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.
