'my family and other animals'

with William Carlos Williams

dear reader,

this is just to say…

it has been raining relentlessly since the last ten days. last night’s rain sits in the iris of the pre-dawn ghost, and through her eyes I try to hold the silence that this island offers, as gratitude. i am at my desk, writing, in a room with a view. a telescope stands on the verandah before me, behind a paisley patterned wrought-iron jaali. its neck extends over the wooden railing, straining past the road in front of the old house. it is squinting sideways. sightless eyes look away from the fisherwoman selling bangda fish, away from the skidding scooters, and children hurrying to the ferry on their way to school, away from all the Portuguese homes with roosters on their roofs sleeved in tarpaulin to match the colour of their blue-tiled limbs and azulejo toes, and away from the yellow raincoated pedestrians, away from the trees preening in the downpour, searching, without success, for a patch of clear sky.

i am pet-sitting for a family of artists who have become friends, trying as always to do some writing, and some reading. dhanno* the quietest, and most aloof of the 5 animals who are taking care of me in this beautiful house, lies at my feet. she is old and weary, like a quiet mami who has seen the ways of the world, and wants nothing more than to be left alone, with someone to give her a meal, and allow her to go out and soft-grunt at the dogs outside. she does this, of course, with the intuitive disdain of posh women who know how to pronounce words like caviar and croissant. dhanno’s got swag. She wears it lightly - the worn out, glazed effervescence of a beauty who was once the talk of the town. you are fortunate if she deigns to let her majestic gaze fall on you, with those eyes lost in another time, like some once famous actress, coveted by many, who learnt to be fiercely independent, silently making her way in this chaotic world. Dhanno is gentle, loving, and rarely gets angry. she is ageing gracefully, foregoing the pleasures of the world - a monk, receding into herself, attired in a golden-black velvet habit, breathing softly, as she dreams of wet green grass and boiled chicken.
from her
i learn about the silence of slowness.

oreo’s as old, but feistier. her ochre-brown coat is only slightly lighter than the mangalore tiles that crown each of the homes here. she’s dhanno’s contemporary, but you’d only know it from her eyebrows when she frowns at you irked by some immaturity, when those twin commas of fury reveal their gray. oreo wears her heart on her sleeve; she doesn’t hide what she’s feeling. she’s poised in her nonchalance, and demands attention. straight as an arrow, she has a foxy air that complements her devil-may-care attitude. you do not go to oreo. oreo comes to you. and when she comes, she is unabashed in her love. she likes to be updated on all events pertaining to the house, and its inhabitants. in fact, she takes offence if she is not called for family meetings. she takes the safety of her caregivers and the home very seriously. even the hint of another being entering the compound drives her wild, and she takes it upon herself to charge to the verandah, to issue warning barks. she’s not blindly vindictive though, she wants to play, and if she sees a familiar stranger - a vagabond cat, say, who’s been testing the waters, coming to the compound…closer and closer everyday - you might catch her tail wagging in glee. new friend. she’s perhaps the first to sense when something is wrong. maybe she lost somebody close to her when she was young. maybe she holds herself responsible. who knows…i think, she has grown into a state of anxious but vigilant empathy that detects the slightest threat in her immediate environment. when she trusts you, though, she loves you without inhibition. if you leave her alone for some time, she comes and enquires if everything is alright, by nudging you first, and then burying her head between your knees. if you come back late from work or something, she makes her irritation apparent, howling at you, questioning you - how dare you? most of the time, when she’s not sleeping, she follows me around the house. she shadowes my footsteps, goes everywhere i go, almost as if to make sure that I don’t forget myself, or what I am supposed to be doing. i love oreo. she is as sweet as she is bitter. she teaches me loyalty, and the certainty of desire. from her
i learn radical empathy. i discern the importance of single-minded attention. i understand, also, the limits of anxiety, and spontaneity
and the uses of rage.

the youngest and most excitable members of the household are changu and mangu. these two lost kittens generously adopted by the family, are everything the other three are not. the oldies are just slowly getting used to their quirks. oreo has figured out that they are here to stay, and in her more playful moods, runs after mangu like a younger, more energetic playmate might. but she isn’t any match to their raw, explosive, infant fire. i have been a cat parent before, yet did I never breathe this madness of unbridled play till i saw these two in their hungry prime. mangu has a little charlie chaplin moustache, and will deceive you into believing that she’s the calmer one. no object in the kitchen, or anywhere in the house is safe from their searching tongues. so persistent are they in their efforts to find something to nibble (caught somewhere between the teething and the suckling stage) that even empty stove tops or wooden blocks are subject to the scourge of their tiny sandpaper tongues and teeth. if they could, they would have nibbled away the entire house - brick by moist brick. they act as if they haven’t been fed for a thousand years, when in truth, they’ve been eating non-stop!

the most exciting moment of the day comes in the morning when they have to be fed for the first time. after the dogs have been taken for their morning walk, and it is time for the kittens to be fed, the arena is cleared for the great fish dash. they start to get antsy when they realise that the time has come for the most important few seconds of their lives. the vessel has been taken out more than an hour prior to the great feeding, and their masters have been depriving them of their cherished food for soooooo long now. their sniffing noses catch the scent…and… they start to meow. they can tell by the smell that the fish has been kept in their bowls. somebody
has to hold one of them back else they’d tear each other to pieces in their famished excitement.

i tell you, they’d put usain bolt to shame. i don’t think a speed gun could tell which one of them is faster. like two fearless gladiators clawing and snarling they lunge towards their silver prey - come in their way at that time, and you will be assaulted by a barrage of angry yowls and sharp scratches. the fish are consumed in less than 3 seconds (i know because i’ve counted!), and then they proceed to mop the area around the bowls. the diameter of the explosion extends to the entire kitchen, and the two kittens continue to scour the area for any collateral damage. after they are well fed, and they want to play, they are more amiable. mangu loves to chase her tail, and changu likes the texture of laptop keyboads, charging wires of all types, and anything small which makes a rattling noise. to the toddlers the entire world becomes a toy. and in all honesty, while I might be a bit annoyed by their constant fiddling, this is perhaps the most endearing thing about them. the kittens remind me that everything is about perspective. they meet the world on their own terms, with their mouths, and their bounding curiosity. put them in a metal cage, and they’d try gnawing their way through the bars. inside the house they are lions, but take them outside on their verandah and they cling to each other for dear life.

from them
i learn again how to play
and how to love… without inhibition…

the kittens never fail to lighten the mood. everybody dores them, secretly. even vincent, who i’ve saved for the end.

vincent, is around my age in cat years. like the kittens he acts as if he’s underfed, but his widening waistline tells another story. his coat is the colour of a rocky cave whose moss glistens under a waterfall. vincent is truly a complex character - deceptively inert, and almost calculating, in his sombre manner. some rainy evenings, you’d see him perched on the armchair outside, with snake heads for arms, his eyes trained on the invisible horizon, brooding, like a working class hero nursing thoughts of revolution. vincent is a classic turn-of-the-century mohanlal, harbouring thoughts of freedom and resistance, holding the cares of the world in the barely visible creased lines of his forehead. he is quiet and rarely speaks. you can’t always tell what he’s feeling. a single shrug conveys the most profound emotions - and with those eyes he can bore a hole through your soul. sometimes when he looks at me i can almost hear tchaikovsky’s march slave play in the background. he’s quite an emotional fellow. he pretends like none of the others matter to him - especially the kittens. he hisses at them at leance once a day, usually when they get too close to his bowl.

i realised how deeply he cares, however, one evening when something happened that upset the mood of the entire family of five. it had been raining, and the power kept going on and off. oreo and dhanno were agitated - perhaps the ‘stranger’ cat was outside again. they were barking non-stop. the kittens were yowling, and vincent sat quietly and watched the whole brouhaha from his window sill. he was sitting at a safe distance, and i didn’t pay any heed to him as i tried calming oreo down. it all happened in a matter of a few seconds… oreo suddenly barked louder than them all - he was already in a frenzy of confused excitement - and as if to assist me in calming the kittens down, he launched a full blown attack on changu.

i tell you, dear reader, that at that moment my heart was in my mouth. i have seen her play with the kittens before - but this was different. with one paw on the kitten’s neck, and the other on her flank, oreo was holding down the kitten, whose eyes, little orbs, were bulging from their sockets in fear. out of nowhere, an aquamarine green comet whizzed into the sceene, and bumped into oreo. vincent, the saviour, the quiet revolutionary, the brooding hero, was in the house. he took a swipe at the poor dog’s nose, and oreo released the kitten before dashing outside into the hall. i ran to the kitten to check if she was alright, and when i turned around i saw vincent’s hind paws vanishing quickly from sight. the chuppa rustam had taken it upon himself to avenge his kind, and was following oreo to make sure she was properly defeated and pacified.

at that moment vincent was all alpha - gone were the gentle wiles and the sulky demeanour. hew was all predator… out on the prowl. sure enough, before i could get to him, he had taken another swipe at oreo, and even drawn blood. i ran to oreo, shielding her from the catastrophe, and looked her over. vincent was still hissing, and somehow, i managed to get him out of the scene… oreo didn’t eat at her usual time that night. she was down, the poor thing, and probably in a spot of pain. but by midnight she came to me, hungry, and i fed her.

by the next morning it all seemed like it was forgotten. this is how it is with animals, i realise. they are more forgiving then humans, more impulsive, and more remorseful when they feel they have done something wrong. while rationality evades them, they feel more than we do, and perhaps, in this way, they are more human than us.

from vincent, then, i learnt patience. i understood the meaning of quiet persistence, and what it means to be alert, to bide your time in solitude, giving away nothing, but waiting…. waiting… for the right moment.
apna time aayega.

in that big quiet house, with large rooms, oak cupboards, carved wooden beams and mahogany furniture, the drama of the animals seemed larger, more filmy than it actually was.

the animals are all in fine fiddle now. the two kittens are sitting quietly next to my laptop - both their bodies motoring away in an arpeggio of purrs. oreo and dhanno are sleeping, and vincent is out, probably chasing away the white stranger who keeps turning up in the compound outside.

(dear s and h)

this is just to let you know …
a couple of updates… there were some rugs and such in the washing machine, i have put them out on the line in the verandah to dry - but the rain has been unforgiving, and the mats are still a bit damp. i went to island bar and restaurant 2 days ago, on the night of oreo’s attack on the kitten, and i picked up some island special masala - i’ve kept the brew on top of the fridge. obviously i couldn’t finish the whole thing in two days. vincent is a bit miffed with me since i’ve been keeping him outside to prevent another epic battle, but he’s ok now - i started letting him in more and more in the last two days. oreo seems more excitable, anxious and even more weary since you all left; and dhanno is her usual quiet, stylish self. the kittens are blissfully unaware of everything, and have been a great help in cleaning up every surface of the kitchen floor and counter.

in gratitude…

p.s. no animals have been hurt in the making of this commentary and…
*all names have been changed to maintain anonymity

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