Pros and Cons of Cat & Dog Management: Life Lessons Learnt from Being Owned by 3 Cats and 3 Dogs
In 2010 I lost my mother and generally got lost. A few months later, by the beginning of 2011, I lost my father and became an orphan. I am – I mean, I was – an only child. So I’m not kidding or trying to be precious when I say orphan. For an only child, no matter how old, losing your parents at one stretch is akin to becoming what an orphan is when it is ‘found’ in this world. Lost, abandoned, godforsaken and well, alone. At least that’s how one feels. I won’t delve into what happened the few months after but suffice it to say that it took me more than a few months – actually a few years- to really work out what an orphan actually is and what being an adult orphan feels like. (And adult orphans like me are actually up for adoption in Japan, so there!) The closest I’ve come to knowing the feeling of being orphaned is when i started hanging out with the colony strays in both Bombay and Delhi where I live and work. One needs a lot more than work and being home alone to deal with the emotional chaos and simultaneous vacuum that comes to the surface when realisation dawns that one is truly, actually and fully alone- no matter how brief this state of affairs may eventually turn out to be. And no, finding solace or reprieve or comfort in friends, extended family, or relatives, or even busying oneself in work and the lives (and drama) of others, is never enough. Being alone isn’t curable. It’s not a cold or the flu that a bit of hot tea and society will diminish and erase away like a windscreen wiper.
**
Soon after my mother passed away, I started having my morning cup of coffee outdoors in the colony parking where a jet black stray who went by the name ‘Sumi’ would bolt about between the car tyres and bumpers. My father was still around then and being a late riser I would awake just as he was leaving for work and ask the man friday to make my coffee the way I like it – strong, home brewed, rich, with a dollop of fresh cream and two spoons of jaggery- and taking the mug, I’d exit our apartment with my father as he left for work. As his car drove away from the parking lot, I’d go the the bare space left behind, park my mug on a wall that served as a boundary for the parking and a small patch of dry earth and soil that was meant to be a garden flanking the colony boundary wall but actually was on the verge of becoming its unofficial garbage dump. Hoping to improve on it’s sorry condition, my father and I had planted some saplings for ficus and tulsi and quietly, some part of my mothers ashes along with their roots. The dog would come bounding out of this patch with was surrounded in brown thickets of bracken or small bushes of a local berry found in north India called ber. As I climbed up to sit alongside my coffee mug, she would bolt left, right and centre shaking off her boundless energy using me as the central point of gravity or fulcrum . One minute she would be concentrating on a deep scratching I’d be giving to her dulap, but the next she would fly away on the coattails of a passing car bouncing back in time for me to complete the scratching. Upon further inquiry about my hyperactive morning coffee mate, I found out that this was the reason she was called ‘Sumi’ or Schumi. What, rather who, the store keepers and security meant was Schumacher. It all made perfect sense. But this winter morning bliss lasted only a few weeks. Work beckoned me back to Bombay and to leave my father in his apartment all alone with his man Friday while I tried to resume normal life back in the bay city that was my work base. A few weeks into work in Bombay, I got a call from my father to say he had a bad cold and temperature. Knowing his proclivity for over work at the risk of neglecting himself, I rushed back. Schumi was right there at the base of our building staircase when I returned and we got to share our few morning cuppas for a few weeks until my father got hospitalised a few times and finally, never came back home. Oscar Wilde wisely once said, “ To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness.”
The month that followed threw my biological clock out of whack. I would awake at dusk having slept at the crack of light, at dawn and have to lie down a few hours into the morning because I would feel too weak to stand. There was no question of going down to sit in the empty parking lot with Schumi to cheer me up because the man-friday skulked away soon after whom he considered his real master, gone – he was from Uttarakhand, and would never consider taking orders, leave alone work for a woman. With our apartment empty and my parents gone I saw no reason to wake up in the morning at all. Instead I engaged in all my morning activities by night. I found comfort in having my breakfast in the dark of the dying, late afternoon light. In getting dressed and showering after it was well and truly dark. In starting my day when the rest of the neighbourhood was shutting down, switching their lights off and going to bed. Something about this upside down cycle made perfect sense to me even though it made no sense to people around me. At this time I started my day aka night with going down at dusk to give Schumi her milk and bread in the same parking lot. Unquestioning and sweet, she would wag her tail while delicately and gently lap up the milk and then chow down the soaked bread pieces hungrily. This ritual that soon became our daily ritual would comfort me and she adapted to it without a doubt. As soon as I’d open the door to our apartment, I could hear frenetic tail wagging thwacking against some nearby parked car or the building wall. I don’t know what I’d have done that month had it not been for Schumi to my rescue. My evening-morning coffee companion whose frisky demeanour would make my day which I was living out by night. Every time I’d open the door, she’d be right there, warm and loving, to greet me and show me the love that had gone missing like a lightening bolt out of my life. We met when she was in the early stage of her life and I in the early evening. Schumi and I. She, bursting with boundless energy to be christened a formula one driver’s name by the motorsports savvy store keepers in the colony, and me – about to hit my forties, jaded and fading, unable to keep up my running habit, or even manage my day normally, staying up like an owl by night and hibernating like a bear during the day. Months passed and I barely got out of bed. I would find Schumi dashing around in the evening, her black fur catching the headlights of a passing car, or a car about to park and take up the corner of the store she had appropriated as her bed. Our evening exchange would be silent broken by the sounds of her noisily lapping up the milk. She was never in any sort of hurry . A beige and white coloured mutt would following her around but so terrorised by her he was that he would let her drink up the second bowl of milk if I carried one for him.
Six months into this I was summoned back to work and had to shut shop and leave Delhi. I had gained a considerable amount of weight and slowly disintegrated in the months after my father’s death. barring the first few weeks when a frenetic level of energy overtook me and made me run around and organise papers and shut down what used to be his life – personal and work wise – he was a scientist and still working at 73 when he died – a month or so after his death, I completely caved in to some kind of preternatural inertia that seemed impossible to resist. The only thing I could do those days was lie supine in bed and get up to feed Schumi and write all night until dawn. And then I would eat – binge eat, over eat and eat until I felt I would burst. It broke my heart to think that I wouldn’t have Schumi to share my evening wake up ritual with as much as it would be hard to be back to work and get up in the mornings. I wondered out loud to my friends if I would be able to wake up at all, or if my body felt ready to heave itself out of bed. But there was little choice as my own funds were running low, so I locked up, informed the colony co operative store to watch out for her and left for Bombay . A neighbour from a different apartment block across the road regularly fed Schumi her daytime meal. I didn’t know then that I’d be back later – not for, or with, Schumi but with another creature that mysteriously and accidentally entered my life, Garfield – a five kilo weighing, orange and white feline tabby ! My real mistress and keeper in my new avatar as adult orphan.
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2011
It was the end of my annus horribilis. A year that uprooted me and upended me back in Bombay with no family, no real home, or workplace. It wasn’t as though these weren’t there – I did have a cosy little 650 sq ft to call my own in Bombay and I did have friends and colleagues who cared but trying telling someone who has lost the two people they are closest to in the whole wide world that they can be replaced by all the other things they have in their lives ! It was all there but in the absence of the two people who were my family, who were not just my parents, but my best friends, my confidantes, my siblings, my everything, like a typical and textbook co-dependency on both sides, my parents and I were all these to each other and more. A consolation, pointed out by a few, was that I didn’t die, leaving them who wouldn’t have been able to bear that, nor is such a thing in the natural order of life and its cycles and mysteries. There is no arithmetic in loss and grief, I understood then. What had to be borne and endured would take its own time. It wouldn’t matter in the larger scheme of things whether it woud take me two months or ten years to heal. To heal inside out is what was needed and I couldn’t put a time, place or number on it. Only survive, tide it through. One cannot move on until one heals, moving on without doing the work of healing is to damage oneself and others in the long run. One can’t fake it ’til one makes it in this area – the price one pays in the currency of relationships and work is just too extreme. But I didn’t know this back then and staggered like a broken, well fed beast towards my Bethelem, or so I thought. My habits and routine took the hardest hit. I had taken to sleeping through the day to awake by evening, have breakfast and sit down at the small desk built into the the cupboard in the bedroom of my flat in Bombay. I would start the writing ritual with some reading to distract myself and start writing what I thought was a record of sorts of my family history and life. I didn’t even know why I was writing what I was and where it would go. But it was all I could do mentally, emotionally and physically. Anything else seemed meaningless and of no use to me or the people who I called my close colleagues. I guess I had nothing to bring to the table – nothing left to give because in my mind I was grappling with the fear and the many levels of emotions that come to the surface when faced with sudden, irreparable loss of family in a short time span. To my mind, grief was grief and pain was pain. There was just no other way of looking at it but to experience it, to let it take o2ver, suffer it and see where it took one along. If I was to become lost to everything , even to myself, so be it, I thought. And if I had to find myself all over again and rebuild myself anew, that wouldn’t be a bad way to begin again. In the end, I wore myself out living on my own in that apartment until a dear colleague brought over his cat. He had been given her by a warrior queen who goes by the name Quiien Banerji and is a champion for rescuing and adopting strays in Mumbai. If anyone comes in her way, she pounces on them like a tigress fighting for her cubs. Saying no to Quiien is not an option. So my colleague and friend found this rescue cat in his apartment one evening when he returned home from work. His phone had rung when he entered his apartment and Quiien informed him that the cat in question, Garfield, had been deposited in his two bedroom apartment in Khar and he would now have to be this cat’s caretaker and manager. A list was shared; he was to keep the litter bin filled with fresh litter sand of a particular brand (she was used to it), give her her favourite brand of dry food in a bowl that must be full at all times (her eating habits were random and erratic) and she should be left at home free to snooze and space out in the apartment -he should be prepared to find her at any chosen spot when he returned (for instance, his liquor cabinet that mysteriously had a square shaped cut in hole on the top -maybe meant for a top-light effect that such furniture have, and Garfield could be found curled up on a ball right on top of the square shaped hole, her tail flicking between the dusty and dark looking bottles of Vermouth and Campari like a temperamental pendulum swinging to a stripe of its own). If my friend was overwhelmed or reluctant, we didn’t get to know, just that he had to bear his fait accompli and carry on leaving and entering his apartment at erratic hours as he always did knowing that a cat was following its own routine inside, irreverently and irregardless of his timings. (Another instance, he returned home exhausted after a long day shooting an ad film only to find Garfield ‘feeling precious’ which in feline, especially the alpha variety which Garfield was and still is, manners meant playful, pouting and sulky at the same time. Like her godmother Quiien, there was no saying no to that! Pretty soon his house was a meeting point for all his friends and acquaintances -like me- who pretended to meet him after hours but were actually angling for his cat.
When I returned to Bombay that winter, leaving my evenings with Schumi behind, my friend, sensing my loneliness and depression, offered to leave Garfield with me when he went off on work trips. Some sort strange loyalty to Schumi, and my own depression, made me refuse and promise instead that I would drop in every few days to check on her. He had help who would get to his apartment during the day at her time suitable to her (she worked elsewhere) and cook a meal, tend to Garfield and have a bath, and leave in the span of an hour. On one such hot summer month when my friend was away for a considerably long period of time, I had been away in Kolkata for a few weeks on a writing workshop. The night I returned, on a whim I decided to drop in and check on the cat and see if she needed anything. When I let myself into the flat, it was pitch dark and I couldn’t spot her anywhere. Using my phone as a flashlight I looked all over and finally saw her on the edge of a bed covered in a dark bedcover, facing the window that overlooked the train tracks looking over into the lights at the train platform outside. As she has selective hearing, Garfield, didn’t respond to me at all but the moment she saw me she jumped up and with her claws hung on to the front of my dress. We walked back to the living room and I looked around for her litter bin which was overflowing with her litter and spilt sand. She must have kicked her bowl of water over and the mug was lying upside down on the floor which meant she was drinking water from the toilet bowl. This cat has had enough of being alone, I thought. And in same instant I realised I had had enough of being alone as well. I called my friend who was in Dubai on a family vacation and informed him that I would take Garfield home. As he had always offered her to me to keep me company, he was more than happy that the two of us would have each other for company. I called a cab and got her litter bin, her toys and her food bag into the front seat with Garfield clinging to the front of my dress, hanging on. We rode the short ride to my place from his in perfect silence, she, sitting quietly and attentively on my lap, knowing fully well that she was going home -to her home. When we got into my apartment, I placed all her things as I knew she’d like it – her litter bin in the study under the table, her food and water bowl near the kitchen door and her toys in the bedroom and her scratch pad in between the bathroom and the bedroom. We sat down on the ottoman -the only piece of really comfortable furniture I have ever owned – Garfield like a person, on her haunches with the front paws up, as though they were her hands, like a human. As we at side by side, she leaned in on me, rolled her head over my shoulder as if to say, ‘we’re alright, aren’t we?’ That night I slept more soundly than I had in the two years since my father and mother passed away.
Garfield and I have since crossed the human-animal barrier, inhaling and exhaling each other’s fur/hair and other scratches and bites and licks to establish a kind of intense inter-species love that I hadn’t believed was possible for me. I may be single but I don’t live alone – I wake up to Garfield pushing and prodding me awake so that I can get out to get some morning sun with her, she snoozes at my study table when I write and curls up into a ball on my lap below the laptop when I write in bed, like just now. We have cat fights and human bickering, I often shove syringe full of Digene and Nutralin-B down her open mouth as she bawls and often licks my forehead and neck when I have a migraine, or gives me one of her legendary single stroke scratches when I moan and whine. Our monologues on the telephone as well established as a standard-set routine by now and when I’m away on film for long, one of my helpers in either city will call me up so Garfield can give me a piece of her mind. She is with me when I am alone and feeling low just as she is with me when I travel between cities by road – she sits patiently in her cage in the back seat or on my lap with her back wedged against the steering, her curled up frame totally tight and twisted into a knot, her eyes occasionally looking up at me as if to assure me that she has my back as I drive her yet again to another city, another life. Our bond is probably the strongest bond we each have with another living, breathing creature on this earth. On days and nights when I am away on work and she is not next to me, I feel the painful longing for her grow by the minute just as I feel her warm furry presence somewhere on my lap or my back as if she is right there. The closest I have come to missing anyone this much is my mother, and my father. The help tell me that she too, after a few days of my being away, is intolerably upset, inconsolable. She knows my moods, my flaws, what makes happy and high and even my yoga routine. At times when we’ve been apart for weeks and I return, she isn’t hesitant to jump in the shower for a few more seconds of tubing against my legs and criss crossing my feet in eight formations to tell me she doesn’t mind the water. If this is love, human or animal, this is it and Ive found it and have it with this child who is not just a cat but a mother figure who gushes and fawns over me like both a demanding child and a doting mother. Over time my friends have called Garfield or now as she is called, Gachu, a Gujarati ben, so canny and sharp and specific is she about meeting her demands; a Maharashtrian bai – she is that exacting and accurate about everything from the weather to the specific temperature of the room she will sleep in the afternoon. She has a love for newspapers -especially unread ones on which she spends a considerable amount of time snoozing and turning from side to side, she loves watching TV especially the news at nine and has uncannily adopted both the family bean bag and round cane chair (called ‘dish antenna’ in the house) as her roosting spots.
***
With Garfield in the house my life in Bombay took on a more domestic flavour. Cats have a routine, cats have timings and they are loathe to change it. I can set the alarm by Garfield’s body clock! When I was in college I used to leave notes for my disciplined, early riser father to wake me up early in the morning at an appointed time so that I could walk, run, study or whatever. I never set an alarm. I daresay, I have never set an alarm since Garfield entered my life and my bedroom. She is up at 530 in the morning every morning. Even if I don’t wake up, Garfield will come to my ear and eye and face and give me a litany of cat cries to let me know the sun is going to be up soon! By 8 am she needs to be let out to sun her back and generally smell and sniff the plants in the balcony or terrace. By 10 am she is back inside the house , her coat toasty and warm to drink some water and cool down on the stone slabs on the floor. By noon she has had her morning snack and visited her bowl to eat her cat food twice and resting in the couch in the study. After cooling off there for two hours and as I have lunch, Garfield is back on the terrace sunning herself in the hard midday sun. She moves between the hottest spot on the terrace and the coolest one- the shade in the corner of the rattan chairs, alternating between the two until 4 pm or so when she comes back in to eat something and cool down again. If she finds any dogs, she just bypasses them -they are passed out anyway- and goes back into the study to snooze on the other smaller couch this time. Between 6 and 8 when I’m out walking the dogs or just out walking, she will snooze on top of the dining table facing the balcony or the tv which is left on for her so she can absorb the news and channel it back, less toxic, to me. She will continue to sit on the dining table while I have my dinner or watch the news and get back into the study to sit next to my computer as I write or read. When I go away to make the bed, she beats me to it and can be found waiting there – thereby earning the title, ‘disruptor to the bed-making process’ – in layman’s terms this means that my spreading the bed sheet and attempting to make the bed is seen by her as a playtime activity and she will grab, scratch or snatch anything part of the bed making, be it my hands, face, bedsheets, pillow or cushion, to prevent the bed from being made properly until I physically move her over to the trunk next to it so I can complete tucking in the corners in a split second as she jumps right back in.
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A few years after Garfield entered my life -Garfield who is now called Gachu, Garf, Garfiola, Lady Garfield, Pappy, Guzman, Gazpesh, Gazpacho Green… I’m sure she has the equivalent of these for me in her cat-language (!) – a crowd of other cats entered my life. Actually, I forced myself upon and into the lives of the neighbourhood cats in the colony in Bombay once Garfield was mine and I hers. Felix was my first. A local tommy – Felix was, what in West Bengal, is called a ‘hulo beraal’. Classy and classic tommy – with bulging and high cheekbones, and a sharp angled jaw bone to demarcate him as fully grown male feline alpha! He was a white cat with a pirate patch on the left eye and an ikat-style pattern on his back that resembled a large mole in ikat, and a black tail with no markings. The rest of him was white as the driven snow. The pirate patch gave him both a rough look and a comic one. One some days, when exceptionally male, or morose, Felix with his cries and wicked pirate patch could be a funny sight. Garfield never took him seriously for that. During my long stays in Bombay, Felix and I became walking mates and more. We would sit in the parking lot of my building as I fed him the same brand of cat food Garfield loved and the hulo would chow it down and sit around for me to scratch his chin and ears. Any other cat trying to pass by or make their way in to sample Garfield’s organic flavour would be bashed but and thrashed around like an ISIS flag, to be bloodied and thrown along with the body of the victim, down the gutter that runs along the back of my apartment. The area is a cat-traffic light – in peak hours there’s constant stream of cats passing through possibly because of the odd overlapping locations at the back of the block – the telegraph office ranked by the old post office and its vast, old fashioned quarters surrounded by old tall trees, a large empty plot that belongs to the telegraph office but has been cleaned up and emptied of its tall grasses and lone, large tree for possibly future commercial building, and the long ‘nallah’ that separates, like a clean and neat dividing line, all the three from each other and from our building block. Between 2014 and 2017, Felix was the reigning monarch of the cat-traffic light along the nallah at the back. No other feline dared trespass ! As Felix grew older, he started wandering further and further away until his visits to his fiefdom reduced to once or twice a week or even less until he stopped coming altogether. He did make a surprise appearance or two after being AWOL for months on end but eventually he stopped. Prema, my help in Bombay, and I finally surmised that he had passed on to another dimension. (As we both refuse to accept that cats can d** hence the passing on to another stratum above and beyond makes more sense to us being cat worshippers and cat mother children.)
Next to my apartment in Bombay is a quaint, square patch of park, a popular haunt for walkers, strollers, lovers, aloof and alien college going young adults who care not a fuck, and snarky school kids playing pranks. Not unnaturally it is called ‘Muktanand Peace Park’. On my evening walk there I spotted a white cat with black markings on her tail and head one evening. On my next walk I carried along some of Garfield’s food and sure enough the white cat had all of it and followed me back home. There she remained much to the shock and horror of my neighbours and the Nepali family who have appropriated a tiny shed at the back of the building as the Nepal headquarters of Santa Cruz, West. This cat, we started calling her Mummy, would have litter after litter relentlessly and judging by her looks, she was a progeny and partner at some point to Felix. Her first litter, that came right after she moved in to the building, were indeed Felix’s progeny. Each of the four had pirate patches and other ikat markings here and there. One turned out to be a calico too. She carried them all one by one across from the park and to the horror of the Nepali squatters in our building, deposited them one by one in front of their shed that accommodated a million Nepalis also multiplying and growing in number like Mummy;s litter by the day. Needless to say there was war. The head of the Nepali family, Kallu, our watchman, and the head of the cat one, Mummy, engaged in cat fights day and night. The matter was finally resolved when I shifted the kittens and the lot in monsoon below the staircase though most of them died. The calico was named Cartier and its black and white sibling, Jalebi. (For some reason when they lay in a bundle together they reminded me of the name of the music band I had never heard called Jalebi Cartel.) When Cartier died in a bout of rain that made water about five feet high stand in the building for nearly twelve hours, its more robust and alert sibling, Jalebi survived and showed up the next day as we cleaned the stinking staircase by trotting down from the top floor -the terrace where he’d waited quietly for the rain and flooding to abate. After giving him a rub down – he was spotlessly clean though – I decided to call him Toxic. He was a loud, noisy cat with a pirate patch on one eye, like his dad and a black tail. The rest of him was white. I though he is the best detox for a toxic city and he himself had to turn toxic to save himself – something I haven’t been able to explain till date to anyone who asks why his name is Toxic. Suffice it to say that his love is Toxic. Its toxic love of a radioactive quality for these nuclear and divided times and that’s why Toxic is a survivor and our love grows ever so toxic, helping us survive year after year. (Yes, I love his THAT much.) A day later, Mummy was back. She had spent the day hiding on a boundary wall or ledge as the water level rose and hit five feet. So now Mummy and Toxic were around, the rest of the brood was gone. The Nepalis weren’t too unhappy about this though over time, their affection and love for Toxic and his new brood has grown leaps and bounds.
From Toxic and Mummy came a new litter. Four more cats, of whom two got run over by cars backing out. These episodes occurred when I was away in Delhi with their food and litter arranged in my house but the kittens refused to stay indoors alone in the flat when the help wasn’t around. Eventually, what remained of that lot, the Toxic x Mummy variants post Felix era, were High Key and Low Key, both black and white kittens generously dabbed in black and white like Dalmatians are. When they played it was hard to tell if they were two or three or four cats – it was a real black and white Dalmatian world on a canvas that would be my old orange Ottoman . Low Key was more black than white and high key was more white than black. Simple. Sadly, High Key got run over my a passing cab, again when. was away on a job and out of town. Having said that, around that time I was on the receiving end of daily calls from my ground floor neighbors threatening to pack the cats and kittens into taxis and send them off for good as they didn’t like the cats entering their homes.
One day when I was in Delhi I got a call from my help in Bombay informing me that Mummy and High Key had followed the machhi-wallah who was in building selling fish door to door, out of the block and into the main road, never to be seen again. The help claimed that she arrived the next morning and was told this by the downstairs neighbour for whom she also worked (though she told me sotto voce that she doubted the story). She called their names and searched for them in vain. No Mummy or High Key ever showed up! So, son of Felix, who begat Toxic, is now the reigning monarch of the nallah and Telegraph office and its land in Santa Cruz. Toxic is now five and a fat, well fed Sumo with the Ikat on his back and his pirate patch growing healthily and well. Whenever I am back home in my apartment in Bombay, he makes sure to come and spend the night and use all that nooks and corner that Garfield likes as his own private scratch- pad. In fact, as of now, the whole apartment is his private scratch pad. As most males in the human and feline species, he is a constant moaner and whiner, as though the very burden of keeping our corner of Santa Crux detoxed and Toxin-free, all the while ensuring that his brood grows across the road in Muktanand Peace Park take the very life blood out of him. For this honour, he demands to be fed every time he purposefully climbs the steps and comes up to my living room to eat his meal on the hour and then roll about on a small rug meant for him on the small balcony window from where, with telescopic vision he narrows and widens his eyes into slits and saucers looking out for enemies and trespassing cats at the cat-traffic signal. On some days, a big brown and black cat arrives and perches on the big tree next to the Telegraph office building and sits there quietly in a breadbox position, observing and relaxing as Toxic stays in all night to watch this one carefully, lest he jump over the boundary wall and into his private turf. The Nepalis and their lot have shrunk in number and given up their fight with Toxic who is greeted there with whistles and claps and often sits on their makeshift outdoor dressing table outdoors admiring himself in the mirror in broad daylight in full view of its owners who often have to jostle and fight to see their own selves by shifting Toxic this way and that .
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Towards the end of 2017, I kissed Toxic and told him to take care of the place now that he was the sole manager and chief operating cat in the hood in my corner of Santa Cruz. I packed Garfield’s things and we drove down in my car as usual to Udaipur for a stopover and finally to Delhi. In Udaipur, Garfield is much revered and respected. The head of the household, an offshoot of the royal family of Udaipur, would herself come all way to our room to meet and greet Garfield when she entered the portals of their boutique hotel property facing Pichola lake. They own a beautiful German Shepard called Barfi who was preceded by another German Shepard before him. All right of way, passage among other freedoms are extended to Garfield including, often, the best room in their quaint and gorgeous property in its pristine creams and rugged earthy chevron patterns. Over the years, the Kankarwa home and family have become second home and extended family to me and Garfield. Arriving in Delhi, I decided to settle’ Garfield in Delhi for a while so she could enjoy the weather, the change of season from September – October heat into Delhi winter.I am fortunate to have a lovely terrace that overlooks a city forest and Garfield can be found on the roof of the terrace lounging across the parapet that belongs to my upstairs neighbour, legs spread wide akimbo to soak in as much sun as possible. Over the course of last year, Garfield was befriended and joined by a grey and white cat that looked suspiciously like the infamous Larry, the 10 Downing Street cat – its chief mouser and on its payrolls to catch mice on the property. So we called him 10Downing. Every morning 10Downing would walk gingerly across a long branch jutting out from one corner of the forest and over the boundary wall and towards our balcony grill and make a thick polo sound as he slid in from between the grill lines into the balcony wall falling with a thud. He would maintain a respectful distance from Garfield and only eat when he was offered his own share of food. When Garfield was put on a special urinary diet and her food would be not as smelly and exciting to a wild cat like 10Downing, I started getting for him a special brand of organic cat food that mixes fruit flavours like orange and pomegranate into its fish and chicken flavours. 10 Downing has grown fat loving this brand of food and though he hunts and kills with gay abandon on the other side of the wall where his hunting ground and our city forest lie, he at one point grew too fat to enter the balcony as he couldn’t slide in between the grill lines. And for now 10 Downing has made our balcony his gourmet pit stop for Sunday brunch or a rare special meal when the weather is great and he fit in through the slits in the grill. When he is away foraging for real food on the main road where a street momo seller called Sudharshan makes special chicken dumplings for him and the other cats that lounge there, a hectic orange tabby with deep and bright orange streaks shows up to attempt an attack on Garfield when she is catnapping on the terrace. This blur of orange is called Kaching! – that’s right, exclamation mark and all! – Kaching! is aggressive, extra territorial and super fit. She dislikes Garfield intensely for her royal credentials and believes she deserves a bit of street sledgehammering once in a while. When Lady Garfield is under attack, a deep and endless yowl emanates from the terrace. At such a point, I drop everything to rush and rescue her though one of my new ‘duggies’ – the twins, Boomerang and Babugosha – beat me to it and shoo Kaching! away whilst fiercely protecting Garfield keeping their long sloping backs to her. Garfield usually pees and vomits after such a stressful episode but all of them calm down once realisation dawns that they all performed their prime tasks wonderfully which is, protecting each other together. As Dr Shekhawat, a dog trainer I met a few months ago informed me, family talk along with family time is most crucial in teaching the pets about being a unit, a family. The twins entered my home and my life fully in early 2018 when along with Bella, I had started feeding them. Schumi in the meantime has been adopted by the store owners at the colony store and fed and looked after by not only them but a flurry of other pet loving residents of whom there are many. There is even a pet forum what’s app group run by a fiercely vocal group of residents who post and point out any abnormalities or irregularities towards the strays – rescues or adopted or roaming – in the colony. (This is another reason why I love Delhi. The vocal lot are truly vocal in an aggressive way, enough to shut and clamp even the most vicious and vitriolic of animal haters.)
By the time I arrived with Garfield in Delhi for a long stay, it was winter 2017. I saw two dogs – appearing to be large and grown but actually healthy and wholesome adulting pups – race up and down the stairs. They were being lovingly fed by one of the neighbours but they were clearly still ravenously hungry. I started feeding them that winter and what was initially a milk and bread affair has become a lunch time meal of rice, chicken, vegetables, garlic and haldi cooked in a pressure cooker and fed to the twins who are nearly three years old now and to Bella. In the evening, before their evening walk, they have a bowl of milk with some bread in it. The boys being twins, love to hate each other. When there is love it is peaceable, silent and means cohabitation and co existence in pure love, light and peace. But one wrong move can set the other off and a vicious fight follows that leads to — nothing. Garfield has gotten so bored of their drill that she grooms herself quietly in one corner until its all over. Bella doesn’t care in her new nook where she sunbathes in her dog bed or lies squatting under the silencer of a parked car where the fight seems like a distant and passing storm. But for these two – Boomer and Babugosha – those few minutes are defining moments of their territory and life. When Boomer is on top, Babugosha learns a few gruelling life lessons. When Boomer is on top, he makes sure he stays that way for the rest of that week. They are funny but competitive and nothing is about horsing around or having fun except clamouring for my attention. For all the rest, including food – their eyes and instincts are razor sharp to protect their own rights and turf. Though they are let out at night to roam and claim the colony as their hunting and battle ground, during the day they enter my house by 830 am and lie around sleeping and eating and shifting themselves on all fours from one part of the living room to the dining room without making too much effort. By 8 pm they are taken for their walk which is another exercise in unfair trade, survival, competition and threat perception and enemy attack. And once they are exhausted and tired, they relax into the night by creeping out into the back lane and sleeping there as well just as they sleep all day. The routine is the same in winter except they stay in at night when its cold and roam by day.
Being taken care of by my growing family has allowed me to slowly make a secret garden that is full of plants I love in the forest gazing part of my house. And it is a daily privilege that Boomer, Babugosha, Garfield and 10Downing and the offensive Kaching! get to enjoy it. Makes it tougher to leave home every passing day for love is a thick, hard glue that sticks. And I miss my absent parents and their love for this corner of south Delhi while feeling grateful that they transferred this love for the abundance of green, of nature and animals to me for keeps. I sometimes wonder if they knew beforehand that all of these will take care of me. That I can spread this love to my corner in Bombay and make it my own too, just like I have my own nook in Delhi.
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Tending to Garfield, Schumi, Bella and later 10Downing, Boomerang, Babugosha in Delhi and Toxic in Bombay helped me grow my own garden – a more open, visible one outside and a secret one inside.
