In 2019, before the pandemic had completely altered our world, I had signed up to edit an anthology of cat essays and cat fiction and, if I were lucky, I would get a cat-list or two. How and why I came to do it is the subject of my introductory essay — and so I won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice it to say the inspiration involved a human cat, a cat human (very different from the human cat), my niece and her cat, the magical fact of cat-stories and theories making a beeline to me, and our housekeeper Rupa Didi’s mysterious horoscope. If you think this is eccentric, well then you are on the right track — to us square humans, cats feel eccentric, but that’s only because they jive to their own beat without needing the validation that we humans constantly seek from our surroundings, by which I mean social media.
In Cat People, some of India’s most extraordinary writers have come together to talk about life and love and cats — and yes, hate and sorrow and joy and sex and cats too.
An extract from Sandip Roy’s remarkable short story follows, hoping to give you a glimpse into the bounties of this book:
The Trouble with a Cat by Sandip Roy
Soham could visualise the cat at the window in a Hallmark card sort of way. But he sighed and said, ‘I don’t like cats, just as I don’t like fish. There’s no reason. It just is.’ In the dark he could sense Derek smiling at him.
The next day Derek took him to Hamano Sushi. ‘But I don’t eat sushi,’ he protested as they walked to the restaurant.
‘You can eat teriyaki if you must,’ Derek said, pushing him along. It started with just trying a little bit of the California roll. Then he got more adventurous and reached for the Philadelphia roll with its tangy cream cheese and smoked salmon. Then in a giant leap of faith he tried raw fatty tuna. To his amazement he quite liked it.
‘It’s not fishy with that icky black oily skin like fish curries back home,’ he said in a tone of wonder. As a little boy he would pout over his dinner if there was fish. ‘Too fishy’ he’d whine, his nose crinkled up in distaste at a rohu curry. ‘Too oily’ he’d complain about the koi that had his aunts breathless in anticipation. ‘Too many bones.’ The litany of complaints was endless.
His mother was flabbergasted. How on earth had a fish fanatic like her produced a boy like Soham? Especially in a place like Bengal, where you could barely eat anything without being impaled on a fish bone. Innocuous green leafy vegetables would get jazzed up with leftover fish skin and bones. The dal might have a fish head swimming in it for special occasions.
As he smeared pungent green wasabi on his tuna roll, and garnished it with a shell-pink sliver of pickled ginger, Soham felt that in the middle of San Francisco he had miraculously regained his cultural heritage. He was no more a fish outcaste.
‘I might be able to actually sit down and eat fish with my mother if she ever comes to San Francisco,’ he told Derek dipping his tuna roll into the soy sauce.
Derek smiled at him and Soham knew that he was going to demand payment for breaking the fish curse.
‘Meow,’ said Derek.
‘At least let’s get a short haired one,’ Soham mumbled, trying to assert some modicum of control over the situation. ‘And it has to be black. To match the couch.’
The cat Derek chose was a short-haired jet-black kitten with golden saucer eyes.
‘Isn’t he cute?’ Derek stuck his finger out at the kitten.
Soham shrugged and quoted Ogden Nash.
The trouble with a kitten is that
It grows into a cat.
‘You always say that,’ Derek said, rolling his eyes. The little thing inched forward tentatively and sniffed at the finger.
‘Whatever,’ Soham said grumpily. But watching Derek’s face light up as he scratched the kitten’s chin, he knew he was going to give in. He would do anything to see his face light up like that. He’d never told him that of course. It seemed too flowery. He couldn’t imagine his father ever saying that to his mother.
They named the cat Dumbledore. Harry Potter was one of the few books they both managed to read and enjoy. Soham had bought the book for his niece before one of his annual trips to India. Derek had stayed up till two in the morning to finish the book before he left.
‘You have to read it,’ he told him, tucking the book into his carry-on bag.
Soham had been dismissive. His choice of fiction tended to be more from the Booker prize shortlist. But he’d tried Harry Potter on the airplane on the long journey. ‘You were right,’ he’d said when he called from India. ‘It was a great read.’ He could tell Derek had been pleased. It made Soham smile but he never told Derek that.
For the first few weeks he kept his distance from the cat. The cat, he made clear, was Derek’s. He needed to get it cat food, change its litter and make sure it got its shots. Soham felt that by tolerating it in the house he had come more than half-way. In the morning, if he was up before Derek, it would come padding up to its food bowl and mew piteously. Soham would turn on his electric toothbrush and try to block out its accusing little cries. Once it coughed up a little hair ball. Soham couldn’t bring himself to touch it.
‘It grosses me out,’ he complained later.
‘What would you do if we had a baby and it soiled its diapers?’ Derek demanded.
About to protest, Soham stopped himself. It was just about a cat he told himself, let’s not make it a training course for having a baby.
The next day when he woke up the cat was sitting on the comforter at the foot of the bed. It looked at him and stretched. He wagged his finger at it. ‘Not on the bed,’ he said. It swatted his hand with its little paw. As he stood in the bathroom, his eyes still half-closed, brushing his teeth, it came up and offered its head to be scratched.
One day when he came home from the gym on a warm Sunday afternoon, he found Derek napping in bed. The open copy of Time magazine lay on the pillow next to him. The sunflowers he had picked up at the farmers market were in a vase above the bed. And Dumbledore sat on his chest, curled into a little ball, purring gently. He stood at the door watching the little tableau.
A lock of his chestnut hair trailed across Derek’s face. The warm buttery sunshine streamed across the bed and his belly. The cat looked at him out of those round golden eyes and twitched its tail. He never forgot that moment.
That was the moment he made peace with Dumbledore.
Cat People is published by Simon & Schuster India.
Buy it here.