Cats & Dogs

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For this post I promised myself that I won't Google.

As a rule, I open Google and my online-Webster in separate Windows while I compose. It always felt like I was cheating.

But not today, because I want to be honest with myself and write only from my personal experience and from my reading.

I think dogs have dominated the pet-space overwhelmingly to the practical exclusion of cats.

I never had pets, apart from books.

Thurber is the Dog-Man of English Literature (Mark Twain called himself the Cat-Man). He had more than 40 dogs while the going was good. I guess he drew a thousand sketches of his dogs, some couple of hundred or more of which were published.

I just broke my promise, I hope, just this once.

Here is his own blurb for his book: "The Dog Department":

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"On the lawns and porches, and in the living rooms and backyards of my threescore years, there have been more dogs, written and drawn, real and imaginary, than I had guessed before I started this roundup."

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I don't think there was ever such a famous book like: "The Cat Department".

First I learned that cat could be a pet was from Alice, in "Through the Looking Glass", where I read that cats give baths to their kittens.

That cats can be clean I learned from my own experience:

While I was living alone in the spacious Qrs C1-97, it was so hot and humid that I used to keep all the windows open, even when I went out.

Late one night I entered my bedroom, picked up a book from my built-in wardrobe which doubled as book-case, shut the wardrobe tight, and went to bed with the book on my belly after switching off my table-lamp.

A couple of hours later I was woken up by a scratching sound by my table-lamp; and a soft barely audible 'meow' coming from inside the wardrobe. I switched on the lamp and was staring at a big snow-white cat I recognized from the neighborhood. She was looking at me and the wardrobe... and the wardrobe and me... I could guess that I had imprisoned her offspring. I got out and softly opened its door. The cat jumped in and cuddled a single snow-white days-old kitten.

And she was staring at me as if challenging what was my next move.

I shifted myself quietly to the Hall and slept on the floor for the night.

In our Tea Club next morning I was narrating this incident and Nepu-da, our senior-most colleague, at once predicted that I would be getting married within a year; and advised me to leave mother and child alone and wait for her to take the next step.

I did that scrupulously (marriage was at stake!). She was tending to her kitten with great love and care; and there was not a single occasion when I had stench or had to clean that wardrobe. She was fastidiously clean with her kitten, I couldn't guess how.

After a fortnight when I returned from the Department one day to have a peek at my honored guests, I found they just vanished leaving no trace.

Nepu-da was right: I did get married within a year to a lady who is equally allergic to cats and mice.

The other day in our Hyderabad home she was complaining that a lone mouse was running helter-skelter and damaging her equanimity; and a cat was hounding her, visiting her kitchen whenever the door was ajar and cleaning her milk vessel. Next morning when my wife was chastising me for forgetting to close the kitchen door, I joked that I did that deliberately so that her pet cat could peep in and catch her pet mouse.

She flung the spoon in her hand at me (to the great merriment of her maid) and said that 'cats and mice' nowadays are bosom friends, with her as their common enemy: the very 'Tom & Jerry'.

El Nino's 8-year-old daughter, the Red Duchess, has a pet-cat whose hilarious ride on her dad's car make for an entire Chapter: "Moving a cat in the car" in The House that Nino Built.

My colleague SNB had about half a dozen cats and kittens in his Qrs. I asked him why. He replied that he watches them play for hours on end and enjoys it. He also said that his Tom Cat saved his wife from a cobra, killing it just before she entered her kitchen. I knew that mongoose was the natural enemy of cobra and witnessed roadshows in my village, where a pet mongoose and a pet cobra displayed their fighting skills (the show was shut down just before the mongoose killed the cobra....it was always the mongoose that won).

Dalia (whose Electrodynamics Class Notes I stole and used as my breadboard) had about a couple of dozen cats and their kittens as well as half a dozen dogs as her pets.

I asked her if they didn't attack each other.

She said, since she looked after all of them with equal affection, they treat one another as siblings (quite unlike India & Pakistan).

Perhaps this is about the only time cats and dogs were on an equal footing; other than: "It is raining cats & dogs".


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