“Meow,” a voice soft as air would call me at sharp 5.30 every morning. It was a cat that used to call at my window in the cold misty mornings at Kotagiri, a hill station in the Nilgiris.
That was in 1991 when I worked as a residential teacher at a private school. “Coming,” I’d whisper and tiptoe to the front door to invite her in. And like long-lost friends we’d chat and chat till my roommate got up and yelled at me that it was time to get ready for school.
“What do you have to tell that ‘ugly grey cat’ so urgently so early in the morning?” she’d ask ... And how do you two use the same tone? ... And how does her voice get softer in the mornings? ...”
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And I’d wonder how my roommate woke up so early because both of us (the cat and I) were very careful not to disturb her.
“Don’t feed that cat anything. It’s a thief,” one of the maids who ran the show warned me on my first day there. “If you do, we’ll have to chase her away.”
“You want to pet a cute cat? See this one. Pet her all you want,” one of them said, showing me a black and orange fluffy beauty. Many children surrounded it and my cat friend was chased away.
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Somehow my instinct made me search for the vagabond and so we met each day. Just a “Hi, How are you?” and she’d relate to me all her adventures of the day, it seemed. In order to let our relationship continue, I stuck to the rules of not feeding her. Soon every child on the campus got accustomed to seeing a grey cat following me on the small grass patches between classrooms.
It nearly used to break my heart to find her waiting outside a classroom for 40 minutes, just for the two-minute chat we could have till we reached the main school building. Then she’d disappear into the bushes till evening.
One day she walked into my bathroom and strode across. “No, puss, No. You can’t do that,” I said, chasing her out. From what I knew of my cats at home, she was searching for a place to deliver kittens. My roommate could simply not stand it.
When I confided in another teacher-friend, she wouldn’t believe it. “I agree you have some extraordinary equation. But to say this cat told you she’s pregnant, is pure rubbish. Look at her sides. Absolutely flat …”
Yet, within two weeks she delivered three kittens in a locked room, having jumped in through the ventilator.
After they grew up and were given away, we continued our friendship as before.
But then the Principal found out she had fleas that could spread to the children. I didn’t know how to curb that. The children also pleaded separately for me. Twice my friend was taken in the school bus and left in the wild, and each time she came back. The third time she was left farther away. I never saw her again.
I still remember my friend, and the painful thought is that I didn’t feed her even when she was pregnant.
wini.b.solomons11@gmail.com