A ferociously bright diva, a book-thrower who will never admit to wrongdoing, a dignified gentleman with tremendous sweetness – bestselling author Nilanjana Roy describes her three cats poetically, and believes that writers and cats are kindred spirits. “We’re both independent and don’t like taking direction. We have bouts of extreme laziness and frenetic activity”, she says, adding that no amount of time spent watching them can be enough to understand the richness of their emotional lives.
“They pretty much attached themselves to us”, she says of her rescued family. She adopted her first cat Mara (who passed away recently) after finding her as a tiny kitten in her aunt’s house. The feisty feline was determined to be the only pet but was eventually manipulated into relenting. Roy recalls with amusement how her now oldest cat, Tiglath stumbled across the threshold of her home. “Every time Mara said to him, ‘this is a one-cat household’, he’d roll over as if to say ‘no, no, it’s two cats now’,” she laughs. Roy adopted her second cat Bathsheba when she was a tiny kitten who accidentally tumbled into her driver’s bucket during a car wash, after which he rescued her. She recalls how Bathsheba walked into her house fearlessly soon after, and attacked a mop. “She thinks she owns the place,” she says, referring to the now adult feline’s ‘terrible swagger’ and tendency to unpack suitcases for fun, and destroy first drafts of her work. Her third cat Lola, whom she suspects was an abandoned pet, got into skirmishes with Bathsheba for a year and a half, until one day, when Roy took Lola to the vet, Bathsheba howled until they returned. A deep friendship had quietly formed between them.
“There’s a lot of prejudice about cats - people think they're unclean animals. This couldn’t be further from the truth,” says Roy. Of their capacity for affection, she refers to how Bathsheba steals the other cats’ toys and proudly presents them to her to show that she’s pleased. “Mara died of diabetes at age 12. I was shocked at how patient she was when she was put on a drip. She seemed to know people were trying to help her,” she says . “One of the few ways you can experience unconditional love is to have a purring cat on your lap,” she says. “It’s one of the most rewarding relationships.”
