Kitty litterateurs: on Suniti Namjoshi's Suki and other cat books

[Did this for the magazine Democratic World]

There was an email forward doing the rounds recently, a comparison of hypothetical one-page diary entries written by two house pets – a dog and a cat. The dog’s entry was short, semi-literate and full of sunshine and cheer, with such exclamations as “Oh boy! A car ride! My favourite!” and “Oh boy! Tummy rubs on the couch!” while the cat’s was written in full, elegant sentences and was sardonic and world-weary: the very heading read “Day 183 of my captivity”.

Anyone who knows the two species well should agree that this is a good summary of their broad personality types. And anyone who knows professional writers – at least the ones who brood for hours over the construction of a paragraph or sentence – will agree that temperamentally they tend to be cat-like: mostly reserved, unsocial and irritable, but willing to purr for a short time if a satisfying turn of phrase has been achieved, or a deadline more or less met. There are also practical reasons why writers are more often “cat people” than “dog people”. Dogs are dependent on human attention, needing to be regularly spoken to and taken down for walks, but cats are more self-sufficient, and hence suitable companions for people who spend much of their time in fierce concentration.

In this light, it is interesting to consider the difference in tone between books about dogs and books about cats. The former – especially the ones about life with a pet – tend to be sentimental and emotionally demonstrative, whereas cat books have a certain coolness built into them. And this can be the case even when they belong to the Motivational or Self-Help category. Take David Michie’s very engaging The Dalai Lama’s Cat, told in the voice of a kitten who is rescued by the Dalai Lama at a traffic signal near Delhi and brought to Mcleodganj, where she soon settles into the temple complex and becomes known as His Holiness’s Cat (HHC).

HHC – alternately known as Snow Lion and, to her dismay, “Mousie-Tung” – spends much of her time in the company of the Buddhist leader, soaking in his presence (“had he recognised in me a kindred spirit – a sentient being on the same spiritual wavelength as he?”) and listening in as he discusses the conundrums of existence. Each chapter follows a broad format where a human character discovers the need to rethink his attitude to things, and the cat then applies some of these teachings to her own situation, with varying degrees of success. Thus, an insight about how self-absorption can make one sick and unhappy (a valuable lesson for writers, as it happens!) is linked to our narrator coughing up fur balls after spending an inordinate amount of time grooming herself. She realises that a period of self-pity combined with fear of exploring a new setting cost her precious time that she might have spent getting to know a new friend; and she is even inspired to deal with her gluttony, a by-product of being pampered silly.

As an old cynic wary of quick-fix advice and pat life lessons, I am not really a fan of this genre. But The Dalai Lama’s Cat worked for me because even in times of emotional epiphany, the cat nature retains a certain distance. At one point HHC overcomes her feelings of distaste for a new arrival, a dog named Kyi Kyi, when she learns about his sad back-story. “We reached an understanding of sorts,” she says, but then she quickly adds: “I did not, however, climb into his basket and let him lick my face. I’m not that kind of cat. And this is not that kind of book.”

Such emotional reticence can make brief, unexpected flashes of sentimentality very effective. Suniti Namjoshi’s recently published Suki, a tribute to her deceased cat, takes the form of conversations between human and feline. They talk about such things as morality, social injustice and hypocrisy, and the tone is mostly droll, faux-philosophical and chatty (or catty). But there are deeply affecting moments too. At one point in the middle of a casual conversation, the ghost-cat remarks that towards the end of her life it had been painful for her to open the cat-flap to go outside, and the author responds with a spontaneous cry of “Oh, Suki!” And another exchange, where the cat mentions that she would have liked to meet the author’s family (who were not animal lovers), should cut deep for anyone who has ever had a special, intense relationship with an animal and been unable to share it with their human world.

At the same time, one knows that these conversations are fictional, that Namjoshi is imagining things about the cat’s inner life and rendering them into human language. And so, the book becomes as much about the author herself – it is a form of therapy, a way of examining her deepest feelings, including love, grief and regret. This is also a reminder that there are many types of cat books. Cats can be used to examine a particular milieu as in Pallavi Aiyar’s novel Chinese Whiskers, in which the adventures of two Beijing cats give us a window into aspects of Chinese society including insularity, city-dwellers’ prejudices against migrant workers and the materialism of the young. Or they can serve purely representative or symbolic purposes: Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel Maus depicts the Holocaust by drawing Jews as mice and their Nazi oppressors as cats, but there is no pretence that the book is about animals.

Even overtly cat-centric books like The Dalai Lama’s Cat don’t always try to provide a detailed picture of the feline world and its tactile sensations, which is why Nilanjana S Roy’s delightful The Wildings, and its sequel The Hundred Names of Darkness, are such unusual additions to the kitty-lit corpus. These novels try to imagine what the world might feel like to a cat, from the furniture and carpets inside a house to the smells and textures of the outdoors, or the visceral knowledge that a predator is stalking you in the darkness. And an important plot device is the concept of “linking”: the feral cats of Nizamuddin, Delhi, can transmit whisker signals to each other across vast distances, allowing them to form a network that humans around them are oblivious to. 

This should resonate with anyone who has long-suspected that there is something otherworldly about cats; that they aren’t letting on everything they know; or that they are, like the cat in that diary entry, plotting something diabolical. “When my cats aren't happy, I’m not happy,” the poet Shelley said once, “because I know they’re just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.” Or to telepathically work themselves into the next book or poem.

[A post about Suniti Namjoshi's The Fabulous Feminist is here]

Mousie Tung and a Bodhi-catva guide to life

Being an old cynic who reckons that the best route to (irregular bursts of qualified) Happiness is to strive to be as discontented and stressed as possible, and to keep expectations at ocean-bed level, you may guess that I am not an enthusiastic reader of Inspirational or Self-Help books. This isn't to sweepingly judge the whole category, just to observe that too much of the literature in it offers quick-fix solutions or standardises the many possible human responses to a range of experiences. The sort of motivational book that might just stir my interest would be one that avoids a preachy, smug, all-knowing tone and offers its “wisdom” tentatively rather than burning it onto stone tablets. An even more effective method, though, would be to have it narrated by a cat.

This is what David Michie does in The Dalai Lama’s Cat, which I read in a single, pleasant sitting yesterday. The premise is a straightforward one. A frail kitten is bought – rescued, really – by the Dalai Lama at a traffic signal on the outskirts of Delhi and taken to Mcleodganj, where she soon settles into the temple complex and becomes known as HHC (His Holiness’s Cat). Much of her time is spent in the company of the Buddhist leader himself, soaking in his presence (“had he recognised in me a kindred spirit – a sentient being on the same spiritual wavelength as he?”) – she listens as the Dalai Lama and his associates and helpers discuss various conundrums of existence. But she also explores the world, finding a second home in a cafe in the little marketplace outside the monastery, as well as romance with a local tabby.

Through all this, no real attempt is made to convincingly flesh out the feline world (as in The Wildings, for example) – The Dalai Lama's Cat is not that kind of animal book. HHC – alternately known as Rinpoche, Snow Lion and, much to her dismay, “Mousie-Tung” – is our medium for a range of life-lessons: each chapter follows a broad format where a human character deals with a realisation about his life and attitude, and the cat then tries to apply some of these teachings to her own experiences, with varying degrees of success. (“You may have imagined that we cats never get caught up in such cognitive complexity ... nothing could be further from the truth.”) Thus, an insight about how self-absorption can make one sick and unhappy is linked to our narrator coughing up unpleasant fur balls after spending an inordinate amount of time grooming herself. She realises that a period of self-pity combined with fear of exploring a new setting cost her precious time that she might have spent getting to know a new friend; she reflects on the importance of mindfulness – paying full attention to whatever one is doing in the present moment, rather than allowing a disconnect between action and thought; and she is even inspired to deal with her gluttony, a by-product of being pampered silly both inside and outside the temple complex.

I’m still undecided about this book’s “inspiration quotient" – some of the ideas are nicely expressed, others come close to sounding like platitudes – but one thing The Dalai Lama’s Cat manages to do (given the assumptions of its genre) is to not get over-sentimental. Cat nature ensures the retention of dignity, and a certain aloofness, even in life-changing moments. At one point HHC overcomes her feelings of envy for a new arrival, a dog named Kyi Kyi, when she learns about his sad back-story. “We reached an understanding of sorts,” she says, but quickly adds: “I did not, however, climb into his basket and let him lick my face. I’m not that kind of cat. And this is not that kind of book.”

P.S. Tangentially relevant to this post is the marvellous YouTube video below. Do watch. These three minutes represent the most convincing argument for religion that I’ve yet come across.

The Sender, the street cats and the sourpusses: on Nilanjana Roy's The Wildings

“There are no ordinary cats,” the French novelist Colette said once. Anyone privileged enough to have rubbed noses with these volatile balls of fur will know this is correct, but Mara – an orange kitten in Nilanjana Roy’s debut novel – is preternaturally gifted even by the standards of her species. All cats, The Wildings tells us, can “link” with each other across large distances through whisker transmissions, but Mara is that rarity, a Sender: a cat who can transmit extremely strong signals and even travel far and wide while physically staying in the same spot. Though she lives with humans (or Bigfeet) in a Nizamuddin apartment, her existence poses problems for the neighbourhood strays. When you’re constantly hunting for food and surviving by your wits, it can be unsettling to suddenly hear a kitten’s voice in your head yelling “Thank you, O Bigfeet, for releasing me from the fell captivity of the fearsome sock drawer!”

And so, the “wildings” – led by the sagacious Miao and the queenly Beraal – set out to deal with this unusual situation while simultaneously keeping an eye on their youngest, an overenthusiastic, trouble-prone kitten named Southpaw. However, a much more serious threat soon arises from another quarter. In the creepy Shuttered House nearby live a group of feral cats led by the sadistic, sociopathic Datura, who is the Gabbar Singh of this narrative (the analogy springs to mind because of a passage involving a doomed green beetle crawling about near this pensive villain). Soon battle-clouds gather and a popular trope of the adventure genre – the little hero entrusted with a very big task – comes into play.

Animal lovers are well aware that other species are poorly represented – if even acknowledged at all – in our literature, outside of narrowly defined genres or heavily anthropomorphic writing for children. How pleasing it is then to find, in the pages of a novel labelled just “Fiction” rather than “Fantasy” or “Children’s Fiction”, a real setting filtered though a non-human perspective. The Wildings may not fit the conventional definition of a Delhi book, but it gives us the familiar vistas of Nizamuddin – its leafy residential areas, the dargah and the baoli, the dilapidated old houses, the nearby Humayun’s Tomb – as they are experienced by the four-legged creatures who roam and scavenge amidst them.

For a reviewer weary of the blithe self-importance of his species, the concept is refreshing in itself, but it helps that this is a warm, imaginative and well-paced book. It is superbly produced too, with Prabha Mallya’s lovely illustrations sharing page-space with text, or even (as with two small butterflies watched by an enthralled Mara, or a swooping cheel with his wings spread out) weaving amidst the words. Both writing and drawings pay tender attention to the many elements of the natural world. Though the cats are the main characters, many other creatures move in and out of the narrative: three zoo tigers and a langur whom Mara befriends during her virtual wanderings; a stately mongoose who speaks the generic tongue Junglee, which all animals can understand; an Alsatian pup mistreated by his human owners; warblers and squirrels, bats and mice.

What I admired most about The Wildings is that it is remarkably free from simple-minded anthropomorphising of the sort where animals are basically people in different shapes. It’s true that the things these cats mew or otherwise communicate to each other are expressed in a human language (this being a necessary limitation of the author and her readers) and it’s also true that any story about talking animals has a certain amount of cutesiness built into it. But a serious, rigorous attempt is made here to imagine what the world – including the many aspects of it that have been shaped by Bigfeet – might feel like to a cat, from the furniture and carpets inside a house to the smells and textures of the outdoors, or the visceral knowledge that a predator is stalking you in the darkness. The device of the “link” works perfectly too: it should strike a chord for anyone who has long-suspected that there is something mystical and otherworldly about cats; that they aren’t letting on everything they know. Perhaps the supercilious things really have been virtual-chatting, Skyping and status updating long before we Bigfeet learnt some of those tricks – and doing it to much more meaningful ends.

Because the internal logic of the story is so carefully worked out, I felt Roy might be in danger of being too restrained, but every now and then there is an exercise in pure whimsy: a mention of a rooster named Sunte Ho, a sudden exclamation of “Bakwaas” in the middle of a refined conversation, a passage where a colony of Supreme Court cats with such names as Affit and Davit react to a Mara sighting by speaking in over-formal legalese. (“My learned self concludes that the kitten qua kitten is a hypothetical kitten.”) If I had to gripe about anything, it would be that some of the action sequences – a fight at the baoli, the long-drawn-out climactic battle with the ferals – didn’t fully hold my attention. Though written with skill and sharply observant of cat manoeuvres and the graceful litheness of their movements, these passages felt a little mechanical compared to the breeziness of the rest of the narrative.

The Wildings is, before anything else, a terrific adventure tale with a fine cast of characters, and because it can be enjoyed wholly at that level one hesitates to over-analyse or get solemn about its themes. But “serious” and “entertaining” are not exclusive categories, and even genres that are viewed as being relatively low-engagement or non-cerebral often produce works of quiet, unselfconscious wisdom. This book has things to say about the potential for kinship between natural adversaries, about rules of conduct in a survival-of-the-fittest situation, about heroism taken to reckless extremes contrasted with reluctance to get involved at all, and about the advisability of taking only as much as you need from the world around you.

It is also a story about the perils of being secluded to the point of becoming agoraphobic, so that even a glimpse of the sky can be frightening because “it was such a long way away” – the telling contrast is between the sheltered Mara, who opts to move out of her comfort zone and deal with her responsibilities, and the vicious Datura, who is capable of engaging with the outside world only by trying to crush it. But none of these ideas are thickly scribbled on a placard and waved in front of the reader’s nose; they move beneath the surface of a consistently charming story about a diffident kitten and the world that gradually reveals itself to her. By the book’s end I wanted to “link” into the author’s head so I could read the sequel in advance.

[Did this review for Tehelka]

Kitty lit: Pallavi Aiyar’s Chinese Whiskers

It’s no secret that cats and writers are temperamentally suited to each other. Dogs are more dependent on human attention, needing to be regularly played with, spoken to and taken down for walks, but felines are moody and unsocial and independent - and hence perfect companions for someone who spends much of his time in fierce concentration, or sulking about being unable to write. (Ironically, though I was an unqualified cat person when I was young, I’ve become seriously involved with a very demanding dog at a time when I’m writing professionally and working from home. Not easy.)

Besides, as Aldous Huxley said, “If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” Which brings me to Pallavi Aiyar’s lovely novel Chinese Whiskers, told in the alternating voices of two young cats living in Beijing.


Soyabean is born in reasonable comfort – being part of a courtyard litter that’s cared for by a kindly old lady – while Tofu is from a family of dustbin scavengers, but as kittens they are both adopted by a waiguo (foreign) couple named Mr and Mrs A. It’s a cosy and happy life until threatening winds begin to blow in from the World outside: animals are being held responsible for a nasty bing du (virus) and groups of mean-minded vigilantes prowl the streets, kidnapping unmonitored pets, stuffing them in vans and driving them off to a terrible fate. Meanwhile, the rotund Soyabean is roped in to model for a TV ad for a delicious new brand of Chinese cat-food. He is soon seduced by his newfound celebrity, but Tofu – timid, introspective – is dubious from the start:

And what was all that nonsense about “Chinese food is better”? I wasn’t a very smart cat and there were many things I didn’t know, but I did know there was something wrong with making a statement like that. Maybe some Ren liked Chinese food more and some preferred waiguo food, but how could you say that Chinese food was always better? Even though I wasn’t so interested in food at all, I still thought it was more interesting to have many different kinds of foods than just one type all the time.

The subtext is clear enough; it isn’t just food that is being talked about here. Chinese Whiskers examines many aspects of Chinese society – insularity, the city-dwellers’ prejudices against migrant workers from the countryside, the friction between tradition and modernity, the hard-edged materialism of the younger generation – but it does this with a lightness of touch that is sustained from beginning to end. Many people will see it as a book for “young readers” (with the patronising tone that sometimes accompanies that phrase), and indeed it can be enjoyed by eight-to-ten-year-old readers in the undemanding way that they might enjoy Enid Blyton’s Bimbo and Topsy stories. But I think it also makes for a good companion piece to Aiyar’s prize-winning Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, which was a more overtly serious work of narrative journalism about the Middle Kingdom (and which also had an outsider-narrator – Aiyar herself – looking with fascination at a multilayered World).

Needless to say, the perspective in Chinese Whiskers is a very different one, but it’s insightful in its own special way. What more succinct comment on the human condition than these words of wisdom delivered by a mama cat to her daughter as they discuss the fickle ways of people: “Ren are as the wind. Who can say why they blow this way or that?” It’s a line plucked out of a children’s book featuring anthropomorphized animals, but the context for the conversation is an old professor who got into trouble with the authorities because of the dissenting views he expressed in a book. Even so, despite the hints of danger, the melancholy asides and the sense of a society in flux, the overall tone is optimistic and comforting: the story's leering villains are more than offset by Good Samaritans such as the animal-rights activist Madam Wang and the construction worker Four Fingers Fu who cares for Tofu when she is lost.

The use of Soyabean and Tofu as narrators provides a fresh perspective on such real-life events as the frenetic build-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics (some of the details of which mirror the preparation for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi), but it’s also a useful plot-mover: the cats understand what humans say, eavesdrop on crucial conversations and eventually help expose a cynical money-making scheme. The one very minor reservation I had about the voices is that both Tofu and Soyabean are fairly docile, domesticated sorts, rarely displaying the tartness that characterises the best of their kind. I wouldn’t have expected the caustic tone of Saki’s “Tobermory” from a story like this, but an ill-tempered hiss every chapter or two would have been nice! That little detail aside, Chinese Whiskers was one of my favourite reads of the last few months.

P.S. The book includes some beautiful black-and-white drawings by Gerolf Van de Perre, some of whose other work you can see here.

[Did a shorter version of this for The Sunday Guardian]

Mrkgnao...

...is how James Joyce's realist cats pronounce Meow, and this is what I briefly attempted to do when called upon to say "Meow, Delhi!" in a radio studio last evening. In the midst of one of the most hectic weeks of my life (two grandparents in hospitals now – different hospitals – plus there's the minor business of getting married next week, and sundry other work to be done), I found the time to visit the Meow 104.8 FM office, where I had been asked to participate as a blogger-guest on their evening show "Tu Tu Meow Meow", hosted by Ginnie Mahajan. Was a bit nervous when I was invited, but it went off really well – very informal and spontaneous, living-room conversation-ish, and the fact that recent weeks have been so tension-filled probably helped, because I simply couldn't bring myself to get worked up about this. Treated it as a welcome break from the other stuff that’s been going on. Discussed blogging, answered questions I've been asked before in interviews (what is a blog? Are blogs helping middle-class people find their voice? Is it voyeurism? What do you think of personal blogs?), but had the time to give fleshed-out answers, Meow being a channel that talks more than it plays music.

(And yes, I know I should have put up a notification post before the show happened, but 1) I was offline all day yesterday, 2) I wasn’t sure I would even make it to the studio on time until late in the day, and 3) I didn’t particularly want anyone listening in, so there.)

P.S. Read about Greatbong's experiences on Meow here.

Kitty litterateurs

Don’t want a cat/ Scratching its claws all over my Habitat/ Giving no love and getting fat/Ohhh, you can get lonely/And a cat’s no help with that.
– "I Want a Dog", Pet Shop Boys

Now I agree with the Pet Shop Boys on most counts (I maintain, at risk of being consigned to plebian hell, that their lyrics give me a better understanding of the gay-subculture in Thatcher’s Britain than Alan Hollinghurst’s 500-page Booker-winner this year did) but they got it dreadfully wrong this time. In fact, Cats Rule. The one highpoint of a terrible week was a Monday evening spent sipping rum, gorging on honeyed ribs and talking Book with a group of very interesting people in a room that had a distinct air of Catness.

This was the abode of none but the legendary Hurree Babu, Patron Saint to us lit-bloggers. There was Hurree, dashing as ever, and his Partner, who sat demurely in a corner of the room for much of the evening, occasionally emerging to say something brilliant. Putu the Cat, curled up on a sofa. Samit Basu, talented young author who thinks he’s cat-like and sometimes smiles Cheshirely to prove it. He and Putu spent much of the evening making eyes at each other (incidentally, has anyone noticed how cockeyed Samit is?)

Then there was the Jabberwock, who really IS cat-like. There were Hurree’s two (real) cats, one of whom reminded Putu of his/her dear old aunt. There was the cat-loving Peter Griffin, otherwise The Griff, whose work on the Tsunami Help blog has, apart from all its obvious virtues, brought Blogging to the edit pages of hitherto supercilious newspapers. Also present was the author Ruchir Joshi, who tolerates cats reasonably well. So much cat-love/tolerance in one room in Delhi you never saw before.

So there we all were, and those of us who could speak were being very catty about everyone in the literary fraternity who wasn’t present in the room. Obnoxious authors, hangers-on, pompous lit journalists…we took well-sharpened claws to them all. As Samit has already reported, Ruchir was the raconteur par excellence and had us in splits with his version of a lit conference in Neemrana that went horribly wrong; naturally, Sir Viddiiiyyaaa and his lackeys were at the centre of it all.

The Jabberwock, chastened by evidence of how little he knew of the inner workings of the literary world, was content to listen and learn. The Griff too spoke little but purposefully handed out charcoal tablets to those of us with iffy stomachs. Thus fortified, we feasted without compunction on the delectable selection of meats at paw’s reach.

In sum, a grand time was had by all. The Jabberwock was purring contentedly when he left.

Remembering Sandy

“We must remember. They are a part of us, aren’t they – those we once knew?”

This line from M G Vassanji’s elegiac The In-Between World of Vikram Lall keeps coming back to me and now – I’m not sure why, maybe it has to do with the torpor-induced melancholia of a quiet Sunday afternoon – I’ve been thinking about Sandy. About how it’s been over 10 years since he left us, whether he might still possibly be living somewhere in one of Saket’s colonies, not too far from our house (or, for all one knows, miles away in another part of town – for cats have a knack for travelling long distances under duress, and little Sandy was very frightened that night in early 1994 when he shot out of our house for the last time, driven away by our older cat Kittu, whose exclusive male preserve he had begun encroaching on).

But on the off-chance that he is alive, he would be very old in Cat Years, and that’s a thought I can’t bear – Sandy being old. I’m still only 27 myself! It wouldn’t be right.

Sandy entered our lives yowling sometime in June-July 1993 (haven’t checked my diary for the exact date). My mother and I were visiting relatives and had just hailed an auto to go back when we saw this little ginger-coloured thing, not more than 20-25 days old, looking up at us through astonishingly bright, intelligent eyes. Lots of things about him were surprising: he had a remarkably bushy tail even at that age, and an incongruously gruff, guttural voice for such a beautiful, delicate-looking kitten. Picking him up and taking him home was an instinctive move, and came more out of our concern – there were cars tearing about on the road at the time – than anything else.

There were breaking-in problems. On getting home and actually thinking about what we’d just done, we worried about how Kittu might react, but things went off surprisingly well on that front (there being no threat to Kittu’s sole-bachelor-in-colony status at the time). We fed Sandy milk with a dropper and initially fretted that we might have separated him from his mother when he was too small. When he started teething, I happily offered him the entire length of my left arm as a chew toy (for weeks, all you’d see on that limb were several parallel red lines and fang marks).

Have you heard of a cat on a leash? We weren’t yet ready to let Sandy go out by himself the way Kittu freely did; but he was a stray after all and needed to explore the wild occasionally. So every morning (very early, 6 am or so, before I left for school) and every evening I would take him down for 15-20 minutes on a very long leash (a couple of them tied together). I even gave him his first rudimentary lessons in tree-climbing; okay, that’s an exaggeration but I would goad him up the trunk of the solitary tree of note in our park and watch (still holding on to the leash) as he cautiously tested branches.

Would it be too sentimental to admit that I learnt a lot of things about responsibility and care during my time with Sandy? When Kittu first came into our lives a few years earlier, he was almost entirely my mother’s responsibility – except for the tummy-rubbing, which I helped with – and it mostly stayed that way. With Sandy, I had a coequal role to play: in the feeding, the walking, the providing of general entertainment, the collecting/disposing of sand for the kitty litter. I’m not comfortable with the idea of using a fixed set of experiences to conveniently explain a human life, but I think I did grow a lot as a person during those months.

I’ll rush through the rest of it. Once Sandy was a few months old and started going down by himself, it became obvious that a dangerous rivalry was fomenting between him and Kittu. Things reached a point where if they were both in the house at the same time, they had to be kept in different rooms, which caused much tension for all of us. Eventually, there came an evening when we had guests over, someone got careless, the two cats had a brief scuffle in the living room and we hurriedly allowed Sandy out the door while keeping Kittu locked within. Sandy never returned. I spent 15 minutes each morning for the next two months or so scouting all the familiar spots where I used to take him walking, but with no luck.

Sandy was with us for only a few months compared with Kittu’s 8-odd years, and it might seem strange that I feel a greater ache for the former. To a large extent, it has to do with the lack of closure. Kittu was with us for a cat-lifetime, or nearly that. We watched him progress (?) over the years from being a reasonably lithe young cat into an undignified, burping mound of corruption and laziness; gluttonous, hang-jowled, scruffy and torn from the occasional tom-fight. And when he died (in 1998, from a kidney ailment) we knew about it. I found the body, buried him in a spot just outside the house. There was completeness, and a sense of a life full-lived. None of that with Sandy. His time with us was so ephemeral, it’s still easy to wonder whether we dreamt him up.

Anyone who believes it’s possible to be as close to an animal as to another human being will know that it’s completely pointless trying to explain or defend the feeling to someone who can’t empathise with it. So I’m leaving countless things unsaid here. Suffice it to say this is a more personal blog than I ever intended to post on this forum. But it just happened, and I’m sort of glad it did.