Sunlight bounces off their glossy black fur, their emerald eyes look straight out of a Sabrina The Teenage Witch comic, and their claws emerge like crescent moons when they’re stretching before an unplanned nap. It’s no surprise then, that Sruthilaya Subiksha cannot stop taking photographs of her cats. “They’re so picturesque, I keep posting about them on Instagram,” she says of the brother-sister duo that she adopted a few months ago, not knowing at the time that she was probably their last hope.
“I didn’t realise that black cats had difficulty finding homes,” she says incredulously, referring to the relief that volunteers of the Cattitude Trust felt when Subiksha adopted the rescued siblings without a second thought.
Subiksha, who adopted them as a pair so they’d have each other for company while she was at work, reveals that her first thought when she saw them was, “I hadn’t seen such cuteness in forever”. She recalls that they were underweight and so tiny that they both fit in the palm of her hand. After bringing them home, she was astonished to see that one of her favourite books by Haruki Murakami had a black cat on the cover. “Kafka on the Shore… hence the names Kafka and Kafki,” she explains. She describes Kafka as a ‘lazy black cushion’ who doesn’t move unless he has to, and Kafki as a firm believer in reciprocity, for she meows back an equal number of syllables when told ‘I love you’. “I used to tell people I’m not a cat person,” she says of her former life. Today, despite sleeping in a queen-sized cot, she finds herself being nudged by Kafka further and further towards the edge until she is almost hanging off the bed.
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Subiksha often finds them sitting like humans, staring at the television alongside her with transfixed eyes when the IPL is on, occasionally trying to climb into the screen. And when she scrolls endlessly on social media, Kafka gently knocks the cell phone out of her hand to remind her what’s important.
“I don’t feel like they’re pets,” she confesses. “They’re my roommates… I just happen to live with two black cats”.
She narrates an incident where a friend who didn’t particularly like cats met the two felines and had an epiphany when they smothered her with affection. “She said she had this misconception, and that they completely changed her mind. My work here on earth is done,” laughs Subiksha who often wakes up to find one or both of them staring at her adoringly.
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While her green-eyed companions have enriched her life in many ways, she makes a special mention that Kafka is her spirit animal for this specific reason — he taught her that when you have an urgent task at hand and not enough time, there is only one thing to do. “When I see him, I go – ‘you know what? I’m going to take a nap’,” she says, hastily adding an adjective that he’d consider important. “Unapologetically”.