#Scurf135: a strange stirring and... cats
about a specific connection I have had with cats since the second wave
These days I spend my evenings talking to a stray cat, Minty, on my balcony. She is petite, weary, and has a pansy-like face. She squints at me, meowing in a complaining tone, as if asking me why I turned up so late, or where I have been all this while. Under that fluffy, winter-ready white coat, is a short-legged, well-boned feline with a rather plumy tail. Chatting with her each evening after work, I have found a rhythm to my days.
It’s late November now as I continue work from home. In the emptiness of the house, I experience a new kind of loneliness that threatens to undo me. In this isolation, it’s this white cat and her acquaintances from the neighbourhood that have kept my steady company. This clowder is a mixed bag: all ages, genders, a mackerel tabby, a couple with gold hair coats, three pretty white young ones, a beautiful black one and others.
More often than not they turn up at my house when hungry or looking for a place to shelter their frail bodies. As I work, they like to snooze at the doorstep or on top of the washing machine kept on the balcony. Always extra cautious around new humans, they indeterminately prefer staying quiet. Sitting patiently outside, they call no attention to themselves whether perched by the drawing room window or my bedroom door.
Not a drop of noise in their arrival or departure, these cats just sit there, staring unblinkingly through the window or glass door, sometimes blending with the white marble floor background, on other times just completely out of sight, waiting for me to spot and eventually feed them.
Of various ages, these cats found me when I moved into this house in September last year. It was my first time with animals. As a kid whenever I saw cats, I jumped away from them and found them other-worldly, mysterious creatures. Last September it started off with a couple of kittens that were, according to my flatmate, not more than six months old.
Distant, but also curious about us, these babies were amusing and also baffling. As much as we fed them, they were clear about boundaries: we couldn’t come within 20 inches of their personal space. At first, I didn’t know how to respond to their sudden, quiet, near constant attendance. They were aloof, always looking at me or staring in my general direction, somewhat strangely drawing me in and wearily seeking my attention.
Of the two cats, one was an orange stray kitten accompanied by a wiry female white one. The orange tom cat had the bewildered expression of a lost kid, managing to endear himself to us both. I took to loving them, haltingly at first, and then completely. Not older than six months, these two soon became a fixture of my work from home evenings. Six months flew by in a haze, when around the first half of March this year, the tom cat disappeared, exposing me in its wake to the cat world that undergirds my part of south Delhi.
By March this year our house was surrounded by cats of all shapes, sizes and ages as part of the local cat realpolitik. We were being patrolled by ageing, pissing male cats; females visiting us in hiding from the males; strange, lost, new cats staring at us from the hall windows.
And we continued to get used to the various hissing, meowing, yelling, howling outside the house at ungodly hours. Even in their chaotic energy, these strays were cute and lovable. They were bouncing, pouncing, crying, scratching, climbing, sliding, cramming, clawing, chattering, stalking and purring all the time.
My daily routine now included not only feeding them all, but also striking a balance between unruly members of the cat family. I knew the oldest male cat, a soi-disant head of the family, didn’t get along with the young kittens.
I would feed him on the drawing room balcony, while keeping the kitten’s food in my bedroom balcony. The only spayed male cat of the lot, M, was the most easy going of the lot. He would rub himself against my legs, flattering me, eating whenever we fed him, and never showing any aggression towards any of the other cats. After three months, I graduated from buying one kilogram cat food packs for a month to seven kilogram ones.
But late in April, something shifted. At first I didn’t know it was covid, but as the rapturous infection took hold over my body, I was limited to the bed. Eyes almost always shut, or watering incessantly, out of exhaustion or because of the heavy drugs, I rarely ventured out of the bedroom. During the handful of waking hours each day I tried hard to keep myself away from social media.
With death prevailing all across, a strange silence hovered around punctured only by the heavy whirring of the ceiling fan. Night sweats, joint aches and unending fatigue caught me wishing for an end, or a glimmer of hope at the end of this unending dark tunnel. That is when the cats found me.
In the last year the little creatures had grown accustomed to the comings and goings of my house, moods and work life. Through the silence of the winter of 2020 they had kept me quiet company from the other side of a shut window or a closed door. And now it was their turn to take over quietly, entirely.
They would show up routinely three times a day, patrolling the balcony, peeping from the windows, sleeping by the sill or just looking inside the house as if to smell the illness out. They kept an eye on me from the windows and doors, various corners of glass panes and almost any other opening that they could. Stealthily dipping in and out, marking their attendance. Whenever I was in sight for them, they engaged me. Be it from behind a shut door, or a closed window. They would let out a quiet meow, wagging their tails gently, as if inviting me outdoors.
In asking for my constant attention, either for food or just to be noticed, these cats kept my mind and body busy. On a July afternoon, one of the middle-aged female cats, Blue, sat tight in the balcony staring right back into the eyes of a senior monkey who kept threatening to enter our balcony. Confused by this behaviour, the monkey eventually left, leaving a smug Blue and happy me.
As I continued on my path to recovery, I structured my days around the meal times of the various strays. In the limited hours for which they graced us with their company, I came to discover a strange sense of acceptance. In a world where people show off and rub each other’s noses in their accomplishments, the cats have an ecosystem of their own, running parallel to ours. And this was sobering for me as all human interaction took a back seat, I felt relieved, cared for and attended to in their feral company.
It was only a natural progression when in October, M brought over his newest beau, who we named, Simi. She was wiry, scrawny but unlike almost all the other (10) cats we were caring for. Within a week of my feeding her, she started to come unnervingly closer to my feet, then my fingers, and then the small of my back, as I sat on the floor, feeding her. As I patted her back, running my fingers through her dense silvery black fur, I felt dewy and mushy like never before.
It’s been 13 months now and I still don’t have a half decent photograph with any of the ten (or more) cats. But I do have a gamut of memories, and a gallery full of them in various poses. Those are somewhat less staged and more candid. My family has taken my sudden love for cats in great spirit. My mother asks about them every week when I don’t volunteer any information about them. My cousins are trying to befriend feral kittens near their house in my hometown, Kanpur.
Last month, Minty brought home the tiniest orange baby kitten, the runt of her litter. I fed her from my balcony, as she sheltered with Minty, tucked away from the prying eyes of all other males tabbies. None of her other kittens had survived, which made Minty unusually protective and loving towards this baby orange feral female kitten. The baby pawed at me, playing hide and seek behind a broken window pane in the basement. I fed her dry food, trying to get a sense of her whereabouts a few times a day. We were yet to name her, until one day she disappeared. One of the older male cats took her away, leaving Minty alone as she bereaved the loss of her baby.
I wouldn’t call this a coming full circle of events, but it did feel like something as poignant as she wailed for hours each day, sitting at the same spot from where she had crooned at me in July and August. I orbited her, trying to pat her, soothe in ways other than being there for her with food, and she was resolute in her display of sadness. Her mourning completed more than three weeks later, when she stopped crying, but her big green eyes showed her broken soul.
The hours we’d spent together grieving our loved ones were incalculable. It was here, quietly sitting in each other’s company, human to animal, in its primal, bare, raw form that we both found a semblance of normalcy, letting it unfurl and unfold something so deeply lost within us.
In grieving with Minty, and in living with these stray cats, as they came and went, I found a strange, vindictive, all-consuming jinn of a love for them and for myself. All of life coalesced around me, perfuming my otherwise dull hours with meaning as these creatures demanded my constant attention, whether I was around them or not. More than anything, I finally found a keen sense of belonging with these cats, who did not leave my side even during our bleakest moments. In a time when I am confined to the house, alone, this is a small mercy that makes me grateful.
‘We live the stories that either give our lives meaning , or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’ - Ben Okri
P.S.: In early 2021 I wrote about cats and my very one-sided connection with them here.
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