Cat Colony

“Look at that belly!” 

Her voice sends the crows flying. Hunched over the purring cat, she clicks her tongue. “Where’s the launda? Where is he?” In response, the cat plops down on the pavement exposing her pregnant belly to the sun. She then proceeds to scatter food on the pavement like pigeon feed. kittens come scampering towards her. One springs forth from a flowerpot, another one tumbles down an awning, and two are sent cartwheeling by diving crows fighting for the same food. She frowns at the kittens and looks at the mother grooming herself “Rascal. Banging you up again and again.”

Worse curses have come out of her mouth. I’ve picked up a few as well. It took a bit of adjusting to be woken up not by the sound of an alarm, not birdsong, but Jenny’s foul clarion at first light. That’s her name. I’d overheard the postman address her once. He called her “Jenny aunty”. He’d said, “Jenny aunty, your letter was returned.”

A kitten grabs at the undone lace of her nightgown. Jenny frowns. “Haven’t you had enough, Mama?” she appeals to the cat whose languid eyes stare into space. “Have you seen him? The rascal?” she shouts at the municipal worker. 

“They’re many around, maushi.”

“That’s right, too many. How about some tea?”

The worker leans against his broom and nods. Jenny shuffles down the lane and returns after around a minute with two paper cups of tea. 

“Why don’t they just serve tea in bottle caps, hain? Why even bother with this little? Just a lick’s worth.” she says. The worker chuckles, he seems to enjoy this daily back and forth. 

I watch them drink their tea silently, slurping like connoisseurs, making it last. I remember the pot of tea I’ve forgotten to pour for myself, turning rancid as I watch the kittens chase dry leaves and get caught in sun beams. Their mother is now lolling in a pot with large fronds, unaware that one of her kittens has jumped over the boundary wall. 

Jenny tosses her cup on the trash pile gathered in the corner and walks back to her building; her hands folded over her arched back. The worker sweeps himself off the pavement, leaving behind a cloud of dust. The kittens disappear one by one. I draw the curtains as the sun grows harsher. 

#

I’ve been waking up earlier, catching the water before it runs out and filling the buckets up to the brim; all thanks to Jenny. The only time I step out is to leave the garbage at the main gate, and that early I don’t risk running into anyone. I rush back and wash my feet and make it to the window just as Jenny arrives. There’s a group of buildings on the left, and to the right a tea stall and a small community centre run by a local politician. In between runs a pavement lined with potted plants; a sole bench sits in the middle. It’s here that Jenny comes in, with the rush of morning light, directly into my view. 

I’ve become so familiar with Jenny’s routine that I’ve adjusted my own day around hers. Jenny comes out again at 1 pm with her lunch plate and empties the leftovers in one of the pots. And once again in the evening, she sits on the bench till it gets dark. Sometimes she catches an unsuspecting vendor or a delivery man and coerces them into a conversation about the cats. Then there are the hours that I don’t see her. I imagine her in her house, writing a letter to someone despite it being returned again and again. I imagine her opening a drawer for a pen and finding a cat instead.

 I wonder if there’s one in every drawer. I wonder if she lives alone or whether there’s someone who comes to help her wash her nightgown, massage her cracked heels, oil her messy hair and tie it in a neat braid. Some nights, I dream of her. 

#

Jenny’s late this morning. I lean over the windowsill to get a closer look. Finally, I see her shuffle along in her light blue nightgown, the one with red flowers. One by one, the cats begin to appear. They choose a sunny spot to lounge as Jenny lays out small piles of cat food around the bench. The mother cat pounces on the tallest one and starts to eat. I can’t tell for sure, but I see a bit of disappointment on her face when she looks at the mother cat, as if she wanted her to be a respectable cat, a wise feline, instead of being constantly knocked up. 

Two kittens start to claw at each other, Jenny distracts them by swaying her nightgown in front of them. 

I hear water overflowing and rush to the bathroom. Things seem to slip my mind, especially when I’m watching Jenny. My phone is red with notifications: ten missed calls, a suffocating number of unread messages. It starts to ring again but Jenny’s voice rings louder. She’s found someone to talk to. “There’s a cat. A big launda. He keeps… you know… banging this lady up!” Jenny points at the pregnant cat sunning herself on the seat of a parked scooter. “Look now, so many kittens. Here, there, here, here.” She flails her arms in all directions. “How will she manage?” She clicks her tongue and appeals to the delivery man who refuses to make eye contact with her, wanting to drink his tea in peace. There’s an incredulous look on his face as he watches the acrobatic kittens and shifts a little away from Jenny even as she inches closer to him. She means to whisper in his ear, but fails to lower her volume, “There’s a couple that takes care of the dogs, controls their numbers. They take them to the hospital to get them…”, Jenny snaps the air with her finger-scissors. The delivery man scowls and spits milk skin on the pavement. “Dog people are serious people; cat people are crazy.” She cracks up. The delivery man chugs back his tea and leaves without so much as a nod at Jenny who goes on speaking, “I can’t do it myself. I don’t have a basket. Nowadays you get good baskets to catch cats. Need a big one for this launda. He’s the one to be caught.” 

The window grille imprints on my elbow, though I don’t notice until Jenny walks back to her building, the oldest in the row; propped up with scaffolding and covered in blue tarp. I wait for her to appear through one of the windows. When she doesn’t, it makes me wonder if she has a place of her own to begin with. 

#

“Why must you flaunt your pregnant belly at my face?” Jenny purrs at the mother cat. “Haven’t you had enough?” She sits on the bench and pulls out a packet from a cloth bag. “Today we’re lucky, Mama. We’ve got milk.” She pours some milk into dried upturned leaves. The mother cat laps it up while the kittens wait patiently for their turn. 

From out of nowhere another cat falls into their midst as if straight from the sky. “Launda!” Jenny growls. “Now you’re going to drink up their milk also. What nerve!” She kicks the air revealing a scrawny leg from underneath her nightgown. The cat licks the leaves dry, unfazed by Jenny, and walks onto the road to lick its paws. “That’s right. Get run over!” Jenny barks watching a car approach. The cat runs off as the car honks its way up the lane. It enters her building. Jenny follows but keeps her distance. 

A man gets out of the car. She stares at him as he chats with the security guard. He turns around to look at her directly. Jenny looks away and returns to the bench. She sits down facing me, a blank stare on her face. I doubt she can see me; I doubt she’s even looking. Kittens paw at the empty milk packet that she clutches tight in a fist, but Jenny is lost in thought. 

#

This is an old neighbourhood. Where I’m from, we don’t see cats out in the open. Neither do we see women like Jenny, roaming out of the house in nothing but her nightgown at all hours of the day. The buildings here are at least 50 years old and no taller than the trees. Some residents are older like my landlady. Eighty years old and in fine fettle due to a lifelong habit of taking the stairs. Unlike Jenny, she’s graceful, her attire is most fashionable. Her voice is soft unlike Jenny’s that rouses the entire neighbourhood with wild yelling in the mornings, matching the loud vocalisations of the cats mating, toppling bins, denting cars and fighting over territories at night. 

That’s what I like about cat colonies. People here are so used to Jenny and her cats, no matter how undesirable. No one tries to tame them. 

The buildings here all face the same way, connected by a network of back alleys, hidden behind the garish façade of the community centre. Except maybe from the bathroom window, I have no view of the world outside these corridors. 

These past months, I’ve grown familiar with the faces that come and go through this tiny lane. I recognise every vendor, every delivery man. I even recognise the crows, each with their own peculiar set of behaviours. But the man who pulled up in the car this morning, I’ve never seen him before. The visitors here are old-fashioned and never arrive emptyhanded. Yet there he stood, bare-handed, suited, booted. Even as he left not too long after, walking back to his oversized car as if he couldn’t leave soon enough, as if he had more important places to be, it confirmed my suspicion. He didn’t belong here. 

#

“Cats are vicious storms hellbent on bringing a flood of kittens.” Jenny sings to the pregnant cat. “What are you going to do, Mama?” A flurry of activity surrounds Jenny as the sun rises head high. A laundry man delivers ironed clothes, and a small tempo brings in furniture, followed by the local cable man carrying a wire reel over his shoulder. They all enter the building in which Jenny lives. 

The window grille is hot to the touch. I wonder if the heat from the bench is stinging Jenny. I wait for her to go back inside, but she doesn’t. Instead, she continues talking to the cat and I hear her over the grumbling of my stomach. “You’ll teach them how to hunt pigeons. So many of them, they are all yours, Mama,” Jenny says, throwing furtive glances at the men struggling with a large, floppy mattress. “You got to teach them how to hunt rats. Rats here are slow, Mama, but bigger than pigeons.” She stops a fisherwoman, “Give one or two here, na.” The woman rolls her eyes and grabs a fistful of fish from her basket. “You’ll have to pay me for all this one day,” she says dropping the fish next to the cat. “Haan. Haan. Go.” Jenny waves the fisherwoman away. The mother cat pounces at the spoils. The kittens have learned to come one by one; a hierarchy has been taught to them. Everyone gets their share; some get it before others. 

“There he is, again!” Jenny shouts at the cat lurking on the boundary wall. She releases a slew of curses including some new ones I’ve never heard before. The curses have no effect on the cat. I see her eyes tear with incomprehensible rage. “No more, Mama.” Jenny sits back down, “He will come, he will eat, he won’t leave anything for the kittens. He will fight, he will kill. He will take everything away, Mama. It’s in his nature.”

#

This morning, Jenny comes with a bedsheet and spreads it over the bench, covering the rusted arms carefully. She places a plastic bag on the side where a pillow might be. I can see the red flowers of one of her nightgowns encased in the plastic, rolled up and stuffed in.

She’s wearing the same thing she was wearing yesterday, muddied at the bottom. The kittens try to hop on to the soft sheet, she lures them away with food. 

“What are you up to, Jenny aunty?” the municipal worker asks. Jenny curls up on the bench. The security guard watches with one eyebrow raised. Passers-by spare one look at the unremarkable sight of an old woman on a public bench. 

“Now I can watch you, Mama. I can watch you all the time,” Jenny tells the cat. 

I’ve learnt a few things about cat pregnancies. They carry the litters for around two months and then find somewhere ridiculous to give birth. The kittens are often born in unreachable places like inside pipes, drains, vents… I once saw baby kittens inside the metal arms of a retractable awning. Every crevice in this urban sprawl is a nursery for newborn kittens.

Isn’t there a story about pregnant buffaloes, that if six of them die together an evil spirit is released that causes ill health to humans? There seems to be such a thing with cats as well, if a young cat is pregnant, a benevolent spirit appears to protect it. There’s such a thing for women too, that if one is pregnant, several motherly spirits appear and take over bodies with soft hands to make laddoos and other things that need to be balled up in the shape of a belly. I might not remember much from my own pregnancy, but I do remember the smell of boiled milk, burnt sugar and hot breath of the motherly spirits.

A benevolent spirit has entered Jenny, driven her to homelessness. Whether the mother cat likes it or not, her kittens will be born under her watchful gaze. And only once little squeaks emerge, tiny mews echo and miniscule paws touch the earth, will it leave Jenny and return to the spirit world. 

#

“What are you doing, Jenny aunty? Why are you sleeping here?” asks the local cop. 

Jenny cocks her head to the right. 

“Is there something wrong with your flat?”

“Yes.” Jenny says, “One man has gone in and taken over. He’s drying his chaddis in my balcony, leaving cigarette butts everywhere.”

The cop sniggers and this seems to anger Jenny who spits at his feet. It’s the way she talks. She doesn’t seem to have the patience to choose the right words. She prefers to get to the crux of her feelings with a certain immediacy, something to which I relate. 

“I haven’t had a man in the house since my father.” Jenny grumbles.

“But he’s your brother, Jenny,” the cop says, having decided not to humour her this time. “He’s your family.” 

“Hah!”

“Go back to your flat, Jenny. Don’t let me see you spending another night here. Doesn’t look good.”

Jenny shakes her head, averting the cop’s disparaging gaze instead looking at the cat licking the underside of her tail. “I’m not going back. Not till you ask the man to leave my flat.”

“Your brother, he owns the flat, no?”

“Hah! Wah wah!” Jenny sniggers and seethes at the cop with a glare that implicates him instantly. He shakes his head and walks away slowly, as if his ego wasn’t hurt. He keeps an eye on her from a distance and gestures in the direction of the tea stall. A young boy brings him a cup. ‘Mental’ the cop says instead of ‘Thank you’, looking towards Jenny. 

#

It looks like Jenny spent another night on the bench. Her hair is matted, the loose clip barely hanging from a few strands. She’s fixed a stare on the male cat up on the boundary wall. It turns around, revealing a maggot infested jowl. “He’s going to die.” Jenny says, “He’s desperate to sow his seeds.” She explains to no one. 

Jenny folds her legs and gets comfortable, sitting uncharacteristically upright and still. She looks peaceful and vexing at the same time. She reminds me of a picture of a fertility goddess I used to stare at in the hospital room. 

The municipal worker brings her tea. A fruit vendor leaves a bunch of bananas next to her. Others begin to leave their offerings: biscuits, fish, a packet of milk. Even the tree sends a few flowers her way through the wind. Jenny accepts the gifts as she sits godlike, the mother cat as her mount. Jenny Ma, Goddess of fertility. Part of me wants to step out and offer her my sandwich. But I can’t get myself to go near her. I fear she’d disappear if I got any closer.  

#

I’ve had to stay up later than usual thanks to Jenny. I can’t help myself; I want to know how she spends the night on the bench. But I can hardly see anything. I can’t make out whether the dark shadow on the bench is Jenny or just emptiness. The only dark spot in this city, and it hovers over Jenny and me. There are no streetlights, maybe because this lane can’t be considered a proper street, for many it’s a dead end. But there are advantages to the darkness, it spares us a part of the sky and in it I see two faint stars. Where I come from, we don’t get a chance to look up at the wide sky and its plentiful stars. 

I’ve held my bladder for so long that the sensation isn’t bothering me anymore. It begins to physically hurt to stand in the same position, so I slide down the wall and rest my head against the window. 

The cracks on the ceiling have spread like cobwebs. I trace each strand to find a centre but instead I find the interconnected series of events that made me end up here. 

It’s not so bad. It’s a small space, but it’s mine. However, I can’t help asking myself why I decided to leave home and how my life would have been if I had stayed. I hear fortuitous thunder that lulls me to sleep.

I wake up to find the pavement slick with rain. I wait for Jenny till everything glitters with sunlight. The bedsheet is soaked through and sticks to the bench like skin. There’s a rumbling coming from Jenny’s building, I see a white, windowless van come out. I see the suited, booted man who I’ve deduced is Jenny’s brother. He watches the van leave with his arms folded, like one does having dealt with some unfortunate business. When Jenny doesn’t arrive even after the municipal worker has finished sweeping the entire lane, I begin to wonder who was in the van. It could’ve been Jenny; it could’ve been her cats. 

#

This morning, I see the mother cat lying on top of the bedsheet that now lies crumpled over the pavement. She’s surrounded by new kittens, just a few days old. They walk blind looking for their mother, pawing the tattered threads of Jenny’s bedsheet. I feel relief seeing them. The end of that relief stretches with worry. Where is Jenny if not with her cats?

 I peep through the windows of Jenny’s building, I see familiarity but none that resemble her hunch, her loosely clipped hair, her floral nightgowns. I hear voices, but none with the same pitch and range as Jenny’s. The kittens disperse when the municipal worker comes closer to the bench. A brave one tries to play with the broom. The worker shoos the kitten and sweeps around the bench. He pulls on the bedsheet from one end, rolls it up, and throws it in the garbage pile. 

#

The water’s run out for the morning and I didn’t fill the buckets again today. I haven’t managed a bath in two days. I scan the windows of all the buildings, some are shut and the ones that are open seem to serve no purpose other than to let the air in. No one seems to be looking for Jenny from their windows, and so I must stay here to keep watch. Even today, the bench lays empty and the mother cat in wait. The kittens play unaware of the spirit that brought them into the planet.

#

I seem to have relied too much on Jenny’s cursing, her general tousled look and the din she creates every morning, because there’s a woman on the bench but I can’t tell if it’s her. She’s dressed differently, in a tunic and pyjamas. If only she would look up so I could recognise the glint in her eyes. But she doesn’t, she remains still, looking down at her hands folded over her lap, a white strip around her wrist.  

“Jenny aunty, how are you?”

It’s the worker. 

She looks up vacantly, there’s not a hint of madness, not a single errant twitch of a muscle. 

“Looks like your brother’s taking good care of you.” 

It’s as if he’s struck a nerve. I see something stir in her and finally recognise Jenny. The spectre of a wicked smile appears on her face. Was it that she appeared to be in good care or was it that everyone assumed her brother to be a caring sibling? I wonder which part of what the worker said so sincerely summoned her madness.

“At least you’re not alone, Jenny aunty.” He adds.

I can tell she’s resisting, it’s taking an effort for her to not react, to remain quiet. The worker waits for her to say something, nonetheless. I catch it finally, the glint in her eyes. I see them fill with a steely gaze. I see her jaw tighten as she grips the bench with both her hands and stands up. She starts to walk shakily. 

“Are you getting some tea for us?” the worker asks. 

Jenny shuffles down the lane, towards the tea stall, then the community centre, on to the main road. I press my face against the window grille to follow her, but I can only see as far, till she disappears from my view. A few minutes pass. I wait for her to return with tea, so does the worker. More time goes by, but Jenny doesn’t come back. 

#

I’m woken by the phone’s incessant vibrating. Instead of cancelling the call, I accidentally answer it. I can hear my husband’s voice echo from the speaker. “Hello? Hello? I know you’re there. Speak to me.”

I switch the phone off and go to the window. It’s the middle of the night and the street is so silent that thoughts come to roost in my head. The day I decided to walk out on my marriage, I remember not caring about much else. My husband was sure I would return; how else would I survive out there? My mother was too; she swore on my late father that he would want me to return. Both were convinced that I had lost my mind. Why else would one choose to leave everything behind? 

Not a day goes by when I don’t receive messages from my husband. I was an uncomfortable truth of his life, taking up space that belonged to others, being loud when I should be quiet, creating the mess rather than tidying it up, being sad when I should be happy. Even in my absence, I seem to be doing something wrong. Every day he asks me when I’ll come back. As if he thinks I don’t know what’s waiting for me if I do. Every day he demands an answer. Where I’m from, they don’t let you go just like that. 

#

It’s morning. I see the postman walk around aimlessly around the building holding a letter. I wonder if it is another one of Jenny’s letters that was returned. I see him talking to the security guard; it must be about her. The security guard shrugs and then laughs and I begin to question if the conversation is about Jenny at all. I see the municipal worker has found someone else to joke around with, without so much as a passing glance at the bench that Jenny had occupied for years. 

The cats are gone too. I’ve seen them hop over the boundary wall never to be seen again. This morning, I see the last remaining kitten, now fully-grown. I see her tail swish at the sight of a dragonfly. She hops on the boundary wall to catch it and crosses over to the other side. I’m sure she’s left for good. 

That’s what I like about cat colonies. 

Despite their once-inescapable presence, no one seems to bother that Jenny, and her cats are no longer around. That there’s silence where there was once a harmless chaos. 

And no one is waiting for them to return. 

…