Gunja Roy has her fingers crossed. “If I do well in Class V, my family has promised me a Labrador,” she smiles, still three years away from that. But hers is a cat family, and four felines are always at her heels. How will the sworn enemies — cats and dogs — get along?

“When the dog comes, he’ll be the baby, and the cats will be the bosses. The dog won’t dominate,” she says. “Besides, my cats are quite like dogs themselves. I had heard cats don’t play fetch like dogs, but I’ve taught them that and they love playing with me.”

The oldest cats in this BL Block house, aged a year-and-a-half, are Iring and Biring. “There was a third one in that litter — Tiring — but he left,” says the leader of the pack who had herself earned the moniker Foring.

Shona Kuchi stops Gunja from speaking.

Then came Shona Buchi, who is a half-aunt of Iring, Biring and then Shona Kuchi, who came through the vet’s reference. “The house Kuchi was born in, in Bansdroni, was overflowing with cats, so our vet asked if we could take her in.”

Gunja may only be seven, but she’s responsible enough to have the cats’ vaccination cards in her own name. “Even the cats consider me as one of their own. When they started marking their territory, they peed on me, clearing any doubts,” she makes a face but laughs anyway.

The girl has countless stories about the pets. How they run away with her pencils as she studies or plop themselves on her books, how Biring leaps like Spider-Man on their mosquito net, and how Iring once stole a slice of pabda fish. “The fish was indeed meant for them but was uncooked,” Gunja says. “My grandpa explained that if I was hungry and rasogollas were lying around, it would be fine for me to pop one in my mouth. The same goes for them,” reasons the student of IEM Public School.

But nothing beats how Biring once saved their lives. “My mom had set some milk to boil in the kitchen and come to put me to sleep. But she dozed off herself. Suddenly, Biring started screaming like crazy and pulled my mom to the kitchen, which was by then full of smoke. It could have been disastrous if we weren’t alerted on time,” says the girl who rewarded Biring with five treats that day.

Gunja loves how all cats are welcome in their house. “They know my mother (Anasuya Mitra) keeps food for them, so whenever she opens the windows, they’re there,” smiles the girl who dreams of becoming a vet one day.