Better to Have Loved and Lost

Those who say cats are cold by nature don’t know them at all. Or know the wrong kind. Cats can be heartbreakingly warm and loyal. The kind that will come and nestle up to you even if you chase after them with threats of blows for getting on your bed with muddy paws. So that when they are gone, you’d give anything to see them stretched out on your precious furniture once more, letting their fur down.

However, it is true that cats, at least those with stray blood in them, remain uncompromisingly independent. No amount of love, food, coaxing or threats will keep them indoors always and forever. Let the streets be dirty, full of menacing dogs, speeding cars, hostile humans, rival felines, barbed-wire fencing, treacherous steps or dizzy heights. There is an intrepid explorer in the most timid kitten.

Our tom of more than four years was born and brought up here. I remember when he and his sister were kittens, they were confined mostly to the ample rooftop to play around and be safe from the streets yet not get in our way downstairs. I was once leaving for a week. G, the male kitten, began wailing, looking down from the railing of the rooftop. His sister was less attached to me; she was merely concerned at her brother’s anguish. So she kept rubbing her head against his, one of the ways they show affection. When I returned, the sister was gone. She had climbed down from the roof to the street, only to be killed by a dog before she could be saved. Left alone, G had gone almost crazy with anxiety and loneliness, and it was all I could do to calm him when I returned.

We spent numerous late afternoons on our rooftop, playing football (what do you mean, you don’t know what I mean?), strolling, lazing around… even if I sat on the stairs reading a book, G would come up to sit near me. Then, when he grew older, he naturally began spending more time outdoors, in a world mysterious to us, for it must have existed very close to our house and yet was completely unknown to us: cats have a way of disappearing round the corner. Many times he came home with an injured paw or a nasty wound or a pitiable layer of dirt on his handsome coat. He refused to take medications properly; he refused to be daunted by these perils. He went where he wanted to, returned when he wanted to. He lived his life his way, I like to think.

And he died unbeknownst to us, who knows where and how, following closely a much younger and similarly beloved feline member of the household. G was our OG tom.

He is loved and missed and I hope he can feel a tight hug wherever he is now.

The Unsuspected Depths of Sweetmeat-Crushing Games

As far as games that require little or no thinking go, those where one has to crush colourful candies or gems are pretty much up there. I last played this game around six years ago, when I had an active account in the social media website which hosted the game. And when I say ‘played’, I mean was addicted to, had reached undreamt of levels and were posting philosophical comments about it on the same website. Playing a close variant after six years, I was reminded of those philosophical analogies prompted by the game and struck by the psychological insight shown by the designers of the game. I’m not kidding.

First, the philosophy of it all. I distinctly remember that when I used to play this game, I came across certain levels where I’d get stuck, occasionally even for days (but not too many days, because one cannot try the patience of consumers too much), until suddenly I would be lucky enough to find exactly what I needed on the board and thus cross / win the level. If this is not the same as getting stuck in difficult situations in life, and being able to overcome / get past them only by a combination of perseverance, patience and random luck, I would like to know what is. Think about it.

And on to now: the psychological insight. No doubt the developers of every successful or popular game have a good grasp of what people want and what makes players go on playing. This particular kind of game, I must argue, is one of them. It does not require one to sign up. Less hassle. It is not only colourful, but strewn with ridiculous characters and landscapes that are, from out of the corner of one’s eyes, also vaguely amusing and/or puzzling. It all serves to make it less dreary than, say, another well-known game where you have to locate mines before they blow up.

The levels are easy to begin with, so that one progresses fast (I reached level 15 in less than half an hour, I think; which should be the average speed for a game whose levels reach up to the 700/800s.), but do get tougher in very fine gradation, just enough of an added challenge in each level to make it just about worth playing on, in spite of the overwhelming repetitiveness of the whole premise. Then, and this is an important one, every time you win a level, which, if you play with any attention, you will do every few minutes or even oftener, the congratulating graphics is perfectly over-the-top. You get a golden explosion, a medal, a ribbon, a clapping girl and the works. Not to say a creepy voice remarking with feeling ‘Divine!’ ‘Delicious’ or so on. Compare this, again, to aforementioned mine-locating game where, in the rare case of my winning an expert-level game, all I get is a smiley face so small that I have to look for it. (Compared to the mines exploding every time I do not win. Makes one wonder what is the point.)

And then there is, of course, the choice of candies or gems as play pieces–things most people are innately attracted to. And although this is a single-player game, even if you have not signed up, every time you win a level, you are shown your score on a scoreboard which also displays scores of other players by–note this–elaborately shifting your name and score above those who have scored less, thereby emphasising how better you have performed than how many others. One does not have to be particularly competitive to feel pleased to know that one has done better than others. Even if it’s just a (not so?) stupid online game.

But I mentioned creepy. Yes, the pieces are sweets, but the male voice exclaiming ‘juicy’ or ‘tasty’ every time a clever / successful move is made, does tend to grate on the ears a bit. And the idea of nudging one to sign up by saying ‘you’ve got some sweet moves’ may be witty to some, but dubious-sounding to others.

Then again, perhaps even the touch of creepiness is a very deliberate ploy, to keep the game from being completely vanilla? Who knows. Had I known that there is a mini psychology and philosophy lesson hidden in an online game I pretended to despise? I had not.

Another Old Friend

Seems like this space is mostly filled with cats—which is great—and their obituaries—which, not so much. But then, why not have a space devoted to mourning for animals—pets, strays, friends, passers-by? This very morning, unaware that another of my old friends was no more, I was reading an article where the writer said how she had howled after her dog died, and strangely enough, I felt glad to read it. Not simply because they deserve it—the cats and dogs and the others—but also because it gives me hope. If we are capable of grieving truly and deeply for them, we may also be capable of loving them so, and yes, that gives me hope. For what a nightmare it would be to live in a world where no one but human beings live, and how nightmarish also would be a world where humans and non-humans forget how to love each other.

I am also becoming increasingly selfish, it seems. Just a few days ago, when the adolescent boy of this friend went missing and I began trying to prepare my mind for the fact that he may never return, I told myself and my parents, “Well, at least we did not have to see him die in front of us. At least we were spared the sight of the inert body, the bloodstain and the still eyes.” Nothing but selfishness, this, but selfishness is a far-too-common defence mechanism, don’t you know. For I have also had moments when I have tried to imagine the adolescent tom, the one who is flatteringly, humblingly attached to me, dead, never coming again, running at my sight or voice, and felt slightly panic-stricken. I have also seen his sister lying in the aforementioned manner minutes after she was playing boisterously with him.

So, today too, when I came home and heard that she was gone in the morning, minutes after following my mother around for fish (“Didn’t even get a chance to eat that fish,” said my mother, who is vehemently against pets in the house.), one of my first feelings was a relief at having been spared the sight of her dead body. Denial is another popular defence, I believe.

She is survived by four. She lost more while she was alive. The adolescent tom is looking after the three few-week-olds, the ones whose eyes are still dark blue. All of them are beautiful, gorgeous, precious, spirited. She was a fighter, the mother. I have seen her hitting toms and kissing toms. I have seen her snarling at one and sitting peacefully with another. A girl with strong likes and dislikes, definite opinions and the quiet perseverance to act on those opinions. (I transferred her latest lot of kittens to the roof, where I wanted to keep them, at least half a dozen times, whereupon she brought them down again to the veranda, where she wanted to keep them.)

I remember one of the times she gave birth. She had a kind of open wound/infection on one side of her face. One evening she came to our home, visibly in pain. (They become silent and sit still, in a safe, hidden place.) The wound was dripping pus and possibly blood. Weekend night: no vet’s chamber. I managed to call a vet home and he prescribed what he could, seeing her from a distance. That very night, in that very condition, she gave birth to a litter under my parents’ bed. I remember shining a torch on them under the bed to take a better look and see what colour combination the newcomers had inherited. And though she knew me and trusted me and I daresay loved me, at this intrusion of her privacy, she curled her paw a little tighter around the babies.

I like to think she’s gone to be with her other children now. I like to think that all of them—the non-humans, the super-humans—are together, in play and in peace.

Pure love, pure grief.

Neighbours, Visitors, Guests

So this is the world.

 

Quickly, before the crows come.

 

I just called to say…

 

… I love you.

 

none the worse after a shower

colours and colours

Is that a bit of stale bread I see there?

Look what I can do now!

 

Name unknown

Goodnight, love.

 

Images not for reusing. (Not that you’d want to, with stunning public-domain cat photos all around.)

Till We Meet Again

Perhaps when I die, I shall get a warning or a notification of sorts: your time has come; please prepare yourself. And how shall I get that warning, you ask? My cats will come to see me. My cats who are no longer here, that is. Till now, I used to think it would only be my first cat, the beauty in black-and-white, my beloved friend, the wonderfully mature, intelligent and warm one. Now I think: perhaps I shall be lucky enough to see all of them. The one who was white with orange spots, who scratched me in play and made me take an anti-tetanus and understood that she had made a blunder; the one who would simply come and fall asleep behind the statue in our veranda; the one who would begin with a snappy ‘Meaow!’, and after some milk would take it down a couple of notches and respond with a mild ‘Mew.” The same one who, while passing outside the window of our kitchen one day, called my attention to herself with a “Hi,” and after I had expressed my pleasure to see her and asked her to come in, replied with a ‘Nope. Bye,” and walked on.

If I am lucky, the one who has gone away now to join these others, the one who left most recently, shall also come to see me again. She’s the one who looked a bit like a tigress – a young and playful tigress. This is how we became friends: one evening, I realised that the dogs in our alley were barking at a cat who had ran up our frangipani tree. I went up to the roof to help her because cats do this: they often climb up to a height and then have no idea how to get down, the intrepid explorers. On seeing me, she greeted me with a subdued mew, which meant as clearly as possible: ‘Oh, hello. Here we are, in a bit of a spot. Bit scared too, to be honest… Anyway, could you lend a hand?’

So I got a small tub and extended it towards the tree so that she could jump into it and then I would bring her inside the roof. But she made the leap directly into the roof herself, and was soon rubbing herself against my feet, possibly to show her appreciation of my moral support. The dogs were still waiting and barking below the tree, so that could not be an exit. I tried to show her a different route out, stayed with her a few minutes till she had relaxed enough to start the all-important grooming, brought her some milk and left her sipping it.

A few days later, during the day on a weekend, she came and sat down on the wall in front of our house, below the frangipani, and I had no doubt that she had come to renew the acquaintance. I also realised that I had met her before, on the park wall, mewing uncertainly. I had taken some milk to her then too, and she had not only had some of it, but had also rolled over on her back, possibly to assure me that she knew my intentions were noble. Rolling over on her back was her mannerism, actually; we came to see that in the following months.

And today, she has been missing for a week and someone who takes care of cats tells me two of them have been killed recently by dogs near our house. Two plus two = our playful little tigress (perhaps also the timidish tom who would sneak in to lap up the milk she would leave undrunk) is gone.

So long then, love.

 

Photo Parodies

Whoever can identify the two pretties may give her/him-self a pat on the back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(It’s Marx and Engels, silly.)

One Sleepy, Rainy Afternoon

Pool of light

Three men on a wall

 

Angry bird?

 

Hungry bird!

 

Frangipani

 

Rain-washed

 

Mirror

 

Ms Woodpecker

 

Spot the fly!

 

Anything interesting?

 

Hide and seek

 

Broad and beautiful

 

Lessons in Love and Loss

Last night, not for the first time, I dreamt of my cat. It was a vague dream, remembered but vaguely, but I think, in it, someone said she may have come back and pointed out a cat to me, and I looked, thinking, of course, she has returned finally, but then thought that it wasn’t her but some other…

Because I have not seen her dead body, I shall always keep alive the possibility that she merely went away. And sometimes, when I consider getting another pet, I wonder whether it would hurt her if she decided to come back and found that someone else was in her place. Of course, no one shall ever take her place, but would I be able to explain that to her?

But I need hardly worry so much. For one thing, she doesn’t seem to be coming back. For another, I strongly doubt I shall volunteer to bring another pet. The only time I did so was when I bought two bunnies who died within a fortnight. Guilt had been a predominant feeling at that time, as I regretted that I should not have brought them in without knowing well enough how to take care of them. And I wished that they didn’t have to die to prove how irresponsible/ incompetent I was.

I certainly hope to have a dog some day. Right when I have figured out how not to get my heart broken whenever I look into their eyes. And when I am confident about being able to take care of them. If that ever happens. I am also toying with the idea of rabbit(s) once more… It’s a bit like thinking of pizza and delighting in the very thought, so that I do not ultimately have to end up executing the plan.

My cat came to us of her own accord. It was natural, spontaneous, unplanned and therefore, destined to happen. She would come in the hope of fish, would be shooed away, then I indulged her a little, then some more, and before we knew it, she was raising four newborns in my bedroom. And now, the moments that I think of the most, miss the most, are those that we spent together in silent companionship – apparently almost unaware of each other, but actually very glad for it. At any rate, I was.

No friend like the friend you can be comfortably silent with.

Something Beautiful

I do not follow the news. About current affairs, my ignorance borders on the criminal/moronic. This, of course, has spelt trouble or very near it more than once. A disastrous interview at a higher education institute comes to the mind, for instance, where, when asked what are my opinions about the important political transition my state was facing, I had to admit that I had no opinion, being very uninterested in politics. The silence that followed told me, before the official declaration of results, that I would not be studying there.

There is a simple reason, however, behind my deliberate avoidance of the news. The news seems to be all bad. Every headline yells that the world is going to hell, one sure step at a time, and what’s the point of learning to what new lows people can stoop, is my feeble argument when I am reproached for being so foolish. It is a feeble argument, I suppose, somewhat like burying my head in the sand. To try and improve matters, both in the way of being slightly better informed and to feel slightly less hopeless, I am considering scanning at least one newspaper everyday, with a very definite purpose: to find at least one really good/ encouraging/ hopeful/ heartwarming news. And preferably keep a record of them.

Just last week, a friend asked for a happy story. I too, would very much want to read (and write) happy stories. Stories, of course, do not necessarily mean “fiction”. The articles in news media are also “stories”. I shall hunt and hope and hold on to happy stories in all senses of the term, then, and surely that would be an even better reason for reading the paper than preparing for interviews.

As an introduction to that project (The Happy Story Project?) and a conclusion to this week’s post, here’s a piece of niceness, not fiction but very real, unlikely ever to make it to any news medium. Near where I live is a park. The gardener who tends to it lives in the park with his wife in a dwelling for which the term ‘shed’ is too grand. They are childless. They keep cats. I believe some cat landed on their doorstep and they never turned it away and she gave birth to a litter, so that their part of the park has been dotted with about a dozen cats for some time now. Even the other day, someone dumped four kittens on them, and they didn’t turn away a single one. What is that cliche about those with less being more generous?
Anyway, the gardener and I were discussing how sad it was that so many stray cats are killed by dogs, and among a list of cats he had known who had met the same end, he said he had buried one in the park. It was a nice gesture in itself, I thought. But what made this moderately nice gesture rather remarkable and memorable to me was his casual addition that he had then planted a tree on the spot where the cat was buried.

I suppose this is what I may call a sense of beauty.

Who Is It?

I realised some time ago that I unconsciously imitate people I love. ‘Imitate’ is not the most accurate word perhaps. I incorporate their certain idiosyncrasies into myself – that’s more like it. And some of those remain with me after the people are gone out of my lives. Their habits become my habits. Then, one fine moment, I catch myself in a word or gesture and realise that it had not always been mine.

It does not always have to be people I love, though. But it most often is. Even if I don’t like to admit it. For instance, sometimes I catch myself uttering a thoughtful “Hmmm” like a certain person often does. Because I am now conscious of it, I can observe myself and remember the other and compare what exactly am I doing that is imitation. Is it the tone? Is it the accompanying look? The half-smile-half-frown? As if that person is considering a serious matter but is ready to break into a smile at the slightest mention of a joke?

Sometimes, I feel like laughing out loud, and I am inclined to do so the way one of my friends, who is no longer a friend, used to laugh. Some other times I want to laugh like another friend – lowering and hiding my face for a moment as if trying to suppress the laugh. I occasionally pass my hand over my head; I think one of my teachers used to do that and more recently I have observed two other teachers do that as well, with complete disregard to their hair, so maybe that gesture of serious thinking is common to teachers, and I do it when I am trying to give the impression that I am thinking about something while I am actually thinking about something else.

I have also noticed a tendency in myself to gesticulate with my hands while I am explaining something, and that is probably borrowed from an ex-classmate, and there really is no affection to speak of in this case (neither is dislike!); just that the gesture was noticeable – even rather irritating, but what do you know, I came very near imitating it. Sometimes I’m inclined to act like a spoilt child, and that is not (just) because I am a spoilt child, but because an ex-colleague I used to be very fond of could pull that off really well.

The way I sit at a table is copied from both my mother and my father. And probably my sibling. So is the way I sleep. The way I sometimes struggle with chewing food or tying shoelaces is a straight lift from Dad. But then, all of me, the very fibre and the skeleton, the flesh and the blood, are derived from them, so that it’s rather pointless to try and list traits I’ve inherited from the family.

The unconscious imitates what it notices, so that every time I repeat another’s word or gesture, it can remind me of that person. Is that it? This is how I keep the other with me when I cannot keep the other with me? I got you, Unconscious. That’s one of your cats out of the bag. No longer unknown, but possibly unacknowledged, uncertain, uncanny, unrhymed – this trick of yours.

(Only I know which of those words I love and which is loved by another.)