Cats of Sahakar Nagar

We found her on one night,11 pm to be precise and it was pouring outside.

She was being bullied by a white Tomcat and was clearly mewing for help.

I love all ginger cats, because they remind me of meeri the cat I grew up with in Malleswaram, so I immediately took a  thenginKayi sippe filled it with milk and kept in the karbevin gida.

Kabish  did not drink the milk, but it clearly understood that we were extending a welcome.

Next morning we found it in our front yard ,right next to the karbevin gidda and I got so excited that I started making meow sounds, but it merely glared and bared its teeth at us and hissed, which clearly sent the message ‘get lost’.

The same night it managed to gain entry into our house and started prowling about with the occasional meow.

We were amused about how it seemed to walk around the house, with absolutely no tredepition about the two humans.

But in the mornings, we were cold shouldered,hissed at ,glared at etc etc.

The weekend that followed these antic filled days was the one we finally managed to win over Kabish.

We had earlier tried feeding milk and rice but it just ignored it like how I used to ignore Badnekayi and bendakaYi huli as a kid.

It was a A, who finally decided that there was no point it testing the brahminical bovine diet on Kabish.

And off we went to the mallu supermarket , which stocks everything under the sun and we got whiskas fish.

Kabish made the slurpiest sounds as It consumed whiskas and there was no looking back.

Our maid T, who comes in every morning, quietly disapproved of the indulgence, and covertly told me that the right way to raise a cat is by feeding it haal-anna, meat eating cats are not to be trusted ,I was told out of A’s earshot.

Kabish in the initial days was througly amused by all human or ape activities and used to observe us for long hours.

We even got it all fancy toys which it totally disregarded and synthetic laundry bag was its favourite toy.

Kabish is now all grown up and gets us completely and we think we understand Kabish very well but we really don’t. Its like having to parent a kid with permanent teenage angst, but we like it.

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Upcoming stories:

The Jaguar Cat

Black Striped cat which wants to be adopted.

Kabish and the journeys to the vet clinic.

Kabish favorite lounging places.

Stay tuned or not.

King

When Siri first told me you passed away, I refused to believe it.

I spent the entire afternoon in denial,working furiously.

But In the evening I could no longer keep my emotions in check.

I suddenly wanted to hear  Siri's voice, to reassure me that its not some kind of dream.

I remembered the last time we met, at Polar Bear in Malleswaram.

I remember speaking the most meaningless things to you,  I think I was home for the weekend

from Chennai or not yet joined work, but I had to leave early.

I did not really feel bad then, I knew we would meet countless times again,it is you, King, you always ping, you always call, you are the one who always makes the efffort to keep in touch.

But suddenly that last meeting feels precious to me.I tried hard to recollect what we spoke about that day.

But I could hardly remember.

And thats what is so special about you. The conversations with you could be full of discussions about something supposedly important or we could talk about how best to drink vodka.

You were one awesome friend king, In a place like RV, you made shy junis like me, feel at home. You were always there, I remember you even gave some very sensible advice in my seventh semester 

when I was not  really upbeat about things.

The sadness is there,deep and suddenly so many things remind me  of you.

But for me there is not denying the fact,you were a precious friend King.

I still remember how you used to take the malleswaram bus sometimes just so that we could talk nonsense all the way and you vehemently say it was not trouble walking all the way back to rajajinagar.

You were bare, never hiding all the weaknesses that are so human, and I think that made all of us love you even more.

I will miss you. And you were supposed to give me strawberry weed and maybe ya in heaven, or whatever place that we all go to. And yea, I always listen to the Kinks whenver I think of you.

1. I really need to learn to wear a Saree quickly, and to be fair, I can manage to drape your chiffon and the polyster sarees to an extent but Kanjeevarams just intimidate me.

So I got this bunch of sarees for my wedding nearly nine Kanjeeverams and they are all very beautiful. But I get totally scared  that I will crumple them and do some irreversible damage to them.
It so transpires that I 'm a pampered brat. Everytime I had to wear a saree Amma or twerp would do it for me and I would not lift a finger and find faults much to their exasperation.
So, my winter shutdown has just begun and I'm going to practice wearing Sarees all day.
With special pointers from Soda of course.
Ill be that pro-saree draping person who will help out helpless teenagers.
And then Ill start stocking my cupboard with all those pretty cotton sarees.

2. My driving test was a disaster.
A kept wondering why he married me.
The driving school guy would shout at me of course.
And I stopped a lot of traffic in Sahakar Nagar.
A has been hiding our car, scared that I will crash it, but it is time.

3. I also want to write more.
4.Talk to strangers.



 

Appa hired an Innova as soon as our landline rang bringing the sad news.
I was in some way relieved that my Ajji no longer lived.
I had travelled to my grandparents' in April and was completely pained to see my grandmother suffering , she was already a mere shadow of the strong busy householder she had been.

As our vehicle travelled on the NH , many cars whizzed past us, traveling at speeds which made us believe that there was no time at all left in the world.

There was of course a time when time really stood still. It was the time when we took this train
http://indiarailinfo.com/train/map/all/route-yesvantpur-salem-passenger-56242-ypr-to-sa/9018/997/38
This train of course had a slightly different timetable then and we simply called it "Passenger".. The ticket was priced at 10 rupees if I remember right and it started from Bangalore City station at 7 30 in the morning.
Amma and Appa preferred this train to ferry us to Salem. There were many factors which counted in our parents choosing "Passenger ", it started at 7 30 am, so it helped Amma to yell till we woke up, finally threatening to abandon us here in Bangalore if we did not get up and brush our teeth.

Both twerp and I would brush our teeth , we had short hair then,so no trouble on that front and we would finally be bundled in the auto and deposited in the train by Appa.
Amma would have packed idlis and chutney pudi for breaksfast which we would devour as soon we were near Hosur.
Amma would use this time to catch up on her reading and twerp and I would read our Enid Blyton's passing the books between us.
We would later graduate to Harry Potter of course.
We would get sleepy again and would doze off in Amma's lap.
The train itself was a real circus,being unreserved, people would fight for seats and luggage space.
It mostly carried people from rural Tamil Nadu who worked in  Bangalore, mostly in the construction business
Twerp and I were usually the yuppies on the train and drew a lot of attention with our short hair and our fancy books.
Sometimes we found that we had noisy poultry for company and Amma would frown vowing to take the intercity train from the next time.

But it never happened.
We only took the passenger year after year till both of us became busy with our entrance exams and our grandparents also slowed down, needing extra care.

The best part about our Ajji was that she was totally unhurried, unlike Amma, all of Ajji's time was ours.
Most of the days were spent playing nonsense games with twerp , I also picked up the habit of reading the THE HINDU to the last T since there was nothing much to do.
We also played chess with  thatha , two against one.


Afternoons of course very hot to go play outside and thatha would have dozed off after the lunch  and Ajji was free, all her chores almost complete ,so the three of us would retreat to either of the bedrooms to spend the afternoons.
Ajji would tell us a lot of stories, she would tell us about her father, whom she loved a lot and spoke about the time he was a clerk at Maharaja's college in Mysore. She spoke about how they were chinese tradeswoman in Mysore with whom they bartered stuff, I wonder why I never asked her more about it.

I would be doing a lot of injustice , if I dint mention that my Ajji was passionate about Carnatic music.
To this day I wonder how she learnt it, I should ask Amma before I forget.
She had made an dedicated effort to teach all her children and grandchildren Carnatic music,  none of us were as good as she was  despite all her efforts.
Ajji always wore a classic pair of earrings with white stones, they were not diamonds but they would shine, she would tell me she had bought that after AIR paid her for one of the programmes she had performed for them.
Every person who walked in to mourn for her that day, would not leave without mentioning how she loved to sing.
She treated me and twerp as equals, she would tell us about how her brood of seven kids had dissapointed her in some ways, some days she would talk about them with pride.
When we retreated to the smaller of the rooms, where her blue netted cupboard was kept she would make us privy to it contents.
She would us show my Uncle's pictures, who had then left India to pursue his American dream, she would show his pictures in front of the NASA and his family in a American street all decked up for christmas.
She loved MSS and kept a picture of her , which one of my aunts had got clicked for her after a concert.
She kept the picture in the Complete works of Swami Vivekananda, she would tell us how she was grateful that one of the swamiji was kind enough to get her translated version in Kannada. Some afternoons she would immerse herself in these books and me and twerp would be  left to fend for ourselves.
As the afternoons progressed we would doze off, twerp and I would wake up to find that Ajji was already up making coffee and bristling up some tiffin.
In the evenings we would go to the Ramakrisna Ashram both of us catching clinging to our Ajji's hands and we would hurriedly crossed the road to make it to ashram on time.
We would never fuss, because the music was beautiful and I can still sing some of it.
We would meet Ajji's friends after the aarthi and she  would introduce us as  " Lakshmi ponnunga".( Lakshmi's Daughter's).
Ajji also taught twerp crochet and twerp remembers how she never lost patience even though she kept asking her to teach something again and again.

I did not cry at all but I broke down when I remembered how my Ajji had taken me to a dentist in Salem  to correct my teeth which were growing haphazardly then, I continued the treatment in Bangalore of course , but it was my Ajji who first noticed something was wrong.

The last time I met Ajji was just before I got engaged, sometime in late March.
She had difficulty then in remembering a lot of things then, but she was very lucid when I asked her to sing.  I recorded three songs one on Rayaru, two on thulasi and felt very stupid and very guilty for not having done it the countless times Ajji sang in the kitchen or when she suddenly break into a song to illustrate a point she was making.


I travelled to Salem again after my marriage , with my husband to meet my grandfather but the house felt completely empty.
My Ajji in her better days would have quizzed A about so many things.
She would have waddled around the house cooking a  "habbada aDige"
My grandfather would have complained the curd was sour.
But time is weird, it also begins to fly and bloody it makes our grandparents all frail and takes them away.







 

In memory of our ginger cat

December brings the promises of the Bangalore Book Festival and I decided to buy everything I have been wanting to read lately, from SL Bhyrappa’s   Parva to The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy at the festival, ,the latter’s reviews however made me break my resolve. Cats and Delhi are two things which I hold very dear and hence the book was procured from Flipkart.

I have just started the book and twenty pages into it has brought back a rush of memories of the cats which have lived for generations in the extended compound of the house we lived in earlier at Malleswaram.

Seshamma Ajji was the patron of all the cats that lived in Malleswaram eleventh cross.

Amma ,to this day swears she always remembers Seshamma Ajji having a minimum of two cats following her around the big brooding house ,of which she was the mistress.

As we lived just behind her house, the kittens from Seshamma Ajji’s brood would spill over to our house.

And my sister and I were delighted. Growing up in a strict household  ,were touching a dog they said would guarantee you a place in hell, cats were more acceptable, even though Amma regularly reminded us that if one hair from the ginger coloured felines ,they were mostly ginger ,since the mother cat who lived in Seshamma Ajji’s was one, were to fall down ,thanks to our shenanigans we would have to replace it in gold.

We found everything Amma said amusing and almost never paid any heed to what she said as we regaled the cats, feeding them milk from the milk pathre transferring the milk to theGinkai sippes.

The thenGinkai sippes littered around our house were the sole evidence of twerp and I having fed the cats before Amma came home from office.

Meeri of course was an exception,  Meeri managed to win Amma’s heart and hence gained entry into our household.

Meeri inspired many a poem in our house, one which went like this

--Are you alive

Are you dead

O’ meeri

It is four’o clock.

Even today, mum sis and I sing this  in our now sub-urban house much to my dad’s bemusement.

Meeri ‘s routine mostly comprised of lounging in Indira ajji’s terrace which was beautifully shaded by one of the trees planted on the road. Meeri slept such that it was bathed in optimal amount of warmth from the muted Bangalore sun.

At four o’ clock when Twerp and I returned from school Meeri would promptly appear to be scratched ,fed and let into the house.

It would find our red plastic chair,and curl into it ,till we changed and poured milk in one of the sippes.

Amma would come around 5 ish and make Meeri tumble out the red chair by tiliting it slightly and Meeri treated this with no disdain, it merely shook itself,licked itself all over and settled down below the chair.

Meeri had an interesting sibling a pepper and salt  cat, whom we dint name, it lived in our extended compound and drank milk from our sippes,when we fed Meeri, but rarely did it allow us to scratch it ,neither did it inspire affectionate songs from us like its sibling.

Meeri also had a strange habit of following Appa around as soon as he returned from office and mew the house down, Appa would admonish us, asking us why we had not fed the poor cat.

Appa tired after a long day,with no patience to cut open a new packet of milk ,would often pour coffee from his cup and Meeri would lap it up eagerly.

Meeri had a litter of its own soon after and this is when Meeri’s story takes a sad turn,for we could not manage a litter of four over excited kittens, Appa and Amma thought we could give them to CUPA for to be put up for adoption and Meeri neutered would be retuned to us.

CUPA soon after told us that all the kittens were adopted, though Meeri ran away scratching one of the people and setting itself free.

Amma broke the news gingery to us and I put down the newly released fourth Harry potter book to cry for the cat whom we had all loved so much and we could never forgive ourselves for having given her  away to CUPA.

It was after this unfortunate turn of things did the pepper and salt cat warmed up to us.

We were united in the loss of the ginger colored cat ,who had even won over Amma.