Cats!!!!!!!!

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I have no issues with cat, as long as it does not distribute its hair on the sofa set. In fact, its various sounds apart from usual meows amuse me.

Since we are in the ground floor, we have to keep the lower windows closed in this ever inquisitive neighbourhood. If I pack my suitcase for a solo trip, I have to answer everyone right from my neighbours to all folks who claim to know me before I was born; till I board the moffusil bus in peaceful anonymity. Painful most of the times, yet dependable in times of need.

Things I have to learn

1. Purify my internal system weekly without mom’s knowledge. The moment she learns, then my fasting plans would be ruined. She would elaborately prepare 3 chutneys for a simple idly, and offer this and that on a platter. She would then report that I don’t drink water to everyone who comes home and to all relatives over phone.
2. Not to shriek on seeing a flying or an equally scared cockroach. (In ground floor, all creatures feel free at home, even snakes)
   
3. Not to shriek and wake up if a cat jumps on to your bed through the open windows in the middle of the night.
   

I have learnt to tolerate and ignore the buzzing wasps and humming honeybees just 1-2 cms from my body every day. (The perils of sitting close to a mango tree in ground floor) I had great compunctions to get mom to destroy the wasp nest. (Out came 5 big green worms!) I was surprised to how these worms metamorphose to wasps due to tiny doses of wasp venom.

Coming back to cat. God knows where and all, it had walked before choosing to jump on my bed and spoil the cleanliness with its soiled paws. Once I made the bed in the morning, I would not let my bro sit on it, or my sister place her dirty feet on it, a fact that has caused so many mini fights in the past, and now, there is nothing I can do with a cat that has already taken flight.

Summer rains. And it just does not simply rain. The winds are fierce and howling, the windows rapidly close and open in a crash. The fallen dry leaves are lifted up above and then rolling thunder-lightening and it pours. In this rain, there was this mother cat with a kitten in its jaws. It was trying to jump up to the window. (Nearly 9 feet). It fell twice, still could not make it to the window. God knows where it kept its kitten that rainy night.

There is another big cat with a thick black mustache and its nearly white counterpart. Their favourite place is beneath the tamarind trees. Sometimes the mustached cat and I play a StatueNoBlinkingEyes game. And every time, the cat wins after we stare hard at each other for some time.

Garuda purana mentions that “A person who shouts and scolds others without proper reason will be born as a cat.” And there are stories that a cat has 9 lives. Tom and Jerry, funny cat mimicries. Cats! The menace!