this beautiful unlikely friendship...

to accompany this post, neither do i have a photograph, nor a song. but i will post some text from a story i read on this 11 degree evening that warmed me right to the bones:
Apart from this—and a slug I once found in the kitchen on a midnight trip to the toilet—the basement has been a calming place. The dining table in the kitchen is used as a desk, where outside the window you hear the whistling northern wind. All year round the temperature here is lower than on the surface by seven-to-nine degrees. By August I had already turned on the heater and begun sleeping under an electric blanket. When October came even the heater wouldn’t do. There is a fireplace. The slightest vibration upstairs sends clumps tumbling down. Judging by the craacked and pitch-dark walls inside, it must have been used recently. But even in the bitter cold I’m still afraid of carbon monoxide poisoning, so instead I boil a pot of eggs and let the steam bubble out. In less than ten minutes its warmth has snaked through the room. I close the door between the kitchen and the bedroom to keep the steam in, which dances in the yellow glow of the hanging bulb and covers the window in droplets. Sometimes I light candles (being mostly awake at night) and the flames form inconceivable designs among the droplets and glass.
Link to complete story: https://lithub.com/notes-from-the-underground/